The Artifice of Place Building truth into the faux terrain
Miruna Mazilu, 2015/16
Content page
1. The Artifice of Place
Manifesto The potential of transcending place Constructing a reality
2. Fake Terrain
The seamless experience Staging the faux terrain Foreground-background alignment Collapsing scales
3. Suspending Disbelief
The continuous ground Disabling place The artifice of place
To be continued... 5
6
What is place? Thesis
The thesis questions what is place today, and argues for the faux terrain as a means through which to challenge the way we perceive context and place. The moment we experience a place isn’t tied to either our location or the location of the place in question. Our context is built as archipelago, a patchwork of disconnected states. It’s no longer clear what is to be in a room, building, city or landscape. We tune into spaces rather than simply occupy them; and usually we tune into multiple overlapping spaces at once. We have familiarised ourselves more with this condition which has become very complex in the last few years with the proliferation of the digital world. We interact at different overlapped scales and contexts on a daily basis. Our physical boundaries are traversed through digital means and this new way of interacting with our surroundings alters our interpretation of what is real.
7
Philip Johnson ‘Glass House’ (1949)
8
What is place? Thesis Philip Johnson builds a house in which to die. Within the Glass house, Poussin’s painting, “The burial”, hangs in perfect alignment with the horizon to extend the interior into the exterior landscape. The narrative of the painting envelopes the reality of PJ’s death, whom died in 2005 in the Glass House.
Painting horizon line 9
Landscape horizon line
10
The narrative of the painting envelopes the reality of P.Johnson’s death, who died in 2005 in the Glass House.
11
12
Two completely different worlds and realities which are combined and disrupted by a 10 cm frame.
13
14
The threshold of the frame is broken in Lina bo Bardi’s MASP. The museum, acts as a cultural faux terrain. It legitimises a series of displaced objects which all find a coherence standing aside each other in a singular space. Lina creates a conversation about site through the pieces she brings together. Each artwork was shown to be its own site, extracted from context, using the plinth as an architectural element of isolation.
15
16
Transcending place The Plinth Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics medal ceremony. Beyond the establishment, the resonance of the image could not be overstated. It was 1968; the black power movement had provided a post-civil rights rallying cry and the anti-Vietnam protests were gaining pace. That year, students throughout Europe, east and west, had been in revolt against war, tyranny and capitalism. Martin Luther King had been assassinated and the US had been plunged into yet another year of race riots in its urban centres. A few weeks before the Games, scores of students and activists had been gunned down by authorities in Mexico City itself.
17
Through the plinth, Tommie Smith and John Carlos consciously insert themselves in the televisual space, bringing a vast event to the intimate audience of 5 people in a room.
18
Boundaries of place aren’t fixed At the 68’ Mexico Olympics event, the plinth generates a conversation outside itself, acting as a means to transcend place. The gesture extracts themselves from the games. They are now foregrounding Mississippi and aligning with their american counterparts.
19
Much like the relationship between a painting and the site of its making, the project crafts the line between the seen and the actual as a method of constructing place and its identity. This is what makes up my faux terrain. The aim of the FT is to immerse the viewer into the reality of the image created and construct a way of understanding a condition. 20
21
Our physical boundaries are traversed through digital means. This new way of interacting with our surroundings alters our interpretation of what is real. A current example, are a series of photos Instagram released which show the original image captured. Foreground changes the reading of the background. With each foreground the conversation shifts site. Does our innate desire to believe make us disregard the medium and believe the displacement? 22
23
24
25
HENRY ROUSSEAU His best-known paintings depict jungle scenes, inspired not by any firsthand experiences of such locales (the artist reportedly never left France), but by frequent trips to the Paris botanical gardens and museums. Stories spread that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico.
Henri Rousseau’s best-known paintings depict jungle scenes, inspired not by any firsthand experiences of such locales (the artist reportedly never left France), but by frequent trips to the Paris botanical gardens and museums. Due to the cultural assumptions regarding the process of painting, stories spread that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico.
26
27
Does the medium disappear and allow for immersion, or do they coexist?
Rousseau’s paintings aren’t inspired by any first-hand experiences of such locales (the artist reportedly never left France), but actually by frequent trips to the Paris botanical gardens and museums.
28
29
Much like the relationship between the painting and the site of its making, the project crafts the line between the seen and the actual as a method of constructing place and its identity. This is what makes up my faux terrain.
30
31
The identity of a place is defined by what the audience chooses to foreground against it.
33
The installation suggests that I am making a model of the Glass House, when in fact, this model never existed outside the realm of the print. As I pose against the paper to extend the space within the image, I break the threshold between the two realms. In this way, the staged foreground legitimises the making of the model. The project constructs different sets of alignments which provoke a narrative to transcend scale, place and materiality. It does so through building the faux terrain.
34
35
When animated, a set of different mediums are applied on top. As the Glass house jumps in and out of fiction with Poussin’s painting, the 1:1 installation obliterates the line between object and image. With each new foregrounded medium another site is revealed, from the material, physical space into the constellation of both: virtual and material production. The displacement collapses contexts and scales. It allows for a conversation at a huge dimension (of vast landscapes) while sticking to principles that still conform to a room. The identity of the place is defined by what the audience chooses to foreground against it.
36
37
0.9
m
0.9
m
2.1 m
5m
00
0.0
0.9
m
2.1 m
The artificial place is in search of the euphoric moment of suspended disbelief. 1
2
In this glimpse of immersion, the wrinkles of the paper fall away and the nook comes to life through the threshold of the smart phone. The ground on which this installation stands is resolution. Resolution defines the relationship between viewer and material. 38
3
39
40
41
CONSTRUCTING GROUND
Moving outside of the room, the ground is crucial in defining our understanding of place. We alter the ground and build new layer upon layer, establishing new relationships between objects and inhabitants. Whether cultural or physical, this relation is a thick condition, not a surface condition.
43
Andreas Gursly - Rheim II
44
A discontinuous geography Culturaly, Gursky champions the artifice of photography, by challenging his audience assumptions about the reality of his photographs. Gursky exposes 3 conditions of the artifice of place, as he carefully edits his image to provide the mirage of another. One isolated from context, one which clashes with the context and a third which depicts an absurd construct of the landscape.
45
46
Constructing landscape as a discontinuous geography which reveals itself as a seamless experiential & visual ground.
47
48
A discontinuous geography As opposed to a painting or a photograph, physically, we experience terrain by movement. Crafting the line between the seen and the actual forms the method of constructing place and it’s identity.
49
Through the archipelago, we now move at the scale of the city. Like with the absurd construct of Gursky’s landscape, place is established as a dynamic and fragmentary construct. As you navigate through the terrain the fragments form instances of continuity, presenting a continuous narrative.
Crafting the line between the seen and the actual forms the method of constructing place, where the subject is constantly redefined through changing sets of relationships.
50
51
52
53
54
55
As you navigate through the terrain the fragments form instances of continuity, presenting a continuous narrative. Through isolation, you are removed from the original setting of the city. Creating the effect of vastness into the city responds to the desire of escaping into ‘the other’.
56
57
1
It is a constant process of constructing landscape as a discontinuous geography which reveals itself as a seamless experiential & visual ground.
58
591:200 / 1:1 SCALE The city falls away as you surface on to the fields that stretch towards the horizon of rolling hills.
2
3
The act of clashing the 2 conditions construct paradox. THEa GLIMPSE
3
The water is re-circulated maintain the cascade for a predefined time. To regain entree to the top of platform #1 water is eventually pumped to refill the lake and
re-align the view. As the platforms come together as one for the audience’s THE=>GLIMPSE Lake is drained no access platform #1. experience, they also engage with each other into a tocycle Before lake fills enough to influence the platform’s position before pistons The water is re-circulated maintain the cascade aand predefined time.are of disabling place from being established at ofone end inisforeventually activated, there a moment misalignment between platforms #2 & #3. to To regain entree toisthe top of platform #1, water pumped the lake and re-align the view. order to form the identity of a place atrefill another.
Lake is drained => no access to platform #1. Before lake fills enough, there is a moment of misalignment between platforms #2 & #3.
60
61 SCALE 1:200 / 1:200 ENABLING PLACE
3
62
63 SCALE 1:200 / 1:2000 DISABLING PLACE
The continuity of the view relies on the elements being aligned. Once the alignments is broken, we have a clash between two worlds. 64
65
From tiny shifts in scale, to having an entire lake disappear, cascading as a curtain against the city; the audience is invited to engage with their context at a different scale.
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
Now, the construct of the mirage is revealed as you cannot inhabit it. It is so detached and distanced from you, reaching the absurd. The viewer is confronted with overlapping conditions of distance. On the one hand he is isolated from his immediate environment. On the other, finds himself on a higher ground, acknowledging that the space he occupies is part of an infinitely larger & broader context, to which he must eventually return.
76
77
76
77
Returning to initial ground of departure, that of the city, the fragments of the archipelago are revealed. You encounter instances of ambiguity and displacement, challenge thresholds of proximity, framing, boundaries, materiality & duration. Conditions which define a particular relation between place and inhabitant. 78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
The architecture of artifice builds place through a patchwork of disconnected states. Therefore, the proposal isn’t contained in a room, building or landscape per se. It constructs a paths which connects them. 88
89
90
91
92
93
94
IF PLACE IS A BEAST, THE IMAGE CONTAINS IT. THE SPACE OF THE IMAGE AND THE SPACE WHERE THE IMAGE IS FOUND, HAVE A CONTINUOUS EXCHANGE. WE ENJOY IT AND MANIPULATE IT.
95
96
97
INDULGING IN THE FAUX TERRAIN FANATICS
98
99
100
Faux terrain gallery F.T. typologies
Portal Strategies
p.o.v.
PLINTH
FRAME
BACKGROUND
SCALE
DISTORTION
101
DISPLACEMENT
PROJECTION
THRESHOLD
Grains of Sand Before flying back to Chicago and leaving Germany forever, Mies, who is unable to walk, watches from his car as the roof of the Nationalgalerie is lifted into place. An axe murderer kills seven people in Taliesin, and burns it to the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright rebuilds it, and 11 years later it burns again. He rebuilds. Oscar Niemeyer is denied a visa to enter the US for being a communist and, consequently, is unable to teach at Yale. A young professor named Louis Kahn is hired instead. The following year he begins work on the Yale University Art Gallery, launching his career. Piranesi dedicates Campo Marzio to his friend Robert Adam. Robert, together with his brother James, brought back to England two of Piranesi’s sketches that they later give to Soane. In 1959 Khrushchev and Nixon debated everything from American kitchens to American capitalism. Lord Burlington scribbles notes in his original edition of the four books by Palladio. In 1927 modernism is born with the Weissenhofsiedlung designed by 17 architects. In 1972 Charles Jencks declares the death of modernism as Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe is demolished. Philip Glass later composes Koyaanisqatsi for Godfrey’s Reggio’s film of the same name, which includes the demolition. Gordon Matta-Clark is invited by Peter Eisenman to take part in the Idea as Model exhibition. He brings a rifle and a set of photographs of housing projects with broken windows. On the afternoon of the opening he shoots out all of the windows in the gallery. Fashion imitates architecture in 2014 when Chanel turns a photograph of Barkow Leibinger’s Trutek building in Seoul into suit. Hannes Meyer spends the waning years of his career building in Mexico City. Lina Bo Bardi works for magazines in Italy but builds in Brazil. Duchamp takes a urinal and turns it into a fountain by another man. Andy Warhol tips his canvases on the floor, pees on them, calls them the Piss Paintings. By 2150, Venice and Atlantis share a similar fate. The Eameses get the wrong steel delivered to site, change their design and build the house we know today as the Eames House. Reyner Banham records his thoughts on tape while driving through LA. These recordings become his Four Ecologies. 75 years after Loos’ death, Ines Weizman reenacts his unbuilt House for Josephine Baker in Ordos, Mongolia. In the future, the phrase ‘in the future’ is understood to mean something else entirely. In 1966, Antonioni rounds up a group of AA students to film a scene for Blow-Up, in which they drive through the newly completed Economist Building by the Smithsons. Frank O Goldberg one day changes his name and decades later steals what would have been a great building right out from under Zaha Hadid. In 1949, Philip Johnson builds a house in which to die. Architect Giangiorgio Trissino took a young assistant stonemason under his wing and renamed him Andrea Palladio. in 2044 building-sized 3D printers will make copies of what cities were supposed to look like as described in old-fashioned science fiction novels. Godard’s use of the red towel in Le Mepris was instrumental in transforming how physical objects were used in film as thresholds between time and space. Mark Fisher released a giant inflatable pig above Battersea power station only to have strong winds blow it towards Heathrow and blocks airspace. Dr Dre started his musical career with an E-mu SP-1200 changing forever the widespread influence of music sampling and its oft resulting controversies. A light fixture falls out of the sky and changes Truman’s life. Of all his life experiences, Buckminster Fuller always said his time teaching at Black Mountain College with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning was the most profound. The Oculus Rift will be commercially launched in 2016. Architect Kisho Kurokawa, founder of Metabolism, reinvented the Japanese 102
modern man and hosted a TV talk show for 14 years. Steve Jobs walks into Xerox park and later ‘invents’ the mouse after reverse engineering one that he saw in their offices. Peggy Guggenheim begins her career with The Art of This Century gallery 1942-1947. In 2029, a network applies to the Diploma school. The interview panel rejects it and suggests third year. Network appeals the decision. In life Duchamp sold Brancusi’s sculptures, in death they are exhibited side by side in two elongated rooms in Philadelphia. After the Submerging, London postcards no longer feature the Houses of Parliament. After the Duke of Urbino injured an eye in a jousting tournament, he had the bridge of his nose removed to improve his field of vision. He translated this flattened form of viewing into the intarsia of his studiolo. In 1932 Philip Johnson curated an exhibition and invented the International Style. Citizen Kane’s Rosebud, the murder in Rear Window, Jerry Lundegaard’s $40,000, Monty Python’s Holy Grail remain unexplained and undiscovered. Le Corbusier painted a mural in E-1027, Eileen Gray called it vandalism. Marshall McLuhan sent his book The Medium is the Message to the printers. What came back was The Medium is the Massage, and it changed both everything and nothing. Lubetkin’s career in London started with a pool for penguins and a house for gorilla’s in the London Zoo. He later becomes one of the most emblematic figures of British modernism. 28 years later Cedric Price builds the Aviary. Italo Cavino died before writing the sixth memo for his series of lectures titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In the book, Here, McGuire captures the lifecycle of a single room from 500BC to 2033. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera meet in Detroit and become Mexico City’s power couple in love and art. 387 countries sign a treaty recognising a new nation-state whose borders are entirely electronic. Three students meet whilst studying architecture at Westminster under Foster. They used their student grant money to buy instruments and created Pink Floyd, one of the most influential bands of all time. Curzio Malaparte fires his architect Adalberto Libera, redesigns the house, and builds it with the help of a stonemason. McDonough describes it as a ‘building with an ontology as complex as the twentieth century, often called by those who have seen it, simply, the most beautiful house in the world’. The identity of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, once rumoured to be an architecture student, has never been confirmed. After his election, President Reagan asks to see the Situation Room, only to discover the room he was thinking of was on the set of Dr. Strangelove. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics medal ceremony. Bikini island was bombed and vaporized over the course of a decade. FAT engineered its own death as a means for reinvention. When candidate Nerendra Modi appeared as a hologram in rural communities in India, many believed him to be magical and voted him into the office of Prime Minister. The polka-dotted field conditions of Yayoi Kusama are an art so extreme that to produce them, she teeters between real world and installation space within her psychiatric care home. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is the culmination of research initially launched with his observations on species similarities across the Galapagos Islands. Buster Keaton receives a one-week build-it-yourself house as a wedding present, and a train demolishes it as soon as he is finished.
103
1968 Mexico City Olympics ceremony MASP, Lina Bo Bardi
104
Campo Marzio, G.B. Piranesi Penguin habitat, Lubetkin
105
Central Park, NY
Stourhead Park, UK
106
Thomas Demand
Hiroshi Sugimoto
107
Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger
108
109
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
Original Screen Old Spice Commercial
00:07
00:15
00:30
Behind the Scenes of Old Spice Commercial
Scene set-up
Starting scene
Final scene shows the set-up of a new gravity and ground which is created through prop movement and actor position through the camera.
121