MIT SA+P Press

Massachusetts Institute of Technology SA+P Press Architecture Publications

Thresholds 43: Scandalous Nathan Friedman and Ann Lok Lui, Editors Azusa Kobayashi and Julia Novitch, Design Under the Influence Ana Miljacki, Editor TwoPoints.Net, Design Building Discourse: Proposition & Proof MIT Master of Architecture Thesis Projects, 2008-13 Irene Hwang, Editor TwoPoints.Net, Design Keller Gallery Exhibitions, Volumes 01-03 Irene Hwang, Series Editor TwoPoints.Net, Design

Contact: Irina Chernyakova Exhibitions & Publications MIT Architecture ich@mit.edu / 617-324-4416

Thresholds 43: Scandalous Nathan Friedman and Ann Lok Lui, Editors FORMAT

408 pages, 100 illustrations 6.5” x 9.5” Paperback DATE

Spring 2015 CREDITS

Design: Azusa Kobayashi & Julia Novitch DETAILS

ISBN: 978–0–9961166–0–2 Retail Cost: $20.00

Thresholds is the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture, held in over 150 university art & architecture libraries around the world.

Gasp! What provokes this reflex that leaves one short of breath? More than just a sudden turn of events, for discourse to move from gossip to scandal there have to be stakes. Reputations, profits, and history-by-the-winners are on the line.

Thresholds 43: Scandalous investigates the relevance of scandal in creative practice.

Its content confronts a history of devious schemes, spectacular headlines, and pulp fictions by engaging them in critical conversation.

In 1939, architect George W. Stoddard understood these stakes well when writing his apology to the AIA Board of Directors. “There are times in every man’s life when he does things on the spur of the moment that he later regrets,” Stoddard implored after flouting a professional ban on advertising.

The popular newspaper tabloid from following decades trafficked in one form of scandal surrounding the crime of regrettable deeds: originating in the private sphere and then splashed in the public one. These stories trade in schadenfreude while simultaneously performing in the interest of public good.

Stoddard’s delinquent act barely raises the contemporary pulse.

Today, shocking headlines proliferate. If scandal shapes and reflects the historical moment, what does this de-sensitization say about our current condition? Many artists and architects operate fully conscious of an anesthetized public.

Thresholds 43 complicates and provokes the idea of ‘scandal’ through scholarly discourse and inherently scandalous content.

Contributors to the journal include: Cristina Parreño Alonso Nisa Ari Austin+Mergold Jordan Carver Beatriz Colomina Jackson Davidow Sebastiano Fabbrini fala atelier Didier Faustino Peter Galison Kristen Gaylord Hans van Houwelingen Andrés Jaque Mark Jarzombek Ang Li John May Ruvimbo Moyo AnnMarie Perl Doris Sommer NADAAA Urbonas Studio Nora Wendl

Under the Influence Ana Miljacki, Editor FORMAT

200 pages, 162 illustrations 5.25” x 8.25” DATE

Fall 2014 CREDITS

Design: TwoPoints.Net DETAILS

ISBN: 978-0-9836654-6-5 Retail Cost: $24.99 With a foreword by Mario Carpo and Nader Tehrani

The Under the Influence book is based upon the eponymous symposium, which brought together scholars and practitioners of architecture in order to focus on one of the most anxious disciplinary topics: influence.

The symposium invited each of the participants to illuminate a single terma disciplinary synonym for appropriation-and through that term, the specific strategies, historical, and disciplinary circumstances in which it is enmeshed. It was organized and hosted by Ana Miljački, and presented by the MIT Department of Architecture.

The book includes introductory texts by Mario Carpo and Nader Tehrani and discussions moderated by Ana Miljački, Amanda Reeser Lawrence, and Michael Kubo.

Participants include: Alexander D’Hooghe Cristina Goberna & Urtzi Grau Eric Howeler & Meejin Yoon Timothy Hyde Mariana Ibanez & Simon Kim Florian Idenburg Sam Jacob John McMorrough Michael Meredith Enrique Walker Ines Weizman

Building Discourse: Proposition and Proof Editor, Irene Hwang FORMAT

496 pages, 785 illustrations, Full Color 9” x 12” DATE

Fall 2014 CREDITS

Design: TwoPoints.Net Assistant Editors: Kyle Barker, Nathan Friedman, Sarah Hirschman, Elizabeth Yarina DETAILS

Retail Cost: $40.00

Building Discourse examines the origins and consequences of the thesis project. Featuring twenty-four projects completed between 2008-2013, this volume of Building Discourse draws from the M.Arch degree program at MIT Architecture.

“The theses included herein are [...] a collective discursive space framed by the idea that the work may be able to bridge those disciplinary traits that are deemed autonomous with the social, political and economic phenomena that is impacting the world today. [...] What [the students] demonstrate through their projects is the urgency and seriousness with which they consider world transformations—in viewing the environment, the speed of urbanization, protocols of manufacturing, and a range of other themes that are impacting us all today. At the same time, the students have a deep awareness of the artifice of the design project: as research, polemic, and a Petri dish for future intellectual development. The merging of these two interests marks the importance of this educational threshold—a symbolic end of the graduate studies, but in actuality a launching point for future studies. These theses, if measured by the tracks of previous students, will take this next generation beyond the traditional role of the architect, expanding our terrain, and challenging the very cultures that produce our disciplinary closure.” − Nader Tehrani, Introduction

KELLY SHAW

BUILDING DISCOURSE

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Kelly Shaw HYPERsensarium: An Archive of Atmospheric Conditions M.Arch Thesis 2013 Advisor: J. Meejin Yoon Readers: Caroline Jones, Joel Lamere, Christoph Reinhart

HYPERsensarium proposes a tangible interface of atmospheres for public experience through an archive of historical and projected weathers. While architecture’s purpose has long been to act as the technical boundary between the body and nature’s elements, this thesis seeks to re-expose the body to conditions society has disengaged itself with both physically and socially.

Despite scientific data showing rising surface temperatures, increasing carbon dioxide levels, rising sea levels and extreme weather occurrences, environmental issues occur on scales of time and space too broad for human understanding. Air is invisible and thus uncontested.

HYPERsensarium is an experiential museum of weather chambers, de-neutralizing the weather for public immersion. Architecture becomes the medium through which the

Perspective: Approaching HYPERsensarium through Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden

BUILDING DISCOURSE

senses are isolated and then re-exposed to the archived weathers. With the majority of the project submerged within the grounds of Washington, D.C., visual, acoustic and thermal conditions reach stasis before visitors emerge into one of the archive’s chambers. The environments within the chambers are mechanically driven, juxtaposing the visitor’s “natural” views of D.C. with an artificial atmosphere absorbed through other sensoria.

The thesis seeks to rethink the archive as a physical and digital system collecting and accumulating data. Accumulated data no longer sits dormant within traditional archival typologies, but can be used to recreate physical conditions with which to finally ground our relationship to our surrounding atmosphere.

Above: Weather chamber components

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Redesigning The Airlock HYPERsensarium mediates the movement of the public through a constantly changing outside environment, a stringently controlled museum interior and finally the exhibited atmospheres within each of the four weather chambers. Such parameters guided the design of an architecture which could conceptually and physically support such an organization and sequence. In examining various devices used for environmental control ranging from the gas mask to the ubiquitous revolving door, the fermentation lock became the parti for the thesis as it spatially produces a circulation route which can provide the attenuated exhibition experience to isolate, neutralize and then re-expose the senses to changes in air temperature and humidity.

The general principle behind the fermentation lock seen on the right page is that it allows for carbon dioxide to be released through a “lock” made of water. The medium of the lock allows for carbon dioxide to escape due to the buildup of air pressure on one end of the lock without allowing oxygen to pass through from the other side. Restricting the movement of air to the release of carbon dioxide ensures that the environment on one end of the lock is free of exterior contaminants.

In HYPERsensarium the museum itself acts as the lock. The public’s sense of light, temperature and sound are controlled by

passage from the exterior D.C. climate into that of the underground museum. HYPERsensarium’s subterranean concrete architecture acts to acclimate visitors to the museum’s hermetically sealed interior temperature, lighting conditions and sounds. Each of the four atmospheric chambers is accessed individually through a hydraulic elevator lift.

The attenuated ramp acts as the program space housing the exhibition explaining the environmental conditions for each chamber. Each coil of the ramp terminates at a platform from which visitors can then take a hydraulic lift into the weather chambers above ground level. The hydraulic lifts necessitate an excavation of ground deeper into the earth in order to compensate for the mechanical space needed to house the piston’s full range of motion. Visitors walk onto the lift platforms which are flush with the rest of the exhibition hall’s floor plates.

Once visitors enter a chamber, the platform on which they stand acts as the locking mechanism sealing off the weather chamber. As visitors are taken back down, they experience each chamber and exhibition space in sequence, becoming acutely aware of how many chambers are left with each descent. The exhibition terminates when the public re-ascends up a more expedient escalator back to the archive entrance.

Opposite page, top: Sectional exhibition and chamber model Opposite and this page, bottom: Long section and plans Above: Airlock studies, from top: Fermentation lock, CO2, and O2

BUILDING DISCOURSE

KELLY SHAW

Exhibition Space Section

EXPERIENCING THE HYPERSENSARIUM Key to axonometric (Below) and perspectives (opposite): 1. The public begins at the entrance of the museum where most of the thesis is entirely hidden from view.

Only the appearance of the glass chambers on the far end of the park indicate that there must be an entry nearby.

2. As they descend into the narrow, underground tunnel, the public slowly loses sense of orientation, form, scale and dimensions normally associated with above-ground architecture.

The tunnel is illuminated by slivers of lighting embedded into the concrete railings of the tunnel and terminates in an illuminated doorway.

3. The tunnel opens into an expansive concrete exhibition space. As the public descends down the ramps, they stop to view snippets of information being presented from angled LCD displays.

4. The exhibition space is lit by light wells formed by glass elevator shafts.

As visitors move between the elevator shafts, they can see movement within them as passengers ascend and descend from the

NOTES 1 Erik Holm and Leslie Scism, “Sandy’s Insured-Loss Tab: Up to $20 Billion,” The Wall Street Journal, 16 December 2012, <http:// www.online.wsj.com>.

weather chambers.

their own chamber.

5. Each ramp sequence terminates with the opportunity to ascend into the accompanying weather chamber via a hydraulic elevator lift.

8. Visitors can also view into adjacent chambers where the temperature and humidity may cause inhabitants in another chamber to react very differently physiologically despite having shared views based on the season, clothing and interior conditions.

For example, a chamber may feel even warmer due to the visitors arriving in their winter clothing in December.

6. As passengers ascend the glass elevator shafts they are able to see other visitors moving in adjacent elevators. Each lift contains glass railings which lock into place when the lift is in movement.

7. Once in the weather chamber, visitors can see views onto the surrounding D.C. grounds. Their view of the exterior may be influenced by haze, fog, dust, etc., filtering the view in

9. Upon descent from the lift, the public circulates through the rest of the exhibitions before reascending into the entry building via escalator.

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Curtis Roth

Acid Ecologies: Or the Secret Lives of Spanish Tomatoes Master of Architecture Thesis Advisor: Ana Miljački Readers: Miho Mazereeuw, Alexander D’Hooghe

Concealing the Migrant’s Presence

This thesis seeks to unpack the nature of ecology within architecture, not as a neutral science, but as a legitimizing construct, building a future and transforming the ethics of the present towards very deliberate ideological ends, and contingent on certain practices of alienation which themselves have historically laid the groundwork for later environmental and social crisis.

The thesis asks the question: what do we mean when we call an architecture ecological, and what sort of reality are we advocating within that practice.

The project is not staged explicitly as a critique of ecology, but rather a challenge to the overwhelming neutrality with which the ecological project is entertained within architectural discourses, under the premise that an ecological awareness must first entail an awareness of the means by which ecology constructs unreal realities in order to work for us.

The project takes place in Almeria, Spain, which in the last forty-five years has gone from the poorest region in Spain to one of the richest, through the wide-scale application of greenhouse urbanism. Almeria is currently the largest intensive agriculture site in the world (80,000 acres) and supplies the majority of winter produce to Europe.

But Almeria is also, in many ways, an accelerated microcosm of larger contemporary ecological paradigms, what Keller Easterling called an autonomous world. Almeria is a place in which the apparent neutrality of ecological ideologies are consistently leveraged towards technological transformations of the landscape, precipitating widespread environmental and social fallout conditions. In Almeria, ecological ideologies consistently serve as the legitimizing platforms by which transformation after transformation (each promising an ideal future) com-

pound the effects of peripheral disaster, all under the guise of a seemingly neutral science.

The thesis argues that within a condition in which neutral ecology is leveraged to legitimize specific ideological and economic positions, it may actually be the task of an ecological architecture to irrigate radical alternatives, not as ideal futures, but as provisional presents, alternating ecological life rafts within contested environmental conditions.

The thesis proposes one such alternate present. It interjects itself within the most recent techno-ecological shift from chemically applied agricultural practices to the promise of a genetically engineered future, a ‘clean’ Almeria in the wake of widespread chemical fallout.

The alternative is formed from a seemingly simple premise, to merely doubt that Almeria’s genetic turn won’t precipitate alternate forms of fallout equal to its chemically contested state.

Above: Interior view

BUILDING DISCOURSE

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Bacteriological Quarantine Zones Urbanized Territories The Road to Europe Flash Flood Corridors Ecological Preserves Export Infrastructure

Fla

Flood Corrid or sh s

Scale of Flooding Event Flooded Greenhouses Copyright Seed Run-Off Chemical Run-Off Engineered Ecologies 1.600.000 Gallons 203 Greenhouses 14.5 Tons of Seed

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use and sociopolitical value (a bit like ecology no?): “Our contemporary ‘mad’ condition inevitably suggests new and unforeseen regroupings of its fragments. No longer linked in a coherent whole, independent from their past, these autonomous fragments can be recombined through a series of permutations whose rules have nothing to do with those of classicism or modernism.”

More recently, the project of non-consensual constituencies has been taken up by Alexander D’Hooghe in his work on the liberal monument, in which the insidiously neutral condition of urban sprawl is re-conceptualized into contradictory groupings of specific ideological enclaves, “screaming their own desires into the surrounding emptiness.” D’hooghe resuscitates Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work, in which multiple, even contradictory political positions are concretized through the open interpretation of multiple simultaneous realities in a shared field.

In short, 1: Acid Ecologies seek to re-instrumentalize the alienated fragments of existing ecologies into new alternateecologies. 2: to incubate contradictory alternate-ecological positions as the mechanism for perpetual ecological consciousness.

And 3: to build constituencies around these positions as plausible interpretations of the now hegemonic ecological unreality.

32.5 Tons of Chemicals 49 Ecologies 660.00 Gallons 124 Greenhouses 11 Tons of Seed

Flooding Trenches

25 Tons of Chemicals 37 Ecologies

1/Decade

660.00 Gallons 124 Greenhouses 11 Tons of Seed 9.5 Tons 12.5 Ecologies

Accumulation Pools

Circulation Routes

BUILDING DISCOURSE

1/Month

1/Year

Staged Flooding

Constructing Alternate Publics Almeria’s defunct miracle, an 80,000-hectares enclave of intensive greenhouse urbanism on the southern coast of Spain, operating on the now-normalized cusp of chemical catastrophe, has been reinvigorated through the promise of a genetically engineered salvation, where measurable chemical disasters are neutralized through the production of contamination on an immeasurable scale. Acid Ecologies imagines the possibility to doubt Almeria’s cleaner future through three hallucinogenic permutations of the miracle’s existing catastrophes: bacteriological infection, contaminated flash-flooding and corporately controlled seed migrating dust-storms. The project attempts to uncover alternate forms of agency in a landscape where the production of disaster has become the norm.

The miracle has always been made manifest through processes of multiplication, from one loaf to a thousand, or in Almerian terms, from one harvest to a miraculous two. The first harvest, engineered through the transparent sheen of polycarbonate, tampering with the approaching effects of the winter sun; the second paints the plastic white in a desperate attempt to reverse the effects produced by the first and control the rapidly escalating heat of the Mediterranean summer. If the first harvest is defined by a transparent mediation with its surroundings, the white-washed harvest sees the last tomatoes of the year produced through a claustrophobic battle with the very conditions that facilitated the first.

Like a territorially-scaled greenhouse, Almeria’s recent history has macro-cosmically mirrored the phobic transition from transparency to claustrophobia. If the first decades of the miracle were characterized by the exploitation of southern borders for the endless supply of migrant labor and the taxing of northern borders into richer European produce markets, recent decades, carrying with them widespread outbreaks of tomato contamination, racial violence, and competing sub-fruit harvests in the very same regions where Almeria once cultivated cheap labor, have transformed Almeria from the world’s richest tomato middle-man into a provisional city of plastic, operat-

ing in the extremes between their own ideal futures and their impending obsolescence.

But unlike your everyday supernatural event, the plastic miracle, in its last throws of optimism, has given birth to an alternate miracle, through the promised salvation of genetic modification. Under the messianic guarantee of a cleaner tomato, Almeria has been transformed into the global capital of applied genetic engineering, a cleaner cure for claustrophobia in which increasingly obscure scales of transformation compound the effects of peripheral disaster by casting catastrophes into further realms of immeasurability. But what if it were possible to leverage doubt in Almeria’s salvation, not as resistance, but as the vector of desire from which Almeria’s latent, but unconsidered, alternate trajectories might emerge?

Genetic Almeria has become the unplanned pregnancy of the dromospheric turn from the chemical to the biological, from reduced sperm counts in German vesicular glands to defective infants in France, from planned-poison to sequencedengineering, where terrified Europeans with rapidly enlarging prostates increasingly prefer the unknown-unknown to the known-unknown. But Almeria’s genetically engineered turn can also be seen as one of modern ecology’s inevitabilities, trading calamity for uncertainty: Pyrethroids replaced with transgenesis, contaminated groundwater and chemically induced madness among the Moroccans, replaced with the brilliant shine of softball-sized tomatoes and white lab-coats imported from Switzerland.

However, Almeria’s genetic-turn also briefly exposes the often camouflaged, totalitarian nature of progress, and with it, the possibility to doubt, not as a form of disbelief, but as a hallucinogenic questioning of the processes by which the agents of progress, under the guise of ecology, conceal their hegemonic conviction. In the moment of Almeria’s genetic-turn, it may be precisely through the fanatic championing of the latent possibilities of a chemically-poisoned-present that Alternative Almerias may emerge. Acid Ecologies attempts to uncover alternate futures within Almeria’s problematic contemporary, harnessing chemical catastrophes towards contradictory ends through the construction of three enclaves of doubt within a landscape of blind-optimism in a now-ubiquitous eco-utopiangenetic future.

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Archival Architecture Architectural Heritage as a Form of Political Discourse Ohio State, 2012-present KSA Trott Visiting Professor, 2012

Keller Gallery Exhibition Catalogs Irene Hwang, Series Editor FORMAT

13 cm x 21 cm, 328 pages total 6 Books, 48-56 pages each DATE

Fall 2014 CREDITS

Design: TwoPoints.Net DETAILS

ISBN-13: 978-0983665434 Retail Cost: $24.99

Exhibitions: Personal Space PostlerFerguson 99 Marginal Street Landing Studio Space-Time 1964-2014 Jorge-Otero Pailos with the MIT Edgerton Center and the MIT Museum Essay contributions by: Martha Buskirk Andrei Pop & Mechtild Widrich Laura Raskin Get to Work Room Studio featuring A:LOG New Massings for New Masses MILLIĂ&#x2DC;NS: John J. May and Zeina Koreitem Essay contributions by: Andrew Atwood Kiel Moe

Top: Interior of the International Space Station Above: Interior View of the Orbital Workshop

the environment . The one exception is the gondola module, with its symmetric arrangement of windows out into space, though even there the persistent Velcro patches and random bits of equipment break up the smoothness of the space .

Above & Following Spreads: Photographs of Personal Space exhibition at the Keller Gallery.

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Top: Tank farm demolition.

Above: New park.

Opposite: Salt ops.

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HOW TO PERFORM A PHOTOGRAPH

BY MARTHA BUSKIRK

Visitors encountering the Space-Time exhibition at MIT’s Keller Gallery could be forgiven for thinking that they knew what they were looking at. An enlarged photograph of an apple pierced by a bullet presented viewers with one of a number of stop-motion scenarios made famous by Harold Edgerton, in the context of the institution where most of his experiments with stroboscopic photography took place. But this version of the iconic photo, dated to 2014 and attributed to Jorge Otero-Pailos, was not simply a reproduction of Edgerton’s 1964 original; rather, it was a completely new undertaking, painstakingly remade using the same process and equipment, and its display in conjunction with a smaller-scale print of Edgerton’s 1964 Bullet Piercing an Apple, video documentation of Otero-Pailos’s process, and a copy of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture invited further inquiry.

Otero-Pailos recounts a number of intersecting motivations in his desire to engage with Edgerton’s famous image. One is his long-standing involvement with architectural preservation, where time is always a central concern. Graduate work in MIT’s Department of Architecture meant that he was familiar with Edgerton’s work as well as alert to its appearance in the context of Giedion’s classic architectural study. In Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion reproduced Edgerton’s time-lapse image of a golf swing immediately following a photomontage of Rockefeller Center, using both to support his analysis of an architectural environment organized not in relation to a single ideal vantage point, but rather as a series of views, unfolding in both time and space, that the mind has assimilate in a manner analogous to the ability to comprehend a movement made up of the successive positions recorded by Edgerton.1 The type of black-and-white photograph illustrated by Giedion was characteristic of Edgerton’s stroboscopic images from the 1930s,

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Opposite: Edgerton's Springfield rifle on its stand, ready to fire. The apple and blue backdrop were placed inside a plastic cube to protect the surrounding historic equipment from flying apple sauce.

(Photo by Deborah Douglas).

1. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941). In the first (1941) edition of the text, which was designed by Herbert Bayer, Edgerton’s photograph of a tennis swing appears on page 370, in conjunction with a discussion of images of speed in the context of Futurism, and the Rockefeller Center photomontage (created by Giedion himself) is reproduced on page 576, followed by Edgerton’s time-lapse photograph of a golf stroke on page 578.

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TOOLS FROM THE VENDING MACHINE

Rhino: The tool of choice for most young architects we know. While the “ortho” button is always tempting, we find ourselves sketching and wasting time doodling more than anything else. Suprisingly though, the wasted time almost always informs how we end up approaching something later, including the drawings in our book. It is an excellent way to productively waste time.

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NEW MASSINGS FOR NEW MASSES: 33 APHORISMS ON COLLECTIVITY AFTER ORTHOGRAPHY

BY MILLIØNS

1 .

There once was an architectural dream called Housing, which demanded from any architect who dared wander into its dream-shadow a complete rejection of existing culture . Housing was, during its early and most radical period, the first legitimate architectural counterculture. It was also a possible path towards career suicide .

2 .

Housing is no longer possible . All of the historical conditions that made Housing a viable and sensible architectural concept have been swept away and replaced by something else . Socialism and Progressive Liberalism have given way to Reflexive Neoliberalism; the State has been swallowed by the Market; communication has been replaced by information; sociality has dissolved into interactivity; metropolitan anonymity has been erased by mediated “privacy” (rendering senseless any conceptual or practical divisions between the so-called “public and private realms”); The scalar city has been supplanted by ascalar urbanism; historical time by real time; the visible by the invisible; etc. This much we know .

New Massings for New Masses opened on May 15, 2014.

3 .

More consequentially, for our purposes: the architectural spirit of experimentation that motivated Housing has ceased to exist because the technical-representational surface from which it emerged — the orthographic architectural drawing — has forever disappeared, and cannot be brought back.

4 .

We labor over surfaces . We expend our energy pushing things across surfaces, and those surfaces constitute for us a kind of technical substrate for how we think about our objects and their relation to our world . What we call “thinking” is always-already technical, and our intuition is inseparable from the possibilities and limitations afforded by specific technical regimes.

5 .

For a very long time (it is hard to say exactly how long, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes) architectural surfaces were orthographic . Seen from an anthropological view, orthography is a geometric gesturing that arranges marks into “legible” lines and texts . Orthographic reasoning imposed itself on a prehistorical world of magical images— pictograms—and produced linear surface-frameworks for the emergence and endless refinement of concepts. Orthography

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Keller Gallery Exhibition Catalogs Irene Hwang, Series Editor FORMAT

13 cm x 21 cm, 328 pages total 6 Books, 48-56 pages DATE

Spring 2013 CREDITS

Design: TwoPoints.Net DETAILS

ISBN-13: 978-0983665434 Retail Cost: $24.99

Exhibitions: Objects by Architects Sarah Hirschman, Curator

Feeling Contexts C+S Architects

With work by: Cheryl Baxter, Deger Cengiz, Chiaozza, Atelier FCJZ, Barbara Flanagan, FTF Design Studio, Graypants, Höweler + Yoon/MY STUDIO, Incorporated, Fiyel Levent, Lightexture, Atelier Manferdini, Molo, Moorhead & Moorhead, MOS, NADAAA, Nervous Systems, Rael San Fratello, Stanley Saitowitz

Essay contributions: Nader Tehrani, “The Delicate Instrumentality of Infrastructure”; Fulvio Irace, “Venetian Landscaping”, Silvio Carta, “Architectural Generosity”

Essay contributions: Christianna Bonin, “Between Paint & Paper: Remaking the Bauhaus Object” Mariel Villere, “Model Subjects”

Essay contributions: Matthijs Bouw, “Towards a Generous Architecture” Michael Kubo, “The Politics of Production”

Patterning by Heat: Responsive Textile Structures Felecia Davis and Delia Dumitrescu Certain Aspects of Architectural Form: Fifteen Selected Projects, 2009-2012 William O’Brien Jr.

Incremental Change: AtFAB Status Report Anne Filson & Gary Rohrbacher

CERTAIN ASPECTS OF ARCHITECTURAL FORM FIFTEEN SELECTED PROJECTS 2009-2012 WILLIAM O’BRIEN JR. November 29 - December 17, 2012

The Keller Gallery MIT Department of Architecture

them in medieval paintings as ritual objects—one particular eighteenth-century model collection provides a fascinating range of the model’s meaning and importance as a tool for both design and teaching. With a civic mission to elevate the status of architecture, architect Sir John Soane collected models as he developed his eccentric house museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. The collection was meant to articulate his lectures at the Royal Academy in three dimensions and to give students an opportunity to spatially understand historic architecture, built work that was otherwise inaccessible. Soane would cordon off sections of his multi-story house museum to correspond with each lecture and students could examine the models, holding the space with their eyes if not with their hands. While each model represented a specific project in place and time, the collection as a whole was meant to represent “architecture” in general and along a Hegelian path of history.

MODEL SUBJECTS MARIEL VILLERÉ

Frank Gehry, an architectural figure whose early career is marked by classic experiments in form and space, is more commonly known for his mature deconstructivist work, leading technology research to produce sculptural and impossibly fragmented forms. Inspired by more than computational geometry for his 2003 Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Gehry used a familiar object as a metaphor for the performance of the planned building. He modeled his signature back-bending silver curves from the contours of a baseball mitt, an architecture that would allow him to “hold music in his hands.”

(Fig. 1) I would like to draw out from this example the importance of a personal object in understanding architectural form and scale. Similar to the traditional architectural model, the object prioritizes touch as an approach to an abstract concept in order to understand it. Although students and architects increasingly design in the virtual, a tangible and commonly understood object remains crucial to the design process and to communication. Digital prototyping has positioned architects to question and even replace the traditional model for the sake of flexibility and expediency. As digital tooling has been incorporated into practice, products have seen refined craft, thereby gaining value. Once a form of representational excess, the prototype has become an artful object. Furthermore, the transition in experimentation and representation from model to object can be read as a wind sleeve for the practice of architecture.

The author would like to thank Irina Chernyakova and Christianna Bonin for their insightful feedback on earlier versions of this essay.

Above, Figure 1: Creative Commons Image of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2003 courtesy of Kansas Sebastian on Flickr.

Pictured, from left: Google Map Quilt by Cheryl Baxter, Scraplight by Graypants, Branch Table by Incorporated, Umami Trays by FTF Design Studio, NUM NUM Flatware

by NADAAA. Photograph © Judith M. Daniels, SA+P

are changing so rapidly, the collection of these twenty objects—unified by nothing but their size and a loose academic allegiance of their designers—within a school of architecture speaks most to experimentation with standard structures and scales. No two objects in the show share the same trajectory from design to delivery, and that is where the real story is.

The histories provided in these booklets are an essential component of the exhibition because it was never just about the objects themselves.

Left; Figure 2: Design model in Sir John Soane’s collection.

Image courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Left, below; Figure 3: Cork model of The Temple of Vesta, Tivoli in ruins in Sir John Soane’s collection. Image courtesy of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

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As Soane continued to collect these various model objects, and even multiples of the same models, he filled a multitiered tableau (and every other available surface) within the model room. Without any apparent organizing principle, visitors encountered this room with a site model of Pompeii in cork, 14 cork models of ruins, 20 plaster models of those same buildings in imagined reconstruction, over 100 models of his own architecture, and found architectural fragments and details. By nature of their display, each model lost its integrity and identity in proliferation—no longer offering unique spatial experience and interior journey, but rather seen as parts of a set, the model room.

The model continually approaches object status as architects turn toward new technologies and methodologies of production, often away from the handcraft that Soane commissioned. Technology has made the act of reproducing faster and easier, creating a new image of the entire project after each detailed change. At the same time, advanced geometries call for advanced joinery systems, and the modeling process may focus on resolving a singular joint to reproduce across a façade, for example. Rather than representing the full project in miniature, the recursive prototype

ACTUAL/ JOSH JAKUS UM TOTE, 2005

OBJECTS BY ARCHITECTS I SARAH M. HIRSCHMAN

UM Tote is a sculptural handbag that zips together into a complex form with three dimensional strength from a flat piece of felt. As a sideline to architecture, Jakus was working on several furniture and product pieces—he wanted to make a chair. Upon realizing that a soft-good would be the easiest and most viable product for retail stores, he started experimenting with felt and zippers. Starting with the concept of a bowl, the experiments led him to design a closeable container, which evolved into a handbag. Although the design arose out of material manipulation, Jakus is not involved with the fabrication process, and never has been. Chosen for its structural quality, the felt comes from Canada, zippers from Italy. Die cut at a Hayward, CA shop and sewn in Oakland, CA, Jakus shied away from the sewing after stapling the first prototypes. Evading finishing labor, the felt has added value as a non-woven material that is “basically just tangled fibers.” Jakus adds, “So the edge is cut. No finishing required. I am now working with cork for the same reason.” Simplicity is both an aesthetic and cost-effective approach. Rather than pricing his objects based on the market, Jakus assesses his production costs and profit margins.

The Objects by Architects exhibition was inspired by a mass email from Lerival, a company that produces and distributes furniture designed by architects. More pointed than the daily blanketing from design-object sites, this email was clear—they had a new stool, it was designed by a well-known architecture firm, you should buy it. Though it comes off as any old advertisement, something is different in the direct link the company draws between the object and the designer.

For whatever reason, it’s here, in the world of high-end home furnishings, where architects can be unproblemmatically hailed as visionary, just for being architects. That the unique skills of architecture here are assumed to add value—it’s refreshing. Lerival sells stuff, sure, but in order to sell that stuff, they also package the idea that architects have something to offer outside of the architectural scale. Lerival’s mission statement from the homepage of their website declares that they “champion personality-driven products of versatile modularity to reflect the innovative aesthetics & techniques of emerging design today.” That disciplinary cross-over could be the engine for such innovation and that architects were doing something other than architecture both seemed worthwhile jumping off points for an exhibition within a school of architecture.

Above: Objects by Architects in the Keller Gallery; pictured: Ivy Coatrack System by MOS. Photograph © Irina Chernyakova

With eruptive popularity, UM Tote is now one piece of a line of five bags. Its success pulled Jakus away from practicing architecture into the direction of making objects. He eventually returned to the bowl, and additionally designs “tabletop things” and lamps. He highlights these objects on his blog and website, which he uses as his primary marketing tool. After running the “brutal and expensive” trade show circuit and finding it took him “away from a creative place for months at a time, both physically and mentally,” he is now “taking a more proactive approach and communicating with the public” at local events and through social media. Although the first chair was a failed attempt, he says he will eventually make one.

MV

Compared to a custom home, a one thousand dollar table is modest and attainable. For the architect on the other side of this equation, a table is designed once and done— multiples of objects are assumed and expected; multiples of architecture are breach of contract or copyright violation.

The Objects by Architects exhibition was initially conceived of in a cynical light—it was meant to show what architects did to make ends meet, what other chains of commerce they had to engage in order to make architecture work.

That was, of course, naïve—almost as soon as the objects were researched and collected it was clear that they were all conceived of in very different circumstances. Some of the works included in the show are one-off material tests meant only for internal research. Some were art pieces meant only for exhibition. And of course others are indeed commercial products—but then the quantities in which they’re manufactured, the processes used to create them, and the distribution channels used to get them into the hands of consumers vary widely too. At a time when the tools and methods of design, fabrication, publicity, and distribution

How does your education inform your practice?

JJ My process is very rooted in architecture. I have met a lot of industrial, fashion, and furniture designers and they think very differently. I am more analytical, more iterative, more reliant on process and less on market study. I also treat a set of materials like a site or landscape: what are the possibilities? What are the limitations? How can those limitations inform the design?

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Simultaneously exposing young students to works of architecture seen on the Grand Tour and opportunistically elevating his own designs to match those of the classical world, Soane combined and recombined the models in his collection to get at the bigger question of what constitutes architecture and the making of space? Thought to have designed through

1. The model room remains a centerpiece of the Sir John Soane House Museum, which was bequeathed to the British nation in 1837 upon Soane’s death. The collection now holds items including early 19th century nails, screws and bolts preserved in the structure of the Museum and as fixings for objects.

Window frames and glazing bars, window latches and sash lift are displayed with the other models, therefore further expanding the definition of “architectural model.”

Models of any kind—planes, trains and automobiles, but particularly architectural models— give the beholder the capability to imagine an “other” space, reproduced in a different place and time. Most commonly, architects use the model to plan a design and to resolve conceptual and structural flaws in advance of the fullscale building. Although models have been a primary tool in the design and building industry since before the Renaissance—we can identify

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Above: Objects by Architects in Keller Gallery

Mariel Villeré earned her SMArchS degree in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT in 2013. She wrote her prize-winning Masters thesis on the first documenta exhibition-event in 1955 and its positioning alongside the traveling German Federal Garden Show as an effort to support postwar reconstruction. She holds a BA cum laude in Architecture from Barnard College (2008).

modeling to imagine architectural interiors, Soane commissioned craftsmen to make intricate models that would stack, unfold and reveal multiple spaces. His own designs were placed adjacent to fragments from London buildings as full-sized models of themselves and collected miniature cork models of Greek temples and Etruscan tombs.1 (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3) Each typology had a singular and distinct material expression, from wood, to plaster casts, to the deteriorating cork as a scaled stand-in for stone in ruination.

An artifact and double of the original architectural space sited in Italy, the souvenir model was reality, and Soane became obsessed with this phenomenon. Actively prioritizing his collection over his architecture practice in his later years, these models and their placement in the house were a source of sustainment. To reference Elizabeth Grosz’s definition of the “thing,” the architectural model was no longer a double, but the resource of the subject’s being or enduring. Sir John Soane was so absorbed by these models that they begin to represent and substitute him, rather than simply precedents for his design work or their provenance in the classical world. He went so far as to write a hypothetical archaeological report about his own house museum as a site unraveled by future antiquarians titled, “Crude Hints Toward the History of My House.” In an effort to write his name into architectural history, he collapsed typologies of design model, souvenir and architectural fragment in the model room and in his design work, ultimately defining “architecture” without consideration for time or place. That is, the model lost its full-scale “other” and instead replaced architecture as a hand-held object.

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I . PIXELATED REVEAL

The Pixelated Reveal tension structure was made on the circular knitting machine with the opening yarn . The material was designed with small stripes of melting yarn to create what we called ‘pixels’ which opened when heated by current . The fabric was designed so that many different designers could make their own patterns with these pixels . In addition, the material was designed so that if all the pixels were open there was still knitted material between the pixels to hold the structure in tension .

Above: Pixelated Reveal fabric test before opening.

Below: Pixelated Reveal fabric after current has opened the stitch courses.

This geometric structure is made up of conductive yarn and melting yarn using a tubular Jersey structure . The pattern is formed of four courses of texturized polyester yarn, monofilament, one course of melting yarn or GRILLON VLT® and one of conductive yarn . The two courses made by the conductive yarn and melting yarn are knitted every four stitches which floats on the textile reverse side . Thus, when the melting yarn is heated it disappears from the area where it is stitched in the textile structure .

Our tension structure was wired to open a small 100 cm area of pixels at a time in a spiraling fashion up the tube . Each 100 cm line of pixels was given current through a microcontroller via a positive or negative cable at either end . The conductive yarn was continuous and circular in the tube and had to be cut at each end of the reactive area to ensure that the current only went to that area . The material was connected to a proximity sensor in the exhibition, but we discovered it was very difficult to control the response with many people in the room in an exhibition situation . We decided to activate the structure under more controlled conditions when the exhibit was closed .

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Above: Details of the Tube in Tube textile

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One to Several Table

Five To Thirty Minute Chair DOWNLOADS

DOWNLOADS

The One to Several Table supports working and gathering. It has 3 different kinds of S/Z joint connections, with 22 total connections within one Table. The Table is comprised of 6 different kinds of pieces, with 13 pieces total.

The Table’s loads and forces are resolved with a torsion box top and a rotationally symmetrical arrangement of tapered leg assemblies that provide stability.

X 450 - 1800

Y 450 - 1800

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The Five to Thirty Minute Chair is a side chair. It has 2 different kinds of S/Z joint connections, with 13 total connections within one Chair. The Chair is comprised of 6 different kinds of pieces, with 10 pieces total. Its loads and forces are resolved with symmetrically arranged tapered leg assemblies.

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Z 750.1000.1250

TRANSFORMATION DESIGN

The table transforms dimensionally in width and length, to accommodate the gathering of one or several individuals. It’s minimum parameters yield a table that seats one, and its maximum dimension is limited by common materials and machine beds. Three height options provide a range of seated and standing uses. Optional grommets can be added for wires.

X 430 - 1000

Y 565 - 1000

0 - 10 | 75 - 85

The Five to Thirty Minute Chair transforms dimensionally from 430 to 1000mm wide to accommodate seating for one or multiple individuals. The chair seat and back angles can be independently adjusted to accommodate postures that range from an upright seating for working to lower, relaxed seating for lounging.

The seat length can also be extended.

Silver Lining Bed

Walking Chest DOWNLOADS

DOWNLOADS

The Silver Lining Bed is a platform bed. It has 3 different kinds of S/Z joint connections, and 9 different kinds of pieces, with the number of connectors and pieces determined by its size. Its torsion box platform and symmetrically arranged tapered leg assemblies enable stability and long spans. The bed can be situated against a wall or free-standing within a space.

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Opposite: Reception Desk and Conference Tables at MakerBot Industries Headquarters, Brooklyn, NY

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X 750 - 2000

Y 750 - 1000

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TRANSFORMATION DESIGN

X 800 - 2100

Y 400- 600

Z 400 - 2100

The Walking Chest transforms dimensionally from 800 to 2100mm in width, 400 to 600 in depth, and 400 to 2100mm in height. It accommodates different drawer configurations within its frame for a range of storage needs.

The Bed grows modularly from a daybed to a single, double and king size bed. The Bed transforms both dimensionally and modularly. It transforms from 750 to 2000mm in width and depth can be subdivided into cells, which are themselves transformable to optimize structure and lightness. The Bed works well situated in the center of a space or against a wall.

activists, and builders . As a consequence, architects do not wait for clients anymore . They initiate, share and invest . AtFAB helps show us where the architect’s knowledge is presently of greatest necessity and value .

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Above: Visualization of Open Storage Unit variations

The Walking Chest is a chest of drawers. It has 3 different kinds of S/Z joint connections and is comprised of 11 different kinds of pieces, with total numper of connections and pieces total determined by its number of drawers. Its loads and forces are resolved in a rotationally symmetrical arrangement of tapered leg assemblies that support a frame with cavities that hold operable drawers.

Ninety Minute Chair

Cellular Screen DOWNLOADS

The questions Filson and Rohrbacher ask through AtFAB (“[Can] we provoke a decentralized global manufacturing network by posting furniture cut files online? [Can] designers use digital tools to productively engage the Maker Movement and leverage the best attributes of design expertise and DIY? [Can] we demonstrate new forms of entrepreneurship for architects?”) are not only generous towards the users and producers of the furniture, by inviting them to engage the product, but also to the profession. In AtFab, more than files are shared: by paving the way for new business models for architects, they share a new trajectory for our future .

DOWNLOADS

The Ninety Minute Chair is a chair for lounging.

It has 4 different kinds of S/Z joint connections, with 18 total connections within one Chair. The Ninety Minute Chair is comprised of 7 different kinds of pieces, with 9 pieces total. Loads are distributed across its interlocking seat, arms and legs, so it easily carries several individuals across a long span.

TRANSFORMATION DESIGN The Ninety Minute Chair transforms dimensionally from 800 to 2400mm in width, in order to accommodate seating for one, two, or three individuals. The Chair works well as a single object that seats one or several. It can be aggregated in pairs. Multiple chairs in multiple sizes work well as a seating group.

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X 800 - 2400

The Cellular Screen is a modular partition that bounces light through opaque surfaces. It has 2 different kinds of S/Z joint connections based on the S/Z joint, with the number of connections determined by its size. The Screen is comprised of 3 different kinds of pieces, with the total quantity of pieces dependent upon each versions specified dimensions. Its parts lock into a frame with lateral stability and long span.

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Y 782

Z 873

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TRANSFORMATION DESIGN The Cellular Screen transforms both dimensionally and modularly. It has multiple panels that transform from 750 to 2000mm in height and length, and can be subdivided into cells, which are themselves transformable to optimize transparency. The cell grid is defined by a constant, alternating, or non-linear variable.

X x/n

Y y/n

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Keller Gallery Exhibition Catalogs Sarah Hirschman, Editor Volume 1: 2011-2012 FORMAT

8.25” x 6”, 222 pages total 5 Books, 38-48 pages DATE

Spring 2012 CREDITS

Design: Sarah Hirschman ISBN-13: 978-0983508250 Retail Cost: $14.99

Exhibitions: Lightweight Concrete: Ongoing Investigations into the Production of Variable Density Cellular Materials Timothy Cooke and John E. Fernandez Essay by: Timothy Cooke, “Between Disciplines: Building Materials Research” John Fernandez, “Thought and Thing” The Making of Things Ali Tayar Essay by: Andrew Manto, “The FabLab Paradox” The New Normal: Complete Fabrications Justin Lavallee and Nicholas Gelpi Featuring the work of first year Master of Architecture students from fabrication course that challenged students to design a temporary pavilion to be built on campus.

Walsh Street House | Robin Boyd (1919-1971) In collaboration with The Robin Boyd Foundation; Essay excerpts from Robin Boyd and Philip Goad, drawings provided by the Foundation.

Essay by: Shiben Bannerji, “The Roof of the Un-Small House” Waterworks Carole Starr Schein Interview by Sarah Hirschman Daniela Covarrubias, “Photography and Reality”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology SA+P Press Architecture Publications

Contact: Irina Chernyakova Exhibitions & Publications MIT Architecture ich@mit.edu / 617-324-4416