An Exaggeration of Media

Exaggeration of Media A tendency of tension.

by Nathan Mosure

content 1-4 5 - 10

The Adversary Weaving Fenestration

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Rendered Drawings

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Rendered Paintings

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Space for the Beholder

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Experiential Media

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Architecure of Media

Computation and advancements in fabrication have paved the way for a new type of architecture, one of an articulate surface. Perforated, embroidered, formed, or applied the walls of a building can be patterned for aesthetic appeal but also fabricated to serve as structural members in the design. Herzog & de Meuron and Snøhetta are among the many firms building with prefabricated panels, printing on new materials, or using computer aided design to push the capabilities of what the surface of a building can be.

The relationship between materiality and surface have always coexisted, no matter the material or, recently, even the shape they desire to be. Modular like bricks, or monolithic like formed concrete, the surface has become constrained by the material it is comprised of. As the examples shown on pages 1-5 intended, their surfaces find unison, no matter how complex or ordain the architect intended for them to be.

The tendency that succeeds, however, is the result of what happens when the media and thier outcome are in discord: The exaggeration of media.Â

Perforated Copper

De Young Museum Herzog & de Meuron, 2005

Signal Box Herzog & de Meuron, 1994

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Wrapped / Layered Copper

Casted Fiberglass

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Snøhetta, 2016

Surrounding round leaf foliages drive design pattern.

Embossed

Perforated

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Gantenbein Vineyard Gramazio & Kohler, 2006

Printed Glass / Concrete Robotic Assembled Masonry

Utrecht University Library Wiel Arets Architects, 2004

Applied - Perforated - Cut - Layered - Formed - Cast - Stacked - Printed. The surface has undergone tremendous transformations made capable by innovations. New materials allow for lighter weight structure and thinner structural skins. Advancements in fabrication such as the CNC mill, 3D printers, and precise robotics create opportunities to produce parametric designs that create both an aesthetic pattern and an architectural tectonic. Though the methods are new, the tension between outward appearance and structured shelter is rooted with deep history. German theorists Carl Botticher and Gottfried Semper wrote of a distinction between the “kernform” and “kunstform”. The core structural conditions of architecture being the kernform, and the expressive qualities of technical art in kunstform. The architect is innately concerned with structure, as all buildings and their elements are bound to the ground by one force: gravity. They are also called upon to connect space and buildings with the culture it is being built for. Expression through the surface, or facade, can be seen as an interface between community and individual. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were interested in the surface as a vernacular scene that could be used to connect the less witty public with the architecture on the Las Vegas Strip in their 1968 Las Vegas studio at Yale.

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Clement Greenberg points to this distinction in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, arguing that there is a clash of styles between the high resolution Modernist architecture, and a low resolution cool media of the Kitsch that required little effort by its viewer. It is in the battle between these two styles that patterned facades and the articulate surface have emerged. Printing papyrus leaves on glass and cement to symbolize a material used in the production of paper, but also creating a dot screen to mitigate sunlight(De Young Museum). Casting 700 different variations of sculpted fiberglass panels to mimic the quick-moving fog that sets into San Francisco’s bay doubles as a solution to minimizing construction costs - as it is substantially lighter than formed concrete panels and performs well in high seismic conditions(San Francisco MoMA). The architect is responsible for finding solutions that maximize efficiency, but also satisfy the client and the culture the client is building for. Firms like Herzog & de Meuron, Snøhetta, and MVRDV to name a few have proven that mediums of all kinds can be manipulated into a surface. The interaction between building block and building can be harmonized. The works shown above are examples of this harmony, whereas the works and installations outlined below are the product of what happens when a project’s media are exaggerated so much so that it creates an entirely different architecture.

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Elena Manferdini

Inspired by Mies Van der Rohe’s works within the city of Chicago, Atelier(Elena) Manferdini’s “Building Portraits” uses the combination of drawings in elevation and images or renderings of fenestrations. She distorts the images and drawings in a variety of ways to produce an entirely different typology. Projecting, scaling, weaving, overlaying, and pixelizing are among the ways she distorts the images and drawings. Using Mies’ buildings as a the medium itself, she combines two distinct forms of representation into one. She describes her reasoning for this combination through what she describes as an architectural drawings tension, “Vector drawings, in general have an inherent duality... They want to be a technical drawing to get built, and on the other hand they are a picture of something that is not built yet.” Her work seeks to find a place of creativity in the tension between rendered pictures, and the drawings of that create the picture.

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EXISTING PALETTE

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PIXELATION THROUGH FRAGMENTATION

WEAVING PARTS

LAYERING SCALES

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FOLDING PORTRAITS

Elena then explores what happens in transitioning from two dimensional drawings, to three dimensional models. Building Portraits used as a surface - folding and wrapping in a sculptural form while allowing the projections and grids to interact where edges meet. A collision of precision and free-form. The result of this slipping of the precise nature of a grid, and folding physical surfaces creates an isometric illusion that leaves its outcome ambiguous. Building or sculpture, drawing or rendering, fenestration or pattern?

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Tempera - “A New Sculpturalism” MOCA, 2013

The pavilion examines the work of thirty-eight major and emerging practices in the contemporary architecture of Los Angeles in the past 25 years. Painterly techniques turned into patterns, superimposed with repetitious profiles and perforations wrapped around surfaces.

Elena describes it as, not dissimilar to the city itself, “the pavilion appeals to the public through playful, fictional, and pop-eye candy aesthetics.”

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Exaggerations of patterned graphics with the rendered images spilling out from the cube are juxtaposed with lineal patterns across a spectrum of candy land colors. All of these moves made around the surfaces of the cube, creates a illusion of what the space of the pavilion actually is. Depth is no longer tangible, as seen in the top left image, nor does the distinction between flatness and planar surface read legibly.

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Fabian Marcaccio

“I would say that I ‘render’ paintings instead of making them or building them in a way.” Fabian creates 3 dimensional paintings with acrylic and silicone to represent a type of pictorial history telling through the blending of medias. Action painting for the beholder that acts as transitional space, rather than contemplation. It is not lineal, but rather liberal, using the physical qualities of paint form in a three dimensional space rather than a flat two dimensional painting. His “Paintants” are sculptural-architectonic sequences, morphing painting and mutant to create a modified life. The digital age we are living in has resulted in an “in-between” of media. We use paint, photographs, film, and now we occupy the in-betweening of these media. Fabian Marcaccio examines the nature of painting and the art of the new age, and presents a conflict between the handicap of paintings in the context of sculpture and video projection.

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ANALYTICAL RAGE, 2009 “Ragga”

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ANALYTICAL RAGE, 2009 “SHOOT - SPEI”

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UN Paintant, 2005

Structural Canvas, 2011 Â 16

Functioning dysfunction The paint and the piece are in constant paradox. Painting in an open field of possibilites, without losing its good specificities. The work is meant to transend the medium into infinite points of view, rather than a singular point of view that paintings are historically created to be portrayed. The work fails through a singular point-of-view-lens, and it is in the sum of these failures that the work is represented to the fullest force. Failures as a function; painting in spite of itself. The pursuit of dysfunction is fueled by Fabian’s logic that the digital age has created multiple realities. There is a dual potential developing over a space time dynamic. In-formation informs and re-forms itself through media. His work is derived from this tension of fiction and reality.

STRUCTURAL CANVAS, 2011 “Child Soldier”

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“When the indexical domain of photography is heavily altered by digital means, an abstract rooted history telling could bring an alternative analytical report, against the constant senseless attack of image in the media arena.�

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“Private Contractor” Imagery

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“Private Contractor” Painting

PRIVATE CONTRACTOR, 2007

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Julian Hoeber

Another advocate for using multiple media in the creation of his works, Julian crosses disciplines in drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and design. Interested in producing sculptures that represent an architectural folly, his installations cover the entire process of his core practice. Sculptures with complex forms made with an unconventional materials to represent deeper meaning. His “Going Nowhere” installation creates an idea of what a space can be opposed to what it actually is. Pushing the practice of art and design through a wide range of media that challenge ones psychology, emotion, and narrative. The pieces themselves can be described as illusionary, mysterious, and ambiguous, but they do so through pristine and ordain forms. “The difference between something clean and something rickety is really what defines the difference between the spiritual and the supernatural.. the clean is spiritual, the dirty is supernatural.”

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https://www.blumandpoe.com/sites/default/files/works/JH515_1.jpg[12/13/2017 9:17:43 PM]

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Going Nowhere, 2015 “Spiral”

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Going Nowhere, 2015 “Corkscrew”

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Rotational Symmetries, Decayed and Stacked 2016

Going Nowhere, 2015 “Vector Model�

Working like an architect, Julian uses formwork not only in the process of casting the shapes and curves he seeks to create, but also as a piece of art in themselves. This relationship between creator and creation is of equal importance in the installations they are presented. The images on the bottom left and right, are the formwork for the pieces pictured above them. His craft in constructing the tools to create reflect the same precision and meticulous nature of the pieces they mold. The wood or fiberglass medium used contrasts the ceramic medium within it; rather than simply disposing of formwork, Julian displays them to strengthen the relationship between the body and shell. The mirrored forms then act as symbols for issues he is concerned with: representing architectonics and experiential media, an issue he found interest in after studying Anne Tyng’s work.

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Jessica Silverman Gallery, 2015 “Thought of Forms Forms of Thoughts”

“Irregular Tension Structure”, 2016

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Demon Hill, 2010

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Hammer Projects: Julian Hoeber - Hammer Museum

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Hammer Projects: Julian Hoeber OCT 30, 2010-FEB 27, 2011 This is a past exhibition

Los Angeles-based artist Julian Hoeber uses a wide range of media—including sculpture, drawing, filmmaking, installation, and photography—to explore psychology, emotion and narrative. For this exhibition, Hoeber presents Demon Hill, a freestanding structure based on the architecture of “gravitational mystery spots.” The architecture of these shacks creates the illusion that gravity works at an angle, that water runs uphill, and that bodies stand at a sharp angle to the floor. “Mystery spots” claim to be an effect and marker of a geological anomaly or a supernatural phenomenon

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Image Gallery

Related Programs

2011 FEB 27

CLOSING

JAN 6

Screenings Playtime

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ARTIST - ARCHITECTURE

Whitesett Blvd, Elena Manferdini, Los Angeles, 2015

Villa Ascona, Elena Manferdini, Switzerland, 2010

Eye Pavilion, Julian hoeber, 2016

paintant Stories, Fabian Marcaccio, 2000

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Paintant Stories, 2000

Predator, 2001

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Skyline of Exaggerated Media “The Future”, Photoshop Rendering

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Works Cited Pell, Ben. The Articulate Surface. Birkauser GmbH. 2010 Greenberg, Clement. Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Beacon Press. 1961 Stinson, Elizabeth. How to Make a Building Shimmer Like the Ocean, Using Plastic. Wired.com, 2014 <http://www.ateliermanferdini.com/>. Website <https://youtu.be/cSfMxh6e_nw>, “Exhibition Walk-through: ‘Building Portraits’.” Video <http://paintantscorporation.com/site/> Website <https://youtu.be/CAArSvXdJTw>. “FABIAN MARCACCIO - Some USA Stories”. VIdeo <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7pZDKh5qbY>. Fabian Marcaccio Interview with Todd Gannon. Video <https://www.artsy.net/artist/julian-hoeber> Website <https://youtu.be/BeXqueGcADM>, “Julian Hoeber & Cayetano Ferrer in Conversation”. Video <https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2010/hammer-projects-julian-hoeber/> Website