ZOO

NERO CHENXUAN HE

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTURE

Nero Chenxuan He

Spring 2020

SCIArc

Graduate Thesis

GRADUATE THESIS

ZOO ZOO

Spring SCI- Graduate 2020 ARC Thesis Thesis Prep Devyn Advisor Weiser Cultural John Agent Cooper

Essai sur l’architecture 2nd ed / Charles Eisen / 1755

ZOO ZOO

noun /zuË?/ A situation characterized by confusion and disorder.

01. 1D, 2D, and 3D. p.1 · 02. Fore- ;Back- ground. p.13 · 03. Past, Present, & Pending... p.21 · 04. Style from Form? p.31 · 05. A Formless Construction p.41 · 06.

Thrist of Collection p.51 · Annex p.65

Content.

Double Transparency / JesĂşs Rafael Soto / 1956

Greg Lynn led the architectural trend of animated form. However, motion is relative. Our view is dynamic based on how we look at one architecture without this architecture itself being dynamic. Through the change of human perspective, buildings as essential visual information will also change. To a degree, architecture moves, constructs, and deconstructs in mind. It is easy to translate architecture into 2-dimensional information through drawings and digital documentation methods. With training, a 3-dimensional volume can also be traced back through reading 2-dimensional information with imagination.

SUPERFLAT NERO HE & JONATHAN WARNER TESTA VERTICAL STUDIO 2019

1D, 2D, and 3D.

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

2D VISUAL INFORMATION The Cornell Box An Experiemental Evaluation of Computer Graphics Imagery Gary W. Meyer 1986

01 / 3

VERTICAL CITY Physical Model La Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) Le Corbusier 1924

Architecture discipline is a study of transforming architectural information back and forth from 2D to 3D. Renderings are 2D representations of 3D volumes. When one 3D volume is erected the visual information will still get flattened in our mind as a 2D information, which may or may not be accurate to the real construction. Architects have also been trained to read drawings as plans and sections etc.

The systematic way (due to most of the historical precedents) is to understand what each line stands for and extrude it to construct a “phantom architecture.” Till the point designing through plans and sections becomes a trend to understand spatial organizations.

THE CORNELL BOX DESCRIPTION [1] Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture Andrew Atwood 2018

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

Images on the left are “the Cornell Box, or rather of two different representations of two different models of the Cornell box: a photograph of a physical model constructed out of plywood and painted (left) and a rendering of a digital model composed of zeros and ones (right). These models were built in a closet and in a computer, respectively, in the early 1980s in the computer science department at Cornell University, where they were used to test early rendering algorithms.

They were compared side-by-side as one of the first tests of photography versus rendering, in the interest of making what we now casually call ‘photo-realistic rendering.’” [1]

EXTRUDED ARCHITECTURE Do architects define the line between black and white?

Architectures in this project are the result of simple extrusions from its urban plan. Le Corbusier believed that most of the 20th-century cities were chaotic and inefficient. Thus, he came up with this solution to provide effective means of communication, an abundance of Green Areas, better access to the sunlight; and reduce urban traffic. The whole element function is described as a “Living Machine.” In this project, he also represented an indisputable idea of how people should act in the space he created in a very defined and constructed way as one of the results of extruded architecture. This act shows how Le Corbusier is well known for the relationship between architecture and politics, and have no engagement with creating ambiguous or uncouncious space.

4

FLATTENED ARCHITECTURE Drawing for Basement Plan St Paul’s Cathedral Church, London John Britton 1809

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

INPUT AND OUTPUT Painting for AA Graduation Thesis Malevich’s Tektonik Zaha Hadid 1977

5

architectural data to create a new architecture.

Image on the right shows Zaha Hadid’s thesis work. One of Hadid’s most significant influencers, the Russian painter and theoretician, inspired the Dame’s AA graduation thesis, which transformed Malevich’s 1923 Arkitekton model into a 14-story hotel that stretched across London’s Hungerford Bridge. Through her drawing, she illustrated the idea of how she segregated parts from the old model and reorganized the architectural information into her final design. There is also a clear transformation between 2D and 3D drawing techniques. They co-exist in the same drawing to blur the line and to test people’s imagination to see the architecture they want to see. Architecture design becomes a game of operation.

A TREATMENT OF ARCHIVE [2][3] Testa Vertical Studio Syllabus Peter Testa 2019

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

Existed architecture document “offers an archive of found objects and set pieces to be appropriated overturned, recombined, and recontextualized in the design.” [2] Architects’ new role is no longer overproducing objects rather than creating a process of decoding to reduce, reuse, and rethink architectural information to “exploit new ways of seeing re-seeing, and sensing” [3]. By processing drawings and its visual information, formal and representational architectural patterns, repeatable elements, as poché, structure, circulation, programmatic division, and spatial organization and be isolated out by reducing it down to its essential elements. All elements are carefully extracted based on the fidelity of how architectural information is filtered or inherited to create a better conversation in terms of using existing

WORLD OF PROJECTION Diorama Illustration Etching Le Diorama de Daguerre (Daguerre’s Diorama) Les Merveilles de la Photographie Gaston Tissandier 1874

6

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

WINDOW IMAGINATION [4]Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays: Cornelliana Colin Rowe 1995

BUNDLED INFORMATION Elevation drawings for a Online Survey A Provisional Definition of the Architect Curtis Roth 2017

7

“In the nineteenth century Gilbert Scott said something like this: If you see a building with windows of a size to admit an appropriate amount of light, it may or may not be a work of architecture; but, if the windows are definitely too big or definitely too small, then you can be almost certain that you are in the presence of an architectural endeavor.� [4] The collection of 2D imagines at the bottom shows a series of housing units with different window sizes. One can imagine the interior

construction and atmosphere through these 2D images by considering the view one window could capture, the amount of light could go through the window, and the possible programs associated with the room behind this window, etc. Information is bundled up with the change of the 2D elevation drawings. On contrast, imagines on the right show how 3D objects could be seen through a certain perspective and produce a visual flattening optical illusion that enhances the idea of 3D to 2D.

CAMOUFLAGED FORM I. SuperFlat - Admin Testa Vertical Studio Nero He & Jonathan Warner 2019

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

CAMOUFLAGED FORM II. SuperFlat - Conduit Testa Vertical Studio Nero He & Jonathan Warner 2019

TRANSFORMATAL DIMENSIONS How do we misread the visual information we have seen?

Illustrating how one pattern extracted from the original object projecting from two directions (top and bottom) could blend onto the shaped form.

Through two particular perspectives, the silhouette of the shaped form fades away because of the glorified enhancement of the architectural patterns on top to achieve two flattening moments.

8

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

A LOGICAL MESS SuperFlat - Axonometric Drawing Testa Vertical Studio Nero He & Jonathan Warner 2019

INFORMATION OVERLAY What is the new role of architects if design information is given?

With input architectural “pattern” data, architects’ new role is to learn how to reuse the data and process it to create different outputs. The output itself contains the architect’s design language through the particular process he created. The result of this new mindset of architectural design is producing a formless information overlay, which could also be seen as a collection of objects, a pile of volumes, and a mountain of structures, etc. An archipelago on a building scale is constructed where the building is divided into its own worlds to develop a singular identity but have many modes of ways in which it works. It also stimulates new programs, as Rem Koolhaas illustrated in his book, where men are eating oysters in the locker room.

9

The image at the bottom shows a sculpture work by John Chamberlain. His distinctive metal sculptures, often made of crushed automobile steel, reveal both the stately grace and the expressive plasticity of industrial materials. The process of making the sculpture is by disassembling existed objects, deforming the parts, and reassembling to form new objects.

This workflow leads to Chamberlain’s sculptures hold forms as a pile of things. They are formless and orientationless. However, if you zoom into details of the pile, you still can trace back to each collected object’s origin. With this concept in mind, we could process architectural information the same way: extracting

internal organizations and overall form from a exisiting architectural data as 2D graphic creates a literal representation of objects which are layered, reprojected, and reorganized to achieve intersecting formal relationships and flattening architectural effects.

Image to the right shows how patterns are used as the extraction of formal and representational systems. They address repeatable elements such as poche, structure, circulation, programmatic division, and spatial organization by reducing it down to its essential elements. All elements are carefully extracted based on the fidelity of how the architectural information is filtered or inherited.

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

A PILE OF THINGS Automobiles Parts Sculpture Daddy in the Dark John Chamberlain 1988

10

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

“I have a mad impulse to smash something (together)... To commit outrages.�

11

ZOO | 01. 1D, 2D, AND 3D.

HERMAN HESSE 1963

Metropolis / Fritz Lang / 1927

Architects need to aware that architecture is a political design product. It includes space manipulation, which undoubtedly affects people. With the idea of architecture is visual information jumps between 2D and 3D, we can connect the dot that architecture acts as a 3D spatial object when it is in the foreground of the view, affecting people consciously. When architecture mutes to the background, it could be seen as a 2D image with patterns influencing people subconsciously, by changing style, directionality, frequency, and balance, etc.

The camouflage of architecture itself becomes a celebration of human activities.

GALAXY IN HUTONG NERO HE INSTAGRAM POST 2016

Fore- ; Background.

ZOO | 02. FORE- ; BACK- GROUND.

FADE IN TO THE BACKGROUND Winter Glazing of the Loggia Wiener Staatsoper Hermann Czech 1991

02 / 15

SURFACE TREATMENT Miniature Film Set Blade Runner 2049 Weta Workshop 2017

This type of architecture could be defined as background architecture, which affects people’s subconsciousness. Today, many renderers allow programmable shading, which can create high quality (multidimensional) procedural textures and patterns at arbitrarily high frequencies. However, architecture rendering has ready potentials, when they are ready, they will come to be.

And this potentials depends on how close one’s eye scanning through the surface, the further the flatter. Similarly, the construct of a mini-city scene for a film set shares the idea with background architecture that at that scene, human activities are celebrated.

ARCHITECTURE RHYTHM [5]Hermann Czech and the Disappearance of Architecture Christian Kühn 2016

ZOO | 02. FORE- ; BACK- GROUND.

In 1991 Herman Czech, known for his subtle interventions in historic buildings, was entrusted with a winter glazing for the loggia of the Staatsoper, which presents as the image on the left. His work is noted for a strong emphasis on context, sophisticated and often ironic use of architectural elements, and interest in rules and underlying order rather than sculptural form. [5] Czech gained fame throughout Europe in the 1970s with his delicate architectural reconversions of bars in Vienna and several public buildings, based on the strategy of continuation and convention instead of contrast. and blend in with the rest. Architectural elements have different but repeatable rhythm.

CONVENTIONAL FALSENESS Architecture to the public is just a shell?

Miniature models in film sets are produced with layered of care: the light through windows, the color correction, the material details, etc. It is a general construction of a make-believe, the action of pretending, feigning, or imagining suggests that things may be quite different from how we perceive them to be if, only for a moment, we suspend disbelief.

Despite the strange scale of a giant person next to the architecture, the architectural information it delivers is merely the same as those in real life, which is a result of background architectures.

16

ZOO | 02. FORE- ; BACK- GROUND.

BITMAPPED ARCHITECTURE Digital Rendering Tyrell Headquarters Syd Mead 1982

BITMAP VISUAL TRICK [5]Relativistic Ray-Tracing: Simulating the Visual Appearance of Rapidly Moving Objects CiteSeerX 1995

17

Rendering or image synthesis is the automatic process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model (or models in what collectively could be called a scene file) by means of computer programs. Also, the results of displaying such a model can be called a render. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry,

fill the complete area without repeating the image (thus avoiding visible seams). Also bitmap textures can be created to be used as repetitive patterns to fill an infinite area. The borders of these patterns or small textures should be treated to give a seamless appearance when applied to an image, unless, of course, the seam is something to be shown.

[5] The representation method delivers fore-

viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene.

The data contained in the scene file is then passed to a rendering program to be processed and output to a digital image or raster graphics image file. The term “rendering” may be by analogy with an “artist’s rendering” of a scene. This process is transforming a 2D image to digital data to represent a 3D mode.

Bitmap textures are digital images representing a surface, a material, a pattern or even a picture, generated by an artist or designer using a bitmap editor software such as Adobe Photoshop or Gimp or simply by scanning an image and, if necessary, retouching it on a personal computer. Textures can be built as a large image, larger than the final destination (such a page, for example) so as to

ground and background information with the same technique. Without light and shadow, bitmap visual information remains flat. To read bitmaps within a shape, one needs to view with proper convergence, which allows the repeating patterns to appear to float above or below the background to reveal the form. In order to perceive 3D shapes in these autostereograms, one must overcome the normally automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence (angle of one’s eyes). The illusion is one of depth perception and involves stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspectives each eye has of a three-dimensional scene, called binocular parallax. Autostereogram’s visual information changes based on different ways of reading and decoding.

2D CODING Dot Autostereogram Solving Magic Eyes Katherine A. Scott 2013

ZOO | 02. FORE- ; BACK- GROUND.

3D DECODING 3D Scene of a Horse Solving Magic Eyes Katherine A. Scott 2013

18

ZOO | 02. FORE- ; BACK- GROUND.

“Latent utopias are hiding within this domain of strangeness.”

19

ZOO | 02. FORE- ; BACK- GROUND.

ZAHA HADID & PATRIK SCHUMACHER 2002

History of Rise and Fall / Manabu Ikeda / 2006

One architecture, just like a city, unmasks its local culture and delivers a heterotopia message: it exists in time but also outside of time because it is built and preserved to be physically insusceptible to time’s ravages, It contains wholesome contextual information, which reveals the historical past in different time frames, the blooming present with the concurrent building technology, and the pending future ready-potentials, when it’s ready it will come to be.

Through a process of decoding, this architectural information posses pattern languages that could be used as a self-referencing guideline to subtract or expand.

METROPOLIS FRITZ LANG MOVIE SCENE 1927

Past, Present, & Pending...

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

THE COLLECTION OF HISTORY Imaginary Reconstruction Etching Idea delle antiche Via Appia e Ardeatina (Idea of the ancient Via Appia and Ardeatina) Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1756

03 / 23

FRAGMENTS OF PLANS Collection of Fragmented Plan Drawings Empire of Ice Cream Sam Jacob 2019

organized around a central void, or a heterogeneous stack of aggregations. It is a volumetric diagram that reproduces the cloud-like image of nodes in a dense network, with the nodes ranging from abstract geometries to figures.

[6] Each medium is a piece of information that carries cultural and technological segments.

One can draw connections from different perspectives from one subject to the adjacent ones. Architecture is no longer defined and articulated only by architects, but how to digest the massive, all at once, information provides an interface for everyone to interact with architecture. The result of mix and match stimulates a certain playfulness in this discourse.

MEANING OF AGGREGATION [6]A New Library for Atlanta Research Questions Damjan Jovanovic 2019

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

The main challenge of creating an architecture for the 21st Century lies in producing a new image of a building dedicated to preservation and dissemination of knowledge in the age of content. The idea of content implies a collapse of classically distinct ideas of medium and subject matter into an inherently malleable and diffuse new notion of a creative product that can exist in multiple states simultaneously without a hierarchical precedence of either.

Content is how knowledge and information exist on the internet. How do we design for storing, using and producing content, and how does a symbolic representation of content look like? An aggregated super volume

ENDLESS CITY Where is the border of this endless aggregate?

As Sam Jacob describes: ‘Every piece of architecture is a world. Each an empire within its own borders. But outside of these perfect islands of architecture the city they make up renders them fragments. We experience them as fragmented sequences of different worlds. And at the city itself remains in a constant state of construction and destruction.’ Empire of Ice Cream produces plans that will never be built, drawings that evolve according to their own patterns: A stream of consciousness and a mania of production.

24

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

DISCRETE FRAGMENTS [7]What is Ornament? The Poetics of Reason Ambra Fabi & Giovanni Piovene 2019

PATTERN AS POLITICS Pattern Collection Lisbon Architecture Triennale - What is Ornament?

Sam Jacob 2019

25

A study of architectural patterns becomes a collective database in a different time frame: looking at fragments and moldings as the occasion in which ornament is discrete and condensed into few precise points; considering columns as ambivalent structural elements; looking at cladding as a conscious project rather than the passive result; exploring patterns, intended as regularly repetitive arrangements reflecting the time and the society in which they are conceived; looking at information superstructures like texts, frescoes and screens, when they become the main instrument to compose a building; enlarging ornament to the whole urban environment, embracing the complexity of shared space and imagining it as a scene for the development of public life. [7] Images at the bottom flattens

histories and cultures through its categorisations. This project attempts to remarry the decorative and symbolic strands of pattern making. And in doing this aims to reveal that politics, as much as pleasure is central to the design of pattern. With this notion in mind, a lot of Chinese architecture designed in the 20th century contains a political patterns mix and match: the prevalence of that unholy union of Western and Chinese architecture, the “Big Hat” (大屋顶) buildng.

The idea of combining traditional Chinese building features with modern Western-style architecture goes back to the very dawn of Chinese modernity in the late Qing and early Republic expressing the evolution of the design traces carefully with the political contours of the past century of Chinese history.

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

CULTURAL ADDITION A Chinese Hat Digital Photo Si Bu Yi Hui Kaiji Zhang 1952

Digital Photo China Agricultural Museum Xinghuan Yan 2005

Photocopy Cultural Palace of Nationalities Bo Zhang 1959

Digital Photo Beijing Friendship Hotel Bo Zhang 1954

Photocopy Grand Hotel Taipei Cho-cheng Yang 1952

Digital Photo Rooftop Mountain Villa Unknown 2007

26

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

A CHINESE ORGAN Digital Photo Net Heart Valleys Unknown 2016

A FUTURE MOUNTAIN Movie Scene Metropolis Fritz Lang 1927

27

As time went on, Chinese hat buildings grew more and more ugly. Essentially, this is because traditional Chinese architecture proved fundamentally incompatible with modern large-scale Western structure. Because the appearance of traditional Chinese architecture is dictated by the logic of its intricate wooden-frame building technique, one cannot merely separate the façade from the framework; any efforts to do so result in the kind of ungainly proportions we have seen. The need for this ingenious but costly technique was obviated long ago by the advent of concrete and steel-beam technology in the late 19th century, which allowed Western architects

to install non-loading bearing walls as Chinese builders had been doing for centuries.

A study using neural networks to combine two imagines into one takes the style of an organ looking Chinese building with multiple “hats� on applying in the form of one scene from the movie Metropolis. A heterogeneous Chinese mountain is created. All parts are interrelated but somewhat still remain discrete. Architecture becomes a city holding lives and possibilities in every balcony, staircase, and between columns. It is one building, with one foundation at the bottom, but also hundreds of buildings rooting on their ground. People are in it and on it.

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

A CHINESE MOUNTAIN Combined Image by Ostragram Neural Networks Untitled Nero He 2019

28

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

“They exist in time, but also outside of time because they are built and preserved to be physically insusceptible to times ravages.”

29

ZOO | 03. PAST, PRESENT, & PENDING...

MICHEL FOUCAULT 1980

PokĂŠmon Yellow / Nintendo / 1998

Most of the architecture can be represented with its outline and patterned infills.

One successful architectural information should not rely too much on its form. Each piece of information should be equally treated and lay it out on the table without a boundary. Architecture as a formless information overlay fits in the world of big flat now better. They are just like hashtags associated with one twitter post but could also exist in other posts. If architectural patterns are no longer preoccupied with its form, they are no longer isolated but celebrating the interdependence, aggregates to form an identity and value as a whole.

PLASTIC SURGERY NUNO COELHO INSTAGRAM POST 2020

Style from Form?

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

FAKE DOOR, REAL DOOR Street View Screen Capture 2821 Main St Santa Monica CA Google Maps 2020

04 / 33

FRAGMENTS OF PLANS Game Boy Game Screen Capture Glitch City PokĂŠmon Yellow 1999

while other countries follow with their own twist. After a style has gone out of fashion, there are often revivals and re-interpretations. Each time it is revived, it is different.

When architecture style is no longer preoccupied with its form, architecture becomes a formless information overlay. Each style segments could transform differently when leaking from their origanl form.[8] A stealth aircraft is made up of entirely flat surfaces and very sharp edges, and its form reflects the signal away when a radar signal hits. In a way, the form still matters. It matters how well a form is receiving the style information and whether the form should react to this information.

STYLE INFORMATION [8] Architectural Styles Carson Dunlop 2003

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

An architectural style is characterized by the features that make a building or other structure notable and historically identifiable. A style may include such elements as, method of construction, building materials, and regional character. Most architecture can be classified as a chronology of styles which change over time reflecting changing fashions, beliefs and religions, or the emergence of new ideas, technology, or materials which make new styles possible. Styles therefore emerge from the history of a society and are documented in the subject of architectural history. Styles often spread to other places, so that the style at its source continues to develop in new ways

IN A MIND OF PATTERNS How is pattern information delivered through context?

We know an architectural pattern by reading the repeatable elements from a scene. If one element consistently appears with a certain rhythm, then this element could get single out and study for its placement, function, and repersentation. When one element gets decoded, the pattern constructed by such an element could be understood. Just like the way one understands how an RPG game works in a 160 by 144 pixels screen, the game scene is constructed by repeatable patterns, but by learning how to use the interface, one could know which pattern acts as a barrier but which is the ground he can control his avatar to stand on.

34

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

FRANKENSTEIN Digital Photo Beijing West Railway Station Jialu Zhu 1996

The image above shows a photo of Beijing West Railway Station located in western Beijing’s Fengtai District. The construction concept of Beijing West railway station began as early as 1959. It was planned and researched three times in history, but the first two were put on hold for political and economic reasons.

For the third time, in 1989, the preparatory work, adjustment planning, and re-reporting were resumed and finally approved by the state. People could easily see which objects were added on, which part of the station is stripped down and rebuilt. This megastructure is considered as one of the iconic “Chinese big hat” typology. From its facade, one can easily extract more than ten architectural patterns. They are well nested at their spots bounded by the formal language of this typology. One could tell the disconnected parts sitting on another with extremely symmetrical manners. If only tracing the facade architectural pattern information, the formal language

35

is still implied by the bundled groups with the same or different patterns. When tracing the faced, a fidelity question brings back to the table again. Different patterns have different scales, which could not be represented in the same resolution. By thicking vector lines of the trace, resolution of all patterns gets reduced.

However, new patterns revealed by reading and misreading segements. Some are joining forces got bigger and blurred. Some are too hard to read, but the negative space becomes a new pattern of itself. Last but not least, through simulation, patterns are leaking out of the ghosted form like the sticks house got blown away by a wolf in The Three Little Pigs children story. Information starts to travel and exchange. It reacts to the outside form, and some bounce back. If one takes a frame of this simulation and map back to the original megastructure, the form is irrelevant as a result, but the information it contains still resembles what the station is, but better and necessary crazier.

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

INFORMATION OVERLAY After Effects Simulation Game of Operation Nero He 2020

36

INFORMATION OVERFLOW Digital Animated Art Untiled Nero He 2020

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

FORMLESS CITY Digital Animated Art Architecture Machines Peter Burr 2018

37

The image on the top left shows a screen captured frame in a simulation using the pattern languages from Beijing West Railway Station.

The animation relies on a study from digital artist Peter Burr. A simulated community of occupants endlessly loops through itself and its home-like blood through the body. It is part of a series of arcologies designed and built in a video game engine - buildings developed to emulate living organisms to sustain themselves. Moving patterns forms a shape and then disappear in the motion. People walking in front, at the side, to the back, indicates the depth of the field and a possible volumetric protiental. Sometimes it looks like

a computer glitch, which represents nothing.

But the nothingness could be anything by misreading the information. It is an everyday scene, an architecture, a block, a city. It is also just moving parts that exist in a monitor delivered as a visual art project holds massive information but gives no time to decode. Facade information, or not, appears flat but indicates three-dimensional space in between.

There is a power through the motion as if they could turn themselves into a 3D form, but the form itself has been camouflaged into a subconscious background fusing and binding with everything else, all at once. There is no self identity in this massive endless repetition.

EVERYDAY SIMULATION [9] Architecture Machines Peter Burr 2018

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

MIXING BOWL Textile Design Digital Print Animal Skin Collage Sevinç YĹlmaz 2016

38

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

“Today’s art is no longer preoccupied with form.”

39

ZOO | 04. STYLE FROM FORM?

CHRISTOPHER WOOD 2019

Tableau comparatif de la hauteur des principales montagnes et lieux remarquables du globe au adessus du niveau de l’ocÊan / Constant Desjardins / 1830

Mountains in a drawing form are constructions of different fictions. People could only depict its shape by tracing light and shadow with textural conditions on the form received from one perspective. When they are laid out front to back, the drawings deliver contextual information. However, when they are laid out side by side, the drawings provide measurable scientific information. The change of view affects the shape of a mountain. In the mountain, outside the mountain, at the bottom of the mountain, in the cave inside the mountain, no two views are alike. No one can tell the true shape of a mountain.

TABLEAU COMPARATIF DDES PRINCIPALES HAUTEURS DU GLOBE PHILIPPE VANDERMAELEN COLLAGE DRAWING 1822

A Formless Construct

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

INTERCONNECTED RELATION Hunting Scene Etching Chasse au Lion et au Tigre after Peter Paul Rubens 1775

05 / 43

UNREALISTIC FANTASY Lacquer with Gold on Wood Core Display Cabinets Unknown 1723

of what they have seen in nature, but what they have thought about nature. No one cares whether the painted colors and shapes look like the real object or not. Shan shui painting is a kind of painting which goes against the common definition of what a painting is. Shan shui painting refutes color, light and shadow and personal brush work. Shan shui painting is not an open window for the viewer’s eye, it is an object for the viewer’s mind. Shan shui painting is more like a vehicle of philosophy.

[10] The image below contains traditional Chinese architecture complexes. They are meandering between oversized rocks, which slowly fuzing into the mountain backdrop.

SHANSHUI 山水 [10] Two Twelfth Century Texts on Chinese Painting Robert J. Maeda 1970

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

Shanshui (山水), refers to a style of traditional Chinese painting that involves or depicts scenery or natural landscapes, using a brush and ink rather than more conventional paints.

Mountains, rivers, and often waterfalls are prominent in this art form. Most dictionaries and definitions of shan shui assume that the term includes all ancient Chinese paintings with mountain and water images. Contemporary Chinese painters, however, feel that only paintings with mountain and water images that follow specific conventions of form, style and function should be called “shan shui painting”.

When Chinese painters work on shan shui painting, they do not try to present an image

CONTEXT BUT NOT OBJECT What are components to illustrate a mountain context?

Shan shui paintings involve a complicated and rigorous set of almost mystical requirements for balance, composition, and form. All shan shui paintings should have 3 basic components: Paths – The concept is to never create inorganic patterns, but instead to mimic the patterns that nature creates. The Threshold – The concept is always that a mountain or its boundary must be defined clearly.

The Heart – The concept should imply that each painting has a single focal point, and that all the natural lines of the painting direct inwards to this point.

44

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

ANYTIME EVERYWHERE Mount Scenes Drawing Inume Pass, Ejiri in Suruga Province, Cushion Pine at Aoyama Thirty-six View of Mount Fuji Hokusai 1830

DRAWING THE FORMLESS [11] An Atlas of Geographical Wonders from Mountainstops to Riverbeds Jean-Christophe Baillu, Jean-Marc Besse, Philippe Grand, & Gilles Palsky 2014

45

Despite the singular effect that comes from their being combined together, the mountains often remain quite realistic, conserving, between their skillfully tiered flanks, entire landscapes of valleys and folds animated by the interplay of shadow and light. Sometimes they are transfigured by an unrealistic and fantastic color scheme; sometimes they are depicted as a mass of purely abstract pointed cones. This back-and-forth between realistic forms and imaginary shapes is quite enjoyable. No matter the figurative option selected, the mountains always appear somehow like the tiered steps of an organ keyboard, an image that turns nature into a powerful and skillful organist. The Greeks used the word ametriton to describe

an unknown or distant shoreline, a word which means “unmeasured, not yet walked upon.�[11] Image at the top belongs to a series of landscape prints by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai . The series depicts Mount Fuji from different locations and in various seasons and weather conditions. Despite its name, it actually consists of 46 prints, with 10 of them being added after the initial publication. A formless context could only be described and documented from different perspectives and time frames. Zooming in and out, one could see the change of a space and the unexpected deformation of the object, the same objects allowing multiple visual forms of itself displayed with local context.

CONSTRUCTED WORLD Color Printed Collage A Comparative Picture of the Principal Mountains and Rivers in the World C. Smith & Son 1836

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

ENDLESS SCENE Chinese Shanshui Ink Painting and Calligraphy Spring in Peach Blossom Land Bangda Dong 1760

46

In the section drawing below, the architecture consisted of three levels, to be built in the shape of an elephant, with entry via a spiral staircase in the underbelly. The building was to have a form of air conditioning and furniture that folded into the walls. A drainage system was to be incorporated into the elephant’s trunk. This eye-catching form contains a formless interior that includes a nature scene with trees planted inside. That room depicts what architecture is containing the uncontainable. On a different scene, two etching drawings on the right shows man-made construction in caves. The irregular layers of

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

WORLD WITHIN A WORLD Sectional Copper Engraving Elephant for the Glory of the King Charles François Ribart 1758

47

rocks exhibit how a mountain turns outside inward. It is unknown without further information if such a cave is constructed by bombing the belly of a mountain or found by explorors. The interesting thing is, these drawings demonstrate how humans are fighting with nature but not coexisting with it. Is it because they illustrate the interior should not conventionally be seen? How a formless construction delivers enough information that still could be considered as architecture? A cave, indeed, framed humans and trapped them for display. And the stairs are always in the middle ground, comes from nowhere, leading to unknown.

STAIRS IN CAVE Antique Steel Engraved Print Grotte d’Osselles Unknown 1835

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

CAVE AS HOTEL LOBBY Antique Steel Engraved Print La Grotte Basse Unknown 1835

48

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

“From the side, a whole range; from the end, a single peak: Far, near, high, low, no two parts alike.

Why can’t I tell the true shape of Mountain Lu? Because I myself am in the mountain.”

49

ZOO | 05. A FORMLESS CONSTRCUTION

SHI SU 1084

Courtesy of the Hierakonpolis Expedition / Xavier Droux / 2003

A collection of objects brings up the fidelity of the overall form. The aggregate has a fuzzy edge that blurs the certainty of a silhouette. The collection is also for the sake of documentation and comparison. A zoo is a collection of animals. It shows the harmony of a man-made nature that neutering animals with different scales and have different needs. It also reveals a problematic division between humans and animals.

A zoo is an interface to embrace heterogeneous life forms in an active scene. Barries, visiting route, and even landscapes are designed with narrtives, which is undoubtedly compulsive. Why not turn it into safari?

SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM JOHN SOANE DIGITAL PHOTO 1837

Thrist of Collection

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

ANIMAL HOUSE Importing New Animals Scene Etching Rotunda to the Giraffe and Elephants Acarie Baron 1842

06 / 53

MOUNTAIN CONSTRUCTION Digital Photo Historical Artificial Rock Formation for the Polar Sea Panorama Hagenbeck Zoo 1913

cages, no monkey cliffs, and no bear pits. The only architecture-li products that made it into the programme were a horse stall and an open dugout, which bears an unintentional resemblance to Marc-Antoine Laugier’s depiction of the aboriginal Vitruvian hut. The rigorous interpretation of the study results is that the exotic world of wildlife in German children’s rooms does quite nicely without captivity. The animal made of plastic lives in a boundless habitat between the child’s bed, desk and play corner.

[12] The coexistence of humans and animals is a celebrity nowadays from an animal right perspective, which we should never prison animals for display in a glorified fake nature.

GREAT UNKNOWN [12] Construction and Design Manual Zoo Buildings Natascha Meuser 2019

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault considered gardens and especially zoological gardens as perfect examples of heterotopy, as places that remind us of a thousand other places. We see Arctic and tropical landscapes in close proximity in our zoological gardens.

Mountains and oceans, forests and steppes are all windows on the ‘great unknown’. Our zoo landscapes engage the imagination. How do humans deal with animals in captivity, what is a species appropriate attitude from the standpoint of a zoologist, and how do humans relate to nature in different cultures? A German toy came out with a game world with a backdrop of plants, trees and boundaries. No lion

STAGE FOR ANIMALS Why constructing a fake nature without scientific knowledge?

In 1900 The animals were not in a cage, they were on stage to deliver a maximum feeling of animals in their natural surroundings instead of designing the enclosure strictly to perform a function. The idea was to reflect the image of the natural living space of each species. Viewers are supposed to transport back to a paradise where animals were presented at a glance in a supposed harmony.

54

GARDEN AND BLOCKS Zoo Plan Colored Lithography Plans Raisonnés de Toutes les Espèces de Jardins

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

Gabriel Thouin 1820

55

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

INDOOR GIRRAFFE Taming Girraffe Scene Etching L’Êtable de la Girafe Karl Girardet 1842

If one wishes to locate the beginning of zoo architecture as we understand it today, the first examples of an independent typology occur in the early nineteenth century. This idea does not necessarily correspond to that presented by zoo history accounts. But when looked at a little more closely it quickly becomes clear why late into the Baroque period there were no significant impulses for constructing wild animal buildings. Since antiquity, wild animals were kept either in pits or trenches, locked up behind bars. The point was to create holding

building are five apses, a third of which consist of low towers (accommodating animals), giving the building its massive appearance. A closer examination reveals that the individual facade elements, the window openings, and the corners of the building are emphasised by exposed masonry and cornices in addition to the combination of right angles.

While the central building, with its glazed dome letting in natural light is dedicated to the enjoyment of the visitors, the animals were mostly housed in partly unlit stalls in the

structures or security buildings, with which humans had total control over the life and death of the animals, without any intent in conducting scientific observations or even maintaining the species. The unique form of the structure shown above is unprecedented but in its formal derivation, it recalls the geometry of the Castel del Monte near Bari. Attached to a ten-sided

smaller sections of the building. From the few drawings that have survived, there are no further clues as to how the animals were kept.

However, we see animals and their breeder in an oversized interior space with an oversized door. Architectural elements are disproportionally magnified, which could easily let tall animals like giraffes coming through.

56

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

QUARANTINE Animals Displacement Scene Etching Giraffes – Granny-Dears & other Novelties George Cruikshank 1836

SYNCHRONIZED ZOO (LEFT) Collage Painting Zoologischer Garten Berlin G. Guthknecht 1880

57

f one wishes to locate the beginning of zoo architecture as we understand it today, the first examples of an independent typology occur in the early nineteenth century. This idea does not necessarily correspond to that presented by zoo history accounts. But when looked at a little more closely it quickly becomes clear why late into the Baroque period there were no significant impulses for constructing wild animal buildings. Since antiquity, wild animals were kept either in pits or trenches, locked up behind bars. The point was to create holding structures or security buildings, in which humans had total control over the life and death of the animals, without any intent in conducting scientific observations or even

royal keeping of wild animals in bear pits or stag trenches, was entirely in keeping with the antique intention of keeping animals as a source of food, as well to exhibit them for amusement or the demonstration of power. Whether the zoo was marketed as an arbitrarily blended ecosystem or whether the intimated freedom of the wild animal was not in fact wishful thinking on the part of the views? The controlled freedom of the animals in their territory in the zoo was architecturally attainable because new materials and methods of construction spurred on the typology of the shell structures: plastic made its entrance in architecture. The new material led to formal experiments with shells and hyperbolic paraboloids. Zoos are

maintaining the species. The typology of the menagerie, as it had developed from the

not circus but parks and playgrounds for lives, both humans and animals, in all venues.

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

SYNCHRONIZED ZOO (RIGHT) Collage Painting Zoologischer Garten Berlin G. Guthknecht 1880

58

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

FRAMED HARMORY Oil on Lime Painting Saint Jerome in His Study Antonello da Messina 1475

HOUSED WILDLIFE Oil on Wood Painting Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg as Saint Jerome Lucas Cranach the elder 1526

59

where architecture is a mediation between the individual human and the bigger world.

Architecture at the back blends with adjacent context, offering mediating spaces from outside but never as destinations. People on the rooftop are still constructing the architecture complex to extend them tower for possible new street lives. But is was the consequence for the zoo, of the desire to combine nature and architecture as reflected by its buildings? There was a return to landscape architecture with the architecture itself becoming a landscape simulation. The boundaries between structurally overburdened landscape and building articulated as the landscape became more and more blurred.

At the same time, the architecture became camouflage, Just as in the military arena.

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

During the first 1,000 years of the Christian Church there were many saints who loved animals. They lived with them, rescued them, nursed them and saved them from hunters.

In turn, many saints were helped by animals.

Legend tells St Jerome (the man depicted in two drawings on the left) took a thorn from the paw of a lion who repaid him by giving up eating other animals and serving at the monastery until he joined St Jerome in death. Put all the symbolic reasons away, drawings with human(s) with animals coexist ina man-made structures show architecture in a very natural relationship to the individual offering protection and a place of a public collection. A fresco in Siena 14th century by Lorenzetti at the bottom illustrates a great powerful merchant city. One can see the hill

COEXIST ON A HILL Fresco Painting The Allegory of Good Government Ambrogio Lorenzettie 1338

60

AGE OF MONKEYS Painting Satire on Tulip Mania Jan Brueghel the Younger 1640

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

TRAPPED HUMANS Woodblock Prints View of a Kabuki Theatre Hiroshige 1820

In the painting on the top, shows how people had acted like foolish monkeys. Monkeys negotiate, monkeys weigh the bulbs, monkeys count money, and monkeys keep records. The monkey on the left has a list of bulb prices. On the right, a monkey urinates on tulips. Behind him, a speculator is brought before the court for debt. A monkey sits crying in the stocks. In the center background, a disappointed buyer comes to blows. On the right in the background, a speculator is even carried to the grave. But monkeys at least in this drawing can finally be treated like humans enjoying all possible social activities.

As contrast, the painting at the bottom shows a Japanese Yoshiwara tea house, which offers different activities, including prostitution.

Both customers and courtesans have different rankings. The lowest-ranking courtesans, either not very good-looking or well educated,

61

sat in front of the windows facing the street so that clients could inspect them and choose their favorite. Customers were then brought into a large communal room divided by flimsy wall-screens; there was no real privacy and couples could see and hear each other, as was often shown in shunga. The highest-ranking geisha waited in luxurious tea-houses, and had the privilege of rejecting customers not to their liking. Sexual relations did not take place at the first meeting, but usually only after three or more expensive sessions, at which the client gave presents, such as kimonos and fancy hairpins, and brought food and drink for all the tea-house employees, although this rule was not so strictly enforced after the mid-eighteenth century. Architecture acts as barriers to segregate the viewers and performer. It has a zoo-like result, where two different spaces of the architecture is in different worlds.

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

BLOSSOMING STREET LIFE Oil on Wood Painting The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius Carlo Crivelli 1486

MAKE-BELIEVE What is the reason of creating fake narratives in art work?

Make-believe — the action of pretending, feigning or imagining suggests that things may be quite different from how we perceive them to be if, only for a moment, we suspend disbelief. Contemporary cultural and political dilemmas regarding the status of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ permeate our daily interactions, whether mundane or extraordinary, and exert unprecedented pressure on architecture’ historical identity as the locus of the real. The stability and immutability of Vitruvian firmitas has effervesced into innumerous bits of data that congeal in myriad forms to comprise, describe and construct various aspects of our environment.

62

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

“The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.”

63

ZOO | 06. TRIST OF COLLECTION

DESMOND MORRIS 2009

65

Annex.

ZOO | ANNEX

AMPHITHÉÂTRE Amphitheater

RENARDS Fox

OISEAUX Birds

67

All architectural objects are created based on Plans Raisonnés de Toutes les Espèces de Jardins. Fuctions of these buildings are based on current exsisting programs located at the same block.

ANIMAUX PAISIBLES Peaceful animals

ZOO | ANNEX

OTARIES Sea lions

VOLIERE Aviary

68

ANIMAUX PAISIBLES Peaceful animals

ZOO | ANNEX

BELVÉDÈRE Belvedere

SERRES TEMPÉRÉES Temperate greenhouses

DAUBENTON Daubenton

69

OURS Bears

REPTILES Reptiles

ZOO | ANNEX

SERRES CHAUDES Greenhouses

GRANDS ANIMAUX Large animals

70

ZOO | ANNEX

ZOO MOUNTAIN SCI-Arc 2020 Graduate Thesis Prep: Zoo Nero He 2020

71

ZOO | ANNEX

SELF REMAPPING: ZOO SCI-Arc 2020 Graduate Thesis Prep: Zoo Nero He 2020

72

ZOO | ANNEX

ANIMAL AGGREGATE SCI-Arc 2020 Graduate Thesis Prep: Zoo Nero He 2020

73

ZOO | ANNEX

SELF REMAPPING: ANIMALS SCI-Arc 2020 Graduate Thesis Prep: Zoo Nero He 2020

74

01. 1D, 2D, and 3D. p.1 · 02. Fore- ;Back- ground. p.13 · 03. Past, Present, & Pending... p.21 · 04. Style from Form? p.31 · 05. A Formless Construction p.41 · 06.

Thrist of Collection p.51 Annex p.65

ZOO ZOO