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Design Technology and Digital Production: An Architecture Anthology 1st Edition Gabriel Esquivel
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Digital design and computer architecture. ARM Edition
This book is a rigorous account of architecture’s theoretical and technological concerns over the last decade. The anthology presents projects and essays produced at the end of the first digital turn and the start of the second digital turn. This anthology engages and deploys a variety of discourses, topics, criteria, pedagogies, and technologies, including some of today’s most influential architects, practitioners, academics, and critics. It is an unflinchingly rigorous and unapologetic account of architecture’s disciplinary concerns in the last decade. This is a story that has not been told; in recent years everything has been refracted through the prism of the post-digital generation.
Design Technology and Digital Production illustrates the shift to an architectural world where we can learn with and from each other, develop a community of new technologies and embrace a design ecology that is inclusive, open, and visionary. This collection fosters a sense of shared experience and common purpose, along with a collective responsibility for the well-being of the discipline of architecture as a whole.
Gabriel Esquivel is an associate professor at Texas A&M University and the director of the T4T Lab and AI Advanced Research Lab at Texas A&M University. Gabriel was born and educated as an architect in Mexico City with a degree from the National University and received his master’s degree in Architecture from The Ohio State University. He previously taught Architecture and Design at the Knowlton School of Architecture and the Design Department at The Ohio State University. He is a founding partner of the online magazine AGENCIA , a publication dedicated to problems about teaching theory, and technology in Mexico.
Design Technology and Digital Production
An Architecture Anthology
Edited by Gabriel Esquivel
Designed cover image: T4T Lab 2019: Garret Farmer, Andrew Atwood, Sephora Belizor, Maria Chapa, and Julia Vasilyev. Graphic Design by Quinn McCormack.
First edition published 2023 by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
The right of Gabriel Esquivel to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-17069-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-17070-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-25167-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003251675
Publisher’s note: This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by the authors.
To all those who have believed in me. A special thanks to Quinn McCormack and Paul McCoy.
Chapter 3. Sofware and Social Interaction
3.1. Discrete: An Architecture in Large Numbers by Gilles Retsin. 45
3.2. Programmed Ruination: Hyper_Artifacts by Daniela Atencio and Claudio Rossi. 51
3.3. Mediated by Scarcity. Video game simulations at the intersection between systems and 55 narrative by José Sánchez.
3.4 Mereologies or Designing with Parts by Daniel Koehler. 59
Chapter 4. Agency and Artifcial Intelligence
4.1. Liminal Platforms by Casey Rehm. 63
4.2. Tings, Facts, and the Ontology of Neural Architecture and Artifcial Intelligence by 69 Matias Del Campo.
4.3. A Multifarious, Anisotropic, Material Agency: Speculations on Additive Manufactured 75 Architecture by Robert Stuart-Smith.
4.4 Architecture Trough the Formal Lens of the Machine Learning Apparutus by Benjamin 81 Ennemoser.
Chapter 5. Ofset Mediums
5.1. Tis Must Be the Place by Courtney Cofman. 87
5.2. Deep Vista by Viola Ago. 91
5.3. Triptychs, Domes + Still Life(s) by Perry Kulper. 97
5.4 Irradiated Histories, Irradiated Futures: Uncovering Subperceptual Exposures in the 101 Borderland by Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller.
Chapter 6. Objects, Aesthetics, and Reality
6.1. Architecture and Our Aesthetic Future by Graham Harman. 107
6.2. Te Young Adolescent’s Primer on Architectural Reality by Mark Foster Gage. 111
6.3. Miniature Architecture for a Miniature World by Ferda Kolatan. 115
6.4. Decadence Transition and Coexistence : From Baudelaire to Object-Oriented 119 Ontology by Niccolo Casas.
6.5. Background Concerns by Michael Young. 127
Chapter 7. Questioning Nature
7.1. Wilderness Ontology. Interview with Levi Bryant. 133
7.2. Ecocentrism & New Ancientness by Barry Wark. 137
7.3. Natural’s Not In It by Nate Hume. 141
7.4. Representations Of and In the American Purlieu by Clark Thenhaus. 147
Chapter 8. Open Hypothesis
8.1. Openness and Fragments by Gonzalo Vaillo. 153
8.2. Synesthesia by Joris Putteneers. 161
8.3. Anotherness: One Hypothesis and Four Keywords for a Poly-Plural Hospitality 165 by Jordi Vivaldi.
8.4. Architecture as Worldmaking by Denise Luna and Alex Santander. 171
Chapter 9. Multiple Practices
9.1. Ateljé Sotamaa. Interview with Kivi Sotamaa. 179
9.2. Tom Wiscombe Architecture. Interview with Tom Wiscombe. 187
9.3. P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S: Interview with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich.
9.4. Oyler-Wu Collaborative. Interview with Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu.
Preface
Gabriel Esquivel
With the application of digital technologies, architecture has entered a period of transition from the first to the second digital turn that encompasses the time required to translate the consequences of this digital revolution of the late twentieth century and early 21st century into a new architectural reality. In addition to the inclusion of new material production processes, automation, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence (AI), this technological development entails changes in the processes and concepts that determine both the design and the aesthetic regimes in architecture. This book explores the importance of design research through projects executed by different architects deploying new tools, mediums, and workflow modalities to construct, transform, and provoke new possibilities in architecture.
New technologies are essential in our daily lives; the use of these tools as a working medium for our diverse modes of expression has become inescapable. Today within architecture, digital tools— from machine learning to fabrication technologies, from AI to Big Data—are becoming more and more ubiquitous and pervasive. Architecture echoes innovation techniques in the matter of computer programs with which to elaborate new projects in pioneering formats, components, and aesthetics, thus setting the tone for the next future itineraries to follow. Digital is everywhere—from the infrastructure we use to navigate the world to the objects we use to communicate (Claypool 2020).
This book, which I call an anthology, will be of great value as a set of projects and readings. For all those interested in new explorations of architecture’s reality, it includes authoritative discussions and conversations from architects, critics, and philosophers. The book is also about theoretical reflection on the work, not reflection as an operative theory but as a search for the possibility of discovering new arguments that emerge from within these projects. Architecture for a long time has borrowed a series of terms and ideas directly from the philosophy that produces a very deep argumentative rigor necessary to organize the mental processes of reasoning in architecture coherently and validly. However, philosophy is not necessarily the only other discipline by which these projects can be interpreted. The denomination of human or social sciences is also appropriate to define or explain the function of architecture. When we speak about the past referring to the future, it may seem a difcult paradox to explain. However, it is what emerges in the current state of architecture that takes digital
sources for support, both at the creative/imaginative and formal/technical level. Tese computational tools emerging from digital technology have diversifed and expanded the traditional resources of the architects.
Te pencil, the pen, the physical model, the sketch, compass, or triangles—that is, the common instruments of architecture—are now combined, united, and sometimes replaced by an advanced suite of sofware and applications that continually surpass themselves in innovation, capacity, resolution, and precision, thereby providing us a fast and fertile ground in computational workfows.
In addition, the potential for using these tools is vast, immeasurably diferent from what could have been imagined by any architect barely a generation ago. Almost at the same time these new technologies emerge, they will be sooner rather than later afected by new challenges. Most of the projects shown in this book are working with several of those challenges and have gone beyond their original premises, thus acquiring new relevance and meaning. Tey are part of an active process of the universe of digital technology in architecture, which no longer sees the need to describe the world only in materialized space but gives agency to new areas of speculation, research, and innovation. Tis book aims to describe how innovations in digital tools and speculation in architecture have contributed to the way that people can experience and think of the built environment—both today and in the future. From parametricism to augmented reality and AI, this anthology instigates a much-needed conversation about the future positive role of architectural design, speculative theory, and digital technologies.
Some theorists, practitioners, and architecture academics question whether these new forms of the discipline bring with them “the end of human agency,” which will be replaced by the intuitive nature and the didactic formula of the tools’ interfaces, created so that those who handle them are not disadvantaged by the complexities of conventional decisions. Indeed, the belief that computation is responsible for assessing the viability of projects has become the most feared myth. Regardless, digital technology has certainly enriched the spectrum of the architect, who no longer feels restricted by any kind of physical or spatial limitation and can give authentic and complete freedom to architecture’s imagination. Terefore, digital architecture is not less than the one we study as precedent, live, or see in the streets. Moreover, its tropes, speculations, or even fantastic options share part of the constructive, operational, prosaic, and achievable reality that tries to constantly actualize and situate what is being observed—that which seems unique, revealing, and breathtaking on the computer screen—and if properly understood can become the future of the human agency. Tis complicated scenario gives way to diferent conversations in architecture, some sharing commonalities but some also exhibiting strong disparities. Tis book is a strong attempt to present those shared positions that deal with architecture, technology, politics, and aesthetics under the umbrella of a decade in digital history.
It is important to point out that at the academic level, these projects foster opportunities for involvement that enhance the complex and everlasting relationship between architecture and technology. To that end, architects serve the academic community as well as the practicing architecture community. Tis service is achieved through active research within an interdisciplinary environment. Technology has brought a new architecture paradigm that has blurred the boundaries of the disciplines into a world of collaboration.
Introduction
Marjan Colletti
EXT. THE HOTEL - DAY
In front of the doors at the entrance of a grand hotel, a lobby boy named 0 dressed in purple greets the arriving guests, almost all dressed in black. ‘Woosh’. Doors open.
Welcome. Welcome to The Grand Digital Hotel. I’m 0, your porter. Monsieur Gabriel E., the concierge, will be able to further assist you if you have any questions.
In the following paragraphs, I will be 0, your porter, your doorman, partly lobby boy, partly lift boy, and even your fire marshal. I will be your Zero Moustafa of the situation – as in the 2014 comedydrama film written and directed by Wes Anderson The Grand Budapest Hotel 1 (and Gustave H. being the concierge), which some readers may be familiar with. The usage of this reference may somehow be random, yet this association has helped to structure this text. When asked to pen the Introduction to this book, I was conscious that writing an introduction to someone else’s book is a whole different ball game than writing one for one’s own book. The analogy of an introduction is reminiscent of the lobby DOI: 10.4324/9781003251675-1
FADE IN:
of a public building – that space that greets visitors first – grew on me. I confided in such correlation and began writing/designing one that would hopefully greet you, the reader, adequately.
Moreover, a line in Gabriel’s Preface – ‘in recent years everything has been refracted through the prism of the post-digital generation’ – also helped provide the chosen movie reference with further context. Undoubtedly, the aesthetics of The Grand Budapest Hotel, in particular the animated scene that introduces the building and its fictitious site, could certainly be described as quintessentially post-digital: flat and two-dimensional, retro and romantic, pastiche and pink. Yet this book, and its doppelgänger hotel (in my imagination), have thankfully little to do with this post-digital canon, a self-indulgent condition of disciplinary implosion that neglects (-, minus) the digital. On the contrary, in my opinion, it deals with a developing idea of a trans-disciplinary post+digital state of mind that endeavours to evolve the digital (+, plus) to the benefit of the built, and the natural environments, as well as virtual domains. I may suggest: postdigital!
Nonetheless, I named this place only The Grand Digital Hotel, not to upset Monsieur Gabriel E. and the guests – they may not like being labelled as being postdigital. Not yet. 0
You know. This is not a luxury hotel for extravagant clients, but more of a Hôtel Industriel for start-ups.
INT. THE LOBBY - DAY Muzak playing 0
May I have your name, please? Are you a member of the club? Terms and conditions apply.
CUT TO:
In general terms, a lobby, or foyer, is a semi-public space (one almost always gets admission into the lobby of a theatre, cinema, museum, station, airport, etc. without a ticket) and therefore should be designed to be fully accessible, open and airy, of easy navigation, and arranged to control, direct, and/or block the flow of people entering and exiting the building. It is usually granted higher design attention in terms of surface treatment, furniture selection, and décor than more pragmatic spaces further in, as it is intended to reveal, and sometimes fake, the aesthetics, the quality, and the mood of the rest of the spaces. It appears to me that the same rules apply to an introduction: it is the ‘space’ that readers enter first, that provides refuge and relief from the ‘outside’ world, and that invites visitors to look around and consider the topics of the book, eventually to check-in. Concepts and ideas can be placed here as single pieces of selected furniture; hopefully nicely arranged and ready to embrace visitors. A few cosy couches here, a few designer chairs there; ideally some plants, and good lighting to create a nice and relaxing atmosphere for both day and night.
Yet there were huge caveats. Firstly, would this lobby be fit for purpose, with very little insight into the programmes and functions of the inner parts? After all, John Portman’s Hyatt Regency Atlanta lobby would not make much sense for an airport. Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center atrium would not be appropriate for a museum. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s MOCAPE foyer would not suit a town hall! And then, would I overly misuse my own lobby to lobby for my own interests, and influence the reader in ways that were never intended? I set out not to do so. I also decided to be the porter, and not a rough, black-dressed muscle-packed bouncer, making sure inappropriate, or unsuspecting, visitors are made aware, explicitly, of the exclusivity of the club (only digital, please), nor a Court Marshal – those
stiff, rather snobbishly and over-dressed announcers of guests at formal audiences, balls, and dinners (enter so-and-so, welcome so-and-so). Both associations have to do with exclusivity, and surely this was not Monsieur Gabriel E.’s intention at all. Neither is mine.
On the contrary. I am confident that the ‘construct’ that lies behind this lobby space is very inclusive. I state this without really knowing what lies behind it but being acquainted with several of the people – friends, students, peers, references – who go in and out here. They are young, fresh, vital, optimistic, techno-savvy, and dedicated people working on progressing, improving, and changing architecture. So, what is inside The Grand Digital Hotel now? Word analysis of the book’s draft manuscript reveals the main terms used throughout 1) ‘architecture’, 2) ‘design’, and 3) novelty. Per se, the first two are rather conservative, disciplinary terms, whilst ‘new’ is simply overused – seductive, but skin-deep, and does not age well. Then, we can find the very tangible ‘objects’, ‘things’, and ‘parts’, and the more intangible ‘human’, ‘nature’, ‘technology’, and ‘time’, too. This list seems to disclose that the book vacillates between an early and a late digital stance.
CUT TO:
INT. THE LIFT-DAY Muzak playing
Can I tell you a secret? It wasn’t murder, after all.
In the movie, the police wrongly accuse Monsieur Gustave H. of having murdered Madame D., a wealthy dowager. Equally, we would be wrong to believe that Monsieur Gabriel E. assassinated Madame Digital, here, with this project. This is not the case. She was revolutionary but also became ill (we all knew it) even before Mario Carpo diagnosed her with a fatal disease in 2017 in The Second Digital Turn 3 , based on earlier aging symptoms detected by Greg Lynn in his Archaeology of the Digital 4 exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2013. The first pathologies even date back to 1998, when Nicholas Negroponte’s unambiguously stated in his ‘Beyond Digital’ article in Wired magazine that ‘Face it – the Digital Revolution is over’ 5. Her death was hence a slow, gradual, and continuous process, not a murder. But she was very beautiful, agile, an icon of elegance, smoothness, modulation, our dear Madame Digital, yet fragile. She passed away on 31 March 2016, on the very same date as British Iraqi starchitect Dame Zaha Mohammad Hadid unexpectedly deceased at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida, United States. Not a coincidence. On this very date, the era of what I call ‘The High Digital’ died with her. 0
Which Floor? 1: Speculations, 2: Hybrid Assemblies, 3: Software and Social Interaction, 4: Agency and Artificial Intelligence, 5: Offset Mediums, 6: Objects/Aesthetics/Reality, 7: Questioning Nature, 8: Open Hypothesis, 9: Multiple Practices?
INT. ONE OF THE CORRIDORS - DAY
CUT TO:
A Siren howling in the background. O is wearing a high-visibility vest. From the speakers, we hear repeatedly several pre-recorded
announcements: ‘Fire Alarm. Please remain calm and evacuate the building by the nearest exit.’
0
Fire Alarm. Please make your way out of the building, promptly.
At this very moment, more than the death of the digital, we have another emergency to deal with… I was and still am a committed advocate, like most of the users here at The Grand Digital Hotel, of how digitality has positively affected the design, the making, and the inhabitation of buildings. However, there is a globally howling siren droning in everybody’s ears, which can no longer be disregarded as a regular drill. It is not: the ecological crisis has reached a point of no return.
0
Please leave your belongings behind.
Please, leave your disciplinary dogmas behind. As fre marshal of the situation, I may risk coming across as moralising and sermonising, but it would be irresponsible not to mention how the economic recession, warmongery, pandemics, and growing lists of environmental and climatic catastrophes are ruling present times. Tis is not the present the digital was working on, not the future it attempted to shape.
0
Please find your nearest exit.
My personal exit from the digital was the postdigital: an evolution, the development, extrapolation, translation, and application of the challenging, intelligent, and beautiful ideas of the digital together with non-digital design technologies and other digital production methods (yes, the way the terms are ordered here, is correct). However, there is no time to discuss this, here. We must keep going.
CUT TO:
EXT. THE HOTEL - NIGHT
In front of the doors at the entrance of a grand hotel. The façade is on fire.
Te building is on fre. Or, more precisely: the façade is on fre; the fat and two-dimensional, retro and romantic, pastiche and pink post-digital façade described in the frst paragraphs. We already can see through and understand how complex the bowels of Te Grand Digital Hotel are. By the way, the name is a shortened version, but I believe that it sufces; everybody knows that digital equals design, and industry, these days. It once was called Te Grand Digital Technology and Design Production Hotel Industriel. It was a huge fab lab for CAD and CAD/CAM folks, the space flled with small desktop 3D printers, a CNC router, a laser cutter, and half-used flament rolls stacked up in every corner. Now, it is called Te Grand Design Technology and Digital Production Hotel Industriel. Te diference between the two may be disregarded as whimsical wordplay, but it denotes a clear and essential distinction: the frst was a brainchild of the frst digital turn, and this, is one of the second digital turn. Tat digital, technology, design, and production can be used interchangeably, tells you that this metaphorical hotel, and the book, are of this very
period between the turns. Personally, more than a turn I consider this most recent phase to be a transition of the digital from being a technology to being production, and the reversal of design not to be merely the creation of ‘objects’, ‘things’, and ‘parts’ but an agency system intertwined with technology; a transition to the postdigitality mentioned earlier. Now, we will rebuild this façade! Diferently! Te old façade made people believe that architecture was unfamiliar with and unaware of, the grand challenges we all face, from ecology to energy to automation, from economy to migration to climate. We will build a postdigital façade and a new lobby: beautifully fabricated out of sustainable materials, responsive and intelligent, porous and in dialogue with nature. Tis may be then the frst, but I am sure there will be many more Grand Postdigital Hotels around the world. Why not join the new loyalty programme!?
FADE OUT:
EXT. THE HOTEL - DAY
Years later, in front of the doors at the entrance of a grand hotel, now with a new design. 0 is now the concierge, older and dressed in purple and black. ‘Woosh’. Doors open.
Welcome. Welcome to The Grand Postdigital Hotel. I’m 0, your concierge.
Notes
1 Wes Anderson (director, screenplay, story, production). Te Grand Budapest Hotel. Fox Searchlight Pictures, TSG Entertainment, Indian Paintbrush, Studio Babelsberg, American Empirical Pictures. 2014.
2 Online at databasic.io. Accessed 04.08.2022.
3 Mario Carpo. Te Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence. Cambridge, United States: MIT Press, 2017.
4 Greg Lynn. Archaeology of the Digital. New York, United States: Sternberg Press, 2013.
5 Nicholas Negroponte. ‘Beyond Digital’. In Wired magazine, Issue 6.12, December 1998. Online at https://web. media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html. Accessed 04.08.2022.
Images
0.1 20th Century Fox, Te Grand Budapest Hotel.
Chapter 1. Speculations
We build with ideas. Unfortunately, there is a part of the practice that is built not only of concrete and steel but greedily disregarding society at large; however, architecture rises above thought. Contemporary architectural discourse has been more concerned with its position within culture in general and thought in particular. Terefore, university courses in architectural theory ofen spend as much time discussing philosophy, cultural studies, and their connection with the architectural humanities.
Te theoretical world of contemporary architecture is plural and multicolored. Tere are diferent dominant schools of architectural theory that are based on speculative realism, post-structuralism, or cultural theory to mention a few. For example, there is an emerging interest in the rediscovery of the postmodernist in the defnition of new radical tendencies in architecture and their implication in the development of cities embracing the idea of discipline, or in new aesthetic and formal approaches to architecture through the appropriation of concepts from Object-Oriented Ontology. However, it is hard to say whether any of these explorations will have a widespread or lasting impact on architecture.
Some forms of architecture theory take the shape of a conference or a conversation, a treatise, an anthology, a competition, or a book. Architectural theory is ofen didactic, and theorists tend to stay close to or work from academia. Tese types of theoretical publications became more common in the 20th century and architectural theory gained considerable richness. As a result, styles and movements formed and dissolved much more rapidly than the relatively enduring modes of earlier history. Tere is the hope that in the second digital turn, the use of technology and social media will further the discourse on architecture in the 21st century.
Interview with Hernán Díaz Alonso
Gabriel Esquivel: Tank you so much for doing this. A few days ago, I was looking at those pictures that we had taken from Azul Rey Conference in Mexico City 15 years ago. Whatever was important for you then, is it still important for you now, or what has dramatically changed?
Hernan Diaz-Alonso: Talking about the past is never easy because I live in the now. I don’t tend to look back much. I went through a bit of that process a year and a half ago when we had to fnish the book and the monograph, which is always annoying. I think a lot of things have changed but a lot of things remain the same. So, it depends on how you see it. On one hand, you are always doing the same thing with diferent iterations. On the other hand, sometimes you would like to think that a lot of things have changed, but then it is not so evident in the world. What changed for me had to do with how to separate the human being from the architect. At a human level, many things happen, when you get older, you become more literal and more straightforward. You feel less pressure to ornament things with words, and you become more aware of the reality of your work. You can select the kind of work you are interested in doing, it would probably have many chances to survive in the real world, it depends on the choices. But there is that level of being surprised by the fact that the work is still there. As you mature, the work is diferent, at the same time the context has changed. If we go back 15 years ago, maybe not just me but all of us were trying to be more provocative, today you cannot think in those terms anymore. I’m more interested in being literal, I’m way more interested in being straightforward about what I think and how it became part of the work. Along the way, you lose your own ability to work with the tools, with the computer, and then you start to work a lot more with other people. You become more like a creative director than a designer, there is a certain distance, and in that sense, things have changed. I think the spirit of what interests me is still there, the obsessions
remain similar, but the vehicles of transformation are diferent. As you evolve, you tend to get rid of a lot of noise, things become much more essential.
My role as SCI-Arc director takes a huge amount of time in my life. In the last four or fve years, my activity as a designer got much more sporadic. I’m not as productive as I used to be, I used to be working all the time. We still design, we still produce stuf, but it has been in a diferent way, there is much more time between things, but when there is a lot of time in between, you lose the rhythm. I’m a very primitive designer, applying a lot of instinct but that is something you must cultivate. I’m not a conceptual designer, I’m just more emotional, and I need to be like that all the time, but that is changing too. I feel like every time that we work on something, it is almost like we start from scratch, which was not the feeling I had before, it was constant, like a bundle of stuf. I think that is not the case anymore, however, I’m looking forward to when I can do that again.
GE: You have been and still are an important fgure in architecture, a game-changer in terms of your discourse, aesthetics, and the use of digital technology. Do you feel that there is a huge pressure to be in that role, you were the guy that was changing things, a disruptor?
HD-A: First of all, the things that you are saying are stuf that other people label you with. I have never labeled myself under any of those things. I design what I design because that is the way I see the world. If it is disturbing, disgusting, or insulting to many people like it has been in the past, I understand why, and I respect that. Even today there are people who get really worked up with the work, they think it is not architecture. I never get afected by that because I think architecture is a subjective feld that everybody is entitled to have their opinion on. Some of the criticism is also fair. I never feel that pressure because it is like breathing, I don’t know any other way. Tis is what comes out of my brain and my guts, and I don’t know how to do anything else. I think the pressure will come depending on what you measure as success. I’m still very immature or very childlike when I’m working. It has to be exciting for me, the other stuf remains secondary to me. I never thought of myself in those terms, I think there are other people who are truly game changers, I consider myself more of a designer.
GE: When your frst book about Xefrotarch was published, it became an item to have because it described an important radical period of architecture. When your book Surreal Visions was published, the message in the introduction was that you are a visionary. Do you think that today there is still room for being radical or visionary?
HD-A: I have never considered myself a visionary, I have always operated in the present. When you ask somebody to write an introduction or a comment about you or your book, it is hard for me to believe what they say. I don’t read what they wrote until the book is published because I don’t want to censor it or edit it. Probably there is room for people to be visionary, I’m not so sure that architecture, which is such a slow-burning feld, is the right vehicle for visionary work. I think it is very difcult for architecture to break away from the past and the pressures of whatever that means. I think there is room to be visionary maybe in other felds, I don’t know what it will take for somebody to be a visionary architect. To produce something radical, a disruption, nobody knows what that is. To be radical, there must be something established that we could rebel from. Tere are so many established things, so you are being radical against which one? And we’ve seen so many options in the feld for the last 15 years. Tere are people being theoretically radical but are very conservative in terms of design and vice versa, I don’t know what the rule is. Maybe at the risk of being simplistic, I think it is much more interesting to try to do something good rather than radical, try to do something interesting, try to do something stimulating. I think there is still some room to be somewhat provocative. I think some words got distorted over the years, and people have misunderstood the terms. When you say provocative, people assume radical.
GE: People have recently been looking at your work but not in the way it was originally seen, they are looking at it with a diferent lens, more openly and less biased as well, is that important for you?
HD-A: First of all, I was not aware of any rebirth of interest. As you get older, you can’t be seen as radical anymore. Also, I think the lack of success relaxed everybody, comments like this guy didn’t build this insanity, so, they are fne. I have always been immune to those things because, over the years, I have
this insanity, so, they are fne. I have always been immune to those things because, over the years, I have become less feisty than I used to be because you come to terms with the realization this is what you do, and it is not the truth of anything. I think architecture or design at large, is still defned by this kind of moral understanding, that there is some perfect truth. I have always said that architecture is like a religious war in that everybody is fghting for their own version of God, which one is the right one or the wrong one? I also think everything is cyclical. If things hang around, if you hang around, eventually people go back to it, but it will be abandoned again. I’m fully aware that the level of infuence that any of us have is very little, and that is fne. I always think that the work of many of us is a little bit like jazz, it is music for other musicians. You go to jazz in a club and 80% of the audience are musicians. Recently somebody sent me a very critical review of my book, and I thought what they were saying about the book is actually 75% right. Tey were saying that I should go into art and objects or whatever. Yes, I’m doing that. Te only thing I thought was unfair is when they were talking about SCI-Arc being a program, it is not a program, this is a school with almost 50 people teaching design, and everybody has a diferent date, a diferent view, or whatever. I don’t understand why we are in the feld where everybody is so invested in attacking or destroying what somebody else does.
GE: Can you describe why SCI-Arc has always been kind of a thermometer? People come here to see what’s new, what’s happening right now, it has always played that role. What has been your role and how has it been diferent from, let’s say, Eric Owen Moss’s role when he was here?
HD-A: Te role has already changed even during the time I have been doing this. Look, in these kinds of jobs, the circumstances dictate many of the changes. I think there is a misconception about how much the leadership of an institution can infuence the curriculum. As a leader, you have infuence, of course, but the times are constantly changing. When I started six and a half years ago, I came from inside of the school, I was the graduate chair before this job. So, I was part of it in one way or another of things that were happening. My frst thing was, that I don’t want to start from scratch, I don’t want to destroy what has been achieved. Tere are certain things that make sense, and they are already working fne, the question was, how can we expand those? My main goal was to understand that there is a particular way architects think which can be applied to many things, and this is something that SCI-Arc has always done. I wanted to work with the existing great team, our design drive, and the digital expertise for sure, all these aspects are at the core of what the school is. Trough new tools of communication, social media, and so on, we need to keep expanding to produce change beyond the walls and engage in a much larger cultural conversation. Speculation became the keyword, more than radical, more than experimental because we are in a position where we have achieved an important maturity level. Tere are also things that happened and forced us to change. Climate change, the pandemic of course, but also the problem of racism in the country, have become important discussions that we must deal with. I have started to think about what the social agenda is, and how this agenda intersects with a speculative design agenda. I think this is a challenge and a fundamental change for us. You try to focus on expansion and global interaction for the school, and then something else happens. Academia is the place to push forward because pulling back is way easier than pushing forward. Our role is to keep pushing, and not accept reality as it is.
Te job is not about being a visionary, it is about the fundamental question I ask myself every week, what is next? If this is not working, let’s break it down, let’s start again, or let’s keep pushing. Tat comes with criticism because architecture is the elephant in the jungle, it is slow, it is big, and it does not like to run. Tere is a level of uncertainty that you need to learn to be uncomfortable with. I think an institution should always be uncomfortable, not complaisant in a positive way. Your leadership role is to stimulate that discomfort, to support and push the people to do that. I have always told everybody, the faculty, and students, that what we always expect from them is to be and do the most extreme version of who they are, not to change who they are, but to be the most extreme version of themselves because this is the place for it. I think it is our job to make sure that SCI-Arc should keep reinventing itself all the time.
GE: What do you think will happen in the next ten years, when a student comes to an institution, should that student start looking for things that he or she is familiar with, or should he or she be open to experimenting, with whatever is being ofered?
HD-A: I think anybody who can predict what will happen in the next 10 years, should be taken with a grain of salt. Architects like science fction but we shouldn’t confuse science fction with fantasy which is very diferent. Science fction basically is to use the future as speculation about the present. But you are really talking about the present, you are not talking about the future. Architecture as such is always in speculation because any architecture project is going to take about 4, 5, 6, or 7 years to be fnished. So, this is what we do on a regular basis. An event like the pandemic happens once every hundred years. So, things don’t change as much as we think they do. We’re going to see more and more architects and architecture students with an entrepreneurial spirit. We are going to see more invasions of new professionals or new business models or new ways of production. Tese things are set in motion in which architects act as communicators and as infuencers. I think there are still going to be many architects who want to build because that has such an afnity, is seductive, is powerful, you want to put your footprint in the city, on a place that’s not going to disappear. Architects are general experts, when most of the world is working towards specifcity, we are kind of resisting that. I see a diversifcation of the capacity of architects to operate in other forms of architecture and not just buildings. I may be wrong, but that’s what I see as a pattern. We’re going to see an entire generation of thinkers that are going to develop multiple careers in their lifetime. As an architect, you have to be like a sponge and absorb as much as you can, and whatever you think you know is never going to be enough. I don’t think that’s diferent, that has always been the case. I think people in our generation come from a culture of what I call depth of knowledge. We went to the library and spent hours there. We all knew about architects, and we all had our heroes. Young architects don’t think that way, they come from the density of knowledge. Tey know a little about a lot, and that has changed the rules in how you build and accumulate knowledge in a productive way. We must be able to adapt and accept it without getting stuck in something that happens to all of us from time to time; claiming that our times were better. We come from a culture where we were taught to repress, and now we are moving past that, but we also must be careful that we maintain certain values of specifcity, sophistication and many other things that you need to learn to be able to navigate in architecture. At the end of the day, who knows what is the right answer? You have to navigate to the best of your ability and try to put your best intention, put your heart into it, and hope for the best.
GE: Tank you. I think you are still the one who says it like it is and puts things in a very straightforward way. Tis is what I was still anticipating.
New Orders Te Digital Revolution, or Breaking Bad Habits
Elena Manferdini and Jasmine Benyamin
I certainly would not venture to defne the concept of order…but I trust it will bring out the feature which interests me in decorative design. Te arrangement of elements according to similarity and diference and the enjoyment of repetition and symmetry extend fom the string of beads to the layout of the page in font of the reader, and, of course, beyond to the rhythms of movement, speech and music, not to mention the structures of society and the systems of thought.
-E. H. Gombrich
Te Golden Section, the raumplan, the nine-square grid, modeling algorithms – geometrical orders and their afnity to aesthetic and spatial experience are enduring themes in architecture in both its visual and material manifestations. Why are we drawn to geometrical rules? Why do we lean on them as short hands to formalize the built environment? Why do we fnd them pleasing? According to cultural theorist and art historian E.H. Gombrich, this tendency to seek order is seated in our universal human impulse to fnd predictable rhythms in space and time. In his celebrated tour of ornament from 1979 entitled “A Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art” Gombrich makes a case that all decorative arts are the expression of an innate “sense of order”; since the beginning of time, ordering logics have assisted human existence in adjusting to complex, not to mention dangerous, external triggers. For their part, architects leverage their multifarious tools to create environments, and along the way, try to make sense of the world around them. Tis ‘making sense’ invokes other words that encircle rationalization, rules and control. Tese centuries-old pathologies refect our shared instinct to seek dominion over space and time. Tis essay harnesses Gombrich’s expansive framework by casting a wider perceptual
and formal net, to provide a more robust accounting of the role of order in contemporary architecture, whereby emergent computational tools have drastically expanded the possibilities of geometrical orders. Since human development has always required orientation in space and anticipation of time, orders have always been aligned to the perception of meaning. Te lasting link between order and meaning is deeply rooted in our biological heritage. Te formal characteristics of a variety of human artifacts, buildings included, can be seen as manifestations of that psychological predilection for order. We, as humans, like what we can control. Terefore, the harmony of parts constitutes a way of being psychologically afected, of being moved emotionally. For centuries architects have adopted these guiding principles as frameworks to design space. Recurring fgures in architecture – the arch, the column, a mold, or a square grid – are at their core, manifestations of harmony. Simplest of all is the formal dialog between part to whole, or between colors and their complementary hues. Over time, these ordering afliations have become primordial drivers of classifcation.
Te conventional narrative on orders where Western architecture is concerned begins with the Greeks and Romans and centers on the column.
At the onset of their Vitruvian (if not earlier) theorization in de Architectura, columns begin to carry a double load: as part of a larger set of supportive building elements, but also in their symbolic afnities with the human body. No bodies, no columns, no order. It stands to reason then that the enduring triad of frmitas, utilitas, venustas is the frst conceptualization of ‘order’ as constitutive of a larger system of rationalization. For thousands of years, the Golden Section has been used in art, architecture, and design as a way to produce visually satisfying geometric forms. Alberti’s de re aedifctoria conceives buildings as bodies whose forms are produced via mental perception and materials derived from nature. He mobilizes Euclidean mathematics as a vehicle for visualizing ideas into ordered formal propositions. In Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier’s invocation of ‘regulating lines’ grounds his early 20th-century theory on proportional systems. In so doing, he formalizes an intuitive sense of grid-based aesthetics into a comprehensive architectural language.
Going beyond the western canons, one can fnd similar tendencies towards an order in Islamic ornament, whose geometrical patterns have been deployed as decorative elements and have come to delineate specifc stylistic guidelines for architecture. In Chinese domestic architecture, walls and their ordered sequences not only delineate architectural spaces or courtyards; they also index a strict social hierarchy that dominates programs and structures. In short, the armature of an ordering logic has always underpinned space making, as syntax does in any language. In most cultures and civilizations, order and proportion have acted as powerful agents within which form, composition, and spatial organization could fourish.
As these and many other examples illustrate, ordering systems have come to constitute a catalog of canonical attributes, and a manual for the creation, evaluation, and analysis of architecture. Te architect’s instinct to seek dominion over space is manifested in generations of sanctioned rules that have rationalized our aesthetic experience of the built environment. Naturally, these ordering systems have delineated the limits of architectural qualities we have considered fundamental for the canon for centuries because they exemplifed our visual and material culture more precisely than other structures. It is important to note that the process of canonization has been essential to the autonomy of the feld and its discourse. Without these rule-based notions, it would be hard to formalize a method of making or engaging in fruitful conversation around buildings that best defne our culture at any given time.
On the other hand, when the rulebooks fail to be updated and expanded along to mirror shifs in our culture, orders calcify into doctrine. Geometry runs the risk of losing its innocence and becomes a prisoner of a dominant idea. Canons have stunted our inherent cultural diversity and rather reinforced a singular interpretation of what architecture should look like. In fact, it has become apparent that the canon has – willingly or not – excluded from the disciplinary discourse a variety of stakeholders that did not fall within accepted norms. And while the desire for order is here to stay, it is time to expand our shared institutional memories, decolonize architecture and open the feld to a more inclusive worldview.
In order to produce new, unexpected geometrical orders that break bad habits, architecture needs to refect on our epistemological and disciplinary limits, and look forward to the adoption of new tools. What better than computers can fulfll these two tasks? Computers are both the repositories and generators of new knowledge. Tey can follow defned sets of instructions and execute them, they can process big data and fnd invisible orders. Over the course of the past thirty years in particular, computer technology has facilitated thinking, learning and making with hitherto unimaginable speed.
Te frst digital turn presented a paradigm shif in our understanding and leveraging of complex geometrical order. In the intervening decades, the growth and breadth of computational tools have expanded the mathematical space of architects’ formal imagination and inadvertently mined the old doctrines. Looking back at this fertile point of origin, it is impossible to dismiss that computation has played a central role in dismantling formal dogmas and their myriad architectural associations. From folding to cyberspace, from hypersurfaces to parametrics, from scripting to large data, digital tools have disrupted the doctrines that we commonly associate with the canon. Tey promise new primary orders, syntaxes, and imaginaries.
Technology ofers increased access, and democratization of aesthetics, and opens the possibilities for unprecedented access to the design process and its outcomes. Disciplinary hard lines have gone by the wayside as the dissemination of open-source sofware platforms have amplifed numerous stylistic sensibilities that now fnd new homes in architecture. Tis coupled with the ubiquitous trafcking of architectural images on social media has drastically broadened the visual language of our feld beyond the archive, the museum, and the library. We can no longer rest on grand narratives.
While in recent years some post-digital practitioners and academics have manifested an anachronistic longing for canons, it is clear that the digital is here to stay and that its powers go well beyond virtuosity and formalism; computation is at the core of the contemporary mandate for design inclusivity and equity. Innovation and novelty usher in new experiences and perspectives, and ultimately give voice to ever-expanding audiences. Alongside precision, current trends in computation have introduced degrees of contamination, imperfection, and indetermination – all necessary ingredients for our architectural present.
1.1 Living Picture: Interactive wall design by Atelier Manferdini for Kaida Center of Science and Design. Location: Kaida Center of Science and Design, Dongguan (China) 2019. Courtesy of UAP.
1.2 Urban Fabric Rugs: Model A3, one of 12 hand tufed, hand-carved 100% New Zealand virgin wool rugs designed by Elena Manferdini and produced in limited edition by Urban Fabric Rugs. Shanghai (China) 2018. Courtesy of UFR.
1.3 Hibiscus: Shading panels by Atelier Manferdini for Alexander Montessori School front facades Miami, Florida, USA 2016. Courtesy of Atelier Manferdini. Photo by Artofmart.
Images
1.3
Use your Illusion, and Other Advice
Dora Epstein Jones
Like a funhouse mirror, a basic premise of parametrics and AI is to weird the normative – to defamiliarize, to cause a perceptual and psychological ficker between what we understand as reality, the normal, and what is not. In the funhouse mirror, we have normative expectations of seeing our bodies; and whether we like the view or not, we tend to associate that perception with our identity (“yep, that’s me”). Seeing our bodies in the funhouse mirror, however stretched or compressed, disproportionate and alien, for a brief moment, and knowing that this is a trick of the mirror, brings delight. We laugh, in part, because we know the illusion is temporary. We laugh because we know, we know (we hope), that the normative body will be stable despite the illusion.
With parametric sofware and AI in architecture, the task of weirding the normative is also delightful. But, to paraphrase Dave Hickey poorly, what starts as a momentary “ha” can shif fairly quickly to a more lasting critical assessment.1 Of course, the algorithmic path provides plenty of small giggles along the way – funny little machine takes on cornices, humorous computational versions of mouldings, almost naïve and adorable versions of so many architectural tropes. But, afer the initial chortle, the real intention sets in. Te architectural weird asks us to question the normative – a normal column, a normal arch, a normal angle. Like the convex mirror, we measure the alternative according to the expectation – the window that is no longer exactly parallel to the architrave, the roof line that does not form a complete horizontal ray, and so on. However, unlike the funhouse mirror, the sof manipulation of forms in architecture does not stop at an ontological limit of identity, like the body does. Instead, and in every case, we stand huddled on the border of many more provocative sets of questions for the feld of knowledge that we call architecture. Strangeness invites the idea of possibility – windows shaped like pears, roofines melting like ice cream – as new forms,
and even, new norms. Architecture, being the generous discipline that it is, invites these possibilities. We can comfortably ask, “what would a world of these architectures be like?” And, we should.
Te Serlio Code is certainly a delightful set of investigations, exercises, fabrications, and outcomes. Te folds and glitches confound. Te colors astound. But, weirding the normative, especially in architecture, should be more than a matter of delight. We should take weirding as a very serious critical provocation, and ultimately, as a key responsibility in architecture today. First, we must recognize and acknowledge the intense intellectual scrutiny required for the success of sofware-driven architecture and fabrication. Second, we must continuously engage the work with the understanding that norms established within architecture are NOT stable entities. Te discipline of architecture wants us to continuously reexamine it. Te Serlio Code lays this all before us.
More Tan Sensorial
AI certainly is not the frst instance of architectural strangeness. Prior to our generation, there is a concept of architectural strangeness derived from Gestalt psychology, in particular, that of the cognitive psychology used by Richard Neutra in the mid-20th century.2 In this formulation, architectural strangeness is caused by a cognitive dysfunction. Te brain is unable to grasp a proper or correct perception because of some past trauma. In the cases of Gestalt, the onus is on the designer to clarify his/her intentions in the design act, or to resolve or ameliorate the trauma through design afects.
Preceding generations also had their avant-gardes, from Superstudio through to Sant’Elia, and then further back to Soane, Ledoux, and Boullee. For these, we ofen refer to Fried’s Art and Objecthood. Michael Fried had defnitively described the efect of strangeness as a form of bad object perception.3 Like the architectural solution to resolve trauma, the architect understands their objective as transportative, an agency to create feelings beyond literalism, and for Fried, beyond semiosis. And, while Fried’s world had resulted in “good and bad” valences for art and art criticism, the idea that architecture should be “absorptive,” and even “beyond words,” and especially as a matter of its “greatness,” has not at all disappeared.
Our very generation shares a basic sensibility derived from Anthony Vidler’s descriptions of the “uncanny,” the evocation of a feeling of dissimilarity.4 In many ways, like the funhouse mirror, the uncanny, or unheimlichkeit to be more precise, evokes the sense of a proper home, literally translating to “feel unhomely.” Te formation of strangeness in the uncanny is that of a Freudian unconscious, hovering above and below consciousness. Te unconscious is as a spectre that fogs the view of conscious and clear object relations. In the architectural uncanny, it is a feeling of alienation, and hence, a detachment. Te “uncanny” was a very popular term in architectural postmodernism, both as a strategy and a tactic, especially as an intentional act of disruption.
Te accepted explanation of alienation, of strangeness, of weirding, therefore is as a sensory experience, one that destabilizes (as in postmodernism) or must be harnessed to potentially soothe (modernism). Aligning with post-criticality in the later postmodernist period has further buried strangeness into a tangle of afects and efects. Tus, by the time that formal computing, such as the use of Maya, was being advocated, it was doing so on the proviso that architecture should just be felt and enjoyed.5 And, while that sounds buzzy and pleasurable, like an architectural pharmaceutical, the entire premise belies the power of architecture and the capabilities of the human brain. I claim that architectural strangeness is not merely a feeling, it is ofen also a rather precise and almost always instantaneous calculation.
Of course, not all feelings of unheimlichkeit are semiotic or intellectual or critical. Not to mention, not all architectural sensations are conscious ones. To be fair, I am not a cognitive psychologist, nor am I engaged in sensory research. I am, however, deeply, deeply interested and invested in the idea that we all seem to “recognize” architectural tropes within the world of artifcial intelligence. In many ways, we approach AI as if in a funhouse mirror, and for me, this activity of object recognition that we perform within AI, such as with the Serlio Code, provokes important disciplinary realities, ones that operate at the level of the establishment of architectural norms.
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space will not permit. An idea, however, can be obtained of the various forms of screw propellers patented in England before 1850 from the plate facing page 118, to which we have already called attention.
The lower illustration facing page 120, which is taken from a contemporary aquatint, shows the Archimedes on her voyage from London to Portsmouth in the year 1839, when she attained a speed of eight knots against both wind and tide. Facing page 122 is reproduced a model of her stern framing before being planked up. As a further test of this screw idea Wimshurst, who had built the Archimedes, launched the Novelty in 1839, a much larger vessel than her predecessor. The Novelty will be seen in the next illustration, and in her we see the “screw” vanishing and becoming more assimilated to the modern propeller. Originally the corkscrew shape entitled it to be called a screw; but the evolution of time and experience has now considerably altered this. It will be noticed that in the Archimedes the screw is a little distance away from the sternpost, but as seen in the Novelty the propeller is put right close up against it. This Novelty was the first cargo steamer fitted with a screw, and made her inaugural trading voyage from London to Constantinople and back with entire success. She is interesting also as having been the first ship to be fitted with an iron mast. This material was employed for the mizen, the other masts were of wood; her rig was that of a barque. For some years after the introduction of the screw, and so long as sails were still retained as auxiliaries, there had to be some means of overcoming the resistance of the screw when not in use and the ship was proceeding under sail power. This was done either by fixing the blades so that they caused the minimum drag, or by lifting the screw into a well. The Novelty lifted hers on deck over the quarter by means of davits. This arrangement will also be seen in the illustration. This idea is now obsolete, since sails are but rarely employed as auxiliaries.
STERN OF THE “ARCHIMEDES.”
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
Now the introduction of the propeller was not so simple an event as the reader might imagine. Ordinarily, one is tempted to argue that it was merely a case of putting the power aft instead of at either side, as in the use of the paddle-wheels. But, in fact, the introduction of the screw opened up a new set of problems connected with ship design. In the early days the design of a ship’s stern, both in the
THE “NOVELTY” (1839).
sailing ship and the steamer, was badly neglected. Later on the improved lines of the clipper sailing ships certainly did much to improve matters. I referred at the beginning of the previous chapter to the manner in which a vessel going ahead moves the water in which she floats, and how the eddies round the stern impede her advance. Now when a propeller revolves, much of its power is, even nowadays, wasted by what is called “slip”—that is to say, by the yielding of the water so that the screw does not progress to the full extent of its “pitch.” (The “pitch” of a propeller is the amount of distance which is represented by one whole turn of the thread. We could measure, for instance, the “pitch” of a corkscrew by the distance which it would penetrate in a cork.) Even after years of experiments and improvements the wake at the end of a steamship tends to reduce the speed of the water past the propeller, but when first the screw experiments were conducted the design of the afterbody of a ship’s hull was so carelessly considered that the “slip” of the propeller was considerable. There is also to be taken into account the fact that by the rounding in of the “stream lines” at the stern the vessel receives a pressure which helps her forward. When, however, a propeller is added to a ship and set in motion it disturbs this helping-forward movement, and in a ship fitted with only a single screw this disturbance is even greater than in a twin-screw steamer, because the latter has her propellers placed well out, away from the hull. We need not here pursue the subject further; it is enough now to show that every improvement in the steamship began a new chapter of problems, introduced difficulties that could never have been anticipated, which time and patience alone can solve satisfactorily.
And so we come to the construction of the Great Britain, of which the model is illustrated opposite page 126. Let us recollect that it was only in 1836 that the little six-ton launch Francis Smith had been built, and that it was only three years later that the Archimedes showed by her successful voyages that the screw method of propulsion was no fanciful, impracticable theory. In this same year, 1839, there began to be built a still more wonderful screw steamer The Great Western Steamship Company had already been so satisfied with the Great Western that they believed that a far larger
ship would be even still more profitable. Therefore, Brunel was again consulted, and he reported that already the furthest limit of long ships built of wood was reached. There was no alternative but to construct her of iron, for the reasons that I explained some time since. Iron had already been used in ship-building for barges and also for steamboats, but on no large scale. Aaron Manby, in conjunction with Charles Napier, had built the first iron steamboat as far back as 1821. This ship had been conveyed in sections from Horseley, where she was made, to the Surrey Canal Dock, and there put together After being tried on the Thames on May 9th, 1822, she steamed away the next month with Napier in command, and Manby as engineer, arriving in Paris on the eleventh of the same month. She was thus not merely the first iron steamship, but the first iron ship that ever put to sea. For the next twenty years she continued to ply on the Seine. Napier was the financier of the attempt to promote iron steamers on the French river, but by 1827 the slump in the steamboat had taken an acute form, and he was left a comparatively poor man. But in 1832 the Lady Lansdowne was built by John Laird of Birkenhead for the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, and she was the first iron steamer constructed with the intention of performing sea-service. She was a paddle-boat, and measured 133 feet long, 17 feet wide, with a tonnage of 148 and a nominal horsepower of 90. Later still the Robert F. Stockton, to which we have alluded, was also of iron.
But the Great Britain was to be 322 feet long, with a beam of 50½ feet, and a displacement of 3,618 tons, with a cargo capacity of 1,200 tons, able to carry also 1,000 tons of coal, and 260 passengers. To build such a big lump of a boat as this was to be a very grave undertaking indeed. In fact, no contractor could be found who would undertake the construction of the ship or her engines. She was something out of the unknown; there were no data upon which to base calculations. Brunel, therefore, made out the designs and the Great Western Company with great daring proceeded to lay down plans for building her themselves at Bristol. This was in 1839. It was intended to give her the usual paddle-wheel engines, but the Archimedes arrived at this port, and the success of her screw propulsion caused Brunel to modify his designs so that the Great
Britain should become not only the largest iron ship ever built, but the largest screw steamer.
It was originally intended to name her the Mammoth, but she had better been called the White Elephant, for all the use she was afterwards to her owners. Her rig was like nothing afloat, and the vocabulary of nautical terms contains no adequate description. From our illustration it will be seen that she had six masts. On all except the second she carried fore-and-aft canvas, but this second mast carried two yards and square sails. Forward she had a bowsprit and triangular headsails. In sail area alone she carried 1,700 yards of canvas, and in length the hull was 100 feet in excess of the largest line-of-battleship afloat. She was actually floated on July 19th, 1843, but it was not until December of the following year that she was able to enter the river, owing to the delay in the alteration of the dock. In the meantime her engines had been put aboard, and on July 26th, 1845, after trips to London and Liverpool, she left the latter port with sixty passengers, and 600 tons of cargo for the Atlantic run. She arrived in New York after a fifteen days’ passage, with an average speed of 9¼ knots. On the homeward voyage her best day’s run was 287 miles. The illustration facing page 126 is from a model of her sixbladed propeller, with which originally she was fitted; but on one of her voyages she had the misfortune to break this and proceeded to Liverpool under her canvas. A new propeller was then fitted which had but four blades, but later on she again resorted to the original number. She continued her Atlantic voyages until 1846, when she ran ashore off the Irish coast in Dundrum Bay during the month of September, and remained for eleven months exposed to the terrible wintry weather; but Brunel had a wooden breakwater, loaded with stones, constructed round her, and she was eventually re-floated and taken to Liverpool, and though her bottom was naturally considerably damaged, yet the mere fact that she had been able to survive at all showed that confidence might be placed in iron as a material for ship-building. But by this time her owners had had enough of her, and she was sold for less than one quarter of the £100,000 she had cost. After alterations to her rig and her engines, she was employed in the Australian trade. She was next relieved of her engines, and turned into a sailing vessel, and then used as a
coal-hulk off the Falkland Islands. Finally she was broken up at Barrow.
THE “GREAT BRITAIN” (1843)
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
PROPELLER OF THE “GREAT BRITAIN.”
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
But apart from her size, the Great Britain possessed other novel features which are worthy of notice. We have already remarked that as the length of ships increased, so did the longitudinal strain, and new methods had to be devised in order to overcome this. The Great Britain was specially strengthened longitudinally, and furthermore she was divided into five water-tight compartments. The original purpose of transverse bulkheads was that if a vessel were holed by collision or grounding, or—in the case of naval vessels—pierced by shell, she might yet remain afloat. Nowadays they do more than this, for, when carried up to the strong deck, they add to the longitudinal strength of the ship. The Great Britain also possessed another novelty, in bilge keels, which extended for about one-third of her length. The object of these, which are so well-known a feature of modern steamships, was to lessen rolling. Her bulwarks consisted of iron rails with netting running round the ship. Here, again, was a new
departure. In the older ships the heavy wooden bulwarks were a relic of the days when the guns were sheltered behind them; but from the view of seaworthiness they were really a false safety. If a heavy sea were shipped, the water was held in and not allowed to get away easily; in the case of the Great Britain the water could escape just as quickly as it came aboard.
Facing page 128 will be seen a reproduction of a model of the Great Britain’s engines, as originally placed in her before she ran ashore. Steam was generated in a double-ended boiler. The nominal horse-power was 1,000, but twice that amount could be obtained, and a speed of over 12 knots. There were four direct-acting cylinders —of which two will be seen in the foreground of the illustration— placed as low down in the ship as possible. The early engines which were used for the screw did not drive the latter directly, and on reference to the illustration it will be seen that in the centre of the crank shaft was a drum, which was connected with another drum just below it on the propeller shaft by means of four chains.
When referring to the side-lever engines in a former chapter, I drew attention to the fact that in spite of their virtues they had the great drawback of taking up a great deal of space. The second illustration facing page 128 represents an attempt to overcome this disadvantage. As will be seen on examining the lower part of the engines, the lever has now become very small in size. It will be noticed that there are two inverted cylinders, whose piston-rods are connected by a cross-head, the latter being guided by lever parallel movement, and from it the power was conveyed by means of a connecting rod to the crank on the paddle-wheel shaft. The connecting rod can be seen between the two cylinders in the illustration. These engines were made in 1843 for the Helen McGregor, a paddle-steamer engaged in the Hull-Hamburg trade. She was of 573 tons, and was one of the largest ships of her class.
ENGINES OF THE “GREAT BRITAIN.”
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
ENGINES OF THE “HELEN McGREGOR.”
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
It was not until 1852 that the Cunard Company were so thoroughly convinced of the capabilities of either iron ship-building or the screw propeller as to give both a trial. Four iron screw steamers were then built, and these were the first owned by this line which were fitted with accommodation for emigrants. The next year six more iron screw steamers were added, and connection formed with the chief ports of the Mediterranean; and when the Crimean War broke out a number of the Cunard ships were employed as transports. But from one reason and another the screw propeller had not found general favour among passengers. The vibration it caused, its unpleasant “racing” in bad weather, and the new motion as compared to that of the old paddle-wheel, allied to the usual
obstinate temperament, showed that the earlier type had still to be retained for a while. Following on the medieval custom, the stern of these early steamships was still regarded as the place of honour, and the saloon passengers were accordingly placed abaft the machinery, which was amidships. Thus placed, the traveller was doubtfully privileged, for the close proximity of the propeller made life on shipboard exceedingly trying to the nerves, and there were many who, having voyaged in the old ocean-going sailing ships, looked back with mixed feelings to the longer but less nerve-racking journeys. The strain on the early screw engine was very considerable when the vessel was pitching fore and aft into the Atlantic seas. Being of comparatively small size, its movements in such circumstances were far more lively than in a modern, lengthy liner, which is able to stretch over a longer span. Consequently, as the bow came down into the sea and the stern rose out, the propeller was much more prone to race wildly, and the gearing, such as we saw in the engines of the Great Britain, was not infrequently unable to endure the terrible strain to which it was put. It was for this reason that the screw engines were afterwards made direct-acting.
The Cunard Company decided to build their next ship of iron, but with paddle-wheels. This was the Persia, launched in 1856, a vessel of 3,300 tons burthen, with accommodation for 250 passengers. But she was even surpassed by the Scotia, which was built in 1862, and is interesting as being the last and the finest paddle-ship which was ever made for their Atlantic service. An illustration of this vessel will be found opposite page 130 She was fitted with the greatest luxury of the time, to carry 275 cabin passengers, had seven water-tight compartments, and a double bottom, so that even if she should have had the bad luck to run ashore she would still most probably be able to endure. Nowadays most steamships are fitted with this excellent arrangement, which was first adopted in the Great Eastern, through the ingenuity of Brunel, to which we shall refer presently. But the Scotia turned out to be also a fast boat, and materially altered the time spent in crossing the Atlantic; she lowered the record to just two hours under the nine days Her engines were of the familiar sidelever type, and were the finest examples of their kind that were ever made. The cylinders were 100 feet in diameter, and steam at 20 lb.
pressure was supplied by eight boilers with forty furnaces, the speed attained being 13½ knots per hour; her daily coal consumption was 159 tons. She could carry 1,800 tons of coal, and was exceedingly strongly constructed. We can obtain some idea of those paddlewheels shown in the illustration when we remark that they were no less than 40 feet in diameter. She was afterwards turned into a “telegraph” ship for use in cable-laying, and her paddles changed for twin screws. It was not until about 1896 that her water-tight bulkheads were put to practical use; for as the result of an explosion on board of vapour from spirit her bow was blown out of her, and the water began to rush in. Her collision bulkhead was also damaged, but happily the second bulkhead saved the ship from foundering.
From a Painting By Permission of the
THE “SCOTIA” (1862)
Cunard Steamship Co
THE “PACIFIC”
(1853).
Turning our attention away from the North Atlantic for a while, we shall be able to see that steamships on other routes were now fast passing from the olden types, when designers and builders were working with only a minimum of data on which to base their achievements. We have already referred to the highly important knowledge which was gradually being obtained concerning the relations between the hull of a ship and the water in which she is floated. One of the greatest authorities on this subject about the middle of the last century was John Scott Russell, who worked out a theory regarding the resistance of the ship passing through the water. He it was who contended that the hull should only move the water out of the way sufficiently to allow the widest section of the ship to pass through, and to do this in such a manner as should cause the least amount of friction and disturbance of the water, so that, when the ship was gone by, the particles of water should be restored to their original quietude. It is important to bear in mind that the design of a ship must be made with regard to the speed which it is intended to get out of her. Thus, it is now a well-known principle that to give a ship highly powerful engines so that she is forced beyond her proper speed only makes the waves diverge from the
From a Painting in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
sides and waste themselves instead of travelling with the vessel and giving it a forward impetus.
The model of the hull in the illustration facing page 134 represents the steamship Victoria, which was built in 1852 of iron, and designed by those two great geniuses Brunel and Scott Russell for the Australian Royal Mail Steam Navigation Company. Even the least practised eye on looking at her lines can see that she possessed speed, and it was this ship that gained the £500 prize offered by the Colonies for the fastest voyage to Australia, her time from Gravesend to Adelaide being sixty days, including two days’ delay at St. Vincent. The Victoria was designed as embodying the wave-line theory and for a speed of ten knots. It is not necessary to examine this model many moments before one realises how unmistakably the clumsy, ponderous hulls so characteristic of earlier years were now being replaced by sweet, graceful, non-resisting features. The hull of the Victoria was separated into a dozen watertight compartments and displaced 3,000 tons, her length being 261 feet, with a breadth of 38 feet, or approximately seven beams to the length. She had a two-bladed screw, and when this was not in use, and the Victoria proceeded under sail-power alone, the propeller was fixed vertically. Thus arranged, the ship could sail 5½ knots, but it is interesting to remark that when the screw was allowed to revolve freely the speed of the ship was increased another couple of knots.
MAUDSLAY’S OSCILLATING ENGINE.
From the Original in the Victoria and Albert Museum
ENGINES OF THE “CANDIA.”
From the Drawing in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
It was in this ship that a type of engine was fitted to which, so far, we have not referred. This was the oscillating kind, and was destined to become pretty well universal in paddle-ships, though not without serious opposition at one time. This type had been patented as far back as 1827, by Joseph Maudslay, and in the Aaron Manby, already mentioned, the machinery was of an oscillating nature, for which Manby had obtained a patent in 1821, but even farther back still—in 1785—William Murdoch had proposed the use of oscillating cylinders. It is only fair to Maudslay to say that he had independently worked out this arrangement, and so afforded yet another instance of the possibility, which I have enunciated before, of different inventors working at the same set of problems and bringing about a similar method of solution. In the accompanying illustration is shown Maudslay’s original oscillating engine. In this type the cylinders, instead of being fixed, oscillate, and the necessity of the connecting rod is dispensed with, for the cylinder is placed immediately underneath the crank shaft, as a reference to the illustration will show. Each cylinder is mounted on trunnions in the same manner as a cannon, being placed at a point about the middle of the cylinder’s length, so that it can swing, or oscillate, in such a way as to correspond with the arc which the crank makes in its movement. Thus there are both weight and valuable space saved. In the instance before us the condenser is placed between the two cylinders; the central trunnions communicate with the condenser, and the outside trunnions with the steam pipe. But Maudslay’s engines did not at that time find the appreciation which had been hoped for, and it was not until 1838, when they were re-introduced by John Penn, that they received their full favour. We shall return to the oscillating type when we come to consider the Great Eastern. But we may remark that the interesting steamship illustrated opposite page 130 was also provided with the oscillating pattern. This is the packet steamer Pacific, which was built in 1853 for the Mediterranean service, and is another example of a vessel constructed on the wave-line system. She was built of iron, and had nine water-tight compartments.
The Pacific was interesting in another feature, in that she generated her steam in four tubular boilers, each of which had five
furnaces. Briefly the evolution of the boiler had been on this wise: As originally fitted in the Clermont and Comet it was simply a water-tank set in brickwork, and was nearly full of water, with the fire outside, or, to use the expression generally employed, “externally fired.” In those days the pressure of the steam was not greater than the pressure of the air, which we saw to be 15 lb. to the square inch. Then came a modification of this in which the furnace was placed inside the boiler, the advantage being that, with the water all round, the latter could be the more readily heated. This developed into the marine “box” boiler, with internal flat-sided flues and furnaces. This type continued to be fairly universal until about 1845, but the utmost pressure of steam which these were capable of enduring was not above 35 lb. or thereabouts. But tubes instead of the flat flues began to be introduced about the year 1850, owing to the suggestion of the Earl of Dundonald, and these were to be of about double the diameter of those which had been common to locomotives for the previous twenty years. The pressure was soon raised considerably, but there was a strong prejudice against using high pressures at sea, and the idea was not encouraged.
THE “VICTORIA” (1852).
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
THE “HIMALAYA”
(1853).
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
COASTING CARGO STEAMER
(1855).
From the Model in the Victoria and Albert Museum
In the same year that the Pacific took the water was launched the Himalaya, of which a beautiful little model is here illustrated. She was built for the P. and O. Line. This fine ship-rigged steamship was constructed of iron at Blackwall in 1853, and in the following year was bought by the British Government and steamed away from Plymouth with soldiers for the Crimea. She was of 4,690 tons displacement, and in that year made a record run from Gibraltar at an average speed of 13½ knots. Originally she had been built for carrying both cargo and passengers, but now she is, or was, ending her sphere of usefulness as a coal hulk at Devonport. Her coal “endurance”—she could carry 1,200 tons—made her a valuable
asset, and her six water-tight bulkheads rendered her still more efficient. As will be seen from the illustration, she had a single propeller, and this was driven by yet another type of engine, which we have now to consider. We refer to the vertical trunk engine. We shall be able to understand this better if we examine the illustration facing page 132, which reproduces a drawing of a similar type of engines installed in the P. and O. Candia, built a year later than the Himalaya. In the trunk engine the piston-rod was done away with, so that the connecting rod is attached directly to the piston within a trunk or tube. This trunk passes through a steam-tight stuffing-box in the cylinder cover, and is made wide enough to allow of the lateral vibrations of the connecting rod inside. As long as steam pressures did not exceed 35 lb. this proved to be satisfactory; but the friction of the stuffing-boxes when they became of large dimensions was a serious drawback. The Candia, for which these engines were made, was a screw ship, and the cylinders were placed in a fore-and-aft position. By means of this type of engine, employing trunks, the height required was greatly lessened, and it was not necessary, as will have been noticed was essential in the case of the Great Britain’s engines, that part of them should come up through the deck. Thus, the trunk type meant a saving of valuable space. Between the cylinders were arranged the condensers, which were of the jet type. We may stop to remind the reader that the condenser had been the invention of Watt, who had improved on the Newcomen engine not merely by covering over the top of the cylinder, but by condensing the exhausted steam in a separate vessel, called a condenser. This condensation he brought about by means of a jet of cold water, and the same principle was still employed in the Candia. Condensation having taken place, the water thus formed, together with any air which has got in, is then drawn off by the air-pumps, which will be seen in the illustration to be worked from an intermediate crank. It will be remarked on glancing at the left of the picture that the Candia’s crank shaft was connected with the propeller shaft by means of spur gearing, which doubled the speed of the screw, and so of the ship, but yet allowed the actual engines to run comparatively slowly. This toothed wheel idea was a better method than that employed in the Great Britain’s engines, though it was only
just one stage better There was a rooted objection in the early days of the screw to running the engines at a great speed, and thus it was only by some such means of gearing that the propeller was made to revolve quickly. In the course of time, when a wider experience and knowledge of engineering matters had been obtained, the gearing was done away with and the engines became direct-acting, and so there ensued far less friction, an absence of complication, and less expense caused by gearing. At the same time the power obtained by the newer method became more direct.
A customary apparatus nowadays adopted for steamships is the surface condenser, and in the effort to increase the steam pressures this has been a potent factor. But it had already been tried by Watt, by David Napier, and re-introduced by Samuel Hall in 1831. The surface condenser consists of a number of brass tubes about three quarters of an inch in diameter, through which a stream of cold water circulates. This necessarily keeps the pipes cool, and thus condenses the exhaust steam which is thrown on to them from the cylinder; it is practically a kind of tubular boiler. Instead of the jet, as in the older form of condenser, it is the outside of the pipes which performs the office, and the air-pump does its work as before. The condensed steam is now available for feeding the boiler, and after being filtered the feed pump draws it into a heater and thence it is led into the boiler once more. If the reader will now turn to the illustration facing page 132 once more, he will see in the right hand of the picture that in the Candia the feed and bilge pumps were worked by small beams from an eccentric.
By being able to use this water for the boilers a great economy was effected, but in some of the P and O. liners the boilers suffered rather badly, since an injurious chemical action was set up owing to the continuous return of the same water backwards and forwards from the condenser. Nowadays the problems connected with the condenser have been fully mastered, and the advantage of being able to use distilled water is obvious; for one of the surest and quickest methods of bringing about ruin is to use sea-water for the boiler, over which it will lay a thick crust of salt.
