goo version 1.0

goo

Contributors Koko Barnes Ruben Caldwell Robert Cox Steven Chou Therese Diede Paola Echegaray Jacob Escoff Stephen Froese David Gonzalez Ayaka Kobayashi Hales Jochen Hartmann Dalia Hamati Dave Hecht Tom Heltzel Sam Hur Eivind Karlsen

Demitra Konstantinidis Dan Taeyoung Lee SangWook Lee Bo Liu Sam Meyerson Kim Nguyen Elizabeth Nichols Owen Nichols Luis Paris Alan Paukman Nicholas M. Reiter Leigh Salem William Brian Smith Yurika Sugimoto Sydney Talcott George Valdes Michelle Young Anton Yupangco

goo. version 1.0 goo is a collection of uncollected work - flights of fancy, experiments in process, speculations outside the realm of final presentations and shiny publications.

This is the work that is fodder for revision, from which alternate possibilites may be derived. A single image, representing a concept or a technique, may find a fruitful pairing with another image, and new projects may emerge.

The collection also embodies a novel data set from which observations, measurements, diagrams, hypotheses, and experimements may be performed, drawn and proposed.

Goo is an ongoing and dynamic ecosystem with no other fixed goal than to see what becomes possible when the standard limits on what is worth showing are tossed aside in favor of letting the light of the sun reach the darkest crevasses of the creative architectural mind.

1st year studio goo David Hecht & Stephen Froese

FROM THE WIRES May 18, 2011 The wreckage of the StarshipGSAPP was found this morning in a field just outside of Fresno, California. Details of the crash are forthcoming. From black box information it appears that the crew, having scant knowledge of math and physics, miscalculated the trajectory of the reentrance into the Earth’s atmosphere. The calculations were complicated by the fact the ship was returning from the distant future at the exact moment of reentry.

Investigators are still sifting through the debris to determine if any information about the mission can be recovered.

Readers will remember that the StarshipGSAPP was launched into space three years ago in search of architecture. The ship was built to travel through time and space in pursuit of meaning in that most elusive of fields.

May 19, 2011 Crews have discovered a trove of documents from the wreckage of the StarshipGSAPP. Now begins the difficult task of determining the extent to which the crew was able to carry out their vital mission.

May 21, 2011 Forensic computer scientists have recovered fragments of digital files from the SS GSAPP. The recovered items include mission specific crew logs documenting the painstaking process of architectural decoding.

Unfortunately most of the logs consist of files partially corrupted by electromagnetism generated during the off-axis atmospheric reentry attempted by the crew.

December 24, 2011 The President has issued a nationwide call for volunteers to crew the newly constructed Starship Avery.

March 15, 2011 Using the partial logs recovered from the SS GSAPP, commanders from STARARCH have begun the process of training the new crew of the SS Avery. One source, who insisted on remaining anonymous given the sensitive nature of the mission, said that there is very little to go on. He indicated that reconstructing the GSAPP crew’s work on the missions has been difficult at best. The Spectator has obtained a copy of the training documents to be published in their entirety later this week. They include the original mission briefs as well as the partial crew logs from the GSAPP.

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW DOCUMENTS Prepared by Ruben Caldwell and William Brian Smith STARARCH Internal Review Committee

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Title:

THE TECTONICS OF TAUTOLOGY

File no. 99879-2 Character of case:

MISSION 1.

WEEK 1

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

RECOVERED SS GSAPP CREW LOGS M1.122-4 DAY 1 I have never been good with existential questions. I’ve ignored them because they seem so unproductive. Um, what does it matter if reality is real or not? It is what it is.

Or isn’t it. Uhg, God. I make myself sick. This stuff makes me sick. I don’t know.

Isn’t that okay? Is it okay that I don’t know? These arguments have been around since the beginning of time. And where has it gotten us? We’re still struggling to answer the same questions. I guess that’s the problem. We’re trying to solve unsolvable problems. We’ve created questions to answers that will never exist. Can’t we just put them to rest? What does it mean to mean? I mean, what difference does it make? Am I stupid?

I sometimes fear that these questions are just used to make me feel stupid. Well, I’m not stupid. I’m just careful and efficient with choosing my intellectual battles. I’d rather use my energy to cure disease than wonder if disease has meaning. Well, it does.

It kills people. End of discussion. And what are you doing to do about it? Well, here’s one for you: architecture doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything. No, no, no, no. That’s not fair. I know it isn’t. Meaning is meaningful. God, this is so ridiculous. I think I’m with Hegel on this one: if reality and appearance of reality are the same then it remains senseless to entertain the thought of discussing the distinction between real and appearance of real. No discussion needed. It’s perfect.

M1.462-1 DAY I’ve been thinking. I know I know I know. No thinking. But it’s mission critical now. Here’s a question for you. Well, a question for me. I have a problem. No, it’s kind of a question. Um, okay, well, if nothing is really real then there’s nothing in the universe that can actually be represented. [Indiscernible speech] Because everything is constantly changing. Everything is susceptible to interference. Stuff we create and things we say are inevitably exposed to noise and interference and thus also to potential transformation. There exists an interesting paradox that successful communication necessarily involves the risk of failure. Communication may be thwarted or ‘betrayed’ by the medium through which it passes. But if we take the position ‘downstream’, at the point of destination rather than departure of the message, we may see this failure, this betrayal, as also the process of invention.

Meaning is constantly evolving. Therefore, we can only take mental Polaroids of it. And I think that’s right. It’s okay. The real. The meaningful. The meaning of real. They are all impossibly elusive. They disrupt and dislocate every system and structure designed to represent it. Maybe we should just remove these words from our vocabulary. I’m okay with not being able to ever represent reality or to be able to articulate meaning.

Should architecture have meaning? Does it have to be meaningful? Well, it doesn’t need to mean anything secretly. Or it can, if that helped the design of it. But it’s meaning or the communication of its meaning is irrelevant to its user. Because in reality, the building is just a space. It can be beautiful, of course, but that beauty has no right meaning because in reality: it is what it is. And if reality, by definition, is always a thing of its past, then I’m concerned with bigger things. Like, the future.

And going home. Something that actually has meaning to me. [End audio]

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Report made at:

Fresno, CA

File no. 99879-1 Date Orginiated:

05/11/2011

Period of investigation:

01/13/2011 05/11/2011

Report made by:

W BRIAN SMITH AND RUBEN CALDWELL

Title:

Character of case:

THE TECTONICS OF TAUTOLOGY

MISSION 1.

WEEK 1

Previous intercepted communications:

MISSION BRIEF: The goal of this simulation will be to find Meaning. She has been kidnapped and held for ransom on by Hegelian Terrorists on an undisclosed planet. Intelligent forces point to her location as somewhere between Paradox and Reason. Her survival is dependent on our writing. We calculate that at 8 hours a day, for two weeks your written output should equal some 619 pages. This should be enough to damage the planet’s pleonastic force field. We will use the writings of Kant, Hegal, LeFevbre, Neitche, Foucoult and others to generate ideas about the possibilities of Meaning’s whereabouts. Many of these writers argue that either Meaning is real or it is not. We will answer difficult questions: Is meaning real? Is real rational? Is Architecture real? Should Meaning have anything to do with architecture?

Read and do not stop reading. Write and do not stop writing. Your writing will range from the profane to the profound. We expect pleonasm. We demand output. Meaning is waiting for us. We must save her in order to save ourselves.

PLANETARY DESCRIPTION: Monastic topography of rough drafts, discarded writing implements and canyons of empty coffee cups.

NECCESSARY EQUIPMENT: Douglas Adams’ tiny translator fish. Full cups of coffee.

An ability to read and write simultaneously.

TEXTS: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Book II, pp. 16-34, Book I, pp. 75-94, 162-203.

G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, 711-721, 734-754.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 1-57, 479-493.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pp. 463-501.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, pp. 1-39, 247-293, 330-366, 549-50.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 9-56.

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 3-35, 115-136.

Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.”

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind, pp. 3-22, 126-161.

Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

Jacques Derrida, Truth in Painting, pp. 17-147.

Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, pp. 71-124.

Michel Serres, The Parasite, pp. 3-73, 94-97, 147-164.

Richard Hoftstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, pp. 3-60, 158-76, 246-284, 310-336.

J. Scott Turner, The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures, pp. 1-8, 26-39, 179-214.

Gerry Webster, “Structuralism and Darwinism: Concepts for the Study of Form.”

Brian Goodwin, “A Structuralist Research Programme in Developmental Biology.”

Approved by:

Copies of this report:

Fresno, CA WASHINGTON, DC NEW YORK, NY

DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE.

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Report made at:

Fresno, CA

File no. 9325-1 Date Orginiated:

05/11/2011

Period of investigation:

01/13/2011 05/11/2011

Report made by:

W BRIAN SMITH AND RUBEN CALDWELL

Title:

Character of case:

THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

MISSION 2.

WEEK 3

Previous intercepted communications:

MISSION BRIEF: On this planet we will focus on the creation of an exhaustive catalogue of images. You will spend two weeks clarifying what you think is beautiful, ugly, terrifying, grotesque, awesome, hard, elegant, wonderful, spectacular and heartbreaking, for example. We will attempt to discover new means of demonstrating these concepts through layering, obscuring, blurring, morphing and cutting, for example. Do not fear the beautiful. Do not cower from boldness. Your survival depends on an intrepid sense of intuition. This planet is a vacuum; therefore, sound does not exist, and you cannot speak. You can only rely on your images to convey whatever emotion or quality it is you wish to communicate.

PLANETARY DESCRIPTION: A Vacuum composed of an infinite field of holograms and projections. Bring lunch; there is nothing real to eat here.

NECESSARY EQUIPMENT: Lunch. 360 degree 3d glasses. All images ever in existence and any drawing tools available to you: Adobe Photoshop, a copy machine, trace paper, unrestricted access to an infinite image database and your deepest emotional nadir.

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

RECOVERED SS GSAPP CREW LOGS M2.945-5 DAY 1 I’ve been on this planet for three years now and still I have no idea what is beautiful.

On Earth I know what is supposed to be beautiful. A flower, trees, waterfalls, sunsets, views from mountaintops, the ocean, cities at night, newborn children, the curve of a woman’ thigh, factories. I also know what is ugly. Factories, decaying bodies, asymmetrical faces, coal, railroad yards, subway stations in certain cities, cities during the day, the moon during its middle phase, dams, camels, beards, oil. Although maybe a woman’s thigh isn’t beautiful, it could just be the curve. I suppose that it depends on what type of factory and where it is. I say oil because I don’t like the idea of it.

The same with coal. Beards always seem as though they’re hiding something. Newborn children are actually quite grotesque, they just hold such promise. The view from a mountaintop isn’t so much beautiful as it is sublime. I said flowers because everyone does. Decaying bodies signify death. Asymmetrical faces are ugly but asymmetry is Approved by:

Copies of this report:

Fresno, CA WASHINGTON, DC NEW YORK, NY

DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE.

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Title:

THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

File no. 9325-2 Character of case:

MISSION 2.

WEEK 3

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

not. The moon mid cycle feels incomplete in both directions. Camels I’m not sure about, they just seem strange. Here everything is strange. Every day we encounter something new and are forced to ask ourselves what it is how it can be described. If it looks like something from Earth its easy. We can readily identify characteristic that lead us toward certain adjectives. But then we always ask ourselves is it the Earthly version that I am projecting onto this new thing? We constantly look for ways to talk about our discoveries in terms that allow the thing to lead its own life, separate from our projected notions of earthly descriptors. But how can we make ourselves see with eyes that are not predisposed toward certain colors, certain lines, particular modes of movement? Those of us who have been here longer are more adept at describing newfound things and circumstances in ways that seem disinterested from attaching meaning to image. They use every imaginable method to describe the things they find unsatisfying, except of course the simple word ugly. The language that we use has drained the iconographic meaning of the fantastic images we find every day. I struggle with this daily almost to the point of professional paralysis. [inaudible] I think above all architecture is about ideas. If I am to make a “terrifying” drawing how do I start? Certainly not with justifying its existence or relevancy. And certainly not with any rules or constraints. Like others, I feel the rigidity of my training has absorbed my ability to think outside of what is necessary, relevant and clear. Wait. Why would architecture be terrifying? I will not think about it. When I think of terrifying, well, the first thing that comes to mind is the underside of a Stag Beetle. Perhaps because of childhood associations (my brother would plant them on my stomach while I slept) but more so because their undersides are these jet black, cavernous, structural wonders grooved with spectacular precision– a seamless enclosure to their gelatinous guts. Maybe it’s the guts that are terrifying. You squeeze them and it all just sort of slides out in no particular order at all. The fact that there is no organization at all, that their insides are just swimming around in chaos – perhaps that’s what frightens me the most. That no one, no higher being, thought to organize their insides. It’s just an abandoned, pulpy disgust. But a drawing of this? Maybe I would take a previous section drawing – maybe of something important like a museum or hospital and I would just reorder it to the point of incomprehension. Would that be terrifying? To you it may look stupid but to me it would signal a loss of control and worse, an inability to think coherently. So, yes, I have what is now a terrifying drawing for me. But what use is it? Who will understand it? Should it be understood? What if no one gets that its terrifying? Have I failed the mission?

This mission signals to the importance of the production of emotion within the architect as well as the communication of that emotion. The value of emotion is communication. If drawings of ideas can provoke emotion then they can communicate something a plan or section cannot: relevancy, consequence and affecting substance. It does not supplant the section or the plan but augments it to a level of higher understanding – one that expands the reach of architectural communication to those not visually equipped to “read” my “clear” and “coherent” drawings - If those are, in effect, my words then this image is the proverbial picture. [End audio]

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Report made at:

Fresno, CA

File no. 9874-1 Date Orginiated:

05/11/2011

Period of investigation:

01/13/2011 05/11/2011

Report made by:

W BRIAN SMITH AND RUBEN CALDWELL

Title:

Character of case:

SECTION BRAIN/ PLAN BRAIN

MISSION 3.

WEEK 5

Previous intercepted communications:

MISSION BRIEF: You will arrive on this planet in a mutable white cube. This cube will become your prototype. It is constructed of Xhorumbrium and is easily manipulated.

The site of your landing will serve as the site for our new base. Your task will be to immediately reconfigure your cube into walls, planes and appatures in preparation for the arrival of a larger crew. We will need precise drawings of your configuration so that we may build a replica and train the crew. The crew will also require information about the sensory nature of their respective spaces so that they may begin to acclimatize to their new environment. You are free to use any means necessary to provide us with the information we need but remember that it must precise. Technically, spatially and atmoshperically.

PLANETARY DESCRIPTION: White walls, for now.

NECCESSARY EQUIPMENT: A mayline. A sketchbook. A camera. A pencil.

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

RECOVERED SS COLUMBIA CREW LOGS M7.143-7 DAY 1 We’ve been ordered to produce a series of drawings. I’m worried because I cannot draw.

I was once told that in architecture drawing I am accountable for every line on a page; every line must mean something. Is this true? I also heard once that architecture drawings (the conventional types: plan, section, elevation) were simply diagrams.

Diagrams are data; therefore, I understand architectural drawing as representation of data. They convey not only methods and means of construction but imply movement, porosities and experience. Maybe to answer this question I should propose another, brain freezing puzzle: what is architecture about? No, really. What. is. it? The brief says that I need to be preciese. Is precision the point? Or is this about learning to draw?

Have I produced architecture if I draw a plan and section that can be built? This seems like the baseline. I need to understand how these drawings work, how they’re used and what they say. I know that plans and sections are cuts, that they reaveal information

Approved by:

Copies of this report:

Fresno, CA WASHINGTON, DC NEW YORK, NY

DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE.

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Title:

SECTION BRAIN/ PLAN BRAIN

File no. 9874-2 Character of case:

MISSION 3.

WEEK 5

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

that would otherwise be hidden. I believe architects should be passionate about ideas.

Can a plan be passionate? I think to be passionate one must also be prone or willing to participate in outbursts. What place do outbursts have in architectural drawing? If my section exclaims itself from the constraints of what is to be built am I falsifying my creation, my ideas? Are these necessary to communicate my ideas or are they obscuring my design insecurities?

M7.143-7 DAY 11 The key is to first be right. A plan can be passionate and a section can sing. Its as though I am discovering a secret language. The beutiful thing is that these drawings are our own, and accessible only to other architects. A series of lines on a page, through their organizaiton, weight and relationships to each other can say so much about how a space can work. I know now that I need to show where the drawing is cut. This is probably the most important part because it is says so much about my stance. Why have I cut through this room or not that. I love that people back on earth are looking at my drawings, taking them seriously and wondering about the placement of every line. Finding meaning in every decision that I made. I’m making drawings that have clear hierachy, that are explicit. I’ve found that a drawing isn’t convincing unless it looks as though I meant it. I think that plans and sections are amazing because they say exactly what I want them to say.

M7.143-7 DAY 16 Maybe I was wrong. Even the most basic plan can be read in so many ways. The architect uses the plan to create space in her mind. The plan is unlike the section because it is more challenging. It is harder to draw and harder to read. It is our most secret document. The section reveals it all, it shows what is there, evern how it might feel. The plan only reveals this level of atmoshpere in the hands of an architect. Only the architect can see, imagine and celebrate the plan. Despite this wonderful gift we use sections more and more. Sections are Nora Roberts, plans Jane Auten.

M7.143-7 DAY 24 I finally understand that plans and sections work together. That they are coordinated.

This must be the most important part. This has also been the hardest thing to learn. Now my brain just knows it. It know to llok around the corners of my drawings. To see the space, to understand the drawing within the space. The section literally lines up with the plan and the plan with the seciton. I get it. Now I wonder what else can be done?

Is there some way to see the plan and section simultaneusly in way that captures the meaning of both? If architects are trained to look at these drawings couldn’t there be some completely new drawing that we could becomed trained to see? Would it still have meaning.

Might it offer us more? [End audio]

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Report made at:

Fresno, CA

File no. 92837-1 Date Orginiated:

05/11/2011

Period of investigation:

01/13/2011 05/11/2011

Report made by:

W BRIAN SMITH AND RUBEN CALDWELL

Title:

Character of case:

FUTURE ANTERIOR

MISSION 4.

WEEK 7

Previous intercepted communications:

MISSION BBRIEF: This is the saddest planet. You will be visiting your home planet 200 years in the future and some 70 years after a catastrophic event. The exact ramifications of the event have yet to be described. We know only that certain fundamental laws of physics have been irrevocably broken. Your task is to determine what is amiss. You must then create a life support system that responds to this new paradigm so that we may begin repopulating our planet.

PLANTARY DESCRIPTION: Earth, but different.

NECESSARY EQUIPMENT: You’ll know when you get there.

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

M7.143-9 DAY 2 We are being asked to do a couple of things here. The first is to design constraints. The constrait is what makes architecture work, what seperates it from art. Constraints are our partners in the debate, they are the boundary condition against which we push. The more imaginative the response to the edge the more sucessful the building. This planet is new and therefore proposes new constraints. The constraints that we imagine may be as stragne, as meaningful or as banal as we wish. The interesting thing is thinking about what the constraint will mean. How it will be reflected in our buildings. The hardest part is not imagining th building then designing the constaint. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t doing this to some degree.

M7.143-9 DAY 7 The key to a good constraint is imagining the possibilities of interesting responses.

We often talk about program and the programming of a building using the language of constraint. The program offers tensions that the building responds to, amplifies or downplays. The reaason that we are being asked to create our own tensions is that the imagining of these types of boundary conditions is what lets us begin designing. Even more important though is that without constraints design is hard. So why the future?

What is the point of imagining the future if there are so many different ways to respond to contemporay issues, boudaries and program? I’m still thinking of a building though.

I need to stop that. I kind of feel like the building that is floating in my head full Approved by:

Copies of this report:

Fresno, CA WASHINGTON, DC NEW YORK, NY

DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE.

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Title:

FUTURE ANTERIOR

File no. 92837-2 Character of case:

MISSION 4.

WEEK 7

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

form is much more boring than the one that could exist if I let the constraint guide it. I’m not even sure anymore about how to think about the missing physical law. Maybe there needs to be some kind of story... Do I just make up a story? What does that even have to do with anything?

M7.143-9 DAY 9 This really feels like there is no point. Just a series of deadends. I haven’t learned anything about architecture. Nothing seems to hold meaning so I might as well just pick one. They’re all the same really, I could talk about them all. What counts as sucess here? How do I know if I’m doing it right. There doesn’t seem to be any real reason to do one thing other. The point of a new future is strange.

M7.143-9 DAY 21 Architecture is about imaginging the future. It is fundmentally a process of imagining things that don’t yet exist. OK, here’s something. So how do I make myself really imagine the future and to what end? I’ve designed a constraint that seems really interesting it... (inaudible).

M7.143-9 DAY 32 I’m beinging to understand how this planet is functioning. This project offers the key to a new design freedom. It confusing because I thought that we were suposed to be finding ways to restrict our design. The whole point was to make us do something in a certian way. But I’m realizing that a certain way isn’t just any certain way, its a design process that is fundamentally alien. This has allowed me to develop alien forms of architecture, which are by definition new. I feel like I’m trying to find some new kind of architecture/human interface. You obviously can’t achieve this by thinking about arcitecture that response to basic earth derived conditions. [End audio]

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Report made at:

Fresno, CA

File no. 9447-1 Date Orginiated:

05/11/2011

Period of investigation:

01/13/2011 05/11/2011

Report made by:

W BRIAN SMITH AND RUBEN CALDWELL

Title:

Character of case:

EVENT HORIZON

MISSION 5

WEEK 9

Previous intercepted communications:

MISSION BRIEF: This planet is infinite. It consists of a unending stream of material and spatial conditions identifiable only at the correct scale. Your task is to escape by identifying the scale appropriate to human habitation.

PLANTARY DESCRIPTION: A sponge like collection of material identifiable only from up close, afar or in between. Depending.

NECESSARY EQUIPMENT: A camera. Scale figures. Uppers.

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

RECOVERED SS GSAPP CREW LOGS M.587-3 DAY 1 To my family: If you are reading this letter it is because I am dead. Or about to die. Regardless, I am not returning; you will never see me again. My mission failed. And I fear it is entirely my fault. As of the date of this recording I have been rehearsing one of the most difficult human teleportation transmission techniques in existence. They have not been going well, thus I prepared this letter to you in the event of what I fear will be an inevitable and mortal failure. The dangers of this type of human teleportation are many but stem from the fact that it is not machine-dependent. I am about to be transmitted into a black hole where my only chance of return depends on my ability to imagine myself and my surroundings at multiple varying scales so that I may crawl out of it. This sounds absurd, I know. But know it is a serious matter. Not to bore you in my final farewell, but the details are important and must be explained if it is to be reattempted. Right now, I am most likely and quite literally hanging by a thread of matter. My survival demands that I re-conceptualize my entire existence and physical makeup to be accommodated by that piece of matter. It is most definitely absurd, but assuredly useful in the field of human teleportation and for the future of space making. Imagine the possibilities back on Earth. You could either be sunbathing on a Approved by:

Copies of this report:

Fresno, CA WASHINGTON, DC NEW YORK, NY

DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE.

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Title:

EVENT HORIZON

File no. 9447-2 Character of case:

MISSION 5.

WEEK 9

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

sandy beach or lying awkwardly on piles of scorching boulders. Your morning milk becomes a lactic sea; Swiss cheese morphs into a rubbery postmodern museum; or you catch a ride to work on the tails of a dragonfly. Are you laughing at me? It’s okay. I’m dead, remember? If you can think like this space becomes infinite in its capacity to serve you. You might consider me a martyr for future spatial possibilities. That was stupid to say. Right now I’m rehearsing with my bed sheets. They are crumpled on my floor. Their folds seem like waves. One second. I’m trying to imagine a sail boat…It didn’t work. I told you I was bad. Maybe I’m being too literal? Okay, I see….I see…I see cake frosting. Uhg. I’m so sorry. This is why I am doomed. This was easier when I was a child - when my imagination wasn’t limited by adult laws of thermodynamics.

Veins on leaves were plans for magnificent future cities; exuberant parades streamed by the sunspots in my eyes; my humid exhale an unfortunate and devastating category 5 for my fellow swarming gnats. And now? Cake frosting. I’m hungry. What should be last meal? Mom, you used to make me cold pepperoni casserole. I’ll miss that. Dad, you were right: I am not an artist. To my sister: I went to a Chinese bakery to buy a loaf of bread bread bread….! Good bye. I love you all. [End audio]

STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Report made at:

Fresno, CA

File no. 92777-1 Date Orginiated:

05/11/2011

Period of investigation:

01/13/2011 05/11/2011

Report made by:

W BRIAN SMITH AND RUBEN CALDWELL

Title:

Character of case:

THE COCKTAIL PARTY

MISSION 6.

WEEK 11

Previous intercepted communications:

MISSION BRIEF: You will attempt to interact with actual members of society at large.

Invite your banker friends. We’ll bring the lawyers and doctors.

PLANTARY DESCRIPTION: A room filled with evidence of your training program.

NECESSARY EQUIPMENT: Architectural Clothing. Cocktail of your choice. A stance on something.

Supporting Docuemnts and Details:

RECOVERED SS GSAPP CREW LOGS M6.568-9 DAY 1 This may be the hardest mission I’ve yet to encounter. I am fearful of my success because I know two things will happen. First, I will be introduced as an architect, which is not true. Second, I will be asked “What kind of architecture do I do or want to do?”

To which there are two replies. With fraudulent and unbridled ostentation: “Well, yes of course, my architectural residency was in modern art museums. I design modern art museums.” Or truthfully: “Well, architects really do whatever gets them money.

House? Sure. Science lab? Not a problem. Just promise that you’ll pay me and I’ll design whatever is needed.” Let me entertain the former response. If I choose this option I’m guaranteed some sort of social and professional credibility. They’ll assume I’m successful and wealthy; that I’m a ‘citizen of the world’ as architects ought to be. This response will not surprise them but simply confirm what they’ve thought about architects all along: they’re smart and creative and have a profound sense of ambition. This response corroborates the primacy of the architect as set forth by Ayn Rand (“And what do you think of the Fountainhead?” Say, “It was a shrewd piece of film and for the most part spot on.”) This is what they want to hear because it is the image they uphold in their mind’s eye whenever they think about architecture. I want them to think this, and I have an obligation to our profession to sustain this myth. When they want to design their third home in Sagharbor they will think of ‘architect,’ and they will think of Howard Rourke, but they will call me. I must be their Howard Rourke. I Approved by:

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STARARCH INTERNAL REVIEW Form No. 1 This Case Originated at Fresno, California Title:

THE COCKTAIL PARTY

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MISSION 6.

WEEK 11

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must deliver them by whatever means available to me an image of greatness. Do not fuck this up. Do not bring up “But what if it wasn’t?” Do not use this as opportunity to question architecture. Use this opportunity to tell them what architecture is. It is this false reality that allows architects to exist (or at least operate at the level they are operating now). It is this false reality that got me to this cocktail party in the first place. I was invited because I carry the flame of capital A architecture.

Snuff it out if I will, but be prepared to deal with the consequences.

M6.569-0 DAY 1 Part 2 Now for the second response.

But I don’t know what architecture is? I feel like Ijust paid six figures for the answers to the wrong test? Then please, I’ll respond with “Actually, you know, I don’t know what architecture is. I’m told it has something to do with buildings but I know it’s much more than that.” If they have not yet gone looking for the quiche platter they may humor me with ‘Like what?’ To which I have three sentences to boil down my entire education and proclamations about architecture (Do I have any?) into one tiny grain of salt. “Architecture is about a process of thinking based on building, but it is not a building. We have an uncanny ability to synthesize layers of complex and contradictory information. This type of thought process is applicable not only to designing and building buildings but to all the cursory forces that influence the built environment: from product design, to politics to facebook.”

Facebook is a built environment? Of course it is. Just ask your aunt who asked me to help her raise her barn. Ah, yes, but that’s not real space. That’s virtual? To which I reply, “Is it?” Then I’ll coyly pivot in the opposite direction, slide a few salmon puffs into my pocket and head out the door to the L train. [End audio]

Steven Chou light

Dalia Hamati light

Jochen Hartmann drawing

Sam Hur light

gooed by Owen Nichols

The images you are seeing interspersed through this publication are instances of an experimental collision between moments of process. In the course of a project, there are points of divergence between a multitude of possibilities and single outcome that will be produced. These collages sidestep the linear path that has already been followed to explore the possibilities of cross-fertilization between projects at various stages of their production. As happens in the studio, concepts and images influence each other in multifarious ways and may therefore generate unexpected results. We hope these brief excursions into intense melding inspire lateral shifts in your understanding of how creativity in a studio culture is possible.

Is the study of architecture necessarily confined within a building? Classrooms for theory in the day, studio for practice in the night? But what is the architecture school if not a distillation of the world outside?

If architecture students could survive a trip outside of the gravitational pull of the formidable structure housing their educational life, perhaps they would find laboratories of spatial thought - living and dead, extended skywards, speeding along horizontal planes, buried beneath their feet.

goo here. scan and send to gsappgoo@gmail.com

Subterranean structures, cryptic and hidden from view, lie beneath the city of Paris as we know it today. These structures contain systems -- the infrastructure -- that feed the life of the city with transportation, sewer and water, power, and lines of communication. Underground spaces also act as crypts and burial grounds for religious groups and have been adapted for artistic and cultural purposes. Paris, as an organism, is thus a palimpsest of the visible image of the city on the ground level and efficient productivity below.

Most large cities contain a subterranean infrastructure. However, Paris is unique because of the prevalence of vast limestone and gypsum quarries that were in operation from Roman times until 1939. As their excavation built the city above ground, the quarries, whether burrowed or open air pits that were eventually covered, left vacuums of space beneath the city’s surface, now filled with modern day infrastructure and remnants of historic uses.

The Paris underground performs in the same way as organs or the vascular system of the body do. These systems provide the body and the city with essentials needed to operate. The sewer system flushes out wastewater and provides the city with usable water. The Metro provides the city with circulation, and connection to neighborhoods and monuments that have created the image of the city. The quarries were dug in order to provide the stone to the built city today. The excavation of the limestone and gypsum underneath the Parisian streets has provided the city not only with buildings but also a platform for the infrastructure that it has today.

The quarry excavation gave birth to

certain crypts (actual or by association) beneath churches and cathedrals, the catacombs where bodies were moved from the cemeteries to the underground for fear of disease, the sewer system, the Metro system, and an underground culture of people. All of these aspects of Paris help shape the city in its image and performance. Not only do these facets of the city give life to Paris but also give it a cryptic mystery: there exists an entire other city below Paris, the fact that the image of the underground is unclear to most people gives the city a new and interesting characteristic.

The fabric of Paris is layered with “skin” on the surface and the organs and veins burrowing underground.

Bodies both introduce raw materials as food and produce excrement.

To apply the analogy to the city of Paris, the excavation of the quarries produced excrement, which was re-introduced to the city fabric to renew it. The earth is excavated, and then injected back to the earth in a new way, providing feet to its many cathedrals, churches and public buildings and the blocks of the body of the buildings above.

Associated with the religious customs of the churches are the underground crypts, an architectural typology that the city excretes back to itself, a cycle associated with life and death, waste and renewal. The link between the caves, catacombs and crypts is intertwined with how various societies in Paris over time treated the dead in relation to the living, bound up with the life cycle of the quarries and their materials.

Physically and metaphorically, the rich interplay of surface and underground juxtaposes thoughts of conscious and unconscious, visible and hidden, present and past, reality and metaphor, the cycle of life

Owen Nichols

Subterranean structures, cryptic and hidden from view, lie beneath the city of Paris as we know it today. These structures contain systems -- the infrastructure -- that feed the life of the city with transportation, sewer and water, power, and lines of communication. Underground spaces also act as crypts and burial grounds for religious groups and have been adapted for artistic and cultural purposes. Paris, as an organism, is thus a palimpsest of the visible image of the city on the ground level and efficient productivity below.

Most large cities contain a subterranean infrastructure. However, Paris is unique because of the prevalence of vast limestone and gypsum quarries that were in operation from Roman times until 1939. As their excavation built the city above ground, the quarries, whether burrowed or open air pits that were eventually covered, left vacuums of space beneath the city’s surface, now filled with modern day infrastructure and remnants of historic uses.

The Paris underground performs in the same way as organs or the vascular system of the body do. These systems provide the body and the city with essentials needed to operate. The sewer system flushes out wastewater and provides the city with usable water. The Metro provides the city with circulation, and connection to neighborhoods and monuments that have created the image of the city. The quarries were dug in order to provide the stone to the built city today. The excavation of the limestone and gypsum underneath the Parisian streets has provided the city not only with buildings but also a platform for the infrastructure that it has today.

The quarry excavation gave birth to

grotto-esque. The corpse, like the crypt is “neither inside nor outside but outside-in and inside-out.”

The rotting corpse may be the best example of bi-directional liminality and the grotesque. The body is dead but hosts life by actively rotting. Its decomposition is the result of organisms feeding off of the body and its nutrients. Death and life occur simultaneously.

The grotto and the crypt are similar in what they are, what they represent and the qualities that they share. The main quality is that there is the lack of natural light. Both are typically dark and damp, ‘grotesque’ in nature. Caves, along with grottoes, crypts and catacombs, have phantasmagoric associations due to their innate mystery, and the grotesque figures contribute to that aura. All of these architectural typologies have secretive and hidden qualities, whether they are carved or burrowed out of the earth, situated within an existing fissure of stone or disguised with plentiful trees to obstruct direct sunlight.

In today’s usage, crypt typically refers to stone chamber beneath the floor of a church used as a burial place and chapel. The idea of underground secret worship has a long history, going back to pre-Christian and early Christian times when caves were used to hide worshippers Throughout Paris, churches and cathedrals have crypts, such as the one below the apse at St. Denis, where important figures were buried and reverent ceremonies could take place.

Other examples include the secular Pantheon, and the relatively recent crypte archaeologique at Notre Dame, that reveals the layered history of the site. The crypt of the cathedral of Notre Dame, established in the 1960s in the parvis or

forecourt of the cathedral, displays and commemorates the vestiges of former civilizations (thus the name crypte archaeologique). The broader site once contained a Roman temple to Jupiter, a hospital, ancient sewer and water systems, and other physical and symbolic remnants of times past. These crypts were especially created based on the type in general and also on the tradition of the underground systems beneath the city.

The Quarries From Roman times, when Paris was still called Lutetia, it was one of the few cities that could be built with locally quarried stone. The deposits of limestone, used for building blocks, and gypsum, used for plaster, were readily available within a five-kilometer radius of Ile de la Cite, where the city was concentrated. Raw construction materials were mined from this area until 1939. Over many centuries, from those Roman times forward, the stone quarries created vast, cavernous underground complexes.

Paris is built on a very large sponge: it is a multi-cellular subterranean setting with a complex system of damp channels “supported by a chalky framework that was precipitated there from the sea fifty-five million years ago.” Limestone was quarried to build stone buildings, monuments and sculpture while gypsum was excavated in order to make plaster, and clay to make brick and roof tiles. Limestone was located mainly in the south of the city in the 5th, 6th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th arrondissements.

Gypsum could have been found in the north and northeast of the city in the 10th, 18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements. Before the quarries

were made, the ground level of the city was excavated to acquire the proper stone to build. Once these resources were exhausted, the city decided to burrow underground for the stone. The city of Paris demanded more stone to be quarried than what was being excavated.

Quarrymen were forced to push the limits of excavation. “Long parallel passages ten to twelve feet broad were dug into the quarries and the extracted material was carried vertically and quickly to the ground level via wells sunk into the stone.”

Once all of the stone was taken from the earth, vast and unstable vacuums were left abandoned. The question of structural stability of the ground level was not a serious concern until December 17, 1774 when the present-day Avenue du General Leclerc, near the Place Denfert Rochereau collapsed into the empty quarry beneath. Three hundred meters of road disappeared from ground level. At this point the Conseil du Roi became the authoritative voice and ordered for the quarries to be made structurally sound.

The void left by the quarries created a massively multifarious subterranean labyrinth. This labyrinth was put to use for infrastructural purposes, giving birth to the sewer system, the metropolitan transit system, telephone communication system, storage for bodies etc. The Paris underground is the vascular system that pumps the city full of life.

Body Language: Burrowing versus the Vitruvian City The act of burrowing and digging to create the quarries stands in contradistinction to the rational and ordered architecture created

from that raw material. The organic process and resulting forms is thus transformed into the rational.

As Vitruvius writes in his Ten Books Of Architecture, “We must be equally careful that the walls are perfectly vertical, and that they do not lean forward anywhere.” In order for an early human to practice architecture, before Vitruvius, he must have had two principles of construction; he must have a sense of gravity and awareness of the strength of materials that he was using to build. This early man was not necessarily building at ninety degrees to the earth, but most likely was using the earth as other animals inherently would in order to construct shelter. Vitruvius in his Ten Books of Architecture speaks of the earth as something that architecture has to sit on rather than burrow in. Dealing with the earth as the ground limits the architecture to certain things, for instance Vitruvius’ comment on verticality.

Humans for the past several centuries have used architecture as a tool to represent, perhaps falsely, the sense that everything is okay.

Monumental political structures stand tall and clean with stability, unchanging shape, greatness and clarity of organization.

Buildings are considered man-like, and they are described in that way in order for the building that man owns to portray the characteristics that man aspires to. Architecture as invented by human society is described in relation to the human body. Etymology of the word plan, the English word, has a double origin. Although related to the Latin planus, meaning ‘flat’, and referring essentially to the flat diagram, it also goes back through the Italian pianta to the Latin planta or ‘sole of the foot’, the Latin being in turn

related to the Greek ichnos, ‘footprint’ or ‘track.’ Icnographia was the word for ground plan used by Vitruvius. Our ancestors evidently found it natural to think of buildings as they thought of themselves.

They called the ground plan of a building a footprint because they thought of it as analogous to the mark left on the earth by the human foot. Essentially they thought of buildings as being like people.

Terms like front from the Latin frons, ‘forehead’, and facade from face suggest the same correlation.

Parts of building were even more likely to be seen in this way, especially columns and their bases, from their Greek baino, ‘I walk’, and their capitals, from the Latin caput, ‘head’.

Architecture as we humans know it does not respond to the body in the same extent as the architecture of other animals. Burrowing animals form their architecture literally based on their body; the burrows of a mole or gopher are very close in dimension to the animal that excavated them. Burrow structures are very interesting pieces of architecture. Their non-Vitruvian builders also have to rely on their innate sense of gravity and strength of materials. Instead of building above ground as humans normally do, burrowing animals use the earth as their structure. Positive material that humans build above ground act in the same way as the negative material that the burrowing animal does not excavate. The human building process is a positive additional process, where as the burrower uses the opposite, negative subtractive technique. The result of the difference in technique is that the burrowing animal does not have to rely strictly on gravity when going about her construc-

tion. She can build at any angle that is easily traversable since what she does not burrow performs as support to what has been burrowed. The subterranean burrow does not have to do with massing as the ground-level architecture does; rather it deals with interconnectivity and issues of choosing dwelling and storage spaces.

A bird constructs her nest in a similar was as the burrowing animal does in an above ground setting. Instead of using the ground as her foundation, she situates herself in a tree, collecting twigs that can be carried by mouth. She uses her body to form the twigs to create a dwelling. Without reference to designs to other birds’ nests, the bird creates a structure that is quite similar to her animal compatriots but is unique to her body. She has to form the nest by pressing or rubbing her body around to secure the structure and to allow the proper spacing for her and her young to dwell. She does not dig as the burrowing creature does but still uses her body for a single dwelling space in the same way as the mole uses her body to establish spatial dimension of the burrow.

The crypt, quarry, tunnel or any other subterranean structure created by man takes note from the animals that are limited to such structure. The Paris metro system is a good example of a subterranean ‘burrow’ that has much more to do with the interconnectivity of the system and connectivity of the important aspects of the city above.

The monuments and other pieces of architecture that create the image of the city of Paris have to do with creating a mass using material excavated from the quarries below.

The massing is then subdivided in its interior to allow for sensory

and spatial relationships between the grandiose architecture and the people who inhabit it. The actual massing however is the aspect that creates the image. People relate a lot of the beauty of the city to the massing of monuments and buildings. It is an interesting and cryptic relationship since the mass is hiding what actually happens inside, in the subterranean spaces that, whether religious or not, are crypts.

Crypt

What is a crypt? A crypt belongs to the earth and the church. Both earth and church have excreted the crypt and consume it.

A crypt is hidden within the earth, burrowed under the church giving it feet to stand on. It is inside the earth, outside of the church but the detail that gives the church its spirituality and life. It hides the hallowed or hollowed chapel and holds some of the most valuable relics and sarcophagi the church obtains. Not only does the crypt hide something from the rest of the church but it also hides the fact that it is hiding. The entrances to crypts are not obvious, whereas the entrance to the church is, the altar is, the transepts and the apses are.

The crypt holds the secret. It has a spiritual and intimate space for prayer, contemplation and privacy within a place that has become a public arena for tourists and avid Christians.

When someone walks into a church in Paris, her experience is the same as when she is walking through the streets of the city. Paris has become a spectacle, a museum.

The tourist walks into the city and into the church to see the church, to photograph it, to prove that she was there. The actual activity that gives

the city and the church its sense of mystery and exuberance is happening under her feet.

The crypt, like the human body, cannot be described as either inside or outside, as it is not one or the other. The crypt cannot be described in black or white where one is the binary opposite of the other.

The human body, to the extent that it is related to architecture, cannot be described in this way either. The esophagus cannot be undeniably inside of the body if at some point it transforms into the tongue, then into the mouth into the lips, which are a portal to the body and exposed to exterior elements. Similarly, the crypt is not inside or outside the church. It is not completely one with the earth but it is not one with the air either. The crypt is not simply dug out of the earth, a space is excavated and material from the earth is treated and replaced, creating a wall between the natural earth and the hallowed space of the church. The crypt mimics the church in structure because it is an active foundation to the surface level of the ornate cathedral or basilica.

The crypt is not as grandiose as the ground level of the church as if it were not as good, as if it were relegated to the underground for a reason. The crypt is cryptic by disguising its relevance to the church as a whole, when in fact it may be more important than the ground level. The ground level of the church gives the occupant the feeling of the presence of god. Especially in the Gothic Cathedral, the scale of the human is disregarded to propose the sense of importance. The crypt does the same thing in the opposite manner. The scale of the crypt is more related to the scale of the human

figure. The ceilings are lower, giving the sense of intimacy where the opposite occurs above the heads of the occupants. The relationship to god is still present but in a more related way than in the high gothic cathedral above. The crypt can propose the feeling that God is close, where above, God is watching.

The Crypt is invaginated in the Church, in the Earth and the tomb that the crypt contains is invaginated in the crypt. Is the body inside the tomb inside the church or the earth in a greater way than the crypt is? Is the crypt itself a tomb that may contain other tombs? If the crypt is a tomb, then what is the church above? What is the earth? “Interiority as nothing to do with the inside or the inhabitable space of a building but rather of a condition of being within. However as is the case with the grotesque interiority deals with two factors; the unseen and the hollowed-out.�

Instead of defining the crypt as either inside or outside of something, it may be better understood through metaphor: the crypt is sited by excretion or ejaculation into itself. It is taken from the earth and discharged back. The same goes for the church, a church takes a chapel and expels it into a place where it serves a more meaningful purpose than a chapel on the level of the altar. Not only is it part of the program of the church in terms of a space for prayer and contemplation, but it also literally supports the church. Through this analogy, we associate the crypt with the quarries that are the foundations and the founding process of the formation of Paris as a city.

The crypt as a burial ground was a later development in the history of the settlement that became

Paris, and was part of the debate about the physical (and resulting spiritual) relationship between the living and the dead.

Places for Life and Death in Paris In Roman times, the dead were buried in a necropolis located outside the walls of the city, visible evidence of the important history of the society for all visitors to see.

Later, in early Christian times, the important ones were buried at churches, above ground in sarcophagi and raised tombs made from the stones of Paris’s famous quarries. Ironically, some of these structures were looted for their stones during the Middle Ages, post the year 1000. This is evidence of a successive history of use and re-use of the earthen material of Paris itself.

Burial of important people also too place below ground in crypts associated with churches, which allowed for contained reverence in a sacred, secured and also somewhat secret vault. For example, the site of the revered church of St. Denis, from the 7th century forward had been a necropolis. The celebration of the dead was always an important part of the Christian liturgy and the significant figures were kept close to the most religious sites.

The same occurred with important secular figures, as the old church of Sainte-Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, was built over in the 18th century for the Pantheon, a magnificent structure by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, which encapsulated the remains of important church figures and royalty and created a crypt, a mausoleum for the well-known.

Over time, Christian burial for ordinary individuals occurred in churchyards and specially conse-

crated places throughout the city, for example in the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris which accumulated over 2 million bodies over a millennium. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, French society had no problem comingling living and dead, possibly because worship of the dead was important to their religion and society. But in the early 19th century, the focus shifted to a concern for hygiene and by state order, cemeteries had to be located outside of cities.

It was at that time that the famous Catacombs were created. Even though they occupy only about 1/800th of the area of the underground passages, they offer an impressive commemoration of the dead. They assumed their present form – vast volumes of bones and skulls arranged in decorative patterns -- in 1809 when Napoleon wanted Paris to emulate the imperial city of Rome, which had its own catacombs.

The organization of the bones in the Catacombs of Paris has been agglomerated to create walls and architecture within the underground tunnels. The manner in which the bones are stacked differ from the way bodies are organized in Catacombs elsewhere. In the Catacombs of Palermo, Sicily skeletons are in tact and are shelved against the walls underneath the Church, giving a sense on identity to each skeleton. Since the Catacombs of Paris were organized through the process of moving bodies from cemeteries all at once, skeletons have been disbanded and the identity of the skulls, femurs and other parts of the skeleton are lost. The losses of identity of the skeletons in the Catacombs in Paris give the burial ground very cryptic

characteristics. The original components of the individual skeletons are unknown in place and existence.

The secret lies in the bones.

The modern medium of photography helped maintain the cult of the dead in Paris through people like the Parisian photographer Felix Nadar who published a photographic essay in 1867 called “Le Dessus et le Dessous de Paris” (“The Above and Below of Paris”). He photographed much of the underground of Paris, including the Catacombs, and the sewers as also discussed in this paper.

While the interest in this paper of Felix Nadar’s 1867 essay “The Above and Below in Paris” has focused on his documentation of the underground passages throughout the city, what was remarkable about Nadar’s vision and effort was that he showed to the public aspects of the city that they could not see as part of their everyday experiences on the ground: both the passages underground and the panoramic, Icarian view from above. The ground plane that the citizens occupy is sandwiched between these two views as a palimpsest, a compression of the city rationally organized above by streets and buildings built of limestone and gypsum quarried from the earth, and organically developed below by the burrowed underground passages that are both the physical substance and the lifeblood of the city.

Sewers are a complex labyrinth of productivity within a city. Paris had one of the first sewer systems due to the vacuums left by the excavation of limestone from underground quarries. Although sewers are known for their filth, unwanted rodents, crime, poverty and political insurrection, cryptically they promote cleanliness and hygiene.

In Les Miserables, perhaps the most famous literary evocation of the underground city, Victor Hugo depicted the Paris sewers of the 1830s as ‘the evil in the city’s blood’, a place where the poor and the outcasts of society lurked together as a threatening formation for the world above ground.

One of the most impressive feats of Baron Georges Haussmann was to improve the Parisian sewer system.

Not many people understood the extent of Haussmann’s improvements of the underground until the French photographer Felix Nadar in the mid 19th century showed the public the underground. Nadar was interested in photography without the support of natural light, which was a perfect coupling of subject matter and politically charged material when he chose to photograph the underground of Paris.

Nadar began to assemble scenarios where the new sewers with their impressive and clean engineering were on display by use of artificial light. This affected a lot of people by altering their perception of the underground.

Paris Underground Today Today the underground of Paris contains the infrastructure that was imposed on the quarries. The remaining vacuums left by the excavation offer a creative setting to the Parisian art culture. Many kata artists venture through the underground and produce art, using the burrowed walls as their canvas.

People use this empty site as a space for dwelling, exploring, and partying. Some lucky Parisians receive an invite to attend one of these parties.

In order for them to attend, they must find their way to the intended space. Along with kata art and

underground parties, there have been music concerts that take place in the abandoned quarries. The acoustical differences in the underground are unique in comparison to world above ground. These concerts have attracted hundreds of interested Parisians.

Gordan Matta-Clark focused on the underground of Paris in his work in 1977. He was interested in architectural waste and work leading up to the catacombs and sewers in Paris had to do with cutting literal sections and creating massive holes in dilapidated buildings. His interest in holes and historical waste led the artist to the underground of Paris where he made a series of photographs and films positioning lost or buried histories of the city against the built environment above. The positioning of the work exploited and encouraged the encounter between the past and the present city.

I mean, a truffle is a fantastic thing buried somewhere in the ground....

Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don't. In fact, the next area that interests me is an expedition into the underground: a search for the forgotten spaces left buried under the city as his-torical reserve or as surviving reminders of lost projects and fantasies .... This activity should bring art out of the gallery and into the sewers.

Guided tours of the underground are provided to the public in certain places around the city of Paris.

The public is invited to tour some of the catacombs and archeological findings. Instead of allowing the visitors to roam free and experience the labyrinth, a path is given to the visitor by blocking off alternate possibilities. Artificial lighting is provided in the public tours, which is important because of the lack of natural light in the underground.

For explorers of the underground that do not attend the public and legal tours, artificial light is not provided and the explorer must provide her own. This limits the amount of visibility and allows for a much greater amount of cryptic mystery.

There is a difference between falling from something and falling into something. Humpty Dumpty fell from the wall and he was injured when he met the ground. Alice on the other hand falls into the rabbit hole and she was not injured, rather her fall was a dreamy, mysterious fall. In myth, Icarus was consumed by the labyrinth and ‘fell’ out of the labyrinth into the sky, where he was free from the prison that he had created and his journey into the sky offered a multitude of mysterious possibilities. Icarus was in awe of his journey into the sky and his new ability to fly to a point where his curiosity towards the sun led him to fall from the sky and fall to his fatal demise. The underground of Paris is something that one falls into. It holds secrets that are unknown. The cryptic underground is a labyrinthine, unexpecting and dreamy fall that contains the unknown secrets of the outcome.

gooed by Owen Nichols

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Rich Lowry Rarely does a museum ex hibit cause a crime spree. That's the dubious distinc tion of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where a show on "street art" -- a k a vandalism -- has inspired graffiti "artists" to deface nearby buildings.

The police arrested one of the people featured in the show, a French gentleman by the name of Space Invader, on suspicion of responsibility for some of the local vandalism. Mr. Invader is famous (in certain circles) for depicting the 1980s-era video game from which he takes his name.

How appropriate that he takes such a childish subject for his childish acts.

Art-world big-wigs don't have to live here: Graffiti blights poor neighborhoods, as seen on this corner of LA's Griffin Avenue.

The museum has lent all its cultural power -- and the considerable financial might of its backers -- to glorifying petty criminality and an urban blight practically synonymous with disorder and mayhem.

The museum's director, Jeffrey Deitch, has long experience in legitimizing graffiti. When he was in New York, his SoHo gallery specialized in the work of the spray-can and Magic Marker set. When he hosted a show featuring a replica of a graffiti-scarred ghetto street in 2000, the NYPD arrested one of the alleged artists under suspicion for having earlier defaced a Bronx middle school.

For all the self-congratulatory transgressiveness of Deitch and other promoters of graffiti, they tend to blithely accept only damage to other people's property, as Heather Mac Donald notes in a withering critique in the City Journal of the "Art in the Streets" show.

The museum paints over graffiti on its own back wall, and "doesn't even permit visitors to use a pen for note-taking within its walls," Mac Donald writes, "an affectation unknown in most of the world's greatest museums." MOCA's implicit attitude is "Heedless acts of vandalism for thee, but not for me."

In age-old countercultural style, Deitch has made a lucrative career from exploiting the acts of people ostentatiously violating bourgeois norms.

It's seemingly the ambition of every graffiti artist to become so famous that he can do well-paid work for the world's most powerful corporations while spouting juvenile cliches about the oppressiveness of "the system." Between its corporate sponsors and its foundation backers, the MOCA show itself is the rotten fruit of US capitalism and wealth.

At least the idiot ideology of the apologists for graffiti is feasting on itself in contention over the show, providing amusement if not aesthetic value. Per The Associated Press, "The Phantom Street Artist, whose well known Rage Against the Machine album cover isn't represented, said the museum practiced the equivalent of post-Colonial hegemony in going with more mainstream artists." The Phantom Street Artist obviously defines "post-Colonial hegemony" as anything that irks him on any given afternoon.

Hegemonic or not, "Art in the Streets" is simply a glorification of the loathsome practice of painting your name or doodles on someone else's property. As Mac Donald documents, graffiti culture celebrates routine acts of theft and intersects with street gangs. It involves a lifestyle (latenight forays to break the law) and brings consequences (criminal records) that are destructive to young lives.

Then there are the effects for everyone else. Surely, some vandals are gifted artists, just as some drug dealers have keen business minds. But so what?

Graffiti is almost always hideously ugly. It damages private and public property. It costs millions of dollars to fight and remove. It was the cutting edge of the wave of disorder that nearly sank pre-Giuliani New York City. If an aspiring artist is ambitious and talented, there's an obvious recourse -- find a canvas and paint on it. It worked for Rembrandt.

The people who run and back the museum are fortunate enough not to live in neighborhoods beset by graffiti or to own property likely to be targeted for the "art" they celebrate. It's not their children running around with spray cans or their businesses being vandalized. They can afford to excuse and patronize a public nuisance that is the bane of communities everywhere. They are a disgrace even to the decadent elite. comments.lowry@ nationalreview.com Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/glorifying_blight_JFeuudR6Lx1Kf6wlPvYnBO#ixzz1MDtnbTVY

gooed by Koko Barnes & David Hecht

Eoghan McTigue

Architecture and Defacement

ls there a place for "absence" in the planning and development of city space? Can we take the "Empty sign" work as an example where material has been removed from a specific place to create new interpretative possibilities. can we apply this to city space and streets?

The social anthropologist, Michael Taussig, when speaking about "defacement"' contends that political artefacts, portraits, flags, statues, buildings, etc. are inert when they appear on public display. lt is only when they are defaced that they begin to become charged politically. It is in that moment that these artefacts begin to reveal traces of what Taussig calls the "public secret". For Taussig, the "public secret" is that which is generally known but for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated. Taussig connects the issue of secrecy to defacement, suggesting that depth is revealed when the surface is damaged: “the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of the surface”. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, when the tear is partial or incomplete.

In the 50s, the French artist Raymond Haines pulled down advertising and political posters and remounted them in galleries, both as a response to a media saturated public space and as a criticism of the artwork of his contemporaries. These fractured images’ composites of layers of postings, fragment language and graphic form to create a complex and unconscious patterning of “the public voice” as it appears in print form. In my projects collectively titled “Empty Sign” (1998 2002), I have taken photographs of institutional notice boards after having completely stripped the information from the boards. These photographs are then installed in a manner that extends their meaning into the architecture of the gallery space. ln the project “All Over Again” (2004), I photographed political murals that had been painted over in white. These white gable structures are not entirely blank, as traces of the obscured mural are still evident on the surface of the photograph. I used the free-standing structure “Free Derry Corner”, located in the nationalist Bogside in Derry, as the template for the installation of the work. The gable end from the “All Over Again” series has had material from its surface obscured while the Free Derry corner gable is the only remaining structure, from the 1960s, in an area that has been bulldozed and redeveloped over the course of the past forty years. These are pictorial and architectural palimpsests, surfaces and areas that have been erased and reinscribed over time. The fact that these actions have never been fully completed, that there are traces of the previous composition or street structure in place makes them all the more compelling.

I want to connect these theories and strategies of defacement to my current research based around architecture and popular protest movements in Berlin. I am interested in connecting the development of architectural spaces in the east of the city to its history of protest movements. I would like to concentrate on certain aspects of this research that relate to defacement and attempt o develop some of the questions from that research.

How can this "labor of the negative", that we associate with defacement, be applied to the productive mentality of planning and building? According to Taussig, the negativity in the act of defacement is far from negative in its effects, for it brings an absence, that we would not otherwise know anything about, into a state of presence. Is there a place for "absence" in the planning and development of city space? Can we take the "Empty Sign" work as an example where material has been removed from a specific place to create new interpretative possibilities? Can we apply this to city space and streets? Can we engineer strategic gaps in the city to extend its interpretative potential? Following these ideas, how does the continual redevelopment of Alexanderplatz relate to theories of re-inscription and overwriting that we associate with the palimpsest? Is there such a thing as an architectural palimpsest?

More specifically relating to acts of defacement, what did the destruction of the facade of the British Embassy by a group of protesters demonstrating solidarity with Palestine in 2002 reveal about the politics of the architecture of that Embassy?

Eoghan McTigue (1969), artist, Berlin. He works on the relationship between architecture and display. Selected exhibitions: “Here After”, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 2006, solo. “Enthusiasm”, Frieze Art Fair, London 2006. “Parade Ground”, COLAB, Bangalore 2006, solo. European Month of Photography, Berlin 2006.

MOP Projects, Sydney 2006. “Every Picture Tells a Story”, Sparwasser HO, Berlin 2006. “Fragments of Another Language”, Galerie Kuttner Siebert, Berlin 2005, solo. Independent publication: “Free Association”. eoghanmctigue@yahoo.com From An Architektur 18: Camp for Oppositional Architecture: Theorizing Architectural Resistance

goo on new museum Elizabeth Nichols exploration

gooed by David Hecht & Owen Nichols

unidentified goo

Alan Paukman atmospheric differences in section

Alan Paukman form finding Robert Cox drawing

Jochen Hartmann lazy cut files

Nicholas M. Reiter material intersection

From “Counter-Adaptations of the Contemporary Urban Landscape: Skateboarding and American Urbanism”

by Stephen Froese

sf2448 12/17

The Brooklyn Banks32

Justin Herman Plaza at Embarcadero Center in San Fransisco became an iconic skate spot in the 1990s, attracting visitors from around the world that came to skate its ledges and benches.33 The area persisted in popularity among skaters despite consistent efforts by the police to prohibit the use of skateboards in the area. 34 Ultimately the plaza was demolished and rebuilt according to a new design, specifically aimed at limiting the potential for the built forms to be adapted to use by skateboards.35 More commonly, existing architectural forms are altered to resist improvised functional adaptations; metal knobs are added to ledges, benches and other surfaces 32 Smith, photo: Jay Maldonado.

33 Jensen, Travis. “No Easy Skate: S.F. Is No Longer Shredder Heaven.” (San Fransisco Chronicle 9 March 2007).

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

Gooed by Koko Barnes & Stephen Froese

David Hecht diagram, movement

Owen Nichols module

Alan Paukman fields of movement

Ayaka Hales diagram, movement

Studio Kumpusch Christoph a. Kumpusch, Critic site model

gooed by Ayaka Hales, David Hecht & Owen Nichols

Owen Nichols drawing Steven Chou library

Ayaka Hales exploration

Jochen Hartmann drawing

Ayaka Hales exploration

gooed by Ayaka Hales

Ayaka Hales exploration Ayaka Hales exploration

Owen Nichols library

Jochen Hartmann library

Owen Nichols intersection

gooed by Ayaka Hales & Owen Nichols

Jacob Escoff representation

Dalia Hamati light

gooed by Owen Nichols & Nicholas M. Reiter

Owen Nichols librar y

Ayaka Hales exploration

Alan Paukman magnets

Leigh Salem colony

unidentified goo

Luis Paris librar y

gooed by Owen Nichols

Owen Nichols diagram

Owen Nichols intersection

Owen Nichols plan

Jochen Hartmann drawing

Owen Nichols section

Owen Nichols plan diagram

gooed by Owen Nichols

Steven Chou library Jochen Hartmann drawing

Ayaka Hales exploration Ayaka Hales exploration

Ayaka Hales exploration

gooed by Ayaka Hales

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Eivind Karlsen & Gearge Valdes

goo here and send to gsappgoo@gmail.com

Owen Nichols library

Nicholas M. Reiter rendering

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Nicholas M. Reiter rendering

Ayaka Hales study model

David Gonzalez exploration

Paola Echegaray library

gooed by Owen Nichols

Spring 2011 Studios

Frequency and top words : Word Occur Freq.

Rank studio 98 1.40% 1 new 62 0.90% 2 design 54 0.80% 3 space 43 0.60% 4 architecture 41 0.60% 4 our 36 0.50% 5 hall 34 0.50% 5 monday 34 0.50% 5 what 34 0.50% 5 city 34 0.50% 5 avery 33 0.50% 5 friday 33 0.50% 5 wednesday 33 0.50% 5 urban 33 0.50% 5 how 30 0.40% 6 through 29 0.40% 6 work 28 0.40% 6 students 28 0.40% 6 download 26 0.40% 6 planning 26 0.40% 6 architectural 26 0.40% 6 public 25 0.30% 7 syllabus 24 0.30% 7 these 24 0.30% 7 monograph 22 0.30% 7 travel 22 0.30% 7 project 22 0.30% 7 structure 20 0.30% 7 cultural 19 0.30% 7 between 19 0.30% 7 use 19 0.30% 7 development 19 0.30% 7 building 19 0.30% 7 street 18 0.30% 7 within 17 0.20% 8 knowledge 17 0.20% 8 physical 16 0.20% 8 should 16 0.20% 8 information 16 0.20% 8 each 15 0.20% 8 you 15 0.20% 8 focus 15 0.20% 8 like 14 0.20% 8 time 14 0.20% 8 form 14 0.20% 8 vendors 14 0.20% 8 community 13 0.20% 8 may 13 0.20% 8 soho 13 0.20% 8 rio 13 0.20% 8 two 13 0.20% 8 zoning 13 0.20% 8 program 13 0.20% 8 world 13 0.20% 8 potential 12 0.20% 8 cities 12 0.20% 8 projects 12 0.20% 8 based 12 0.20% 8 york 12 0.20% 8 neighborhood 12 0.20% 8 site 12 0.20% 8 culture 12 0.20% 8 west 11 0.20% 8 existing 11 0.20% 8 industrial 11 0.20% 8 civic 11 0.20% 8 being 11 0.20% 8 research 11 0.20% 8 issues 11 0.20% 8 working 11 0.20% 8

Yolanda Daniels / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall Tatsuya Sakairi, Teaching and Technical Assistant Libraries are curious repositories. They are, as the philosopher Michel Foucault noted in the essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heteroptopias,” “storehouses of knowledge” that exist in space but outside of time. They are spaces of accumulation, localization, arrangement, and, editing. The structure of libraries appears to be finite, while, th structures of knowledge appear to be infinite and ever expanding. How is knowledge to be housed? The expansion of knowledge has continually exhausted the limits of encyclopedists in the effort to contain all in one or a series of volumes. Americana, Britannica, Collier's, Everyman's, World Book...have all been supplanted by social media and information networks...by Wikipedia.

Analysis I brief Who has access to knowledge? What is appropriate knowledge? Considering the popularization of information in the 18th century enabled by the printing press in contrast to the popularization of information in the 21st century enabled by the internet allow for a vantage point to consider the forms to characterize contemporary “storehouses of knowledge, and, who has access to them. Mining public information controversies across time, such as, Wikileaks, the 911 cover-ups, Watergate, the CIA tapes, etc., the studio will focus on the limits of public information and knowledge, i.e. public education, to explore and generate new spatial topographies of public knowledge.

Analysis II brie In the effort to provide public access to knowledge and to reconsider the apparently finite architecture of accumulation, the studio will shift between studies of the limits of collections and limitless information, and, the limits of form and limitless transformations. Beginning with the limited formal vocabulary of architectural sections of the 18t century French encyclopedist Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie as representative of the finite architecture of accumulation, the studio will explore the form of spaces of “enlightenment” today.

(II) DANIELS STUDIO

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Arch Core II Arch Adv. IV Arch Adv. VI UD HP UP NY / Paris

city’s where east future contemporary well economic portfolio spatial explore both ted complex analysis experience area develop local central art yet areas many however environment better part background process your districts current major spring navy support ways side upon way fayerweather together even production today long must buildings century social airport them population spaces ideas yard group build itself approach means strategies already plan people expected every condition rather next tedx individual

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Mark Rakatansky / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall Two of the most significant modes in architecture today — inflected figuration and parametric design — stand at seemingly opposite sides of the design spectrum. On the one hand, with parametric operations we see projects of extremely articulated and complex surface accumulations of components. On the other hand, with inflected figuration, w see extremely legible projects possessing a diagrammatic formal clarity.

The task of the studio is to challenge this opposition. In spite of their differences, both modalities have been fundamental in reconfiguring new forms of program, site, structure, and tectonic fabrication. And at the present moment, like opposite characters in a good buddy film — The Dude and Walter in The Big Lebowski or Thelma and Louise fro the selfsame named movie or Wikus and the alien "Christopher Johnson" in District 9) — they both are at an impasse and need each other's help.

After all, what is inflected figuration but the parametric modulation of programmed volume? And what is parametric design but the inflected refiguring of a select set of elements? Like in the buddy film, each of these characters is there to bring out more character in each other through their interaction, rather than their isolation. As it is now on thei own the former tends to create a field-based architecture of varied components, the latter an object-based architecture of inflected volumes. In short: small parts with no articulated figural form vs. big figural forms with no articulated parts.

Our section will be an experimental lab to create new hybrids of surfaces refigured with social program and formal volumes rearticulated through modulations of their component parameters. The library today, with its civic identity being refigured and rearticulated through new uses and new users, new media and new mediations, is an ideal typolog to experiment with and through to develop new methods and modalities. Your invention will provide breakthroughs in this formal and cultural impasse. Our studio assistant Luc Wilson will provide help for those interested in working through parametric software. The goal is to develop new breakthroughs in the parametric process: putting the social program back into programming, putting the dramatic script back into scripting. But parametrics is much older than the use of current digital models, older than Luigi Moretti's use of the term in the 1950s, older even than its first self-conscious use by certain architects in the Renaissance such as Giulio Romano and Andrea Palladio. It is indeed as ol as architecture itself, which has always been developed through themes and their parametric transformation. Operating on and through your own drawing and modeling parameters, with or without the use of programs such as Grasshopper, will provide the means to transform our understanding of what might be architectural about the civic today, and through what parameters we could refigure its future.

(II) CIVIC FIGURES, SOCIAL PARAMETRICS

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Download the Syllabus

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library fabric before much often first architects built small advanced just client etc description significant collective coming place residential parametric nature studio role transformation high master upper industry museum designed washington dress touch wny interface gsapp ready technologies own possible term land conditions purpose university preservation programs under soon book sustainability empty break libraries crisis stuff large while park goal semester practice board station study ever including history political student become limited

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Karla Rothstein / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall / Studio Website The rarity of urban silence is an inspiration.

Beyond acoustic assaults, our lives are shrouded in pervasive visual, emotional, political, and virtual noise. Multiplicity, distraction and cacophony epitomize the desirable complexity of the metropolis, yet spaces of contemplation, focus, and reflection are integral to our existence as well. Though much less frequently encountered, these moments o quiet clarityi resonate with sensuous intensity.

Recognizing the culture of hyperbole, superficiality, and intertwined existence in which we operate, projects in this section will strive to articulate succinct, meaningful aspirations, shed gratuitous glitter, and be accountable for valuing and evaluating decisions and consequence. Honing our means of exploration and translation will amplify the impac of action. We will honor the substantive power of words and space -content and void– aspiring for concurrent states of silence and profundity throughout the semester.

(II) URBAN SILENCE

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Silent, as in the poetry of snowfall.

Silent, as an unspoken promise, understood.

Silent, as a quiescent volcano - still, for the moment...

Spaces that support the study, precision and intensity of profound work.

Robert Marino / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall This semester’s work involves the design of a complex building within a dense urban environment. The programmatic and technical requirements alone will be a significant challenge for beginning designers.

Overshadowing these requirements however, is a much larger imperative for the design: To find an expression for our collective selves in the form of a public building. The public library remains as one of the few places of potential public congregation. The role of the library has expanded to accept many purposes beyond the mere dissemination of reading material. As such it has a kind of civic responsibility to symbolize the remaining truth of our collectivity.

Students will be encouraged to discern potential qualities in an architecture that is not merely a reflection of our individualistic and somewhat dissociated times. Instead, qualities that support reason and common human themes will be encouraged.

While this is acknowledged as the overarching goal of the semester, the studio’s methodology may seem paradoxical. The solidity and permanence of clear structural precepts and a poetic assembly of materials may produce the armature on which the student’s intuition may be productive.

We recognize that, in the Platonic sense, we are making shadows. It will be a goal of the studio to keep the ideal in mind.

Robert Marino January 18, 2011

(II) SHADOW STUDIO

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Mark Wasiuta / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall Description coming soon

CORE ARCHITECTURE STUDIO II

28441

Download the Syllabus

municipalities proposals parameters particular structural provide located communication effort sense organization trip north urbanism same search idea back end accumulation years studios specific understand website ultimately center question encouraged beyond life virtual free human order might propose problem decorum international made sometimes expression always active presence needs code regulations far zone class events inflected istanbul others columbia create context now need landscape historic point challenge growth consider articulated then groups appropriate across

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Christina Goberna / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to the other” by Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

From the destruction of the ancient library of Alexandria by Julius Caesar to the publication of communist scribers by senator McCarthy, from the burn of the pre-columbian archives by European conquerors to the persecution of the authors of degenerate literature by the Nazis, from the elimination of bourgeois literature by Stalin, to the current hunt of Wikileaks, the practice of censorship of books has been a common practice and the burn of libraries an extended sport that civilizations have constantly exercised along history in order to control or annihilate the culture of the people they have conquered.

This studio is based in the premise that if every public library constructs a shadow library of its absences, exclusions and censorships, the concept of citizenship that it engages is not natural, but an accumulation of specific ideological choices. Hence, the design of a public library demand us a critical analysis of its catalogue’s exclusions, a carefu understanding of the choices of its order and sharp interpretation of the specific civism that its public program potentiates.

If libraries not only assert but also challenge authority by their content and monumentality, ultimately the question that rises is if architects should orchestrate a definition of civism, a symbolic presence and a repository of knowledge or if they should be freed from all responsibilities.

In the initial analysis, students will be encouraged to approach these issues with boldness. The consequent design should bring polemics to the debate about public libraries as forum of civic engagement.

(II) NEW VOLUMES NEW PROGRAMS: PARAMETERS OF PUBLIC IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY

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Karel Klein / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall To approach the question of what constitutes a civic architecture in contemporary society, the studio engages a seldom-considered topic in contemporary discourse—architectural decorum. Stated simply, the problem is that of appropriate expression for a given situation and remains one of the oldest of architectural topics. Instead of interpreting civi architecture as being affiliated with its institutional functionality, the studio examines the civic condition as one of atmosphere and sensibility where the complex network of values in our contemporary society is made intuitive and immediate.

Though decorum is sometimes associated with ornamentation, the issues of decorum comprehend many problems in the design of a building. To privilege decorum is not to privilege visual representation but to foreground how a public presence is established and interpreted. When we ask what is appropriate, we are examining values. Spatia conditions, organizational relationships, sensory atmospheres, presence on a site, all answer to judgments of propriety at some point. The interest of the studio is to carefully consider and reconsider our culture’s habits of perception and the expectations of built space commonly brought to the civic arena.

As a way to consider notions of decorum more carefully, the studio will examine the world of fashion. It has often been said that how we dress is a reflection of who we think we are. But more accurately, how we dress is always tied to an idea of who we think we are for a particular situation. Further, it is in the world of fashion that the complexitie of our culture is immediately grasped. No longer do we have any reliable dress code that can be understood as appropriate for every occasion. The individual in today’s world is a complex amalgam of affectations that unfold in an ever more public arena. We are exposed like never before. And things being the way they are, it seems silly fo architecture to assume that there is a universal dress code.

The studio is in search of ways to dress a building for a public event, and understands this as a problem full of complexities and contradictions.

(II) DRESS CODE: RETHINKING ARCHITECTURE'S CIVIC PRESENCE

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Christoph Kumpusch / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall Description coming soon

CORE ARCHITECTURE STUDIO II

28441

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housing 5 0.10% relationship 5 0.10% janeiro 5 0.10% post 5 0.10% south 5 0.10% beginning 5 0.10% uses 5 0.10% formal 5 0.10% play 4 0.10% document 4 0.10% return 4 0.10% content 4 0.10% exploration 4 0.10% region 4 0.10% global 4 0.10% vendor 4 0.10% still 4 0.10% pre 4 0.10% seek 4 0.10% very 4 0.10% week 4 0.10% types 4 0.10% requirements 4 0.10% three 4 0.10% developments 4 0.10% conference 4 0.10% weeks 4 0.10% places 4 0.10% dubai 4 0.10% against 4 0.10% avenue 4 0.10% speakers’ 4 0.10% instead 4 0.10% produced 4 0.10% meaning 4 0.10% contextual 4 0.10% strategy 4 0.10% conleste 4 0.10% transportation 4 0.10% since 4 0.10% around 4 0.10% think 4 0.10% examine 4 0.10% streets 4 0.10% terminal 4 0.10% levels 4 0.10% case 4 0.10% too 4 0.10% mid 4 0.10% possibilities 4 0.10% day 4 0.10% challenges 4 0.10% greatly 4 0.10% earth 4 0.10% tokyo 4 0.10% although 4 0.10% decades 4 0.10% activity 4 0.10% seems 4 0.10% activities 4 0.10% problems 4 0.10% technology 4 0.10% regional 4 0.10% office 4 0.10% uff 4 0.10% proximity word frequency 4 0.10% questions gsapp studio descriptions 4 0.10% retail 4 0.10% gooed by David Hecht again 4 0.10% address 4 0.10% decisions 4 0.10% multiple 4 0.10%

Download the Syllabus

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Readability (Alternative) beta : (100-easy

20-hard, optimal 60-70)

of books has been a common practice and the burn of libraries an extended sport that civilizations have constantly exercised along history in order to control or annihilate the culture of the people they have conquered)

Min sentence length (words) :

Total number of characters : Number of characters without spaces : Average Syllables per Word : Sentence count : Average sentence length (words) : Max sentence length (words) : easy 20-hard)

( from the destruction of the ancient library of alexandria by julius caesar to the publication of communist scribers by senator mccarthy from the burn of the pre columbian archives by european conquerors to the persecution of the authors of degenerate literature by the nazis from the elimination of bourgeois literature by stalin to the current hunt of wikileaks the practice of censorship

12.5 80100 51789 1.91 617 20.38 98

Galia Solomonoff / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall Temporary/Contemporary Pavilion Design Build Studio Course Description:

(IV) PAVILLION STUDIO

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Kazys Varnelis / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall Description coming soon

ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE STUDIO IV

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Yoshiko Sato / Monday, Wednesday & Friday, 2pm - 6pm / 500 Avery Hall Space Travel One of the most provocative images of space exploration from the 19th to the end of the 20th Century has been that of a space station floating above the Earth to serve as a way station to the universe. As an idea, the space station has emerged in popular culture long before it became a concept or possibility in space exploration. The visionary image for the space station as they appeared in art, literature, and film greatly inspired the imagination of scientists to probe the limitless territories of the outer atmosphere and the eventual implementation of our present day and future galactic outposts. From early science fiction projections it has been understood that once rocket propulsion coul overcome Earth's gravity and reach orbit, travelers would be "halfway to anywhere" they might want to go. From such a mythical concept one can imagine a station floating in Earth orbit serving as a transit point enabling travel from Earth to the Moon, our galaxy, and beyond.

Although space tourism has been a theme for countless of science fiction representations and speculations of the leading scientists in the 1950's, the idea and realization of vacationing in space has been greatly overshadowed by government space activities - military operations, scientific research, etc. The focus of space activity during the Cold Wa paralyzed for many decades the public's imagination of the possibilities of space travel. However, in the mid-1990s, NASA re-presented "Space Tourism" as the next major target for the space industry in the post-Shuttle era of space architecture. For many countries around the globe the tourist industry operates as a highly competitive marke averaging about 15 times greater revenue than the space industry itself. As tourism is such a significant generator of enormous revenue and often employs the use of advanced technologies (mass aeronautical transportation, computers, telecommunications, etc.), the creation of future holiday space-spots are projecting vast financial gains resulting from the links between the new space industries and technologies as they expand for public consumption. However, with today's skepticism about space travel, it is still seen as inaccessible—being too special, too dangerous, and certainly too expensive for most people to experience or even entertain. Only history can dispute these many shortsighte preconceptions about entering into unknown realms made possible by joint efforts of technology and industry. In 1912 aviation was subjected to a similar apprehensive attitude as virtually no one could have imagined that a mere two decades from its onset more than 1 million people would fly over the expanses of the earth's oceans.

(IV) SPACE STUDIO V: MISSION TO DEEP SPACE

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Total word count : Number of different words : Complexity factor (Lexical Density) : Readability (Gunning-Fog Index) : (6-

make artists society neighborhoods values personnel investigate march final conceptual received xxi manufacturing energy moment access operations models volumes limits themes finite modes studies set mark forms understanding users older paris district seemingly volume complexity interested green series technical teaching latter

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Columbia

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Campus

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24.4

Urban Design gooblock by David Gonzales

Bronxification The Bronx has a history of Jurassic-scale infrastructure; in this 90-second animation a site where an elevated track, a Robert Moses expressway, a Metro-North train rail, the Bronx River, and manufacturing all sandwich each other in parallel is evaluated through the lens of infrastructural personification. All these built characters (the river was moved during construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway) currently ignore each other resulting in negative effects for their living community. Divided neighborhoods, air pollution, lack of access to open space, and a dirty river are consequences of their personality disorders. After analyzing these issues, the animation proposes a type of cross-pollinating infrastructure in which a new recombination of materials ensues in a more responsive built environment.

The cover of a handbook made for Science Grad Students in Kharkov Ukraine on how to move out of Soviet Block Housing and squat the owner-less space between

Stairclaw (known as FireClaw) Relics of Industry and Production (garage doors, fire escapes, docks, elevators) still left in the City become the triggers for disassembly into an ecosystem of manufacturing where ideas, technology, and infrastructure is shared. A fire escape becomes a Fire-Claw that allows buildings to give each other handshakes, the Roto-Transfer, made of garage doors, is constantly redefining shared spaces as it sorts materials, Mobile Laboratories filled with engineers move entire buildings to structural testing sites, and a Vertical conveyor Belt showcases finished prefab products to shopping contractors.

end Urban Design gooblock

FORUM SPEAK [With an incoming M.Arch] Commiserate_Forum: Hello, Friends. Today we are speaking with Archolyte, who has a something to say on the topic of going to Columbia GSAPP. He/she has been lurking at the edges of our discussion on school applications but has finally agreed to add his/her voice to the conversation First off, what made you decide to join us today, after such a long silence?

Archolyte_Wanabee: A night of delightful adventures has disposed me towards joining the fray. I was a bit more active last year, the year of my failed applications, but this time around, I stayed quiet until it felt as though the time was right. Or I had enough to drink to be bold enough to speak up.

[Jaded_GSAPPer: You must’ve had enough to drink to come out with “a night of delightful adventures has disposed me…”]

CF: You were accepted for admission to a number of architecture masters programs. Which did you decide upon?

AW: I’m going to GSAPP. CF: Why? AW: I want to fuck with architecture. I want to mess it up, to challenge it, to give it some trouble by virtue of the fact that its academy admitted me to its ranks and thought it would get out of that unscathed. I have ideas that spill into the psychotic, but follow a logic that I believe will change the world. I want to hit the edifice of architectural practice, thought, and education with the force of a million rhinos angry that there are software developers crass enough to use my species as a brand name. I want to make architecture scared to admit to anyone that that is what it is.

[JG: Mess it up? Besides the admission to being a psycho, nothing else you said makes any sense.]

CF: That’s a bit bold. Do you think architecture is the place for such...energy?

AW: I think architecture could be better for it. And I think GSAPP is the only place that could handle this. No, let me rephrase. I’m not sure they can handle it, but I think that particular institution could channel such energies in direction that coincides with the force of my efforts. And possibly survive the process.

[JG: Presume much???]

CF: Many people within the architecture world (and outside of it) seem to have a notion of what GSAPP is about.

What makes you think your view is more accurate?

AW: Well, anyone who thinks they have an idea of what GSAPP is about, be it NURBs, digital fabrication, flashy graphics and animations, etc., etc., are perhaps right. To a very limited degree. To give the hint: I did NY/Paris, and I did Intro to Architecture. And I did not do spectacularly in either, in terms of grades. However, I think I got something. I got that Columbia is a restless institution. That it is unsatisfied with complacency, acceptance, boredom. If you have an architecture background and you got into GSAPP, accept this challenge: you are not to be boring. You are not to design structures that you already know how to design, you are not to adhere to principles that you have been told are correct, you are not believe ANYTHING you have been taught. If you go to GSAPP and do so, you will fail. Perhaps not with grades, perhaps not even in accolades, if you are in fact an excellent producer of digital wizardry who is able to boggle minds with the complexity of your renderings. In fact, such efforts will be worthy, in that you are, unbeknownst perhaps even to yourself, pushing the limits and bursting the boundaries. That is what I hope to see at GSAPP. GSAPP appears to be a place where insanity is recognized as genius and bold experimentalism is encouraged to the point of breakdown. Perhaps these efforts do not always results in success; the efforts themselves, however, are a wonder to behold. That is why I want to be at GSAPP. [JG: Maybe GSAPP has inadvertently sold itself as a mental institution, though there are some people interested in, you know, making buildings.]

CF: Do you think that other approaches to architectural education are invalid then?

AW: Not at all. There are people who would prefer to stay the safe course, to engage with the broader audience and present the safe, friendly face of our field. These people are necessary; architecture must have a market, and to have a market, people must feel safe investing. I might even be inclined to engage in this behavior, to understand its place. But I will not stop there.

CF: What do you mean? What do you think a student can do to move beyond “safe” architecture?

AW: I will push it. I will do uncomfortable things, make claims and extend into disciplinary realms that thought they were safe from the mad machinations of those who seek to give material form to the immaterial, intentional, imaginary realms of their expertise. No one is safe from this enquiry; it will consume all fields of knowledge in an effort to better give physical form to concepts, whether or not that form will be realizable in a given lifetime.

[JG: You might also discover that the complete lack of focus makes for projects without direction that are unrealizable for reasons other than their experimental nature.]

CF: Some might say to you, that’s all well and good, but look at Abstract. How can one avoid succumbing to the urge to give in to flashy renderings and complex digital diagrams?

AW: To those who think it is NURBtown: go there, now, and ask the people who have yet to use a computer this semester how they are doing. They are shattering conceptions of what it takes to make architecture today; they are at the institution that first attempted a paperless studio; their hands are dirty, and they love it. Some may not have enough hands to produce their ideas, and so the computer becomes vital; but it is thrilling to know that there are people who do, who can. They inspire me. They are pushing architecture into strange new realms.

[JG: What if the people who aren’t using the computer can’t draw, or those who need the computer discover that it is only slowing them down? Each studio and each project may have a different solution that best fits the problem, and likewise for each student.]

CF: And so this is why you are going to GSAPP? I am going to GSAPP because I want to fly far beyond the edges of what we think architecture is, to dangerous, uncharted realms where it’s as likely that I will lose my mind as I will produce something great. I want to take that gamble and I think GSAPP will let me. Whether it wants to or not.

[JG: There are people who are eager to move away from the “purple plastic shiny renderings” and towards representational methods little seen in abstract or in the realm of professional practice. They, however, are less concerned with making grandiose statements and more interested in producing mind-busting quantities of work. You had better hedge your bets, cool your jets, and take a look at them. They are the ones pushing forward the silent revolution.]

anonymous goo contribution

anonymous goo contribution

anonymous goo contribution

Nicholas M. Reiter material exploration Tom Heltzel, Luis Paris, Sydney Talcott concrete experiment

Nicholas M. Reiter airlab

Ayaka Hales exploration

gooed by Owen Nichols

The Unpaid Architecture Internship:

The Culture of an Architectural Education “Thank god for people who are unpaid interns. When I started in architecture, I was an unpaid intern. I think the practice is fabulous. People who move up in the world all start as unpaid interns.” – Peter Eisenman.

Internships are a fundamental component of an architectural education. The Internship is an opportunity for curious undergraduates to explore the profession before delving into expensive institutional learning, for eager architecture students to learn from well-seasoned senior architects, and, for those who are on a path to receive a license, to complete the Intern Development Program (IDP). However, many of these internships are unpaid, opening the door to more job opportunities in a competitive market as well as complaints over legality and morality.

Are unpaid internships legal? Some are and some (deemed exploitative) definitely are not. The line is drawn with several, very tenuous, guidelines, including a requirement that the employer “derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.” (2) I would argue (and hope), however, that in most cases, the intern does bring something to the table and should be expected to contribute to the company or firm for which he or she has been working. Ultimately, legality, in my opinion, is hardly the issue, particularly when architecture students willingly and eagerly accept positions at firms that will not pay them a dime for their work. If labor laws were more strictly enforced, many of the opportunities available to young and aspiring architects would be lost, which could be detrimental to the well-established system of an architectural education.

Beyond legality, I believe the issue of unpaid internships is an ethical one. Whether we like it or not, architects are often accused of being elitist, and, the unpaid internship certainly raises issues of accessibility. In many cases, students who are able to accept unpaid positions at firms typically have the financial support from their parents (or elsewhere) to do so. I recently finished an architecture internship that required 10 hours of work a day, 5 days a week (unpaid) in New York City, leaving very little, if any, time to make an outside income. Do I regret this opportunity?

Absolutely not. I worked on projects that gave me extremely valuable experience, in my opinion. Projects that I would not have had the opportunity to explore on my own. However, if it weren’t for the financial support of my parents (not to mention that they are both architects, and therefore, understand the “rules of the game,” so to speak) I would definitely not have had that opportunity. Unpaid internships, therefore, deny students who have a professional eagerness but lack the financial support to gain access to opportunities that allow them to compete in the race for experience and the development of a robust network. Educational institutions that encourage internships as a fundamental component of an aspiring architect’s development should endeavor to offer additional financial support. Furthermore, firms that hire interns should assess the value of these students’ contributions and offer at least a very small stipend.

Beyond the issue of financial access, it seems that the system of unpaid internships requires a re-evaluation of the culture surrounding the continuation of architectural education into the professional realm. The IDP Program, overseen by NCARB and a prerequisite for taking licensing exams, attempts to institutionalize the education of young architects in various practice-related areas, but it ultimately is just a checklist.

Architects should recognize that with interns comes a responsibility to teach – they automatically enter into an unspoken mentorship. Education, within or beyond the institution, takes time and consideration from both the pupil and the teacher. While an attitude adjustment (for some, not all) is difficult to enforce, the practice of mutual evaluations, which is prevalent in the institution particularly between a studio critic and his or her student, should be sustained in the context of the professional field, providing interns with an opportunity to evaluate their mentors and vice versa.

By giving interns both the financial opportunity to take an unpaid internship position and a voice to evaluate their mentoring architect, the culture of architectural internships can focus on its educational benefits rather than its exploitative plights.

1. In response to a question posed at a 2007 lecture at Harvard GSD. Beyond a few comments, Eisenman refused to elaborate because the question, in his opinion, “was meant snarkily.” Eikongraphia, “Peter Eisenman on unpaid internships,” March 2008.

2. U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division. “Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under The Fair Labor Standards Act,” April 2010. 1.

written by an unhappy intern.

Ayaka Hales intersection

Ayaka Hales exploration

Ayaka Hales exploration

Ayaka Hales Collage Surface, path, movement, intersection

Jochen Hartmann Digital Process movement, structure

gooed by Ayaka Hales & Owen Nichols