ISSUE 015

ONE:TWELVE | ISSUE 15

ISSUE EDITORS Andrew King, Undergraduate Editor Marly McNeal, Undergraduate Editor Malena Grigoli, Undergraduate Editor Thomas Mahoney, Graduate Editor Ally Lammert, Treasurer Courtney Masters, Graphics Chair Sofia Kuspan, Graphics Chair Maryan Warsame, Graphics Chair Kristen Perng, Graphics Chair Xhoana Nikolli, Social Media Chair Deborah Tadesse, Social Media Chair

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CONTRIBUTORS Alex Warner Brenna Bierman Benjamin Arias Ethan Young Marly McNeal Moones Mirbeygi Peter T. Larsen Sam Bonnell-Kangas Tom Mahoney Stephen Turk Evan Schlenk Nour Al-Qarra Aleah Westfall Zachary Slonsky Art on pages 26-27, 38-39, & 56-57 by Aisha Cheema, Shriya Ravishankar, Xuan Zhang, and Kris Hager for Erik Herrmann’s seminar in autumn of 2019.

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THE CALL What systems do our disciplines choose to legitimize? The academic discourse influences conventions, but to different extents. How do some conventions persist through generations while others remain in constant flux? What do these conventions say about the structures of the discipline itself?

The following submissions were compiled in the months before the global COVID-19 lockdown. Archiving work with fixations on particular architectural discourses, unbeknownst to the expansionary sociohistorical consciousness of this past year, materializes a retrospective posture. A time capsule before the shift. Please enjoy the following essays written by Knowlton students in the months preceding the lockdown.

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CONTENTS Id, Ego, Superego, and the Architectural Maverick Alex Warner

10-13

Outsider Architecture Brenna Bierman

14-15

Err In Convention Moones Mirbeygi

16-19

Sowing Architecture Ethan Young

20-21

Best Ever Architecture Recipe Marly McNeal

22-23

Materiality in The Age of Discipline Benjamin Arias

24-26

Medium Medium & Media Peter T. Larsen

30-34

Autograph: The Market Value of Immaterial Goods Sam Bonnell-Kangas

36-37

Architecture in the Age of Remote Sensing In Conversation with Stephen Turk

40-51

The Meta Discipline Zachary Slonsky

54-57

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ID, EGO, SUPEREGO, AND THE ARCHITECTURAL MAVERICK Alex Warner

The ID

The Id, as Freud would put it, is someone’s innate, childlike desire, seeking only what is pleasurable. This fantasy-oriented thinking focuses on achieving a selfish objective through illogical and impulsive decisionmaking. It is the essence of human nature before being converted and altered by logic, emotion, and societal norms. The Id is a subconscious force, pulling the mind towards a sea of wonder and amazement.

In an architectural representation of Freud’s theory, an architect’s basic and immediate urge to draw line upon line, manipulating the field to bend to the whims of the mind, is determined by the Id. What now appears on the paper, on the screen, and in the mind of the architect is nothing short of a compulsive, ideal version of a project that may never get off the ground. These irrational, initial concept designs fill sketchbooks and random hard drive folders, rarely seeing the light of day. It is an amusement park full of infinite opportunity, “weird” forms, complex diagrams, a labyrinth to navigate. When the Id comes through in a final design, the result has the potential to be a pioneer amongst the ordinary. Architects bank on the mindset of being able to produce their desires before reality takes the reins.

Reality is the ego.

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The EGO

The Ego balances innate desire with the forces of reality and plausibility. It balances morality with desire in order to determine the appropriate actions and thoughts of the person.

For architects, the Ego combines some aspects of design with that of realistic engineering and code. There are codes and regulatory measures to ensure safety; however, some codes limit the ability of an architect to design something new. Having a code that determines monotony does not create enough difference to allow for ingenuity and enough change within the discipline of architecture. Cities begin to look cookie-cutter when the imagination of the architect is limited. This does not produce a maverick that goes against the grain to produce the extraordinary. Without a crystal ball, architects are forced to grapple their imaginations with that of society.

The SUPEREGO

The superego is a moral code that dissuades individuals from doing something that will produce feelings of guilt and regret. The feeling of guilt after a person does something that he or she finds “pleasurable” is the Superego overpowering the pull of the Id. The Superego utilizes emotion to project an image of an ideal model to follow. This image is influenced by the guidance provided by friends and family and societal norms.

For architects, the superego can either be a deterrent or a safe haven. The foreboding guilt of what could be or what could happen if architects were to design something that will be populated by people, drives many projects. No architect wants someone to get hurt, to feel unsafe, or feel miserable in a space. These feelings ensure the safety of the public and the spaces in which they occupy. These feelings, producing modes of conscious-building, work to encourage a design within totalizing aims. In design-centered fields, nothing is perfect. The project will never be finished as it will 11

be reworked time and time again in the mind of the architect. The constant need for perfection is why the superego has such a grasp on the architect’s psyche.

The MAVERICK

It is utterly difficult to determine which direction the discipline of architecture will take. I am inclined to believe that the pioneering nature of architecture will exist from the technique one uses to produce the form, not the form itself. The overarching questions include when and in what capacity? I cannot say what the ramifications of this discovery will be or how it will subsequently shift what we know of as architecture.

All I can say is that Society needs a new Maverick, one in which all others will follow. The Maverick will unbridle the magnitude of the Id in the design and the final products. In many cities, the ego and superego completely derail the wonderful ideas put forth by the id. The id no longer has the power to influence the decision-making of the architect. The problem this creates is a “been there, done that” scenario that does not inspire a new generation to reach higher.

Sometimes the simplicity of a box is a welcomed relief. Other times, a box in a sea of boxes creates a field of mundane. There will always be architects that design great boxes, suited for society’s view of what architecture is... But for the discipline to survive, we need architects to show what architecture could and should be. Society needs the id to overpower the superego, maintaining a stronger grip on the ego. Architecture should be ever-changing, not a periodical progression of form and space. Technology and engineering are constantly evolving at a fast pace. Architecture needs to catch up and become the propeller of engineering and technological advances. It should not evolve only after technology or engineering allows it to, but should be the reason for the progression.

Pioneering mavericks are rare, especially put up against 12

architects who revert back to the successful styles that history has been known to appreciate. Architecture will always be a balance between the id, ego, and superego; however, the id needs a stronger voice in the debate of design. The discipline needs the risk-takers, the rebels who go against education and adapt the unreasonable concept design into something logical, but just as radical. These individuals will push technology and engineering, art, and architecture forward. Eventually, the rest of society will catch up.

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Outsider Architecture Brenna Bierman

Mélanie van der Hoorn

Author: Viken Berberian Illustrator: Yann Kebbi

Madelon Vriesendorp

Arkitekturstriper: Architecture in Comic-Strip Form

The Structure is Rotten, Comrade.

Photos: Nasjonalmuseet, Annar Bjørgli

Top left: Cover Top right: pages 104-105 Bottom left: 120-121 Bottom Right: pages 246-247

Flagrant Délit, 1975. Welfare Palace Hotel, Sunken Medusa Raft, 1975-6.

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In Mas Context’s NARRATIVES issue, Design with Company states, “We are looking for ways that the representation of buildings and the buildings themselves start to collapse upon one another.” The notion of representation and building entwining into a new, indistinguishable whole raises the question of what the identity of the architect truly is. For architects who believe that architecture lies solely in building, arguments could be made against the “paper architects” by asserting that they aren’t truly architects despite their theoretical or ideological impact on the discipline. However, this stance negates the impact of ideas on architectural discourse. Why does an idea have to originate from an architect for it to be deemed a more valid architectural stance? Architecture is deeply entwined with other fields; Design with Company’s belief that representation and building are becoming enmeshed furthers the connection of architecture with the general visual arts.

Therefore, the architectural discipline no longer has the luxury of separating itself from the artists, authors, and theorists from other backgrounds.

Architectural criticism can come from very unlikely places. Although untrained as an architect, Mélanie van der Hoorn has spent most of her career analyzing architecture. Her background is in cultural anthropology, which allows her to take unique stances on architecture. Even though she isn’t an architect, her work is able to contribute to architectural theory. Her contribution to Mas Context’s Narratives issue even sparked the idea for an exhibition at Oslo’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.

In 2019, Fantagraphics Books, a publisher of underground and alternative comics, released The Structure is Rotten, Comrade, a 320 page tour de force dissecting a fictional architect’s aspirations to redesign Yerevan, Armenia. Creators Viken Berberian (author) and Yann Kebbi (artist/cartoonist) are not architects. Even so, the novel is peppered with subtle references to the discipline. Slices of ideals from many architectural tribes pop up, all stewing in an underground Yerevan that is moments away from revolting. Brutalism, capitalism, and cement are all lampooned

by Berberian and Kebbi. They are all pointing back to what sparked this fictional Yerevan’s revolution: a marriage of capital and one architect’s hubris.

Madelon Vriesendorp, an OMA co-founder, has become an advocate for architecture to be more heavily integrated into the other arts. As an artist, often overlooked in favor of Rem Koolhaas, she was able to output a great number of iconic illustrations that were commissioned for OMA at first glance. It was not until much later that she would get credit for her original drawings, culminating in a retrospective exhibit by the AA and receiving an award from The Architectural Review.

Eva Franch i Gilabert, the AA director, states “[Madelon] is all about opening up people’s imagination, regardless of age, disciplinary labels or expertise.” In the end, isn’t that what the discipline should be about? Instead of wasting time trying to determine what “is” and “isn’t” architecture, an exercise contingent upon outdated disciplinary backdrops, architects should embrace the dynamism, rigor, and imagination of other fields. After all, architecture itself is just about imagining what doesn’t exist.

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ERR IN CONVENTION Moones Mirbeygi

Convention, in its broadest sense, is a readily accepted norm for accomplishment, achieved only through the guidelines of a previously established tradition. This can be both a source for and an obstacle against creativity. Inversely, error can be defined as a deviation from that established precedent, based on the root definition of its Latin origins.

Although often unintentional, deviation from the standard, or in other words, mistakes, are more frequent when considering the notion of error. But error does not always refer to the unintentional byproduct of a dysfunctional regulatory process. Intentional discrepancy from this norm equally exists. That being said, this error, intentional or not, allows for an opportunity for creativity to emerge.

Based on Vitruvian ideals, architecture imitates nature and therefore, cannot endure anything that deviates from what our natural order permits.

This point of view demands symmetry, proportional perfection, and indisputable laws governed by the hierarchy of that which occurs naturally.

But while this proclivity for perfection was dominant throughout the majority of Classical history, Gothic architecture, oppositionally, was more conducive to error. This change in theoretical positioning deviated from symmetry and order, while allowing individuals a certain level of design leniency. The desire to build taller incidentally meant that the final form was not entirely determined prior to construction beginning. The rigidity and conventionalism of the Classical style and its inherent denial of human variation or imperfection was ultimately replaced by the Gothic style, that which was born out of the imperfection of the former.

Similarly, Renaissance artists shared classical notions within their artwork.

The intention was to capture the precision and perfection of Antiquity, which for them represented the possibility of attaining absolute beauty in the artwork they created. But even with this strict ideal in mind, Renaissance man was not without fault.

Michelangelo, for instance, pushed the boundaries of what Renaissance man could be defined as. That being said, the Renaissance man could do anything he willed himself to do, and therefore, he could also err. Because of Michelangelo’s willingness to create fault, he was reprimanded by his 16

critics for the blatant disregard of established rules. They believed that he disregarded Vitruvian norms and the tightly defined precedents of Antiquity that could then lead to a rupturing of Classical ideals and the harmoniousness of proportional perfection. Consequently, Michelangelo’s error was not in the way that he portrayed man, but that his work belonged to an aesthetic experience that transposed typical convention.

Michelangelo’s lineage was subsequently championed by followers of the Baroque movement, a generation later. There evolved a distinction between the conventional perfection in Renaissance architecture and the erroneous dynamism of Baroque form. With that being said, an oscillating dichotomy between vastly opposing poles can be seen throughout Architectural history. Not only were certain styles, like in the Gothic movement, more willing to implement error as a way of deviating from the norm, but every movement to follow a previous generation could be understood as an erroneous departure from that which came before. So while the Baroque was an error in comparison to the Renaissance, Renaissance itself was an error unto the Gothic. Deviation from convention, when considering evolution of style and aesthetic taste only occurs because we, as a species, allow ourselves to wonder what possibilities exist outside of any given generation’s typical, societal milieu, as a means of perpetuating constant change.

This same systematic change and general ideation can be tracked through the Modern and Postmodern eras, as well. Modern architecture is the ideal manifestation of calculation and precision, leading to a type of utopian inevitability. And it is within this mindset that le Corbusier constructs a set of scenarios that will help engender creations for successive generations. In addition to the disturbance of the grid of structural columns in Villa Savoye, which was erring from previous rigid and finite column conventions of the past, his other works, like Ronchamp, created an anomaly that was completely removed from international, architectural thinking. With this deviation, Corb marked the beginning of a revolution that altered modern thinking, provoking the new era of Postmodernism.

In the Vanna Venturi house, a perfect combination of erring from familiar forms, Robert Venturi incorporates familiar devices like horizontal ribbon windows, a gabled roof, and an arch-framed entrance. But what may appear to be strangeness or flaw is actually intentional error. Venturi strips these classic architectural tropes of their original functions and applies them in unconventional ways. Windows are mismatched, the entry door is found on the side, the gable has a vertical opening in its center, and, above all, 17

this gable is located on the long side of the building, rather than the short, completely distorting its scale. Additionally, the front and rear facades do not relate to one another, strengthening the house’s ability to be misread at all moments of experience. Finally, the house is painted as a means of disguising its materiality, an error in convention when compared to the material expressiveness of Modern Architecture.

Following the lineage of purposeful misappropriation, Peter Eisenman believes Architecture to be a sequence of intentional misreadings or dislocations of previously established norms. This, in turn, allows strict, formal systems to be questioned, manipulated, and altered for the generation of error. Shifts and changes in Eisenman’s houses can be understood if we subconsciously recognize a cube to be the ideal condition unto which Eisenman has therefore altered, deviating from the norm. In his works, Eisenman pursues Superposition of systems that lead to ambiguity, liberation from function, and complicating the language of space. This may then be understood as erring from the precision, efficiency, functionality and the clear language of Modernism.

Another proponent of a similar line of thinking is Andrew Zago. He chooses to work in and around “misregistration,” a term that refers to a printing process error, which can produce blurred images. In Property with Properties, the underlying premise of Zago’s proposal is to misalign the typical suburban boundary in order to develop flexibility within the community. Through the technique of misregistration, Zago developed possibilities diverging from the norms of suburban housing. Additionally, in his New Federal project, he works with the grid as a norm where in one model a piece of the grid misbehaves and in the other the physics of the grid changes.

It is said that to err is human. This might explain why we, as a society at large and as a discipline specifically, are often drawn to the incessant need for perfection and, holistically believe that this outcome can be attained through technological advancement. Although, perhaps ironically, there is nothing more that our species fears than the perfection of technology to the absolute limit by where humans become obsolete. While machines, as it currently stands, are not entirely errorless, it is reasonable to believe that someday they will be. But in the meantime, while machine errors can be utilized as a source for creative inspiration, this novel byproduct could become the function for which human’s will equally exist as a similar mode of creative, inspirational error. From this future human error, in direct contrast to the perfection of machine, certain irregularities and deficiencies 18

of the finite human existence will perhaps become a new symbol of erroneous beauty and an impetus for sentient life that may or may not still remain in this projective scenario.

However, there is another perspective of error as that which moves away from truth or concurrent concepts. But, fundamentally, error simply exists as a range of intentional or unintentional deviation from standard convention, whether that be the most minute difference to the most radical separation. For Architecture, this can be understood as deviation from normal expectations of the built environment. From the artwork of Michaelangelo to the uncertainty of the technological future, it would appear that to err is a sign of creative advancements that have yet to be discovered. In some sense, creative or radical Architecture is often stumbled upon, through a process of error. Even though all errors or moments of straying from an established set of rules does not yield new information to be later recognized as an accomplishment, as Architects, we yearn for discovery with every passing attempt to generate original, subjective, artistic expression. The specific error which alters the path of an entire generation’s design values is but the most elusive discovery an Architect could possibly come across.

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SOWING ARCHITECTURE Ethan Young Above: The Umbrella Academy - “I Think We’re Alone Now” Dance Montage

The insertion of the cross-section is the planting of an architectural seed in the mind of the audience. The Umbrella Academy’s use of spatial representation introduces the language of architecture to an unexpecting and unfamiliar crowd. From such an introduction, there may spark in them the interest to learn it.

The cross-section speaks. Look! See the unity of this unusual and remarkable family. Walls do not divide them! Togetherness is celebrated, and solitude is shown to be an illusion. Architecture is presented in a way that is accessible to an audience. Through its iteration, relationships and hierarchies between the members are newly revealed. Central positions grant importance. Symmetry and adjacency establish relationships. There is also an eerie sense of surveillance which is whispered through the screen. Despite the privacy of the characters in their rooms - someone is watching them.

If the architectural section is translated into a home, we get something like MVRDV’s Double House. This building puts transparency, surveillance, and the notion of together-but-separate into practice. Passersby are conscripted to form the surveillance system. It is a role they take on every time they choose to pass by and peer into the looking glass. If these were the residences of Western politicians - US, UK or New Zealand for instance - the building would then be commenting on the global surveillance enacted by Five Eyes Alliance and enter the debate on the right-to-privacy. Take the

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Above: MDRDV’s Double House

architectural section and apply it to a public institution - say a library - onlookers now gain the liberty to choose between the roles of surveyor and surveyee, and surveillance is democratized.

Architecture is powerful. It can be used to ask important questions and make bold claims. To spur public conversation toward meaningful topics and allow unique participation in them.

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Best Ever Architecture Recipe (Easy) Marly McNeal

Are you tired of having bland projects? Do you keep getting roasted in reviews for having dry final boards? It is time to spice up your game with our all-new Architecture recipe!

Let’s face it- thinking of a good idea for a project is hard. Most of us simply don’t have the time to think about our projects before designing them. What you might not know is that you don’t need to do that at all! With our recipe calling for a few scoops of post-rationalization and a gallon or two of successful representation, you will be on the path toward success. What are you representing, exactly, you might ask? That’s not the point. You’ll figure that out at the end. There is no need to stress about it—this Architecture recipe is a piece of cake!

So many recipes call for elements like sustainable design or innovative structural methods, but ingredients like these are challenging to find. If you are tired of wasting your time designing buildings with meaning, and you just want a flavorful final project, then this recipe is for you. It has almost all the features of your instructor’s favorite projects, plus it is made almost entirely from scratch!

Cook Time: While it typically takes a handful of months to prepare, more experienced designers can shorten the bulk of the work to a few weeks of all-nighters.

“Once you try it, you’ll never go back!”

- Fourth-Year Undergrad who got an A- in studio “This recipe was the icing on the cake for my portfolio.”

- Recent graduate who was hired after only 19 interviews “The play with ingredients is quite fascinating. The spatial composition creates a really special moment that leaves me wanting more. I appreciate how organic it is, and I love that it explores the notion of mixing together many rich textures.”

- The one juror with the funky glasses that 22 occasionally gets invited to reviews

Ingredients Drawings • 1 Pinterest account • ~Artsy~ color palette • 25% of a Rhino Model • Aesthetic entourage Model • 1 bottle Sobo glue • 1 bottle clear drying Guerrilla Glue • 1 glue gun • 258 hot glue sticks • Lots of tape • 19 Cups of post-rationalization • 10 bottles of spray paint • 8 Tablespoons of scale figures • 500mg caffeine

25%

Sun 1:42 AM

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to Subscribe Recipes

Health & Wellness

Scale Figures

• Choice between the following materials: - A few hundred dollars of acrylic - 26 sheets of foam core - Leftovers from the woodshop Drawing Instructions: • Collect architectural inspo from pages like Pinterest and Instagram • Choose an image that has a color palette you want to use • Determine what Illustrator hatches closely align with your aesthetic (Pro-Tip: If you are an experienced designer or really want to impress your professor, customize the hatches or even create your own!)• Hop onto Illustrator and draw what your heart desires! Draw those angles! (Note: This does not work for everyone. If you feel stuck, walk away and come back to the computer at 3 am—the time constraint can fuel a more efficient design Model Instructions: • Prepare your main materials - Are you using lots of curved shapes? Or did you spend all your money on the last project? If so, scrap foam/other material from the woodshop is your best option! Sit back and let the mill/foam cutters do all of the work for you.

• Does your design have 90 angles? Are you anti-laser cutter or have you not learned anything since freshman year?

Well that means foam core is for you! Get out the box cutter and hack away until you have some relatively straight pieces.

• Are you rich? Are you poor but willing to do anything to impress your professor?

Try using acrylic! It can be laser cut and even forms around molds when heated!

• Spray paint your material according to your color palette. Are you getting bored 23

Fun

and/or tired with the project? Try spray painting indoors, but not in the spray booth, for a rush of adrenaline.

• Start assembling your materials. Apply your Sobo glue carefully so that the edges are clean and crisp. Press and hold together firmly until your fingers go numb.

If it is still wet, or for extra strong connections, use Guerrilla Glue. (Pro-Tip: Tape areas people won’t be able to see!)

• Once you realize that you will not complete the model in time, begin using hot glue instead. Heat your glue gun to approximately 375 or until the adhesive begins dripping on the table. Apply generously, and time permitting, remove excess glue. (Caution: Glue may be hot.)

• Laser cut scale figures. And by scale figures, I don’t just mean people. Trees are key! If you really want to impress, try adding scale cars and furniture.

Comments I loved this recipe! If anyone is wondering how to heat and shape acrylic, I personally started by preheating my oven to 300°. I baked a sheet of acrylic for 5-7 minutes (depends on thickness). Then all I did was take it out and place it on a mold! It looked great, and the scent from my oven made my whole house smell amazing! :) Are you stupid?? I can’t stand the way you talk about foam core. You can literally laser cut foam core if you’re careful, you don’t have to just “hack away.” You had some decent tips but I’m not going to be following this recipe any time soon.

Your advice about the scale figures is SO TRUE. They really do make or break a project! I mean, who can say no to a painted palm tree?!?

Materiality in The Age of Discipline Benjamin Arias

In our lifetime we have experienced a complete shift to digital design. With the introduction of progressively newer and better design software, the medium by which to represent architectural material often reverts to a false hope of white plasticity. In studio design, small massing models exist, constructed out of white paper, white foam, or white painted wood. These models are devoid of materiality in an attempt to match their digital counterparts. This whiteness, an appropriation of purity and perfection, allows for the model to read as abstractly as possible, leaving the audience to interpret the architectural object without material bias. This default, uninformative mode of representation, questions the very notion of materials usefulness within the design process.

Perhaps serving as the genesis for an Architecture devoid of color-laiden facades, the Pyramids of Giza and the Temples in Athens were constructed of limestone and pentelic marble, respectively.

Like their contemporary counterparts, these works of Architecture attempted to exist solely as imposing symbols of celestial purity, acting out of a power and ingenuity of which the designers believed color would add nothing to its fundamental meaning. In opposition to such a notion, however, the structures on the Acropolis are now known to have been originally adorned with polychromatic finishes. This knowledge of polychromy was first recorded in 1788 by Stuart 24 24

[1] Mallgrave, Harry Francis. “Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 16731968,” 2005.

and Revett in their collection The Antiquities of Athens[1]. Even after this news was published, discussed, and confirmed, attempts were made to correlate the contemporary with the historic through the application of whiteness. It is crucial to understand this historic knowledge pertaining to form and facade because of man’s constant attempt to contextualize their surroundings through the aesthetics of the built environment, for which we inhabit.

When using pure, flat white for design, a certain organic quality is lost. The organic represents the life that we are surrounded by on Earth. Materials that are available from our environment offer a sense that we are a part of something larger than ourselves. Even when a tree is chopped down to form wood planks or clay is dug up to form bricks there is still a remaining life in the materials that can be instinctively felt by the occupant. The natural materials, including wood, brick, and stone, exhibit the quality of organic life that is absent with white painted walls. Unfortunately, white monochrome masses comprise the majority of disciplinary projects. These buildings are sterile and without ornament. The experience upon entering a structure of this nature is like walking through a hospital or prison, qualities of habitation which are incompatible with necessary levels of human comfortability.

The majority of structures physically built today still use those natural materials aforementioned.

Adversely, the materiality of academia, the discipline of architecture, too often ignores the impact of material in design. The materials chosen for the few disciplinary projects which come to fruition are comprised of pure flat white walls. On the occasion that wood, stone, or brick are applied, the materials are chosen as 25 25

an afterthought; as if part of a separate project altogether.

Using natural materials connects the architecture to the site and environment in which it lives. A building should arise from the site as if it has always been there, yet only just discovered.

One example of this is Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterwork in Pennsylvania. Wright discussed his process of design in his lectures titled An Organic Architecture[2]. Another instance where natural materials are used is in Critical Regionalism described by Kenneth Frampton[3]. He described the typology as an architecture rooted in its ancestral, local materials, but utilizes modern forms and the contemporary meanings associated. That being said, the resources chosen for a project should influence the forms and structural systems.

Therefore, they must be synthesized during the design process in order to achieve this result.

The indifference to materiality in design limits the potential of our built environment. However, in order to move forward in our field, we must continue adding to the generations whom we have recently learned from, but we must also look backward and understand the way that we have achieved our most sacred buildings. It is only recently that we have stumbled upon the use of digital software in our process. Through this medium we have achieved astounding and progressive forms that were never before possible, but it is pertinent that we also understand the negative byproducts of this approach to design.

[2] Wright, Frank Lloyd.

An Organic Architecture: the Architecture of Democracy. London: Lund Humphries, 1939.

[3] Frampton, Kenneth.

Modern Architecture: a Critical History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

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MEDIUM MEDIUM & MEDIA

Peter T. Larsen

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Architectural representation finds itself in between an idea and built actuality. Our responsibility to the Avant-garde and the architectural discipline is to constantly test the limits and boundaries of the representational status quo as well as the medium in which representation is executed. The type of representation of most concern is that of projects yet to be realized and/or speculative works. The representational medium of interest, pertaining to speculative architectural practices, is inherently less concerned with standard construction documentation or client-driven renderings, but is on a constant revolutionary quest to translate plausible spatial ideas into something that evokes sensations through an ephemeral experience. Additionally, cross-disciplinary experimentation allows for an unforeseen mediation of practical techniques. Consequently, the efforts of experimenting with the medium of other disciplines will engender progression of architectural constructs.

I was recently a part of a studio led by Jeffery Kipnis where challenging the status quo of architectural representation was the primary focus of our efforts. The prompt was to create a film for a speculative project that displayed architectural performances and their subsequent consequences.

Architectural performances are the elemental qualities of a work of Architecture that have meaning beyond the necessities of the design and function of a building. The consequences of architectural performances are harder to define as they are hypothesized on the outset of a project yet are innately subjective and should be left to individual interpretation. Jeff endeavored to ingrain the concept of disciplinary specificity to differentiate relative medium used in the practice of Architecture versus the practice of filmmaking, art, or any other adjacent disciplines. This includes, but is not limited to, the painter’s brush, the film maker’s camera, the magician’s hat, the sculptor’s chisel, and the Architect’s pencil. These tools require a specific medium to create a disciplinary work; the canvas, the screen, the stage, quarried marble, and a piece of paper. Each tool and user carries different techniques which create different results.

What is curious in our endeavors for progression is the possibility that the discipline of Architecture may adopt the medium of another in order to create new qualities of architectural representation. Interestingly, the mediums used in the representation of Architecture have historically been realized only once the discipline has accepted it into the canon. Examples of representation adoption include, but are not limited to: plan drawings from Gothic master-masons’ staff in sand diagrams; perspective drawing from Brunelleschi’s Florence Baptistry painting; the use of harmonic 31

proportions for the arrangement of spaces from choir hymns; and the most recent, as it relates to this article, the architectural fly-through being derived from animation, film, and documentaries. When adopting a medium from another discipline, it is extremely important to create parameters that will distinguish its usefulness to the discipline of Architecture. Specifically, what from the discipline of film making can be used to enhance architectural representation and what should not be used?

In the case of our studio project, one of the main objectives was to challenge the architectural fly/walk-through and its inherent filmic qualities. The architectural fly-through is increasing in popularity, and is becoming a viable method of representation, as it is now typically a requirement for most new, large-scale architectural competitions. The advancements in rendering technologies in the past decade has made it possible to create realistic animations that are almost, and soon will be, perceived as filmed in reality. All of us in the discipline of Architecture know of the cliché fly-through where one must imagine being a bird flying over the site, or the scene is positioned from an implausible vantage point while riding a wall-less elevator inside an atrium. If close attention is paid, however, there is never the sound of wind rushing by or other perceptible effects which indicate that one inhabits a machine of some kind. In actuality, there exists nothing more than just some soundtrack that endeavours to produce an upbeat overtone. The screen is always framed in an unrealistic, first-person point-of-view where, at best, all characters are animated to walk around robotically and, at worst, sit lifelessly, staring blankly at a newspaper, phone, etc. I do not want to downplay the usefulness of this type of representation for the purposes of appeasing competition jurors or creating better client relations, but these are the elements of the architectural fly-through that invariably derail the representation of a speculative project as the architectural performances are lost. Aerial shots should remain as still renderings, axonometric drawings, or some form of orthographic projection. These views are solely concerned with formal qualities and surrounding context of a project and will never be experienced by the user, engendering a false sense of reality.

People have intentional destinations, a varying pace at which they walk and can only experience a space as restricted by gravity. An effective film about a speculative project will be highly curated, framing specific views of architectural qualities, which will impress intentional affect on its viewer for maximum internalization and performative experiences.

For my final film, I concluded that in order to use the screen as a medium 32

to represent Architecture, all scenes should be filmed or animated, in a way in which people actually experience space and time with the constraints of gravity at realistic heights and angles of peripheral vision, consistent with the extents of the human eye. Filmic techniques such as camera shots, camera angle, camera motion, framing and focus, along with tropes that create a sense of familiarity and/or distraction, force the viewer to be drawn into the medium of representation. In our quotidian experiences, Architecture becomes background to the events we take part in, unless, of course, it is our intention to experience a work of Architecture. Because of this, it is also of interest, but not necessary, to have a narrative that can allow the viewer to make an emotional connection to the film and allow the Architecture and its performances to be present while simultaneously existing in the background. We must resist using all the tools and techniques that are available to the filmmaker because the architectural performance may then become ambiguous. Where the tracking shot, the pan, or the first person point of view allows the viewer to imagine themselves in the space being observed, or put themselves in the shoes of the person being tracked, the Birds-eye view, the ultra-wide screen, and any perspective distortion techniques, eg. the dolly shot, a zoom, or arc shot, are cinematic techniques that endeavor to heighten the drama or the tension of a specific scene and are not realistic ways in which we experience a space.

With the birds-eye fly-through, the architectural performance becomes more ambiguous if the totality of the project can be viewed. Caution must be taken when producing a film as representation for an architectural project. Therefore, one must be extremely critical when selecting the medium for architectural representation, and thoughtful when selecting the type of media in which it is presented.

With that being said, how do we communicate conceptual ideas and in which medium is it best to present them? In academia, we create mediumsized models and use the medium of printed renderings and orthographic projections pinned to a board for critique. But to reach the masses, social media has become a dominant force in the spread of architectural ideas, representation, speculative and finished projects, and will continue to capture the attention of the masses due to its availability. Advancing the discipline should be the goal when challenging or adopting any new medium of architectural representation, though sadly the current trend is to create click-bait, watering down of Architecture to a meaningless object.

Architectural formalism has been transformed into Architecture as object rather than a series of qualities with relationships, theoretical endeavors, 33

and context. Media killed the zeitgeist. Most methods of representation that the Instatecture (Architecture made specifically for or relating to Instagram) world is concerned with is an oblique perspective or a privileged view drawn to grab attention for one moment. Typically, the performative qualities of Architecture are lost to these soulless renderings. Great works of Architecture become reduced to an image that evokes an impulse to like the medium over what is being represented.

However, there are certain exceptions in some social media posts, such as live feeds and videos in works of Architecture, or architectural exhibitions, where the content’s creator gets lucky and captures the essence of a space.

This success is typically attributed to the person filming, holding the camera at eye level. As the advancements in animation rendering improve through updates in technology such as VR and AR, there is an effort to represent works of Architecture in real-time through the individual lenses. Social Media has given rise to the Instatecture world where content can now be streamed immediately to a mobile device. This medium is another tool that requires specific techniques in order for it to become a contribution to the discipline of Architecture. Just as film has been an initiated form of architectural representation, medium forms of media can play a role in the future. Consequently, as architectural publications seem to be submitting to the annals of irrelevancy, new digital forms of media are on the rise.

The question of “How can you immerse yourself into a work of architecture that is yet to exist?” must be at the forefront of the advancement of any convention. After all, isn’t the point of Architecture to invent affect and heighten spatial awareness through sensation? The medium of architectural representation must not lack disciplinary specificity or choreography through appropriate techniques, otherwise it will lack quality. Yet there still is hope for the next generation of architectural representation. For technologies such as film, virtual reality, and augmented reality to become useful as forms of architectural representation, further refinement of the techniques used by Architects must be realized and adopted by the discipline.

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AUTOGRAPH:

The Market Value of Immaterial Goods Sam Bonnell-Kangas The distinguished visiting professor(s) at a given school of architecture is granted the honor of a prestigious title, the chance to engage with the students of the university, and their choice of coffee from the nearest café.

In seminar-style meetings or workshop classes, students enjoy the opportunity to collaborate and speak with prominent Architects, who’s projects have often filled precedent studies throughout their education. The students’ reaction to the injection of these noteworthy Architects into their daily lives is varied, ranging from blank stares to fervent fandom for the Architects obscure, forgotten projects. After the initial awe, the students then have a desperate need for the Architects autograph in their personal copy of said Architect’s selected, written works, often opened for the first time moments before the pen inks it’s immaterial but valuable stroke.

The autograph still holds relative cultural currency in the age of vast digital progression. It indicates greater importance, an

increased level of authenticity, and of course, acts as proof of the student’s face-to-face interaction with this prominent figure. This is all to say that the act of obtaining an autograph materializes the immaterial, a societallyconstructed value of relevancy.

Autographs, in general, have become such a commodity that a niche discipline has emerged, allowing for only the most wellversed eye the ability to confirm an authentic autograph with its associated author from that of a false scribe.

The market value of the autograph is a fluctuating system that depends on the frequency of signature, the item it is inscribed upon and, most importantly, the person signing. But, beyond the monetary value, the autograph carries with it a strong connection to the inherent scribe. The autograph has a human market value. This means the item and signature itself have become eternally connected to the societal value of the person signing, which in turn is largely dictated 36 36

by public perception. This representation, like a stock’s value in the broader, global market, is directly correlated with perceived and/or tangible principle of the given object. Therefore, the more infamous the figure (Architect) becomes, the higher the human market value will increase. This system is a carefully balanced economy that could turn on the collector over the course of a single negative news story; think Richard Meier.

As a relevant example, the book titled House is a House is a House is a House is a House, by “well known” architect duo Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, currently sells online for $37 (unautographed). Despite their presence as a successful LA-based architectural firm, key academic members of the GSD at Harvard, distinguished Baumer Visiting Professors at the Knowlton School of Architecture, as well as various other academic positions all over the world, I can only assume their pinnacle piece on personal works up to this point will slowly depreciate from its original price due to a multitude of reasons. But as a result of generally positive public perception, their book will continue to retain, at the very least, a minimum level of marketplace and archi-societal value.

However, if that same book is

signed with a simple momento of the week spent at KSA during the Baumer Seminar, with an inscription such as “Keep up the great work” or “Good luck on the rest of the semester,” the published artifact will then carry an additional sense of immaterial value. The now autographed book transforms into a metaphorical extension of the architectural pair, forever correlated to their societal standing. If one is to imagine this scenario, taken to its ideological extreme, it would not be so absurd to predict that an individual could collect enough autographs to become something like a majority shareholder in another’s public image; my personal experience with Johnston Marklee comes to mind. Along this path of linear thinking, the claim could be made that if the autographers were to harm the value of their social standing, the autograph collector would be drastically affected by this negative depreciation. The mark left by a swift stroke of ink, a seemingly valueless exchange, lasts but a minute duration. But in actuality, this symbolic and representational act has now entered the market of societal and immaterial value. However, I did not get their autograph because I forgot my book.

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Architecture in the Age of Remote Sensing I n C o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h S t e p h e n Tu r k January 24th, 2020

In order of appearance: To m M a h o n e y ( T M ) G r a d u a t e S t u d e n t , O n e : Tw e l v e E d i t o r S t e p h e n Tu r k ( S T ) P r o f e s s o r , K n o w l t o n S c h o o l Evan Schlenk (ES) Graduate Student Nour Al-Qarra (NA) Graduate Student A l e a h We s t f a l l ( AW ) G r a d u a t e S t u d e n t

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TM: Architecture finds itself in what appears to be a unique moment in time.

There are many groups and forces pushing and pulling against one another in terms of what the discipline should be, how it is to be defined, its perception both internally and externally, and, perhaps most importantly, its situation within society, as a whole, and where that might lead all of us moving forward.

And what I find so interesting about your area of focus, Stephen, is that you seem to have predicted this sort of eventual paradigm shift within the discipline, meaning that there would be an inevitable reevaluation of the Architect’s standard “tool kit.” And when I say that this is a unique time for the architectural discipline, I mean in the way in which changes are occuring at a rate that the world has never experienced previously.

Hand drawing and physical, laborious fabrication fades out as the use of digitalization, automation, and virtual reality grows exponentially.

The dissemination of information occurs at a rate unseen before, and alternative platforms for idea-creation and sharing now exist that render the institutions of print media and academia not nearly as critical as they once were. That all being said, this creates an opportunity to redefine what standards are to be inherent to Architects and how we all might move forward for a more progressive future.

Now, Stephen, your work, from what I can tell, largely focuses on the idea that the scale of Architecture has permanently enlarged, and through digital means, we now have tools, such as Google Earth, and other GPS-based software, to begin designing with these new tools at hand.

ST: Oh yes, I would say that is true, but it is a relatively recent interest, maybe over the past eight years or so. In terms of the period that you were speaking of, over the course of twenty years, I certainly developed an interest in the interrelationship of representational systems and Architecture as such, but in a very broad sense. I’m probably one of the last people that was completely taught by hand, so I’ve seen this transition first hand. Thirty-five years ago, obviously there were computers, but they were primarily for programming, and we just used them to create very primitive forms. Over this time, I did see their use in academia grow, but the long-term digital transformation has been very interesting to watch evolve throughout time. However, my interest in representation goes back much further than that. I became very interested in every sort of emergent mode 41

of technology and how it has affected the discipline. I then began to look at tools such as Google Earth and computer gaming.

Therefore, my overarching interest has been based in popular modes of architectural “tools.” For instance, computer gaming or Google Earth are things everyday people use all the time. In the beginning, these were not considered disciplinary tools at all. They were just modes of popular representation. And yet I found them to be incredibly architectural in a way that was somehow parallel to the Architecture of the time. And indeed I have a very long-term project where I have decoded computer games’ mazes and, in a sense, compared them to low architectural production. Therefore, they were created with no pretensions of producing architectural space but were purely for entertainment purposes.

Nevertheless, there is this weird parallel relationship to high architecture production or disciplinarity production that I became fascinated with. They raise questions of relationships to symmetry, part-to-whole, and the sort of logical assembly of sequences.

So in computer gaming, objects or circumstances are aggregated in a very strange way that I found to be both quite fascinating, simply as spaces, but also as an implication of what Architecture means to the notion of the subjects and their inherent essence of subjectness in relationship to space. But over time, I turned the focus to Google Earth, as you well know.

Subjects are now able to view Architecture and the entire world in a matter of seconds through these new tools. And from that, there’s this kind of amazing fluidity and ease by which this occurs in our contemporary age of Architecture. Now the world itself is readily available to every person.

Therefore, the average person may use it for very pragmatic, straightforward reasons. I like the computer gaming aspect because it potentially changes the way we previously thought of architectural tools and how they might best be implemented for new lenses of viewing and creation. So not only do they create new works in and of itself, but reimagines the actual organizational structure of the subject to its adjacent, built environment.

So the subject of my current Thesis studio has been to question all of these notions pertaining to very old problems within Architecture, specifically about its ability to image make. But this also brings up the notion of the Figure to the Field. Through all of this technological separation between Architecture and the individual user, the lowest common denominator 42

becomes the pixel, a relatively low resolution of viewing the world through tools, such as Google Earth, when magnified to its greatest possible extent.

So when viewing figures in a field, through the pixelated Google Earth lense, the notion of and relationship to the ground becomes extremely important.

This then became a fascination and interest of mine.

TM: The idea of the ground makes me think of some of your work from the early 2000’s that I’ve seen through various platforms, and it appears as if there are consistent tropes of occupiable, sectional ground. It often calls to mind, for me, work such as Agadir. And I’ve heard you speak previously on the built environment’s relationship to the ground through Google Earth or notions of extruding the ground to be able to provide sectional quality for occupation. So what has developed or transpired that allows one to evolve from looking at Koolhaas and projects like Agadir to this very specific set of tools that you are currently interested in, like pixelated maps being the starting point for a design studio? The theme of topographical manipulation as a means of designing built objects appears central to not only last year’s thesis group but also the current class, which is looking at pixels, maps, and various filters, all for viewing the Earth through a new lens.

ST: This is a really interesting question. You bring up Agadir; I do have a very long term interest in Koolhaas, which might seem surprising given the nature of the images of the studio. I also have a very strong interest, curiously, in strong figuration that occurs in Koolhaas, but this interest is in some sense to understand that idea of figuration relative to contemporary notions of the groundness, reevaluated based on something like Google Earth, which brings into question the legibility of the strong figure. So I’m simultaneously, and maybe paradoxically, interested in strong figures and the way in which they read but also how they infiltrate the ground. So the studios have looked at the ideas of image processing, specifically photoshop that uses filtering technology to process pixels and think about the way in which figuration can still be produced. But through this tool of filtering and pixelization, this somehow allows the figure to still be read but ultimately blurs it, particularly in the relationship to the edge. How is its boundary or its envelope, in its relationship to the world, affected? I simultaneously don’t believe that the Architecture just disappears in this new technological regime, but, nevertheless, I think it is affected, and its idea of strong 43

figuration is additionally impacted by this notion.

This graduate class, in general, is investigating the notion of presence.

Our studio, which is called Architecture in the Age of Remote Sensing, is related to this idea of presence in relationship to the fact that it may be used as a tool for figural recognition. You can identify that something is there and that something is conceptually a figure, whether it is a concept or, in actuality, sort of an image. So the studio looks at how you detect that or how do you determine what is the boundary of Architecture or what is its envelope and how is that related to the world. And more importantly, how is it reevalutated given the fluidity in which one could look at any object at any kind of scale or, equally, as an idea that the world is a singularity.

Traditionally Architecture has emphasised its presence; that’s been its main modus operandi for millennia. It is a symbol and it is a thing, in the world.

And that is obviously registered against the earth as a ground, as a total ground. I think given this new technology, it is an interesting moment we are in.

TM: When considering the work from these Thesis studios that you mention, I see a very specific process in Rhino everyone in that class went through to produce their final images. I was wondering how or why the specific types of push/pull or boolean operations were chosen as the means and methods of these particular projects?

ST: Yes, that’s a good question because there could be many processes that fall out of this given system, but it was our attempt to find a sort of translation between the idea of the image effects that occur in Google Earth and the notion of its conversion to three dimensional arguments. So we used a combination of photoshop filtering, like I suggested, and the ‘heightfield’ command in Rhino, which basically makes a distributed 2.5D translation of the image file. Those were then manipulated to produce spatial or volumetric arguments. I believe it was really just a way to use the available tools to make an analog between the technology in Google Earth and the proccessies of Architecture. Now, Google Earth does in fact use heightfields in terms of the way it maps the world and can then allow those moments of ground manipulation to be brought into the discipline and used as a tool within a program we utilize everyday, like Rhino and Photoshop. However, I 44

don’t know if it’s necessarily a perfect analog, but it was an available analog that we could begin to study the interrelationship between those two. But yes that was propagated through many people. This year, specifically, I am asking them to develop their own method, along this same line of thinking.

So that could be one of the techniques they use, but they could invent their own method. I really do believe the method is very much related to the idea.

So hopefully we’ll have a broader set of spatial experiments and ideas with this particular group of experimentation.

But I also wanted to touch on something you said earlier. You mentioned that things are accelerating, in terms of technology and transformation.

And I think that is true, and I also think that people have access to images, including architectural ones, more than ever, whether it is through Google Earth, or Instagram, or whatever media platform. People go on trips, and they take pictures of things they see, the landscape, the buildings, etc. But they are mapping things by the way they pre-plan them in Google Earth.

So strangely, they are totally available to the populus at large. And we of course, as a discipline, use them too. This studio is looking at the potential ways in which that is active as a conceptual armature, potentially opening up the meaning and breakdown of the object to the world. While I’m not advocating that the Architecture is just filtered away into some noise. It’s actually interested in the liminal state in which you can recognize figuartion complexly, in a nuanced way, relative to the ground in which it occupies.

And yet somehow Google Earth is producing new effects in that way. The studio looks to study the aesthetic of these new occurrences and how they can potentially affect the buildings that the graduates are designing, in general. Each of them are taking different tacts on that. So my interest is a sort of a broadbase one, but they each have their own sub-interest where they are researching very specific things and teasing out a lot of implications that the technology might have for certain phenomena in Architecture. So as a collective we are researching this remote sensing idea as an analog of Google Earth or things like Google Earth. But they each have their own ideas which they can speak about…

TM: Then this is a good moment to transition to the specific works of the graduate students that are currently with us. I am interested to see how each person individually defines some of these same questions or notions that Stephen brings up but also how these issues related 45

to remote sensing find their way into the respective projects and the research that has preceded. That being said, I find it interesting that we, meaning the generation of current graduate students, did not get to see this technological shift that Stephen mentioned earlier about means and methods of working and creating. We, by and large, arrived at the beginning of a peak of digitalization, changing the Architectural discipline and the way in which it operates. So how is what you all are doing, now, to be interpreted for moving the discipline forward with new notions of representation and disciplinarity?

ES: We talked a lot about the idea of representation and especially using these filtering techniques and how the line is blurred between continual generation and representation. So personally I’m using a recursive filtering system to generate the blurred line between building and ground. A question I have for Stephen is how do you see the role of the designer or the Architect changing as we move forward, and how do you see agency or authorship changing as these techniques become stronger or more prevalent?

ST: I am very strongly interested in the role of the Architect. Unlike some people who research digital culture, I’m not an advocate that these things become procedural or that the role of the design intelligence of the Architect is somehow acquired through the computers. I am a very strong advocate that the role of the intentionality of the designer is very critical.

And so I see these as tools but that also sounds like, Evan, you just dismiss the argument, that the tool is just simply controlled by the intelligent author.

And I believe there’s a more complex relationship occurring between tools and the intentionality of the Architect author. There is an influence of the tool that produces certain ideas, like the way in which aesthetic phenomenon is organized or produced within that tool. But nethertheless the Architect guides them, and it chooses the effects, and those fit into a complex understanding of the cultural milieu in which the author is found.

Therefore, I am a very strong advocate of architectural disciplinarity, like you guys as authors, for example.

There are these transformations, but I think there were huge transformations in the past that we tend to gloss over. Over time, there 46

are all of these transformative ways to represent Architecture as an image, whether that be through printing, newspaper, computation, etc. So what’s happening here, to get back to Tom’s point that this is all accelerating, is that there have been moments where technology has seemed to accelerate rapidly. Each new generation has to come to terms with the technologies that are available, like new, circulated images, in whatever mode that may be for the time. I think this is part of a very long story. It does seem like it’s accelerating quickly, and there may be some truth to the idea that it is in fact very fast, now. But it is not unprecedented that these changes are occurring.

But for each moment Architects still retained their specific intentionality and didn’t lose their authorship in these previous transformations.

You know, I think, for instance, things that are being studied in the independent research group, which is led by Curtis Roth, are investigating notions of elsewhereness or distributed workflow. I know Curtis has interest in distributed networks, artificial intelligence, and, more specifically, the distribution of labor through people across the globe. This creates no singular place for working, therefore there are many authors in some sense that add together. But despite this tendency to disseminate, widely, there is still a role for the individual people who make up that network. And there is also the role of the audience that seems to be individuals to view whatever is produced by those systems. So I am not an advocate that AI, or other similar systems, are going to take over for us or something.

TM: With that being said, how does anyone else see this question of authorship within your own projects? We can potentially use these notions mentioned as tools and what would be your take on this question Evan brings up about authorship or Architecture within this changing landscape of culture?

NA: This investigation of the use of new tools to the architectural discipline is what adds to the authorship, in a sense, and what we’re doing with remote sensing is looking into detection. With my project, specifically, I am working with platforms that are able to detect figures within a given field. So we are also working through multiple scales, from the small, medium, large, and extra large, and even at the scale of the vast. Once we establish a unit that could later be multiplied, it would be useful to implement this “vaster” scale.

This scale would act like a project would act when used as a calibration 47

marker, in coherence with remote sensing technology. Again, with the use of tools like photoshop filters and tools they have certain attributes that could be extracted and applied to this type of Architecture, the usefulness of content aware pictures, for example, become very relevant. The efforts of the platform are magnified through these filters because they perform the act of clearing the background to establish a figure. I think the topics that we picked are deeply embedded in Architecture, discipline, history, culture and politics, even if they appear to merely be background entities at first glance.

For instance, platforms are deeply related to the origins of Architecture where the notions of “platforming” symbolize some of the earliest attempts to demarcate a certain civilization of gathering of like-minded individuals from the so-called “other.” Therefore, the platform, in a sense, became a way to establish boundaries and create precincts without the usage of walls while simultaneously defining a certain area for a specific function, performance or ritual. And this all began even before the use of masonry.

Just the act or the performance of leveling the ground can be traced back for the use within athletics, common gathering space, or something as specific as public speaking. My goal is to use the attributes that I extracted from my research for how the role of the platform has changed and what qualities it has, like rhythm and elevational quality, among other things. And then I want to see how I could use those remote sensing technologies, and how I could apply them in a way that I could get to utilize the platform for a nonconventional way but see what other ways we could deal with it.

AW: For my particular interest in remote sensing, I was fascinated with the depth that this view can create. So it is not just about road lines or property lines, or the “edge,” which Stephen mentioned. When a user is engaged with a satellite view, of a given program, scale can be quickly altered by zooming in and out. And when one is performing this act of scale manipulation, shadows tend to appear in relationship to the magnitude of the zoom that is applied. This can then give various notions of depth, allowing a sort of sharpness or softness change. Right now, this can all be utilized as a form of cataloging what is in fact present. Additionally, our class has discussed the origins of drawing, which can be traced back to the use of candle light and the shadows being cast onto caves, and that was then traced, which can also be interpreted as a form of cataloging. But as drawing technologies advanced, this catalogue was constantly experimented with. So at its root, I am interested in trying to shift from the catalog to a notion of how things 48

can be changed with what we are seeing through the depth of remote sensing.

TM: And from my outside perspective, it seems that in all of these projects there is a certain level of political acknowledgement. Aleah, yours specifically is called the Politics of Shadow and you reference The Politics of the Envelope

by Alejandro Zaera-Polo, which I thought was a great reference for the work you are laying out. But all of these notions seem political in one way or another. What are everyone’s thoughts on the socio-political aspects that are embedded in these projects? There is often an argument, especially within our particular graduate class, whether a relationship between Architecture and politics even exists. But for me, on a personal level, there is such a deeply ingrained overlap between Architecture, politics, and society, that one cannot simply separate these seemingly discrete disciplines, but rather they mutually coexist as a non-differentiable entity, firmly situated between human culture and historical context. So with that in mind, I have really enjoyed watching the individual aspects of politics manifest itself, blatantly, in each person’s thesis project.

AW: Yes, I would say politics in Architecture has played a large role for almost everyone. For me, my initial interest in the shadow was in dense, growing cities. That is to say a tall building casts long shadows on existing, smaller structures, which is politically and metaphorically loaded in and of itself.

But the shadow is rarely studied during the Architectural design process.

In fact, this is an automatic byproduct of the built environment. So that led me to try to figure out how to control the shadow and integrate it into the architectural form, as an integral step of my interventionary process.

This will hopefully conclude with the shadow and the Architecture being considered as a singular entity, rather than an inherent byproduct of little thought or planning.

NA: In my project, the politics of the platform serves as a tool for grouping “things.” And if you trace back to the Acropolis, this sort of has that attribute of prominence or hierarchy. Like the Acropolis or Zigurates, the elevation has to do with a certain degree of hierarchy, and when it comes to this notion, it is revealed that there is always a play towards power. And I think 49

that this is embedded in the politics of all of our architectural designs.

TM: I found the platform very interesting because this is something I am interested in for my thesis project as well, but also because the idea of the platform, to me, inherently relates to structures of power and hierarchy. For my personal research, I reference various mid-century Italian Architectural responses to plays of power such as Fascist regimes, among other things.

In a more contemporary sense, I have looked a lot at works like D’Hooghe’s Liberal Monument, Pier Aruelli’s writings, and many others that are working mostly out of Europe.

NA: Yes, the Liberal Monument was a source that I too am interested in and certainly played a role in this contemporary notion of the platform.

TM: That being said, what’s interesting about the politics of a so-called platform, or the act of raising up a specifically-defined level, to get back to Stephen’s original point of a strong figuration, creates a clearly delineated border.

Now, granted, this can also be read as a political wrong-doing. A tightly defined border often carries the connotation of denying access to a specific group of people or ideology. But yet the way in which D’Hooghe lays out his argument is that the given platform, or figure, actually allows for an agonistic juxtaposition of contradicting parts which can now be in conversation with one another on this newly created “ground.” Nour, was this something that you also were consciously aware of when choosing to design within and around the concept of platform creation?

NA: Yes, that is correct. I was also looking at works by Superstudio and Archizoom, and, specifically, Continuous Monument. But when considering a piece of Architectural design, such as Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon, it is essentially a series of platforms, which I interpret to be a direct response on the current status of the political state within society.

ES: Similarly, I became interested in the politics embedded in Architecture through strong figuration or separation because of this idea of a proving 50

ground appearing a certain way in Google Earth and what that could mean when viewed through remote sensing technology. These are huge complexes measured in square miles rather than square feet, like a typical building would be. And as I progressed through this research, it became very apparent how critical economic tendencies are related to the proving ground and how privacy can come into play where companies are trying to develop new technologies, often in secret. These complexes allow them to hide themselves from the outside world, except in the case of the satellite photograph. So I am beginning to develop a building, at the scale of one of these complexes, that allows engineers and researchers to develop new technologies for the automobile, still in secret from the outside world and their competitors but simultaneously hidden from above as well. It is attempting to completely hide itself from easy recognition. This might be considered as the anti-figure.

TM: I find that to be a fascinating avenue in which to focus your research around, particularly in our day-and-age of total transparency; you are after an architectural image of complete illegibility. This can certainly begin a conversation about ethics. Is it ethical to engender a type of complete opaqueness from the outside world when society-at-large clammers for more transparent action from major corporations? The technological advancements we have discussed and through the lense of total transparency that social media, cellphones, etc allow for, is that type of Architecture socially ethical? And perhaps an alternative model, which you are proposing, might provide unanticipated benefits. This could all be questions you discover answers to throughout your thesis research. But to dive into a debate on ethics seems to be a topic for another conversation...

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THE META DISCIPLINE Zachary Slonsky

As we have come to find out, designing a building can be a woefully complicated endeavor.

From the site strategy to the material sourcing in the construction schematics, large forces are whittled down to a level of clinical detail. This complexity is managed by the architect through their particular brand of systematic design: ideas are bracketed within one another, using the context of previous decisions as justification for proceeding decisions. This process posits the building as a spatial contingency. The door exists because of the wall, the wall exists because of the room, the room exists because of the program, or a formal parti, etcetera, etcetera. Everything is based upon the logic of the spatial operation from the next adjacent scale. The spoofs of this activity litter our academic projects, as seen in the

imaginary paperwork cache of Mr. and Mrs. Frank’s divorce attorney, the couple responsible for funding Peter Eisenman’s House VI. “You see, everything was going great between us until Peter-excuse me, Peter’s ‘system’-decided we had to sleep in separate beds… 3 feet apart from one another. I just couldn’t stand the tension.”

As we balance more logic on the footing of proceeding logics, the decision-making process becomes sequitur: less like an Athena-fromthe-head-of-Zeus situation, more like a fill-in-the-blank. These systems take on a mind of their own, as they ultimately converge upon an aesthetic product we know as a building. While this building postures as the sole commodity of the architectural 54

process, it is not that which is being bought, sold, and traded within the discipline of architecture. In many ways, buildings are more so the commodity of real estate.

The commodity at play within the discipline of architecture is that of the system, the background logics, the subjectivity, the logistics behind the aesthetic. In our reviews, the presenter and juror compete and collaborate to define the nature of this commodity by juxtaposing the words, drawings, and models, to search for continuities between representations. Our discipline upholds a feedback loop between the construction of systems and the appraisal of them. In an economy increasingly governed by (bureaucratic, algorithmic, financial, ... ) systems, this pedagogical exercise cultivates agency for the thoughtful production of new realities.

In philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s cornerstone essay The Medium is the Message, care is taken to note the dialectic between mediums (such as television, electricity, the printing press) and content (correspondingly: cartoons, light, newspapers). Content is always a medium for further content, and mediums are always the content of other mediums. While cartoons may be the content of a television 55

set, cartoons can also be the medium by which Teen Titans can be the content of. Since cartoons also exist as a cultural medium, another feedback loop with shifting conventions and loose boundaries, sustained as a practice by the content filtered through it.

The same holds true for the plot, characterization, and animation style that unfolds within Teen Titans. Aesthetic conventions and narrative logics produce a medium structure by which each episode can unfold. This systematization can be carried out to the minutiae of the illustration techniques, drawing a hierarchical connection between the placement of a pixel and the coal burned to produce the electricity that flows through it.

It can be seen then that systems too, are mediums. A design logic is the medium by which the contents of landscape and building manifest. It is the content of a grander-scale medium, a critical turn toward subjectivity itself is prompted. Michel Foucault handles this transition in Discipline and Punish when explicating the two fold nature of word discipline.

Foucault describes discipline as a technology, a hierarchical positioning of power relationships where one’s positionality is upheld both by their subjugation and the subjugation they enact upon those

beneath them. In his words,

they must frequently consider relationships between the programmatic usage of space, and the socio-psychological impacts.

Here, the built environment is viewed as a medium for social content. Terragni’s Casa Del Fascio was not built independent of the political psychologies who inhabited and beheld it.

Japanese familial structures are not independent of their conventions around domestic space-making. Law enforcement is not independent of redlined urbanisms. Foucault cites the darker side of this connection, using Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon to describe the disciplinary mechanism of hierarchical surveillance through an architectural representation.

Social fabrication does not occur independent of spatial fabrication, and this connection forces the architect to consider the cultural implications of made space.

“Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power, which because of its own excess can pride itself on its omnipotence; it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy. These are humble modalities, minor procedures, as compared with the majestic rituals of sovereignty or the great apparatuses of the state. [emphasis added] As we participate in a culture driven by the production of objects (be they writings, drawings, models, lectures, …), the ‘minor procedures’ of our exercise produce a particular type of individual. This is, after all, what it means to get an education in the first place. How these individuals become content extending from the grander-medium of academic bureaucracy can be studied as an imprint of what the discipline of architecture even means; much in the same way that our experiences, modalities, and position shape the constitutions of our subjectivities.

If we posit this discipline as a system that produces individuals with a streak of system-criticality, then the architect is not only a content-designer with a concern for spatial sociology, but also a meta-theoretician capable of transcending traditional disciplinary restraints. With a practice in conceptualizing the systems that influence their

This is not a foreign concept to the architect, for in their practice 56

productions, the architect can situate themselves within a greater hierarchy of power relationships.

This becomes necessary if architecture wants to escape designation as solely a reformist practice--locally lessening the impact of larger forces; making a building less environmentally damaging, making institutions less elitist, making urbanism less segregated. When our dreams of change amount to Rem Koolhaas supposedly making wealthy shoppers uncomfortable within his Prada Epicenter design by staging them as exhibitionists, under the critical gaze of those sitting on the opposing big stairs, are we not just using politics as a gimmick? Does it not become increasingly difficult to brand OMA as a subversive trojan horse when backdropped against the several dozen other Prada collaborations? If we want to imagine a discipline that can do more than just virtue signal change to quotidian class, race, and environmental narratives, we have to move past indulging solely in the architectural content that our subjective mediums produce, and turn a critical eye to the mediums that subsume our agency and produce us. Here, we can rely on the skills our discipline disciplines: a care toward social configurations, a literacy for systems, a sense of scale, and the design tools 57

to imagine alternatives. We have to take a turn toward the meta, critiquing ourselves and the system economies we are exchanged within.

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ONE:TWELVE | Issue 15 Discipline. Convention.

Submissions collected spring 2020 | Published spring 2021 One:Twelve is produced by a small group of Undergraduate and Graduate students at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University and is typically published annually.

For inquiries, please contact us at www.onetwelvejournal.net 275 West Woodruff Avenue Columbus, OH 43210

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