One is always crossing the horizon, yet it always remains distant. In this line where sky meets earth, objects cease to exist... A horizon is something else other than a horizon; it is closedness in openness, it is an enchanted region where down is up. Space can be approached, but time is far away. Time is devoid of objects when one displaces all destinations. — Robert Smithson Cover Image / Das Riesengebirge, Caspar David Friedrich, 1835.
Paprika! Vol. 3, Issue 06: Horizon November 2, 2017
The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com. To read Paprika! online, please visit our website, yalepaprika.com. AZZA ABOUALAM (M.Arch. I, 2018) is sustaining the 4th floor with a bottomless bowl of Halloween candy. Come by, say hello, and sneak a sweet treat!
In other news: RICHARD DEFLUMERI makes pies. Really good pumpkin pies.
10/30 If you have any interest in visiting the local haunted house, “Fright Haven,” expect more scares and spatial variety per square foot than any building designed by an architect.
10/28 The weekend after MID-REVIEWS saw an eerily deserted Rudolph Hall. The only late night activity? The EISENMAN STUDIO, still searching for lateness.
10/27 For a Halloween party which may or may not have happened, RON OSTEZAN (M.Arch. I, 2018) may or may not have shaved his mustache. Ranging in rare-ness and scare-ness from the do-nothing’s, the lit one-prop to full eccentric makeovers, the mood was only soured by the Friday night date that discouraged the real zombies from attending. Candy to the organizers and kudos to the prisoners.
10/26 In what has evolved into a weekly ritual, PETER EISENMAN paused his Advanced Studio pin-up, sending students to fetch milk and Insomnia Cookies.
10/26 An Ode to Midterms, by MELISSA WEIGEL (M.Arch. I, 19): “Just because a stair is big, does not mean people will sit on it.” I had considered this stair for a week. I spun it around on two monitors and observed it in 3D printed plastic. It took, however, another’s eye to see that it was not the design or size of the stair, but the siting that would improve the project. Unlike first-year reviews, I now have the opportunity to re-examine and rework my project. After all the production of first year, having a true midterm this year was a gift.
10/25 At an event hosted by Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Dean DEBORAH BERKE spoke with TITUS KAPHAR (MFA, ‘06) about their under-construction “Postmasters” community arts center. Adaptive reuse projects occupy a sliding scale between the reverent and irreverent, Berke remarked, where the architect’s unwitting collaborators are often the stodgiest of dead white men.
10/25 A group of students, through EQUALITY IN DESIGN, took 7th grade students from Conte West Hills Magnet School on a field trip to the Green to discuss spatial concepts. Since their social studies unit is focusing on Ancient Greece, the group talked about public spaces in ancient Athens and how those may have been essential to its democracy.
The Commissioners have requested more posters! (Current count: 4). In return, the School is requesting more email GIFs. (Current count: 0).
10/24 The RUDOLPH OPEN is in the thick of Round 2. Dukes of York BENJI RUBENSTEIN and MICHAEL LOYA (M.Arch. I/MBA 2019) are making another run for the cup after nearly clenching the finals last fall. The first year Post-Pro students have embraced the badminton tradition with enthusiasm. Will their comradery provide a home court advantage?
Contributors: NINO BOORNAZIAN, ALEJANDRO DURÁN, MATTHEW WAGSTAFFE, MELISSA WEIGEL (M.Arch. I, 2019), RON OSTEZAN, MEGHAN ROYSTER (M.Arch. I, 2018), JACK HANLY, MAIA SIMON (MED, 2020)
On the Ground
And welcome to Rudolph Hall.
Such was the conceptual inquiry we set out on in editing this fold. In fact, what began as a pursuit of the sublime developed into a collection of articles that investigate much broader conceptualizations of horizon(s) in architecture than we had foreseen, forming a lively issue that we enthusiastically offer. We hereby present our topic twofold: to promote and to question its conceptual value, and to discuss what is, so to say, on the architectural horizon. This latter focus seems especially apt for an issue published on the occasion of our school’s Open House. With that in mind, be sure to check out the accompanying bulletin this week for students’ takes on the Yale School of Architecture.
In certain belief systems there exists a point of connection between heaven and earth known as the axis mundi; in our current capitalist belief system, each new “supertall” building seeks to redefine this cosmic axis. The moment one steps out of the elevator onto the eighty-fifth floor, one’s relationship with the horizon is altered. Architecture has this capacity.
What role does the horizon play in architectural discourse and building today? If one of the primary projects in architecture has long been the establishment of a ground or a new relationship to the ground, overlooked is the corollary that architecture controls the cusp where ground meets sky. By occupying the sky and the ground at once, a building demonstrates the mutability of this edge.
Delineated by that which soars above and swims below, the margin between earth and sky is an intensely spatial subject. From the fixed line relied upon in celestial navigation to the liminal zone of twilight, the horizon serves as one of the primary modes by which we, as humans, orient ourselves in the world. It is both factual and phenomenological. The horizon facilitates self-projection, which is why so often we associate it with the future. It constrains our perception of space and yet is vastness manifest.
Architects seem to never tire of bemoaning our discipline’s fade into irrelevance. But architecture is incapable of being irrelevant. Perhaps we have sleepwalked into impotency by not honing in on who our observers are. In the same article where he identified architecture’s “accidental audience,” Buck offered that “by engaging sensibilities other than traditional beauty and strategies beyond core architectural media, we can make our argument to a wider audience.” I would build
As disciplinarians, we exhibit varying degrees of success toward this end, even between projects. Bureau Spectacular’s proposal for MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program, for example, is a project that engages both architectural dialogue and the public in a way immediately relatable to both. The project, which proposes a collection of prefabricated pools scattered on the ground and suspended on a steel grid, takes advantage of a public event to mediate the line between academic investigation and public display. “Visitors do not need to know or care about our love for Cedric Price, Kisho Kurokawa, John Hejduk, or Yona Friedman,” says the project’s promotional video. While Price et al. frame the project’s conceptual investigation, its accessible and justwhimsical-enough architectural language would have allowed anyone to immediately engage with its spatial investigations.
Orli Hakanoğlu and Jeremy Jacinth’s review of the current Chicago Architecture Biennial in Paprika! Bulletin IV revealed the most recent and stinging example of architects’ negligence towards our broader audience. Who is the Biennial’s target audience? A public event displaying work by academics and practitioners to other academics and practitioners successfully alienated all three of those constituencies to one degree or another. One might say that the public may have left amused, but uninformed and perhaps unmoved. This may have been a moment to cogently and convincingly engage the public; instead, it seems a missed opportunity. Again, not every idea in architecture needs to be tailored toward public consumption, and maybe most of them shouldn’t be, but when the opportunities arise to interface with the public, it may be unwise to squander them.
Architecture doesn’t share this advantage. As Brennan Buck pointed out in Paprika! 3-04, Everyday, architecture’s audience is mostly “accidental,” and the public’s engagement with architecture is usually passive, or in a state of distraction. But unlike its audience, architecture—or design, more broadly—is not a passive discipline. Architecture is polemical. How architecture addresses audiences outside the echelons of academia needs to reflect this, even if the reactions we elicit may not be the ones we expect. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was poorly received the night of its premiere, but this calamitous presentation was an important event in the course of music history, contributing to the evolving relationship between audiences and polemical works of music.
But every musician need not be social visionary, a communicator, or even a performer; behind every premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall is a composer who, in the spirit of Babbitt’s essay, has spent his or her life studying and learning from the works of other artists. But symphonies like the LA Philharmonic and other performers provide an important connection between this private, intradisciplinary world and that of the public. Music has the advantage of spectacle: it demands a focused audience, be it an audience of one or of one thousand.
But the disciplines diverge here. Music is keenly aware of who its audiences are, and successful symphony orchestras—which one might call one of the most public practitioners of that discipline—go out of their way to calibrate themselves to and engage with their varied audiences. Just look at how the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which the New York Times recently called “America’s Most Important Orchestra,” straddles the multiple boundaries it encounters: the boundary between itself as an elite institution and as an agent of public good, between itself as a conservator of timeless works and as a brash innovator in the world of classical music. It’s both a cloistered entity residing within the walls of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and an activist on the streets and in the public venues of Los Angeles.
Art music, the kind studied, written, and performed at schools like Juilliard, Berklee College of Music, or the Yale School of Music, shares much in common with the architectural discipline. Each is inextricably linked to power and resource-rich institutions. Within both, myopic intellectual discourse shares space under the disciplinary umbrella with the canonical, the quotidian, and the vernacular. One might even argue that the disciplines are similar in that both rely on the senses as a starting point for their consumption: in one way or another, work in both disciplines communicates a set of values about something to somebody, intentionally or not.
Forty-five years later, in 1958, American composer Milton Babbitt would issue his famous rebuke of classical music’s audiences, polemically titled, “Who Cares if You Listen?” In the article, Babbitt argued that audiences of laypeople were no longer equipped to receive advanced musical works exploring concepts like integral serialism and aleatoric composition, just as they weren’t equipped to understand advanced concepts in physics or mathematics. Arguing for academic music’s retreat from public life, he wrote, “it is only proper that the university, which significantly has provided so many contemporary composers with their professional training and general education, should provide a home for the ‘complex,’ ‘difficult,’ and ‘problematical’ in music.”
Igor Stravinsky sat stunned backstage, looking out into the crowd. Before him was a calamitous scene: concert-goers from across Paris had packed the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to watch what would become one of the most momentous events in the history of music—the premiere of the Rite of Spring. As the heavily rhythmic, ritualistic ballet and music lurched forward, chaos broke out in the audience as the factional split between detractors and supporters of the performance quickly became evident. Stravinsky could only watch in shock as a fullblown riot consumed the hall. The reviews in the papers were merciless.
“Who Cares If You Listen?” Alejandro Durán / M.Arch. I, 2019
Issue Editors: Brian Cash & Luke Studebaker Graphic Designer: Yo-E Ryou Coordinating Editors: Amanda Iglesias & Julie Turgeon Publishers: Jeremy Jacinth and Nadeen Safa Web Editor: Seth Thompson
Editorial Statement Brian Cash & Luke Studebaker / M.Arch. I, 2019
It took some years and a lot of traveling in space and time. “Environment” seems more appropriate today to describe things without the burden of European traditions of landscape. The term
In your more recent research and writings, you have shifted away from the concept of landscape and toward what you’ve called a concept of environment. Can you talk about that shift in your thinking?
A Conversation with Alessandra Ponte Alessandra Ponte is a professor at the École d’architecture at the Université de Montréal. She has also taught at Princeton University, Cornell University, Pratt Institute, the ETH Zurich, and at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. She is the author of The House of Light and Entropy (AA Publications, 2014), a collection of essays on North American landscapes. On October 17, 2017, the Issue Editors spoke with Ponte over the phone. The following is an edited version of their conversation.
The act of surrendering to a reflective state where one is both fully present and completely lost is achievable through built space. We are capable of, and responsible for, creating environments that force occupants to think, question, and surrender to the unknown. The art of losing oneself can be a constructed conscious act, and architecture can be the tool. As Solnit argues, “Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
Yet, architecture as a practice is often equated with a desire to rationalize and to regulate the unfamiliar. The processes of sketching, diagramming, and measuring are all tools architects employ to master a site. Even the act of naming a “site” suggests a new understanding of it, transforming it from an unknown location into something knowable. In a discipline teaming with Type A personalities, it is no wonder that an “open door” has been shut on on so many possibilities for the unknown or the mysterious in the built environment.
It is the artist’s responsibility to open doors and invite the unknown. Through this work of exploration and questioning, humanity moves forward. Architecture can also achieve this dialectic between the constructed environment and the possibility of the unknown. Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute frames and rationalizes the horizon line, allowing the infinite abyss to be a part of daily contemplation. At Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the reflective surface of the wall suggests the unknowable loss of war. Visitors lose themselves to their reflections superimposed with the names of fallen soldiers.
This elusive condition began to be addressed by Renaissance painters in the 15th century. Figures were no longer solely depicted against flattened backdrops, but rather painters began to employ depth and atmospheric effect. With the invention of perspectival construction, the horizon line was given new importance as it became a tool for understanding three dimensional space. The lines converging toward a vanishing point on the horizon line rationalized the immediate setting, but it also allowed for the viewer to understand that a world lay beyond the constructed scene. In Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, Christ, the vanishing point of the painting, is framed by a window looking out toward the blue of the distance. This, the only depiction in the painting that hints at a world beyond the immediate scene of the supper, is the unknown of the horizon seeping into the otherwise sealed off scene.
The atmospheric effect of the blue distance symbolizes both the unknown and the unknowable. It can never be occupied. The horizon will remain untouched no matter how far you journey toward it.
To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. —Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The Blue at the Horizon: Leaving room for the unknown in Architecture Phoebe Harris / M.Arch. I, 2020
Do we care if they listen?
on this and say that we need to be mindful of the language we use, the opportunities we already posses, and the intention behind our communication. Ultimately, an idea’s value is tied into its ability to be received and internalized by others. Perhaps we could even say that in architecture, ideas must be catalyzed into actions, reactions, finished works, or advocacy. When architecture addresses its broader audience well, everyone stands to benefit. Things get built and ideas are spread. Perhaps even our visual language as designers should come into question. Outside of building and writing, drawing and object-making are our primary tools of communication. At what point do drawings and objects become too alien or incomprehensible to telegraph their ideas? Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was certainly alien to early-20thcentury Parisian audiences, but it has come to be recognized as a great work and is still performed publicly today. Who, outside of informed appreciators and studious classical musicians, has ever heard of Milton Babbitt? I dare say that even among most musicians, his essay is more well-known than his musical works. The difference is clear. While both composers were indifferent to the tastes of their audience, one composer chose outright to abandon any idea of addressing his audience through his work. If our ideas are to have potency, we must begin every project—written, drawn, built, modeled, or otherwise— by asking: who is our audience and where, when, and how are we speaking to them?
In that line of thought, your critique of the horizon in the Western aesthetic tradition would be that it doesn’t account for the process of territorialization by us and other animal and machine subjects.
I don’t know if the drone creates territory. I haven’t had time to think about that. What I think is that you cannot separate territory from the environment. And the environment that I conceive of—mainly through Uexküll, Sloterdijk, and others—is that animals and humans inhabit bubbles. Nonhumans and nonanimals also inhabit bubbles. Now, talking to you, I think machines do the same. They select from their surroundings certain things, and this is where they live, in these bubbles of selected signs. That’s the territory. This is the great message of Deleuze and Guattari: to think of the territory not just as produced by the state or power or a corporation, but to think of the territory as the production of the subject. We are all territorial. Think of when you go to a classroom, don’t you always sit at the same place around the table? This is my seat. That is territorialization. There is a great possibility in thinking that we constantly produce territorialization, especially if it becomes conscious, and not just unconscious territorialization. It can become a response to state territorialization.
Going off of the intimate nature of the drone in relation to the satellite and GIS, how is territory questioned or created by the drone?
Your cell phone operates off of satellites as well, and I bet that it’s your best friend. It’s mine, too, but I’m also aware that it can send information to anyone who wants it. I have no control over that. Like the iPhone, the drone functions because of satellites, but you still have agency over it. At the same time, it is also codified. You don’t have permission to go too high or fly over certain spaces. Invention is moving quickly around the use of drones. From what I understand a lot of landscape architects are fast-moving from GIS to drones. It’s producing a different type of landscape architecture. The scale is more intimate with a drone. In fact, the drone reintroduces the horizon for the spectator, which is familiar to us. To look out and over the horizon implies domination and appropriation, but these are human concerns and not machine concerns. The horizon is not a meaningful symbol for the drone, in terms of how it orients itself and functions.
The drone is a wanderer, which brings up the nomadic space that Deleuze and Guattari talk about, which you reference in your essay [“Journey to the North of Quebec”]. Is the drone’s spatial paradigm a nomadic space that is yet completely territorialized? Drones depend on satellites to navigate, so there is a tension between the ability to wander and the massive geospatial infrastructure supporting this.
In your emails you referred to my essay, “Journey to the North of Quebec,” where I write of electricity and the acoustic space theorized by [Marshall] McLuhan. This idea of acoustic space, the space of new media, comes from Inuit culture, which doesn’t have a horizon. I think that McLuhan could theorize media only because he was Canadian. Canadians have a huge problem with space. This is not a joke about the geography of Canada. Canada is on the margin, on the periphery. It has always been on the periphery of empires, a position that I like very much because you have a great perspective from the margins.
Right now, my students are going out to buy drones to use for studio. It’s very interesting what’s happening in landscape architecture. For years everybody was talking about infrastructure and systems. Why? Because everybody was working with GIS and satellite images. Now they work with drones, and what they see is completely different. It is a closer, oblique view that can see target-subjects more closely and in a different way than GIS—again, the horizon is not there. What is not yet theorized and could be another project is the notion of space. What is the space we are producing? Some people are recovering [Henri] Lefebvre and the production of space. That is not enough to explain or critique the world that we are mapping today, speaking of autonomous vehicles and the systems they use for navigation, which is not just a banal cartography of streets: it must map events and objects in motion. We depend on this cartography produced by the machine for the machine, but there are also alternative cartographies or countercartographies.
We half expected that. For us, the horizon is interesting because it takes part in a process of mapping in that it is a line marking a boundary. Through the horizon we see the territory already as a map. One of the gaps we see between your thinking and ours is the role of land. How does physical land factor into your thinking about environment and mapping?
Now I’m shifting again, and it’s a logical shift. After three years of studying mining in the arctic and subarctic of Canada, my new topic is architecture and information. This idea of technology and how to confront technology was already present in my shift from landscape to environment, but now it’s even more present. For the last four years, I’ve been teaching studio and doing research with my students. One of my students now is doing a thesis project around autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles mean mapping. New maps. The autonomous vehicle is creating a bidding war around mapping. This is extremely interesting because these are maps for machines, maps that are not directed toward humans. So, in all the things that are interesting to me right now, the horizon is not there. The horizon pertains to pictorial tradition, to perspectival construction, and not to what’s happening right now.
landscape comes from an aesthetic tradition, which is a very limited way of perceiving the world. Is it beautiful? Is it sublime? This is why environment is a lot more interesting. Especially the line of thinking I’ve been following from [Jakob] von Uexküll to [Peter] Sloterdijk—that each of us filters something from the environment that is of interest to us. It seems like a more interesting approach than the landscape approach. By the way, the landscape approach also implies a horizon, which is your topic. The environment—it’s doubtful that you can include a horizon in that.
On a much larger scale, one which encompasses not only architecture, but the globalized, Western early-21st-century society, we are further bounded by a general inability to imagine what lies beyond our capitalist political economy. It is, as philosopher Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, easier for us to imagine the end of the world—as evinced by the number of apocalypse-themed Hollywood films—than a noncapitalist one. As writer Ursula K. LeGuin noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” With multiple crises of climate change, rampant inequality, and violent nationalism looming, we find ourselves at a juncture where designing the location of castle turrets or the view out the prince’s dining hall is no longer enough.
But what of recognizing the horizon itself? Not the literal horizon, but horizons that symbolically surround our imagination? Given the over-specialization of knowledges in our age—which splits those who investigate space into compartmentalized disciplines like geography, planning, engineering, architecture, sociology, etc.—do we even lift our eyes from our field to inspect where the horizon lies?
To appreciate how our spatial understanding is delimited by the perspectival horizon, one must appreciate the difficulty of imagining the type of perception entailed in medieval European images, where the horizon was absent or rejected altogether. Or perhaps in medieval Islamic illustrations, Byzantine mosaics, or Japanese paintings beginning in the Heian period, exhibiting their distinctive type of detached, floating “axonometric” view. Through these examples, we understand that we cannot physically see beyond the horizon, and that our grasp of the world is inescapably bounded by the perceptive structures that frame our relation to it.
Certainly, it bounds our physical perception. So, too, does the horizon line in perspectival drawing form the basis of modern Western spatial understanding, and by extension bound its ontological outlook. This story of the individual-as-subject viewing objects on an infinite plane is well-rehearsed. It suffices to allude to the trajectory stretching from the painting The Ideal City attributed to Laurana—one of the earliest paintings to use strictly constructed perspectival projection to depict an architectural environment—to Heidegger’s essay, “The Age of the World Picture,” in which he identifies this logic culminating in a treatment of the whole world as an image detached from human observers—and beyond.
In Old English, the word for horizon was eaggemearc, or “eyemark,” meaning the limit of one’s view. Our modern word, however, derives from the Greek horizōn kyklos, “bounding circle,” from horizō, “to divide, bound, limit, separate,” and from oros, “boundary, landmark.” In other words, a boundary encircles us, delimiting the scope of what we are able to see. More importantly, however, that boundary also moves with us. By definition, we will never reach the horizon.
To draw in perspective, one begins with a horizon line. When constructing a view, we are taught that parallels converge at points on said line, off of which is based a realistic approximation of a scene. Just as it is primary in sketching, the horizon is primordial to our spatial perception as earth-bound beings. All orientation to our environment is made in relation to this horizon, which—in addition to separating ground from sky—fundamentally demarcates that which is “furthest.”
The Horizon Is the Limit Martin Man / M.Arch. I, 2019
Yes. The point is to be critical and to be responsible. Just to say the anthropocene is bad doesn’t go anywhere. It’s too abstract. You know, it helps to think straight without putting the burden of ethics in the wrong place.
And that can still be critical.
I would not rewrite anything, but I would add chapters. I’ve had discussions with other people who say that the essay in that book about desert testing and atomic bombs should have said something about the anthropocene. I don’t think you need the anthropocene, frankly. Not just because it’s fashionable, but because it comes with this burden of feeling guilty for being a human and for using technology. To be human means to be a technological being. It’s our nature, in other words. We cannot be technophobic. It’s very hard to escape this trap—capitalism is bad, the anthropocene is bad, technology is bad, and at the same time you embrace your iPhone. This is what I’m trying to overcome: too-easy reaction and too-easy criticism.
Perhaps those layers allow us to think about landscape today without the burden of the Western aesthetic tradition, as you say. Would you go back and revisit the subject matter of some your essays in your book [The House of Light and Entropy], say, on the desert landscape?
This is still a big question for me. I don’t have an answer. But it is like McLuhan and media—it’s not that one medium disappears. Everybody tells you that the book is disappearing. No way. It’s staying. I think the horizon is going to stay, in a way, but there are now more layers.
We’re definitely interested in moments when the horizon is not present, or obscured. The horizon remains for us, stubbornly, because it’s physical. Maybe this is just so rearguard, but how do you talk about architectural form within a project like yours that is investigating space and information? What are the implications for the actual buildings that we might build?
Yes. What’s the horizon for a machine? Or, let’s say, for a deer? Even the autonomous vehicle, it doesn’t orient itself to the horizon. Not at all. A drone is not oriented by the horizon. I hope I am being helpful. My point is not to destroy your idea. Actually, it’s thought provoking for me.
Buck concludes, “By engaging sensibilities other than traditional beauty and strategies beyond core architectural media, we can make our argument to a wider audience, even if it means doing so without the wall text.” We must make our arguments without wall text and our work must point to the worlds beyond museum walls.
By no means am I suggesting that models and drawings do not belong in museums or that they do not deserve to be discussed in ArtForum. Rather, I am objecting to the increasing commodification of intermediate realizations of architecture projects into the same distorted, unethical market that demands these captions to ease the cataloguing, appraisal, indexing, filing, valuation, trading, and measurement of these genius works.
The “paper” architecture of early OMA, for example, still points to the real world—it could plausibly be constructed. Even the more didactic paintings work through a project and set the terms for later designs. The telos of many of the Chicago projects is Instagram; they aim to become flattened from project into captioned image.
Brennan Buck’s article in Paprika! 3-04, “Architecture’s Accidental Audience,” touched on many of these points. While the article was excellent on the whole, in his discussion of the Tumblr art of The Jogging, he shows just how easy it is to subject visual culture to other registers of value, writing that “Some viewers reposted images, often ignoring the caption and erasing any trace of the origin of the image, fully removing its status as an art object.” Here, Buck mistakes the art market for art in general. Removing a caption might remove an image’s status as an art object, but cannot diminish in any way its status as art. To add a caption to Zaha Hadid’s paintings of architecture is to attempt to make them into art objects, to design a model specifically for the Chicago Architecture Biennial is an attempt to make an architecture object.
In the moment, the subjection of architectural tools and implements including drawings, renderings, and models to this type of codification seemed inappropriate, as if these works were being prepared for auction, measurements provided to ease collectors’ apportioning of wall space to various displays of artistic investment, separating what had been a means of achieving a built work from the understanding of a complete project. Treating architectural processwork as art objects is an undermining of architecture in general. However, this treatment is only growing more common, having dominated the Chicago Architecture Biennial with many of the models on display designed with the rooms of the Chicago Cultural Center in mind as the final site, rather than designed to point to future built conditions in the city beyond.
After the death of Zaha Hadid, ArtForum published a series of tributes to the late architect by peers and friends including Mark Wigley, Anthony Vidler, Daniel Libeskind, Nasser Rabbat, Frank Gehry, and Bernard Tschumi. These stirring passages were illustrated by Hadid’s paintings of her projects such as the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong. Each was accompanied by a standard art market-inflected caption. For example, “Overall Isometric—Day View, 1983, acrylic on paper, 52x72½.”
Sites Beyond Instagram AJ Artemel / M.Arch. I, 2014 Director of Communications, Yale School of Architecture
Looking beyond to a world that dismantles our current political economy may require us to organize a fundamental break in the order of abandoning representational perspectives and horizons. This is an endeavor that begins now in school, as well as in professional practice. We should be thinking and designing the world that lies beyond our current horizons, not just reproducing what we see within current boundaries.
Facing our own second-year, core design studio projects, where we are currently designing food-business incubators within a ferry terminal, how do we look simultaneously at the layout of a kitchen and what it means to design for an enterprise like Foodworks, one of many in the so-called “sharing economy,” such as Uber, Airbnb, and WeWork? Companies which are birthed by neoliberal market logics; which attack social protections and offload risk to workers; which further reinforce economized subjectivities that render every aspect of life a competition between individuals; which ultimately render our profession undervalued and our very lives economized, precarious, and monadic; which destroy the commons, widen class inequalities, and deprive people of healthcare, food, or education. Once we see the bounding horizons around us and find them inadequate, we may not only start to imagine otherwise, but move to shift what we can see.
Paprika! Vol. 3, Issue 06: Horizon November 2, 2017 Exquisite Mission Statement
As a prime institution • in an increasingly complex world • we do not yet have apparent answers • The intention of the Yale School of Architecture • is to foster • a broad and informed understanding of architecture and its related disciplines • We work at the corner of Chapel and York Streets • and speculate • on • the wills, fantasies, and foibles of a society • largely fueled by private capital • Rudolph Hall provides an arena for healthy • dogmatic • irreverence • Being critical, it seems • does not impose one single design philosophy • The architect is more than • what is right and wrong • Architects can, or should, claim the greatest ownership • of • the conditions we construct, and those who architecture has historically failed to adequately serve • We • focus our lens on • teams of collaborators willing to share and exchange ideas • and • the students’ future as both practitioners and leaders who can expand architecture beyond: “ • highest caliber • ” • and • rhetorical appliqué • and • pluralism.
—Sutured together from the student-written YSoA mission statements published in this week’s Paprika! Bulletin. yalepaprika.com/fold/bulletin-v/