Paprika Year in Review, 2015-2016 by PAPRIKA!

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Year in Review

2015-2016

Paprika! Year in Review

2015-2016

Parallel Projections: A New Model JOHN KLEINSCHMIDT (MArch ‘16)

Interview: Faris Zaher, CEO of Yamsafer DIMA SRROUJI (MArch ‘16), Sarah Kasper (MArch ‘16), and Charlotte Algie (MArch ‘16)

Agile Architecture ERIC ROGERS (M.E.D. ’15)

Response to Faris PIER VITTORIO AURELI

Mirror, Mirror PREETI TALWAI (M.E.D. ’16)

Leveraging Residue: It Takes a Bit of Practice MADDY SEMBLER (MArch ’16)

On Hip-Hop WESLEY HIATT (MArch ‘17)

Thin Things or Possibly A Building MATTHEW BOHNE (MArch ‘17)

Naked in Alaska DORIAN BOOTH (MArch ’16) and NICOLAS KEMPER (MArch ’16)

On Dancing and Rowing: Reprise on Peter Eisenman CHARLOTTE ALGIE (MArch ’16)

Book Review— Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry ANDY STERNAD (M. Arch ’16)

DeNatured DIMITRI BRAND (MArch ’18), JAMES COLEMAN (MArch ’18) and JONATHAN MOLLOY (MArch ’18)

Architecture’s Attrition Problem: Interview, Susan Surface CAT GARCIA-MENOCAL (MArch ‘16)

Interview with Robert A.M. Stern SAMANTHA JAFF (MArch ’16) and TIM ALTENHOF (Ph.D. ’17)

The Value of Good Practice: Interview with Cesar Pelli of Pelli Clarke Pelli LUKE ANDERSON (MArch ’16)

Chum Pipies- The Musical BRENDAN BASHIN-SULLIVAN (B.A. ’15)

Letter from the editors Like the carpet after which it is named -- strewn with bits of chipboard, empty coffee cups, and broken badminton birdies -Paprika! can get messy. A reflection of the diverse and sometimes contentious voices at our school and within the field, the publication embraces an egalitarian vision for discourse which invites all interests and opinions to be printed. As Paprika’s second year in print comes to a close, we reflect on notable pieces from the last twenty issues, as well as the events, lectures, and conversations that most affected our student body. In keeping with Paprika’s goal of open dialogue, the pieces included in this book were selected with the recommendations and insight of the students who took on the task of editing an issue. In a video produced for Paprika’s kickstarter campaign last fall, Nicolas Kemper, co-founder and former editor, describes his motivations for its founding. “I would hear strong opinions at the back of a review, at the bar, during quiet moments in studio, but very rarely did those opinions come together or form a discourse.” At the time of their publication many of the pieces included here became topics of conversation in Rudolph Hall -- both in class and out. These conversations have allowed us to widen the curriculum to include the issues that are most important to the student body. As the editorial team takes this opportunity to reflect on the year, we would also like to thank the dozens of writers who contributed pieces, the graphic designers who added richness to the spreads, and to the issue editors who took on the challenge of fostering conversation. We are incredibly appreciative of our supporters, who ensure Paprika’s continued publication. DIMITRI BRAND (MArch ‘18) and ETHAN FISCHER (MArch ‘17)

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Parallel Projections: A New Model JOHN KLEINSCHMIDT (MArch ‘16) September 11, 2015 Today, quasi-professional competitions like the Guggenheim Helsinki inhabit a bizarre space somewhere between pure ideas and aspirations to build, commodifying architectural ideas as simplistic images. Is there another model? Kyle Beneventi thinks so. A former New Haven resident who worked for Pickard Chilton, Beneventi is now the 3D Director at The Seventh Art, a branding agency in New York City that primarily serves developers. Like many young professionals with pent-up creative energy, he entered a handful of competitions but was frustrated by their inherent dead-end nature. “I entered, did my hard work, sent my boards in and even won one, but that was it. I had put forth the initial effort of generating ideas, but didn’t have the connections or means to take any next steps.” The collective amount of work produced for competitions astounded him. “I saw a wealth of talent and ambition to explore relevant issues that had nowhere to go afterwards.” Not seeing much difference between winning and losing, Beneventi endeavored to provide an alternative to the existing status quo. In 2013, he started a company called Parallel Projections which administered its first competition in the summer of 2014. Called “Reanimate the Ruins,” it focused on generating ideas for the defunct Packard Motor Plant in Detroit, abandoned since 1954. Beneventi’s goal was to build interest and support from local stakeholders to pave the way for real, built work. “There is a misconception that what designers produce is a product and not a process,” says Beneventi. “Is there a way to give some credibility back to the designer, to try and make something more substantial happen so you don’t just win a couple thousand dollars at best and have a portfolio piece and nothing else?” In order to transpose the free-wheeling speculation of traditional competitions to a more focused arena, Parallel Projections assembled an advisory team and jurors that included Dan Kinkead, the director of projects for Detroit Future City, the strategic planning initiative unveiled in 2013 (about which Toni Griffin lectured in this school in Fall 2013). Most significantly, Fernando Palazuelo – the developer who owns the Packard Plant – signed on as a juror. “We introduced Reanimate the Ruins as Phase I and hoped that the relationship with the developer would take shape enough to bring on Year in Review 9

a Phase II where we could work on getting it built and embrace all the complexities that come with that kind of effort,” said Beneventi. Whereas most jury deliberations are faceless non-events, Palazuelo, local government officials, and esteemed design educators studied and reviewed the top thirty Reanimate the Ruins submissions at an awards gala in Detroit attended by competition entrants. “He could see that the ideas generated by our competition had value in design, program, and phasing,” recalls Beneventi. This dialogue was to be the basis for future work. Unfortunately, due to market pressures and political forces, efforts to enter Phase II have stalled. Nonetheless, this is an interesting development and an intriguing alternative, enough so that Parallel Projections is busy planning its next move. Inspired by the Packard Plant’s near-mythic status as an icon of Detroit’s decline and recovery, Beneventi and his team became interested in generating ideas around ameliorating the effects of forced resettlement of squatters in the Torre de David – the infamous tower in Caracas that has stood unfinished since the 1994 Venezuelan banking crisis. However, an ongoing conversation with Alfredo Brillembourg of Urban-Think Tank shifted the focus from icon to issue. “If we were to push through with our original idea and focus on the tower, it could only ever be an ideas competition,” says Beneventi. “By adapting the brief and avoiding the iconic tower, we’re opening up the possibility that entrants ideas can become visible to city officials and builders in Caracas and put in motion real solutions to a relevant issue, rather than simply produce beautiful images.”

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Agile Architecture ERIC ROGERS (M.E.D. ’15) September 18, 2015 One issue I have always had with architecture is that it typically involves clients. Clients, when they invest in architecture, usually expect some kind of return on their investment, and in this sense, they almost always bring capitalist relations to bear on the design process. This is fine unless you happen, like I do, to wish for an architecture that moves beyond the determinism of prevailing power structures. Because of its immense cost, the production of buildings is a difficult thing to wiggle out of these determining forces. I have argued in a previous issue of Paprika! that perhaps subversive architects should be ready to let go of producing buildings altogether, favoring instead a radical misuse of the existing built environment, with the architect becoming more of a hacker of spatial softwares than a top-down manufacturer of spatial hardware. Here, I’d like to present a caveat to that repudiation of the production of actual built form. In the weird world of business “theory”, a new paradigm is taking over: agility. Companies, rather than investing tons of resources into a product in order to perfect it before its launch will release a “minimum viable product” (MVP), which they test in the actual marketplace and iterate upon in a series of releases. First introduced in the software world, agility has recently witnessed broad success in the world of hardware production as well. Can architecture learn something from this? Upon returning to San Francisco (where agile jargon has annoyingly made its way into the everyday lexicon) as a YSOA graduate, I began two organizations in which I have been testing these and other questions hatched during my graduate studies: Nookzy, which is a peer-to-peer spatial amenity sharing platform that uses the market to encourage sharing behaviors that ideally will continue more effectively in a non-market context; and Spontaneum, which is a fast-growing group dedicated to throwing illegitimate events that misuse urban spaces, turning parking lots into movie screenings, underpasses into naked dance parties, and deploying select illumination of unrecognized features of the city as a means of elevating these to monument status, along with other seemingly nonsensical urban interventions. For Nookzy, the improvement of tiny spaces on a very low budget is made possible by the fact that the company benefits from altering the spaces of the hosts because they will then have a higher occupancy rate, yielding more income for all parties. Nookzy pays for the adjustments, and this is a new and interesting way to deliver design services in an “agile” kind of way. As a first “MVP”, I fabricated a small, $3,000 two-story building that hosts 8 hammocks, an upper deck with an enclosed, 18-foot canvas yurt structure, and a sharp, radial form, comYear in Review 11

plemented by 18 sheer, bold red curtains, which we erected at Burning Man. It was a popular feature of Black Rock City, and so we are going to find it a permanent home in San Francisco, where it can be booked by Nookzy users on an hourly basis (hopefully we can stick a few $300 inflatable hot tubs in there as well). This is low-budget design in which the designer has total control of the whole process because it is inexpensive. In any case, Spontaneum is the more interesting example, in my opinion, because it uses minimal structures to alter the experience of existing spaces. For our events, it often is the case that some small amount of infrastructure is needed. At the bare minimum, Spontaneum needed a generator for remote electricity, some speakers, and some bold lights—hard to come by for a decent price, but fortunately, the widespread practice of indoor marijuana cultivation has brought cost-effective, impractically bright lights that have no green spectrum, and whose output therefore appears pink into the marketplace. Super bright pink grow lights are therefore readily available to the urban hacker who wants to set out to contrarily illuminate corners of the city that nobody seems to appreciate. None of this gear can’t be had by Friday with free two-day shipping, and so it is a replicable set of tools that we have used in our initial hardware. A new strategy, which I have grown rather fond of recently, is the use of colored plastic cling wrap over existing lighting in indoor and outdoor spaces, such that the illumination is tinted with whatever hue the hacker desires. We do what we can to keep the costs down and the events free. We borrow stuff from friends; we use tools and toys in multiple ways; we try to achieve the maximum effect with the minimum material; we rarely get permission (permission is expensive!); we have eliminated the client completely. I believe we have accomplished a minor instance of architectural self-valorization.

Mirror, Mirror PREETI TALWAI (M.E.D. ’16) October 2, 2015 Screens large and small, overflowing with moving digital images, are ubiquitous in our built environment. From airport terminals to smartphones, they are integral to our everyday physical and social infrastructures. Cultural theorists have developed various nomenclatures for these omnipresent interfaces, including MediaSpace, everyware, and the ambient. Over the past decade, screens have rapidly infiltrated another spatial domain – retail. These retail screens – central to “phygital” consumer environments that blend online and brick-and-mortar shopping – are architectural elements built for personalized consumer interaction. Unlike other avatars, retail screens are explicitly tied to desire, ownership, and identity. When we shop, we incorporate external objects into our self-concept. Thus, this subject-screen relationship is characterized by reciprocity between the retailer’s use of the screen to manipulate desire, and the consumer’s engagement with the screen to create and affirm identity. An early deployment of moving digital imagery on retail mirrors was in Rem Koolhaas’ Prada “epicenter” stores (2000-2004). The “Media Stage,” where “all of Prada [could] be browsed – real and virtual” was one concept that unified various locations. Fourteen projectors created a panorama of images whose content ranged from videos of larger-than-life runway models to simulated interiors of global epicenter stores. The Media Stage was more than a portal to objects of desire; it was simultaneously the architecture and the object of desire. As Koolhaas proclaimed, “the projection acts as an architectural material,” constituting both structure and experience-as-commodity.1 Enclosed onstage shoppers with constructed images, the screens functioned to position consumer-subjects as voyeurs, who were seemingly granted exclusive access to footage from Prada productions, fashion shows and even store security videos. Yet ultimately, these highly-curated quasi-cinematic experiences trapped the body within Prada’s brandscape. Self-image and identity had meaning only relationally to the brand’s scale-less, decontextualized, and ephemeral images, and the human body was at once implicated and dematerialized. As Koolhaas claimed, one could (must) “commune with the Prada aura in an intimate and immersive manner.”2 If the Media Stage conceptually conflated shopper-voyeur and brand, Koolhaas’ Mirror Wall (San Francisco) did so literally and physically. The wall displayed “semitransparent daylight projections” where

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“mirror images blurred with projections.”3 These projections included content shared with the Los Angeles Media Stage, but also consisted of various representations of bodies: line drawings, naked forms, and translucent “ghost” images. Within a soup of networked images removed from their geographic references, consumers encountered anonymized objects, while also being forced to continually confront themselves. The subject’s body was externalized as the object, intimately familiar, yet alienated through the screen’s manipulation. The Prada dressing rooms continued this trope, where “magic mirrors” were created through a camera, linked to an embedded plasma screen. The mirrors were “governed by the movement of the person” such that small movements prompted “real-time display” while larger movements (like turning around) caused “a time delay that allowed the person to see the movement being replayed.”4 The temporally separated transformation of the subject’s image into video further accentuated the objectification of the subject, inviting upon oneself the gaze that would be cast on the other.

is a powerful demonstration of the extent to which these screens are endowed with personal meaning beyond their optical qualities. The retail screen transcends both traditional metaphors for screens as windows/portals/frames/filters and traditional modes of spectatorship. The screen becomes a coveted architectural and representational object in itself, while the consumer-subject becomes an object of display, gazing at oneself while being literally gazed back at by the screen. The new rituals of shopping tied to these screen technologies, not inherently sinister and perhaps inevitable, nonetheless construct new identities. Designers must critically engage with, not simply exploit, the knowledge that the shaping of the screen is, in fact, the refashioning of the body itself.

The Prada mirror-screen prototype, dormant for nearly a decade, has recently resurfaced, even more technologically virile. One example is Rebecca Minkoff’s New York “connected” store (in partnership with eBay, 2014), where consumers virtually browse store inventory on large mirror-screens before trying on merchandise in screen-equipped “smart” fitting rooms. While Prada’s mirrors objectified the subject through cinematic juxtaposition, Rebecca Minkoff’s mirrors gaze back. They feature “Kinect sensors that record the customer’s motions… and a sophisticated tracking system which identifies the customer and remembers what they bring into the dressing room and don’t purchase.”5 Shoppers are positioned beside runway models (embodiments of the brand) while being seen in the most intimate of spaces. The physical juxtaposition highlights the imperfect reality of one’s own body, simultaneously immersing shoppers into, and separating them from, the brand. The retailer-designer capitalizes on this malleable self-image: When the Minkoffs did testing on the first version of their interactive mirror… they brought in a few employees to try it out in the context… “They walked out screaming, ‘I’d never ever use this!’” says Uri [Minkoff]. “I was like, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Those are fat mirrors—they make us look fat!’… The Minkoffs took the eBay team… to track down the most figure-friendly mirrors they could find…and incorporated the technology into them. ‘Now [customers will] sit in front of those mirrors all day because they look skinny.6 The rather alarming implication here, that body image can be replaced and re-incorporated just as easily as a mirror and its circuitry, 14

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Notes 1 Rem Koolhaas and Bertili Patrizio, “Media Stage: Concept,” “Media Stage: Content,” in Projects for Prada Part 1(Fondazione Prada, 2001) n. pag. 2 Koolhaas, “Triptych: Concept,” Projects for Prada, n. pag. 3 Koolhaas, “Mirror Wall,” Projects for Prada, n. pag. 4 Koolhaas, “Introduction,” Projects for Prada, n. pag. 5 Neal Ungerlieder, “Why Rebecca Minkoff and Ebay Are Betting on Smart Dressing Rooms,” FastCompany, November 12, 2014, http://www.fastcompany. com/3035229/the-smart-dressing-room-experiment-how-irl-shopping-is-gettingless-private-but-more-persona 6 Danielle Sacks, “How Rebecca and Uri Minkoff are Shaking up Retail,” FastCom pany Create, February 9, 2015, http://www.fastcocreate.com/3041516/masterclass/mirror-mirror

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On Hip-Hop WESLEY HIATT (MArch ‘17) October 9, 2015 “$100,000 for that little sound – and I’m like, ‘Come on! Where’s the love at?’ I’ll just play it my damn self.”1 – J Dilla, 2003 New York City, 1975 – A Disco DJ cuts back and forth between tracks to keep a crowd moving. Techniques developed as means of shifting between records quickly evolves into a form of music very much its own. This music marries DJs, working with increasingly vast and varied libraries of vinyl records, to the rhymes and exclamations of rappers, or MC’s, the public faces and spokesmen of the city’s emergent Rap scene. Such is one of Hip-Hop’s many creation myths. While I’m confident this music needs no introduction, I’d like to position the aesthetics of Hip-Hop alongside some of the architecture commonly associated with this very moment in time, that is, the architecture of Postmodernism. I do this, in part, to redeem a school of architectural thinking too long absent from thoughtful, critical discussion, an absence which persists, I believe, despite what certain ostensibly hip, but ultimately unthinking, design blogs and magazines have heralded as the new “PoMo Revival.”2 Emerging from a very specific moment in history – and not insignificantly American – the various modes of Hip-Hop expression comprise a veritable textbook of cultural tendencies broadly understood in terms of the postmodern: formal and visual appropriation, the rejection of conventional notions of authorship, a non-linear understanding of popular history, artifacts put to use in the service of unabashedly public performance. Of particular interest here is the common Hip-Hop production technique known as sampling. By sampling I refer to an artist’s explicit use of content, be it visual or aural, not original to the work of that artist, self-consciously appropriated from others, and combined with additional outside materials in the process of artistic creation. One familiar example of this technique would be Kanye West’s use of Ray Charles’ I Got a Woman in his popular hit Gold Digger. Other, perhaps more exemplary – and certainly more controversial – instances of sampling can be found on late HipHop producer J Dilla’s album, Donuts, long considered a high-water mark in the history of sample-based Hip-Hop; or Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, a wholesale rethinking of Jay-Z’s blockbuster Black Album, wherein every note of instrumentation was sampled from the Beatles’ White Album. Operating outside the conventional strictures of modern intellectual property law, yet well within the sphere of public art and entertainment, these producers, and others like them, have helped to construct an approach to aesthetic production standing in clear opposition to both Romantic and Modern traditions – tradi16

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tions favoring, above all, the twin concepts of originality and singular genius.3 Indeed, in sample-based Hip-Hop music, far from eschewing explicit reference to previous work by others, Hip-Hop producers and musicians make appropriation of the old a veritable precondition of the new. In my view, this notion might, without too much of a stretch, readily be applied to a reading of Postmodernist architecture, thereby by raising important questions about the production and criticism of architecture today. One such question regards architecture’s relationship to capital. Reading Postmodernism in terms of Hip-Hop’s culture of sampling might even free it from the common critique that would align its values with those global capitalism. Aside from creating new work by way of appropriating the old, sampling encourages the continued making of art through precisely these means. Denying the possibility of commodification, the free sampling of history results in works which constantly build on themselves, valuing process, temporality, and change over singular, salable objects. Such a definition, of course, would seem to refute the common argument, posited by Kenneth Frampton and others, that Postmodernism reduces the whole of architectural history to a series of easily consumable images, capable of being bought and sold on the world market. It also opposes the more recent, somewhat thoughtless embrace of the aforementioned “PoMo revival,” celebrated across the pages of web-based magazines, which so embarrassingly announce the return of Postmodernism as a style-in-vogue4 — i.e. a commodity – as opposed to a set of convictions and values comprising a certain world view. Seen in this way, the various arts associated with this brand of postmodern aesthetics, far from being tools, or instruments, of capital, might in fact serve as sites of resistance to it. Viewed through the cultural lens of Hip-Hop and sampling, architecture has potential be one of the most effective sites of such resistance, due in part to its stubborn denial of commodifiable, singular objects, but also by way of its relationship to the public. By public, I mean a range of constituent groups at varying scales which construct an identity, united by all they share in common, with common space, as such, the fundamental element of any public formation. Indeed, the various forms of Hip-Hop production – rapping (MC-ing), turntablism (DJ-ing), Breakdancing, and Graffiti – were all born, and survive, well outside of modern art’s foundational institutions, in places inextricable from generous notions of the public: the corner, the nightclub, the car, the ball court, the street. Architecture’s unique and long-lived presence on the public street insists on a certain type of encounter, if not thorough engagement, with the public, providing the members of that public an opportunity for consent, resistance, or willful ambivalence vis-à-vis cultural, Year in Review 17

social, and political mores. It is in this dual capacity for encounter and resistance that Postmodernist architecture’s appropriation and reuse of history both requires and is enabled by a public sympathetic to that history – a shared heritage, evoked in order to be questioned, recontextualized in order to be put to work. A sampled architecture engages the aspirations, values, and history of its public, while nonetheless remaining critical of them, thus resisting the forces of capital which might otherwise serve to restrict its appreciation to the moneyed, landed classes; or worse, to enforce a cultural apathy in architectural design in the interest of easy commodification.

The Value of Good Practice: Interview with Cesar Pelli of Pelli Clarke Pelli LUKE ANDERSON (MArch ’16) October 16, 2015 Known for design excellence as well as creating an excellent work environment, Cesar Pelli of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects tells us about the relationship between good design and good practice. LA: Do you think that paying architects fairly for their work pro-

A sampled architecture, in the manner of Hip-Hop, also encourages in its public an attitude of resistance to laws and other restrictions which, in an attempt to protect, and thereby profit from, intellectual property, further enforce the stagnation of creative culture. The dispute surrounding Danger Mouse’s Grey Album is a well-known case in point, resulting from EMI’s attempt to end distribution of that record on the basis of copyright infringement, despite the “original” artists’ approval of the mash-up.5 Impossibly expensive use rights for samples also prove to be a constant frustration for many Hip-Hop artists. To wit, see J Dilla, above. We should be thankful that no similar situation existed to stop Rossi from appropriating the image of Ple nik’s dome in Ljubljana for his project in Milan. A public that views its history not as a stagnant document of long-past words and deeds, but as something to be put to work – to be shared in a creative commons, reused, willfully misappropriated, and sampled – can and must resist the forces serving to stall and bankrupt creative culture, in the interest of a culture based on proceeds and profit. Not merely a fad to be consumed, Postmodernist architecture’s enduring value will be found in its aspirations for meaningful engagement in the public sphere, an engagement which takes stock not only of form and space, but of time and place, too. It heralds a living architectural tradition which, like Hip-Hop, constructs its future through public engagement with its past.

duces better work, and creates a better office environment? CP: Yes, I believe that. First of all, I think it’s important to pay properly because we think it’s fair, reasonable, and just. And yes, it produces better work, no doubt. LA: Rumor has it that you ask for a minimum fee of 18% from clients. Can you tell us a little bit about your fee structure? CP: Nothing remotely like that. Today architects have to be very competitive. Clients also know that and they know exactly how much they can squeeze out of you. LA: How do you think good design intersects with good business practices? CP: The truth is, they don’t necessarily intersect. It tends to be that people who are good designers are also very intelligent, so they also apply that intelligence to running a company one way or another. One very good example is Norman Foster, who is a very sharp businessman and a very good designer. When I brought Fred [Clarke] here, he knew nothing about business, he was just a junior designer with me in Los Angeles. Desperation made us learn. He was a very good learner, and he had a good sense for business. If you’re smart, you get advice from business people and lawyers. It’s not very difficult to get good advice. You can also read about it. LA: What is the relationship between expressing a unique and personal architectural idea, and fulfilling your responsibility to the client?

Notes 1 YouTube,. ‘Dilla Interview 2003 Part 1 Of 4’. N.p., 2015. Web. 20 Sept. 2015. 2 Dezeen,. ‘Postmodernism Is Back. Welcome To Dezeen’s Pomo Summer’. N.p., 2015. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. 3 Schusterman, Richard. “The Fine Art of Rap.” In Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 205. Second. ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000 4 Dezeen,. ‘Postmodernism Is Back. Welcome To Dezeen’s Pomo Summer’. N.p., 2015. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. 5 Cbswods2.wordpress.com,. ‘Paul Mccartney Is Down With Hip-Hop’. N.p., 2015. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.

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CP: We take very seriously our clients’ desires and wishes. We believe that’s part of our responsibility as architects. They are the people that are putting in the money, they are the ones selecting you, depending on you, and if they don’t like your work, they can fire you. We like our clients to be part of the decisions from the beginning. They help in shaping the design. They are our collaborators. And we are very good listeners. LA: How would you describe your office culture in terms of the design process? Would you characterize your office organization as hierarYear in Review 19

chical? CP: Slightly hierarchical, but not much. Some order, no doubt. And you need some order, because decisions have to be made and projects have to move ahead. But the office culture is very open compared to other firms I know. We let everyone in the team share their opinion and it’s taken seriously. We listen to everyone, even the youngest collaborators. That is very much part of the office culture. It helps the design process, no doubt. LA: How would you characterize a good client? CP: A good client for me, is someone who has clear ideas about what he or she wants and needs and expresses them clearly. And also someone who makes decisions. We like very clear directions and clear decisions. LA: It’s very interesting to consider ‘sustainability’ as more than just an environmental issue- you’ve described it as having economic and cultural significance as well. CP: I think designing buildings that are as sustainable as possible is essential if we are going to survive in this world. Economic and cultural considerations are also essential in every project. Economic considerations define the limits of the project you work with, and we design for the budget. And we very much like to understand the culture of the place we work in. That’s what made a huge difference in the competition to design the Petronas Towers. All the architects participating were not from Malaysia, but I was told by the client that we were the only ones to take the request to design a Malaysian building seriously. The other designs could have been built anywhere in the world. LA: I understand that you see good management as essential to good design. Do you think architects are trained to be good managers? If not, how can we improve? CP: No, architects are not trained to be good managers at all. It is very difficult to learn management for an architect in school. Sometimes the management taught at school is not quite the kind of management we need. The management taught in school is how to make money, what we need in the schools of architecture is how organize work efficiently. You may or may not make money. Probably if you are very efficient you will make money, but that’s just a byproduct. It’s a good byproduct, but not the primary objective. I think if you make your primary objective making money, you’ll never do decent buildings.

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On Dancing and Rowing: Reprise on Peter Eisenman CHARLOTTE ALGIE (MArch ’16) November 5, 2015 I studied my undergraduate degree in Melbourne, Australia under the supervision of one distinguished alumnus of YSoA, very little known outside our remote Island colony, who works and teaches the life lived through architecture, framed by experiences of his training in New Haven. He said architecture is like rowing or dancing. Training is not particularly intended to be sensorial, satiating, appealing. The training leads us to strength, and the aim is toward something like a muscle memory of the dancer, where a lifetime of repetitive acts breaks through the physical constraints of the human’s own mental or corporeal physique, to generate a greater thing – the coherent art of when everything comes together with music and choreography of the piece. Having read Misha Semenov’s review of the Chicago Biennale which, in a wonderfully surrealistic paring, uses our own YSoA Professor Peter Eisenman as the great antagonist for the delights found at the exhibition, I thought it potentially opportune to describe the existence of a different experience. While Chicago proves to Semenov that the challenge clearly encountered by him in Peter’s class can ultimately be dismissed, as he doubtless would have liked, Semenov cannot yet see that this challenge is the precise point. In Australia, Peter’s practice erupted onto a largely Anglo-Saxon community as the post-war condition challenged the national identity. Greeting an influx of traumatized post-War refugees from across the world, Australians faced a new augmentation and amalgam of the once mainly British language, culture, lifestyle, manners. Our community of people, who had only just given up their British passports in favor of Australian ones, newly realized the absurdity of eating roast beef and potatoes for dinner in the 35 Celsius (95 degree Fahrenheit) heat. The question of what type of architecture they should make became fraught and problematic, a source of great doubt. Our primary source of authority – once British Architecture journals – was now undermined, and incapable of expressing the new sense of place and new questions of local as it became separated from colonial. The baby-boomer generation of architects thus found a deeply propelling self-empowerment in the absolutely radical re-reading proposed by Eisenman’s ideas of deconstruction. The idea of ‘the copy as a new original’ empowered its own miniature renaissance in Australian architectural culture, where formerly modernist ideologies and forms had been unthinkingly preached and replicated despite having only ever been seen through magazines. Maybe an architecture which is about challenging the very notion of knowledge itself, was never likely to resonate through college town USA, and its products like Semenov. The term social is frequently used, by Semenov, to contrast the objective of the Biennale with so labeled Eisenmanian approaches. The Melbourne experience clearly refutes this. A so-called Eisenman Year in Review 21

era in Australia coincides with broad awaking from a latent status-quo of imposed authorities of knowledge. Without doubt, the late 20th Century period of architectural thinking, set out and debated by figures including Eisenman, empowered newly liberated colonial (architectural) cultures in critical doubt globally, providing guidance to their search for re-structure long before Facebook united the Middle East. On the other hand, many social/ environmental claims are not what they seem. Semenov seems to favor a definition of social which he wants imposed on both Peter and a globe, other worlds like Australia and further afield– possibly to Africa for instance, where I traveled this summer on a KPF Traveling Fellowship. Through Central Africa, an imposed social world defined by aesthetics and phenomena is rife with problems. Social outsiders are held as thrill-seeking and self-serving, another brand of foreign NGO zeal. The latter could describe Joseph Grima himself, who has a track record of arguing the social brand indiscriminately and internationally, as curator and editor, a Biennale expert flitting between global metropolises, previously the Biennale Interieur Belgium and Istanbul Biennale. Subsequent to those curatorial positions also, Grima was editor of prominent Italian publication Domus, from 2010 until 2013. In this capacity, he frequently articulated an idea of social in exclusion to, or distinction from, traditional architectural endeavors. The latter point, that is – the separation of any social claim from the purpose and authority of architectural form would be a point that, in all likelihood Peter Eisenman, and certainly myself as a Melbournian trained in a modern day colonial world imbued with his thinking, would refute vigorously. Today Peter Eisenman’s IBA social housing project of 198185 is a happily occupied dwelling block teeming with small families securely sustained in respectful and engaging private existences. A contemporary walk past the project sees Turkish children playing soccer, sheltered in the nooks of the ‘Eisenmanian’ deconstructed cubes, functional in their social role as safe and supervised spaces. Mothers with prams can enter safely into the glass gridded mezzanine and up the lifts to their homes. A supermarket is on the neighboring corner. The cold continental wind is broken down by the distorted grid extruded in moments of soffit and shelter. Whether this is a social place, or not, is left by Eisenman for you to decide, indeterminate as always. My own inclination would have been to resist any kind of generosity to Semenov, in explaining, the qualities and merits of other global experiences. This resistance would never have been shared by Peter’s own pedagogy. Moreover, the strange and undisciplined juxtapositions in Seminov’s piece would, in all likelihood, be the right kind of mix to start with for Peter. It remains the case that both Chicago and Peter, the former a flash in the pan event and the latter a lifetime of practice and pedagogy, are only obliquely related at all. Myself, I will always think of architecture like rowing and dancing, as I was taught in Melbourne, where architecture is only equivalent to all those early mornings on the river, counting strokes and moving up and down. 22

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Book Review— Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry ANDY STERNAD (M. Arch ’16) January 14, 2016 There is nothing inevitable about Frank Gehry’s success. Born Frank Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, his creativity could have been limited by tenuous family finances. His achievements, however, are not accidental: propelled by a “distinctive combination of anxiety and curiosity,” he has insisted on making buildings to the point of turning down lucrative opportunities that he believed would compromise his architectural mission. Fundamentally shaped by the sense of freedom and experimentation, his architecture has become a global brand. Paul Goldberger, former architecture critic for the New York Times and The New Yorker, met Gehry at a cocktail party nearly 40 years ago, which inspired the young critic’s first story. Since then, the relationship has largely been one based on admiration. For Goldberger, the youthful gloss of that first encounter seems never to have worn off. Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry is a true insider’s view of Gehry’s life and work (although the architect had no editorial input). Goldberger constructs the image of a man whose humility masks his ambition; who embraces fame, and famous friends, with a casualness that belies his desire to belong. On the whole, Goldberger eschews his day job as architectural critic, and largely avoids discussion of the design process and creative struggles inherent to any act of design. Instead, he plays storyteller, name dropper, and above all, reputation defender. He labors throughout the book to emphasize the practical, program-driven nature of Gehry’s unconventional buildings, a position that is somewhat at odds with the hint of something intangible in the book’s title, Building Art. As an old friend, Goldberger attempts to rebut a common criticism of Gehry’s work: that his forms are self-indulgent, with little regard for client, context, or cost. This might be possible for the first half of Gehry’s career with projects such as the 1967 Merriwether Post Pavilion, where the exposed structure doubles as architectural flourish. He describes Gehry’s architecture as originating from careful observation, not fanciful invention. The chain link and exposed studs of his radical Santa Monica home were cheap and tactically deployed. Hopeless, however, is an attempt to prove the functional value of his other swishes and swoops, and at times Goldberger’s defense is a stretch. He describes Gehry’s own home as “a composition made of slashes and clashes, of colliding forms and texture, solids and voids, all seemingly random but considered as meticulously as any Miesian detail.” Surprisingly, he presents a commitment to rationalism as one of Gehry’s defining characteristics: Year in Review 23

“By 1969, Frank had begun to see himself as an architect who would produce unusual forms that were not pure flights of fancy, but would be anchored in reason. That notion of highly imaginative form that, however unusual it might seem, would be a rational response to both human needs and to a client’s specific program — that would not, in other words, be the arbitrary creation of an architect — would underlie the rest of his career.”

In contrast, Gehry himself seems to embrace the muses, explaining in conversation with the author that “architecture’s intuitive, it’s a magic trick. I don’t know where it comes from.” Rather than diminish the work, Gehry’s acknowledgment of intuition confirms the subjective value of building as art. Goldberger is only fleetingly critical of Gehry, his image and his work, and this criticism typically involves business practice. Gehry canceled production of his Easy Edges cardboard furniture series, a seemingly selfish decision with real financial consequences for his business partners. He feared it would distract too much attention from his buildings: however idiosyncratic, he always wanted to be identified as an architect first. Goldberger portrays Gehry’s unique form making as thoughtful engagement with disciplinary questions, especially during the high postmodernist and early digital eras. Socially, he was among Philip Johnson’s “kids” (along with Dean Stern) although his work remained apart from the group. Like the historicists, Gehry looked for ways to overcome the sterility of the international style, yet disavowed historicism tongue-in-cheek in favor of another, even more primitive form: the fish. The fish was first explored through sculptural light fixtures, later through buildings, and has finally been abstracted into the sinuous, titanium-scaled surfaces of his most recognized works. As the forms became more complex, Gehry reluctantly turned to digital technology to realize the spaces he imagined. His firm became known for redefining the role of advanced modeling software in architectural practice, not to find new forms, but to enable the cost-effective construction of shapes often derived through analog means, such as his famous tape-and-torn-paper models. Art was never far from building. Goldberger concludes by reiterating Gehry’s belief in the traditions of architecture: that his buildings, like the greats of old, have “visual and sensual rightness,” and that he “uses concrete, physical form to create meaningful sensation,” as opposed to illusions conjured up in virtual design space. His work reflects an honest, unselfconscious, and often uncompromising belief in his vision. His buildings may look like nothing before them, but they are buildings nevertheless, and Gehry is their undisputed architect.

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Chum Pipies- The Musical BRENDAN BASHIN-SULLIVAN (B.A. ’15) January 21, 2016 As the Naknek River winds its way into Alaska’s Bristol Bay, clouds of birds cluster on its muddy surface, as though drawn by magnets. The squawking masses are dominated by gulls, but occasionally bald eagles join the flock to feed on a slurry of salmon bones and offal that drains continuously out of a series of “chum pipes” set into the river bed. Every salmon cannery in Naknek, AK (population 300, off-season) has a chum pipe, the final elimination in a digestive process that begins in the bay’s five river mouths. Each 12-hour fishing period, a fleet of 3,500 32-foot drift boats haul in fathom after fathom of gillnets studded with sockeye salmon. Deckhands pick the fish from the net and throw them into mesh bags in the boat’s hold, which are later winched aboard much larger ships called tenders and sluiced into holds full of icy water for transport back to Naknek and its canneries. Once docked at Ocean Beauty Seafoods, the tender’s crew attach flexible hoses up to two feet in diameter to the ship’s hold. Massive pumps strain to suck out the morass of salmon, water, blood, and ice. Two things allow the canneries to pump hundreds of thousands of solid salmon carcasses at a time: the sockeye are shaped so as to be hydrodynamic even under rigor mortis and they secrete prodigious amounts of mucus and slime. The system is, for the most part, self-lubricating. So quickly can a half million pounds of fish be slurped into the pipes that often the canneries can’t process them fast enough. A member of one cannery’s beach gang proudly showed me a patch of concrete about the size of a tennis court and studded with valves and hatches, his crew’s handiwork from the previous season. Underneath, he told me, were three enormous steel tanks, overflow storage for peak season. But when working smoothly, the salmon travel up the tubes and into the cannery proper where they are cleaned and sorted, then filleted, flash-frozen, or canned depending on grade. At Alaska General Seafoods I met a 23-year-old college student from Oregon who was the undisputed master, after three seasons, of his cannery’s vacuum sealer. He told me that the keys to success on the cannery circuit are specialization and taking as many overtime hours as possible without keeling over from exhaustion. For the unspecialized, the roughly 6,000 seasonal cannery workers, college students from Washington and Oregon recruited at career fairs, entire families flown in from Puerto Rico, members of local Yup’ik and Athabascan tribes, there is little to do but wait for the salmon to come in. The canneries house them in structures that range from decaying wooden bunkhouses to newly built corrugated aluminum dormitories not out of place on a college campus. And indeed, the pre-season, with its heady mix of anticipation and mind-bending boredom (Naknek is not connected by road to Year in Review 25

the rest of the country; everything must be flown or barged in), has a note of the collegiate in it. Knots of cannery workers sit on the balconies of their bunkhouses and smoke, or walk the mile and half to town in search of the public library’s notoriously elusive internet connection or, failing that, a stiff drink. Outside of their function as processing centers and dormitories, canneries are also places of business. Each has a tidy little office in which deals are struck. A commemorative clock with a different plastic piece of nigiri for each number tells the time in Ocean Beauty’s main office, a hint at where the real market for Alaskan salmon lies. The canneries’ decision, as salmon prices plummeted in the 1980s, to harvest and sell the salmon eggs they once discarded with the offal to the Japanese market may well have saved the industry and the town. But in addition to choosing how, when, and to whom to deliver the season’s catch, cannery offices deal with the fractious, chaotic world of the fleet itself. No banker worth her bonus would see lending money to a drift boat captain as anything other than career suicide: fishing permits are expensive, equipment unreliable, conditions harsh, and crew (like myself) unskilled. Furthermore, the season’s profits are threatened by such diverse factors as water temperature, the exchange rate with the yen, mechanical failure, extreme weather, accidents, and arrests. The cannery thus becomes the patron as well as the client, often agreeing to float five figures or more in debt from fishermen on the strength of previous seasons. This gives rise to a relationship somewhere between fierce mutual loyalty and punishing debt peonage, and these rooms have heard as much desperate pleading as friendly banter. But fundamentally the cannery remains “there” for its fishermen. This year, with the predicted run of 50 million fish weeks overdue, Ocean Beauty allowed a flotilla of its fishermen, who had launched their boats prematurely, to tie up all together to its pilings rather than waste fuel fighting rough waters on the bay, or waste money having their boats pulled into the boatyard. Forty or so boats formed a raft, and crews grilled and drank beers and laughed on their decks. When the river ebbed low, the boats touched the muddy, sick-looking bed of the river, and the stench rose heavy with the sun. The crews, stirring after the eerily short Alaskan summer night, had front-row seats when the eagles arrived at the chum pipe.

Interview: Faris Zaher, CEO of Yamsafer DIMA SRROUJI (MArch ‘16), Sarah Kasper (MArch ‘16), and Charlotte Algie (MArch ‘16) January 28, 2016 [Editors] Can you introduce Yamsafer to us and describe the office space briefly? [Faris Zaher] Yamsafer.com is essentially a Booking.com or Expedia clone. In terms of the source market, where the travelers come from, we’re focused on the Middle East, and specifically the Gulf countries such as Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE. Our office is based in Ramallah, Palestine where we started at the end of 2011. Since then we’ve been growing by 50% each month. Some months we’re doubling in size. We started out as a three-person company, today we’re over 60. In terms of the space, it’s an indoor space on the 11th floor of a commercial building that has a panoramic view of Ramallah. On the interior it looks like a promenade, a main street with benches and sidewalk tiling. Plants, a bike, and couches line the promenade. In the distance is a café with a view to the city, and in the open space are a series of loosely organized desks and a ping-pong table. On either side of the promenade you have small spaces that are more private for meetings and a quieter working environment. Given that in the past few decades there has been a shift in the definition of the place of work, it can no longer be limited to one place. People can do work from home, or on their phones from vacation. Why have you put so much energy on the design of your office space? I think that the reason we invested so much in the space is because it makes even more sense for companies that are emerging out of places like Palestine to invest in space than it does for companies like Google. Space is a very powerful tool. Obviously all of these companies do it to attract top talent, because at the end of the day these are your assets as a technology company. If you’re a Google employee at Palo Alto, and you’re not at work, you’re at Fisherman’s Warf, or going hiking. You can do a million and one things outside of work there. Here, the lack of alternatives makes the workspace all the more important. Restrictions imposed on people – the Israeli occupation and mismanagement by the Palestinian Authority — require you to solve problems dealing not only with people’s work but also with people’s lifestyles in general. It’s more challenging because you’re stepping outside the scope of work and into personal space. The occupation has then affected Ramallah physically and spatially, but given that borders and walls can’t confine information flow, how are you affected by the occupation? Individually, each and every one of us is affected by the occupation, and so the business is indirectly affected as well. People come into the office after going through three checkpoints and getting harassed and abused. The business itself could then be indi-

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rectly affected by the frustration of its employees. But it depends on which angle you choose to take. On the flipside, we reject the status quo. We are hungry for change and that makes for better fighters. We could have been more directly affected if we decided to set up in another location like Dubai or Amman. It’s very difficult for Palestinians with a Palestinian ID card to travel out of here. We knew that was the case. That’s another reason we chose Ramallah; there was no other option. As hard as it was to get everyone here, we managed to do it because we knew that the alternative would have been even more difficult. The benefit of that is now paying off, because the internal flow of information that we have here within the confinement of these walls is much more efficient than any other organization that might be scattered across one or two or three countries. That’s what really matters in technology, because at the end of the day, as you scale, most of the communication between you and your customers or partners is going to happen online, but the internal flow of information is what you need to maximize on to be super efficient—that you can’t do online. The point is to have a closely-knit group of people. You build this mesh that allows people to move faster and that propels the business forward. Who works for you? Are they all from the West Bank? Do people return to Palestine because of Yamsafer? We have some people who came back from abroad to visit and decided to stay here. It’s sort of a reverse brain drain. Everyone here is highly intelligent and very skilled. They probably have the option to work for companies like Google, but they stay here out of choice and a desire to change things. Not everyone is from the West Bank. A fifth of our employees are Palestinians from Jerusalem. Do they cross the border every time they come into work or do they live in Ramallah? (The 8-meter separation wall and checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah blocks entry in and out of the area. You have to have the right ID card to be able to move with the permission of the Israeli government.) Some do live in Ramallah, but most cross the checkpoints every day. It depends on people’s preference. Obviously there’s a problem with the Jerusalem ID living in Ramallah, but I won’t get into that. I’m the only one from Nazareth, or “the ’48”—whatever you want to call it. (“The ’48’” refers to 1948, the year Nazareth was occupied. It is now considered an Arab Israeli city, and is fully under the control of the Israeli government)

like to be in Palestine because it’s not such a great feeling today. What we try to do here is to make you live through what our future vision for Palestine is. The reason why we decided to design the space as an outdoor promenade is specifically because in Palestine we don’t have these outdoor spaces. This is what comes closest to a park or an exterior communal space here. If our company becomes successful we can make a significant impact on the Palestinian economy, but the real impact will come by many others that will follow the same path. Among other things, maybe that will change the way the streets look outside. That’s our vision for what things should be like. There are many architects who have been critical of the “Google office” typology. Although it is a new typology, there is evidence that the space only keeps people at work for longer hours, which is potentially harmful to their well-being. Can you speak to the relationship of work to home, and this dichotomy that you and others at Yamsafer are conscious of? I think most critics of that concept are not coming from the tech industry. They still have this separation in their minds of work/ life. Work for them is purely a means of financing life rather than an essential part of what makes it great. The way people think about working for tech firms is “work is something I enjoy and I come to work because I enjoy it.” You don’t think about clocking in and out. Like any bad relationship you should quit your job once you start thinking about these things for too long. This isn’t to say these jobs are for everyone. Most people, whether they know it or not, want to be in the average because of its convenience, and that requires them to do average work. Those types of people don’t get hired by tech firms because it is harmful for both the company and that person. On the contrary, people who like to work on the edge will be absolutely miserable in a slow-paced environment. What I’m trying to say is bad career choices make people miserable, not their employers. It’s important to note that going to “work” does not mean you’re constantly working. Most people’s friends here are the people they work with as well. It’s a campus-like environment, it’s like Yale. You’re on campus pretty much all of the time for 4 years, I don’t think that’s unhealthy in any way. How do people occupy the space in a way that you weren’t expecting them to?

At the Google office in New York, you know you’re at the Google office, and you know you’re in NYC given the cultural references painted on the walls of the office. At Yamsafer do you feel like you’re in Palestine?

I was really surprised a couple of times in our previous and this office. When we were 10 people in the 200m2, it didn’t work well. It was counter intuitive because technically we had more square footage per person, but we realized with less density there was more noise. When there were 20 people it was ideal. People didn’t talk that much, because they felt like they were sharing the space instead of owning the space. At that point, people were respecting the space and it felt more communal.

Well, you know, we don’t want to draw inspiration from what it feels

Another instance I noticed was the way designated areas were used

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for different purposes. We have a very big dining area where people are supposed to eat. When people eat in large groups they eat there, but when it’s a small group they eat in random places on the picnic tables or couches. We designed these specific types of spaces that are designated for something, and people use them for something else. We can’t tell people “you can’t do work in the kitchen;” that’s not going to happen. The next time we design a space, we have to keep in mind that we have to be able to change the designation of spaces quickly. Paprika! features issues that are mostly very local. What would you like to portray about being an entrepreneur in Palestine, and in the Middle East in general? The only reason we’re successful is because we don’t have American preconceptions of how things should work. If Americans could do it here, they would have done it already. Expedia could have been the leader here, but they didn’t do it for a reason. You need to think about these regional problems differently, and you probably need to be from here to understand how to tackle these issues. That means that you come into the game with a lesser amount of experience. Tech entrepreneurship didn’t exist 10 years ago in the Middle East. There was absolutely nothing. There is not a wave of successful entrepreneurship that you can draw experience and talent from. You need to figure things out on your own, and it forces you to move quicker, and to be more efficient than your Western counterparts. You need to be more efficient in terms of cost because you probably have less money. You’re going to make as many mistakes if not more along the way, so you need to be practical with your attacks. While the guys in Silicon Valley drink soy milk and attend conferences, we go an extra mile or two. If you keep doing that systematically, eventually you will win, regardless of how disadvantaged you were to begin with.

Response to Faris PIER VITTORIO AURELI in conversation with DIMA SROUJI (MArch ’16), SARAH KASPER (MArch ’16), and CHARLOTTE ALGIE (MArch ’16). January 28, 2016 The Yamsafer office is very similar to case studies I’ve been researching myself. The only difference is, of course, the location—namely, the mobility of people is very limited in Palestine, as well as within this specific company. In other economies outside of Palestine, people are relatively free to move, or are at least given that impression. I found most interesting Faris Zaher’s argument that at Yamsafer, like everywhere in the world, people are increasingly confusing what is— and is not—work. This is a crucial, and recent, subjective transformation. Some people do not know anymore when they are and are not working. Seemingly everywhere, the difference between life and work has completely disappeared. It is a very ambiguous situation. I found it most interesting where Zaher described the outside-of-work alternative of ‘just watching Netflix’ as a very alienating activity. Well, he’s right. It is true. This is a most interesting point. Once you realize this problem, the question is: what is the response? At the moment you don’t know when you work and when you don’t work, it is very easy to exploit people. This is a problem. Offices look more and more like houses. There is a lot of social bondage between the worker and the employee. In our office we try to have lunches together, to create a nice atmosphere. But this constant work condition results in paternalistic, almost family-like relationships, which are often very problematic. Work is no longer this impenetrable abstract activity that you do for someone you don’t know or don’t care about; work happens in domestic environments. Another response would be the opposite from this negative situation, to say ‘I want to have a fixed job.’ My parents, for example, had fixed jobs and good wages. You have your pension and your holidays. You can get married and have a family. The stable examples like my parents are totally horrified with the idea that I don’t know where I am going to live, or work, or have a family. They now realize that this lifework of total distribution might be permanent—not just a transition. I think something is often forgotten in these kinds of discussions about the transformations we see in Yamsafar and many tech industries. These transformations were not top-down projects, led by the state. This way of working was introduced in the late 70s by young people who were horrified at this kind of fixed job, fixed contracts, family life.

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In Europe we call this the ‘77 generation’—the year of punk, of no future, of no longer being institutionalized by society. People were trying to live life by traveling a lot, and were totally reluctant to work in a wage system. At the time, this was possible. They were coming out of the golden age of the welfare state. Things like gentrification didn’t exist, so they could make the choice to be precarious. They could risk failure, because time allowed for it. When capitalism understood that this way of working was desirable, it was co-opted. It became what is now called “flexible work.” It became the main way in which the younger generations live and work. From my side, this kind of condition puts an enormous pressure on people. Perhaps, in the case of Yale students, this is particularly apparent. But the problem comes in when you grow and realize that this is not a transition, but rather an endless process. What was also very interesting in the interview was his honesty. Whether we condemn or support his methods of working, I think the honesty is, across the board, incredibly helpful to understand the situation. We don’t have that honesty. In architecture, I know for certain that there is a lot of frustration, depression and fatigue—physical and existential. Schools are just full of frustrated people, because they cannot bear this pressure. Competition is everywhere. What we do is just a way to accomplish it all under pressure, while at the same time appear as winners. For architects , as soon as you give the impression that its all too much, you are a loser. You lose the aura that you need to have in our field to get work. In this sense, I found Zaher’s interview a great invitation for us all to be more honest. I don’t think that, globally, all those who work are yet at the stage where we can organize or resist the eroding distinctions between work and non-work. I don’t think it’s possible right now. What we should all do is search for new ways of living and working that are not stressful, which don’t make life unbearable. This is a really important issue.

Leveraging Residue: It Takes a Bit of Practice MADDY SEMBLER (MArch ’16) February 4, 2016 What the hell is relational aesthetics? Even those of us familiar with the term still have to resort to this question. The traditional model of aesthetics operates like this: artist makes painting. Painting is hung on wall. Viewer looks at said painting and walks away saying ‘that was good art.’ The model of relational aesthetics works as follows: artist makes pancakes. Free pancakes are offered to anyone who wants one. Social interactions are built around the eating of said pancakes. Participants walk away saying ‘those were some yummy pancakes.’ While this reduction may trivialize social practice (RA’s more common term) the example emphasizes a way for us architects to view aesthetic production as a matter of process, context, and situation rather than constructing a salable product. In this model of making, artists abandon traditional studio practice and use their skills to transform the social environment. Social practice, as an aesthetic tool, certainly influences the work of Assemble, a London collective whose work crosses the disciplines of art and architecture while maintaining the public as active participants. In their piece ‘Folly for a Flyover,’ the group constructed a temporary folly shaped like house under a highway used as a public meeting space, eating venue, and movie theater. In nine weeks, the underpass had 40,000 visitors. The success of the folly persuaded the city to build permanent recreational infrastructure under the overpass, a typically underutilized leftover space. In this instance, Assemble leverages residue in a multitude of ways. First, the group appropriates a leftover space, an unfortunate consequence of 20th century urban planning. Too loud, too dark, too neglected for development but a lucrative space for play. The undefined field creates a kind of tension in the urban landscape for ideas to be born out of the residue. Second, the physical construction of the folly becomes a kind of residue when the influx of visitors makes a stronger mark than the structure itself. The folly fades into the background, leaving the social fabric at the forefront. The structure can be disassembled but the power of gathering remains. Finally, understanding that the conceptual identity of a place plays as much a role as its physical attributes, Assemble builds a ‘fairytale’ narrative into the folly, imagining it as the house of a stubborn landlord who refused to accept displacement and chose to live in a house straddled by two highways. The architects redefine an identity of the place not by projecting into the future but by resurrecting an icon of the past. By using the folly as an operative tool for social engagement, the architects of Assemble offer a story of nostalgic residue that inform a poetic ethos of an otherwise troubled place. Viewing building as a relational tool rather than a finite object positions our work as the first mark, constructed with precision and intent, yes, but one that eventually fades to the background, supplanted by a changing social fabric. It allows the public to walk into the dark underbelly of a highway overpass and leave saying, ‘those were some yummy pancakes.’

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Thin Things or Possibly A Building MATTHEW BOHNE (MArch ‘17) February 25, 2016 “What am I looking at?” “What you are looking at is Piranesi, Kahn, and a ballet dancer in a bar placed in a gilded frame. This is somewhere along the lines I imagine my midterm review to begin.” Midterms week at the YSoA conjures images of models and drawings pinned up on the walls with oversized monitors for validation by the doyens of architecture. Yet, we rarely ask ourselves, ‘what are we looking at?’ ‘what are the means we use to communicate ideas of architectural possibility?’ Last Spring, my alma mater, Rhode Island School of Design, showcased a collection of drawings, prints, and photographs from the archives of Alvin Boyarsky, former director of the Architectural Association. The exhibit, Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association, exemplified Alvin’s belief that “we fight the battle with the drawings on the wall.” Amidst the whims of Zaha Hadid, the quakes of Lebbeus Woods, and the delicacies of Michael Webb, absent was the presence of what we may demand as a clear architectural proposal. There were no plans, no sections, and no indication that our world was not seen at 89 degrees, or within a roving female form consuming the city, or within a giant sail marooned on an island. Each drawing’s thesis and terms for evaluation and engagement are unique, not universal. Yet, each drawing “problem-worries” rather than “problem-solves.” The ideology of “problem-worrying” was the central theme to a lecture given at the AA in 1966. Professor Emeritus Stanford Anderson, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argued for a new age of architects more concerned with problem-worrying than problem-solving. Anderson argued that the current models of problem-solving in architecture are either interested in problems achieving definite goals or with problems synthesizing from a body of established facts. Conversely, he proposed an architecture of problem-worrying, “ concerned with structuring man’s environment so as to facilitate the achievement of human purposes, where the purposes are incompletely known at the outset and cannot be extrapolated from known purposes.” Anderson proposes: humanity’s purpose is to categorically alter the very environments that creates them. I argue that drawings of “problem-worrying” suggest new environments subject to the very processes of their generation. These are drawings that work within and on the disciplinary boundaries. The best drawings straddle an elusive division between suggestive image-making and rigorously constructed spatial concept embodying 34

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Bruno Latour’s question, “why do we so often act as if matter itself were made of parts that behave just like those of technical drawings, which live on indefinitely in a timeless, unchanging realm of geometry?” Like the drawings hanging on the walls of museums, there is an urgency to discuss the undisciplined drawing. As students interested in the discipline of architecture and representation, it is paramount that we ask ‘how do we construct an undisciplined drawing?’ Moreover, ‘how do we establish the terms for evaluation?’ Marco Frascari proposes that our profession must be aware of the types of drawings we make. Our methods of representation have been “codified by tradition, the profession, and legislation.” Yet, as architects often do, we clamor for design totality. Our drawings must hold the color, the smell, the emotional resonance and affect that concretizes architecture; evocations that drawings of codified conventions cannot hold. Before Yale, I had the privilege to speak at length with Amy Kulper, a self-identified historian of ideas and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Taubman College, University of Michigan. We discussed the instrumental nature of the image that prompted a close friend and mentor of Professor Kulper, Dalibor Vesely, to speculate on the nature of image-making. Vesely posits there is a distinction between instrumental and symbolic representations, and argues that we can trace the meaning of “symbol” back the Greek word symbolon, which means ‘to gather.’ The mission of symbolic representation is to gather meanings together. Additionally, instrumental representations connote utility. In this way, the cut sheet serves as instrumental representation in that “constructional logics of the object are its sole ambition.” An example of this type of representation may be the prolific artifacts made by SHOP Architects. Diametrically, we read the work of Perry Kulper as symbolic. Here, the architect employs relational drawing methods with the capacity to draw potential meanings and references together. In the case of the cut sheet, the process by which the image was designed is no longer relevant. What is important is its relationship to the process by which the final object will be made. In the case of the work of Perry Kulper, the drawing is of nothing. Beautifully nothing; not overtly illustrative or diagrammatically reductive. The site of the work is the drawing surface, and the drawing is a means of exploration. The drawings of Perry Kulper, most of which now have been widely published, were completed in the 1990s. Since then, they have inspired and mystified many. But why?! Why are we admittedly seduced by the ‘undisciplined drawing’? The (re)conceptualizing of available representational strategies begins with contextualizing them and understanding when representations are most successfully deployed. This also comes with the understanding ‘that the questions we ask now may no longer be suitable via plan or section.’ Contemporary architectural drawings may resist immediate understanding, or even Year in Review 35

efficiency, and may even be artworks in and of themselves. This semester I have the privilege of working with Sean Griffiths, Sam Jacobs, and Jennifer Leung in their Post-FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) studio. They embody the instrumentality of architectural drawing. From the beginning, our tutors have described the studio as “post-plan” and “post-section,” and rather suggests the investigation of the tension between the composition of lines on paper and the composition of matter in space. The method of this studio aims to arrive at drawings and things not yet represented as the thing itself. This process is only achievable if we move beyond known representational conventions and relationships and use the drawing surface as a means of discovery. To recapitulate Jacob and Griffiths, architects do not make buildings, but rather drawings of the possibility of building. The more lucid question is: why do we subscribe to a notational system that represents an architecture? This practice requires close-reading our own work. We are not able to produce work with a predetermined understanding of what it will mean, and are able to interpret its meaning after brought it into existence. Having attended a strictly art and design school before my arrival at Yale, I will be the first to admit that I am uncomfortable. I am uncomfortable with the way in which we receive and evaluate work in a jury setting. Sean Griffiths best elucidated my unsettlement when he described our reviews as more familiar to fine art practice; the production of work and the representation and reading of work is a contingent and relational practice. For each drawing and artifact we produce, we are searching for its specific evocation, but also for possibility. It is fertile ground for a reconsideration of the work we produce and how we produce it, questioning the highly prescriptive curatorial practices of display. Think “Advertisements for Architecture” (1976) by Bernard Tschumi. As we approach jury week, our work is calling us to understand its essence, and the most productive means to present that work: a synesthetic tour-de-force.

Notes Marjanovic, Igor, Jan Howard, Nicholas Boyarsky, Beau Johnson, Sarah Rovang, and Alvin Boyarsky. Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association. (2015): 139. Print. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Anderson, Stanford. “Problem-Solving and Problem-Worrying.” Architectural Association, London. Mar. 1966. Web. Latour, Bruno. “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?” Isis 1.1 (2010): 138-42. Print. Kulper, Amy, and Carl Lostritto et. al. “Interview with Amy Kulper.” Work in Progress 1.16 (2015): 44-47. Print. Rhode Island School of Design Architectural Press. Nesbitt, Lois Ellen., Alexander Brodsky, Ronald Feldman, and Ilya Utkin. Doll’s House. 1990. Etching. Brodsky & Utkin: The Complete Works. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003. Print.

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Naked in Alaska DORIAN BOOTH (MArch ’16) and NICOLAS KEMPER (MArch ’16) March 10, 2016 “Unless you are naked in Alaska, you are in the designed space” said Patrik Schumacher, director of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), “Every single act is framed by a designed artifact.” The zeitgeist — and the tech and algorithm driven design method parametricism — is alive and well in London. At the Architectural Association (AA) Patrik Schumacher, parametricism’s chief evangelist, began a talk by emphasizing his credentials as a member of the avant garde, a ‘proto-engineer’ who imagines new forms of organization to be resolved by those who follow (presumably engineers). His co-teacher, Theodore Spyropulos, threw the claim right back at him: how could Schumacher — whose office has hundreds of employees and buildings going up around the world — possibly claim to still be part of the avant-garde? They used to be out in the wilderness, but since he has clearly “been asked to the table,” what are they now? Schumacher gestured around, “Today, everything is designed by a professional. In fact, everything is Bauhaus — Gropius and Mies designed this room, designed these chairs, designed that television.” Bauhaus. Not the Parametricists. That was the problem.[1] The room and the chairs were hardly visible for the students covering every surface — most of them in the AA’s Design Research Lab [DRL] unit started in 1997 by Schumacher and Brett Steele. Today Spyropulos directs the unit, and the teachers focus on technology in design. Rob Stuart Smith’s students will design real time drone swarm fabrication systems. Shajay Bhooshan — who also works for ZHA — wants his students to design a new ‘maison domino,’ using robotic arm 3D printing. Theo’s students will each design 36 houses, in a contemporary recreation of the mid-20th century Case Study Houses. And Schumacher’s students — like the studio at Yale — are designing a cluster of towers for a site in Shoreditch, London. Because DRL seeks to design everything, its adherents are not particularly content to let their opposition live and let live. Judgment of their contemporaries, who are teaching this semester at Yale, came quick and fast. Dismissive of FAT (“Why would you go back to older, less sophisticated repertories?”), they fixed most their attention on Pier Vittorio Aureli, whose unit is the most popular at the AA. For them, Aureli’s work “was the retro-condition, we have been there, it is a form of nostalgia. He is proposing a form of architecture and society which has collapsed, he is hankering for the ‘70s, but there is a reason that did not continue.”

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Meanwhile in San Francisco, Pier Vittorio Aureli lamented to his Yale studio, which is engaged in designing affordable housing, that parametricism passed without making much of an architectural contribution. Schumacher was now the one hanging onto the past. Indeed many of the more ruthless ‘proto-engineers’ — Object Oriented Ontology [OOO] comes to mind — have written parametricism off as dead. Having ridden high in 2005-6, when, as Patrik said, ‘we could smell blood,’ the parametricists took a staggering blow in the crash, which canceled many of the more fantastic projects and shifted the focus of architects onto the plight of the downturn’s many victims. A new emphasis and interest in social issues left Schumacher — whose clients are usually fantastically rich — in an ideologically awkward place.

Gehry designed headquarters of Facebook. They asked its project architect, Greg Sobotka, pointed questions about whether Gehry Architects had considered the blurred boundary between work and life, a new condition now typical in the tech industry (they had not). And it was Melinda & Bill Gates who in their foundation’s letter last week said what the world needs is to rethink how we approach unpaid domestic labor — the very agenda of the Aureli studio.

Social issues are Aureli’s raison d’etre. His studio spoke more about San Francisco’s social and political history than its architectural one. For him, the city was, and continues to be, shaped more by social and political forces rather than purely formal ones. In discussing the construction of the Coit Tower, for instance, he was quick to note that the tower was an attempt to control the Leftist groups that inhabited Telegraph Hill through a philanthropic gesture by the West Coast industrialists. The architecture is thus directly informed by, and in relation to, the political environment in which it was created. The formal and socio-political are inseparable.

In his talk, Schumacher noted that new ideas sometimes just move slowly, likening ZHA to Alberti, whose project started with theories and drawings, like Città Ideale — depicting a fantastical gridded and axial city — that from there became individual buildings, the occasional town square and finally whole gridded and axial cities and nations.

Aureli emphasized to his students that he focuses on the past not to revive some kind of retro-condition, but to study the great potential of projects both architectural and philosophical that were never fully realized. It is an opportunity for redemption — he understands the failings of the 20th century’s utopian and socialist projects, but believes they are not without merit. There is something to be learned from their radical approach to domestic space, the political formulation of which is central to his studio brief at both Yale and the AA. Schumacher understands that social issues are a weak point for parametricism: “Many of the most intelligent students today want to talk about social issues, so we should talk about social issues. Aureli is talking about social issues. He [Aureli] is talking nonsense, but he is still talking about what interests them.”

So if Schumacher’s agenda is no longer new — is in fact a revival — and Aureli’s is more in tune with the tribulations and priorities of the tech industry, where does that leave Schumacher? Perhaps he will have some answers in his upcoming issue of AD, Parametricism 2.0.

The path might be long, but Schumacher will not rest until he sees parametric cities, nations, even chalk boards, pluralism be damned: “We need to figure out which paradigm is best, for the city in the end is one. Where is the convergence? We need to reclaim the ability to judge.” Unless you actually are naked in Alaska, the consequences of this convergence are very real. Anyone who has taken even the most casual gander at ZHA’s work and Aureli’s drawings will understand a ZHA city and an Aureli city — even chalk board — are radically different propositions. Back at the AA, Eugene Tan had one last question for Schumacher: “What happens if you lose?” “Don’t think I will.”

Schumacher emphasized that his interest was in social issues not for those on society’s margins, but its cutting edge: “What does Google need? That is the more interesting question than what does a suburb of Mumbai need — we know what they need — hot water, shelter, electricity — it is right there on the shelf.” Google, “the research driven swarm,” is something we have never seen before, one of many challenges unique to our age. But it was Aureli, in San Francisco, whose studio toured the new Frank 38

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DeNatured DIMITRI BRAND (MArch ’18), JAMES COLEMAN (MArch ’18) and JONATHAN MOLLOY (MArch ’18) March 28, 2016 The title of our fold, (De)Natured is a reference to Vincent Scully’s contribution to the publication Denatured Vision following the 1988 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art which opens “The way human beings see themselves in relation to nature is fundamental to all cultures; thus the first act of architecture is the natural world, the second is the relationship of human structures to the topography of the world, and the third is the relationship of all these structures to each other, comprising the human community as a whole.” In this quote is a call for a radical reconsideration of the role of architecture, moving from the conception that architecture is primarily a social discipline that defines our relationship with each other to an architecture that is primarily dependent on our relationship with the landscape, and by extension nature. Humanity, technology, and nature, once seen as progressing towards an inseparable future, are now overwhelmingly perceived as distinct from one another, even adversarial. Even the concept of the Anthropocene has an underlying dialogue of conflict which necessitates an “other” (note how the Holocene extinction is also referred to as the Anthropocene extinction). More recently, Slavoj Zizek postulated that rather than being impotent in the face of nature, we are in fact omnipotent, to the point where nature can no longer be thought of as existing. Technology is being tasked with expanding its role as the mediator between humanity and nature, protecting humanity from the hostile nature of our own construct, and the unspoiled “other” nature from humanity’s destructive presence. In post-Sandy New York City, there is a heightened sense of the city’s evolving relationship with its rising and volatile coastline. Recent resiliency legislation and rebuilding projects[3] have formed a preliminary methodology for addressing the city’s vulnerability, defining the condition and performance of the city’s developing perimeter. These steps have struggled to define where exactly the line exists between the nature we must defend ourselves against and the nature we must defend ourselves with. Some proposals call for a separation and defense from a broken and hostile ecosystem (see: BIG’s “BIG U” for Rebuild by Design) while others have worked to actively blur the line through adaptive and performative landscapes that incorporate or disperse the rising waters (see: LTL’s proposal for MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition). In this vein, natural conditions and environments are increasingly used as generative devices. However, these responses tend to be superficial, often embodying a false image of simplistic formal means. Furthermore, technophilic solutions abound, promising efficiencies – spatial, performative, philosophical – that will “reduce” our impact on 40

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the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency has meekly stated on their website that “green building is gaining momentum,[4]” as LEED formulas and sustainable design consultants promise to institute a criteria for building that will mitigate the industry’s inherently harmful effects on the environment. This is insufficient. Architecture must bridge the supposed static and adversarial relationship between humanity and nature, acknowledging that the two exist in a metabolic continuum. Yet establishing this continuum calls into question previous notions of protection and preservation, making preconceived boundaries between humankind and nature increasingly undefinable. Without the benefit of existing standards, architecture must contend with the vaporous rhetoric of a new ecological agenda. Without a deeper understanding of this ecology, we tend to construct in its absence simplified working definitions for its constituent parts. Rooted in an often necessary pragmatism, we loosely employ ideas of “nature as other” in order to keep rain out of buildings while necessarily ignoring that those building in fact affect that very rain through their presence within an ecological metabolism. We are at once intimately familiar with these working definitions – we all know what natural means – and confounded upon their investigation – what really is natural? Indeed, the term natural invokes both a technical and teleological argument without clarifying either. Though it resists comprehension, humanity’s relationship with the natural is a primary architectural concern and must be continually investigated with conceptual, technological, and systematic rigor. We must ask: are current conceptions adequate or are they based on dubious ontological arguments and symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues? Are the physical and philosophical buffers we create between ourselves and nature necessary? Or are they problematic simulacra that present a controllable and definable nature that further separates humanity from physical realities? Or on an even more fundamental level, what is the legacy of these dichotomous forms of thinking and how do they affect our conceptions of preservation, stewardship, and production? To philosophically address these relationships is to make explicit the dialogue that is noticeably absent, yet crucial to the profession and our education.

Notes 1 Scully, Vincent. Architecture: The Natural and the Man Made. Edited by Stuart Wreke and William Howard. Adams. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991. 2 Slavoj Zizek. Ecology Without Nature, Lecture Athens 2006 3 http://www.usgbc.org/leed

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Architecture’s Attrition Problem: Interview, Susan Surface CAT GARCIA-MENOCAL (MArch ‘16) April 7, 2016

Susan Surface graduated from YSoA with an MArch in 2012. Their biography describes a “designer and photographer, an organizer of events and exhibitions, and a researcher of the politics of art, design and architecture. Surface’s practice centers the creation and preservation of livable, equitable places, and demonstrates how design can support civic participation by integrating research, curatorial work, and creative production. At Design in Public, Surface is director of the Seattle Design Festival and curates exhibitions at the Center for Architecture & Design. Surface is also a curator at The Alice, an independent artist-run gallery. Surface has been an architectural designer with super-interesting!; an organizer with Architecture for Humanity and Artist Studio Affordability Project; and a researcher with C-LAB and the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Surface was a 2014 A-I-R at The Center For Photography at Woodstock, was a teaching fellow in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Yale, and earned a B.F.A. in Integrated Design from Parsons School of Design and an M.Arch from Yale School of Architecture.” Surface reached out to Paprika! editors after Bulletin II, which covered the school’s meeting to discuss the results of the AAU Sexual Climate Survey. The following is a conversation about Surface’s experiences at YSoA and beyond with Cat Garcia-Menocal. CGM: What has been your experience in practice? SS: I lucked out big time in practice. Mostly because my jobs have come from people that sought me out about the issues I was interested in. I worked for was Kian Goh [ed. note: founding principal of super-interesting!, YSOA M.Arch ’99] who reached out to me when I volunteered with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Then I worked for a small luxury residential firm which was a good learning experience -where I really learned how to do details right. CGM: What do you think about the school’s lack of formal training to address sexual harassment, especially for visiting faculty? A possible reason it has not been done is because of the cost or a perception that it would be unfeasible to actually train that many people every year. SS: That’s assuming that a student will not pursue a lawsuit that will cost [the school] way more than hiring some consultants would. That lack of policy relies on students not feeling empowered to take that kind of recourse. If these people can figure out how to design an entire city, figure out how to make the most advanced buildings in the world, write the theory that is at the forefront of our profession that will determine how we all think about this industry for the next several hundred years, then they can figure out how to offer a sexual assault prevention class. It’s not that hard. 42

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CGM: What do you think of the perception that these issues are not within the purview of (capital A-) Architecture? Patrik Schumacher’s statement following Alejandro Aravena’s Pritzker win is a recent symptom of this tension in the discipline. There seems to be strange and perhaps misleading polarization of formal and socially concerned projects. SS: You know, it’s funny. I chat with Patrik Schumacher quite a bit and actually, this very week he is part of a symposium that addresses the social implications of parametricism. [ed.note: see “Parametricism 2.0 at the AA School of Architecture.] The premise of the symposium is that parametrics needs to move beyond the strict mechanical engineering component of how [form is made] and address the ways in which it is social. He is actually very concerned with how [social issues] shape urban form and the implications design has for shaping society… Now, he and I disagree very deeply on how society should be structured, but it’s a misunderstanding of his particular take to say that social concerns are beyond the purview of architecture. When you get into people that focus on a social justice perspective, who tend to be more in line with the left and the tradition of Marxism, then they do butt heads. They have dismissed Schumacher’s social ideas by negating what he’s actually saying about [parametricism] having a social component. I think anyone that says this is not about social issues would actually be disagreeing with Patrik Schumacher! [laughs] Then there’s the other thing, which is: What is capital-A Architecture? We have to look back into the deep history of those things you see in Architectural History 101. This goddess with a little hut forming a shelter. How is that not inherently concerned with a humanity and a social [idea]? If you look at the Western history of architecture, which is what you typically learn at Yale, Eisenman is drawing from churches. He is drawing from the history of Judeo-Christianity and the Catholic church— things that were inherently concerned with proportion; they were concerned with communicating religiosity which is a way of organizing a culture and a way of embedding moral code and behavior into a space that creates reflection for that. It’s a space that people coagulate around, that monarchs and religious leaders decided was worth investment. There’s been an Enlightenment and Modernism. Modernism was a very social project. So maybe there is a capital-A architecture that is not concerned with social issues, but that would be a complete deviation from the entire history of architecture. Something that architects have done in order to establish themselves as a profession is to create the history and the canon. Building code is a way that municipalities create these social mores by concerning themselves with public safety, materials, ADA, and environment. Anyone that thinks these are not social issues just hasn’t taken their first year history class. CGM: How do issues of gender incorporate themselves in that history in a meaningful way, and why is it important to talk about gender or Year in Review 43

even consider gender when you’re talking about architecture and the purview of architecture? SS: Well, a simple reason would be to say because people think it’s important. Why is it important to talk about marble? Why is it important to talk about laminated wood? Because someone has made it available as a topic that is relevant. Because architecture is a social network, it’s a way of relating to each other, I don’t even want to reduce it to a career. Wouldn’t you want or need to inform or enrich your practice by being able to address [these issues]? Anytime someone thinks that it’s not their problem or it’s not something they’re equipped to deal with, they seem very fearful, as if they don’t trust themselves to be able to engage directly with that topic, or they have somehow coasted through life in such a way that they’ve never had to. Perhaps it’s a fear that addressing it might somehow undermine the privileges that they have been afforded. If we don’t attend to things like attrition, or why certain types of people tend to leave [architecture], then we lose a lot of the richness that those people bring to architecture. The suffragist Catherine Beecher is known as a feminist thinker and a suffragette organizer who made all these really intense designs for kitchens and homes with the intention that she could change how families lived. Think about people like Louis Khan, who had this archetype of ‘house’ which is not a specific house, but a house which could then be a space that creates a family. It’s a little suspicious to think that that’s not borne upon how someone thinks about space and place.

The system is designed to keep certain types of people out. Think about who never gets to become an architect. There are only a few programs where you can enroll part time— Boston Architecture College. There a few where you can work while you’re a student and get paid. CGM: And it’s telling that the top-tier institutions don’t really entertain that model. SS: I don’t find it at all embarrassing to describe the circumstances from which I came, but when I explained exactly what the issue was then the response was “Oh poor thing!” CGM: People of very specific socio-economic backgrounds are going to be dissuaded from studying architecture not because of a potentially exclusionary pedagogy, but because out in the field, the pay is low. So the question becomes why would someone of little means want to enter into such a low-paying position? SS: Why would someone of means want to get into that profession when they know what it’s like to earn more? Why would anyone do it? Because, for some they might feel that it’s the way they can affect the change that would benefit themselves, which is the case for me. I didn’t go into architecture altruistically, I went into it intellectually and as an advocate for myself and my people. Also, I would be in a building and think “I could make this so much better. Let me!”

CGM: Is architecture currently exclusionary and is that changing? SS: There is something deeply exclusionary about how people become architects. It’s, to some degree gendered, but it’s also very much raced and classed. Think about how you are a student: you are a full-time student and therefore either coming from some independent means, or you have a partner that supports you, or you’ve saved up some money, or you’re living on $11,000 a year in student loans roughly because that’s about as much as Yale says one can live on beyond full tuition (at least when I was there). Imagine earning your education as a Yale student and all the workload as a single parent. Imagine earning it, as I did, with two elderly loved ones who financially depend on you. Imagine earning it as someone who is disabled. Imagine earning it when your critic decides your model must be made of Plexiglas, must be done on Friday, and you don’t have $200 to spend on Plexiglas. When I was in school I often worked in bars and did odd jobs rather than work for Pelli or another respectable local firm, and I was told by professors that this reflected poorly on my priorities. This was considered evidence that I didn’t care about my education because I was working to support myself and pay my rent. For me that indicated a faculty and administration that does not know how the other half lives. There’s this assumption that you’re at least middle class. Like if you get kicked out, you have a family home to go to, but if you’re financially responsible for that family home, what do you do?

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Interview with Robert A.M. Stern SAMANTHA JAFF (MArch ’16) and TIM ALTENHOF (Ph.D. ’17) April 14, 2016 On Monday, March 28, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the editors of Paprika! XXIV sat down with Dean Stern for an interview. Prior to this meeting, the editors had sent out an open call to the students of the School of Architecture, soliciting one hundred questions. They received forty. A blessing in disguise perhaps; the interview published here consists of fifty questions, and lasted well over an hour. Throughout the cheerful and lively conversation, we discussed socks, artificial intelligence and ‘getting Bobbed.’ Here’s a look at the man inside the Gucci loafers: Are you a master? I never think of myself as a master. But I’ve been doing architecture for quite some time, so I should be on top of my game by now. Who were your masters? As a student, Paul Rudolph was without question the dominating force in the school, and I certainly respected him and his work enormously. I also respected Philip Johnson and his work, but he was not actually teaching when I was a student. He was appearing for lectures and studio reviews. Then later on at the end of my student days, I came in close contact with Robert Venturi. And in my early days as an architect—or as an intern architect if you will—I continued to be very close to Bob Venturi and his ideas. I published in Perspecta 9/10, which came out in the spring 1965, a significant excerpt from his book (Complexity and Contradiction) and also a significant portfolio of Venturi and Rauch’s early work. I began to know the work quite well in 1962 and was in close contact with Venturi from that point forward. A servant with three masters is a problem. Since, for example, Philip Johnson always said he liked Bob Venturi’s plans but couldn’t stand his buildings, Bob Venturi is not prone to like anybody’s work of his generation but his own, and Paul Rudolph not liking Bob Venturi, especially after Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown savaged his Crawford Manor apartment house in the book Learning from Las Vegas. What does a master wear? Oh, well. (We are all looking at Dean Stern) No, come on, it’s a silly question! Different people wear different things. Frank Lloyd Wright was an incredible fin de siècle dandy through most of his life with a flowing foulard. He frequently wore a beret, and then adopted the pork pie hat. You always could recognize him from his costume. Mies wore elegantly tailored suits. He probably had a tailor. Philip Johnson dressed very well. He was always impeccably attired. He could put on a pair of blue jeans and would somehow make you think he was attending a black tie party. Paul Rudolph wore these suits from Louis Boston, they were tweedy, they kind of looked itchy, but he was always well attired. In those days you wore a coat and tie. Charles Moore: bad suits, bad cloth. Tom Beeby: not a snappy dresser. Cesar Pelli dresses nicely, but I wouldn’t say he wore master’s clothes. And then there is me who likes to wear what I think are 46

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nice clothes. I always wear a white shirt, like Steven Harris, but I own a tie, unlike Steven Harris. You know, getting up at the hour in the morning I’m forced to get up, I reduce my decisions. I’ve always worn Gucci loafers since 1965 (the year Perspecta 9/10 came out, editor’s note). You can always identify a pre-1965 picture of me. I might be wearing something else. But after that it’s easy. There you go. Why am I telling you all this? Herman Spiegel, an engineer… we don’t want to talk about his clothes. Going through the deans now. As to teachers, Jim Stirling was very notable. Jim Stirling began to put on quite a bit of weight in the course of the time he taught at Yale. He ended up very large. He always wore dark blue, immaculately pressed, long-sleeved shirts, which I believe he got from Turnbull & Asser. So here he was, this ‘Mr. Anti-establishment’ shopping in the most establishment place. And he was very vain about his socks—bright colored socks. Clothes were very important to him— he would give an award to the project in his studio he liked best. He would give that person a shirt. So it was all about the costume. The fashion icon of the school, until recently mostly male, because the school was mostly male, I’m not going to comment on women’s clothes—I don’t want to get in trouble here. What’s a color you like today? I always like yellow. I always wear a soft, buttery, yellow pocket handkerchief, and I think a pocket handkerchief is very important. I carry two handkerchiefs—one for show and one for blow. The blow one is in my back pocket. The one for blow may just be a pale blue (pulls it out of his pocket). Yellow, I reserve for the pocket handkerchief. When did you commit to wearing yellow socks? When I returned to Yale as Dean. I think that Keller Easterling made an observation one day that Fred Astaire always wore yellow socks. It turns out, Fred Astaire did wear yellow socks a lot. I admire Fred Astaire. He also always wore pale blue socks. So I have this whole set of pale blue socks. But I’ve locked into yellow. It’s easier to stick with one color. And I think, Astaire wore pale yellow and pale blue socks because as a dancer, he was very aware of his feet and what they might look like—maybe wanting to draw people’s attention to his feet. Anyhow, they have become a signature of mine. But I’m no Fred Astaire. Why do you think most architects wear black? I think a lot of architects have confused the profession of architecture with a religious cult. I did not enter architecture with the same intention as though entering a holy order. We are now leaving the fashion compartment. Dean Stern seems pleased. What activities do you do besides architecture? Not very many (laughs). The older I get, the more I do less of the things that I thought I would do when I got to be older. So I don’t go to as many museums and cultural events as I would like. Once I became the dean, I stopped going on any kind of a regular basis to live theater in New York, which I used to be quite an habitué of. Year in Review 47

I just found for one thing an absence of free time, and another, I was usually so exhausted that at the end of the day I would go and sit in my one hundred dollar seat and have the most extensive snooze ever known to man which is neither nice for my companion nor for the neighbors in general, and probably rather disturbing to the actors on the stage if they could see me. I’m looking forward to catching a few plays after June 30th. On the weekends, I find myself writing emails and reading texts that have been written whether its Constructs or Dean’s letters or books like the book of the history of the school I’ve written with Jimmy Stamp, which was a four-year project. I am the best editor I know. And maybe I’m the best editor period. I catch all kinds of mistakes. I cannot read a book by someone else without finding mistakes. On the other hand, I know there are mistakes in my books, I write in the margins, I correct the text. I’m obsessive. I have a very good eye for detail, which is very useful for an architect. I find that not so many architects have a great eye for details. But the architects I admire, whether it’s Mies, or certainly Rudolph or Johnson, they had very sharp eyes. They could see details. They could see where things were. I see things that are out of line. Drives people in my office completely insane. How did you know that Bob? (raises his voice) Or, I will say to them: how big is that? And of course in the computer age the answer is usually one of stupefaction. And I say, maybe it is three inches or whatever. And finally they fish around and find a scale—every architect in my generation had a little one in this pocket (points to his shirt), and they measure and say: how did you know it was three inches, and I say: experience. So I guess I am a master. A master and a monster are usually very close to each other. I shouldn’t have admitted that, but better I say it than you. Your most traumatic experience with another architect? (bursts into laughter) Well, there was a time when I had to peel Denise Scott Brown away from fighting with Paul Rudolph in my apartment over the subject of the way Denise and Bob Venturi had treated Rudolph’s Crawford Manor. This was at a party I gave after the opening of the Venturi show at the Whitney in 1969. It was a small show, very interesting. So that was rather traumatic. And I remember that Ulrich Franzen, the architect, came up to me at the party and said: Bob you better go into the library, Denise is about to kill Paul Rudolph. That was pretty scary. There are probably some other moments. Agreed, that your early work is more original? I don’t want to be original. I want to be good. That’s what Mies van der Rohe said. I think that originality is the luxury of youth. You have to make filthy little spots to put yourself on the map. But it is often not the most important thing about architecture. Quality of the physical thing, appropriateness of the thing in its setting, and in relationship to the activities that it houses, are things I value very much. Dada screams are very original but not very interesting. Is it more interesting to look at a painting by Jackson Pollock—very original, but very hard to understand, and maybe there is nothing to understand at all—or to look at a painting by his more or less con48

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temporary Edward Hopper. There you go. They are both great artists. Which has been more rewarding, practice or pedagogy? I can’t imagine my life of one without the other. This coming year when I will be on leave will be a heavy trauma. I will probably wake up at 4:45am as I did this morning with no reason of getting up at 4:45am. And I will probably run to Grand Central Station and sniff the train and then go back home. They are both rewarding. In my early days of teaching in the 1970s and early 1980s, when I was advocating what was called Post-Modernism but I was advocating its maturation to something that I came to call New Traditionalism, I found teaching very, very interesting, because I did win over—maybe intentionally, maybe just by the fact that they were truly interested in what I was saying—a whole group of young architects—this was when I was teaching at Columbia, although I did teach at Yale when Cesar Pelli was the Dean. So that was very interesting. By the time I stopped teaching at Columbia, because I came to Yale as Dean, I must say, I got a little tired of pushing the great big ball of architecture up the hill and it was always rolling down and deconstructing around me. But I take the long view. So I don’t know. I love to be in an office. I love the experience of designing buildings with others. I’m not so big on going to the field. I don’t stand in the field and give instructions. I’m bad at it. I have a shorter patience, as you may have noticed. A hard-hat doesn’t go with my look. When I want to walk through a project, especially in recent years when the Federal Government has made onsite inspection so much more subject of rules and regulations—you have to wear a hard hat, you have to wear special shoes, I can’t wear my Gucci loafers—it’s really a problem! But I think that if you have the pretense of being a master, you need to combine both, because the master needs to teach the young, bring them along, and the master needs to lead the people with whom she or he works as well, and show a certain mastery to build confidence. What does it mean in an office, if you’re the head of the office, and nobody has any confidence in what you’re saying. You’re not a master. You’re just the boss. I don’t want to be thought of as just the boss. How do you think that your career would have differed if you were to graduate in 2016? I can’t imagine at all. I suppose, I would have learned how to use a computer. My nine-year-old grandson can use a computer. My sevenyear-old granddaughter can use a computer. I cannot. Now you might say: why can’t you—because I didn’t want to learn. I didn’t want to become in its thrall, and because I do believe computing, while very useful for hundreds of things in an office or in practice, useful to make quick representations of design and intentions, in fact I think it’s the worst way to go about designing; it homogenizes practice. And I could not achieve what I wanted to do by doing it on a computer. So to this day in our office, I make a little sketch, and then another, a plan, a sketch of an elevation, of a section like in the Beaux-Arts days and then we make a little clay model, and I usually don’t hack at it because everybody is terrified when I lift a mat knife that I might not only kill myself but them (laughter), but Year in Review 49

we model in physical terms. I think architecture is physical. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not digital. Digital means is a way of drawing maybe at a certain point but I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about the physical. My feelings are no secret. I think everybody knows how I think about the computer at this point. How has research and writing affected your practice as an architect? Well, I tended to compartmentalize these different things. The research, say the books on New York, an elaborate and rather expensive hobby. But of course there are times when in contemplating a design and working on a design and talking to clients or government agencies, I can call up in the conversation information that maybe many other architects donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have. So itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nice and useful. But thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not why I do it. I do it because I feel thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s just a great interest. Because I enjoy it. Some architects play golfâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather design the clubhouse and also write a book.

For the full interview, please visit: http://yalepaprika.com/interview-with-robert-a-m-stern/

Paprika!

EDITORâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S NOTE In late August, I found myself hunched over a small poolâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;my shoes and hands caked in acrid mudâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with a group of volunteers attempting to rescue salamanders from an evaporating bog in the humid backcountry of North Carolina. Far from the palm-wringing anxiety of a summer competition deadline, it seemed like a poignant time to take stock of this system which we as architects have all participated in or at least observed. An analysis of the historical arc and the various incarnations of the competition model reveals a volatile terrain of astounding successes and failures in terms of both ideas

In an August 21 New Yorker profile on DEAN STERN, writer IAN VOLNER suggested that as his architecture had moved from winking at the past to seeking to embody it, the Dean had moved from being a member of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Graysâ&#x20AC;? to being a â&#x20AC;&#x153;Black.â&#x20AC;?

9/3 â&#x20AC;&#x153;About 700 tons of sodium cyanide did in our site,â&#x20AC;? said ALAN PLATTUS, explaining the China studioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eleventh hour shift of site from Tiajin to Beijing. The studio is approaching the new site with a series of urban analyses. The MARION WEISS (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;84) and MICHAEL MANFREDI studio is working with â&#x20AC;&#x153;Brangelinasâ&#x20AC;?: that is, mashups of precedent campus plans designed to uncover new programming potentials. After an all-too-real discussion of bricks and Hardie board, the SARA CAPLES (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;74) and EVERARDO JEFFERSON (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;73) studio has begun site research with a focus on technical issues. The first question of the year at the JONATHAN ROSE (B.A. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;74) lecture, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Design like you give a damnâ&#x20AC;?: â&#x20AC;&#x153;What is an example of when you should design like you do not give a damn?â&#x20AC;? The New York developer replied that you need to discover what is important to you, then pursue that. ELIA ZENGHELISâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; studio heard first-hand stories of the AAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s marijuana-infused culture of the late 60s, where first year student REM KOOLHAAS was instructed to â&#x20AC;&#x153;pull his socks up.â&#x20AC;? The studioâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first assignment is to create â&#x20AC;&#x153;image manifestosâ&#x20AC;? to explore program and public space. Setting the mood for their Scottish observatories, SUNIL BALDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio begins with four drawings of spheres and darkness. Many in the studio are quite literally in the Stone Age, researching Neolithic constructions for contemplating the cosmos. Some are even clicking around dark rooms to embody the ultimately engaged space lunatic aficionado, the bat. Led for the second year by JOYCE HSIANG (B.A. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;99, M.Arch â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;03), the first years commence by designing a study to fit in a 24â&#x20AC;&#x2122; cube. Said MICHAEL SZIVOS of the rapid three week timeline, â&#x20AC;&#x153;if you have a problem with the time span for the first project, just go to the bar, have some drinks and complain about it to each other.â&#x20AC;? Also for the second year, for their studio the Second Years will design an architecture school, but this year at Kean State. Splitting up into groups to conduct site analysis and precedent studies, studio head EMILY ABRUZZOâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s analyzes the philosophy and pedagogy of MICHAEL GRAVES, in whose honor the school was founded.

9/4 â&#x20AC;&#x153;The person who relished the bombing of Berlin was Hitler, the people who relished the bombing of London were modernists. America didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get bombed, so we bombed ourselves, we called it urban renewal,â&#x20AC;? said the Dean on the opening of his seminar, Parallel Moderns.

- BĂŠla BartĂłk, composer developed and efficacy of the associated labor. Canonical competitions such as the 1982 Parc de la Villette and 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower serve as markers of intense theoretical and aesthetic discourse. Beliefs were at stake. Are such influential provocations present in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s submissions? This issue considers the medium of competitions, offers individual experiences, assigns personal value, evaluates the activity levels within the school, and demands that Paprika! readers consider their own positions within this debate.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The battlefield is littered with famous designers who never got built for various sundry reasons,â&#x20AC;? intoned PHIL BERNSTEIN, at the beginning of his required course for third year master students. WES HIATT (M.Arch â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;17) concluded his tenure as 6on7â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s m.c. with, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Drink Like you Give a Damn,â&#x20AC;? a production involving multiple videos projected onto the corduroy. AMANDA IGLESIAS (M.Arch â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;18) will be this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 6on7 coordinator.

9/9 JASON MCLENNAN, architect, winner of the Buckminster Fuller Prize, Ashoka Fellow, and founder of the Living Building Challenge, presented his sustainable philosophy at the Divinity School, where he and one other consultant will be designing a â&#x20AC;&#x153;living buildingâ&#x20AC;? residential community to replace the Canner Street apartments. Practicing what he billed as â&#x20AC;&#x153;the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most stringent green building standard,â&#x20AC;? McLennan said that whereas they were open to â&#x20AC;&#x153;all different aesthetic paradigms,â&#x20AC;? what made his buildings â&#x20AC;&#x153;radicalâ&#x20AC;? was that they actually harvest more electricity, water, etc, than they consume: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Different from the way design used to - still occurs.â&#x20AC;? Possibly the largest residential building project on campus since the Deanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new colleges, the Divinity School will have designs by January, at which point they will start fundraising. Professedly uninterested in what our school of architecture has to offer, his client, Divinity School Dean Greg Sterling, wants to make a statement with the new building program. Sadly, our school could not take note: the presentation was at Wednesday lunch, a period occupied by mandatory curriculum in the first and second year. The second years were, ironically, in Environmental Design. Said DEAN STERN, regarding the hour and a half free period the School of Management maintains around lunch so as to encourage event attendance and student activities, â&#x20AC;&#x153;If they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t manage their time, what else can they do over there?â&#x20AC;?

FEATURES

Are you optimistic? Well, we are meeting now in late March of 2016, and as I look at the political horizon, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hard to be as optimistic as I might have been in other similar periods earlier in my life. But I am basically an optimist. I think as an architect you have to be an optimist. You have to believe that what youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re making is going to be good and that people will value it, they will appreciate it, not necessarily as great artâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not so badâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but as something that makes them smile, that makes them feel their lives are better, that they can do what they want to do in their lives in a better way. Those are all things architects can enable. In architecture school, and I was just as guilty of this as any student here in this school now, when I was a student I had no use for architects like me, who build all those buildings. Much later on, some Yale student complained about Cesar Pelli when he was the deanâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;he was a brilliant deanâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;they didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t approve of him because he does commercial architecture as though he was sending people to the electric chair or something. Fortunately most students need to get over this view of the world very soon.

Charles Kane, Issue Editor Nicolas Kemper / Andrew Sternad, Coordinating Editors Luke Anderson / Daniel Glick Unterman / James Kehl / John Kleinschmidt /Katie Stege / John Wan, Contributors

COMPETITIONS ARE FOR HORSES NOT ARTISTS ON THE GROUND

Why do you think architecture is important, and who do you think it serves, other than the golf players? (laughter) Architecture is everything about the man made environment. Some of it achieves the level of high art, some of it is good solid meat and potatoes, which is very important after all. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to sit down to a dinner of foie gras every day in the week. Sometimes you want to have bangers and mash. So I think architecture is very important, but it is also something I want to do. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important to me. If I were a musician it would be important to me. Maybe nobody cares to go to a concert. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not a concert-goer, but I think itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wonderful if you would to say to me Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m about to go to a music school I would say wow, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great! Good, you have to fulfill your own inner genius. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like your question. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s kind of a silly question. Not worthy. Architecture is an artâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;high and low.

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September 10, 2015 Fold VI

A FLEXIBLE KINK FRINGE THROUGH MERCURIAL WINDOWS by Daniel Glick-Unterman (M.Arch 17) Project Team: Martin Elliot (M.Arch YEAR?, MIT), Chad Schram (M.Arch YEAR?, University of Michigan) and Daniel Glick-Unterman (M.Arch 17), Competition: ARCHmediumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Detroit Station for the Arts Brief: Re-design Detroitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Michigan Central Station. The station is one of the most prolific ruins in Detroit and has the most broken windows of any building in the city. The priorities of our work in this competition were to contextualize an emerging collective body of research on Detroit; to execute highly specific operations within experimental representation; and to test the capacity of a remote co-production of work. We were not looking for fame or fortune, but saw the competition brief as a context of value systems that were up for debate. The common thread between these motives is emphasis on â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;howâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to work rather than â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; the competition asked for. Our research informed an expansion of the ethical frameworks of practice, enabling us to look beneath the surfaces of situations to uncover hidden agendas and agents, and thereby to reconsider what was at stake within the work. Three precedents rode shotgun: Luigi Pirandelloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;6 Characters in Search of an Authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Rene Magritteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Human Conditionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, and Riachard Barnesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Animal Logicsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. The final perspective drawing is both a proposal and a representation of a proposal, something like â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;a painting in a gallery, of a painting in a gallery, overlooking a landscapeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. The drawing stages the ethical-graining of the work within the space of the renovated atrium

of the Station, and also works as a format for viewing the site-plan, program diagram and other representations which have been installed on the walls of the atrium, and are co-produced by local Detroit workers. Amongst the proposed mediations are: the cloning, modifying and relocating of several of Detroitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s racially charged monuments, commissioning a large rug that is a map of Detroit to clad the floor of the atrium, then allocating a portion of the space to local seamsters that continuously update and repair the rug, the production of a robot of Henry Fordâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pet dog to be built out of Jaguar engines, giving over a portion of the new Station to local craftsman, and incorporation of a new bike share system. The competition served as a lens for us to see our work next to projects that were forced to play along with systems that constrain the imagination and limit what architects dare to work on. In this light, the work can ultimately function for us as a tool for the loosening of authority.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;GUMBOâ&#x20AC;? by James Kehl (M.Arch â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;16) Project Team: Xiao Wu (M.Arch/MBA â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;17) and Li Kehl (MBA â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;16), Phaelan Vaillancourt (MBA â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;16), and Emilio Ilac (MBA â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;16). Competition:Urban Land Instituteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hines Competition 2015 Brief: masterplan for a site in TremĂŠ, New Orleans. Last semester, I participated in the Urban Land Instituteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hines competitionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an annual contest that draws over a hundred interdisciplinary teams from American universities to propose creative solutions for the revitalization of urban neighborhoods. The competitionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s workload was immense. continued on back page

The Art School plied pbr and paper hats at their reception for the closing of their second year show, which will be up through the weekend. During PHIL BERNSTEINâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s special session of Professional Practice course, when given the choice between A and B, 7% of the students chose G. AMANDA IGLESIAS, DIMITRI BRAND, ISABELLE SONG, and JAMES COLEMAN, (all M.Arch â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;18), will be editing Retrospecta 2015-16.

Corrections: In the 9/3 Fold of Paprika, several alumni, Caples and Jefferson among them, were listed as graduating with M.Arch II degrees. There is no such degree, students in the M.Arch I and II programs both receive a Master upon graduation. Moreover, Ed Mitchell was listed among the professors taking a sabbatical this semester: he is not. Please send submissions, suggestions, and other inquiries to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com

Year in Review 51

Nicolas Kemper and Andrew Sternad

Graphic Design: Coordinating Editor: Issue Editors:

Martin Bek

SUPPLEMENT

Dorian Booth and Jessica Angel

PAPRIKA! HANDS ON

PAPRIKA! OCTOBER 2, 2015 / FOLD VIII

September 18 2015 (FOLD VII)

ON THE GROUND The Dean Selection Committee has finished its work, having submitted a list of names - some more endorsed than others - to President Salovey, possibly as far back as June. There is a rumor currently at SHOP that GREGG PASQUARELLI might be one of them. An older rumor named KELLER EASTERLING - the head of the Dean Selection Committee. Word is also that members of the office of DEBORAH BERKE have been making visits to New Haven, and that the principal herself has been making an effort to meet the denizens of floor three.

9/10 "The worst thing that can happen to a designer is to have their first design built," said Dean ROBERT A.M. STERN (M.Arch ‘65) in the question-and-answer session for the CAPLES JEFFERSON lecture. “There’s a reason those houses look like little Dutch houses,” said SARAH CAPLES (M.Arch ‘74) in a powerful and simple explanation of larger forces at play in the Weeksville Heritage Center, in Brooklyn, designed by Caples and fellow Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor EVERARDO JEFFERSON (M.Arch ‘73). Presented with their remarkable design for Brooklyn’s largest African-American cultural institution on the historic site of one of America’s first free black communities, another audience might have joined in a discussion about “passing” and the potential for ornament to run deeper than surface. Instead, four predictable questions about form basically missed the point.

9/15 Why earn a license? To become an “architect,” read the slide in the Tuesday evening licensure talk by NCARB advisor MICHAEL AYLES (AIA, NCARB). Among the exciting developments in our ever evolving licensing process is that we only need 3740 hours - instead of 5600 - to earn our license, and that the exams now cost $60 less. "Search Versus Re-Search: Josef Albers, Artist and Educator" opened at the Yale School of Art with a pizza and beer reception.

“This is the math Donald Trump can do,” began KEVIN GRAY’s introduction to the capitalization rate in his Commercial Real Estate class. The harder stuff” — what Trump can’t do” — comes later this semester.

9/17

“An example of where the restoration of something is its most effective suppression,” said KURT FORSTER of the new Schloss being erected in Berlin in the question session for the lecture of KATHLEEN JAMESCHAKRABORTY, “The Architecture of Modern Memory: Building Identity in Democratic Germany.”

EDITORIAL “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances conﬁdently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Ɏ Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods In this fold we would like to explore the notion of independent work in all of its manifestations: what it means to be "hands on" with the actual production of architectural, artistic, theoretical, or design work outside of the purview of school or professional environments. What are the alternative paths that one can take? In a time when work is largely produced under the authority of institutions or ﬁrms, can agency be reclaimed through independent projects? This fold is an attempt to show that there are possibilities of producing meaningful work at a scale that is accessible to independent pursuits.

ALAN PLATTUS’ (B.A. ‘76) advanced studio leaves for Beijing on the 22nd, a week before the rest of the advanced studios. A collaboration with Tsinghua University architecture students and a lecture by Dean Stern at the Yale Beijing Center will be highlights of the trip to China's sprawling capital city.

9/18

precedent diagrams, which lacked color for trees and lawns. She took a green pencil to the drawings to remedy the apparent fear of landscape.

competes with the Architecture League of New York’s Beaux Arts Ball, THRESHOLD. A ticket to the ball? $100. We know where we’ll be.

"One of the best things about Babel — ironically is that you can understand it in many different languages," said KYLE DUGDALE (PhD ‘15) in the first meeting of his seminar, Babel. No stranger to teaching here as a PhD student and long time teacher of the history component of Summer Visualization, Kyle joins us this year as a

“Originality is king in the kingdom of fools,” quipped PETER EISENMAN in first year Formal Analysis. For the first time, the class presented drawings digitally, focusing this week on San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. The move to the big screen was prompted in part by a “smudge epidemic”: Hull’s supplied the wrong mylar, which

member of the faculty.

caused ink to run.

6on7? It’s a party!

PETER EISENMAN bragged to his advanced studio, “I’ve been camping more than all of you combined; try two years without a shower,” eliciting jokes about his “primitive hut” period.

Paprika!

Captain SUNIL BALD and Lieutenant NICHOLAS McDERMOTT guided their starship of self-styled “darkitects” where no advanced studio has gone before: toward spheres, the shape of darkness, and a visit to the dark side of more than a few students’ psyches. These junior cosmonauts still have a long way to go; one lunar diagram labeled the “pedigree” of the moon. That would be “perigee,” Mr. Spock. Fascinating.

“What’s Yale’s problem with green?” exclaimed MARION WEISS (M.Arch ‘84) upon reviewing her advanced studio’s campus

MARTIN FINIO urged his second year studio to take a position on both site and pedagogy, intoning his students to “think about what it means to be human in the world!"

In his seminar Parallels of the Modern, Dean ROBERT A.M. STERN led a romp through northern climes. Want to crack Aldo Rossi’s code? Take a look at Lewerentz. Dean Stern warned against considering Alvar Aalto a “happy woodsman” and against reading too much into the meaning of certain words, including “Fuhrer” and “Master.” At the Rome drawing reception, the Dean

Preparing urban study models for the PORPHYRIOS studio, BORIS MORIN-DEFOY (M.Arch ‘16) wrote a grasshopper script for mass producing pitched roofs.

9/16

9/11

9/14

announced that last year marked the end of ALEC PURVES (B.A. ‘58, M.Arch ‘65) as head of the Rome summer program. Begun with STEPHEN HARBY (M.Arch ‘80), next year the program will be led by JOYCE HSIANG and BIMAL MENDIS.

KURT FORSTER appeared on ELIA ZENGHELIS’ advanced studio review of “image manifestos.” Forster alluded to LED ZEPPELIN’s “Stairwell to Heaven” [sic], while Zenghelis quoted KEVIN COSTNER’s character in Field of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.”

6on7 tonight, where’syourhead@,

The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com. As PAPRIKA! is published on the occasion of public lectures, there will be no issue published next week.

DEAN DEBORAH BERKE Year in Review 53

THEIR

Wang, Edward Paolini, Christopher

Interview with Saskia Sassen Juan Pablo Ponce de Leon w/ Surry Schlabs

Design in Public and the Seattle Design Festival Susan Surface

WITH— LUKE ANDERSON ’16 FRANCESCA CARNEY ’17 JOHN KLEINSCHMIDT ’16 MICHAEL LOYA ’17 MISHA SEMENOV ’18 MADDY SEMBLER ’17 MATTHEW ZUCKERMAN ’17 ABENA BONNA ’18

Lesbos: The Possibilities of an Island Daphne Agosin Gregory Cartelli

Pity in Pink Pearl Ho

On Hip-Hop Wesley Hiatt

3 Days, 3 Publics

$ PAPRIKA FOLD X $ OCTOBER 15 2015 $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

10/8/2015

EDITOR’S NOTE

TU, 06 M MO, 05 K L

The views expressed in

SU, 04 J

Pa p r i k a !

do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com

A 0 SA, 03 I FR, 02 G H TH, 01 F WE, 30 D E TU, 29 B C MO, 28 A REs

10.1 F.

THE CITY OF 7 BILLION presents a densely layered, radically geocentric view of the human experience on planet earth, proposing from both extra- and intra-terrestrial perspectives questions of what it means to live and to create on this pale marble of blue.

9.30 E.

During class this week, in a discussion about Philibert De L’orme’s Trompe at Anet, NATE HUME tells students that architects are constantly trying to prove their value by making things impossible.

dium

10.6 M.

A common theme emerged as students from the PORPHYRIOS, ZENGHELIS, and EISENMAN studios shared experiences from their travels: the pace of walking tours through the studios’ respective cities was slowed, one by the professor’s demeanor, two by the professors’ age.

10.5

“Architecture today is not about building, it is about assembling,” suggested ROBERT STERN in his seminar Parallel Moderns, talking not about the architects of the lecture — but THOMAS HEATHERWICK, and how he follows Dutch Architect HENDRIK PETRUS BERLAGE, who in his Amsterdam Stock Exchange integrated steel and masonry into a tectonic whole.

10.4

$0.00

ELIA ZENGHELIS’ advanced studio returned late Sunday night, exhausted from seven days in Athens and Thessaloniki, the cultural capital of Greece. The studio worked hard during the day, meeting with local architects and presenting their preliminary research on three occasions, including at Thessaloniki City Hall. By night, the studio went Greek: that is, often eating dinner at nearly midnight, followed by a nightcap with Elia and his wife, architect ELENI GIGANTES. A highlight of the trip was a tour of the Athenian Acropolis and ancient agora, led by assistant professor of architecture PANAYOTIS TOURNIKIOTIS from the National Technical University of Athens. As we contemplated the Pnyx hill and Pericles’ Speaker’s Platform, the seat of ancient Athenian democracy, Tournikiotis recalled, “this was my playground as a child. I never knew it was a special place. Let’s climb.”

J. Based in Florence, studio EISENMAN took a 3.5 hour trip to Arezzo — both ways — to see a single Piero della Francesca painting. The next day included a equally long trip and brief stop in Urbino.

9.30

FOLD Nº

! A K I PR

A$$i$tant I$$ue Editor$, Jacqueline Hall & Benjamin Ruben$tein

“Value” is the theme we seek to explore as members of The Architecture Lobby @ YSoA — a group of students who aim to articulate the value of architecture, and its production, for ourselves and the public. The Architecture Lobby was founded by Yale professor Peggy Deamer in New York City, where a growing number of architects are joining its ranks. The group is represented across the country in the form of student chapters, some of whom give updates on their activities in On The Ground. We want to articulate why, in the “real world” of architectural practice, our expertise risks lying dormant — due to the often necessary position of working under bad labor practices, bad pay, and poor influence. This issue aims to address three questions — First, what are the cultural conditions within architectural practice and education which cause us to devalue our architectural work? Second, how can architects re-define their role in an effort to capture value in new ways? And finally, how can we reassert the value of the architect to a larger audience? We believe that architectural production needs to be restructured to allow for work/life balance, the integration of new forms of knowledge, and fair compensation for our work. Throughout the issue, we feature drawings done by our colleagues, and keep track of how long it took to make them. Issues of time spent, forms of representation, alternate forms of practice, studio culture, how diversity can increase our value, what a good practice looks like, and how we communicate to the public are all explored. We hope to reassert and redefine the architect’s expertise, rather than let our profession fall to the decision making of predominantly developers, politicians, or engineers. At the same time, we hope to re-evaluate the idea of the architect as solitary genius, forever relegated to the confines of their desk, isolated from a larger political and cultural conversation. By increasing the value of architects, we hope to also increase the value of architecture. Special thanks to our graphic designers and everyone who contributed to this issue!

ON THE GROUND At U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, architecture students ERIC PETERSON (M.E.D., '15) and SBEN KORSCH are organizing a 5-week workshop series on “History, Theory, and Practice.” The salon style discussions center around topics like “the everyday all-nighter,” and “I know you got paid last summer.” At GSAPP the student group A-Frame, in collaboration with the Architecture Lobby, put on an event about entrepreneurship and the precarity of the architectural profession, discussing everything from the viability of Start-Up culture in architecture,

to the ethical/social threat when architects only chase projects for money, to the disassociated nature of architectural education from capital and the real world conditions that prevent students from making an impact. A-Frame is an activist group for students to engage collectively and critically with the social, economic, and political issues that frame the ﬁelds of architecture and design.

10/2

In Washington, D.C. at the German Studies Association, TIM ALTENHOF (Phd ‘18) bested the skepticism of literature academics as he presented his paper, “Inside/out: Gustl and the Aerial Architecture of Modernity.” He argued that, just as the emergence of the psyche in modern literature destabilized a clear distinction between inside and outside, so modern architecture’s boundaries have been dissolved through the development of new construction techniques.

10/7

In a talk at the School of Art sculpture department, Artist DANIEL BOZHKOV explained his meticulous research process and how he wants his work only to emerge through interaction, to be “less like an object and more like the weather.” “The guy who builds a cube, can say I know everything about this cube,” said ROBERT BORK as he explained the appeal of classical architecture. In his talk, “The Anti-Gothic Turn: Explaining the Architectural Revolution of Circa 1500,“ the art historian (not the court nominee) championed the late gothic of PETER PARLER as a vital, almost algorithmic, process driven design approach, in contrast to the classical, portrayed as descriptive, and dealing with set objects. The case harks to ERWIN PANOFSKY, who argued that gothic architecture never stopped. Certainly our Dean would agree.

10/8

“If you are doing fieldwork, you cannot be afraid of making a fool of yourself,” said SASKIA SASSEN — the guest of Perspecta 48 Amnesia editors AARON DRESBEN, EDWARD HSU, ANDREA LEUNG, and TEO QUINTANA (MArch ‘13) in a lecture focusing on Finance, “the steam engine of our epoch,” where — in her fieldwork — she infiltrated Wall Street banks by joining their Dominican janitors for midnight lunches.

10/9

Students in MICHELLE ADDINGTON'S Studies in Light and Materials seminar visited the ofﬁces of SO-IL and James Carpenter Design Associates in New York City to look at the cutting edge in light design. Earlier that week, Addington, the Hines Professor of Sustainable Architectural Design, revealed that she was — as suspected — indeed born in the eye of a hurricane.

10/12

At the Yale Architectural Forum, ELIHU RUBIN’S (BA ‘99) presentation on American Ghost towns was questioned by ROBERT STERN (MArch ‘65) as having taken on too much — can Detroit and a western mining town really be in the same category? ALAN PLATTUS (BA ‘76) defended Rubin — in each case the town was abandoned by single industry. Rubin will teach a seminar on the topic next semester.

SUNIL BALD and NICHOLAS MCDERMOTT'S advanced studio's intergalactic trajectory toward the dark side was intercepted by the gravitational pull of Bar on Crown Street. The studio attended Astronomy on Tap, where astrophysicists and astronomers discussed dark matter (still don't know what it is) and recent news of water on Mars (which acts like the salt put down on an icy winter road). In Built Environments and the Politics of Place, DOLORES HAYDEN lectured about a movement of feminists in the late 19th century. In Hayden’s Book, The Grand Domestic Revolution, she calls these women 'material feminists', who insisted on pay for domestic work and sought to socialize domestic labor through spatial reconﬁgurations of the home, neighborhood, and city. One of these women, ETHEL PUFFER HOWES, taught a course at Smith College on work-life balance.

This weekend, the 2015 Vlock First Year Building Project house will be featured in ArtSpace New Haven's City-Wide Open Studios. Guest curator ELINOR SLOMBRA will present works throughout the house, including a mural in the stairwell developed with input from the new homeowner. Saturday and Sunday 12 – 6pm at 193 Winthrop Ave. Also Saturday and Sunday, have coffee with HARPER KEEHN, Paprika contributor, as he lives out of his custom-built teardrop trailer on Cross Campus in front of Sterling Library (Teardrop, featured in Paprika! Hands On, September 18th). Next Tuesday, October 20th, from 8 – 9pm will be the ﬁrst round of Dinner In The Pit! All students are invited for a potluck to be shared in our paprikacarpeted badminton court. Email madelynn.ringo@ yale.edu to signup.

This week’s On The Ground includes contributions by chapters of The Architecture Lobby located at schools across the country, in addition to our regular contributions from Yale students. Contributions by Sben Korsch (UC Berkeley), Violet Whitney (GSAPP), Tim Altenhof (PhD ‘18), Jessica Elliott (MArch ‘16), Dante Furioso (MArch ‘16), Harper Keehn (YC ‘17), Georgia Kennedy (MFA '17), Amanda Iglesias (MArch '18), Madelynn Ringo (MArch '16), Nicolas Kemper (MArch '16), John Kleinschmidt (MArch '16), Andrew Sternad (MArch '16) The views expressed in PAPRIKA! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com. To read Paprika! online, please join our group on facebook: PAPRIKA!

10/13

“You guys have the talent and you could have a great impact in the built environment in a way that doesn't happen when non-architects lead the development process, which is unfortunately 95% of the time,” said BRUCE BECKER (MArch ‘85, SOM ‘85) as he and a panel of ANNE GOULET (MArch ‘00), and RYAN SALVATORE (MArch ‘13) chose the 183 Crown Street development proposal of Team 16 — DYLAN WEISER (MArch ‘18), BENJI RUBENSTEIN (MArch ‘17), and MARISA RODRIGUEZ-MCGILL (FES ‘17) — as the winner of ALEXANDER GARVIN’S opening game. ANN MORROW-JOHNSON (MArch ‘14) and representatives from the Disney Imagineers presented ﬂoating mountains and the way to realize them through Integrated Project Delivery. Structural Engineers? “The gravity police.” Standard of satisfaction? “Awesomeness factor.” KURT FORSTER concluded his Modern Architecture lecture with a sumptuous explication on how Mies “milks” his materials for “every ounce of beauty and presence they will yield.” Ending the lecture with a close up image of onyx, “looking into the cauldron of the earth,” Forster paused, then wrapped it up: “the greatest beauty about beauty is that while it could kill you, it doesn't. Have a good day.”

I$$ue Editor, Elaina Berkowitz

PR e… m

9.29

2 On the Ground

Daniel Glick-Unterman Misha Semenov

In the Kielder Forest just south of Scotland, studio SUNIL BALD took one lane roads deep into the UK’s largest timber farm to see the darkest sky in Europe.

It was announced by TONI HARP (MED) at the reception for the 27th Building Project house — at 193 Winthrop Ave., in New Haven — that JAN LEWIS, an active member of the West River neighborhood and an employee at Yale New Haven Hospital, plans to buy the house and live there with her daughter. Thankful that students “got the roof right,” ROBERT STERN emphasized that the 1,300 SF house was built at half the cost of previous projects. Constructed for less than $100/SF (not counting the more than $100,000 of free materials, or the cost of the students labor), the new owner will be purchasing it for $155,000. Surveying the reveals of her new bedroom, she wondered whether Yale would get around to installing baseboard.

193 Winthrop Avenue, New Haven Yale Building Project 2015

10.5 K.

“Beauty is a forbidden word in architecture,” protested DEMETRI PORPHYRIOS as he encouraged his studio to work its way through medieval cities they had spent the previous month 3d modeling, after all, “you cannot be inspired by a text, unless you know the text by heart.”

10.3 I.

Coordinating Editor$, Nicola$ Kemper & Andrew $ternad

S I D E

HASHIM SARKIS, Dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, delivered the closing lecture at the City of 7 Billion symposium, calling for a return in architectural thinking to physical geography, not just social geography. He covered a wide range of work, including that of Shakespeare, Le Corbrusier, Mies van der Rohe, Enric Miralles, and Bruno Latour. His carefully constructed lecture was a thoughtful response to the many voices heard during the course of the symposium. It integrated the many disciplines that create a ‘Constructed World;’ including anthropology, philosophy, economics, oceanograpy, landscape, cartography, urban planning, and geology. He beautifully wove all these threads back into architecture. Starting with a quote from Shakespeare, a meditation on space ‘in a nutshell,’ he located the origin of space, as such, at the horizon, from which it moves out into the landscape, there engaging the ground, from where it forms the architectural object. He ended with the thought that, in a nutshell, there is ‘an infinite space of action for architecture to explore.’

9.29 B.

9.28 A.

In a non stop tech-tour of San Francisco, studio WEISS MANFREDI saw IDEO’s latest innovation: a new type of nail polish brush.

Some times, to re-launch a career, you need to retire: SEAN GRIFFITHS, CHARLES HOLLAND, and SAM JACOB, the principles of the ostensibly-dissolved London based firm, FAT, will be returning to Yale for a (final?) curtain call, replacing DEBORAH BERKE as advanced critics next semester, joining an already stacked lineup which includes FRANK GEHRY, ZAHA HADID, and WOLF PRIX.

10.2 H.

Friday’s keynote lecture by PETER SLOTERDIJK proceeded at a decidedly slower pace than the day’s previous presentations, eschewing TED-talk style rapidity in favor of a thoughtful, more deliberate narrative, and compelling listeners to meet Sloterdijk “where he was.” His talk addressed our shifting understanding of the globe’s physical nature, tracking humanity’s metaphysical understanding the earth as an object, beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending in the present day. The tenor of his presentation was summed up at the end of his lecture. He sat in front of Hastings to present an indiscernible image in a book, unsure of how to project it on screen, so instead inviting those interested to come closer to take a look.

Graphic Designer$, Cary Potter & Laura Coomb$

MAn on the Street

G. DESIGN

S I D E

“W e m u w il lt ip l n le e e d ve c to m o re rs … , mu “ ch

In conjunction with Professor Saskia Sassen’s lecture at the Yale School of Architecture, this issue of Paprika takes a close look at the roles played by art and architecture in the evolution, definition, construction, and occupation of spaces, places, and groups considered to be “public.” In light of what Jonathan Crary has described as the “widespread depreciation and disparagement of the ‘brick and mortar’ world” — and of Sassen’s own recent work in Expulsions on the various “socioeconomic and environmental dislocations” characterizing the contemporary geopolitical landscape — the concepts of physical territory and built form achieve new prominence as essential to the reclamation and reconstruction of a truly public realm. Recent advances in digital networking technology and social media have granted us unprecedented capacity for communication and connection, but despite our access to such tools, the new types of association they provide remain remote and indirect. This condition is neither inevitable, nor necessary. As artists and architects — as people invested, both personally and professionally, in the betterment and sustenance of the built environment, of the city, the neighborhood, and the community — should we not take stock of our work’s potential to help bring publics into being? As builders, is it not our role to make visible, and thereby to empower, otherwise illegible public formations?

yo u wh at Li ke g ? n , yo u! e a d i ne li He y e n r n on p o be a! ou ik gr K A ! pr a r P ou ad R I in re jo A P To se : P ea ok pl bo e c fa ve

10.2 G.

Combining the histories of monument and diplomacy, LUCIA ALLAIS illuminates the legislation of global heritage in her lecture “Designs of Destruction” during the J. Irwin Miller Symposium by the weaving together of bureaucracy, construction, and identity.

ON the ground :

PAPRIKA!

Kemper, Nicolas Sternad, Andrew

-LEM

Surry Schlabs

Paprika!

Coordinating Ed.

editorial:

Schlabs, Surry

PUBLICS

PAPRIKA! ISSUE ED.

THE PLEDGE Last semester, a total of 68 students from YSoA, Harvard GSD, and Columbia GSAPP signed The Pledge, which is an agreement developed by The Architecture Lobby to uphold the value of architectural labor when seeking a job. The three points of the pledge are as follows: 1

Refuse unpaid internships. 2

Negotiate your employment contract — ask for overtime pay, a living income, and a healthcare subsidy. 3

Be ready to walk away.

If you’re interested in signing the pledge, please contact the editors.

Year in Review 55

-TIONS EDITORS’ NOTE

This week’s issue of Paprika! approaches the field of architecture ‘from the outside in,’ as an attempt to gauge perceptions and ideas about the architect from the perspective of the wider professional landscape. Submissions from colleagues in the fields of law, fine art, medicine, and beyond not only reveal how design thinking informs their own professional practice, but also provide insight into how to make architecture more accessible to those outside our discipline. In short, this issue of Paprika! hopes to act as a bridge--a first step towards establishing a forum for a more active dialogue with those outside Rudolph Hall with the goal of ultimately creating a more critical, impactful, and relevant design profession. !

10/18 ‘It’s the Temple of Karnak!’ exclaimed TURNER BROOKS (’65, M.Arch ’70) after seeing the impressive field of columns supporting an abandoned grain elevator in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Sitting in the middle of the senior undergraduate studio’s next project site, the grain elevator is neighbored by the SS Loujaine, a bus depot, and an original Ellis Island Ferry. 10/21–28 ERIC PETERSON (MED ’14) and lecturer MARTA CALDEIRA partook in the Wohnungsfrage Academy (‘The Housing Question’) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The Academy, coinciding with an exhibit, explored the infrastructures — from global finance to design typologies — behind the global ‘housing system.’ The weeklong event featured a particularly heated where attendees debated whether architects’ proposals to address the refugee housing crisis were legitimate or merely self-serving. Workshop convener and Palestinian architect SANDI HILAL argued architects must take an ethical position: ‘There is no such thing as neutrality; neutrality is complicity.’ 10/15 ‘Ultimately, architects give form,’ conceded MICHAEL MANFREDI in reply to a question about the intense practical justifications for the forms he presented

in a lecture with MARION WEISS (M.Arch ’84), his wife and partner, both Eero Saarinen Visiting Professors this semester. Earlier, of their Novartis campus, ‘Peter Eisenman hates this elevation, so we thought we would share it.’

10/24 A Facebook bout unfolded between architect PATRIK SCHUMACHER, the Dutch critic WOUTER VANSTIPHOUT, and countryman BART LOOTSMA, who alleged that parametricism ‘is annoying so many people that they start to step out from all possible technological innovations in architecture and urbanism.’ S. replied, ‘Bart, that’s absurd... We want the same in the end: understand how architecture can make a progressive difference.’ 10/25 Ink and Vellum, the undergraduate architecture major’s very own society, met in the Jonathan Edwards dining hall after a two year hiatus. No skulls or bones secrecy here: the group is planning an exhibition of undergraduate work for November 12th and field trips to New Canaan and New York. 10/26 A large poster in the 4th floor student group Equality in Design pointed out only 34% of the jurors in 2014’s fall midterms were women. The tally for Fall 2015 so far? 26%: 24 women of 93 jurors. For advanced studios the number dropped to just 8 of 41. 10/26 KEVIN REPP, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Library, and the Postwar Culture Working Group hosted New York-based artist NICOLAS GUAGNINI to lead a discussion of the art historical and political lineage of the Situationists – who resisted institutionalization – in connection to Beinecke’s controversial acquisitions of Situationists’ archives. Guagnini posited that Situationists probed non-Western culture for answers, but the onus is now on contemporary artists to cross cultures without reinforcing colonialism. 10/26 DEAN ROBERT A.M. STERN (M.Arch ’65) walked the fifth floor, the first time he had been observed on that floor in the past three years. Asked about the breach of habit, he replied that he used to walk the studios all the time in the pre-digital era, but now it is too boring: ‘You can’t see what people are doing.’

10/29 At the mention of Durand’s Recueil et parallèle at the DEMETRI PORPHYRIOS advanced studio review, juror and local architect PATRICK PINNELL (M.Arch ’74) mentioned he had checked the work out in 1972. The last date and name on the call card? 1953, L. KAHN. 10/30 ELIA ZENGHELIS, at the end of his advanced studio’s mid review, thanked the critics for giving his students ‘such a beating.’ DEMETRI PORPHYRIOS, one of those critics, replied, ‘It was not a beating, it was a handshake. Just a very firm one.’

10/30 At the CAPLES JEFFERSON studio mid-review, critic ANDREI HARWELL (M.Arch ’06) opined that the ground floor program of one student’s affordable housing project looked rather ‘bougie.’ Dean ROBERT A.M. STERN replied, ‘Bougie? What is that?’ Harwell: ‘Like, bourgeois.’ Stern, ironically: ‘So, you mean the way normal people live?’ 10/30 A cocktail bar encircled a giant model of the new 57th street pyramidal apartment building, one of many dramatically presented projects at the BJARKE INGELS Group (BIG) office halloween party, advertised as lasting 10pm-4am. SHoP settled for a happy hour. 10/30 In Chicago, The Architecture Lobby created (re)Working Architecture, an exhibition concurrent but unaffiliated with the Chicago Biennial. The exhibition invited architects to act out scenes based on the Lobby’s 10 point manifesto in order to present the absurdities of architectural labor (for example, learning during a job interview that the internship you’re seeking is unpaid). Event coordinators included KEEFER DUNN (IIT), MANUEL SHVARTZBERG (GSAPP), QUILIAN RIANO (DSGN AGNC), and ELAINA BERKOWITZ (M.Arch ’17). The three day event culminated with a Halloween party. 10/31 The First Years visited Bushwick, New York to see the site of their last project of the term: a library on a triangular site. One student, reacting to an extremely chic warehouse-turned-hipster-coffee-shop: ‘I feel like we’re not hip enough to be gentrifying this neighborhood.’ A hipster with

stylish haircut sitting outside: ‘That’s how I feel all the time, man!’ 10/31 After an e-mail from Associate Dean JOHN JACOBSON prohibited a YSOA halloween party in Rudolph Hall, said party did not happen, and JOHN KLEINSCHMIDT (M.Arch ’16) and CHARLES KANE (M.Arch ’16) did not come to it dressed as a bifurcated

diptych based on PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA’s (M.Arch 1462) painting Duke and Duchess of Urbino. 11/2 ‘When modern architecture can do that, then you don’t need post-modernism,’ prodded Dean Stern’s former classmate M.J. LONG (M.Arch ’64) to some applause while discussing the visceral qualities of ALVAR AALTO’s Villa Mairea in her talk ‘Anatomy of a Shed.’ Contributors: Eric Peterson (MED ’14), Nicolas Kemper, John Kleinschmidt, and Andrew Sternad (M.Arch ’16), Elaina Berkowitz, Jacqueline Hall, and Georgia Kennedy (M.Arch ’17), Misha Semenov (M.Arch ’18), Tim Altenhof (PhD), Edward Wang (BA ’16) and David Kemper (BA ’13). The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com. Paprika! receives no funding from the School of Architecture. We thank GPSS and the Yale University Art Gallery for their support. The Paprika! fold is an independent publication swritten and edited by students at the Yale School of Architecture. Named for the hue of the iconic orange carpets of Rudolph Hall, Paprika! is pubished on each Thursday of school’s public lecture series. !

IS S U E E D I T OR S : Caroline Acheatel (M.Arch ’17) Garrett Hardee (M.Arch ’17) Georgia Todd (M.Arch ’17) C OOR D I N AT I N G E D I T OR S : Andrew Sternad (M.Arch ’16) Nicolas Kemper (M.Arch ’16) GRAPHIC DESIGN: Chase Booker (MFA ’17)

ring: Featu 17 bler ‘ e y S m y ‘ 17 Madd e n r a C esca 18 Franc Hall ‘ eline Jacqu s h ‘15 i n I c M n ‘16 Peter e Leo nce d o P o l 17 Pab witz ‘ Juan Berko Elaina so ‘16 o i r u F Dante a d ‘16 Stern Andy

Floor Plan of the Lower Grassy-Trace Branch Community Center, the Building Project of 1968

PAPR IK A! FO LD XII

Issue Editors Maddy Sembler and Francesca Carney Coordinating Editors: Te s s M c N a m a r a a n d M a g g i e Ts a n g Issue Advisers: Andy Sternad and Nicolas Kemper Designer: Erik Freer

oject ing Pr VI Build X ! ! a k Papri 2 016 r y 14 , Janua

EDITORS NOTE

ON THE GROUND

Maddy Sembler and Francesca Carney M. Arch I ‘17

Contributors: Elaina Berkowitz, Jacqueline Hall, Nicolas Kemper, Natalina Lopez, Amra Saric, Edward Wang

Welcome back, all! This Paprika! fold is a collective effort that began early last semester. We wanted to take a critical look at the Building Project for our own personal interests, and then decided to share our findings with the YSOA community. With the first year class entering their BP semester, we thought it timely to inform them on the social and pedagogical issues from their start. Also, with the close of the current deanship, we hope the changing tides will bring a refreshed perspective on our design–build program. Beginning with a post-occupancy survey, we wanted to examine the condition of BP houses around New Haven. Unsure about how exactly these projects have impacted the community, we took it upon ourselves to knock on doors, meet with the owners, and hear their opinions. We then looked back on the Building Project’s history. This was in an effort to understand the historical and social contexts in which “design–build” as a curriculum arose and how affordable homes became BP’s social project of choice. Before printing this issue, we reached out to Alan Organschi, the Building Project studio coordinator. We respect what he and the faculty do for the project, regardless of systemic issues that exist, and his response to us is quoted throughout the issue. He provides an enriched perspective of BP as a pedagogical tool while also wholeheartedly sympathizing with our concerns. In this issue you will find the trimmings of semester-long research projects including evidence of BP’s early history, the neglected houses of BP’s past, and a historical survey of New Haven’s landscape that all present a dire need for change in the BP curriculum. We question the construction techniques currently used on site as well as propose potential new programs. We present this content through a critical lens with the hope of encouraging the voice of the student body to effect change at our school. “The building project should be a place of design invention and technical experimentation and it should be more public in its reach, especially given the resources we all throw at it” — Alan Organschi (A.O.)

THANK YOU Last fall more than 170 supporters helped Paprika! raise $15,326 so we can pay our bills. We are listing their names here, in the order in which they pledged. Thank you for your help, now lets get to work. CHECK OUT THE SUPPORTERS BUILDING THE WALL AROUND THIS ISSUE OF Paprika!

EQUALITY IN DESIGN congratulates YSOA on a stellar improvement in the representation of women on juries from midterms to finals this past semester. Overall, women made up 45% of the invited critics at finals, up from 26% at midterms. Although advanced studios have room for improvement — 37% from 19% — EiD is extremely excited to share that the second year critics (Abruzzo, Finio, de Bretteville, Sanders, and Kelly) rule the school by bringing 60% women critics to final reviews. Keep up the good work! 12/17/15: “We remember best not the buildings of the the heroic figures of architecture but rather their heroic figures of speech,” argued ANTHONY VIDLER at the wrap up for PETER EISENMAN’s studio on diptychs, a conversation full of the latter, such as PRESTON SCOTT COHEN’s assertion that the diptych is “the collapsing of the bay,” before going on to note “You’ve never done a facade before.” EISENMAN replied “If I am in a late style, I’m trying to move from plan to elevation. I don’t have a vertical surface. I cannot do a facade.” He also cannot do a dog kennel: “Most studios do dog kennels and spend all their time researching dogs: dogs in, dogs out, big dogs, sick dogs — I can’t teach dog kennels. I give problematics.” “I love the dog kennel,” said VIDLER, “It’s the 4th typology.” Finally, BRETT STEELE made a point we would all do well to remember: “Learning to dislike things is the hardest thing to do... The more you can get it on the table, the dislike, the better more generative power you can have,” noting that whereas Mies was pretty easy to loathe, today Bjarke is too damn likable. Differences, STEELE concluded, are a construction, not a given. 12/18/15: We’ve all heard it before but we’ll gladly hear it again — “Failures are far better than successes,” reflects MARION WEISS during the closing remarks of ELIA ZENGHELIS’ final studio review. Good words to keep in mind for a new year. 1/12/16: Just after Thanksgiving ISAAC SOUTHARD (M.Arch II 2016) received an inquiry from a friend asking if he would be willing to spend two weeks over winter break working on a competition at Tod and Billie Tsien Architects. Upon arrival at their office in late December, he immediately received the project details (alas, the client requested privacy so he is unable to share them with you), their goals, and the design. They explained what was expected of him: an eighthscale basswood model built entirely by hand. The process was what he enjoyed most: building pieces of the model, reviewing them with Tod and Billie, rebuilding, all the while learning more about the thing they were making as it was being made. The act of making was just as important as the idea and the end itself.

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGRAD 01/05/16: NATALINA LOPEZ (B.A. ‘16) offers travel advice: visit Jersey (the one in Europe) for both its war relic bunkers and its knowledgeable, friendly locals. The largest Channel Island has plenty of the former strewn across its 9 by 5 miles that have survived six decades of coastal abuse. The island also features severe winter storms with winds up to 30 mph — a summer visit is better. Ms. Lopez thanks the Harvey Geiger Winter Travel Fellowship for the experience that has supported her research of the repurposed bunkers and their cultural role on the Channel Islands, and returns to California chilled but inspired. 01/11/16: AMRA SARIC (B.A. ‘17) traveled to Spain with the Harvey Geiger Winter Travel Fellowship on a quest to uncover the secrets of spolium, the repurposing of architectural fragments for new construction. Looking at Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia as ideological spolium, and the Mosque of Cordoba as material spolium, she expanded upon adopting adapted concepts for design, and adapting adopted programs over time. Her project investigated the century-long construction of Sagrada Familia, and the multifarious site of the Mosque of Cordoba, from its underground remnants of a Roman and Visigothic temple to the Gothic cathedral planted in the Mosque’s center. Did they call it ‘adaptive reuse’ in the 7th century as well? GROUNDING THE CRITICS Spring 2016 begins with resolutions, ultimatums, and directives. We compare this spring’s lineup to some of the critics’ past teaching endeavors. ZAHA HADID and PATRICK SCHUMACHER move to the city because “remaining provincial is not an option.” It looks like students will be co-tending an urban terrarium of dense correlations and associations, eventually producing “rich, navigable diversity.” HADID has experience in the field; her Fall 2014 studio at the Institute of Architecture, Vienna, explored extensions to the London design museum using transformative biological organizations. KERSTEN GEERS and CAITLIN TAYLOR are traveling in the opposite direction to look for a new commons in the countryside. The 19th iteration of “Architecture without Content” will lay siege to our antiquated notions of the American village — according to them “the stakes are high, but the weapons of choice are relatively simple. It is purely a matter of precision.” The previous 17 campaigns have battled with big boxes, difficult doubles, and Palladio at our kindred acronyms: EPFL, GSD, GSAPP. We can’t find 18. “Property demands commitment,” wrote HANS KOLLHOFF and KYLE DUGDALE who contend that the European skyscraper is not simply an extrusion of the site propelled by property values, but rather a vertical extension of the earth. They will test the limits of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz through the design of twelve towered urban blocks. KOLLHOFF previously led studios at ETH Zurich that imagined hotels for a square in Trieste and Campo dei Fiori and is currently working on the revival of Schinkel’s Bauakademie in Berlin.

WOLF PRIX has intrigued us with a brief of many parts: an information building for a future society of overlapping innovations, somehow thematically involved with water, becoming a vessel that serves as a structure for knowledge. We want to find out more after Thursday’s lecture, “The Himmelb(l)au Project” to be delivered by PRIX, hopefully with our own liquid-filled vessels in hand. GREGG LYNN and NATHAN HUME return with the instant gratification of a robotic fulfillment center that encompasses education, research, and recreation. LYNN spent last summer with students at the IoA looking at “Machine Vision” — how the way robots see can be turned into an urban and formal language. He is also currently editing Log 36: ROBOLOG. We will be glad to see PIER VITTORIO AURELI in Rudolph Hall again. With EMILY ABRUZZO, he will radically conceptualize the house as an apparatus that links gender, ownership, form, construction, and subjectivity against the backdrop of 100,000 impending new houses in San Francisco. Concurrently, AURELI is teaching a year-long undergraduate diploma studio at the AA entitled “The Nomos of the Earth”, borrowing from German jurist Carl Schmitt to rethink the idea of territory as a site for architectural intervention. FRANK GEHRY and TRATTIE DAVIES take the stage once again — they will be challenging students with an orchestral concert hall in Munich. Working with NIKOLAUS PONT, the managing director of the Bavarian Radio Symphony, and ARA GUZELIMIAN, the dean of the Julliard School, they will consider the relationship between design, creative expression, and experience. Last year, we saw GEHRY’s name in the spotlight many times with a major exhibition of his work opening at LACMA and the publication of a biography by Paul Goldberger (read our review on the back page!) — we didn’t mind at all, the more the “gehrier.” Finally, SAM JACOB and SEAN GRIFFITHS, formerly of Fashion Architecture Taste, are back at Yale with a vexing new riddle — how to trim the fat: use the minimum number of lines to create the maximum number of things? They want a new place of exchange, made through the examination of opposites, for either London or New Haven. It doesn’t quite make sense yet but that might just be us. Here are the final words from their brief which will definitely be understood by all: Prepare to be challenged and confused. Prepare to work very hard. Prepare to be sometimes happy and sometimes sad. You will learn a lot and it will be fun. Welcome all! The views expressed in Paprika!! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to Paprika!. ysoa@gmail.com. To read Paprika!! online, please visit our website, yalePaprika!.com

Paprika!! receives no funding from the School of Architecture. We thank GPSS and the Yale University Art Gallery for their support.

R I C H A R D D E F LU M E R I , B RYA N FU E R M A N N , K E N T B LO O M E R, JA M I E L I N D S EY, FR A N C I S D R A K E AG U I L L A R D, CA RO L I N E AC H E AT E L , S H AYA R I D E S I LVA , J O E B M O O R E , M E R E D I T H M O R R I S O N , J O H N E L A , A N D R E W B. S A M U E L , J O H N ST U A R T G O R D O N , A N N A M E LOYA N , T R AT TI E DAV I E S, DAV I D K E M P E R , Q U Y N H D O,

PERCEP 11/05/15

S A M A N T HA JA F F, M A D ELY N N R IN G O, W IL L IA M L AW SON K E MP E R, K IR K HE N DE R SON , DA N IE L N E L S ON , DOV FE IN M ESSE R, DAPHN E AGO SIN , FR AN C ESCA CAR N EY, E THAN KU PE R BERG, IKE MAY, JAC K BIAN , JU LIE FOYER, THERESA CARN EY, ELIF EREZ, PEGGY DEAMER, ETHAN FISC HER, DAV I D KLU MPP, FRAN C E S SAW YE R,

T H A N K YO U TO K I C K STA R T E R D O N O R S FO R H E L P I N G U S B U I L D PA P R I K A ! K E N ST E R N A D, M AYA A L E X A N D E R , K Y L E D U G DA L E , B O R I S M O R I N - D E FOY, JA M E S G I A M M O N A ,

D R E W R U B E N , P E T E R D E B R E T T E V I L L E , C H E N G Q I J O H N WA N , J E O N GYO O N S O N G, A N N E M A , J U D D RO S E N B L AT T, J U L I A E V E R I ST, E L A I N A B E R KOW I TZ , A L A N PL AT T U S,

Paprika!

Year in Review 57

Home

Paprika!

No.

I’m:

Birthplace:

Passports:

Yale thinks I’m from:

My home:

Mobile, AL

Belgium, USA

Dillwyn, VA

Parma, OH

USA

Parma, OH

● MC

Changsha, China

Canada

Gaithersburg, MD

USA

● JK

Davis, CA

USA

Fort Atkinson, WI

It's constantly on the move, constantly building up new layers. Prosaically, it's New Orleans.

Hagerman, ID

USA

Leadville, CO

Leadville, CO, Methow Valley, WA

Washington, DC

USA

Washington, DC

Open to suggestions.

● AP

London, UK

Australia, UK/EU, USA

Alexandria, Australia

Australia

Israel

Israel, USA

New Haven, CT

Israel

Los Angeles

USA

Sugar Land, TX

Houston, TX

Bethlehem, PA

USA

Philadelphia, PA

China

Beijing, China

China

Mumbai

USA

Tarrytown, NY

Rochester, NY

● DS

Nazareth, Israel

Israel, USA

New Haven, CT

Palestine

Clarinda, IA

USA

Brooklyn, NY

Clarinda, IA

Clover, SC

USA

Lake Wylie, SC

Raleigh, NC

USA

Raleigh, NC

New Haven, CT

● PK

● CA

2016.1.28

USA

Vero Beach, FL

USA

Elk Grove Village, IL

Chicago, IL

Melbourne, Australia

Australia

Hawthorn, Australia

Portsea, Berlin, Lugano, New Haven

Sarasota, FL

USA

Casselberry, FL

The entire state of FL.

Changsha, China

China

Changsha, China

China

Nanjing, China

USA

College Park, MD

bler Maddy Sem

Seoul

USA

La Mirada, CA

Seoul, Los Angeles

Hong Kong

Canada

Toronto, Canada

Toronto, canada

● SK

Chicago, Illinois

USA

Crete, IL

● KK

Lebanon

Lebanon, USA

Beirut, Lebanon

Lebanon

Israel

Canada, Israel

North York, Canada

Israel

Cleveland, OH

USA

Newton, MA

Boston, MA

Paris

France

Paris, France

Planet Earth

USA

Ambler, PA

USA

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Jeddah!!!

Toronto

Canada, UK

Oakville, Canada

Wherever I’m alone.

Stamford, CT

U-S-A! U-S-A!

Norcross, GA

Increasingly I consider “home” to be something I bring with me wherever I go. However of all the places I’ve lived, I feel most at home in New Orleans.

Detroit

USA

Gross Pointe Park, MI

34 35 36

● JS

Palo Alto, CA

South Korea, USA

Chuncheon, South Korea

Where I belong.

Grosse Pointe Farms, MI

USA

Gross Pointe, MI

Where ever I am with my family.

New York, NY

UK, USA

Quogue, NY

Wherever my family is.

Elmhurst, IL

USA

Hollywood, FL

Portland, OR

USA

New Haven, CT

Portland, OR

Armenia

Glendale, CA

Where my heart is :)

Seoul, Korea

USA

Louisville, KY

Nowhere

Newcastle, UK

Jarrow, UK

London

Indonesia

USA

Brooklyn, NY

Indonesia

Taiwan, USA

Shanghai, China

Shanghai

Albuquerque, NM

USA

Mclean, VA

Either New Mexico, DC Area, or Chicagoland, as my family has moved multiple times in the last five years.

Hinsdale, IL

Belgium, USA

Hinsdale, IL

San Francisco

Los Angeles

USA

Caneadea, NY

Los Angeles

Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada)

Canada

Winnipeg, Canada

Hong Kong

New York, NY

Ireland, USA

Long Beach, NY

New York

Chicago, IL

USA

Lewisburg, PA

Tianjin

Canada

Toronto, Canada

Toronto

Panama

Panama City, Panama

Canada, NYC, Guangzhou

Lancaster, PA

USA

West Windsor, NJ

USA

United Arab Emirates

Egypt

Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

United Arab Emirates

USA

Whitmore Lake, MI

USA

Guayaquil Ecuador

Ecuador

Longwood, FL

Livingston, NJ

USA

West Orange, NJ

Iran

Karaj, Iran

“I am a citizen of the world.”

Colorado

USA

Boulder, CO

● CP

Beijing,China

China

Beijing, China

China

Karachi

India

Toronto, Canada

Toronto

Beatrice, AL

USA

Beatrice, AL

● CB

USA

Moorestown, NJ

New York City

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Dominican Republic

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Dominican Republic

Qinhuangdao, China

China

Beijing, China

China

Kyle

● XW

● SD

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka

Manhattan, NY

USA

Nyack, NY

House where I grew up.

Austin, TX

USA

Spicewood, TX

Austin, TX

St. Petersburg, FL

USA

Seminole, FL

St. Petersburg, FL

Andijan, Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan

New Haven, CT

USA

New York City, NY

USA

New York, NY

New York City

Kings Park, NY

USA

Kings Park, NY

Rochester, NY

USA

Castine, ME

Castine, Maine

Georgia

USA

Lakeside, MT

Wherever I lay my head.

Issue Advisors: Charles Kane, M.Arch ‘16 John Kleinschmidt, M. Arch ‘16

Hamilton, New Zealand

New Zealand

Aukland, New Zealand

Where the Wi-Fi connects automatically.

Washington, DC

USA

Bethesda, MD

My Parents’ House.

Seoul, South Korea

USA

Brooklyn, NY

USA

Brooklyn, NY

New Haven

Charlottesville, VA

USA

Charlottesville, VA

Wherever my family is…

Columbus, OH

USA

Pickerington, OH

Columbus, OH

Wauwatosa, WI

USA

Madison, WI

New Haven, CT

St. Louis

USA

Saint Louis, MO

St. Louis

Cincinnati

USA

Cincinnati, OH

Haven’t lived in the same place for longer than a year. I’m a nomad.

Cincinnati

USA

Cincinnati, OH

Cincinnati

Princeton, NJ

USA

Essex, MA

St. Petersburg, FL

USA

Pinellas Park, FL

St. Petersburg, FL

New York, NY

USA

Mamaroneck, NY

Scarsdale, NY

Beverly, MA

USA

Topsfield, MA

Tampa, FL

Seoul

USA

Oviedo, FL

Wherever my family is.

Evanston, IL

USA

Glencoe, IL

Chicago

Asheville, NC

USA

Swannanoa, NC

Asheville, NC

Indonesia

Australia

New South Wales, Australia

Indonesia

● DB

Storrs, CT

USA

Brooksville, ME

Storrs, CT

Austin, TX

USA

Dallas, TX

Wherever my family is all together.

Edmonton

Canada

Hong Kong

Kansas City, MO

Mexico, USA

Kansas City, MO

● KG

Ghent

● HK

Thuringia

100

● TA

Singen, Hohentwiel, Germany

Germany

Vienna, Austria

Soundcloud

101

● FZ

Nazareth

102

● KL

Plainfield, NJ

USA

New Haven, CT

103

● PA

Rome

104

● SC

Seoul, Korea

N o t e

“I once overheard the following conversation on a bus: First woman: ‘I can tell from your accent that you’re from Home.’ Second: ‘Yes, I left Home 30 years ago.’ Third: ‘I’ve never been Home but one day I hope to go.’” Invention and Tradition in the Making of American Place, 1986 Denise Scott Brown Is “Home” a place of birth, an ancestral identity, a surrogate city for the nomad, or something altogether unattainable? In a field where globalization increasingly impacts our practice, architectural precedent is no longer limited to either the histories of the site or the designer, or, thanks to the vast world of Google, the library. Paprika XVIII coincides with the lecture given by the Louis I Kahn Visiting professor Kersten Geers. Geers prompted the students in his advanced studio to first study a set of “Ancestors”—Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, Vincenzo Scamozzi, and Kevin Roche. Through these ancestors, a reinterpretation of the American village will hopefully emerge. While our cultural identities are inevitably linked in some way to our place of birth and upbringing, a reappropriation of other origins, be they colonial, adopted, or invented, opens up a space for us to design with a newly defined lineage of freely associated Architectural Ancestors as precedent, from which we can borrow, reinvent, and blatantly steal. But how do our biological and geographic ancestors affect and impact our practice? ‘Home’ is frequently—perhaps bureaucratically, though also broadly self-referentially—derived through nationality. Attendant linguistic, and geographic boundaries in this sense, define homes as static in space not time. But ‘Official’ home—as nationality—is ever increasingly a vestige of historic idealizations of national self-rule, confronting total global homogeneity, ever increasing political unions, conglomerates and alliances. On the other hand, we face a world of increasing mass-migrations. Some of us seek to give back to these manifold issues of home through a focus on the vernacular, or through efforts of social betterment, while others reject notions of subject and place to work towards an intentional estrangement. Do we revive our Homes through our practices or do we revolt? Issue Editors: Charlotte Algie, M.Arch ’16 (No. 19) Sarah Kasper, M.Arch ’16 (No. 26) Dima Srouji, M.Arch ’16 (No. 13)

Coordinating Editors: Tess McNamara, M.Arch ’17 (No. 72) Maggie Tsang, M.Arch ’17 (No. 77)

Design: Seokhoon Choi, MFA ’17 (No. 104)

Paprika!

New Haven, CT Antarctica

E d i t o r s ’

orin

sic

Defo

e ng

Daniel Gli ckUnter

man

sti

oll

gory

Car

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1/20: STEVEN HARRIS tells us how not to make it—“If you build a black model, you really hate your project. It’s like a funeral for yourself.” 1/20: “Critic comes from the Greek word meaning to judge—I am here to judge you,” reminds KYLE DUGDALE, after taking the reins of the undergraduate History of Architecture course. His first decree: “PDFs should be banned—especially in a school so concerned with materiality.” 1/21: A PSA from the third floor: “A number of students have asked me [DEAN ROBERT STERN] who EUGENE KOHN, tonight’s Gordon Smith Lecturer is. He’s one of the three founding partners of KPF —he is the K and still in charge.” 1/21: We were appalled when Mr. Kohn, during that night’s Q&A, informed us that he has “all the partners and their wives over for the holiday party.” If this ruffled your feathers, left a bad taste in your mouth, or plain bummed you out, consider coming to this semester’s first meeting of Equality in Design this Friday at 11 a.m. in the 4th floor pit. 1/21: “To ask, ‘How can one escape the market?’ is one of those questions for most architects whose principal virtue is in one's pleasure in declaring it insoluble’ ... here we will not relish our impotence” declared KELLER EASTERLING to the 50-odd students vying for spots in her 12-person Launch class. 1/25: A new typology emerges in CARTER

Co-ordinating Editors: Tess McNamara, M.Arch & M.E.M. ‘18 Maggie Tsang, M.Arch ‘17 Graphic Design: Sasha Portis

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

Palestine

Korea

Issue Editor: Dante Furioso, M.Arch ‘16

● JK

Paprika! Issue XIX February 4, 2016

aug

Je s

Hann

Alb

Ian Donaldson

bac

Fis

than

Bori

Gold

Gre

Jona

Eth

PAPRIKA! RESIDUE Lisa

Vero Beach, FL Chicago, IL

Fold XVIII

WEISMAN’S “Writing on Architecture”—citing FRANK GEHRY’S Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, the discussion identified what makes buildings successful over time: a "flashy front side for the donors and a cheap rump for the students." Are mullets finally making a comeback? 1/25: Addressing his advanced studio, HANS KOLLHOFF declares: ‘Corbusier got it wrong, it's not a question of style; it's Architecture!’ 1/26: The YSOA Christian Fellowship met for the first time today. The Tuesday morning gatherings involve muffins, coffee, and thoughtful conversation about what it means to weave faith into practice. 2/1: Word is, a meeting this Monday regarding harassment concerns at the School of Architecture will call the presence of all design faculty. We will not know the results of this meeting, because students are being kept out of the discussion. Congratulations to our Fall 2015 Feldman Nominees: JUSTIN OH, SARAH KASPER & DIMA SROUJI, XINYI WANG, ANDREW DADDS, ANNE MA & JOHN WAN, LUKE ANDERSON, ANNE HOUSEHOLDER & CLARISSA LUWIA, HEATHER BIZON & PATRICK KONDZIOLA CORRECTIONS: Last week we said the GEHRY studio was making ¼" scale precedent models, we were wrong, they were ⅛". CONTRIBUTORS: Caroline Acheatel (MArch ‘17), Charlotte Algie (MArch ‘16), Elaina Berkowitz (MArch ‘17), Amanda Iglesias (MArchI ‘18), Karl Karam (MArch ‘16), Nicolas Kemper (M.Arch ‘16), Edward Wang (BA ‘16) The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com. To read Paprika! online, please visit our website, yalepaprika.com Paprika! receives no funding from the School of Architecture. We thank GPSS and the Yale University Art Gallery for their support.

Upon entering the gray-orange glow of a Yale architecture studio, tall plastic trash cans stand in awkward juxtaposition to the rough walls of bush-hammered concrete. The panoramic view of the wide open ﬂoor plate is peppered with the models, drawings and take away containers covering the un-private worlds of each student’s workspace. Drawings are printed and thrown out. Models are crafted then tossed in the dumpster. The by-products of labor and consumption are disposable stage props in the unending drama of production, review, and evacuation. Simply put, the material evidence of design exercises are immediately material, yet ultimately quite ephemeral. This story of waste might be a parable for the unrelenting residue of industrial capitalism, the deﬁning characteristic of the world we supposedly go on to serve (or counter). It might also be a parable of the myriad stripes of residue that characterize the post-industrial landscapes of New Haven and beyond. It could even be a parable for the cultural, political, and intellectual residue of past modes of thought that, here at Yale, do more than merely linger. Unlike some past issues of this publication, the aim here is not to celebrate the school, but to see how students already actively engage ways of thinking, designing, and making that challenge the normative, corporate insistence that architecture is only about new buildings for rich clients. First year students at Yale are preparing to make a single-family house for an Elm City sliver lot, the prototypical leftover space

from the blight removal campaigns of our ﬁne city. Second years are studying Bridgeport, to research a term known as resilience. These are the issues that will be covered by Paprika! and they are fundamental conversations for our school. Broadening the sampling of contributors with work by students from the School of Art and Forestry and Environmental Studies, work by architecture students still forms the core of the issue. The articles in this issue of our student-run publication coalesce around the idea of residue at various scales. Coinciding with tonight’s lecture by urban planner Justin Hollander, Detroit is a sub-theme. The following pieces are not naively optimistic about the potential for design to change society, but rather insist that as architects and citizens, we must rethink the way we deal with what’s left over.

(Psst...ON THE GROUND is in the fold.) Contributors: Elaina Berkowitz (MArch ‘17), Samantha Jaff (MArch ‘16), John Kleinschmidt (MArch ‘16), Paul Lorenz (MArch ‘17), Michael Loya (SOM & MArch 18), Anne Ma (MArch ‘16), Benjamin Rubenstein (MArch ‘17), Misha Semenov (F.E.S. & MArch ‘19), Andrew Sternad (MArch ‘16), Preeti Talwai (MED ‘16), John Wan (MArch ‘16), Edward Wang (BA ‘16), Matthew Zuckerman (MArch ‘17). The views in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to Paprika!: ysoa@gmail.com To read Paprika! online, please visit our website, yalePaprika!.com Paprika! receives no funding from the School of Architecture. We thank GPSS and the Yale University Art Gallery for their support.

Year in Review 59

METRICS Paprika!

PAPRIKA!

FOLD XX FEB 25 5 2016

(De) Natured Paprika!

Fold XXII

Issue Editors Dimitri Brand (M.Arch ’18) James Coleman (M.Arch ’18) Jonathan Molloy (M.Arch ’18)

Content 1. Letter from the Editors 2. 2016—Stocktaking by Tess McNamara (M.Arch & M.E.M ’18) 3. Interview: Alan Organschi by Jonathan Molloy (M.Arch ’18) 4. The Diorama: Memory, Nature, Conservation by Gregory Cartelli (MED ’17) 5. The Case for Architectural Suicide by Dima Srouji (M.Arch ’16)

Coordinating Editors Tess McNamara (M.Arch & M.E.M ’18) Maggie Tsang (M.Arch ’17) Design Seokhoon Choi (MFA ’17)

2016.3.28 6. Eagerness and Cynicism in Bridgeport by Ethan Fischer (M.Arch ’17) 7. Curriculum Advisory Committee by Nicolas Kemper (M.Arch ’16) 8. Landscape Flâneur by Pearl Ho (M.Arch ’16) 9. Health & Wellness by Madelynn Ringo (M.Arch ’16) and Samantha Jaff (M.Arch ’16) 10. On the Ground

1. Letter from the Editors

This is insufficient.

The title of our fold, (De)Natured is a reference to Vincent Scully’s contribution to the publication Denatured Vision following the 1988 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art which opens “The way human beings see themselves in relation to nature is fundamental to all cultures; thus the first act of architecture is the natural world, the second is the relationship of human structures to the topography of the world, and the third is the relationship of all these structures to each other, comprising the human community as a whole.” ¹ In this quote is a call for a radical reconsideration of the role of architecture, moving from the conception that architecture is primarily a social discipline that defines our relationship with each other to an architecture that is primarily dependent on our relationship with the landscape, and by extension nature.

Architecture must bridge the supposed static and adversarial relationship between humanity and nature, acknowledging that the two exist in a metabolic continuum. Yet establishing this continuum calls into question previous notions of protection and preservation, making preconceived boundaries between humankind and nature increasingly undefinable. Without the benefit of existing standards, architecture must contend with the vaporous rhetoric of a new ecological agenda.

Humanity, technology, and nature, once seen as progressing towards an inseparable future, are now overwhelmingly perceived as distinct from one another, even adversarial. Even the concept of the Anthropocene has an underlying dialogue of conflict which necessitates an “other” (note how the Holocene extinction is also referred to as the Anthropocene extinction). More recently, Slavoj Zizek² postulated that rather than being impotent in the face of nature, we are in fact omnipotent, to the point where nature can no longer be thought of as existing. Technology is being tasked with expanding its role as the mediator between humanity and nature, protecting humanity from the hostile nature of our own construct, and the unspoiled “other” nature from humanity’s destructive presence. In post-Sandy New York City, there is a heightened sense of the city’s evolving relationship with its rising and volatile coastline. Recent resiliency legislation and rebuilding projects³ have formed a preliminary methodology for addressing the city’s vulnerability, defining the condition and performance of the city’s developing perimeter. These steps have struggled to define where exactly the line exists between the nature we must defend ourselves against and the nature we must defend ourselves with. Some proposals call for a separation and defense from a broken and hostile ecosystem (see: BIG’s “BIG U” for Rebuild by Design) while others have worked to actively blur the line through adaptive and performative landscapes that incorporate or disperse the rising waters (see: LTL’s proposal for MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition). In this vein, natural conditions and environments are increasingly used as generative devices. However, these responses tend to be superficial, often embodying a false image of simplistic formal means. Furthermore, technophilic solutions abound, promising efficiencies—spatial, performative, philosophical—that will “reduce” our impact on the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency has meekly stated on their website that “green building is gaining momentum,”⁴ as LEED formulas and sustainable design consultants promise to institute a criteria for building that will mitigate the industry’s inherently harmful effects on the environment.

Without a deeper understanding of this ecology, we tend to construct in its absence simplified working definitions for its constituent parts. Rooted in an often necessary pragmatism, we loosely employ ideas of “nature as other” in order to keep rain out of buildings while necessarily ignoring that those building in fact affect that very rain through their presence within an ecological metabolism. We are at once intimately familiar with these working definitions—we all know what natural means—and confounded upon their investigation— what really is natural? Indeed, the term natural invokes both a technical and teleological argument without clarifying either. Though it resists comprehension, humanity’s relationship with the natural is a primary architectural concern and must be continually investigated with conceptual, technological, and systematic rigor. We must ask: are current conceptions adequate or are they based on dubious ontological arguments and symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of the issues? Are the physical and philosophical buffers we create between ourselves and nature necessary? Or are they problematic simulacra that present a controllable and definable nature that further separates humanity from physical realities? Or on an even more fundamental level, what is the legacy of these dichotomous forms of thinking and how do they affect our conceptions of preservation, stewardship, and production? To philosophically address these relationships is to make explicit the dialogue that is noticeably absent, yet crucial to the profession and our education. Signed, Dimitri Brand James Coleman Jonathan Molloy 1. Scully, Vincent. “Architecture: The Natural and the Man Made” from Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Stuart Wreke and William Howard. Adams. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991. 2. Slavoj Zizek. Ecology Without Nature, Lecture Athens 2006. 3. The New York State Assembly passed a bill judiciously titled “An act to amend the environmental conservation law, the agriculture and markets law and the public health law, in relation to the consideration of future climate risk including sea level rise projections and other weather-related data; and in relation to requiring the preparation of model local zoning laws relating to climate risk” that links funding of future projects to their consideration of environmental risks, most notably sea level rise. 4. http://www.usgbc.org/leed

The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com To read Paprika! online, please visit our website, yalepaprika.com Paprika! receives no funding from the School of Architecture. We thank GPSS and the Yale University Art Gallery for their support.

Year in Review 61

Paprika! XXIV

7KH WHUP LV FHUWDLQO\ QRW XQIDPLOLDU 7KRXJK VRPH RI XV PD\ ÂżUVW recall Yoda and the Jedi Order, the mandatory bow to the masters before beginning a martial arts practice, or a prestigious golf tournament that concluded in Georgia last Sunday, the notion of the master holds particular clout in an architectural context. More so, it forms an integral part of our daily lives: ranging from the pedagogical structure of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;master classâ&#x20AC;? to the domestic label of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;master bedroom;â&#x20AC;? from the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role as â&#x20AC;&#x153;master builderâ&#x20AC;? to the graduate degree that the majority of YSoA students seek, the term has a long architectural history and multiplicity of applications. There is much to be said about the word itself outside of an architectural context as well. The highly contested and everything-but-gender-neutral term sparked debates last fall at Yale, with members of the community calling for an abolition of its use as a ranking title in the Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s residential colleges. As the symposium â&#x20AC;&#x153;Learning/Doing/Thinking: Educating Architects in the 21st Centuryâ&#x20AC;? kicks off tonight in Hastings Hall, the relevance of the term in the face of changing models of education and practice seems questionable at best. In pedagogy, the presence of a master implies a certain counterpart. As Yoda remarks: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Always two there are; no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; This ideal situation, as romanticized as it may seem, has little, if anything, in common with the daily routine of education. Only incidentally do young architects enter into fruitful apprentice-master relationships in which both partners can mutually mature. And yet, in a pluralist world that favors non-hierarchical teamwork, masters seem anachronistic. That some of the advanced design studios at Yale can be conceived of as master classesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;however accelerated they may beâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;becomes evident through the cast of invited characters. This spring term came to offer advanced design studios led by Wolf D. Prix, Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, and Greg Lynn, all of whom have been former professors leading master classes at the Angewandte in Vienna, where they overlapped for more than a decade. Perhaps more coincidental than strategic, the spirit of an entire institute has been reunited at Yale, to some extent forming a decisive part of this semesterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s curriculum. Assuming a consistent presence of all members, the structure at the Angewandte allows for strong bonds to build up over several years between the professor and those students who apply to study exclusively with her or him, while the advanced design studios at Yale offer no more than a few weeks for students to absorb, practice, and follow their criticâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distinct design approach. Though this constellation has sadly come to an abrupt end with Zahaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent and premature death, statements from the three other professors offer perspectives on the relationship between their expertise and pedagogy, while Isabelle Song and Dante Furiosoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s articles address advanced studios at Yale from the student point-of-view. Finally, with the last commencement ceremony with Robert A.M. Stern as Dean in only a few short weeks, in the center of this issue we have included an interview with our most PDVWHU OLNH ÂżJXUH ZLWK WKH PDMRULW\ RI TXHVWLRQV FROOHFWHG IURP WKH student body of the school. Whether architecture wants to be mastered altogether is an entirely different question, however. Shayari de Silva, Dimitri Brand, DQG .DWLH &ROIRUG UHĂ&#x20AC;HFW RQ WKH QDWXUH RI PDVWHULQJ DQG WKH PHFKanisms that enable and distinguish one as a master at all. Even by striving for the degree, students indirectly preserve the possibility for a master to exist. Ultimately, every graduate student in architecture receives a Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree, regardless of whether or not they have become one. Rather than accepting the term at face-value with its inherent hierarchy, our contributors aim to understand the idea of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;masterâ&#x20AC;? in a more multifaceted manner. Without trying to replace it with an alternative, this fold re-appropriates the term â&#x20AC;&#x153;master,â&#x20AC;? shedding new light on an old concept that deserves re-evaluation. There is value in ceding respect to those who develop and demonstrate dedication, conviction, passion, experience, knowledge, and rigor in the pursuit of their profession. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s have a more mindful conversation about masters, foregrounding knowledge over authority, expertise over hierarchy.

Paprika!

2Q WKH *URXQG 4/7 6WXGHQWV UHDFW VWURQJO\ DIWHU WKH 2SHQ +RXVH OHFWXUH WLWOHG Âľ,Q honor of Zaha Hadid, A Conversation with Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and Deborah Berke moderated by Mark Foster Gage.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; As the conversation quickly veers away from its intended VXEMHFW VWXGHQWV EHFRPH H[DVSHUDWHG OHDYLQJ WKH RYHUĂ&#x20AC;RZ URRPV LQ GURYHV 2QH SURVSHFWLYH VWXGHQW VKDUHG WKHLU RSLQLRQ afterwards that the only person who could have done a worse MRE PRGHUDWLQJ WKDW GLVFXVVLRQ ZRXOG KDYH EHHQ '21$/' TRUMP. Read a more in-depth reaction in an article inside this weekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s issue. 4/7 Across Chapel Street, the MFA program holds thesis reviews IRU WKH VHFRQG KDOI RI LWV VFXOSWRUV 2Q GLVSOD\ DUH SLHFHV WKDW could have had origin in Rudolph Hall, but perhaps spiked with /6'Â˛$/(; 67(9(16Âś 0 ) $ Âś VXVSHQGHG VWXG IUDPH DQG UHIULJHUDWRU 7$00< /2*$1ÂśV 0 ) $ Âś ZDOO FXW ZLWK FKDLU WDEOH DQG FHLOLQJ IDQ RU 7,027+< 6,17 7,//2ÂśV 0 ) $ Âś enclosures constructed with moving human bodies. 4/7 â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Swag, swag, swag, on you,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; sings Justin Bieber, and the members of YSoAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s student organizations as they handed out goodies to prospective students during lunch. This was WKH ÂżUVW WLPH WKDW VWXGHQW JURXSV KDYH EHHQ IHDWXUHG DW 2SHQ +RXVH LQ UHFHQW PHPRU\ (TXDOLW\ LQ 'HVLJQ 2XWOLQHV DQG Paprika! made their presence known with their wares displayed RQ D WDEOH LQ WKH WK Ă&#x20AC;RRU EDFN SLW :KLOH WKH LQFRPLQJ VWXGHQWV ZHUH OXUHG E\ WKH DWWUDFWLYH EXWWRQV WRWHV Ă&#x20AC;\HUV IUHH LVVXHV they stayed for the conversation on student involvement and organizations. 4/8 1RW \HW UHDG\ WR OHDYH RXU DGROHVFHQFH <6R$ VWXGHQWV DWWHQG our very own Prom, complete with live music and unlimited 3%5 ,6$$& 6287+$5' 0 $UFK Âľ ZHQW URJXH ZLWK D camera, capturing all the fun in over 750 photographs that we poured over the next day. 4/9 $OO WKH GDQFLQJ DW 3URP GLGQÂśW VDS DQ\ HQHUJ\ IURP 0,.( /2<$ (M.Arch & MBA â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;18), who won the Badminton Singles Tournament the very next day. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to know what heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s doing ZLWK WKH SUL]H 2UJDQL]HG E\ KLPVHOI DQG %(1-, 58%(167(,1 0 $UFK Âľ 0LNH LV RQ KLV ZD\ WR ZLQ WKH WULSOH FURZQ (fall doubles, royale, and still in for the spring doubles). 4/9 Âľ*RG LV LQ WKH GHWDLOV Âś FODLPV 3,(5 9,7725,2 $85(/, DW WKH beginning of a Saturday-long image workshop for his studio. He elaborated on the value of details, a convincing reason why people rarely show up in his own work (â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;People in images have the problem of becoming the main focus and provide a false sense of completenessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;) and the role images play in representing a project. Want that signature Aureli look? Check out some of his favorite examples of good images: Flagellation of Christ by Peiro della Francesca, Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, the work of photographer Lewis Baltz, photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and painter Morris Louis. 4/11 3,(5 9,7725,2 $85(/, GHOLYHUV D OHFWXUH HQWLWOHG Âľ'R <RX Remember Counterrevolution?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; on the subject of Filippo %UXQHOOHVFKL 0 $UFK WKH ÂżUVW IUHHODQFH DUFKLWHFW DQG his syntactic architecture for Florence. Brunelleschiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solution IRU D GLVJUXQWOHG FUDIW JXLOG" /HW WKHP VWULNH ÂżQG VRPH FKHDS Lombard labor to continue construction, and re-hire each worker individually at the lower wage. According to Aureli, if Brunelleschi represents the birth of our profession, we now are living through its twilight. The key to our salvation is to reject formalist tricks and to treat an understanding of architectural

history not as a shopping mall but rather, as a way to problematize the present. For what not to do, take a look at 52%(57 9(1785, FDXWLRQV $XUHOL 4/11 â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The debate is much more interesting than the answer,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; says 52%(57 $ 0 67(51 0 $UFK Âľ DW 0RQGD\ÂśV 3K' 'LDORJXH a debate in its own right, hosted by SURRY SCHLABS (PhD) about the nature of pluralism at Yaleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in the blood here, that you always go after the thing that is opposite. If you do not, \RX GLHÂś VDLG 67(51 XQOLNH +DUYDUG ZKHUH ÂľWKH\ KDYH EHHQ telling people what to do, forever.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; KYLE DUGDALE (PhD â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;15) pushes backâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;does pluralism not reduce architects to so many brands, so many options at the supermarket, distinguished not E\ WKH PHULW RI WKHLU ZRUN EXW WKH VL]H RI WKHLU VXFFHVV" 1RWLQJ whereas we used to choose between styles, now we choose between personalities, the Dean still took little issue with the metaphor, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;you can walk up and down the aisles and choose what is good for youâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;someday someone will even choose a 39$ LI WKH\ FDQ ÂżQG D ELJ HQRXJK VLWH DQG SXW FXUWDLQV LQ WKH ZLQGRZ Âś 3,(5 9,7725,2 $85(/, GHPXUUHG Âľ, FDQQRW WHOO P\ students what I teach is merely a matter of style.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 3OXUDOLVP GRHV QRW KRZHYHU LQ 67(51ÂśV YLHZ HTXDWH ZLWK multi-disciplinarityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;should a non architect ever be Dean? â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Why would you want those people running an architecture school? Interdisciplinary is not the same as the loss of your own disciplineâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the center must hold.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; With the last question, %,0$/ 0(1',6 SXVKHG EDFN ÂľÂľ\RX WKLQN ZH IHHG WKH SURIHVsion, but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we also have an obligation to lead it?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;THE WALL WAS A MASTERPIECE!â&#x20AC;&#x2122; exclaims Anthony Vidler, TXRWLQJ .RROKDDVÂś Âľ([RGXV 2U WKH 9ROXQWDU\ 3ULVRQHUV RI Architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; during Theory II lecture in Hastings on Tuesday morning. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the best Trump impression I can do,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; he added. Koolhaasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; radical proposal for a divided London is shockingly UHOHYDQW WR WKH (OHFWLRQ 0(025$1'$ 4/14 The J. Irwin Miller symposium â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Learning/Doing/Thinking: (GXFDWLQJ $UFKLWHFWV LQ WKH VW &HQWXU\Âś ZLOO EHJLQ WKLV 7KXUVday and run until Saturday in Hastings Hall. The symposium, convened by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, brings together scholars, educators, architects, and administrators to evaluate inherited models, discuss current trends, and speculate about future challenges of architectural education. 4/15 -RLQ (TXDOLW\ LQ 'HVLJQ DQG 2XWOLQHV IRU WKLV ZHHNÂśV LQVWDOOPHQW of the Brown Bag Lunch Series. A talk titled â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Political Use of Homophobiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; will be given by Graeme Reid, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Program for Human Rights Watch and Lecturer in Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale College. Paprika! ZHOFRPHV ',0,75, %5$1' 0 $UFK Âľ DQG (7+$1 ),6&+(5 0 $UFK Âľ DV WKH FRRUGLQDWLQJ HGLWRUV IRU &RQWULEXWRUV /XNH $QGHUVRQ 0 $UFK Âś (ODLQD %HUNRZLW] 0$UFK Âľ 0LFKHOOH *RQ]DOH] 0 $UFK Âľ 1LFRODV .HPSHU 0 $UFK Âľ %HQML 5XEHQVWHLQ 0 $UFK Âľ 0DJJLH 7VDQJ 0 $UFK Âľ (GZDUG :DQJ %$ Âľ

The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com. To read Paprika! online, please visit our website, yalepaprika.com Paprika! receives no funding from the School of Architecture. We thank GPSS and the Yale University Art Gallery for their support.

Year in Review 63

The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture. Please send all comments and corrections to paprika.YSoA@gmail.com. To read Paprika! online, please visit our website, yalepaprika.com. Paprika! receives no funding from the School of Architecture. We thanks GPSS and the Yale University Art Gallery for their support.

Paprika!