MArch Part II Y2 Portfolio

PO RT FOLIO

Parthiv Parikh Master of Architecture (ARB/RIBA Part II) Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University Of Greenwich, London United Kingdom, 2021/2

forgery

1

noun

1. The act of forging something, especially the unlawful act of counterfeiting a document or object for the purposes of fraud or deception.

2. Something that has been forged, especially a document that has been copied or remade to look like the original. “he was found guilty of forgery” Similar.

a forged document, signature, banknote, or work of art.

Plural noun: forgeries “the notes must be forgeries”

PRODUCTION OF FORGERY 11th May 2022

Mentor -

Prof. John Bell and Simon Miller E mail -

Student -

Parthiv Parikh (001126337) E mail - pp9204q@gre.ac.uk

I - INTRODUCTION II - FOLLIES III - IMITATION IV - SITE / CONTEXT V - Project BRIEF AND DESCRIPTION VI - REMNANTS VII - METAMORPHOSIS VIII - KIT-OF-PARTS IX - IMPRESSION I X - IMPRESSION II XI - REALIZATION

CONT EN TS

ABSTRACT In the world of mass reproduction and replication of art, one tries to understand its authenticity. Art, as we know, has embarked from the period of renaissance to modernism and abstraction, constantly changing and morphing into different variables. There has been a point where one has questioned the very existence of art and its meaning. In a context filled with great minds carrying vivid imaginations and portraying them not just on a piece of canvas but through any medium present lies the question of who had it first?

The fact that every artwork has an unparalleled expression of individual creative talent, a result of precise personal, historical and cultural context, the art world heavily revolves around the concept of inauthenticity to a larger extent. The notion of forgery slips on either side of the law within a degree of acceptance.

In a fundamental definition the act of forgery in itself cannot be illegal but counterfeiting one or falsely making or altering the legal rights of the person for personal gain is a crime. In a similar way imitation of an object of value used with the intent to deceive another is a criminal offense. The capacity of this word to change states is quite intriguing.

The bubble also exists in architecture which can be seen as replicating design ideas and interior objects into mass production. One can easily buy a Barcelona chair now at a small boutique store that might not even know its true value.

Forgery undermines everything in society. One cannot trust what we see, what we perceive. What happens in architecture if we can’t trust things? It is hence about predictability in architecture. By extension, what we are looking at in forgery applies to architecture directly.

With all the copying, can come some murky territory when the expectation for originality encounters unscrupulous idea thievery. When it occurs in architecture it can be met with praise or frustration and scorn. Some might call this kind of insider appeal, naval gazing - making designs that only a few can understand and ignoring the needs of the world at large. Or it might lead to outright copying, leading to lawsuits and copyright infringement. But, when done well, it can sometimes be part of creating some of the richest and most engaging buildings that not only respond to their context, but also thrust you into a world of history and memory.

What would happen if forgery is practiced at an institutional level. A university that hosts and cultivates techniques to perform perfect forgeries. An almost untrue, inauthentic thought and a taboo for academics, becomes a method of teaching.

I

CHAP T ER I

INTRODUCTION The concept talks about this production of forgery at a stage wherein a bunch of architects and their design styles or characters are imitated in the form of follies. The inquiry begins with capturing the essence of their works in forms of sketches, diagrams and interpreting abstract notions in physical models.

A general cubic dimensional space/volume is taken as a medium onto which layers of development are introduced for each of them, thus generating 8 different follies. Each follie tries to imitate the architect’s idea or design concepts as general field conditions and portrays it in 3Dimentional form.

The second stage is to capture these characteristics and techniques in a form of a painting or a composition with reference to a painting/project done by the architect. There is an involvement of the project site at this stage which would introduce constraints from the site and its surroundings to be incorporated within it. These paintings/collages tend to capture the essence of the architects working style and produce a forged composition.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, -Oscar Wilde

These forged images/paintings when juxtaposed generate a master plan (canvas) for further design developments. As a principle thought of copying, the intent is to mimic what is seen as obvious and apply a weak thought of emulation towards it.

“ The follies are supposed to be empty of meaning, Of content in order to interact with it new kind of occupation, a new set of human relationships. They, as built, are nothing but a moment in the process of conception… abstract notations, meta-operational elements, a frozen image, a freeze frame in a process of constant transformation, construct ion and dislocation. ”, -Bernard Tschumi

I

CHAP T ER II

FOLLIES The selection of these architects was based on their distinct approach towards architecture and design, inspiring art forms or literature works, time period and project type.

1. Peter Eisenman 2. Le Corbusier 3. Frank Ghery 4. Lebbeus Woods 5. Bernard Tschumi 6. Zaha Hadid 7. Mies Van Der Rohe 8. Daniel Libiskind

The unassimilable idiosyncrasies are signs of another geometrical order. With Eisenman one tends to associate more towards his juxtaposition of grids and some non-functional compositions that play a role as a reminder of an architectural process.

Here certain nomenclatures of the architect’s design process have been pondered upon onto which Eisenman associates the most. These include grids, rotation, offset, stretch, montage, inversion, slippage, mirror, volume articulation, implied space, juxtaposition, solids & voids, lack of dynamic balance, and artificial excavation.

The sketch incorporates a neutral grid that leaves impressions on the base with another continuous grid composition intersecting it at a certain angle. These intersections create a montage of 2 solids that have been removed but still form a void, which then combines with an exact volume of the neutral grind undergoing rotation and leaving an offset further away.

PETER EISENMAN

Leading with Corbusier’s 5 points to architecture and his idea of structural expressionism, the follie generates elements associated with the architects working style. Introducing a free plan wherein the internal organization of the space is disproportionate with the structural Cartesian grid. A free-standing form of conical proportion is interjected with a cubic grid of circular columns and horizontal beams.

Keeping in mind his projects and inferring from the open hand monument and tower of shadows, a palazzo is designed from the ground below. The structural grid is shown terminating at the wall with vertical fins but is left continuous on the other three sides. The iconic staircase is introduced in the free plan that is independently standing leading to just a viewing deck. The idea being the staircase is not seen as one would describe, connecting two levels, rather a new definition leading to nowhere.

The composition is derived by assembling them in a 5 point way.

LE CORBUSIER

Frank Ghery’s projects has always been a catalyst for innovation in digital design and construction with advanced digital and fabrication techniques, before which his sketches become a source for augmenting them in the machine. Being greatly fond of sailing and sailboats, his sketches tend to give an expression of a fabric cover on conventional volumetric spaces that drape them into a futurist design.

Also considering the fact his designs include a lot to do with futurism, being trying to capture a motion of force, speed and momentum, the pointed yet curved facades portray a lot of these characters.

The follie here inherits these aspects by using a solid mass as the conventional space and warping around it are these fins that cover the volume not disturbing it.

FRANK GHERY

With Lebbeus woods and his experimental architecture yielding numerous amount of concepts and strategies, fall under one bigger idea being a new beginning. The majority of his ideas talk about a new convention, a radical reconstruction of the problem.

He generates paradigms that make the viewer associate with a future possibility of change and harvest them individually.

A possibility that a building project, once complete, will actually change the society that built it. It’s the idea that a building – a work of architecture – could directly catalyze a transformation so that the society that finishes building something is not the same society that set out to build it in the first place.

The building changes them.

The concept here for the follie undertakes the expression of resistance and freedom. The conventional Cartesian grid, as he refers to, the current state of any problem and the fragmentation shown, being the solution represents the radical change one wishes for. It is a demonstration of free space, free of meaning, purpose, and comfort underlining the premise of his idea of how all spaces should be. The approach to every space proposed to be in the form of an invention, to invent how to be in it, not following a typological model of institutions.

LEBBEUS WOODS

With Tschumi, the discussion is oriented towards the idea of space interpreting it in conjunction with his relationship with spatial experience.

‘Discontinuity is that aspect of scaling which disrupts and thus criticizes the status of presence.

In scaling discontinuity differentiates absence from the void. Absence is either the trace of a previous presence’ -Tschumi.

The follie revolves around the terms of space, volume, and trace origination from a volume of cubic proportion. Disjunction is part of any process and the follie tries to capture it in a physical form. It shows that there was previously a presence of a cube that has been broken, fragmented and a residual part of it has shifted at a certain degree. The force although is seen to continue leaving a frame of presence within the solid mass. As change is part of living, it also leaves a trace behind which cannot be forgotten. It surely becomes blurred but has its essence.

BERNARD TSCHUMI

Hadid’s architectural practice followed suprematist and constructivist ideas. Based on floating lines and planes frozen in time and space, her early representation of architecture presented broken, compound angles with acute interstices that expressed considerable tension.

All of Hadid’s futuristic work pivots on this notion of artistic imagination and virtual hyperspace.

Her definition of these projections what she calls as paintings are adoption of, to an extent, almost aerial views and perspectives of maps and urbanistic charts. The follie here captures the non-resembling finite boundary, perspectives that are accompanied with weightless, directionless conditions and angular elements leaving one free to explore the subject without any limits.

ZAHA HADID

Mies’ concepts often emphasize their own singularity relative to their surroundings, putting themselves - and through their transparency, their inhabitants - on view. His designs are referred to as “skin-and-bones” architecture due to their minimal uses of industrial materials, the definition of space, along with the rigidity of structure, and their transparency. His rectilinear forms, crafted in elegant simplicity, epitomized the International Style and exemplified his famous principle that “less is more.”

The follie here develops on one of his paintings for a country house design. The lines are referred to as bones in the principle generating space around them. A transparent box represents his rectilinear form and the skin reference for spatial distribution as well.

MIES VAN DER ROHE

One way to see the micromegas in form of a follie is to understand the concept behind them. “An architectural drawing,” Libeskind has written, “is as much a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history, to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges. In any case, a drawing is more than the shadow of an object, more than a pile of lines, more than a resignation to the inertia of convention.” In this print, Time Sections, projected fragments of architectural elements explode across the surface of the paper, illustrating no single moment but alluding to events in both the past and the future.

The tightly packed fragments in a transparent box suggest this concept of enclosure and disjunction.

DANIEL LIBISKIND

I

CHAP T ER III

IMITATION The chapter looks at certain projects of the selected architects and their compositions to derive a similar form of representation for the site. The iterations capture the aesthetics, color contrasts, transparencies, overlays, and proportions replicating them with the site in consideration. Certain elements, therefore, change scale and proportions in this process although the essence is of the painting is captured.

The Romeo and Juliet project by Peter Eisenman is trying to expose the narrow and reductive ways in which the world is made known to us through architecture, arguing that more complex and less literal forms of architectural representation should be made manifest within the culture.

Eisenman wanted to debunk the false assumption that architecture must be anthropocentric, especially in this more traditional form of a codified anthropomorphism, and attacks traditional modes of anthropocentric representation as to its core inspiration.

The scheme is interesting precisely because it achieves a positive advance regarding the question of the limits of architectural sense.

In this project, Eisenman used the method of “scaling”, by which certain properties of an object are selected or isolated from their context and transposed to a different location and represented at a different scale in juxtaposition with things in its new context.

Scaling is not a measuring device that identifies any representation in relation to a fixed and identifiable reality.

-The first superposition reveals the idea of division.

PETER EISENMAN MOVING ARROWS, EROS, OTHER ERRORS

The objective here is to try and narrate a similar kind of story involving the site and its context. A set of drawings are made capturing different elements from the city Venice and its surroundings and eventually juxtaposed onto the island of Poveglia.

The first superposition reveals the idea of scaling. The retaining wall on the island is scaled with the presence of St Marks Cathedral. This then involves traces of Venice capturing the river and a city block grid. One thing to be noted here is the superpositions are governed by the aesthetic compositions from the Eisenman project.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

The issues of presence and origin are central to the question of anthropocentrism, and in destabilizing presence and origin, scaling in this context proposes three destabilizing agents: discontinuity, which confronts the metaphysics of presence; recursivity, which confronts origin; and self-similarity, which confronts representation and the aesthetic object.

Discontinuity, recursivity, and self-similarity confront presence, origin, and the aesthetic object in three aspects of the architectural discourse: site, program, and representation.

The quality of spaces in those two cities are juxtaposed with the fictional story of Romeo and Juliet, and by treating “the site” not simple as presence but as both a palimpsest and a quarry, containing traces of both memory and immanence, “the site” can be thought of as non-static.

Eisenman has achieved a series of juxtapositions that, if built, would serve as gentle reminders in a city.

-The second superposition reveals the idea of union.

PETER EISENMAN MOVING ARROWS, EROS, OTHER ERRORS

The second superposition reveals the 3Dimentional quality in the drawings. While comparing the set with Eisenman, the compositions reveal an active trace of the cathedral and a passive trace of grids.

Whilst trying to forge the drawings, Venice and Poveglia are traced together being part of the same lagoon. Even though Poveglia is away from Venice, it still shares a contextual background with the city.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

The second aspect which is confronted is the idea that the programme in the architecture of the early twentieth century is a source of originally value. The original story of Romeo and Juliet, by Da Porto, was inspired by two towers in Montecchio but was set in Verona.

The “site” in the story is therefore fictional, not only because it is in a story, but also because it is ambiguous – it refers to two real places.

-The third superposition reveals the idea of a dialectical relationship between union and division.

PETER EISENMAN MOVING ARROWS, EROS, OTHER ERRORS

The third superposition brings the idea of these juxtaposed elements onto the site.

Comparing it with the city grid and descaling it in reference to the island, tracing them onto the site, and revealing a final composition containing a cluster of overlays.

Again these would only justify as impressions on the site and nevertheless have the potential to transform in reality.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

BERNARD TSCHUMI Parc de la Villette

Here while referring to the drawings of Eisenman’s La Villette, similar compositions based on the existing elements on site are used.

The color combinations and proportions are matched with the buildings present on Poveglia.

In La Villette, the follies are generated with reference to the site’s history of it being a ground for slaughterhouses.

The proportions and elements are derived using the essence of them. In a similar way, the follies on Poveglia use the abandoned building components.

The final drawing is an exploded view of the landscape and existing volumes of the site introducing a contextual grid extracted from the St.Marks Cathedral in Venice. It behaves as a pivotal point and is used as a reference to layout potential positions for the follies.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

ZAHA HADID Vision for Madrid (1992) (left) Metropolis, London (2014) (bottom)

Hadid’s visualization of her concepts is usually portrayed through her paintings. They merely are her thoughts presented on a piece of canvas. One would say it’s an extreme visualization of abstraction.

Here a similar entropy is portrayed wherein Venice gets extrapolated into lines of interpretation.

Certain linkages are shown towards Poveglia with a chance of redevelopment.

As a literal form of counterfeiting, the composition considers the city as a canvas and not the one done by Zaha. Although the purpose of imitation is realized using the Vision for Madrid by Zaha.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

LE CORBUSIER VENICE HOSPITAL PLAN, VILLA SAVOY DRAWINGS, CUBIST PAINTING (clockwise)

As a cubist painting would suggest of objects analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstracted form, the composition here depicts characteristic qualities from the architect’s work and creates a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

Whilst this becomes a base pallet for the collage, elements of Corbusier that he associates most with are imposed with certain transparencies to compose the drawing.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

MIES VAN DER ROHE BRICK COUNTRY HOUSE DRAWINGS

Mies’ skin and bones principle is applied onto the existing ruins on-site with the lines subjected to walls and the built around them transform into space.

Since the site expands around these volumes, the lines are accentuated over these areas proposing an expansion with the program.

The drawing is kept to the minimal reflecting on the idea of ‘less is more’.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

LEBBEUS WOODS LOWER MANHATTAN THE WALL GAME

Woods Manhattan talks about a potential expansion of the city which is submerged underwater.

He speculates on the early foundations on the planet where slowly mountains were transformed into landforms and cities as we know them today. The drawing demonstrates lower Manhattan forming a relationship with the planet and suggests inhabitation in that area.

Similarly, the drawing proposed for the Venetian lagoon ponders upon the fact that the whole city was built on wooden logs and the future really relies on them and their expansion.

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

FRANK GHERY BILBAO (top left) DISNEY HALL (bottom right) LOUIS VUITTON (above)

POVEGLIA, VENICE.

I

CHAP T ER IV

SITE/CONTEXT

The city of Venice.

VENICE, ITALY The proposal is set to be executed in one of the islands of the Venetian lagoon. Being built on a group of 118 smaller islands that are separated by canals and linked over numerous bridges, Venice as a city contains a lot of contexts, and culture that has been borrowed or stolen throughout history. This becomes a key factor for it being a potential site wherein the lagoon behaves like a machine for acquisitions and forgery.

ST.Mark’s Cathedral, Venice

The Venetian Lagoon.

Poveglia Island.

The images on top are progressive photos of the island from early 19th century till date, (clockwise).

POVEGLIA Poveglia is a small island located between Venice and Lido in the Venetian Lagoon. The island consists of a dark history of events from the 17th till late 19th century. It was used as a quarantine station for those suffering the plague and other diseases, and later as a mental hospital, because of which, the island is known for it paranormal activities. The mental hospital closed in 1968, and the island has been vacant ever since. There have been explorers that film on the island yet the place has fallen to disrepair in some places, or mother nature has taken its toll on the remaining buildings still standing.

The surviving buildings on the island consist of a cavana, a church, a hospital, an asylum, a bell tower, and housing and administrative buildings for the staff. The bell tower is the most visible structure on the island and dates back to the 12th century. A bridge connects the island on which the buildings stand with the island that was given over to trees and fields.

The octagonal fort is on a third, separate island, next to the island with the buildings, but unconnected to it. The fort itself today consists solely of an earthen rampart faced on the outside with brick.

With this dark side of the island, it has been abandoned from any further interventions although in 2020 a petition was filed to consider it as a contested public space in the Venetian Lagoon.

The decision was accepted and in 2021 Poveglia has opened its doors to the public. With this rich although a traumatizing history of events, the project revolves around the realm of public intervention on the island in order to revive it back.

Tree Mapping

Existing Context

Terrain

Site Directions

I

CHAP T ER

V

Project BRIEF AND DESCRIPTION École des Beaux-Arts, also known as the Beaux Arts model of architectural education, was built entirely around students drawing and copying the masterful designs of past architects as a way of understanding the fundamentals in architecture. The idea was that through reenacting the processes and actions of those masters, students would gain a feeling for and practice with the rules that govern their designs. Their curriculum started by focusing on students trying to prove their skill set with basic drawing tasks before advancing to the next step, a practice that was highly based on the expertise to imitate someone.

The project brief derives from this notion of imitation reflecting on the idea of forgery as an act of teaching. An educational establishment that recognizes the art of imitation and derives its curriculum based on the concept of copying. Therefore part of the site becomes a university island and the other half becomes a public park for recreation. With a strong idea of forgery involving learning different architects and their styles, the island generates studios in the form of follies that procreate the architects design notion involving certain characteristics such as aesthetic appearance, material pallet, space modulation and proportion.

7 3

14

f

f

f 2

8

Primary Circulation Secondary Circulation Tertiary Circulation

f 6

14

d

b

b

1

9

5

14

g

13

10 13 g

e

11 4

a. b. c. d. e. f. g.

a

h.

13 12

a

12

c

h

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Administration Building Cafe/Restaurant Warehouse/Workshop Printing Store Multipurpose Hall Library Ruins/Museum of Island History Meditation Center and Amphitheater Fine-Arts Studio Painting Studio Sculpting Studio Pottery Studio Ceramics and Glass Studio Jewelry and Metal Studio Cinematic's and Photography Studio Drama and Dance Studio Graphic Design Studio Design Studies Studio Research Studio Archives Exhibition Spaces Recreation

Peter Eisenman Mies Van Der Rohe Daniel Libiskind Bernard Tschumi Le Corbusier Zaha Hadid Peter Eisenman Mies Van Der Rohe Bernard Tschumi Frank Ghery Le Corbusier Zaha HAdid Lebbeus Woods ....

Within these follies is where taught programs of forgeries will be held. The involvement of university campus with part residential and part public space, Poveglia per Tutti (Poveglia for Everyone) generates notions of remembrance across the site as remnants of past. The program expands its course from institutional establishments to public promenades.

SITE ZONING

Parc de la Poveglia.

The North islet of the archipelago includes follie components built from abstract translations of existing built structural elements that spread across the site in a distorted wet grid. The existing flora and fauna on the site creates an atmosphere of a public park which connects to the nearby islands of the Venetian lagoon. Open to public, the brief enables a flow of people entering the site and connecting with the rich and dark history of the site spread across the park.

Università di Falsificazione.

The other half of the island is sub-divided into two connected zones one of which consists of studios scattered around the area where forgery is taught as a practice. The university spans out from teaching fine arts, graphic design to sculpting and pottery where the act of copying is seen as a skill set and not a taboo. The university has its area open to visitors of the park for a cohesive indulgence of the practice.

Poveglia d’Habitation.

The university island being remote from the Venetian center consists of residential establishments for the staff and students. Spanning across the east side it generates sustainable housing for the university. The proposed housing in itself will have a different language and a smaller scale that will celebrate the port side.

Developing on a holistic environment at varying levels, staying quarters also culminate into cafeterias, student initiative shops and breathing spaces.

Park Visualization.

University Island.

I

CHAP T ER

VI

REMNANTS Bring in the concept of decay – which is the rate of change of time and this decay when acts on a building becomes a ruin, a residue of what once used to stand strong opposing the force that constantly tries to crush it. A ruin is a representation of something that remains with parts of it taken, yet never to give up but to embrace the change and mold in with humility. The project takes a step further in evolving architecture around these ruins as remnants of time and space that connect with history to bring out a new regime at the same time considers the historic context as a remnant.

Demonstrating the notions of forgery through the lens of different architects generates this layered process of representation, design and execution through the act of being one. The new proposal creates a state of decay or breaking down where students practice forgery at different educational units and how these spaces travel across the world to develop a rather holistic environment.

STUDIO I

STUDIO II

STUDIO III

STUDIO IV

STUDIO V

STUDIO VI

I

CHAP T ER

VII

METAMORPHOSIS The chapter iterates different compositions derived from previous drawings to cross-pollinate them into layered compositions. The involvement of light and shadows is used to derive montages that generate a similar synergism of chaos and disturbance as the site withholds in its history. The process is used as a means to generate juxtapositions on site that eventually develop into the landscape.

LeC

PE

LW

MvDR

BT

ZH

I

CHAP T ER

VIII

KIT-OF-PARTS As a general feel exercise, the chapter produces compositions with elements from individual follies. The intent was to depict the idea of fragmentation and the process of layering that the concept withholds. The fact that these compositions can be used to produce physical models through means of surface development, it suggests the modular aspect of building construction techniques incorporated in the design.

LeC

PE

LW

MvdR

BT

ZH

I

CHAP T ER IX

IMPRESSIONS I

LeC

PE

LW

MvDR

BT

ZH

I

CHAP T ER

X

IMPRESSIONS II

I

CHAP T ER

XI

REALIZATION

Porto costa ovest.

Università di Falsificazione.

Za Pavilion.

Parc de la Poveglia.

Canale de Poveglia.

PE Pavilion.

Porto costa est.