Perry Kulper Work October 07, 2017
House, Borrego Springs, CA
House in Borrego Springs, CA Vast, arid and seemingly empty, the immediate and expanded site for this un-built house project, offered few obvious, or generative cues, for the domestic occupation of such a landscape. The sparse and near absence of appreciable building fabric exaggerated the sense of placelessness and longing. Designed as a second residence for a poet/ painter and psychiatrist, wife and husband, this 1,700 square foot proposal attempts to adapt, react and initiate potential in a subtle, but rich and varied Southern California desert landscape. A number of initiatives are spatialized to situate the house according to climate and orientation opportunities, enhancing the sense of isolation and to dismantle the picturesque viewing of the landscape. Metaphorically, a ‘fall-out shelter’, in the form of a retractable cedar kitchen object, is inserted in the heart of the house. It is ‘coupled’ with a topography of water (in the form of steel catch basins, roof details, built-in-floral vessels and a ‘water hole’ in the steel floor) and a steel floor to foreground the sense of survival, sparseness and the severity of the landscape. A series of hybrid object/ details are tactically scattered throughout the house to suggest enigmatic catalysts, furthering the sense of absent presence. A large ‘floating’ steel floor would be situated on the site a year before the subsequent house construction, attracting the eventual domestic practices and ‘preparing the ground’ for the arrival of the house. This floor would inscribe and be inscribed, metaphorically and temporally ingesting the changing dynamics of the site and landscape. Raw, slightly strange and unexpected, the floor invites occupants to deal with it- to instigate means to domesticate, tame or surrender to it, much like the challenges of occupying the desert itself. Inhospitable, on the one hand, it anticipates its role as the guardian angel of domestic practices, on the other. Encased by a configured lead coated copper roof, purplish stucco clad walls, aluminum louvers, steel sills and steel water chambers, the steel floor and its metaphoric ‘couple’, the cedar kitchen, establish primary orientations for the house. The entry hall, double stair/ fireplace and roof sleeping chamber enable participation between the orientations of ground and sky, especially dominant in the desert-the sleeping chamber affords primary experience between bodies and the celestial realm as the architecture recedes into the background. Borrego Springs Drawings made: 1990 Drawing Size: 18” x 24” and 24” x 36” Materials: Mylar, graphite, tape
House, Borrego Springs, CA Aspectival Drawings
Desert House, 2: Aspectival Probes The development of these aspectival drawings is a response to an earlier proposal for a small and un-built house project in Borrego Springs, CA. The explorations emerged partially in relation to changed ambitions for the house and a rethinking of designing through the conventions of architectural representation, particularly perspective, advanced in the first Borrego Springs house proposal. These drawings are in strong distinction to the coordinated and synthetic logic of perspective drawings and rather structure aspects, or tendencies, of/ for possible spatial configurations. As a result, they are referred to as aspectival drawings, rather than perspective drawings. While having a sense of coherency and occasionally alluding to relations of proximities and distance, the drawings are structured by a series of fragments that are ambiguously flat and deep, simultaneously: a flat-deep recess; a bracketed and stretched cactus surface; a trapped and intimate red object; white parallax; a folded, artificial and limited horizon and so on. They challenge the continuous spatial preferences established through perspective constructions and open the potential for phased, or punctuated spatial make up. Amongst other things, these studies revealed the possibility for an incomplete architecture- not unfinished, but triggered by spatial catalysts, or attributes, relationally structured, but not spatially continuous. The empty, evacuated, or transitive space ‘between’ tendencies also became interesting, ideationally, spatially and particularly in relation to representational techniques. The phased, or emptied space of representation enabled by the structure of the drawings subconsciously figured into later interests of mine linked to erasure as an architectural activity. The proposal awaits its ultimate completion, knowing full well that the differences between the motives of forms of representation and spatial accounts are occasionally unverifiable. Aspectival Probes Drawings made: 1992 Drawing Size: 18” x 24” Materials: Mylar, found paper, gesso, acrylic, graphite
David’s Island, N.Y. Competition
David’s Island Competition The David’s Island Ideas Competition focused on a small island off the coast of New York. The structure and content of the programming was left to the discretion of each competitor. Historically, the island has been occupied over time by Siwanoy Indians, by various agricultural inscriptions, by a prospective ink factory, by a military base and by a regional power authority. Since 1973 there has been no sanctioned activity on the island and the once proud and dominant military structures are now abandoned amidst a regenerative natural environment. A number of specific tactics are initiated, primarily through drawing. The Strategic Plot oscillates between concrete spatial proposals and notations for further development. Representational borders are opened with the hope of sustaining a more fluid ideational, critical and material amalgamation. The interventions are generated as ways to augment, qualify and occasionally negate, existing island conditions. Additionally, there are several relational characteristics that propagate the new and point toward the unforeseen, continually qualifying the emergent temporal dynamics of the island. The proposal for the island attempts productive engagement with a range of issues. A sample of these include, but are not limited to the following: the islander’s experience of remoteness and isolation, the prevalence and propagation of maritime mythologies and folklore, the manifestations of successive insurgencies and divergent occupations, the cultural import of drift, migration and transience, the latent potential for constructed inundations, the real and imagined sensing of suppressive scopic (panoramic and panoptic) regimes, the representational practices and influences of nautical cartography, the prospective elusiveness of nocturnal ephemera and the literal and strategic deployment of military jargon. While it is difficult to develop in detail the full range of deployments, I hope to point to a more extensive sensibility by articulating a specific intervention. A series of new concrete walls with cold rolled stainless steel details are inserted into the gaps of the existing eastern facing sea wall- they range in length from 200- 600 feet. These ‘gills’ perform permeable border tasks, facilitate kelp harvesting and act as imaginative landings for mythical sea travelers. Conceptually, they access and establish more extensive structural relations in the territories of imaginative and real nautical migration, emergent marine ecologies and the use of biological processes, in this case respiration, as a metaphorical catalyst. Additionally, a series of polyp labs comb the ‘gills’, parasitically gathering data regarding the changing environmental status of these synthetic ecologies. Here, quests for productive knowledge intermingle with imagination and illusory projection, loosening the authoritative grip of quantitative information and analytical domination. A number of other interventions (including an inaccessible divide, or, axis of mutiny, camouflagic surfaces, landing ‘vessel’, labyrinths of emptiness, or, air turbulence fields, moving and mis-coordinated landscapes, a machinic surveillance field, erosion surfaces, polished metamorphic rock gardens, ‘ballasted’ space, an attractive shell surface, ‘easement’ fencing, a ‘multiplied’ officer’s headquarters, bird colony lines, photo ‘ops’, panoramic steel walls and ‘no fly zones’) mingle, interfere with and remain indifferent to the bounded and fugitive aspects of the island. Tactically disposed, these messengers attempt to deal with the history, physicality and projective aspects of the island, sea and mainland. A variety of new event infrastructures prompt a tensional play between tyrannies of control and borderless wandering. Touristic practices and natural cycles coalesce with a range of formal and material dispositions spawning a range of correspondences to limits and the unbounded. David’s Island Competition Drawings made: 1996-7 Drawing Size: 24” x 36” Materials: Materials: Mylar, x-rays, assorted found imagery, cut paper, foil, transfer letters, transfer film, tape, graphite, ink
Central California History Museum, Fresno, CA Competition
Central California History Museum, Competition The Central History Museum Competition in Fresno, CA focused on the design of a museum dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of California’s Central Valley heritage. The region’s rich agricultural base and diverse population provided the framework for the museum’s permanent exhibitions. Prior to specific architectural development, a range of topics were identified and graphically articulated in a thematic drawing- topics thought to be relevant to appropriate disciplinary questions, to the competition brief, to Fresno and to the development of a museum were relationally visualized. In addition to particular ideas that came from the museum program and city these topics, or ideas included; the metaphorical potential of varied mythological accounts (linked to the cultural roots of museums and to the agricultural region where Fresno is located) including Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility and agriculture, Daedalus (the ‘inventor’ of architecture, sculpture and the labyrinth) and the rhetorical potential of the nine Greek muses. Other ideas for the project had to do with aesthetic, scientific and historic developments surrounding artifacts and cultural collections, problems of vision and the contemporary curatorial roles of the museum, the ways in which the intellectual, curatorial and spatial frameworks we construct qualify the ways in which we culturally reflect upon the experience of collections and the sense of incomplete familiarity, or, the degrees of the permanence of representation. The use of analogical references for possible design relations and inspiration including Japanese kosode, dioramas, operating theaters, the Trojan horse and so on, are also pointed to in the space of the drawing. The ‘thickened’ surface of the key thematic drawing and the subsequent drawings including the cryptic site plans, the muse archival drawing and the longitudinal section are preparatory drawings for further architectural development. In their respective ways and at different phases of development of the project, the work on and through the drawings establish the primary topics and actionable ideas for the museum and consequently, what’s at stake in the work, or the scope of the project. Linked to the lineage of collage making the drawings are cryptic, or glyphic languages of architectural and protoarchitectural marks, words and images in which the latent content of the drawing is dominant. Unlike most conventional architectural drawings, which instrumentally describe organizational and geometric properties of a project, some of the preparatory drawings have no particular geographic, scalar and geometric orientation. They establish relational assemblies, or contours of relations en route to specific geometric, material, scalar and durational design choices. Varying degrees of commitment and understanding of the topical orientations and protoarchitectural elements are allowed to co-exist in the space of the drawings. This way of working emerged as a way to circumvent a ‘crisis of representational reduction’, lodged in many traditional architectural drawings. There is an effort in the making of the drawings to broaden the bandwidth of understanding about the content and structural make up of the proposal and an attempt to develop particular representational techniques appropriate to the phase of development of the work. The digital modeling and renderings are an initial attempt to make sense of the mediating capacities of some of the earlier drawings in a configured and material way. Central California History Museum Drawings made: 2001-02, 2009, 2010 Drawing Size: 24” x 36” Materials: Mylar, assorted found imagery, cut paper, acetate, transfer letters, tape, graphite, ink
Bleached Out: De-Commissioning Domesticity
Bleached Out: De-commissioning Domesticity This speculative project attempts to rethink conditions of a domestic world through the literal and figurative acts of editing, censoring, or ‘bleaching out’ of the elements that typically comprise domestic settings. At the same time it challenges the additive, or accretive practices of the architect. Partially inspired by a series of large ‘edge’ paintings by the American painter Sam Francis and by the de-commissioned military aircraft occupying the desert floor at the Monthan Davis ‘Bone Yard’ near Tucson, Arizona, this work sets out a limited framework of interests, initially through the construction of this pair of relational drawings. The house, program, or situation of dwelling, is simply a vehicle to fore ground problems related to censoring, suffocating, or ‘bleaching out’ the typological, spatial and material expectations of spatial situations. Like the ‘edge’ paintings, or ‘masked’ and modified military aircraft, the absence of something (either pigment, or the full physiognomy of the planes) has the capacity to release other forms of potential, or agency. An initial series of ‘marks’ are established in the space of the drawings- they are ciphers for probable, or expected, domestic characteristics. These ‘marks’ are then systematically qualified through additional ‘marks’ to do with ‘bleaching out’, or editing the original marks. This operational volley of censoring and qualifying is followed by a series of notations which attempt to ‘recode’ the now censored origins- the recoding, a kind of mimetic and material rhetoric, to do with virtually presencing the now ‘evacuated’ marks. A pair of hybrid reflexive objects occupies the ‘edge’ of the ‘bleached out’ field, metaphorically providing a new respiratory impetus for the now ‘suffocated’ proto-architectural characteristics. These relational drawings are an effort, in the first of an imagined group of analogous drawings and constructs, which attempt to examine and vivify the wrapping, or censoring, of a domestic world. This, in an effort to release a potential world toward another communicative surface, ultimately retaining non-representational forms of domestic orientation and grounding through recoding the habitual, or expected. Bleached Out Drawings made: 2003 Drawing Size: 24” x 36” Materials: Mylar, text, transfer letters and film, tape, graphite, colored pencil
‘Fast Twitch’, Speculative Desert Dwelling
Fast Twitch: Desert Dwelling The impetus for this ‘fast twitch’ project is an interest in working quickly with a limited framework of ideas and intentions. Partially a form of self-reflection, the approach is meant to augment other methods and techniques for spatial production, specifically the ‘content to form’ approach evident in some of my earlier work. Linked to interests in broadening the architect’s versatility (both the methods and results), this work is meant to open analogic and intuitive means for producing architecture in short periods of time. The architecture, garden and landscape proposal lie somewhere between a camp-site and a ‘house’. My interests initially found bearing through speculations on ground, horizon and sky relations. As a result of beginning simply and working through two initial drawings a number of ideas emerged. Interests in ground, sky and horizon blossomed into a range of considerations through the making of the drawings, yielding ideas not originally anticipated. These interests include the potential of hybrid archetypes, developing subtle shifts in perceptual awareness in the desert, enabling a tensional play between exile and place, the possibility of structuring temporal logics that move between the geologic and immediate, incompleteness as a creative positive and a movement between rhetorical structuring and embodied experience. A series of conceptually and materially ‘milled’ garden-like surfaces, objects and architectural elements attempt to structure these potentials. Initially, the garden surfaces and some cactus are milled by landscape scale milling machines. Then, chromed shadows with materialized building reflections (of three future buildings) are constructed followed by the arrival of a cast bronze bi-plane (10' wingspan), a 6' diameter billiard ball, a wench and 'real' cactus. Finally, the three buildings are built. The buildings are physically coordinated with the previously constructed chromed shadows, but are ‘mis-coordinated’ with the building reflections that were materialized in those chromed shadows. More recently the project is evolving through forms of material erasure (in the three buildings) towards increasing the sense of ‘stranded’ temporalities, amplifying the sense of domestic vulnerability and furthering qualities of indeterminacy in the desert. Analogic references (important and advantageous in the ‘fast’ parts of the work) and architectural/ landscape elements include paired cocoons, storage sacks and ‘petticoats’, an empty game board, wind ‘throats’, an oscillating/ vibrating ‘occupant’, a permanent rhetorical shadow, continuously re-milled garden surfaces and three domestic ‘housings’ (sleeping/ dreaming, food preparation/ storage/ consumption and wondering about/ at a ‘distance’... a space of/ for exile compliments this triad of functional dwelling elements). This first phase of the project has yielded a range of potential and limitation. It has spawned a series of quick sketches toward a second and third scheme. Both a transformation and rejection of the results of this ‘fast twitch’ approach, the next phase of development will continue to favor an approach that is agile, capable of adaptation and which values the movement between half hunches, reflective provocations and soft (in)forming. Fast Twitch Drawings made: 2004, 2008, 2010 Drawing Size: 24” x 36” Materials: Mylar, transfer letters, graphite, found imagery, satellite photo
Vertical Surfaces
Vertical Surfaces This work emanates from an interest in developing thinking and production relative to urban issues. It invokes researched design through the architectural drawing to discover what the city might discuss and to produce a collection of vertical surfaces, all highly varied and opening certain formal, material and disciplinary questions. I have identified 6 vertical surfaces that emanate from varied inspirations including references to: M.C. Escher and the transitional figure, or morphological shifts from figuration to patterning; Chinese landscape paintings and ‘multiple’ points of view, in the same view; to games, gone vertical and producing forms of spectacle, change and dynamic projection; to optical devices that promote scalar shifts, alternative understandings of the figure and the hybridization of surface and object; and to things in constant states of change, or transition, at different speeds. The first vertical surface began from exploring the possibility of appropriating a fragment of my own work, now re-contextualized, to generate a surface. With limited ambitions the drawing provided latent opportunities, exploited and visualized as a surface. Here, the primary ideational framework is augmented by the visual argument discovered in the act of making the drawing. Unlike problem solving approaches that favor the acceptance of a given problem, working within the given parameters until the problem is worked out and a solution produced, this work operates under a different logic. Here, a rigorous discipline is established where design opportunities are discovered, exposed and worked with toward design innovation. The work of design is seen as fluid, capable of embroidering one discipline to another and fusing making and thinking as a synthetic practice. Ultimately, this work is intended to open an entirely different set of conversations in the development of my work and spatial research. If I have focused largely on domestic and landscape conditions, this researched design is meant to provide entreé into the urban condition, on which I have worked very little. The possibility to engage urban conversations is also a way to participate in necessary, if not critical debates about the roles and values of the city, to gain insight about urgent global conditions linked to sustainability and ecological concerns and to invent, from the inside out, if you will, what other conversations might belong to the city. Questions of building morphology, repetition and difference, the cultural expectations of architecture and concerns about the public, or civic life of the city are also on the table. Vertical Surfaces Drawings made: 2012, 2017 Drawing Size: 24” x 36” Materials: Materials: Mylar, cut paper, transfer letters, transfer film, tape, graphite
‘Archival Ghosts + Paradoxical Shadows: Fathoming the Unfathomable’ Pamphlet Architecture 34
Pamphlet 34 Princeton Architectural Press ‘Fathoming the Unfathomable: the Institute of Paradoxical Shadows and Archival Ghosts’ with Nat Chard For Pamphlet 34 collaborator Nat Chard and I are fascinated by conditions of uncertainty. We have proposed a contingent architecture that provokes and absorbs the unforeseen as well as the more predictable relationships into which architecture can enter. For good reasons architecture normally tries to find a tight fit to the sort of occupation for which it is imagined. In this sense most architecture discusses what is measurable, or at least describable. Here, the unfathomable is estranged, spatially and disciplinarily. If it is difficult to discuss uncertainty in the familiar terms of the architectural program then it is unreasonable to expect the architect to anticipate the unknown. ‘Fathoming the Unfathomable’ speculates on how architecture might discuss the indeterminate condition and its generative agency. On one hand, an architecture that nurtures the uncertain cannot forget what is more predictable as many parts of the design process might be familiar. On the other hand, in typical architectural practice the production of architecture strives to corroborate known end games. When the outcome, or the sort of relationship architecture might enter into is indeterminate, then the methods of practice might reasonably adapt in parallel to transformed research processes. While it appears paradoxical to work with architecture and its determining forces, this work wonders how to research indeterminacy? Without the need or desire to aim for synthetic outcomes in projects, we work in parallel, Nat from his attic in Winnipeg, Manitoba and I in a basement in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The collaboration takes place largely through e-mail and Skype conversations. The discussion is at once conspiratorial, generative and critical. The distance and forces of mediation infect the dialogue. One work is contaminated by the arrival of a new drawing or reference from the other, while the reflection on the exchanged material opens new possibilities rather than confirming predetermined outcomes. This condition is heightened by an unspoken policy of exchanging work with little commentary so that any disturbance provided by these reflections is sincere and uncontrived. While we have established rigor in our respective research methods, our collaboration disrupts and reinvigorates the stability that such discipline provides. It is a collaboration that provides the sort of disturbances that bring real uncertainty to the process of design, forging substantial projects through accidental discoveries made through highly varied exchanges. Both of us are interested in the spatiality of the drawing and its capacity to exist somewhere between flat projection and projected spatial settings. In search of this possibility we have examined Baroque ceilings, where low relief components mediate between pictorial and material space. We have also explored habitat dioramas that meld two and three-dimensional elements. This half-depth appears in Nat’s folding of the picture plane and in my work in the physical layering of the drawings. Temporally structured, the uncertain is motivated in the making of their drawings. Nat builds drawing instruments particular to his fascinations. They are designed to nurture an indeterminate experience for the drawing author that parallels possible experiences of the architecture that is being drawn. I work with familiar tools but manipulate their known destinies to discuss their roles in developing the content of the drawing. In registering the construction of each line the act of drawing implicates the situations that might transpire in the architecture. In both cases the act of drawing is a rehearsal for the condition that is being studied. Beyond the flat projection, our drawings reach for a depth of both space and duration. Proposing architecture for uncertain conditions touches many paradoxes and this work plays with paradox to nurture uncertainty- as another source of disturbance, or resistance. We have a fascination that defies the normal patterns of research enabling us to operate with a variety of strategies such as Nat’s subversion (or inversion) of didactic tools and methods and my analogous structuring and relational thinking. Institute of Paradoxical Shadows and Archival Ghosts Drawings made: 2012 Drawing Size: 24” x 36” Materials: Mylar, assorted found imagery, cut paper, transfer letters, tape, graphite
Landscapes
Landscapes The ‘Landscapes’, made in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor and Cambridge, U.K. are a small sampling from a body of some 750 drawings. They are a modest means to expose landscape and representational potential. Begun in the early 90’s, they are meant to be quick, inexpensive and generative. They provide relief from the demands and inherent limits placed upon an architect and teacher, enabling an alternative engagement with prospective and fictional landscape situations. They offered entrée into a subject of which I knew very little. Produced one at a time, but resulting in groups, or sets, the drawings are initiated by any number of motivations. On the one hand, the inspiration might come from the materials on my drawing table and a game of ‘what ifs?’. On the other hand the inspiration might come from the conceptualization of a possible ‘landscape’ like a perspectival sky, a multiplied horizon, a liquid landscape, or even a provocative phrase from a poem, ‘iris clouds’ for example. Seldom related to ‘real’ landscape conditions, a ‘set’ of drawings is pursued until its potential seems exhausted, or I am. are rejected, or thrown away, and judgment about any individual drawing is withheld. Rather, there is an attempt to indulge in the material surface and the open potential the act of making possesses. The drawings employ limits as a form of representational discipline. All share specific parameters including consistent sheet size and ‘double’ paper thickness, the notational tape boundaries and the inscription of pictorial frames. There are formal, material and process conditions that are systematically and serially protected, violated or transformed. The material and practiced processes move between drawing and masking to flooding and resultant unpredictability. At times materials are used in pure states, at others, in combination. Reflectively, the drawings acknowledge psychological and emotional states and occasionally reveal, and equally hide, certain imaginative landscape potential. Landscapes Drawings made: 1992- present Drawing Size: 18” x 24” Materials: Various