2009-2010, Workbook

1 cover

Princeton University School of Architecture_

WoRk Book— 2009/10

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5 6 12 20 22

Undergraduate Program ARC404—Fall 2007 ARC404—Fall 2008 DRUMMOND —Jocelyn, Spring 2009 SNEATH—Charles, Spring 2009

27 30 38 44 50 58 64 70 76 82 90

Masters Program ALTMAN—Ilana, Fall 2008 COOLEY—Zachary, Fall 2008 FUGATE—Sarah Jazmine, Spring 2009 Hillyard —Christopher, Spring 2009 Houser—John, Spring 2009 Kelly—Thomas, Spring 2009 Lauritano —Steven, Spring 2009 Panteleyeva—Masha, Fall 2008 Valle—Giancarlo, Spring 2009 Vobis—Yasmin, Spring 2009

99 103 113 115 116 118 120 122 125 126 129 130 132 134 136 138 140 142 144 146 148 150 152

Doctoral Program Research Seminars

Benyamin—Jasmine Brennan—AnnMarie Buckley—Craig Díaz Borioli—Leonardo Grau—Urtzi Greene—Gina Hookway—Branden Hsieh—Lisa L. Imperiale—Alicia Kallipoliti—Lydia Kim—Jeannie Knoblauch—Joy Kurkovsky—Diana Lopez-perez—Daniel MORENO —Joaquim Preciado —Beatriz Segal—Rafael Stevens—Sara Su—Michael Wen-Sen Sunwoo —Irene Verbakel—Els

con t en t s

WoRk Book— 2009/10

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Architecture and education both require a profound commitment to a better future. That better future is a leap into the void, a belief in something out there ahead, impossible to predict with any certainty. As architects, we design buildings, landscapes and cities for a society whose ideas and technologies will inevitably change; as educators, we teach new generations of students who will practice in a world more global, more urban, more technologically complex, and more open to change. The only certainty is change itself, and our first obligation is to equip all students with the practical and intellectual tools necessary to invent new practices for the new century.

Architecture at Princeton has always been taught in this broad cultural context. Our design studios and technical courses are rigorous and demanding; they prepare our graduates to practice effectively in a competitive environment. Our history and theory curriculum, with its strong interdisciplinary ties, encourages the critical intelligence necessary to make sense of a changing world.

The School’s small size enables us to integrate design and theory as no other school can, taking advantage of the overlaps and intersections between studio work and a rich culture of research and intellectual speculation.

Architecture is a collective art-form, involving the expertise of many different fields. As a School, we promote imagination, inquiry and experimentation. The School is committed to a culture of collaboration involving architecture, urbanism, landscape and media.

Architecture is constantly enriched by the traffic between theory and practice; hence we are committed to engage the world outside the academy. At Princeton, we are confident that our long history of a productive dialogue between academic research and practical design work will produce a new generation of architects prepared to transform our complex world in previously unimagined ways.

—Stan Allen, Dean of the School of Architecture

DEAN’S STATEMENT

Dean’s Statement

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The undergraduate program at the School of Architecture in architecture offers an opportunity for in-depth study of the discipline of architecture within the context of a liberal arts education. The program of study emphasizes the complex relationship between architectural form, culture and society considered through an exploration of architectural design, history and theory of architecture, building technology, urbanism, and landscape architecture. Particular attention is paid to the social and political aspects of architecture’s urban setting, and its impact on the natural environment.

Princeton’s undergraduate program is known for its rigorous interdisciplinary approach. The course of study includes a sequence of design studios and complementary courses in the history and theory of architecture, drawing and representation, computation, environmental and building technology. The broad academic program prepares students for graduate study in architecture and related disciplines such as landscape architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, art history, and the visual arts. In addition, the B.S.E. program in architecture and engineering is offered through the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The School also directs the university-wide Program for Urban Studies which offers additional opportunities for interdisciplinary study.

Each student completes a senior thesis, a rite of passage for all Princeton students. The thesis gives seniors the opportunity to pursue original research and scholarship on topics of their own choice under the guidance of faculty advisers. The senior thesis is a detailed project, presenting a well-argued piece of research on a precise architectural theme, and may include architectural drawings, models, video, photographs, or computer-generated images. The thesis is a yearlong project that begins in the fall semester. Faculty thesis advisers are assigned at the beginning of the fall term of the senior year, and students work closely with the adviser in the formulation of the topic, research methods, organization of the thesis material, and presentation of the work.

undergraduat e

Undergraduate Program in Architecture

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“Can you imagine an elevated expressway at 30th Street just so Long Island guys could get to New Jersey?”

We began with a simple response: “yes.”

This studio focused on a realigned definition of New York, an east-west urban system running from New Jersey to Queens, crossing Manhattan at roughly 34th Street. The studio’s framework originated in two points, the first historical and the second hypothetical. Historically, our work departed from a series of cross-town expressway proposals (all unbuilt) made in Manhattan between 1931 and 1957. In terms of hypothesis, we began with the idea that centralized urban structures—think “downtown” and “suburbs”—have given way to urban definitions that are more constellation-like, more reciprocal, in their center/edge relationships.

Willem Boning

ARC404—Fall 2007

SUBWAY CITY

undergraduat e

ARC404—Fall 2007 Witte

11 undergraduat e

ARC404窶認all 2007

Teo Quintana

13 undergraduat e

1

2

RENDERINGS IN SEQUENCE

OVERALL PLAN

3

4

ARC404窶認all 2007

Sam Stewart-Halevy

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5

15

ARC404—Fall 2008 Witte

undergraduat e

roof/ air transportation

2

THE BIG ROOM roof

This semester’s Advanced Design Seminar explored big rooms. More precisely, the course investigated large/open/multi-use spaces—universal spaces—that have reverberated through much of recent architectural history.

We focused on the big room as a typology that has been subjected to a volatile conceptual lineage over the last 150 years, a lineage with four parts:

circulation opennings

The Big Room, Part 1: Buildings for Unknowns The Big Room, Part 2: Buildings for Everything The Big Room, Part 3: Buildings for Nothing The Big Room, Part 4: Buildings for Now

ARC404—Fall 2008

large open spaces

tilted opennings

mid level

A

B’’

main level

1

tilted openings

B

A’’

main floor

circulation openings

0

ground level/ ground and water transportation

ground floor 1/32’’

section ti AA’ 1/16’’

Christina Argyros

section BB’

17 undergraduat e

INSIDE ferry administration

ramp to helipads

heliport

bus tunnel and parking

ferry terminal

Julia Chapman

cafe

ticket windows

ticket windows

ferry slip

restaurant

main room

bus station

bar

cafe

taxi waiting area

taxi tunnel

main room

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external surface:

surface made from extruded rhombuses acts as exterior and interior helipads

warren trusses:

supports interior open main hall becomes inhabitable with program located on upper level

upper level:

located at bottom edge of trusses houses program such as helipads, theaters, and observation deck

towers:

program filled zones within the main hall ferries become one or more walls of the towers to create varying degree of private space

main level:

folded landscape acts as interior park ferry docks integrated into landscape

roadway:

under water motor vehicle entrance forced by other modes of transportation to wind under and into transportation hub

Alex Knezo

undergraduat e

integrated systems:

21 undergraduat e

Charles Sneath

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The invention, design and construction of Lincoln Center have been told in three stories: the architectural, the cultural, and the urban. Each of these stories describes a particular trajectory of events that led to the creation and aftermath of the Lincoln Center project. Each of them also involves its own controversies and criticism, many of which are still left unanswered. The architectural story deals with the issue of building for the performing arts, and culminates in a discussion of the discrepancies in the acoustical design of Philharmonic Hall. The cultural story addresses the criticism of writers like Jane Jacobs

and their assessment of the validity and potential of the cultural center typology. The urban story involves criticism from various sources regarding Lincoln Center’s relationship to the surrounding urban fabric.

In this thesis, I recount these three disparate stories and propose that they are historically and conceptually connected through two liaison-concepts: the “performing arts” and the “institution”. The “performing arts” and the “institution” were more than just terms that provide connections between constituencies and concerns; they were also ways for the creators of Lincoln Center to internalize criticism and mollify controversy. In the battles and dilemmas of Lincoln Center’s history, the “performing arts” and the “institution” were consistently used against critics and speculation. Although the conflicts were often over concrete values, sites, and events, it is the highly abstract concepts of “performing arts” and the “institution” that emerged victorious.

Drummond—Jocelyn

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is one of the most visited tourist attractions in New York City, second only to the headquarters of the United Nations. Known for its world-renowned performing arts institutions and its role as the first cultural center of its kind in the United States, Lincoln Center is both a cultural and an architectural icon. But if Lincoln Center has become a prototype for “cultural centers” worldwide, what was the role played by architecture in this type of success?

undergraduat e

Drummond—Jocelyn

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Typographic design is based on the relationships between letters, words, lines of text, and theoverall effect of text on the page, or anywhere we encounter it in our everyday lives. The design of letterforms is a process of carefully controlling the interactions of different variables such as x-height, descenders, and bowl size to establish consistency and legibility across the typeface. There are two main applications of type design: long-reading and display (the latter usually in advertising and graphic design). Each of these depends a different level of formal expression by the letterforms; type for long-reading should disappear, expressing the meaning text without distracting the reader’s attention.

The design of display type is focused on the ways in which the typeface can actively express its letterforms, possibly affecting both the type’s legibility , as well as its symbolic presence.

Typography should not be seen as a field reserved for graphic designers and publishers. Instead, it should be understood as a functional design medium to which architectural principles of space, part/whole, figure/ ground and program/function can all be applied.

Architecture and typography have a number of inherently parallel design methodologies, and by examining these different theoretical areas of architecture, it will be demonstrated that typography is a functional design process heavily based on architectural principles.

To develop this argument, I will be first giving a brief introduction to the main principles of typographic design. These principles will then be expanded up on, highlighting their focus on space and relationships of part and whole, which will be considered to be inherently architectural. These main concepts will be examined across a number of carefully selected typefaces from to examine their development and employment of these architectural principles to express new symbolic meaning, while still maintaining the focus on the functional concerns of text. Things such as serifed versus sans-serif type, the role of the white page in relation to type, analysis of letter, word and line spacing, and historical/cultural context will all be explored in order to argue that type design is a technical process which depends on architectural design methodologies.

The intent of this thesis is to prove that architectural concerns of construction methods, materials expression, figure/ground relationships and spatial configuration are required in the design of typefaces, and that typography–like architecture–is a form of functional design that must strike a balance between formal expression and legibility to be successful and understood.

Sneath—Charles

typography & Architecture

undergraduat e

Sneath—Charles

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Liz Diller, Thesis Director Assisted by David Allin Each semester, the thesis students are challenged to make an architectural response to a general thematic question. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Thesis topics are one word themes, agreed upon by the faculty, that serve as a hinge point between architecture and questions of politics, culture, technology or society. The thematic organization of the final semester’s independent design research creates a shared point of departure for students, faculty and visiting critics.

Fall 2008: Democracy

Spring 2009: Excess

Invited Critics, Final Jury

Invited Critics, Final Jury

Michael Bell Catherine Ingraham Mark Jarzombek Sylvia Lavin John McMorrough Michael Sorkin Mark Wasiuta Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

—John Adams Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa! —Alan Ginsberg

Vito Acconci Judith Barry Jeff Kipnis Sanford Kwinter Lars Lerup Sylvia Lavin Josh Lobel Reinhold Martin Thomas Mayne Shohei Shigematsu Benedetta Tagliabue Nader Tehrani Mabel Wilson Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit. —W. Somerset Maugham Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity. —John Keats

M.Arch Fall 08 — SPring 09

M.Arch Thesis Projects

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fall—2008

spring—2009 Altman, Ilana Cubanidad: New Exports Now p. 30

Cooley, Zachary Barriers to a Shared Democracy: “Unfinishing” the West Bank Wall p. 36

Panteleyeva, Masha Get Away From It All: Going Nowhere p. 44

Sahdev, Sumit Be a + Tourist

Shui, Yanfei MADNESS OASIS el Hayak, Chantal Suspended Metropolis: Reproduction of Public Space Paralleling the Production of Capital

Vetcher, Florencia Democratic Architecture Parameters

Manthriprigada, Ajay A Positional Geometry: The National Library of Mexico

Alexander, Michael TOO TOO CITY: Amplifying the Urban Façade

Kelley, Thomas OBLIQUE TRANSFER p. 72

Fugate, Sarah Jazmine Deciduous Domesticity p. 52

Kim, Hanul SUPERDEPTH—excessive monumentality

Hillyard, Christopher Foreseeing foreclosure: A prototype for excess p. 58

Lauritano, Steven lim x r : a space for reading r > p. 78

Houser, John NATIONAL $ECURITY p. 66

Maitland, Padma Leaving Time Behind: The latent potential of excess time at the airport

Xiang, Nan Collective Fit Kardasis, Ari Information in Formation

Valle, Giancarlo SPACE MATTERS: Expanding the Hinge p. 84

Vobis, Yasmin Berlin Himmelplatz p. 92

Wollman, Else Kate Value Capture

Yung, Edward Value Engineering / Engineering Value

M.Arch FALL 08

ALTMAN—Ilana

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ALTMAN—Ilana

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ALTMAN—Ilana

Born from a capitalist system, the tourist hotel once stood as a great symbol of democracy, founded on the principles of mobility, equality, and collective public space. However, when sited in non-capitalist societies this architectural symbol became compromised, caught between the local economy of its host and the global economy of its guests.

As a result of this conflict, the hotel arose as an artificial border marking a sharp division between the space of the building and the space of the city.

Nowhere is this partitioning more evident than in the many tourist establishments located on the island of Cuba, the last great socialist refuge. As the island enters a post-Fidel era and begins to open up economically it presents a testing ground for a new vision of the hotel—an architecture aimed at reconciling socialist public space and service driven, “for-profit” space. This thesis therefore, presents both a new physical and economic model derived from this particular moment in Cuban history; a model which rejects the emergence of the hotel as an enclave and returns the building to the realm of city and its initial democratic ideals.

M.Arch FALL 08

Cubanidad: New Exports Now

35 M.Arch FALL 08

ALTMAN—Ilana

37 M.Arch FALL 08

ALTMAN—Ilana

M.Arch FALL 08

COOLEY—Zachary

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COOLEY—Zachary

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COOLEY—Zachary

Democracy in the Middle East has been imposed as a “solution” to the lasting conflicts in the region, but democracy for me is a site-specific issue. I chose a site and situation at the intersection of politics and architecture to study this idea: the wall dividing Israel from Palestine. The construction of this barrier is synonymous with the construction of two “independent” democracies in the region and synonymous with the “two state solution.” However the limited, shared resources of the region require a shared system of collective decision-making—one democracy that, if achieved, will lead to greater freedoms for Israelis and Palestinians. Architecture has a strong role here. My thesis investigates how the barrier can be “unfinished,” how it can be completed in a way that undermines its divisive intent and encourages civil negotiation.

M.Arch FALL 08

Barriers to a Shared Democracy: “Unfinishing” the West Bank Wall

43 M.Arch FALL 08

COOLEY—Zachary

M.Arch FALL 08

PANTELEYEVA—Masha

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PANTELEYEVA—Masha

47 M.Arch FALL 08

PANTELEYEVA—Masha

49 M.Arch FALL 08

PANTELEYEVA—Masha

Get Away From It All: Going Nowhere Democracy is a constant negotiation between the individual and the collective. This thesis investigates this inherent conflict through the issue of privatization.

Its site, Manhattan’s waterfront, has long been a battleground between real estate development and public space. Assuming access to waterfront to be a basic democratic right, this project creates new forms of collectivity based on individual ownership.

Everyone gets a share of the waterfront and everyone shares a new waterfront city.

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1.07_ C. Ingraham: We’re no longer a world democracy really. We’re capitalist, democratic, and socialist all at once. I mean we’re all combining or re-combining. There are still repressive cultures, there are still cultures that are not as repressive, but everything is being shared in a sense. These different models are being passed around and enforced in places and so forth and so on, so it’s a really interesting moment to check in with political configurations in relation to architecture today.

I really think it’s fantastic doing a thesis that’s oriented toward a political issue of some kind, but I also wish now to push it ahead.

27:29_S. Allen: Students today don’t make drawings, they make posters! It drives me batty, and I’ve said this a million times... but they don’t listen.

4:05_M. Jarzombek: I’ll underline that. The tendency to naturalize social reason I think will need to be held in great suspicion, because it’s such a logical coupling with architectural tropes. You know--problem solving, it wants to be resolved. You want Communism and Capitalism to find a happy mediation. We don’t want conflicts, revolutions, and violence, and so forth. Yet in all the projects, even here, violence was just right under the lid of practically everything. Yet we never once mentioned anything perhaps going wrong.

5:16_M. Jarzombek: From there, we were close to getting an eruption... What is its rupture against all sorts of pre-modern or other formations of political reality, as opposed to it being just somehow a natural extension of how people sit around and talk, like what we’re doing now?

8:15_S. Lavin: I was just going to say that one of the things thesis permits is a discussion of an even broader space in the field rather than the particularities of any one project or another. I think that the issue of democracy--which might have been communism or capitalism, it could have been a lot of things--one of the things that I think it revealed to me is the difficulty of taking on a project like that in an era of suspicion. I mean, for better or for worse, all of the great political architectures that you’re talking about were born out of the mono-mania of conviction, and I don’t think that I saw one project today that was convicted about anything except the ambiguity and the complexity of the problem. Some of the projects conveyed that ambiguity and complexity better than others and found architectural translations or architectural work to do in that way. But I wonder whether the question of the need architecture to return to politics today, if that is the question, whether or not that has to come with the ushering in of the era of some kind of conviction--and that’s very, very difficult.

33:45_M. Sorkin: I was thinking to myself, looking through projects, if I hadn’t been alerted that they keyword was democracy, I was wondering to myself if I would have been able to infer this from this series of projects, and I have to say that I have concluded that I would not have. I think very much that this is a series of projects that assimilate the idea of democracy to ideas of variety and choice, which is to say that it’s a kind of consumerist vision of what it means to be democratic. In the orbit of the issue of democracy, there are a series of other issues, some of them articulated in human rights, some of them revolving around questions of poverty and the distribution of resources, questions of justice, and for my money these problems were too little central to any of these iterations of democracy.

THESIS—Comments

0:45_C. Ingraham: I was very excited to find that this studio was about democracy and the question of democracy, because it’s something we haven’t picked up for a very long time. What surprised me was how quickly democracy seemed to be resolved as a competition between individual and collective, and that then from there it was about public spaces and private spaces. It somehow immediately settled itself to the level of a relatively simple opposition. I think that the role of architecture in democracy, or in any political system whatsoever, is incredibly interesting and not at all self-evident.

M.Arch FALL 09

FINAL COMMENTS FALL 08

9:50_S. Lavin: For me, the thing that I come away with is that I actually have no idea whether anyone thinks democracy is a good idea or a bad idea and a totally dumb idea, and in some parts of the world, I think you would want to be able to know that. You would want to be able to stand up and say, “In this place, at this moment, this is good and this is not.”

And oh my God, it seems, like, embarrassing even just to say something as naïve as that, but maybe it’s just a new era of intelligent naïveté.

34:12_M. Sorkin: too much irony, too much wit, too many projects that weren’t in fact real projects, a lot of projects that somehow were situated in circumstances of privilege and had yet to try to engage questions of equity and fairness. I think you need to have taken on a much bigger theoretical load out of questions of democracy to have situated yourselves polemically in terms of some really burning issue, and then gone on to make the project. ... I think that you should not have pulled so many punches visà-vis the real needs of democracy and its relationship to architecture.

36:00_L. Diller: Democracy is such a loaded theme and is in a sense putting a lot of responsibility on these guys. Even at the termination of graduate school, it’s still a heavy load to pull it off in 12 weeks. I think that the distribution of strategies around democracy was interesting. We saw one that was about process, we started with conflict, we went in different directions, and we ended up with economic issues and economic models.

Not everyone hit it squarely, and people took tangents. The problem that I have is how to generate enough discourse within the group and still allow everyone to intersect a broader theme with their own agendas - agendas that they’re already thinking about all the time in school, so that I don’t derail them. People have individual readings specific to these issues that we want to respect but at the same time we need to challenge them to take it somewhere new.

37:42_S. Allen: I think in a way that the problem is precisely that the projects moved from proposition to project in a way which was too linear.

They were not reverse-engineered enough, there was very little crosscontamination either of the ability to make a statement or the capacity of a proposition to generate new architectural solutions. That is to say that, in the big picture of the length of the studio, there was a lot of thought and discussion and research and debate about all these issues, and then there was a crisis of, “How do I bring architecture into this debate?” and in many, many instances, there was a break, and none of the debate was carried through to the project.

M.Arch SPring 09

FUGATE—Sarah Jazmine

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FUGATE—Sarah Jazmine

55 M.Arch SPring 09

FUGATE—Sarah Jazmine

57 M.Arch SPring 09

Using speculative temperature-mapping methods for space, architectural materials, and human bodies, Deciduous Domesticity borrows the communication strategies and systemic thinking of environmental and material analysis to interrogate the American tendency toward excessive energy use. The resultant drawings inform the design of a model low-rise suburban block for the northeastern United States, whose environmental systems and operable parts react to seasonal temperature change.

Compared to the typical American private realm, the homes of the deciduous block have an additional layer of thermal experience, including warm and hot gardens, thermal baths, cooled pools, saunas, warm communal laundry facilities, cool communal refrigeration of food, dark composting gardens, and sunny roof terraces, all of which exchange heat strategically with privately-owned units. It is posited that increasing the possibilities for the residents’ thermal experience will enable a reduction in overall energy consumption, with customary American private indulgence converted to a newer, richer, and more durable sociability.

FUGATE—Sarah Jazmine

Deciduous Domesticity

M.Arch SPring 09

HILLYARD—Christopher

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HILLYARD—Christopher

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Phoenix, dubbed ‘The Poster Child of Foreclosure’ is used as the test case for this prototype and the project is conceived as a reaction to typical forms of downtown public-private megaprojects. My proposal is a series of linked towers the inhabitation of which varies in proportion over time between office use and residential use. In addition, as the proportion of residences increases, there emerges a series of public spaces and programs, and an accompanying interior urban condition that turns the building into a city within a city. Rather than following the typical responses to rapid economic cycles of either generic flexibility or the production of iconic forms or facades that fulfill desire for the new in moments of prosperity, my proposal aims to achieve fleeting specificity by embedding multiple specific spatial configurations within the building’s permanent structure. These latent spatial qualities disappear and reappear over time as the periodic disposal of interior fit-out or ‘scenery’ takes place.

This in turn produces a different kind of legibility of the building within the city. Further, the building’s infrastructures are recycled with certain elements exchanged between office and residential uses such as circulation, bathrooms, kitchens, and so on.

To achieve this fleeting specificity, several typological transformations are implemented upon a generic mixed use tower. Instead of stacking homogeneous zones of program, the office, residential, commercial and public program co-exist side by side and exchange spaces with one another.

Rather than a central circulation core, the prototype uses an ‘exploded’ core to enable different parts of the structure to be simultaneously used by residential and office programs. Operating within the slack given by raised floors and suspended ceilings, the section is a hybrid of service intensive office use and lower floor to floor requirements of residential units.

HILLYARD—Christopher

The recession continuing through 2009 is symptomatic of a cyclical economic pattern which has spatial by-products: spiraling office vacancy rates following speculative boom-time overbuilding, and a large population of evicted jobless homeowners. This thesis seeks to use the relationship between these excesses (an excess space, and an excess population) to produce a new prototype of mixed use development and a correspondingly different form of urbanism.

M.Arch SPring 09

Foreseeing foreclosure: A prototype for excess

63 M.Arch SPring 09

HILLYARD—Christopher

65 M.Arch SPring 09

HILLYARD—Christopher

M.Arch SPring 09

HOUSER—John

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HOUSER—John

69 M.Arch SPring 09

HOUSER—John

NATIONAL $ECURITY Technology has radically altered the operations of banking institutions over the past two decades to the point where they no longer require space for the exchange and storage of wealth, leaving the bank in a condition of excess. The obvious reaction to an excess of space is the elimination of that space, but in this case an argument for the elimination of bank space ignores the historic responsibilities of architecture to give form to ideas. In the case of banks, the idea is one of a stable economy secured by both private capital and public insurance. With the current state of distrust between banking institutions and the public, it is an opportune moment to rethink the role of architecture as an interpreter of the intangible, and in the case of banks, as a mediator between discredited banks and a wary public.

This thesis investigates the reestablishment of a Bank of the United States following the federalizations of the nations largest financial institutions, and the role of architectural representation in reassuring the public of economic national stability. Ideas of financial security through physical impenetrability found in early banks and the metaphorical illusions of institutional transparency expressed in modern banks are no longer relevant means of architecturally representing the contemporary economic landscape.

In this new era of post-deregulation and a renewed presence of government oversight, notions of financial security can now be realized through an architectural articulation of the interactions between the public, banking institutions, and the federal government.

71 M.Arch SPring 09

HOUSER—John

73 M.Arch SPring 09

KellEy—Thomas

KELLEY—Thomas

OBLIQUE TRANSFER It has been a long time since shopping was simply about purchasing things. Shopping generates consumption as disposition and can be classified as a sub-species within cultural capitalism guilty of fueling consumptive spatial scenarios through repetitive interiors, hyper-choreographed movement, and often times counterfeit simulations of the “urban experience.” Currently, shopping suffers from relying too heavily on sluggish post-war paradigms where standards of optimization subject the occupant to the sedation of experience and controllability.

Critical of architecture’s tendency towards excess organization and mobility, the oblique transfer reflects on the narrow-spectrum linearity of the “Gruen transfer” and the amorphic contextual tendencies of the “Jerde transfer.” The result is a prototype that abandons the modernist notion of the vertical as the fundamental axis of orientation and advocates for a utilitarian topography defined by the convergence of distinct commercial regimes. In addition, the oblique transfer collapses the retail experience into a covered landscape that challenges the normative conditions of brand visibility and three-dimensional movement through an interest in topological form and curvilinear directionality. Through the “mobilization of form” and recovery of Paul Virilio’s notion of “habitable circulation”, oblique strategies are deployed to negotiate scale, display, and pedestrian fluctuations across a field of consumption.

75 M.Arch SPring 09

KELLEY—Thomas

77 M.Arch SPring 09

KELLEY—Thomas

M.Arch SPring 09

LAURITANO—Steven

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LAURITANO—Steven

81

LAURITANO—Steven

Architects, megalomaniacal by nature, tend to approach each project with an excess of scope. They come to the drafting table (or the computer desktop) with cosmological ambitions . . . an innate desire to produce work that exceeds definable limits and begins to take over the world, or—better yet—replaces the known world with a new, particular, and infinitely extensive vision. Part research project, part exercise in obsessive surrender, this thesis wholeheartedly indulges the architectural impulse to take on an impossibly large scope—to engage with and articulate a limitless space through the construction of an artificial horizon.

M.Arch SPring 09

lim x r : a space for reading r >

83 M.Arch SPring 09

LAURITANO—Steven

M.Arch SPring 09

Valle—Giancarlo

85

VALLE—Giancarlo

87 M.Arch SPring 09

VALLE—Giancarlo

SPACE MATTERS: Expanding the Hinge This thesis considers a paradox in which architecture is perceived as a premium yet calculated through ef ficiency. Determined by ratios of necessary space (program) to support space (circulation), these calculations have typically become minimum requirements for the function of a building. Cultural institutions such as museums, however, benefit from higher factors resulting in generous circulation, while other institutions such as schools are not as fortunate. Suffering from a disproportionate relationship between defined space and undefined space, circulation within schools remains problematic as it is not controlled in the same way as the classroom. Rather than controlling circulation space by minimizing it , this thesis proposes a model of expansion.

The project reconsiders the nature of excess : not simply as space that is more than necessary but rather as space of a new dimension. Through a hinging technique that produces differential expansion, this organization takes undefined circulation rendering it spatial in itself. By using this prototype, the figuration of the school is able to acquire new programmatic adjacencies and proximity between parts. In this process, the thesis seeks to question relationships of part-to-whole by offering multiple wholes as well as though the continuity and discontinuity of interior/exterior space.

89 M.Arch SPring 09

VALLE—Giancarlo

91 M.Arch SPring 09

VALLE—Giancarlo

M.Arch SPring 09

Vobis—Yasmin

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VOBIS—Yasmin

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The design relocates the Neubabelsberg Film Studios to the center of Berlin to bring production back to a site suffering from cultural over-exposure.

By integrating the studios with a vast public plaza, new possibilities for experimental media and public participation emerge. Public plaza and back lot become one and the same. The location provides film makers with a readily available supply of backdrops (cropped views to different parts of the city) and unpredictable extras, while the expansive blank field of the plaza encourages a new subject: a spectatorproducer, someone who produces and consumes content in a continuous feedback loop.

Unlike Schinkel’s Altes Museum next door, the plaza’s bowl shape forms a non-panorama: it elevates the horizon, blocking out the immediate context and scale while producing a spatially expansive field of vision by juxtaposing much larger elements: the vast concrete basin below and the open sky above. The city is shut out acoustically, visually and historically, leaving an intense focus on movements and actions of people on the surface. The multiple valleys within the plaza create the possibility for disparate simultaneous attractions. These centers are eroded from below and connected to the exterior by cavernous vomitoria, which immediately immerse the new visitor in an expansive field of activity. The elements of distraction that form the plaza require a more extreme peripheral emphasis—a constant awareness and reading of other possible locations for action.

Spherical projections are an experimental technique for this new mode of peripheral viewing. They are synchronic views that are inherently a collection of multiple perspectives over time. They collapse plan, elevation and perspective into a single drawing by looking everywhere at once. Likewise the project, in its manifold mechanisms of representation, becomes a screen for a continual projection of public desires through an excessive multiplication of reality.

VOBIS—Yasmin

Inspired by the flattened historical perspective of ostalgie, this project looks back to forms of spatiality developed under the Eastern Bloc which have since been abandoned as useful design paradigms.

Specifically, it revives an excess of unaccounted space—typified by communist parade grounds, monuments and palaces, where space was scaled to the mass rather than the individual—to propose that this form of spatiality could have new relevance for democratic capitalist programs today.

M.Arch SPring 09

Berlin Himmelplatz

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VOBIS—Yasmin

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VOBIS—Yasmin

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1:30_S. Lavin: ...Again, I’m at a total loss of words.

I think it was really an astonishing couple of days.

I think that this one word thing is a diabolical invention that only Liz could come up with. It seems so deceptive--deceptively simple--and it is like, ok you give everyone enough rope to almost hang themselves.

2:07_S. Lavin: Over the course of the last couple of days, the issues that are being shared and issues of concern shared by the jury have become increasingly clear. There seems to be a real need to reconsider representation and to think about representation beyond the problems of signification--to turn representation in to an architectural design tool as opposed to a semiological tool. The projects that did that were the ones that I think were the most persuasive. I would also add--I think, there is a larger repertoire of representational tools that you all could use. Huge plots and posters, with some variations and a lot of Photoshop--I mean there is more--there is more available than that. And I would certainly say that one of the things about, say, laser cutting or 3D printing, especially very large scale and so forth, is that all of those are means that are now occupying the threshold between 2 and 3 dimensions and therefore between the obligation of architectural representation on professional level and the obligations of architecture on the immediate perceptual level.

2:35_S. Lavin: Excess, I thought, was a really, really generous topic, because there are so many classic definitions of architecture that identified disciplinarity specifically with excess, and I think that was maybe moved away from too quickly. Excess became very quickly capitalism and those kinds of things. It might have been a richer set of problems if the identification between excess and disciplinary had been dealt with a little more profoundly...

I could not help thinking about, say, somebody like Ruskin, who always described architecture in terms of whether or not the back of statues that were never seen were carved with as much care as the face of statues that were always seen.

So there was the impulse to turn excess into something that was visible and semiotic in that sense, and I am wondering about this other way.

13:50_L. Diller: First of all, thank you all. That was really a treat. It was very interesting these couple of days with the jury. Some of you guys were extremely harsh; some of the work really deserved some harsh criticisms. There were a lot of discoveries, I think, this semester, and I think we did good work. I think there is a lot of work to do, and a lot of things to get better at. I would myself love to get off this wall, you know, but we vowed as a group to just not allow anybody to post anything on this wall and have to deal with space as like a first gesture, an architectural gesture before students go out into the world.

They actually have to confront that and this kind of relentless frontality of the space which actually doesn’t really fit.

It may fit this audience well, but it does not really fit, understanding the project and the narratives. So I think we have to do better in thinking about representation and presentation.

14:58_S. Allen: Yes, this really should be the school that is expert in representation and the description of information.

There is definitely work to be done in that regard.

9:10_V. Acconci: The only thing I was very struck by, very different from schools I’ve known lately is the constant resorting to something that seemed much more physical and real rather than a continued drifting. It’s as if there was a real urge to almost hug something that could be proven rather than to release oneself into some kind of swoon...I was kind of surprised because I didn’t know what I would find here, but it seemed almost the reverse. I don’t mean that as a good word or a bad word, a bad thing, but I know this morning I felt like, “Wow this seems kind of...” Maybe I was too quick to use the word regressive. I think I changed my mind after a while. But it seemed like holding back, whereas with people I’ve gotten to know in their last semester, it seemed like they wanted to throw caution to the winds, even though they are really not sure at all if this could be anything other than doodle or patterns or wallpaper decoration. But the students here seemed to want to test it.

12:00_R. Martin: But just for whatever it is worth, thank you for inviting me. It is fun to come up here and every time one is struck inevitably and seriously by this kind of land wallpaper that you enter. When you enter these reviews, you literally... I mean, I come from the world of like... five square feet per student and here we are... whatever, 500... you get different modes of argumentation, in that way. So the question about how the argument is conveyed is maybe worth adding. I just wouldn’t say one way or the other, that there is like a right way to do it or a wrong way to do it--it’s just to be aware that actually the multiplication of the tools, which actually has been pretty evident in multimedia presentations, poses a new set of issues. Poses, I would say, old-fashioned questions about how to make an argument, and it is always much appreciated when those are answered in an ambitious way. So, thanks for that.

THESIS—Comments

0:15_S. Kwinter: Let me say this, and set a standard of brevity for the final comments. First of all, no, I do this to say, I like it brief--really brief. Number one: pretty impressive thesis day, at least in my world; where I have been, you don’t want to know. Number two: I just want to point out, what an astonishing thing it is to have had so many projects, projects that think independently, and which deal with huge spheres and subjects in the center.

M.Arch SPring 09

FINAL COMMENTS SPRING 09

7:18_ J. Barry: Coming from an art perspective, it was really interesting to hear the differences in the integration between architecture and art. One of the things that struck me was the attention, in certain cases, and probably in the most interesting cases, to the question of infrastructure. That is to say, an attention to infrastructure in relationship to design, and the ability to go more deeply into the program than the normal art project which often just presents itself as an entity to be looked at, but doesn’t imply anything more. It occurred that there is a rich area, between those two different approaches, between art and architecture, which I think this particular moment is leading to.

Because I do think we are in the paradigm shift moment, certainly with how the image is being critiqued. It seems that in this dialogue about architecture--what it might it mean, how can we re-think it--that those questions are also coming up, and this has something important to contribute at this moment.

15:44_S. Allen: We always come around to this argument... on the one hand, the wall paper, and on the other hand, the notion that you can seriously address architectural issues but that you do not have to do that through a hypothetical building.

It does not mean retreating from architecture per se. It does not mean retreating from the agency of architecture as discipline, but it means thinking differently about what architecture can do.

16:12_L. Lerup: If I could slip in, I would say, I am glad I came in the gap, because I need buildings; I have no problem with that...

16:20_S. Allen: I would insist on architecture, I would not insist on building.

16:23_L. Lerup: This is our core business, and when we abandon our core business, we are lost. We are not sociologists, we are not economists.

16:30_S. Allen: Absolutely.

16:33_L. Lerup: Come on then, let’s be architects, it’s cool. [laughter] 37:00_ L. Lerup: What I would consider the highest compliment that I can give is--you’ve seen that when I talked about yesterday--this is an architectural skull that has a brain, but it’s looking for a subject. And I think that’s the most wonderful thing about this, that it really is looking for a subject. And if you can project the subject at least partially, and it’s not a dumb subject; it’s an intelligent subject. And I think that’s the best thing that you can--that’s what architecture can do... It goes back to Rilke’s notion, that “you have to change your life.” I think that if we can make architecture that’s life-changing in some very simple way, but even spatially life-changing, we’ve really arrived at something...We have been the corporate servants for so long in various ways that it would marvelous to be able to pull something off that would actually make us better people.

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The interdisciplinary nature of the program stresses the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social and political milieux. Supported by strong affiliations with other departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, the program has developed a comprehensive approach to the study of the field. Students interact with their peers to sustain individual projects in a context of collective research. The fields of study are normally, but not exclusively, selected within the history and theory of one of four primary areas: architecture, urbanism, landscape, and engineering/building technology.

During the first year of residence, a two-semester pro-seminar introduces students to historical research and methodological approaches, and guides the development of individual research proposals through collaborative projects. A guest seminar series, supported by the School of Architecture and administered by the students in residence, forms a venue for ongoing discussions.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE —

Supporting Faculty —

Beatriz Colomina, History and Theory Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, Ph.D. Program

Eduardo Cadava, Department of English Media Technologies, Literary Theory, 19th-Century American Literature, Comparative Literature, Theories of Translation

Stanley T. Allen, Dean of the School of Architecture M. Christine Boyer, Urbanism Edward Eigen, History and Theory Axel Kilian, Computation and Building Technology Spyridon Papapetros, History and Theory

Esther da Costa Meyer, Department of Art and Archaeology 19th- and 20th-Century Architectural History Brigid Doherty, Departments of Art and Archaeology and Germanic Languages and Literature 20th-Century Art Hal Foster, Department of Art and Archaeology 19th- and 20th-Century Art History, Cultural Theory Michael W. Jennings, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature Late 18th-Century and early 20th-Century European Culture Thomas Y. Levin, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature Aesthetics, 20th-Century European History and Art History, Cultural Theory John A. Pinto, Department of Art and Archaeology Renaissance and Baroque, Landscape Studies Anson Rabinbach, Department of History 20th-Century European History, Intellectual History, History of Technology

Ph.d.

PROGRAM

The Ph.D. Program

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Recently Completed DisSertations include —

Mark Jarzombek (spring 2001) Associate Professor of History and Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

S. Can Bilsel (University of San Diego), Architecture in the Museum: Displacement, Reconstruction and Reproduction of the Monuments of Antiquity in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum (2003)

Detlef Mertins (spring 2001) Professor of Architecture, Chair, Department of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Rodolphe el-Khoury (spring 2001) Associate Professor, Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto Catherine Ingraham (fall 2001) Chair, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, Pratt Institute Sylvia Lavin (fall 2007, fall 2008) Chair of the Ph.D. in Architecture program and Professor of Architectural History and Theory, UCLA John Rajchman (spring 2002, spring 2003, spring 2005, fall 2006) Adjunct Professor, Director of Modern Art M.A. Program, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University Jonathan Crary (fall 2002) Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University Eve Blau (fall 2003) Department of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design Elizabeth Grosz (spring 2004, spring 2006) Professor, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University Mirko Zardini (fall 2006, fall 2007) Director, Canadian Centre for Architecture

Sarah Deyoung (Texas A&M University), Archigram and the City of Tomorrow (2008) Arindam Dutta (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Designing the Present: The Cole Circle, and the Architecture of (an) Imperial Bureaucracy, 1851–1901 (2001) Jonathan Farnham (Philadelphia Historical Commission), A Bridge Game Constructing a Co-Operative Commonwealth in Philadelphia, 1900–1926 (2000) Inês Fernandes, Building Brasilia: Modern Architecture and National Identity in Brazil, 1930–1960 (2003) Helene Furjan (University of Pennsylvania), ‘Glorious Visions’: The Theatre of Display and Sir John Soane’s House-Museum (2001) Romy Hecht (Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile), The Attack on Greenery: Critical Perceptions of the Man-Made Landscape, 1955-1969 (2009)

Research now in progress includes: research seminars —

104 COld war hothouses— 2000–02 106 clip/stamp/fold — 2004–05 108 Learning from Levittown— 2006–08 110 Playboy & Architecture: 1953–1979 —Fall 2008

dissertation ABSTRACTS —

113 Benyamin—Jasmine The Rhetorics of Realism: Photography in Architecture 1900–1918 115 Brennan—AnnMarie A Working Model of Utopia: Adriano Olivetti and the ‘Republic of the Intellect’ 116 Buckley—Craig Images Beyond Images: Architectural Montage in the 1950s and 1960s

Beautiful Leisure: The Decadence and Humanism of Geoffrey Scott, Vernon Lee, and Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Berenson

Roy Kozlovsky (Northeastern University), Representation of Children in Postwar Architecture (2008) Mark Linder (Syracuse University), Space Between Disciplines, 1967: Identifying Architecture in Modernist and Literalist Criticism (1998) Louis Martin (l’Université du Québec à Montréal), The Search for Theory in Architecture: Anglo-American Debates (1957–1976) (2002) Jonathan Massey (Syracuse University), Architecture and Involution: Claude Bragdon’s Projective Ornament (2001) Joanna Merwood (Parsons School of Design), The Mechanization of Cladding: The Chicago Skyscraper and the Constructions of Architectural Modernity (2003) Miikesch Muecke (Iowa State University), On Seams, Carpets, and Stones; A Translation of Gottfried Semper’s Minor Works (2000) Ernestina Osorio (University of California, Los Angeles), Intersections of Architecture, Photography, and Personhood: Case Studies in Mexican Modernity (2006) Emmanuel Petit (Yale University), Irony In Metaphysics’s Gravity. Iconoclasms and Imagination in the Architecture of the Seventies (2006) Stephen Phillips (California Polytechnic State University), Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler’s Mobile Space Enclosures (2008) Felicity Scott (University of California, Irvine), Functionalism’s Discontent: Bernard Rudofsky’s Other Architecture (2001) David Smiley (Barnard College), Pedestrian modern: modern architecture and the American Metropolis, 1935–1955 (2007) David Snyder (Washington University in St. Louis), The Jewish question and the modern metropolis : urban renewal in Prague and Warsaw, 1885–1950 (2007) Tamar Zinguer (The Cooper Union School of Architecture), Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys, 1836–1952 (2006)

Campbell–Mark

118 Díaz Borioli—Leonardo Luis Barragán: Poetics and Politics of an Other Modernity

Fontenot—Anthony

Non-Design, Architecture, and the American City 120 Grau—Urtzi Replica!

122 Greene—Gina Children in Glass Houses: Toward a Hygienic Architecture for Children during the Third Republic in France (1870–1940) 125 Hookway—Branden Computational Environments of the 20th Century 126 Hsieh—Lisa L. The Readable, Playable, and Edible Architecture of ArchiteXt, 1970–1995 129 Imperiale—Alicia Crescita e Forma: The Tissue of Structure

Jaschke—Karin

Spellbound by the Archaic–The ‘Primitivist’ Quest of Dutch Architects after 1945

Ph.d.

PROGRAM

Recent Visiting Faculty —

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130 Kallipoliti—Lydia Mission Galactic Household: The resurgence of cosmological imagination in the architecture of the 1960s 132 Kim —Jeannie Looking for Oracles in Airport Lounges

146 Stevens—Sara Developing Expertise: Architecture, Construction, and Real Estate in the U.S., 1908–1940 148 Su—Michael Wen-Sen The Architecture of Synergy: R. Buckminster Fuller’s formulation of a ‘Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science,’ 1915 to 1938

134 Knoblauch—Joy The Criminal, the Animal, and the Architect: Reforming the Institutional Domestic Environment through the Human Sciences (1963–1974)

150 Sunwoo —Irene Alvin Boyarsky’s Well-Laid Table: Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy, 1965–1977

136 Kurkovsky—Diana CyberSovietica: Cybernetics, City Building, and Systems of Soviet Living, 1954–1986

152 TenHoor—Meredith Food, Media and Spatial Politics from Les Halles to Rungis

138 Lopez-perez—Daniel Skyscraperology, and the Double Exposure of the Skyscraper in the 1970s

154 Verbakel—Els Cities Across Nations. Postwar Competitions for the Transnational Urban Project in Europe

Midal—Alexandra 1968–1972: Cells, Capsules and Units: Furniture as Architecture

140 Moreno —Joaquim From a Little Magazine to the City: Arquitecturas Bis (1974–85) 142 Preciado —Beatriz Prosthetic Architecture: Building the Gendered Body

Robbers—Lutz Modern Architecture and the Cinematic: Sergey Eisenstein’s Glasshouse Project

Rocker—Ingeborg

Evolving Structures: The Architecture of the Digital Medium 144 Segal—Rafael A unitary approach to architecture—Alfred Neumann and the ‘Humanization of Space’

Singh —Rupinder

Tracing the Classical within the Modern

Over the last decade, the Ph.D. program has transformed traditional academic training into a collaborative scholarly workshop generating polemical publications, exhibitions, films and other multimedia platforms.

This workshop acts as the core of the interdisciplinary Media and Modernity program at Princeton, positioning architectural research within a wider field.

research seminar

Ph.D. Research Seminars

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Professor Beatriz Colomina with students: Annmarie Brennan, Branden Hookway, Jeannie Kim, Roy Kozlovsky, Stephen Phillips, Beatriz Preciado, David Snyder, and Tamar Zinguer Tailfins, Saran wrap, ball point pens, Slinky toys, Tupperware, highways, aluminum, hula hoops, food blenders, plastics, Barbie dolls, dishwashers, credit cards, office systems, picture windows, bikinis, fast food, TV dinners, drive-in cinemas, play rooms, window air conditioners, satellites, missiles, bomb-shelters, tranquilizers…: the artifacts of Cold War America. By-products of the war effort, they represent the period as if in a constellation, the result of an atomic explosion, each one of them a fragment for detached analysis or speculation, able to bring light into the period; as if an archeological dig where a piece of a jug may help to understand an entire culture, its habits, degree of development, artistic tendencies and so on. By looking closely at some of these remnants we see the cold war period in all its complexity. An archeology of our own period, a time that still haunts us.

This collection of fragments is simply the pieces an assemblage of pieces picked up for analysis by a group of Ph.D. candidates at a series of seminars and workshops at the School of Architecture at Princeton University conducted between 2000 and 2002. The theme of the seminar was postwar America, a subject neglected in architectural research until recent years, when several conferences, exhibitions, and articles started to open up the field. Instead of talking about designers, buildings, architectural details, designer furniture, master plans, professional publications, and the like, the research paid close attention to popular magazines and books, advertisements, movies and TV programs, governmental initiatives and developers schemes. The seminar tested the idea that the postwar period no longer celebrated the heroic figure of the architect transforming the spatial order, even though most architects were still modeling themselves as heroic.

The real changes were going on elsewhere. Objects of everyday life involved more radical transformations of space than the most extreme architectural proposals. Indeed, the most radical architects were those who were able to understand and respond to these cultural and technological shifts.

In that sense the cold war itself was a hothouse, breeding new species of space, a new organizational matrix. Hence the title Cold War Hothouses, meaning not simply the effect of the Cold War on house design but all the new forms of domesticity that emerged during the period and that in many ways we still occupy today.

cold war hothouses—2000–02

Research Seminar 2000–2002 Book, Princeton Architectural Press 2004

research seminar

Cold War Hothouses— Inventing Postwar Culture, from Cockpit to Playboy

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Exhibition curated by Beatriz Colomina with Craig Buckley, Anthony Fontenot, Urtzi Grau, Lisa Hsieh, Alicia Imperiale, Lydia Kallipoliti, Daniel López-Pérez, and Irene Sunwoo from Princeton University, with the collaboration of Olympia Kazi In recent years, there has been a resurgence of international interest in the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the role of the many experimental publications that were the engine of that intensely creative period has been largely neglected. The exhibition Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X–197X tracks the critical function of the little magazine in architecture during these years, when a remarkable outburst of publications disseminated and catalyzed a range of experimental practices. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals that appeared in response to the political, social, and artistic changes of the period. Clip/Stamp/Fold investigates how an internationally diverse group of architectural little magazines informed the development of postwar architectural culture.

clip/stamp/fold—2004–05

Research Seminar 2004–2005 Exhibition 2006–2009

research seminar

Clip/stamp/fold— The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X–197X

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Professor Beatriz Colomina with students: Pep Avilés, Urtzi Grau, Gina Greene, Joy Knoblauch, Diana Kurkovsky, Daniel López-Pérez, Joaquim Moreno, Enrique Ramirez, Molly Steenson, and Sara Stevens from Princeton University “We shall be more interested in what people make of their housing that in what the architects intended them to make of it. We shall be more interested in the iconography of the ‘Mon (split-level, Cape Cod, Rancher) Repos’ than in the iconography (or structure) of the Dymaxion House or Falling Water. We shall be more interested in the marketing of industrialized house components than in their design. This is not a course in Housing, but an examination of the field from action-oriented and architectural point of view, designed to make subsequent, deeper study of housing more meaningful. We shall not be involved in civic or community action to do with housing in this studio, but in learning what is needed to make our professional contribution to this action more relevant,” Denise Scott Brown, Remedial Houses for Architects, studio brief, 1970.

The seminar was based on an unpublished manuscript by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Ph.D. students visited the office and archives of VSB as part of the research. As with its predecessor Learning from Las Vegas, the text is a further development and continuation of the work begun in a design studio at Yale in 1970. As such, it invites speculation about the role of research in architecture, the iconographical and symbolic values of suburbia, and the nature of architectural education.

learning from levittown—2006–08

Research Seminar 2006–2008 Film in production

research seminar

Learning from Levittown— Revisiting an Unpublished Manuscript by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

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Professor Beatriz Colomina with students: Pep Avilés, Marc Britz, Daniela Fabricius, Gina Greene, Margo Handwerker, Joy Knoblauch, Yetunde Olaya, Enrique Ramirez, Molly Steenson, and Federica Vanuzzi from Princeton University The seminar is dedicated to the study of Architecture in Playboy: 1953–1979.

The thesis of this research seminar is that Playboy played a crucial yet unacknowledged role in the cultivation of design culture in the USA. Through a wide range of different strategies, the magazine integrated state of the art designers and architects into a carefully constructed vision of a desirable contemporary life style. The seminar will explore the ways in which Playboy was ahead of professional and popular magazines in promoting modern architecture and design.

The collaborative research seminar, assembles and analyzes the magazines, the secondary literature on Playboy, the related archives, and conducts interviews with protagonists. As in previous Media and Modernity research seminars, the project will culminate in the collaborative production of a definitive book, exhibition, or event, to be determined as the project evolves.

playboy & architecture—Fall 2008

Research Seminar Fall 2008

research seminar

Playboy & Architecture— 1953–1979

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the binding of photography to architectural debates in Germany was, in part, symptomatic of a larger fascination with the aesthetic potential of machine culture that had developed even before the turn of the century. This interest informed the literature devoted to domestic and industrial design, which made claims to their status as constitutive of modern industrial society. The public deployment and exchange of ideas through polemical texts, propagandist journals, and touring exhibitions by the German Werkbund in the pre-war years celebrated the potential of mass production at the service of larger societal aims.

Hermann Muthesius’ early writings, in particular his Englische Baukunst der Gegenwart (1900) and Das Englische Haus (1904–1905), incorporated numerous specifically commissioned photographs to present English Aestheticism as a precursor to Modernism, reflecting his progressive approach to both practice and pedagogy. A few years later, upon Muthesius’ return to Germany, the harnessing of photography’s pedagogical powers became evident in national and international media campaigns of the Werkbund. Whether through their discursive juxtaposition with texts, or in their positioning as objects among others on display, photographs became both vehicles for the consumption of new objects, and descriptive stand-ins for the dissemination of architectural projects. Everyday household products as well as buildings of all scales were codified through their literal and photographic repetition in journals, serials, and touring exhibitions, displaying the fruits of new co-operations between the applied arts and industry.

Walter Gropius’ early role in fostering the Werkbund’s image production—his rise within the movement through his participation as coordinator of significant photographic collections in conjunction with the Werkbund—formed German Museum of Art in Trade and Commerce (Deutsches Museum fur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe), is often cited but little studied by scholars. Indeed, this early work outside of his own architectural practice exposed him to ideas that would inform not only his early essays on industrial form, but also his concurrent efforts to publicize his own work for Karl Benscheidt—the Fagus complex—whose initial phases were completed by 1911.

Debates over the new architecture engaged a surge of selfpromotional literature that paradoxically coincided with an interest in displaying materially “real” objects of everyday life as well as examples of good architecture. The successful diffusion of these debates relied on the publication of photographic images in order to present a unified face of the Werkbund and to educate a growing but naïve

consumer class. Yet in doing so, such a use of photographs highlighted the heterogeneous (rather than synchronic) arguments of its authors. This dissertation evaluates the use of visual material by pre-war Werkbund members not only in the context of the organization’s founding within the milieu of cultural politics in Wilhelmine Germany, or as a precursor to later more formally self-reflexive photographic production of the twenties. Rather, the use of photographs in early texts by Werkbund founders is analyzed through the lens of their interactions with editors, curators, and photographers.

Special attention is paid to how these working relationships impacted not only the way in which architecture and the applied arts were visualized, but also the actual content of the images themselves. Later, Werkbund-sponsored photographic collections grew in size and importance, and those images published in journals and chosen for public view are examined alongside the larger archive that members had at their disposal. In particular, editorial choices as well as the circumstances of a given image’s use and re-use are explored.

This dissertation addresses one moment in the rich and widely contested relationship between architecture and photography. However, in doing so, it also speculates more generally on the ways in which the intersection of photography with architecture contributes to the fostering of cultural and discursive exchange. While the focus of the research remains in the pre-Weimar years, such an examination of the circumstances and contexts in which photographs intervened in the pre-history of modernism is critical to any re-assessment of later architecture culture.

As reality itself is an effect of representation, photographs likewise test the truth content of the objects they image.

The immersion of photographs in architectural publications around the turn of the century reveals the ways in which theories about architecture are constructed at the moment of their visibility. Some of the problems encountered through the photographic mediation of architecture (namely separation, dispersion and cooption) are not only introduced in the Wilhelmine era; they are widely rehearsed—if not codified—in advance of more well-known case studies from the 1920s. It is the aim of this study to challenge both photographs and the objects they depict with their discursive limits and formal contradictions in mind.

benyamin—Jasmine

Towards A (New) Objectivity: Photography In German Architectural Discourse 1900–1914

Ph.d. abs t ract s

benyamin—Jasmine

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Visiting the United States in 1925 to observe the mechanisms of the American factory, engineer/ businessman Adriano Olivetti tells of his experience in a letter to his industrialist father in Italy, “We arrived in New York, first to study in the library, then the factory, in order to discover the many things which have brought about American capitalism. …We have visited typewriter factories, automobile factories … and we have concluded that the secret is not in the men, because we are not anything less than our brothers who have immigrated to America, but it is in the structure, in the organization, and in the rigor of method.” Soon after, Adriano returned to Italy to apply the knowledge gained from his travels to his father’s typewriter factory in Ivrea. Eventually he would be appointed president of the Ing. C. Olivetti Company, creating one of the largest manufacturing industries in Italy during the 20th century, with factories in Italy, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and the U.K. For Olivetti, the factory embodied the metaphorical and literal center of the community serving as a reference point in forming the civil infrastructure of society and the city. As Olivetti’s company expanded, his realm of concerns grew, encompassing more issues such as workers’ housing, day care facilities, health clinics, and ultimately, economic and urban planning for the Canavese region in Northern Italy. After World War II, Olivetti’s organizational skills were critical in the reconstruction of the country, specifically, his coordination of urban and economic programs within regions through the de-centralization of industry.

He believed that a scientific and democratic planning system could be established by developing a network of regions, consisting of a series of smaller communities with the factory at its center. Recruited to assist in the implementation of the Marshall Plan, Olivetti served as vicepresident of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (Unrra-Casas) and the National Town Planning Institute (INU).

An important aspect of Olivetti’s success was the network of intellectuals he formed throughout Italy and the United States to consult with him on matters ranging from urban planning and architecture to the development of a computer.

The art historian Manfredo Tafuri called this collection of intellectuals the ‘Republic of the Intellect.’ This elite group assisted Olivetti in accomplishing his twofold objective after World War II—to establish a new political movement and a revitalized cultural environment for a war-torn Italy.

The vehicles implemented to accomplish these goals were Olivetti’s publishing house, Edizioni di Comunità, and the medium of the magazine.

The political movement was termed, Movimento Comunità—a ‘Third Way’ that would exist as a socialist alternative to the Christian Democratic and Communist parties. While in exile in Switzerland during the war, Olivetti drafted a plan for a new postwar Italian government structure based on an ‘integrated democracy’ in his book, The Political Order of the Community. The political ideals of Movimento Comunità would be fulfilled through planned urbanism facilitated by regionalism and endorsed and implemented by architects who were the conduits to achieve these objectives. By placing the city at the center of its political ideology, the Movimento Comunità revealed the complex interconnections of power inscribed into city regulatory plans. Olivetti’s second objective of a renewed cultural environment was essentially an extension of his political ideas translated into urban planning, design, and architecture. The publishing house, with its many magazines on these themes, along with its translation of books promoted by the United States Information Service, and the many libraries built around the country, would function as a “factory of knowledge,” producing a specific cultural landscape receptive to liberal democratic ideas.

This dissertation investigates Adriano Olivetti’s urban and political plans for communities and the “designed” system of knowledge orchestrated by his circle of cultural cognoscenti through their respective periodicals. The material is examined from an American perspective, with a focus on the exchange of political, business, and design intelligence between Olivetti and the U.S. This research will demonstrate how an entity based on the factory organization of mechanical production transformed into an organization of information as expressed in design, politics, and publishing. This transformation is marked by World War II, when the operations of the company shifted from a Fordist model of production for the national market, to a Post-Fordist model of production for the global distribution of information and images—fragments which provided a glimpse of an alternative, utopian world imagined, and in part built, by Olivetti.

brennan—AnnMarie

A Working Model of Utopia: Adriano Olivetti and the ‘Republic Of The Intellect’

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brennan—AnnMarie

117

The jarring collisions, scalar mutations, and disorienting, hybrid spaces appearing in the architectural culture of the 1960s and early 1970s testify to an extraordinary deployment of montage techniques. Typically montage in architecture has been regarded as a question of graphics, or as a means for illustrating the potential relationship between an existing environment and a projected building.

This dissertation argues that montage played a more performative than illustrative role: the use of montage to construct an image out of disparate and composite elements enacted graphically the manner in which architects appropriated and assembled new techniques and materials from outside the domain of architecture into their built projects. Such montage images were a special tool, circulating in small magazines and their professional counterparts, in alternative exhibitions and in official competitions. Spurred by the availability of emerging offsetlithographic technology—a moment when the page was just beginning to face the challenge of the screen but had not yet been absorbed by it—the visual gravity and tactility of each montaged component jumped into relief, registering the thickness of the clipping, the variable effects of scaling, the contrasting densities of newsprint and photographic gloss, the mobility of transfer lettering, and the effects and patterns of lithographic color. If much contemporary media theory has assumed montage to be a basic principle of digital environments, the dissertation argues for a reconsideration of the importance of tactility and materiality in the creation of montage images during these years. The construction of such montage images differs radically from those of today’s media, where the specificities of weight, texture, transparency, color, or adhesiveness, are mapped onto a uniform optical matrix whose tactile manipulation has been absorbed by a general interface.

The dissertation further proposes a relationship between the uses of montage in the 1960s and discourses regarding the appropriation of new technologies for architecture during these years. In 1962 architectural historian Reyner Banham described a particular attitude, an interest in the “ingenious mating of off-the-peg components, specials, and off-cuts from other technologies,” to describe an architectural practice of appropriation. Montage tallied well with such an ethos; implying a confident enactment, able to distinguish and manipulate these appropriated technologies at will. From automobile gaskets to lightweight PVC, from retractable masts to synthetic paneling, materials not yet available to architects were captured in imaginary and practical ways, in the hopes of transforming the relation between the building industry, architectural culture, and

a greater public. Devices of montage not only allowed different visions of technological appropriation to be enacted, they aggressively reintroduced and recodified human presence. This conjoining registered volatility and excess; by the late sixties, however, the fantasy of manipulating technology grew increasingly uncertain and self-critical, both of its own projected power, and of the nature of the power passing through it.

Like the material it examines, the dissertation links material from distinct places and times in the form of several case studies. In each, changing ideas about the composite image engage the actual production of images in a manner closely related to redefinitions of architecture during the post-war period in Western Europe. The first case examines the importance of debates in London to post-war architectural culture, examining the particular manner in which the montage practices developed by pre-war avant-gardes, such as Dada and Surrealism, were interpolated there. Through the writings of Reyner Banham, the collaborations of Alison and Peter Smithson with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, and publications such as ARK and Uppercase, such avant-garde practices were redefined in a “permissive” and paradoxical manner through a spatialized conception of collage. If collage was seen as a source of anti-aesthetic energy to be retrieved from movements of the early twentieth century, it also provided an image of an emerging, changeable, and informal order, whose principles could be transferred to a range of scales, connecting architecture to urban design and to advertising. The next chapter, shifting to the European continent, examines the work of Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, and Gunther Feuerstein in Vienna. Shifting away from an overt concern with making seams evident, Hollein and Pichler explored the effect of their erasure in a series of influential photomontages in the early 1960s. In the pages of the magazine Bau their collaboration evolved into a more expanded fusion of architectural history with media and information theory, which combined to produce Hollein’s notorious 1968 montage manifesto “Alles ist Architektur.” Chapter three, examines the work of the Paris-based group Utopie, in which the semiotic decomposition of contemporary rhetoric of advertisements, the critique of urban planning, and the fascination with demountable architecture come together in a theory of démontage. Facing a crisis in architectural education and practice in the context of May 1968, Utopie’s concept of démontage provided a vision of architecture as a structure susceptible to transformation through ideological dismantling while simultaneously feeding a fascination with the radical potentials latent in the appropriation of

buckley—Craig

Images Beyond Images: Architectural Montage in the 1950s and 1960s

Ph.d. abs t ract s

buckley—Craig

demountable technologies. The final chapter examines a subsequent turn towards a more explicitly cinematic engagement with montage, combining the development of narrative scenarios and storyboards with the production of films and video-environments by Florentine architectural groups Superstudio and 9999.

Building upon research that has drawn critical attention to the interplay between architecture and forms of mass media in the twentieth century, recovering this overlooked history of architectural montage promises a greater comprehension of the techniques and the concepts through which the seams of representation could be rendered constructive or be erased during specific moments in time. The construction of montage rendered architectural relationships graphically evident, just as relationships within the graphic fragment were made architectural.

Understanding the various contexts in which such concepts and practices were deployed can provide a measure of critical distance in our own time, when the combinations of media appear ever more seamless.

top: Alison Smithson, collage scrapbook cover made from pieces of Eduardo Paolozzi screenprint wallpaper, c. 1952, Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, Harvard; and office of Ronald Jenkins, Ove Arup and Partners, London.

Renovation by Alison and Peter Smithson and Eduardo Paolozzi, 1952. above left:spread from Architektur, 1963. Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler. left: spread from Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1, 1967. Hubert Tonka and René Lourau. above: montage from Fundamental Acts: Education, Superstudio, 1972–3.

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Díaz-Borioli—Leonardo

Díaz-Borioli—Leonardo

The Architecture of Luis Barragán: Designing a Twentieth-Century Architect Throughout the twentieth century, the authorship of Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) was shaped in the international arena of publicity, institutions, foreign and cultural policies, private interests, and the projection of Mexico’s post-revolutionary national identity.

The reception of his work, however, was only centered on its biographical signification taken at face value. In 1976, the catalog of Barragán’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) solo exhibition stated that his architecture was “autobiographical” and derivative of his memories and emotions. This dissertation will critically analyze exchanges between the reception and personal life of Barragán from 1931 when—in the U.S.—his work was first published, to the 1980s when he became one of the world’s most celebrated living architects.

Barragán’s rapid transition from limited public exposure to a wide recognition after 1976 has not been analyzed. My dissertation addresses this problem by historicizing the becoming of Barragán. Further, it incorporates a detailed analysis of his biography while simultaneously challenging concepts of authorship, signature, and autobiography.

The dissertation first examines the institutional debates leading to MoMA’s exhibition on Barragán that catapulted him to international recognition. Conflicting disciplinary views between Peter Eisenman, then director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), and Emilio Ambasz, a member of the IAUS and then curator at the Department of Architecture and Design (DAD) of MoMA, led the latter to distance himself from the IAUS. At the Modern, Ambasz revived a dormant plan for an exhibition on Barragán that allowed him to advance his phenomenological views of architectural practice through the show “The Architecture of Luis Barragán.” This first chapter also researches the archaeology of phenomenology in the DAD since the Universitas Conference of 1972 also organized

by Ambasz. Then, Mexican poet Octavio Paz presented a phenomenological understanding of structuralism that since then influenced curatorial practices from the presentation of Five Architects in 1972 to Arthur Drexler’s last show in 1979.

The second and third chapter will complement the image of a professionally and personally isolated Barragán in flee of publicity. The second chapter analyzes his selfpromoted life-long publicity in New York and relates it to foreign and cultural policies towards Mexico. In 1931, Barragán, became the first architect from Mexico to be published in the United States and was described as a modern practitioner. Barragán was then an architect from the provincial town of Guadalajara unaware of discussions on the guiding principles of architectural modernism taking place in Mexico City as well as of modern structures

being erected in Mexico. In counter distinction, the U.S. publications on Barragán suited a strategic understanding of a pre-modern Mexico that was compatible with cultural policies supported by the U.S. ambassador to Mexico and the Rockefellers that aided a delay in the nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry. Further, this chapter illustrates how publicity allowed Barragán to become aware of photography as an autonomous medium and incorporated it to his design process. This section shows how Barragán first created in the paper of photographs an architecture that was later canonized by Kenneth Frampton on the basis of techtonics.

The third chapter critically looks into Barrgán’s becoming modern and “Mexican” within Mexico’s post-revolutionary identity debate. First, it shows how his Jalisco origins—a catholic, rural landowner, hispanista, and supporter of a land-reform related civil war with religious implications— influenced his understanding of rural architecture. Further, advancing a postcolonial interpretation, this chapter exhibits how his neo-colonial ideology allowed him to incorporate a differentiated autochthonous population of México into his practice. Such understanding of México by Barragán was a central component of his becoming emblematic of “Mexican” modern architecture.

To frame more precisely the autobiographical effect in the construction of Barragán as an international figure, the fourth chapter pursues a stronger interpretative methodology by analyzing personal aspects of his life and Barragán’s own house. The latter is conceived as a building that complicates notions of the private and the public by both shielding and constructing Barragán’s private persona while simultaneously being a structure in display for the viewing public. This last chapter analyzes Barragán’s walls—the most public aspect of his practice—and through the psychoanalytical concept of social anxiety links it to an Other Barragán that to date has resisted representation. The chapter connects the walls of Barragán to a troubled relation with his homosexuality.

The dissertation analyzes exchanges between institutions in centers of production of knowledge and constructed peripheries, the international projection of national identity debates and highlights the role of geopolitics in cultural policies within the field of architecture. Further, it complicates the notion of the Other in architectural discourse by looking into superimposed ethnic and cultural differentiations combined with divisions within the self. Through the case of the discursive formation of what has been called the autobiographical practice of Luis Barragán, the dissertation examines the construction of subjectivity and authorship in the discipline of architecture during the twentieth century.

Luis Barragán in the Albers’s house. New Haven, February, 1967. From left to right: Anni Damaz, Anni Albers, Luis Barragán, Josef Albers, Lala and Ricardo Legorreta.

121 Ph.d. abs t ract s

Grau—Urtzi

grau—Urtzi

Replica!

This dissertation explores the renewal of the city of Barcelona during the 1970s and 80s in order to identify strategies of reconstruction that operated within its urban discourses and practices. In opposition to the accounts of uniqueness and singularity associated with the Barcelona Model, the public spaces, historic fabric and iconic buildings of the city will be analyzed and defined as replicas, both literal reproductions of (pre)existing works of architecture and, in a sense denoted in the Spanish language, as responses to previous statements. Most importantly, this approach can further clarify the passage from neo-avantgarde reenactments to postmodern pastiche, revealing the shifting relations with the historical past that underline this transition. Its is to reveal the role replicas play in Barcelona Urban Renewal of the 1970s and 80s and as such contribute to our understanding of copying and historical reconstruction as it was practiced and experienced in modern architectural history of Spain and beyond.

Barcelona’s self-replication, encompassing both built icons and historical fabric, truly embodies the uniqueness of the model; but more importantly Barcelona’s replicas of 1970s and 80s also have the capacity of adumbrating a contemporaneous shift of attitude towards history. To clarify a gap in the transition from neo-avant-garde to postmodern historicism, the third chapter analyzes the three replicas of the German Pavilion built in 1929 by Mies van der Rohe for the International Exposition of Barcelona. In 1986, Rem Koolhaas, Josep Quetglas and Ignasi de Solà-Morales rebuilt the pavilion and its history in parallel sites: at the Triennale di Milano, at a lecture that became the book Fear of Glass, and at the original site in Barcelona. All three projects respond to history by replacing as well as creating and erasing historical references and, in their synchrony, unveiling the state of the question of architectural copies.

With this they illustrate three main reevaluations of modern architecture in the peak of Barcelona’s urban renewal.

As a mode of introduction, the first chapter defines the scope of the dissertation by examining three branches of Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ intellectual production: a) his studies on the historiography of modern architecture; b) his interventions on and reconstructions of works of art and architecture; c) his writings on contemporary urban conditions. The intersection of these tragically incomplete projects, which have the city of Barcelona in its background, outlines temporal, spatial and conceptual spheres of the dissertation, establishing a framework to evaluate the use of replicas in the Barcelona Model.

The pavilion of the Spanish Republic for the International Exposition of Paris of 1937, initially designed by the Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert, became the topic of Spanish pavilion of Venice Biennale in 1976 that housed the exhibition ‘España. Vanguardia artistica y realidad Social 1936–1976’. In 1937 the building operated as a political display in the war against fascism and the fourth chapter will explore how in 1976 the same building came to terms with the cultural heritage of the dictatorial regime.

This chapter also describes how a replica, build in 1992, coinciding with the Olympic Games, made such a program obsolete. Historical reconstructions fulfill the ideological function of rendering specific versions of the past and these two buildings, located at both ends of Barcelona’s urban transformation of 1970s and 80s, symptomatically unveil the evolution of the past that replicas meant to present.

Barcelona’s the urban strategy has been reiterated for the last century and a half. Yet, the so-called Barcelona Model is commonly branded as the particular iteration of this model after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 which surpassed the urban realm, renovating the social, cultural and institutional status of the city. The second chapter of the dissertation chronicles the prehistory of this iteration as an implied rather than explicit doctrine to the Spanish Village, a historical theme village raised in the occasion of the 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona. The importance of this village lies in the fact that it worked as the testing ground for the strategies of replication at play in the renewal of the 1970s and 80s. Hypothesis of the experiment was: the urban environment can be used as mass communication device through the absorption of technological media. As Barcelona’s Old City’s future blueprint, the Spanish Village describes a conjectural city in which facts speak for themselves before any outside theoretical framework is imposed on them. It is these “facts” that shape the second chapter before the dissertation unfolds to more theoretical realms.

During the 1970s and 80s, the renovation of Barcelona’s Old City [Ciutat Vella] and its adaptation to a tourism economy solidified the Barcelona Model as an explicit doctrine, which further negotiated the transition from replication of individual buildings to its urban phase. From his office in the Barcelona City Council, the architect Oriol Bohigas guided the collective enterprise bridging architecture, academia, politics and the public realm. The fifth and last chapter examines how his urban polices preserved existing conditions and established the new Barcelona’s Old City’s identity, and used replicas to do so— i.e. It analyzes the series of punctual interventions in Barcelona’s public space commonly known as the little squares that regenerated its urban tissue in its own image.

Courtesy UHF 2009.

123 Ph.d. abs t ract s

Greene—Gina

greene—Gina

Children in Glass Houses: Toward a Hygienic Architecture for Children During the Third Republic in France (1870–1940) My dissertation examines the use of architecture and design to promote the physical well-being of children in France between 1870 and 1940. During a period of ongoing demographic decline and high infant and child mortality, when fears of French degeneration were widespread, architects, hygienists, and physicians collaborated to improve children’s health by constructing a series of hygienic, medicalized, and architecturally modern spaces. In so doing, they sought not only to improve the health of individual French children, but, most importantly, regenerate the French race itself.

Incubators nurtured fragile, ‘weakling’ infants in selfregulating, heated, transparent glass cases which gave the reassuring appearance of being almost hermetically sealed.

State-run nursery schools (écoles maternelles) housed in white-tiled buildings with rooftop sun terraces provided extensive facilities for subjecting working-class children to hygienic training and medical examination. Open-air schools (écoles de plein air) with removable glass walls fostered the unhindered access to the fresh-air and sunlight that would rehabilitate scores of sickly, pre-tubercular children.

Whether through a visual rhetoric of containment or total permeability, through strategies of technological or natural regulation, each modern structure represented the imagined ability of architecture to bolster children’s health.

While an increased investment in children’s health can be understood as part of a reaction against depopulation statistics, what is less clear—and what my dissertation proposes to take on as its primary research question—is how reconfiguring the built environment came to be accepted by so many experts in the fields of medicine, architecture, politics, and public health as an effective way to improve children’s health.

The claim that architecture can rehabilitate has been naturalized to a certain extent but is actually the product of a complicated set of associations. Partly rooted in Enlightenment theories of the power of nurture over nature—and the attendant dream of reforming the modern subject entirely through external influence—the projection of such ideals onto architectural environments was far from inevitable. Rather, the widespread faith in healing through environment, I argue, was rooted in a peculiar admixture of scientific beliefs and discoveries of the late nineteenth century which, even if occasionally contradictory or illfounded, were loosely translated into strategies for managing everything from social policy to architectural design. This combination of scientific theories, directly contributed to the convergence of professional opinion—and the normalization

of such opinions—regarding the hygienic, health-promoting, and even regenerative powers of certain environments.

While historians and theorists of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France have examined the increasing ‘medicalization’ of society and the concurrent intrusion of physicians and administrators into the realms of private and political life, few have examined the phenomenon specifically as it related to the architecture of the Third Republic. More important for the proposed project is that few have examined the Republic’s preoccupation with children’s physical health and none have examined the concurrent development of a s eries of novel architectural spaces for children that these concerns engendered.

The omission is significant for such cultural projects of ‘medicalization’ took on a distinctly utopian aspect when applied to children. Such aspirations were apparent in contemporary discussions of the objects and the architecture. Incubators, écoles maternelles, and écoles de plein air were not only spaces for medical observation, and they were not only sites in which children were produced by ‘power’ as objects of knowledge—although both claims can be legitimately asserted. Ultimately, they were architectural spaces designed to realize a much more ambitious, utopian project: direct, therapeutic rehabilitation of the body and a potential rehabilitation of the physical and moral health of the French ‘race’.

My goal is two-fold. On the one hand, I wish to bring an analysis of architectural design and cultural policy to a broader historical discussion of children’s health and welfare programs. From this perspective, architectural forms can be seen as developing in correspondence with new state policies and priorities. Still more importantly, I wish to bring these child-saving spaces into discussions of early twentieth century modern architecture. The belief in the rehabilitative effects of environment, as evidenced in French discussions of children’s architecture, had a profound but little examined effect upon the modern movement in architecture. This project of building to improve children’s health provided opportunities for architects not only in France but throughout Western Europe and the U.S. to experiment with a new ‘hygienic style’. To better understand why early twentiethcentury architects working in a modern style had such faith in the healthfulness of their designs it is necessary to examine this earlier connection between hygiene, medical therapy, and children’s architecture in the late nineteenth-century.

In so doing, the scientific principles and popular beliefs that informed the development of a totally regenerative, hygienic architectural style are more easily discerned.

(top) Ecole de Plein Air Genevieve-Coulon, Architect Germain Debré, ca. 1934; (center left) Ecole de Plein Air GenevieveCoulon, Architect Germain Debré, ca. 1934; (center right) Ecole de Plein Air GenevieveCoulon, Architect Germain Debré, ca. 1932; (left) Centre d’Hygiene Infantile, Architect Francois Lecoeur, in L’Architecte, April 1924.

125 Ph.d. abs t ract s

hookway—Branden This project is located in the zone of interface between human sensorium and machinic intelligence. Its central figure is the cockpit. Its aim is to trace a genealogy of augmented cognition: here, the supplementing or supplanting of human processes of sensing and thinking by other processes—technological, informational, organizational, pharmaceutical, etc.—and the subsequent production of a hybridized form of cognition through the interplay of its constituent parts. The development of augmented cognition necessitates a sustained interrogation of its “human element” to the end of rendering the relevant human capabilities compatible with the other processes at play in the overall system. In the course of this interrogation, the human element is continually broken down into sub-processes, which are then given meaning in being reintegrated into the system. Traffic across the humanmachine interface is system-defined and two-way; each side holds up a mirror to the other, with human capability increasingly defined by the insertion of technologically- and organizationally-derived processes, just as technological and organizational performance is adjusted by design to human use.

With its main principles elaborated during World War I and the interwar period, the cockpit was developed concurrently, and shared overlaps, with the first deployments of standardized testing at a mass-scale.

Along with mass standardized testing and aviation design, the cockpit was a laboratory for collaboration between the military, industry, and academia, and the results of these collaborations would soon spread throughout civilian life, not only in air transportation, but also in areas including organizational theory, ergonomics and workplace design, and the development of computing.

The cockpit occupies a unique place in this genealogy. As the site of encounter between pilot and plane, the cockpit is essentially a reification of an in-between place, and this is the source of its interest. The cockpit serves both actually and metaphorically as a place of adjudication, wherein boundaries are drawn and rules of engagement set between human and machine. Where most accounts of the rise of machinic intelligence—covering cybernetics, information theory, artificial intelligence, new media, etc.—have focused on the technological side of the interface, the cockpit was from the very start a site of measuring, testing, subdividing, and reformulating human capability. The pilot would be subject to methods drawn from psychology, physiology, physics, psychoanalysis, and medicine; to the stresses of flight in unreliable aircraft, bad weather, high altitude, and combat; and to the control

environment of the cockpit itself, both within the aircraft and in a variety of abstractions of the cockpit in the form of tests, psychological apparatus, and simulators. What would emerge was a new sense of space and time, and also visuality, than is generally given in accounts of concurrent modernism, even as Saint-Exupéry remarked that “the airplane has taught us the straight line.”

(facing page) The Orientator: An early simulator used by the US Army during World War I and the interwar period to test flying aptitude (patent diagram, 1921); (right) The Mirror-recorder: Part of apparatus designed by psychologist Raymond Dodge to photographically record the compensatory movements of closed eyes (1921); (below) Spiral chalk lines on a field: An aerial view showing attempts by US Army pilots to walk a straight line while blindfolded, as demonstration of the inadequacy of the vestibular (inner-ear) system as means of spatial orientation in the absence of visual cues (circa 1928).

hookway—Branden

Cockpit Console Cubicle

127 Ph.d. abs t ract s

hsieh—Lisa L. This dissertation investigates the readable, playable, and edible architecture of Japanese architectural group ArchiteXt that founded in 1970 around a magazine of the same name, ArchiteXt. Consisting of five architects, Takefumi Aida, Takamitsu Azuma, Mayumi Miyawaki, Makoto Suzuki and Minoru Takeyama, ArchiteXt paradoxically adopted a pluralist approach without a common philosophy, encompassing diverse theories and activities—so much so that, beyond building, the architects cooked pastas, charted encephalograms, and detonated explosives.

The pluralist practice of ArchiteXt, in fact, exemplifies the New Wave of Japanese architecture in the 1970s (and onward), where a tremendous array of individual value system rose above Metabolism, the dominant architectural movement in the 1960s. In contrast to the mega-structures and plug-in cells of Metabolism, ArchiteXt revolved around small, curious inventions which remain mostly obscure to architectural critics. My thesis suggests that the theoretical negligence to account for ArchiteXt stems from both its pluralist function, and the cultural and philosophical dimensions rooted in the Japanese everyday practice that the work of ArchiteXt implicitly addresses. Indeed, what does the tangential production of a magazine (readable), a toy (playable), and a pasta dish (edible) suggest about the conditions of architectural making in Japan in the postMetabolism era? And what of the paradox attendant to the readable, playable and edible that traverse terrains beyond the confines of the explicitly architectural? What effects had these extracurricular activities connected to the common practices of reading, playing, eating, etc. upon building creativity? Addressing such questions, this dissertation does not seek to redefine the disciplinary boundary of architecture, but articulates a distinctly heterogeneous treatment in ArchiteXt’s work that links architecture to the details of everyday pursuits, in which the logic of New Wave indeed resides.

Centering around a magazine, a toy, and a cuisine, the dissertation comprises three sections: the readable (ArchiteXt, 1970—1972), the playable (Aida Block, 1981), and the edible (Pachinko Macaroni, 1995). The readable deals with the idea of architecture as writing, scripting, coding, reading, etc.—that is, the act of communication.

Drawing upon a peculiar reading of ArchiteXt through writings of ethnographer/architect Kon Wajiro, social psychologist Hiroshi Minami, Roland Barthes (Empire of Signs), and Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life), the section articulates a distinct post-modern architecture in Japan in connection with their specific cultural practices and philosophy, such as the idealism of

“no self.” The playable examines Aida’s Toy Block House project, 1978—1984, consisting of three toys (Aida Block, Aida Box, Dollhouse IX) and nine houses (Toy Block House I—VIII, X), exploring a notion of informal architecture as it largely plays out in the New Wave of Japanese architecture.

Whereas the edible centers on “Architecture and Macaroni” exhibition in Tokyo, 1995 (that invited a number of rising architects in Japan to design recipes and make macaroni), as well as its western antecedents Haus-Rucker-Co’s food events, 1969—1972 (Mooneating, Vanilla Future, Food City I, II, and Central Park Birthday Cake). Using Miyawaki’s “Pachinko Macaroni” as springboard for investigation, this section looks back to the 1950s and 60s Japan, where a changing philosophy legitimated leisure in the life of the hardworking Japanese, consequently setting off a boom of exotic architectural programs, including pachinko parlor, nopan kissa (no-panties café), rooftop golf, etc.

Mainly I argue that ArchiteXt redefines architecture as action rather than the backdrop for action, and reorients architecture to everyday life in the practices of writing, reading, playing, eating, etc. Thus taking root in ordinary activities, ArchiteXt fosters an alternative paradigm vis-à-vis the grandiose, utopian world that Metabolism romantically imagined.

hsieh—Lisa L.

The Readable, Playable, and Edible Architecture of Architext, 1970—1995

129 Ph.d. abs t ract s

imperiale—Alicia Crescita e Forma: la geometria della natura is the title of the 1969 Italian translation of English biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s text of 1919, On Growth and Form.

This important early 20th century scientific text investigated structural principles that reveal the material structure of nature—how organic form negotiates the demands of the dynamical forces of the physical world through surface tension, cellular divisions, membrane boundaries, and other structural organizational principles.

Italian architect Rinaldo Semino (Genoa, 1937–) produced several experimental projects between 1965–1972 that reveal the influence of this text on his work. Although Semino’s approach was intuitive in respect to the structural examples from nature, his work shows an understanding of the underlying syntax of organization that Thompson’s text was demonstrating and thus is not a superficial attempt to design structures that merely appear natural, organic, or biomorphic.

Three unbuilt projects by Semino were published in the 1973 volume of the Italian magazine, Zodiac 22, “Light Structures” edited by architectural theorist Maria Bottero.

In this issue, Bottero examined the work of ten international architects and engineers in whose work she was able to identify an interest in morphological research which interrogated the structure of material in design and the models offered from nature. In the Introduction she posited that research into the laws governing inorganic material, systems, and language might be extracted to apply to growth in living organisms—offering a linguistic-formal model for growth that could be extrapolated to refer to algorithmic growth and computational strategies in design.

Semino’s projects proposed a construction made of elements which were changing and reactive to the variations in surface and position in the overall structure. Inspired by the direct observation of vegetal and organic tissue structures, Semino developed a series of base elements that aggregate in automorphic, highly complex structures.

The structural element is not only a structural space frame that is then clad or infilled with elements to create surface enclosure: the elements themselves are both structure and surface. One cannot understand the individual element fully until it is set in play in a dynamical process with other units to create a multi-celled architectural entity. To reduce a study only to the cell would be to miss the dual status of the cell as individual and its complexity in an ensemble.

His work possessed a new organic approach—one that was not formal, but procedural, performative, and operative. In this discussion, “organization” is a key term.

An organism may be defined as a whole that reflects a

unity and organization among constituent parts, where all the parts contribute to the whole and no part may be eliminated without compromising the integrity of the whole.

Architecture based upon this reading of organization is one that does not only appear organic, but performs organically.

In biological organisms, cells accrete to form tissue, and there must be the simultaneous recognition of cell, tissue, and organism. This discussion will be extended to speak to the large scale, multi-celled “macrostructures” designed

by Rinaldo Semino and the economic and political climate of the 1960s in which these structures, to be constructed of prefabricated units, were proposed in response to the exponential growth of cities and urban infrastructure.

The investigation of structures based upon the accretion of individual cellular units may be viewed as a singularly architectural question, but it is in the metaphorical equation of cell-to-dwelling that the fuzzy border between biology and architecture are drawn. In this liminal boundary between disciplines lies the territory into which this work will delve.

To speak to the overlap between disciplines, it is informative to look at an exhibit in which Semino participated. Mutations of Form in Architecture curated by Renzo Piano for the Centre for the Studies of Science in Art of London was to be included in the ill-fated XIV Triennale di Milano of 1968.

The XIV Triennale with the theme Il Grande Numero (Greater Number) was an event that spoke to and allowed for an open-ended reading of the period of the late 1960s and its polyvalent concerns. The postwar population explosion triggered many issues of the individual within the many and spoke to a new idea of mass: mass housing, mass murder, mass protests…. Art and life were not to be separated. The Triennale was occupied by students and artists on the day of its opening. This event, where life interacted directly with art, is an indicator of an irrevocable break with the past, a past which held a total faith in technology and power. This break would open up and give a new meaning to the idea of mass numbers, protest, ecology…and architecture.

This work is timely in that we are currently in a period in which the embrace of scientific concepts and their translation to digital techniques for the design and production of architecture is all-pervasive. This dissertation will examine these concepts in specific projects of Rinaldo Semino and comparatively in the work of some his contemporaries such as Mario Galvagni, Sergio Musmeci, Manfredo Nicoletti, Renzo Piano, and Maurizio Sacripanti, in order to bring light to, and an analytical method with which to interpret the formal, constructional, and political concerns of the contemporary state of architectural research.

imperiale—Alicia

Crescita e Forma: The Tissue of Structure

131 Ph.d. abs t ract s

Kallipoliti—Lydia This dissertation traces a renascent cosmological imagination in the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s.

It documents how the exploration of outer space fueled a radical ecological architectural debate that addressed the reinvention of the household and domestic economy, as both a scientific and an ontological project. I am arguing that in the anticipation of a cosmic view and the search for our coordinates in the universe, there was a disciplinary inflation of previous perceptions of habitation, amplifying the household to an interplanetary organism that can capture the immensity of the cosmos and the obscure density of living systems.

Reflecting the spectacle of a now finite “spaceship-earth” in 1967, previous concepts of nature’s preservation as separated from the urban milieu, gave rise to a novel naturalism of “artificial ecology,” where the functions and operations of nature were copied as precise analogues in man-made systems, explicitly in spaceships and houses. At this time, the space program played a fundamental role in the reformation of the building industry, effectively adopting, rationalizing and simulating nature’s operations in the cautious cycling of provisions. The potential for convergence of all waste materials into useful ones became eminently important, as a means of survival within the enclosed space of the spacecraft. However, NASA’s experiments were not only emoting unearthly fictions; they were a catalyst for re-thinking transformed social and technical relationships as architectural problems, particularly in the domestic sphere.

The space program, as a paradigm of reinventing habitation in extreme physiological conditions and instrumentalizing human agency in terms of input and output invoked an ecological sense of inhabiting the world, as seen in houses equipped with digesters, hydroponic systems, composting devices, solar components and wind generators. In essence, the projection of humanity in outer space was less about conquering of a new geographical and technological frontier and more about the projection of primordial habitation principles on earth, as well as the conception of a new type of a recirculatory house, a cybernetic laboratory, that can reproduce the ecosystem in its totality in smaller closed space-vehicles.

Recycling habitation experiments in the backyards of amateur engineers coupled the naiveté of survivalist fortitude with NASA’s latest discoveries on the recycling systems of spaceships, nurturing a cultural fascination with systems that promised to grow tomatoes exclusively from household effluent. NASA’s experiments with self-sufficiency were appropriated by a countercultural generation of environmentally concerned architects in the

United States and England that popularized “autonomy” from the grid of supplies as a tool for social and political reform. The protagonists of this dissertation are architects, like Graham Caine, David Sellers and William Katavolos among others, who perceived themselves as “semiscientists.” Deeply immersed into biology, cybernetics and the life sciences, these architects experimented with the function of domestic space as a performative device, though not as a representational metaphor as Le Corbusier’s “machine for living,” but in a literal manner through growth of living substances and scrutinizing experimentation with human physiology. Edward Burton’s patents for Grumman’s Corporation’s “Integrated Household Unit”, Grahame Caine’s “Eco-House”, Cosmorama’s “Trick Recyclist”, all promised to reinvent habitation anew as a synecdoche of the earth, showcasing an unprecedented belief in the possibility of systematizing the oikos into an autonomous and regenerative circuit, capable of harnessing its waste and providing its own energy.

Methodologically, I use as a primary resource the factsheets—in the form of instruction manuals—that certain architects left behind as a documentation of their “semiscientific” experiments. Throughout the pages of these manuals architecture was staged in a comprehensive set of numerical steps that would spring an end built product.

Fact-sheets and manuals, as educational resources and a collective written landscape of gathered and organized information on building, have marked a significant shift from determining final blueprints to open procedural design expressions and construction methods. My main argument is that the emergent practice of ecological design, as inspired by the cosmological impulse of the day, was paired with a specific building language, structured as an open source computation code. Accordingly, the information policy of the manuals, manifest in the promotion of combinatorial skills, ‘dos and don’ts’ and an evolutionary built-up process that could derail from an original plan or intention, not only influenced profoundly design decisions, but also stirred design creativity. Writing open source design codes was by no means a neutral agent of recording a building process that was already predetermined and consequently executed; the manuals became themselves architecture, in fact the most radical architecture of the 1960s.

Bringing this discussion to face contemporary debates, systematization, as an abstract model of design thinking, was being developed not only long before the actual physical artifact that we now call the computer, but also long before the authorship of these manuals, in an attempt to bring together the principles that govern living systems and

machines since the inception of cybernetics as a discipline.

In light of this lineage of building experimentation, it is worthwhile to observe that two major peripheral areas of the architectural discipline –computation and sustainabilitythat are considered almost in all cases as disjunctive or irrelevant fields stem from equivalent epistemological aspirations and converged in a time where cosmological imagination was at play in the core of the discipline.

kallipoliti—Lydia

Mission Galactic Household: The Resurgence of Cosmological Imagination in the Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s

133 Ph.d. abs t ract s

KiM—Jeannie

kIM—Jeannie

Looking for Oracles in Airport Lounges The neologician Constantinos Doxiadis was born in 1913 on the Bulgarian border, graduated from the National Metsovion Technical University in Athens in 1935, and received his doctorate in engineering and city planning from Berlin-Charlottenburg Technical University with a thesis on the conscious order of ancient Greek communities.

Doxiadis entered the Greek Government as a town planner, and was installed as the chief of the Regional and Town Planning Department in 1940, when Italy attacked Greece.

While fighting on the front as a scout for enemy targets, Doxiadis founded an underground intelligence organization that became the “scientific” general staff of the resistance movement. At the same time, anticipating his post-war role, Doxiadis deployed his technicians to survey the damage in Greece and sketched out plans for reconstruction, which he then published in his underground magazine, already entitled Regional Planning and Ekistics. The war ended in Greece on October 12, 1944, and Doxiadis opened an exhibition on reconstruction two weeks later, easily convincing the Greek government that he should be in charge of the country’s rehabilitation. Doxiadis was sent to San Francisco for the founding of the Untied Nations and returned as the Minister for Reconstruction, lasting—somewhat improbably—through a tumultuous period in Greek government, including the repeated pressures of a communist guerrilla war. The contacts Doxiadis would make during his Marshall Plan years would attract the attention of the Ford Foundation, the United Nations, and American CEOs. After an extended vacation in Australia for his failing health, during which Doxiadis became a tomato farmer, the planner returned to Athens in 1953 to open his office.

Instantaneously the largest planning office in Greece, Doxiadis Associates was housed in an eight storey building adjacent to Doxiadis’s own technical university for the study of ekistics, and included a staff of architects, planners, engineers, economists, sociologists, geographers, and musicologists. Doxiadis’s thesis developed into the idea that five forces and five elements combined uniquely to give each settlement its own character. Ekistics—the science of human settlements—sought to describe the matrix between these five elements (nature, anthropos, society, shells, networks) and five forces (economic, social, political, technical, cultural). If city planning could become a science, Doxiadis posited, its scope would be broad and unbiased.

From the Greek words for habitat (ekos) and settlement (eko), the new science, ekistics, also consciously shared its etymological root with economics and ecology. The tendency in ekistics towards taxonomy led to a classification of things at a global scale—laying out the groundwork for

global planning. With zero-laden figures, Doxiadis dreamt of global ecological balance, but a planned balance. With the courage of the planner bolstered by figures, Doxiadis Associates was able to tread rather fearlessly into any country in need of planning and, significantly, “free of the imperialist stigma.” Given recent debates about globalization and continuing concerns about the effects of modernization upon the urban condition, consideration of an individual such as Doxiadis has become an important, indeed unavoidable topic in understanding the apparent failures of the traditional disciplines of architecture, landscape, and urban planning in the developing world.

This dissertation examines Doxiadis’s work in the United States; specifically, his inability to realize much beyond a partial housing development in Eastwick, Pennsylvania and the community center in Malden, Massachusetts despite numerous commissions to redevelop entire cities, a continuous cycle of public lectures, and a widespread network of Marshall Plan cronies. Simultaneously, the dissertation explores Doxiadis’s relationship with philanthropic funding agencies in the United States— the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation in particular—a constant source of funding and income for his various enterprises, both in Athens and throughout the developing world.

(clockwise from top left) Cover of Urban Renewal and the Future of the American City (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1966), Doxiadis’ long-delayed report for the National Associations of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, funded by the Ford Foundation and ultimately printed by the Public Administration Service; Doxiadis visits Pakistan in 1965, near the completion of Islamabad.

Courtesy Doxiadis Foundation; Part of a series of professional photographs of Doxiadis Associates’ new Univac 1107. Courtesy Doxiadis Foundation; Cover of Ekistics, July 1965, featuring the global ecumenopolis; Doxiadis en route to the Aspen Institute after lecturing at Kent State, apparently making an urgent phone call.

Courtesy Doxiadis Associates; Still from Fellini’s 8½, used

by Doxiaids during his lecture at Columbia University in Low Library to demonstrate the ills of automobile culture.

135 Ph.d. abs t ract s

KNOBLAUCH—Joy

KNOBLAUCH—Joy

The Criminal, the Animal, and the Architect: Softening the Institutional Domestic Environment Through the Human Sciences (1963–1974) Architectural history and theory have yet to acknowledge the lasting impact of the human sciences on architectural design. Nevertheless, between 1963 and 1974 the profession of architecture borrowed from the human sciences to develop an expanded understanding of the occupants of buildings in an effort to develop alternative designs for institutional domestic environments, most notably prisons, public housing and psychiatric facilities. The new, softened or humanized designs for such environments sought to counter the image of the imposing, inflexible and hard architecture of large, staterun institutions by breaking down monolithic forms, using brighter colors and more natural materials and by mimicking traditional domestic environments. These and other design strategies were informed by sociological and psychological knowledge of stereotypical human subjects—the criminal, the human animal and the mental patient—in an effort to use the environment to elicit desired behaviors and soften the exercise of power in the institution just as they softened the forms.

This dissertation examines the work of three architects who received support from government agencies to each study a single institutional program tailored to a specific human subject. Working with criminology professors and the California Division of Juvenile Justice, Sim Van der Ryn and other architects at U.C. Berkeley proposed new designs for correctional facilities to reduce criminal behavior and recidivism. Borrowing the sociological and anthropological idea of “human territoriality,” architect and planner Oscar Newman attempted to reduce crime in public housing using data collected by the New York City Housing Authority. Collaborating with psychiatrists, architect Clyde H. Dorsett formulated codes for a new form of mental institution known as the Community Mental Health Center, from his position within the National Institute of Mental Health. Lastly, the dissertation will address the way that the encounter with the human sciences altered the role of the architect, increasing architects’ skill with representing “latent” social factors of design through diagrams but also limiting their formal jurisdiction.

For architects, collaboration with the human sciences presented the possibility for a more scientific and defensible grounding for theories of architecture regarding the best way to house and heal troublesome populations.

Additionally, using the methods of the human sciences offered legitimacy in the eyes of government agencies in the United States, such as the National Institute of Mental

Health or the New York City Housing Authority. Architects who used data collection, statistical analysis and the graphic presentation of results were able to produce research in a form that such agencies were familiar with, allowing them to engage in government-sponsored research projects.

For institutional architecture, the concept of “human territoriality” had the greatest impact on design, implying a deviant, feral subject of architecture or a human animal.

“Human territoriality” was the idea that human subjects are similar to animal species that have an innate desire to possess and defend a piece of the environment, with violence if necessary. The idea of territoriality in humans was studied by University of Chicago sociologists—such as Gerald Suttles in his work on territoriality in the “slum“—and the idea was popularized by the lyrical accounts of Robert Ardrey, who championed the idea that “the territorial imperative“ was stronger than the sex drive.

The dissertation begins with 1963, a year which marked the passage of the Mental Retardation and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act and the start of Johnson’s Presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Many of the grants for architectural research were provided as part of Johnson’s Great Society, and yet the results were delivered in the early 1970s under a very different, less hopeful regime, where there was less support for urban research. The dissertation thus frames architectural knowledge as a project related to Presidential regime, tracking the relation between research and the philosophy of an administration. The temporal gap in knowledge production, as a project begins and moves through publication and reception, will form an important part of the conclusion of the dissertation. The dissertation will close with 1974, when the majority of the Johnson-era projects had been published, funding for research was reduced, architectural theory was on the rise, and Nixon’s Presidency ended in the Watergate scandal.

(above) Architects worked with psychiatrists at the 1965 Rice Design Fete, combining diagrams, perspective drawing and community psychology into what they hoped would be a new typology for architecture (Vol. II. Architecture for the Community Mental Health Center, Designs from the Rice Design Fete III. Edited by: Coryl LaRue Jones and Clyde H. Dorsett, New York: Mental Health Materials Center, National Institute of Mental Health, 1967. p.29); (right) Bubble diagrams like this one by Kiyoshi Izumi were a visualization and legitimation of architects’ desire to more closely tailor the form to the function of a community mental health center (Vol. II. Architecture for the Community Mental Health Center, 1967. p.35); (below left) Photograph of a patient bedroom at the McAuley Psychiatric Institute for children. Stuffed animals and coloring books allocated to each child are rigidly located within an individualized rectangle of the bed or table, yet they float amidst a quintessential institutional domestic environment (brochure for McAuley Psychiatric Institute, Box A3, Clyde H. Dorsett Papers); (below right) Resident uses new cable television technology for surveillance, part of Oscar Newman’s strategy for “crime prevention through urban design” (Oscar Newman, Defensible Space. Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. New York: Collier Books, 1973.)

137 Ph.d. abs t ract s

Kurkovsky—Diana This dissertation explores the creation of the Soviet urban environment in conjunction with the emergence of cybernetic theory, offering conceptual links between Soviet city planning and cybernetic strategies of governing complex systems.

During the decades of the Cold War, Soviet leaders attempted to reinvigorate the project of building Socialism through an emphasis on technological advancements and scientific modes of organization. These efforts had profound implications for Soviet planning and architecture. An intense interest in systems theory, evidenced by Soviet enthusiasm for the field of cybernetics, was also reflected in a quest to establish the science of housing construction and “city building.”1 The discourse on automation, standardization and optimization of design techniques, building types, and living norms, as well as concurrent developments in atomic research, all point to a fascination with controlling complex, tightly coupled systems.2 By conceptualizing Soviet Union’s expansive Cold War-era housing and city building program in cybernetic terms, my dissertation offers a new paradigm for understanding the Soviet planners’ and architects’ romance with mathematical universals, objective truths, and formulaic design.

From the Soviet point of view, capitalist cities were prone to social and spatial disorder leading to entropy. In an effort to build a non-capitalist city, Soviet planners pursued means of urban containment, spatial homogenization, and environmental control. Drawing on the writings of Marx and Engels that advocated the dissolution of distinction between town and country, Soviet authorities aimed to create an economically and socially homogenous city altogether different from the socially stratified and unpredictable capitalist megalopolis. Early attempts at applying Marxist thought to planning and architecture, however, could not get much beyond notions of communal living as the principal means of achieving a socialist society. The doctrine of Marxism-Leninism offered little practical guidance for building the physical environment appropriate to the new world order. Moreover, Soviets became increasingly aware of their dismal living conditions in their march across Europe during the Second World War. With multiple families crowded inside communal apartments, their every action surveyed and recorded by the other inhabitants, communal ways of living

became associated with Stalinist repressions and terror.

Khrushchev’s promise of internationalism and freedom led to the rejection of the communal aspect of socialist housing.

Launching a massive building campaign, the Soviet leader promised that every family would have its own apartment by 1980. The emphasis on individual apartments brought about new administrative strategies that mirrored cybernetic notions of control. Compartmentalization of housing found an expression in the creation of self-contained residential districts called microregions (mikrorayony), which were embedded within the centrally governed subsystems like city districts (rayony) and cities or towns (goroda). Partial decentralization, achieved through automation of these planning units, allowed greater central control through informational feedback loops. I will argue that using these quintessentially cybernetic methods of directed governance, Soviet administrators hoped to develop a means of controlling social composition, and, by extension, patterns of movement and communication, across the country. 3 Cybernetic governance was not limited to planning and housing construction. Alongside the building campaign initiated by Khrushchev, the Soviet Union witnessed a renewed interest in interior design, consumption, and domesticity, sanctioned by the administration itself. As part of the cultural Thaw, Khrushchev expressed embarrassment over Soviet conditions of domestic labor, and the new Soviet apartments were to become the means of creating modern, rational, and efficient living conditions. Building a new kind of house was discursively linked with building a new way of life. With the emergence of publications on household administration, taste manuals, and guides to contemporary decorating, the Soviet government attempted to link the emergence of the new type of housing with uniquely socialist domestic comforts. The government also launched a campaign against “petit-bourgeois” taste, which was aimed at restructuring all aspects of Soviet life through standardized design, creation of aesthetic norms, and rational household administration.4 Developments in atomic research also promised to further socialist goals in providing a tangible means of fulfilling Lenin’s famous slogan: “Communism equals Soviet

1 Gradostroitel’stvo—a Soviet term used in lieu of urban planning.

3 Paul M. White, Soviet Urban and Regional Planning : A Bibliography with Abstracts (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980) 8-9.

2 My use of this notion is borrowed from Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents : Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

4 For more on this topic, see Viktor Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home,” Journal of Design History 10.2 (1997).

power plus electrification of the whole country.” With the construction of the first civilian nuclear reactor in 1954 on the outskirts of Moscow, directed governance over Soviet space became dependent on controlling another complex system—the network of nuclear reactors that were to power the new society, raising standards of living by creating illuminated, heated, and clean homes. Scientific methods of city building, housing construction, interior decoration and household administration became reliant on domesticating nuclear power through the cybernetic strategies of automation, optimization, and self-regulation.

By using the cybernetic framework for tracing the persistence, transformation, and the eventual demise of the Soviet project of spatial control, my dissertation seeks to offer a new perspective on the conceptualization, construction, and mechanisms of socialist space.

kurkovsky—Diana

Cybersovietica: Cybernetics, City Building, and Systems of Soviet Living, 1954–1986

139 Ph.d. abs t ract s

LOPEZ-PEREZ—Daniel

Lopez-Perez—Daniel

Skyscraperology and the Double Exposure of the Tall Building in Theory and Practice in the 1970s The history of the skyscraper has throughout time captured the imagination of historians and architects alike. The more that is written about this subject in search of clarification, the more elusive and contradictory it becomes. Intending to shed some light on this subject during the 1970s, a number of European and American architectural journals were published entirely devoted to the skyscraper. Across their pages, its image curiously appeared in a state of double exposure, one where contemporary projects were published side by side with texts and images from the past. Remarkably there was almost no cross over between these two forms of production, contemporary practice and historiographical writings. This dissertation explores the parallel innovations in architectural practice and theory that centered on the skyscraper during the 1970s. It focuses on the relationship between technical and aesthetic innovations on the one side, and the theoretical and historiographical writings on the other, paying close attention to the rare moments where they both cross.

By the 1970s, the typology of the skyscraper had experienced a dramatic process of transformation. The isotropic model that had once been made ubiquitous by the International Style had now been transformed into a number of alternatives. Four alternative models emerged from the pluralism that characterized the production of the time. The first resulted from a structural paradigm shift in the change of the building’s load bearing surfaces from an interior frame to the perimeter. This gave way to an isomorphism between the building’s structural performance and its formal expression. The second alternative resulted from a phenomenological paradigm shift where a highly simplified crystalline figuration gave way to the production of reflective effects. Through reflection, the building’s expression and its environment appeared to be one and the same. The third alternative resulted from an iconographical paradigm shift through a break in the organicism that had existed between the building’s envelope and its interior. The wrapping of the exterior envelope of the building with a historicist and monumental expression that was autonomous from its interior, reanimated the debates surrounding historical styles characteristic of the turn of the century. The fourth alternative resulted from a programmatic paradigm shift where a mixuse formula brought urban exteriors deep into the interior of the building. This dissertation proposes to follow an analytical framework that is divided into four sections where each of these shifts can be examined through the analysis of a number of projects in parallel to the theoretical and historiographical discourse that is published alongside them.

The first section of the dissertation analyzes the ‘structural’ skyscrapers that resulted from the shift of the load bearing

frame into a differentiated surface in the form of a tube. At the forefront of this change was the research and projects developed by Myron Goldsmith and Fazlur Khan, both at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the practice of Skidmore Owings and Merrill based in Chicago. In their research, the separation between a load-bearing frame and the curtainwall was deemed obsolete, and replaced by a single system that questioned the curtain-wall as the logical expression for the skyscraper. Their projects resulted in vast open plan interiors and the possibility of a differentiated structural grid for the building’s surface. In parallel and featuring the projects of Goldsmith and Khan, a series of symposiums and exhibitions took place throughout the decade where historians and scholars wrote extensively about the history of the Chicago School and in particular, its contribution to the history of the skyscraper.

This section of the dissertation will analyze a number of thesis projects directed by Goldsmith and Khan at IIT in parallel to the writings of the American historian Carl W. Condit both part of the exhibition ‘100 Years of Architecture in Chicago’ in 1976.

The second section of the dissertation analyzes the ‘crystalline’ skyscrapers that resulted from the apparent disappearance of the curtain wall as part of the shift towards an all glass volume. As an antithesis of the deep corrugated building envelopes of the Miesian Chicago School, these all glass towers reduced the depth of the mullions to a minimum in search for the most continuous mirrored surface. The affect was one of a paradoxical dematerialized presence achieved through reflection and refraction. On the one hand, these projects were highly figural experiments that crystallized the building’s form through a refined process of abstraction. On the other, these projects negated their figuration in search of spectacular atmospheric effects brought about by the reflective and refractive gestalt qualities of their surface.

The Italian historian Francesco DalCo assembled an issue of the journal Casabella entirely devoted to these crystalline skyscrapers. These projects were described as having freed themselves from their own simplified figuration, fluctuating between appearance and disappearance. Questions surrounding the socio-political and cultural implications of this process of transgression launched a discourse that explored their simultaneous presence and disappearance.

This section of the dissertation will analyze Henry Cobb’s John Hancock Tower in Boston and Phillip Johnson’s IDS Center in Minneapolis and the Pennzoil Building in Houston in parallel to the historiographical texts that are assembled

around them and their relationship to minimalist art practices described as part of their basis.

The third section of the dissertation analyzes the ‘iconographical’ skyscrapers that resulted from the shift towards a historicist image for the exterior of the skyscraper in the form of a monument/tombstone. Characteristic of the work of a maverick and infant-terrible, Phillip Johnson’s AT&T Building in New York was described as the death of his own International Style and the birth of a post-modern pluralism.

The defiant subtitle underlining his picture in the cover of Time magazine, holding a model of the AT&T Building: ‘US Architects Doing Their Own Thing’ crystallizes this process of life and death. The English journal Architectural Review published the AT&T Building on its cover in an issue titled ‘Uses and Abuses of History’. Inside, the English architectural historian Reyner Banham described the building as the result of a history `so intensely regional as to be almost parochial, an insider’s Manhattan one-line jest’. Banham went as far as to argue that in fact this building was more contextual than many of the modern prisms that shaped the New York skyline. Its tripartite order once again opened the possibility for the top and base of the skyscraper to be open to ‘reinterpretation’, or rather freed by pluralism.

This section of the dissertation will examine the AT&T tower as part of the skyline of New York in the context

of the discourse surrounding its pluralistic iconography as embodying a paradoxical state of contextualism and expressive freedom.

The fourth and final section of the dissertation analyzes the skyscrapers ‘without an exterior’ that resulted from the shift towards an all interior mix-use formula characteristic of the projects of John Portman. In these, an urban exterior under surveillance is brought deep into the interior of the building seamlessly. The literary critic Fredric Jameson chose the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, as a ‘fullblown post-modern building’. He described the reversal and transformation of the figure ground of the tower and the city as: ‘a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city... a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd... [one that] does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent’.

This section of the dissertation will examine the sociopolitical and cultural discourse surrounding Portman’s hotel projects, particularly the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, in parallel to its contemporary counterpart, located on the same site, the ‘Sphinx Hotel’ by Rem Koolhaas and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture.

141

Barcelona, 1974. One year before the death of the Spanish dictator Franco, a group of intellectuals, most of them architects and with a past of political resistance, started an independent “little magazine” entitled Arqvitectvras Bis. The main protagonist of Arqvitectvras Bis was the architect, educator and writer Oriol Bohigas. Its editorial board included also some of the most prominent Spanish designers and educators, such as Rafael Moneo, Helio Piñón, or Manuel de Solà-Morales, as well as the philosopher Tomas Llorens, at the time exiled in England.

When the magazine ceased publication, in 1985, some of its editors had become pivotal agents of a radical process of preservation, renewal and transformation of the city of Barcelona that would culminate in the 1992 Olympic games. This dissertation argues that Arqvitectvras Bis was the intellectual forum that engendered and nourished this transformation. Thus one could argue that Arqvitectvras Bis went from publication to public action.

Arqvitectvras Bis negotiated the Catalan theoretical consensus on strategies of urban renewal and promoted the historical interest on the city that informed those strategies. It also bridged the academia and the public realm and showcased architectonic models as possible materials for the transformation of the city, delivering them to public scrutiny. The strategy of public address enacted by the magazine was instrumental in focusing attention and providing the interpretative models that enabled the successful reception of Barcelona’s urban transformation.

Thus, Arqvitectvras Bis, both in itself and through the analyses of its reception, is a privileged object to explore the intellectual history of what may be judged as the most successful urban renewal of the last 30 years.

MORENO—Joaquim

From a Little Magazine to the City: Arqvitectvras Bis (1974–85)

Ph.d. abs t ract s

Moreno—Joaquim

143

The aim of my dissertation project is to explore the transformation of the relationship between the body and architecture during the twentieth century and to identify the models of the sexual and gendered body operating as background for modern and contemporary architectural discourses and practices. Using a genealogical methodology, I try to locate the moments of rupture between what I call a model of the body as construction and a model of body (and building) as prosthesis. Second, and conversely, I investigate the use of architectural rhetoric in 20th-century “constructivist” theories of gender and sexuality.

During the second half of the twentieth century, feminist and cultural theorists borrowed from architectural discourse the language of “construction” to denaturalize sexual identity. Arguing that sexual and gender differences are “ornamental” rather than “structural,” “discursive” rather than “material,” “performative” rather than “essential,” different authors from Mary MacIntosh to Michel Foucault or Judith Butler, have concluded that sexual and gender identities are “constructed” rather than natural. In its more sophisticated form, queer theories seem to evaluate all representations of sexual difference on the basis of whether they reveal or conceal their constructedness. In Teresa de Lauretis’ recent work on “technologies of gender,” and Donna Haraway’s definition of gender as a “high-biotechnological system,” sexual difference appears as the result of a process of construction, as the product of a “complex architecture.” Nevertheless this high moment of constructivism has provoked several paradoxical results that Eve K. Sedgwick has identified as “reflexive antibiologicism.”

In order to stress the artificiality of gender, constructivism in its “performative turn” has been forced to renounce the materiality of the body, defining construction as pure discursive effect. Somehow the “disciplinary joining” of feminism and architecture, the borrowing of the language of “construction” to de-essentialize sexual difference has produced, as an unexpected secondary effect, the dematerialization of the sexual body.

In other words, while drawing on architecture to denaturalize gender, feminist and gender theories seem to ignore, first that the discipline of architecture itself is built around the political and discursive tensions between notions of artificiality and naturalness, between structure and ornament, exterior and interior, etc. And second and more relevantly, these tensions have been historically coded in architecture in terms of sexual and gender difference: for instance, ornament is to femininity what structure is to masculinity, whereas interiority is to

femininity what exteriority is to masculinity, to name just two seemingly inconsistent “couplings” within a single economy of sexual construction.

In fact, a rhetorical, political and institutional transfer between architecture and sexual theories had started long before the crystallization of gender constructivism during the twentieth century. This dissertation tries to explore what I would call a “smuggling zone” between the modern and contemporary discourses on architecture and those on sex and gender using the notions of “construction” and “prosthesis” as heuristic models. To study this disciplinary crossing, I rely on a double strategy. On the one hand, this dissertation tracks the language of construction and architecture within modern biological, medical, and psychological discourses on sexual difference up to contemporary feminist and queer discourses on “gender constructivism.” On the other hand, and thus creating an overlapping zone, I intend to identify the “gender matrixes” imbedded within different architectural rhetorics of construction, from Siegfried Giedion to Archigram. This exploration has lead me to produce a genealogy (meaning a history made of ruptures rather than of continuities) of prosthetic embodiment from modern architecture to contemporary gender performances and sexual technologies. I intend to use the model of the prosthetic embodiment to investigate the relationship between the body and architecture, and I propose a material theory of gender as prosthetic incorporation.

Putting forward a theory of gender as prosthesis I try not only to break the impasse generated by the question of the “construction” of the body within gender theories, but also to create a possible area of research for architectural practices. What would be the consequences of understanding domesticity and institutional spaces as gender prostheses? What are the implications of thinking architecture as a technology of gender? The prosthesis as a bio-political apparatus of intervention of the body and in space appears as a possible framework to rethink the questions of inhabitation, accessibility, representation, and disability, and, at a larger scale, enables one to draw a cartography of the architectural production and reproduction of the “natural body” in a post-industrial world.

Finally, this research project attempts to be a critical evaluation of the productive contraband between philosophy, architecture and gender theories. In that sense, this dissertation itself is more a prosthetic operation across disciplines than a disciplinary thesis.

Preciado—Beatriz

Posthetic Architecture: Building the Sexual Body

Ph.d. abs t ract s

Preciado—Beatriz

145 Ph.d. abs t ract s

Segal—Rafael

SEGAL—Rafael

A Unitary Approach To Architecture—Alfred Neumann and the ‘Humanization of Space’ This dissertation examines and analyzes the architectural work of Alfred Neumann built in Israel between 1959 and 1967. Alfred Neumann (1900–1968), a Czech architect who studied and worked in Vienna and Paris during the 1920s–30s, immigrated to Israel in 1949, where he later became Professor and Dean of the Architecture and Town Planning Faculty at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. In 1959 he established an architecture practice with his former students Zvi Hecker and Eldar Sharon which produced one of the most original bodies of work of the mid 1960s. Neumann’s buildings and designs gained extensive international recognition through publications in leading periodicals of the time such as: l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Domus, Architectural Design, Architectural Review, Zodiac, Arts and Architecture, and others, yet to date no research has been undertaken on his work.

Neumann’s approach to architecture occurred as a critique of Israel’s overarching acceptance of International Style Architecture and within the broader international scene, where it can be seen to reflect a paradigm shift from the notion of ‘building as object’ to ‘building as pattern’. His buildings explored the possibility of addressing issues of human scale, sensitivity to light, climate, landscape features, and other human and environmental considerations, without compromising the search for new forms and expressions.

This dissertation sets up an analytical framework through which Alfred Neumann’s work can be theorized and discussed in relation to parallel tendencies and approaches in 1950s–1960s architecture. A close reading of Neumann’s buildings and designs deduces a set of principles that guides the process of generating built form and its adaptation to particular conditions of site. These principles are described in three sections which discuss the intrinsic qualities of the work and its influence and place within both the Israeli and international context.

The first section defines Alfred Neumann’s understanding and use of the unit as a primary element of architectural space. Using post-WWII theories of proportion as a point of departure, it describes a process originating with “units of measure” that leads to one concerned with “units of space”—as volumetric, cellular, aggregate-like components that form the building as a whole. Post WW2 discourse on proportion, in which Neumann also takes part through his own proportion theory—The EM-PHI system, The Humanization of Space (1956), is read as attempting to ‘humanize’ architecture through re-defining its elementary unit of assembly.

The second section will discuss 1960s ideas of patternmaking in architecture as generative of built form—an approach that sought to break away from the notion of the isolated architectural object and aimed at a more substantial intervention in the existing urban fabric. Here I examine the conceptual thinking behind the ‘building as pattern’ approach that developed in the 1960s by members of Team 10, Dutch Forum group, Metabolism group, and others. Alfred Neumann’s statement that “architecture is a creation of patterns” is exemplary of this approach yet offers a different interpretation of the relation between pattern and object, part to whole, and the transformation from two dimensional area covering schemes to spatial ‘packing’ systems.

The last section discusses the influence of particular conditions of site (topography, light and climate, building technologies and materials) on Neumann’s work, its place within the social-political context of 1950s–60s Israel, and its relation to broader questions of regionalism instigated by figures such as S. Giedion, J. Stirling, and Candilis-JosicWoods. Neumann’s attempt to enable rigorous geometric structures to respond to particular climatic conditions and regional traditions, while drawing reference and inspiration from Islamic and Ottoman architecture, offered an alternative account of modern architecture to the emerging Israeli State.

This project concludes that Alfred Neumann’s work represents a unitary approach to architecture; both tectonically—through a design strategy that composes the whole from the assembly of certain repetitive spatial units, and conceptually—as another stage in the morphological-historical development of architecture, and in its potential to unify different types and scales of buildings under one system.

Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, 1963–66 (A. Neumann, Z. Hecker)

Dubiner Apartment Building, Ramat-Gan, Israel 1961–65 (A. Neumann, Z. Hecker, E. Sharon)

147 Ph.d. abs t ract s

STEVENS—Sara

STEVENS—Sara

Developing Expertise: Architecture, Construction, and Real Estate in the United States, 1908–1940 Progress demands expertise. Even the most idealistic goals of Progressive era politics relied upon an apparatus of knowledge-for-hire that developed in the private sector.

During the first half of the twentieth century, American architects, financiers, construction managers, and real estate moguls adopted and deployed a new kind of expertise that resulted in a qualitatively different set of professional practices while also influencing urban form.

This project argues that these technicians of city growth were agents in an organization of collective capital that invented new processes and forms of urban expansion.

Such operations established a set of relationships between architecture, the market, profit, and expertise.

As practices became more organized, more technically and politically adept, and more responsive to economic and consumer markets, new patterns of development appeared in the landscape: enhanced legal controls over land use, projects of larger scale, fewer street grids and more cul-de-sacs. These patterns developed not only from technical innovations or political expediencies, but with the professional organizations and force of personality that inevitably accompany expertise. This dissertation studies the development of expertise in the real estate and building industries and the urban forms that this expertise generated. I argue that increased expertise resulted in more highly controlled and homogenized landscapes while nevertheless opening the door to a new scale of intensity in development. In short, greater expertise produced the ‘progress’ manifest in the American built environment.

The dissertation studies the period from 1908 to the 1940s; that is, from before the real estate industry created a national organization to after the founding of a non-profit, advice-giving organization, the Urban Land Institute. Before the city planning and real estate conferences held in 1908 and 1909, neither profession had established a nationwide organization or platform for their still-loosely-defined fields. Real estate developers were little more than flyby-night operators, and city planners were only beginning to establish their role in municipal administrations. Both groups aggregated individuals from a variety of fields—from civic reformers to profiteering brokers to landscape architects—and these two conferences launched efforts to normalize and regulate practices in the quest for reputable professional status. In so doing, these professional associations hoped to bestow the acronyms of expertise on their members.

Deliberations continued in the 1910s and 1920s as city planning ascended in municipal administrations and private developers such as J.C. Nichols (Kansas City),

A.W. Ross (Los Angeles), and Walter Schmidt (Cincinnati) joined efforts in aggressively pursuing zoning regulations.

Construction companies like the Turner Company in New York expanded in size and began gaining the technical and administrative knowledge to turn out larger projects.

Real estate became a valid field of study, as urban land economics ascended with the work of Richard T. Ely and Homer Hoyt. With the real estate boom of the 1920s, the industry began to self-regulate through national organizations and real estate licensing. Subsequently, through the 1930s, New Deal legislation instigated a higher level of federal involvement in development projects, raising questions about public and private sector relationships.

Public and private organizations, like the National Planning Board and the National Bureau of Economic Research, churned out reports on real estate, underscoring the industry’s perceived importance in the national economy.

In 1940, the major organization for real estate developers spun off the Urban Land Institute as an independent nonprofit organization providing expert advice to the industry.

This signifies a pivotal intersection between the history of expertise and the history of urban form, marking the moment when real estate developers attained the status of experts. These years cover changes in public policy and professionalization for developers and planners that align with shifts in the nature of development projects—larger sites, faster schedules, construction that was technically more complicated, planning that was legally more complicated, and site planning that exacerbated isolation within the urban fabric.

In this project, the question of the relation of architecture and capital will revolve around the articulation of agency as gauged in the production of urban form. Studying particular characters and their professional associations in tandem with real estate development projects will uncover the various modes of expertise that reigned over postwar development. This dissertation will situate industry practices, tracked against their spatial consequences, in a larger framework of capital. The connection this project will make between architecture and real estate development will inform our discipline’s understanding of the processes of urban growth, leading to a more nuanced understanding of how expertise turns a plot of land into profit.

(from top) Developer A.W. Ross created the retail spine of Wilshire Boulevard, altering the urban fabric through zoning controls.

From Richard Longstreth’s Center City to Miracle Mile, p. 135.

The Urban Land Institute published technical bulletins that highlighted the “invisible” infrastructure under the purview of the real estate developer. From the Urban Land Institute Technical Bulletin #13.

149

This dissertation investigates Fuller’s largely unexplored experiences, inspirations, and theorizations during his formative years from 1915 to 1938—a period demarcated at the start by his final expulsion from Harvard University and immediate engagement by Armour & Company, at the median by his conceptualization of an “Universal Architecture” and completion of the manuscript titled 4D, and at the end by his meeting with Albert Einstein and the subsequent publication of his first “synergetically”-founded theoretical treatise titled Nine Chains to the Moon.

The impetus for this investigation derives from Fuller’s still-singular traversal of disciplinary divides for both metaphoric and literal inspiration in the course of conceiving an architecture nominally commensurate with the totality of human achievement, i.e.—his efforts to inscribe into architecture such wide-ranging disciplines as mathematics, physics, painting, sculpture, music, psychology, business administration, construction management, and industrial production. Specifically, this work details Fuller’s as yet unexamined professional experiences with Armour & Company, his service in the US Navy, and tenure as president and chief engineer of the Stockade Building Company; explains Fuller’s unique repurposing of Einstein’s theories of Relativity and Hubble’s discovery of the “exploding universe,” and explores his largely unexplored attempts to combine Ouspensky’s speculations on the Tertium Organum with, among other incongruities, Babson’s market and marketing analysis. This dissertation thus accounts for Fuller’s interpretation and application to architecture of such contrasting notions as the effective “weight of light” with the optimization of architectural performance, the “scientific application of time-space principles and harmonies into modern building construction” and geometries of the “uni-dimensional” sphere, and the “globular, radiating form” underlying various polyhedrons that Fuller promoted as alternatives to architecture’s “fallacious plane and cubical geometry.” For instance, Fuller incorporated virtually every article in the April, 1928 Scientific American into his manuscript for 4D such that the novelties of the proclaimed “modern home” as related by this issue, e.g.—“photo-radio transmission,” “neon light,” “sleeping cars,” and “ear and eye music”, later found their way into his Dymaxion House of 1929.

More generally, this dissertation delineates Fuller’s reading of diverse sources and attempts to insert himself into the prevailing architectural discourse led him to formulate the two contrasting agendas: the public and theoretical versus the private and practical. Publicly, Fuller sought to combine his own experiences and inspirations with developments in science, art, and industry to realize tangible benefits for all humanity. He therefore designated the quantity production of quality housing, or industrialization of housing, as the most urgent crisis to result from the prevailing economic recession. Privately, Fuller attempted to participate in the construction boom. That is, he presented himself as an expert on the building industry, and advocated its wholesale adoption of new materials, manufacturing techniques, and construction methods after the fashion of Henry Ford’s development of the automobile assembly line. It is this very attempt to pursue both agendas that led Fuller to, most famously, re-theorize architecture as, initially, “Universal Architecture,” and then more ambitiously as “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science.”

SU—Michael Wen-Sen

The Architecture of Synergy: R. Buckminster Fuller’s Theorization of a “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” (1915–1938)

Ph.d. abs t ract s

SU—Michael Wen-Sen

151

As chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London in the early 1970s, the Canadian-born architectural educator Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990) implemented what he believed to be the ideal model for a school of architecture: that of a “well-laid table” at which students could sample from a constantly updated international menu of divergent theoretical positions. In the wake of the institutional upheavals of the late 1960s, from the dissolution of the Beaux-Arts system in France following the events of May 1968 to student protests for curriculum reform at American schools of architecture, the convivial promise of Boyarsky’s pluralist, participatory, and anti-curriculum model offered a radical departure from the professional training of modernist programs, as well as from the specialized trajectories of newly reformed curricula. Under Boyarsky’s direction, throughout the 1970s the AA’s institutional platform operated as a nexus for the experiments of an international network of architects, historians and theorists—including Peter Cook, Robin Evans, Zaha Hadid, Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier, Daniel Libeskind, Robin Middleton and Bernard Tschumi, among many others—yielding a significant output of teaching methodologies, in addition to books, magazines, videos, exhibitions and conferences, which catalyzed a series of discourses and practices throughout the decade.

Though widely recognized for his chairmanship at the AA, which lasted between 1971 and 1990, Boyarsky and his achievements at the AA have been neglected by existing scholarship. Tracing the development of his pedagogical theories through the 1960s and 1970s, this dissertation investigates Boyarsky’s experiment at the AA within the broader spectrum of his field of production. Operating on a Chicago-London axis (with requisite stopovers in New York) during this period, the peripatetic Boyarsky was situated at a transcontinental crossroads of a series of architectural debates and practices, and in this way his work and his encounters with an ever-increasing network of contacts will provide a multifaceted perspective on this moment of critical shifts in the discipline: critiques of modernism and its myths, the theoretical proposals of the architectural avant-garde, a developing discourse on postmodernism, and the radical questioning of extant systems of architectural education. Through an examination of Boyarsky’s oeuvre— which in addition to pedagogy includes media experiments, urban analyses, criticism, and collecting—the dissertation aims to complicate both his contribution to architectural education and the broader significance of educational reform during the 1960s and 1970s, a moment when, I argue, pedagogy became a primary agent in avant-garde architectural production.

SUNWOO—Irene

Alvin Boyarsky’s Well-Laid Table: Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy

Ph.d. abs t ract s

SUNWOO—Irene

153

In August of 1972, central Paris was covered in dust.

Architect Victor Baltard’s storied nineteenth century food market pavilions at Les Halles were being demolished, to be slowly replaced by a regional transit hub, a shopping mall, and the arts complex at the Centre Pompidou. Cultural critics seized on the symbolic nature of this trade: the image and spectacle of the capitalist hypermarket would replace the convivial, artisanal culture of the wholesale food market; Parisian urbanism would be forever transformed.

For Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Frederic Jameson, the demolition of the market pavilions at Les Halles marked the end of architecture’s pursuit of ideal forms for sustaining human life, and the beginning of a postmodern period of the increasing separation of urbanism and architecture from bodily need.

This account of postmodern urbanism, however, is misleading. Since the eighteenth century, Les Halles had been continuously renovated, and it was always a site for testing new forms of social and architectural modernism.

And in spite of the real rise of dematerialized labor and disembodied spectacle decried by twentieth century social and architectural critics, residents of the late twentieth century “society of the spectacle” still had bodies: they needed places to live, food to eat, design for the systems of the maintenance of life. My dissertation seeks to generate a and more nuanced account of the “postmodern shift” by examining the ways that the French government, as well as architects and artists working in France in the 1960s and 1970s, did remain engaged with developing architectural forms and programs for sustaining life. Taking this architectural and urban engagement with the alimentary maintenance of life as its subject, the dissertation follows food and its architectural enclosures from Les Halles, to the National Interest Market of Rungis, the enormous suburban wholesale market that replaced Les Halles in March of 1969, tracing the ways that food, architecture, and political economy became intertwined in this period.

Rungis Market, along with Orly Airport and the Paris Beltway, was one of the most significant pieces of Parisian infrastructure realized during the 1960s. Funded by a public-private partnership, in concert with other suburban developments, such as the villes nouvelles and the cités, Rungis was designed to feed a newly decolonized and de-industrialized Paris, reducing high food prices by modernizing the infrastructure of food distribution. Unusually, two architects, the Beaux-Arts trained Henri Colboc and Georges Phillippe, were charged with overseeing its design and construction. Colboc and Phillippe were highly invested in figuring out how to

arrange and embellish space in order to fill the bellies of the Parisian populace. They translated the State’s goal of reducing French food prices into built space by improving truck routes, installing hi-tech informational tracking systems, and rethinking suburban space, and in so doing, generated an ideal model of the balance between public infrastructure and private cooperation in the French marketplace. Colboc and Phillipe’s deployment of informational and spatial technologies to reorganize commerce and everyday life has been highly influential, and today is duplicated worldwide in hypermarkets and distribution centers from Carrefour to Walmart.

The decision to move Les Halles’ to the suburbs produced a very different response from the architectural and artistic avant-garde. For not only Debord, Baudrillad and Lefebvre, but also a whole cadre of architects, artists, urbanists and filmmakers interested in critiquing or producing alternatives to the technocratic urbanism of the 1960s and 70s, representing Les Halles became a means to comment on the place of the body within the “society of the spectacle”.

Images of Les Halles, Rungis, and food made regular appearances in architectural magazines and pamphlets of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Yona Friedman, Jean Nouvel, and the Utopie group produced significant alternative plans for the area. Gordon Matta-Clark’s project for the 1976 Paris Biennale, Conical Intersect, theorized a new relationship between vision, food, and urbanism, while the photographer Marc Petitjean and the curator François Barré’s installations in the Halles neighborhood illuminated the urban and biopolitical stakes of Paris’ regional transformations.

Examining the design of Rungis Market in concert with works of criticism, art and architecture that took the alimentary economy of Paris as a subject, my dissertation will provide a more complete account of how architecture, food, and biopolitics are intertwined in French architecture.

This dual approach enables a detailed analysis of how urban change impacts the forms and social capacities of both art and architecture in postwar France, as well as a historical foreshadowing of how the linkages between Les Halles and Rungis might bear on presently-troubling relationships between Paris and its periphery.

TenHoor—Meredith

The Belly of the Suburbs: Architecture, Food and Biopolitics from Les Halles to Rungis

Ph.d. abs t ract s

TenHoor—Meredith

155 Ph.d. abs t ract s

Verbakel—Els From the Treaty of Rome (1957) to the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), the European city transformed significantly under the influence of geo-political changes, economic expansion and socio-cultural shifts. In this period, architects, urbanists and policy makers conceived and implemented a series of competitions for transnational urban projects at strategic locations in Europe—such as Strasbourg, Geneva and Luxembourg—which profoundly influenced the reality and imagination of a borderless European urbanism. The competitions produced a distinct discourse on the relationship between architecture and territory in a globalizing world and formed a distinct set of ideas within postwar urban practices and theories looking at the future of the European city. This early discourse on transnationalism from the architectural point of view served as an important vehicle for the postwar project of European integration.

The formation of transnational urban projects at discrete moments in time challenged existing modes of nationbased place-making. At these moments, spatially overlapping identities reached a point of conflict between regional coherences, national territories and transnational aspirations. They produced a distinct set of urbanisms and architectures that represented hopes, desires and utopias but also conflicting territorial realities.

This dissertation will study the discourse produced by a series of competitions for transnational districts in European cities in the context of the global city in the postwar period. The study will use materials from case studies of competitions for the European Zone in Strasbourg, France, the European District in Luxembourg city, the International District in Geneva, Switzerland and others. Each competition will be treated as a distinct genealogy in which the architects and urbanists involved, as well as formats employed will be explored. The dissertation will structure the debates and practices produced by these competitions chronologically in order to ‘distill’ three significant moments in the formation of a transnational urban model.

A first set of competitions occurs during the end of the fifties and first half of the sixties, including the 1957 competition for the Place des Nations in Geneva, the 1958 competition for the Capital of Europe, and the 1964 competition for the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

In the search for a European peace after the Second World War, architectural visions emerged that promised to provide a no-man’s land of international cooperation.

Large architectural interventions proposed singular, monumental buildings and structures promoting a vision

of political solidarity transcending nations and reconnecting regions. As cities kept growing, the city-region thus formed a renewed concern as the ‘rival’ of existing political boundaries.

From the end of the sixties to the beginning of the seventies, the autonomy of the earlier transnational projects was replaced by a new functionalism of urban ensembles that aimed at serving developmental practices of economic expansion. New urban districts were added as satellites to existing cities such as Paris and London. The four functions of the city: dwelling, working, leisure and traffic, proposed

by CIAM’s Charter of Athens in 1933 to de-densify the industrial city were subdivided in zones and redistributed over the city-region. As a reaction, the architectural debate put forward the multifunctional urban zone, inspired by national infrastructure initiatives of economic expansion, as a planning device for the transnational district.

During mid-eighties and nineties, influential international agreements encouraged a new-fangled search for transnational urban visions, this time not as a promise but as a witness of European integration. Postmodernist architectural discourse had widened the gap between architecture and urbanism, reinforced by the disappointment with large brutalist projects of earlier decades. Competitions such as the transnational district for Strasbourg-Kehl in 1991 and the second competition for the Place des Nations in Geneva in 1995 renewed the architectural aspiration for reinforcing the identity of a European or even global urbanity. In the context of unstructured and dispersed cross-border urbanization, transnational architectural and urban visions promised to generate anchors for further borderless European urbanization.

The dissertation will examine the discourse produced by these competitions and their contribution to larger debates in architecture and urbanism of the postwar era. The study will have a closer look at the way transnational urban projects related to the evolution of postwar urban theory in the general context of architectural and urban discourse such as the debates on brutalism, megastructures and metabolism but also pattern thinking and concerns with future city growth such as the megalopolis and the citta diffusa. Moreover, the competition as a distinct point of convergence between a wide range of agencies from policy makers to architects, will provide additional insights in the production of architectural discourse.

Verbakel—Els

Cities Across Nations. Postwar Competitions for the Transnational Urban Project in Europe

_ e ur t c e t i h c r A f o l oo h c S y t i s r e v i n U n o t e c n i r

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