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Princeton University School of Architecture Workbook— 15/16
1 CONTENTS
Workbook— 15/16 2
Dean’s Statement
5
Masters Degree Program
32
Arc 501/Michael Meredith—Fall 2014
7
M.Arch Thesis Projects
36
Arc 503/Paul Lewis—Fall 2014
8
Sonia Flamberg, Spring 2015
40
Arc 505a/Liam Young—Fall 2014
14
Gina Morrow, Spring 2015
44
Arc 505b/Stan Allen—Fall 2014
20
Daniel Tappe, Spring 2015
48
Arc 505c/Liz Diller—Fall 2014
26
Hans Tursak, Spring 2015
52
Arc 502/Guy Nordenson—Spring 2015
56
Arc 504/Jesse Reiser—Spring 2015
M.Arch Studios
60
Arc 506a/Alejandro Zaera-Polo—Spring 2015
64
Arc 506b/Andrés Jaque—Spring 2015
69
Undergraduate Program
70
Arc 404/Mario Gandelsonas—Fall 2014
78
Ben Denzer, Senior Thesis Spring 2015
80
Dalma Földesi, Senior Thesis Spring 2015
82
Mariya Rusak, Senior Thesis Spring 2015
84
Misha Semenov, Senior Thesis Spring 2015
87
Ph.D. Program
114 Daniela Fabricius
93
Collaborative Research Projects
116 Ignacio Gonzalez Galan
94
Modern Historiography:
118 Urtzi Grau
Latin American Architecture
120 Vanessa Grossman
96
RADICAL PEDAGOGY©
122 Margo Handwerker
98
Playboy & Architecture: 1953–1979
124 Evangelos Kotsioris 126 Anna-Maria Meister
Dissertation Abstracts
128 Matthew Mullane
100 Cristóbal Amunátegui
130 Yetunde Olaiya
102 José Aragüez
132 Masha Panteleyeva
104 Luis Avilés
134 Clelia Pozzi
106 Joseph Bedford
136 Daria Ricchi
108 Marc Britz
138 Michael Su
110 Esther Choi
140 Meredith TenHoor
112 Britt Eversole
142 Federica Vannucchi
Workbook—15/16
This workbook offers a portrait of the Princeton University School of Architecture, through the work produced by our students during the academic year 2014–2015. Although one of the smallest in the U.S., the school includes all the stages of architectural education: an undergraduate program with a heavy emphasis in the liberal arts, an accredited professional graduate program as well as a postprofessional program, and a rigorous doctoral program. All these programs benefit from the fact that the school exists in the context of Princeton University, a framework that provides the highest level of excellence in the discovery, production and transmission of knowledge in the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences. The three programs not only share the space of the school; they are also engaged in an internal network of exchanges where students interact, bridging the different programs as teaching assistants, providing a unique armature of communicating vessels that connects all programs. Ph.D. students are teaching assistants for the master program students and the master students are
3 D E A N ’ S S TAT E M E N T
teaching assistants for the undergraduates. Through the years, this particular functioning has prepared those students who plan to become teachers beside their engagement with the practice, another distinctive feature of the Princeton alumni. The school prepares the students to confront an unpredictable future, a constantly changing world of practice, new emerging forms of urbanity, environmental challenges and the multiple effects of globalization by offering the most advanced and rigorous technology courses that promote experimentation and, fundamentally, a history and theory curriculum that has always been distinctive of the Princeton University School of Architecture. The work of the students reflects the rich culture of the school and the strong interdisciplinary ties that link it to other departments in an academic environment that encourages a continuing and fertile dialogue within the University. Mario Gandelsonas Acting Dean of the School of Architecture
5
D I R E CTO R O F G RAD UATE STU D I E S, M. AR C H. P R O G RAM S
Paul Lewis DEGREES
Professional Master's Degree
Post-Professional Master’s Degree
The Master of Architecture degree (M.Arch.), accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB ), is intended for students who plan to practice architecture professionally. It qualifies them to take the state professional licensing examination after completing the required internship. Refer to the NAAB statement at the end of this flyer for more information.
A post-professional M.Arch. degree is available to those who hold the degree of Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch.) or its equivalent from an international institution. These are students who have successfully completed a professional program in architecture and have fulfilled the educational requirements for professional licensing in the state or country in which the degree was granted. Students typically complete this program in two years. This degree is not accredited by the NAAB .
P R O G RAM S O F STU DY
The master’s degree program is structured around a rigorous sequence of design studios. Studio work is complemented by courses in technology, history, theory, and analysis and representation. Each student constructs an individual program of study to meet course and distribution requirements. Students are also eligible to take elective courses in the School and in other departments of the University. 3-Year Professional Program
Post-Professional Program
Students in the professional M.Arch. program must take a minimum of 24 courses, typically four per term, including one design studio each term and the independent design thesis in the final term. The studio sequence, required technology and professional practice courses, and basic courses in history/theory and urbanism constitute a core that represents the basic knowledge of the discipline. In addition to these required courses, each student must complete distribution requirements within the areas of history and theory, and building technology.
The post-professional program curriculum has recently been updated and changed to a two year program. Students entering in Fall 2014 and later will be required to take a minimum of 16 courses from the areas of design studio, history and theory, building technology, and elective courses that can be taken throughout the University with the approval of the Director of Graduate Studies.
M. ARCH THESIS
Master’s Degree Programs
7
FALL 2014 TH E S I S D I R E CTO R
S P R I N G 2015 TH E S I S D I R E CTO R
Liz Diller
Michael Meredith AS S I STANT
Federica Vannucchi 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 2014
Ruiqing Li, Autonomous Driving Urbanism Faculty Advisor: Stan Allen Zigeng Wang, A Beautiful Country— A Fairy Tale of the Landscape of ‘Globalization’ Faculty Advisor: Christine Boyer
Maggie Qianru Hua, Living in Flows—VHO: A Network of Urban Nomads in Hong Kong 2030 Faculty Advisor: Liz Diller Jaime (Ting Yan) Kwan, S.O.S. (Systems Optimized for Subterranean Architectures) Faculty Advisor: Jesse Reiser and Forrest Meggers
SPRING 2015
Yang Li, The Manfrigo Competition- Realism and the Architectural Truth Faculty Advisor: Michael Young
Serguei Bagrianski, On Error: Error Propagation as Syntactical Agent Faculty Advisor: Jesse Reiser
Jose Meza, Combine to Apply: House in Princeton NJ , 2015 Faculty Advisor: Michael Meredith
Laura Britton, Differentiated Continuity of the Urban Interior: Thresholds of Shinjuku Station Faculty Advisor: Michael Young
Gina Morrow, To the Point: Scanning and the Coordinated Surface Faculty Advisor: Michael Meredith and Lucia Allais
Patricia Chia, Constructed Topographies: A Proposal for a New Method of Architectural Production of Singapore’s Identity Faculty Advisor: Mario Gandelsonas
Daniel Tappe, “City All Main Street”: Linear Urbanism in the United States / Rethinking the city of the American Southwest Faculty Advisor: Stan Allen
Sonia Flamberg, Drawing and the sensory apparatus: updating architectural representation for the post-digital age Faculty Advisor: Michael Young
Hans Tursak, Support/Surface Architecture: Project for the Beginnings of a Digital Complex Faculty Advisor: Stan Allen
Tyler Hopf, Sensory Architecture Faculty Advisor: Axel Kilian
Shota Vashakmadze, Love the Land Faculty Advisor: Jesse Reiser
M. ARCH STUDIO
M.Arch Thesis Projects
Sonia Flamberg M.AR C H TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
Drawing and the sensory apparatus: updating architectural representation for the post-digital age FAC U LTY ADVI S O R
Michael Young Architects have always produced atmospheres and highly sensorial experiences like texture, color, temperature, and the registration of other figures and bodies in space. In fact, some have argued that these moods and effects are architecture’s primary tools for affecting change in the world—but they have been notoriously difficult for architects, both as objects of design and of discussion. There is a legacy of historical drawing methods that allow viewers to project themselves into represented spaces, be they far away or unbuilt. These techniques of representation require some if not equal commitment on the part of the viewing subject. Theories on the tactile line and the the link between haptic and visual understandings of space describe lines as traces of bodily gestures and projections of expanded fields of touch. This project seeks to use computational tools to move beyond the photorealistic renderings that have been the hallmark of today’s digital paradigm thus far—that use tropes of the sublime to stun viewers with heavenly rays shining through clouds in shots taken from precarious precipices—and develop a visual repertoire that uses the sensory apparatus of the viewing subject as an instrument to produce haptic and kinesthetic effects, activating the epidermal eye and transforming the subject from voyeur to voyageuse. It seeks to recuperate the tactile and its intrinsic link to the visual and other senses and move beyond the reading of symbols and referents to a more embodied sense of perceptive reception, attuned to moods, resonances, emanations, vibrations, and ambiances.
9
M. ARCH THESIS
FL AMBERG—SONIA
The project attempts to make tangible the presence of and relationships between four viewing subjects or protagonists using four methods. 1. Texture is produced by representing surfaces as hairs or microvilli that are normal to it. The hairs are the normal vectors to a 3D scan of the room, and reflect its material density and surface articulation. 2. Shadows and temporality are evoked using color. The difference in angle between each hair and a single roving “ghost vector� are calculated into RGB color values that correspond to Z, X, and Y axes respectively. 3. The sensation of proximity of one’s body to an architectural figure is heightened with depth and magnification. As you move closer to the walls of the installation, their projections get closer to you. 4. Sharing space with other bodies is marked by the multiplication and overlap of projections. Each body that enters the installation generates its own set of hairs.
11 M. ARCH THESIS
FL AMBERG—SONIA
13 M. ARCH THESIS
FL AMBERG—SONIA
Gina Morrow M.AR C H TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
To the Point: Scanning and the Coordinated Surface FAC U LTY ADVI S O R S
Michael Meredith and Lucia Allais Buildings are increasingly being seen, documented, and visualized by scanners more than they are by people, and yet Architecture has been resistant to incorporate scanning into aesthetic discourse, reserving it for the professional and technical spheres of preservation, infrastructural surveys, and BIM . This seems like an oversight because scanning alludes to almost every existing mode of architectural representation—projective geometry, perspective, photography, etc.— and collapses them into a single paradigm. I’m proposing that there is a way to perspective, photography, etc.—and collapses them into a single paradigm. I’m proposing that there is a way to understand scanning as something more than a representational device—that the act of scanning in addition to its post-processing can be thought of as a form of fabrication. In this sense the scanner is the true “site” of my thesis, and I have developed tools and ways of working that try to imagine the different realms in which scanning could affect design or the ways in which I can have some kind of agency over the scanner’s point data. What’s particular about points is that they carry large and varied sets of information. Every point in a scan contains a time stamp, an RGB value, and XYZ coordinates. Furthermore, scanners collect points in bundles called frustums, and when triangulated into a mesh, they are assigned vectors normal to their surface. Each tool I have developed takes on a particular quality of scanning—time, RGB data, stitching mechanisms, view frustums—and tries to posit a means of intervention. For this iteration of the project, I have applied my tools to one of Princeton’s graduate apartments in the Butler complex. Originally built as temporary emergency housing for married veterans after World War II, the apartments are soon to be demolished and so they offer a kind of preservational urge. However, I would argue that all buildings reenact the ones that came before them, and that these same techniques can be applied to a wide range of existing physical stuff that includes but is not limited to found objects, scale models, and raw materials.
15 M. ARCH THESIS
MORROW— GINA
17 M. ARCH THESIS
MORROW— GINA
19 M. ARCH THESIS
MORROW— GINA
Daniel Tappe M.AR C H TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
“City All Main Street�: Linear Urbanism in the United States / Rethinking the city of the American Southwest FAC U LTY ADVI S O R
Stan Allen As my response to the colonization of the American Southwest I propose here a linear development along preexisting infrastructure. The aqueducts of the Southwest offer the possibility to foster a linear development along a highly artificial piece of infrastructure. The artificial landscape lends itself to a linear urbanization with a clear perimeter. The hostile environment of the Southwest as well as the monumentality of the landscape require an architectural response that uses a language similar to the land art movement while literally constructing an architectural frontier between the wilderness and the colonized land. In this respect the garden exists within the urban machine. Architecture becomes the framing device for the linear urban typology. Structured as a three dimensional representation of the American grid, it references the systematic colonization of the expansive Western landscape while symbolizing the clear geometry of the linear urban project.
21 M. ARCH THESIS
TA P P E — DA N I E L
23 M. ARCH THESIS
TA P P E — DA N I E L
25 M. ARCH THESIS
TA P P E — DA N I E L
Hans Tursak M.AR C H TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
Support/Surface Architecture: Project for the Beginnings of a Digital Complex FAC U LTY ADVI S O R
Stan Allen The overwhelming impulse at work in most new brands of digital formalism is predicated on a post-compositional practice of channeling systems/special effects rather than intentionally arranging discrete elements into meaningful organizations. What this thesis posits instead, is a generative system in which painterly surface-effects (informed by digital aesthetics) interact with the geometric lattice of the architectural support. A strategy is put forward which maps concepts from post-war painting onto architecturally-specific geometric organizations. Such scenarios complicate the ontological status of structure and skin, and the perceptual effects they have on materiality and optically; setting them into active, reciprocal relations. Responding to the fatalistic criticality of concepts like phenomenological “grounding” or the ironic celebration commercial culture in Pop sign-play, the thesis wagers the possibility that digitally-informed surface conditions and democratic, open-ended experience/interpretation are not mutually exclusive. The architectural imperative however, is that one understand surface and support as two sets of analogous compositional data in the act of forming a design -suggesting new territory for intelligible perceptual and hermeneutic complexity (as opposed to the obscurantist digital fetish for effects like blur, haze, unknowably vast fields and tectonics that seem to defy physics). For the purpose of the project, a compositional game is created within a self-enclosed field condition; a system of objects set into a delimited, artificially prepared ground. While the vocabulary of these exercises are couched in the history of abstraction and its analysis— the placeless floating world of Modernist nonobjective painting—the program of the project might be imagined as a derelict suburban high school athletic field, urban park, rural airfield or highway off-ramp rest stop reclaimed as a park somewhere in the Northeastern region of the United States. Like the vocabulary of many 3D modeling programs, the grammar of each exercise is built first on logics of point-line-plane and paper-thin surfaces in an idealized representational space. Individual elements are spaced in a manner suggestive of game-board layouts, athletic formations, libraries or circuit-boards; their literal positions alluding to a perceptual phenomenon in which discrete volumes radiate their own space. While each isolated moment is faithful to an encompassing, plan-based group-logic, the composition unfolds for the viewer in time as a field of industrial components in part-to-part relations. The objects ostensibly speak to one another in an obscure language meant to be read as a topographic essay in relations between individuals, sets, and interstitial vacancies.
27 M. ARCH THESIS
T U R S A K— H A N S
29 M. ARCH THESIS
T U R S A K— H A N S
31 M. ARCH THESIS
T U R S A K— H A N S
501: medium (technical support) + convention (artistic genre, typology, history) + play (!@#?) = Architecture PROFESSOR
Michael Meredith FALL 2014
Architecture Design Studio Medium is how we conceptualize and work through a project (“technical support� i.e. form, function, material, program, context, and so on). Convention is how we situate and evaluate the work within the discipline. Play is something else. History has proven these elements to be highly unstable, of course every generation tasked to rewrite them and each of these with their own specific outcome or emphasis in mind. While convention may offer some protection against the anxiety generated by change, medium continually produces new enthusiasms and frictions which exacerbate the improvisation of play. This introductory course presents the discipline of architecture through a series of interrelated discrete exercises. These problems are not meant to represent the synthetic totality of the discipline, rather an overview of a few important aspects, points of architecture that help construct a self-conscious framework, allowing for the students to individually connect-the-dots, providing a foundation for further development.
Laura Salazar
33 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 01 M E R E D IT H — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Ryan Roark
Emma Benintende
35 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 01 M E R E D IT H — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Mark Acciari
503: Elevated Houses PROFESSOR
Paul Lewis FALL 2014
Integrated Building Studio Approximately 45,000 houses in New Jersey are currently built on former wetlands. Built to maximize the real estate value of waterfront properties, that very proximity has proven toxic due to global warming and sea level rise, made acutely palpable by Hurricane Sandy. While much of the debate about the future of these wetland sites tends toward the binary extremes of retreat (buy back and demolish programs) or fortification (sea walls), the more tactical/ local approach of lifting a house above base flood elevations is emerging as a more common approach. Single family houses across the region, previously rooted to their lawns have grown legs and new houses are being built atop platforms, with these platforms operating as a surrogate ground. Driven by sea level rise, lawns will likely be reclaimed by migrating salt marshes over the next 50 to 80 years. These transformations present a fascinating architectural problem. What happens to the basic elements of the suburban house—the front lawn, the driveway, the garage, the front door, the front elevation, patio, porch, roof, basement, windows—when the basic organizational relationship are radically reconfigured? Elevated houses now exist in New Jersey that give evidence to this problematic—houses built without front doors, former front doors marooned on upper floor decks, elevated thick driveways, back yard privacy replaced by panoramic exposure, extremely large upper level decks replacing the lawn, etc.. The studio explored what new opportunistic architectural potentials can be exploited from the dislocation of the building from the ground, and the transformation of the ground into a type of wetland.
Sonia Flamberg / Regina Teng
37 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 3 L E W I S — I N T E G R AT E D B U I L D I N G S T U D I O
Van Kluytenaar / Gina Morrow
39 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 3 L E W I S — I N T E G R AT E D B U I L D I N G S T U D I O
505a: BRAVE NEW NOW 2014 PROFESSOR
Liam Young FALL 2014
Architecture Design Studio We have always imagined the spaces and environments of a day yet to come. As we flick through the catalogues of yesterday’s tomorrows we see starry spaceship skies, moon base futures, jet pack ray guns, food in pill form, flying cars and xray specs and we wonder whatever happened to the futures we were promised. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. These visions of what’s to come do not merely anticipate but actively shape technological futures through their effects on the collective imagination. This capacity for a fictional project to simultaneously reflect the current condition while suggesting the possibility of the next is what drives our engagement with these visions of the future. BRAVE NEW NOW exists in the territory where science fiction becomes scientology, between the documentary and visionary, where speculative fictions become a way of exploring a world that realist fiction struggles to grasp- a world increasingly ruled by unreality. BRAVE NEW NOW will slip suggestively between the real and the imagined to present filmic fragments of the near future city.
Patricia Chia
41 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 5 A YO U N G — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Daniele Profeta
43 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 5A YO U N G — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
505b: Start-Up City PROFESSOR
Stan Allen FALL 2014
Architecture Design Studio This studio revisited—and hopefully reinvented—the tradition of imagining a city from scratch. The world’s population is projected to increase by 1.5 billion in the next 15 years. Already more than 50% of that population lives in urbanized areas and the percentage is projected to reach 75% in coming decades. In developing countries (where the bulk of the population growth is occurring), the existing urban infrastructure is simply incapable of supporting that level of growth. Rather than accommodate that population growth in already stressed urban centers, a more viable strategy would be a series of Start-Up Cities). In order to develop new strategies, we collectively analyzed past examples, and produced designs valid in the present. We reviewed contemporary urban thought and proposals: New Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism, Infrastructural Urbanism. We explored new conceptual frameworks opened up by complexity theory and ecological thinking. We investigated the environmental implications of city design, and pay attention to the ecological impact of these new cities. Finally, the iterative and serial nature of urban form is wellsuited to computational design and we made full use of new design methods.
6,500,000
6,000,000
Phoenix 5,500,000
+1,900,000
5,000,000
4,500,000
4,000,000
Tucson
3,500,000
3,000,000
2,500,000
2,000,000
+690,000
1,500,000
Arizona Population 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
1,000,000
500,000
Est. 2013 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2013 2030
Daniel Tappe
6,482 9,658 40,440 88,243 122,931 204,354 334,162 435,573 499,261 749,587 1,302,161 1,745,944 2,718,215 3,665,228 5,130,632 6,392,017 6,626,624
49.0% 318.7% 118.2% 39.3% 66.2% 63.5% 30.3% 14.6% 50.1% 73.7% 34.1% 55.7% 34.8% 40.0% 24.6% 3.7%
Projections 2050: 9.7 million to 13.1 million
70 miles
45 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 5 B A LL E N — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Miles Gertler
Jeff Anderson
47 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 5 B A LL E N — I N T E G R AT E D B U I L D I N G S T U D I O
Igor Bragado
505c: Catalyst/ Retardant PROFESSOR
Liz Diller FALL 2014
Architecture Design Studio An architectural catalyst is typically a work of signature architecture meant to stimulate economic growth and urban renewal in a city. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a critical benchmark of the potential of a single building to spur the revitalization of an urban area in decline. Closer to home, the High Line’s transformation from an obsolete stretch of industrial infrastructure into a public park is a more modest case in point. Conceived initially as a local amenity that would boost neighborhood growth and attract 300,000 visitors annually, the High Line now attracts over five million visitors annually. Once a quiet probe in a forlorn corner of Manhattan, the High Line is now the organizing principle for a new wave of post-industrial commercial activity. Today, the High Line is a microcosm of a city in delicate balance between vacancy and gentrification. What is the measure of success for the urban catalyst? Can development happen too quickly? What is the responsibility of the architect in shaping the aftermath of positive urban change? Extending the chemical metaphor, if a catalyst speeds up a chemical reaction and a retardant slows one down, can there be a role for an architectural retardant?
Melissa Frost
49 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 5 C D I LL E R — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Kayla Manning
100 100
AIR RIGHT SOLAR / WATER PORTION ELECTRICITY COVERAGE ( % ) WATER COVERAGE ( % )
AIR RIGHT SOLAR / WATER ELECTRICITY COVERAGE ( % ) WATER COVERAGE ( % )
AIR RIGHT SOLAR / WATER ELECTRICITY COVERAGE ( % ) WATER COVERAGE ( % )
600 300
AIR RIGHT SOLAR / WATER ELECTRICITY COVERAGE ( % ) WATER COVERAGE ( % )
21 household 16 household
16 household
16 household
16 household
28 household 16 household
Bowen Zhang
16 household
32 h
M. ARCH STUDIO
AIR RIGHT EXTENSION INTENSITY SOLAR / WATER PORTION ELECTRICITY COVERAGE ( % ) WATER COVERAGE ( % )
80% Reduction 1084 sq m
21 household
80 % non-potable water 18819 sq m
32 household
100% Grey Water 1411 sq m
16 household
32 household
16 household
21 household
A R C 5 0 5 C D I LL E R — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
household
51
502: Fragments of a Diversion Infrastructure: The Bayou Lafourche Diversion PROFESSOR
Guy Nordenson S P R I N G 2015
Architecture Design Studio The Mississippi Delta has been losing land area at steady rate of at least 1,000 acres per year due to the lack of sediment deposition, the effects of salt water intrusion due to artificial canals, and to hurricanes, land subsidence and sea level rise. The total land area of the Delta is about 100,000 acres of which 60% are coastal marshes so the rate of land loss is significant—and it is likely to increase. The land loss affects the ecology of the Delta including the related fisheries, and threatens many communities including long established native ones. The loss of marshes also increases flood risks throughout the Delta and of course to the city of New Orleans. To mitigate this a number of scientists and activists have proposed creating major new “diversions” that would redirect the flood waters of the Mississippi at the Old River Control Structure to feed five areas of the Delta: Wax Lake, Terrebonne, Bayou LaFourche, Davis Pond and Bayou LaLoutre. Of these Wax Lake is currently functioning. The diversion projects would entail major new infrastructure on a scale commensurate with the original Mississippi control structures of the 19th and mid 20th centuries. It would also disrupt and alter many existing communities and landscapes. This studio worked to develop portions of the infrastructure, landscape and (sub)urban designs for the proposed diversions along the Bayou Lafourche by first imagining an overall strategy of flows both down and up stream and then introducing fragments of the infrastructure to come. This infrastructure will relate both to the water, sediment, transportation and energy flows as well as community needs both ongoing and in the event of natural disaster emergencies.
Emma Benintende
53 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 2 N O R D E N S O N — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Mark Acciari
Ryan Barney (top)
Shujie Chen (bottom left)
55 M. ARCH STUDIO A R C 5 0 2 N O R D E N S O N — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
+20 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
+15 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
+10 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
+5 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
NO SEA LEVEL RISE
+20 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
+15 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
+10 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
+5 FT SEA LEVEL RISE
NO SEA LEVEL RISE
0 ft
Ryan Roark (bottom right)
15 ft
30 ft
45 ft
0’
1,000’ 2,000’
5,000’
10,000’
504: Japan Studio: Yokohama Redux PROFESSOR
Jesse Reiser S P R I N G 2015
Integrated Building Studio The occasion of the Yokohama Port Terminal competition in 1995 was a watershed for the discipline in many respects. A new generation of architects and theorists across the globe seized it as a platform to explore emerging modalities in design, design technology, and delivery which would in the ensuing decades become the medium through which and against which much of contemporary practice plays out. To understand this shift is to recognize that Yokohama elicited changes not simply in one architectural register but across almost all of the disciplinary and sub-disciplinary categories that involve the conception and practice of design. This studio undertook the Yokohama Port Terminal competition twenty years out based upon the accumulated knowledge gleaned from the salient speculative projects to emerge out of the competition and the subsequent trajectory of those ideas in the fieldSelected material from the studio will be presented next year in symposia at Tokyo University and Princeton University, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Yokohama Port Terminal Competition and in a planned publication.
Sanger Clark / Regina Teng
57 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 4 R E I S E R — I N T E G R AT E D B U I L D I N G S T U D I O
Julian Harake
Lily Zhang (facing page)
59 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 4 R E I S E R — I N T E G R AT E D B U I L D I N G S T U D I O
Lily Zhang
506a: Recycling Seoul: an Update to the Athens Charter I N STR U CTO R
Alejandro Zaera-Polo S P R I N G 2015
Architecture Design Studio The aim of this research is to produce a comprehensive proposition for the contemporary city: a speculative update of the Athens Charter. We use Seoul as a paradigmatic case of the contemporary city to test different proposals in a specific urban environment. The studio operated as a research group where every member undertook a particular experiment that became part of a collective proposal. The object of this research is to manifest the physical and spatial implications of technology on social organizations, urban events, or institutional and economic formations, once applied to an existing physical infrastructure. Members of this research will collaborate with authorities in Seoul Metropolitan Government and other institutions. Students will develop an innovative network of recycled spaces for Seoul through architectural means. The physical precedent of these existing infrastructures will help to focus spatially and materially the questions of our research: the final proposals will have to be necessarily mediated through these pre-existing physical entities. The studio strategy will be not so much to translate the digital into the physical but rather to mediate digital technologies through a pre-existing urban infrastructure, and to engage in the processes of urban recycling, which we believe will become increasingly crucial for urban planning. How can architects play a role in encouraging a community of innovation for Seoul rather than another wave of gentrification? The work will be aimed at envisioning viable reuse of these infrastructures for programs which are created by and for new urban technologies. We will assign different projects of urban recycling to the different functions of the Athens Charter, in order to test them on a condition of re-use rather than of tabula rasa.
Kendall Baldwin
50 STORIES
35 STORIES
61
A R C 5 0 6A Z A E R A- P O LO — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Justin Davidson
M. ARCH STUDIO
35 STORIES
Kayla Manning (top left)
Vincent Meyer-Madaus (center bottom)
63 M. ARCH STUDIO
North-eNd eVeNt - uNfoldiNG of the piaNo Nobile iNto the city GrouNd
cheoNGGyecheoN-ro eVeNt - spiral ramp aNd stairway stretch to coNNect three leVels
Daniele Profeta (right)
A R C 5 0 6A Z A E R A- P O LO — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
eulJiro uNderpass eVeNt - coNtiNuous parK permeates throuGh the GrouNd aNd asceNds to the piaNo Nobile
506b: Transurban States of America I N STR U CTO R
Andrés Jaque S P R I N G 2015
Architecture Design Studio Suburbia and countryside are no longer experienced in opposition to cities. A number of transformations have fueled this change: the growth of mobile broadband access, online interaction, air passenger traffic, daily commuting and commercial freight; the empowerment and increasing influence of independent town-oriented sensitivities (from farm-to-table to the Americana music scene); and the growing intensity of media attention and political discussion on environmental concerns, by which suburbia and countryside locations have gained visibility and imbrications within cities’ unfolding. As a parallel process, freeways, franchises, green areas, condos, and concerns on the quality of air and “healthy urban experience” have made their way into cities. City, suburbia and countryside, as special categories, are no longer able to explain or project the demarcation of daily life. Having breakfast, engaging politically or developing relationships are all processes happening in a different spatial mode, namely the transience between constellations of heterogeneous entities distributed around the world, occupying simultaneously urban and non urban space. The studio proposes to explore what happens to architectural design when facing this spatial mode, that we will call TRANSURBIA . To explore its architectural specificity and ways for architectural practices to become relevant in its design are the goals of the TRANSURBAN STATES OF AMERICA studio.
Igor Bradago / Miles Gertler
65 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 6 B JAQ U E — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
Rennie Jones / Abby Stone
67 M. ARCH STUDIO
A R C 5 0 6 B JAQ U E — A R C H IT E C T U R E D E S I G N S T U D I O
69
D E PARTM E NTAL R E P R E S E NTATIVE
Mario Gandelsonas The undergraduate program at the School of Architecture is known for its rigorous and interdisciplinary approach to pre-professional education. The four-year undergraduate program leads to an A.B. with a concentration in architecture and offers an introduction to the discipline of architecture within the framework of a liberal arts curriculum. In addition to architectural design and the history and theory of architecture and urbanism, undergraduates study a range of disciplines that contribute to an architect’s knowledge and vision, including courses in architectural analysis, representation, computing, and building technologies. Such a broad academic program also prepares students for a graduate program in architecture and other related disciplines such as landscape architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, art history, and the visual arts. The courses in architecture develop a broad understanding of the concepts and methods for the planning and design of buildings, landscapes, and cities. They include the history of architecture, the history of urban form, analysis of contemporary urban problems, analysis of modern architecture and visual studies, related social sciences, and building technologies. Drawing skills are not required before entering the program; they are developed as an essential part of the course work and design studios. 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, and computergenerated 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.
U N D E R G R A D UAT E
Undergraduate Program in Architecture
PROFESSOR
Mario Gandelsonas FALL 2014
MICHAEL GLASSMAN
404: The Fluvial Metropolis
Senior Independent Work/ Advanced Design Studio
For an architectural student, it is impossible to overstate the importance of first-hand exposure to the sites and cities that are the subject of their design work. For most of our students, the fall 2014 senior urban studio will be their first opportunity to travel to Sao Paulo, Brazil; for some of the American students, it is their first significant educational experience abroad. While in Saõ Paulo, they will not only experience the city directly (gathering site information and photographs necessary for their design work)—they will be working closely with their counterparts in Sao Paulo University. Travel to Brazil offers our students exposure to a unique mix of the urgent issues associated with urbanization and globalization, while at the same time introducing them to Brazil’s rich historical and cultural past. Indeed, it is this mix of history and modernity that makes the experience of Brazil so important for our students. The 2014 Senior Joint Studio has been developed in conjunction with the Faculty of Architecture, University of Sao Paulo. The site for the studio, one of the Eco ports of the Hidroanel, a major urban infrastructural project, a 170 km. water ring in Sao Paulo will be located at the Borore lake arm of the Billings reservoir, between Peninsula “Cantinho do Ceu” and Peninsula Borore. The program for the first part of the studio will be the “reading” of the work of the Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx within the context of five hundred years of Western and non-Western garden design and the program for the second part will the design of a water park as a new cultural and entertainment device for the Sao Paulo metropolitan region. A meeting in Sao Paulo has been scheduled during the fall term break at the end of October for a joint presentation of the student projects and a discussion to assess and compare the different architectural and pedagogic approaches to the program. The goal of the studio is to introduce the students to three urban concepts that separate urbanism from architecture: First, the notion of the city as the result of a never ending process of construction and destruction that develops through time as opposed to the architectural building as product and object, second, the replacement of the figure of the architect as author by a inter and transdisciplinary collective entity that includes technical, artistic and social science practices blurring their roles and boundaries and third the development of an urban device. Finally the studio will focus on the growing importance of megacities in reshaping the architecture and urbanism of the 21st century and of the development of a new global, urban culture complicating the aesthetic, economic, political, and social responsibilities of students, researchers and practitioners.
71 U N D E R G R A D UAT E
highlighted systems
highlighted systems
pool
pool
changing rooms
observation deck
theater
“trees”
market
1/32 1” = 1’
1/32 1” = 1’
hydraulic lifts
soccer pitch
external stair
1/32 1” = 1’
hydraulic lifts pool
pool
pool
pool
pool
changing rooms
observation deck
theater
market
changing rooms
“trees”
theater
market
stairwell
external stair
1/32 1” = 1’
1/32 1” = 1’
soccer pitch
market
pool
pool pool
“trees”
skate park
external stair
1/32 1” = 1’
stairwell
benches
1/32 1” = 1’
theater
market
soccer pitch
external stair
observation deck
observation deck
“trees”
theater“trees”
skate park market stairwell
external stairskate park benches
1/32 1” = 1’
pool pool
changing rooms
changing rooms
market
external stair
soccer pitch
1/32 1” = 1’
observation deck
theater
stairwell soccer pitch
skate park benches
pool
changing rooms
“trees”
stairwell
external stair
1/32 1” = 1’
observation deck
observation deck
theater“trees”
skate park benches
external stair
skate park benches
pool
changing rooms
stairwell
soccer pitch
A R C 4 0 4 G A N D E L S O N A S — S E N I O R I N D E P E N D E N T W O R K /A DVA N C E D D E S I G N S T U D I O
1/32 1” = 1’
stairwell
skate park benches
external stair
benches
soccer pitch
external stair
1/32 1” = 1’
hyrdaulic fun palace hyrdaulic fun palace Design for a floating water park
Design for a floating water park
A design which explores the fluid relationship A between design which architecture explores andthe ground fluid relationship inherent in the between “waterarchitecture and ground inh park”. Through a series of simple hydraulic lifts, park”. programmatic Through a plaftorms series of simple (pools,hydraulic fields, theaters, lifts, programmatic etc.) plaftorms (pools, fie move in section depending as they are loadedmove with visitors. in section depending as they are loaded with visitors.
Visitor interaction with each program creates aVisitor constantly interaction changing with environement, each program as creates platforms a constantly are changing environement, pushed up and down by the flow of water throughout pushed up theand park. down Platforms by theare flow paired of water in tothroughout systems, conthe park. Platforms are paired nected by a series of tubes through which thenected water isbypushed, a seriesresulting of tubesinthrough cause and which effect the water relationships is pushed, resulting in cause a between use and circulation. However this relationship between use is sometimes and circulation. enacted However over over thisseveral relationship stories, is sometimes enacted over obscuring the causality (i.e. the pools on the roof obscuring are filled thewith causality water by (i.e.the theloading pools on of the platforms roof are several filled with water by the loading stories below, perhaps unbeknownst to the swimmers stories below, who occupy perhapsthem). unbeknownst to the swimmers who occupy them).
Through these systems and relationships, the Through Hyrdaulicthese Fun Palace systemsquestions and relationships, how the concept the Hyrdaulic of datum Fun Palace questions how is transformated by the proposition of aquaticisortransformated fluvial architecture. by the proposition of aquatic or fluvial architecture.
so, what does a day at os cubos look like? well, a day at os cubos could look different for everyone. after all, os cubos are a space that has something to offer to everyone. in the end, however, a day at os cubos is filled with intertwining stories, exciting interactions, and lively activities that can bring the community together! from providing spaces for people to exercise or simply hang out to serving as a decorative landscape for the weekly night port concerts, os cubos has something to offer to everyone.
luzia, 39
marcos, 17
marcelino, 6
julia, 18
fausto, 62
the following pages will follow a saturday in the life of the family of luzia, marcos, and marcelinho as well as julia and fausto, also community members.
6AM-12PM
I HATE MY MOM!
CEU swimming classes?
CAN YOU TAKE YOUR BROTHER TO HIS SWIMMING LESSONS?
WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?
NO! I ALWAYS TAKE HIM! PLUS, I TOOK HIM TO THE MOVIES LAST
MARCOS, 17
EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT, A MOVIE IS SHOWN IN ONE OF THE L CUBOS. IT IS POWERED BY THE SOLAR ENERGY THE CUBO CAPTURES DURING THE DAY.
I’M REALLY ENJOYING THE WATER ZUMBA CLASSES ON TUESDAYS! IT’S A PERFECT WAY TO EXERCISE WHILE I WAIT FOR MY KIDS TO GET OUT OF SWIMMING CLASSES!
I’M ASKING FOR A FAVOR, MARCOS!
luzia, 39
julia, 18
COMMUNITY MEETINGS ALLOW PEOPLE TO DISCUSS NOT ONLY THE USAGE OF OS CUBOS BUT ALSO OTHER PROBLEMS IN THE COMMUNITY!
THE CITY PAYS A SMALL FEE TO ELDERLY COMMUNITY MEMBERS TO CLEAN UP OS CUBOS EVERY MORNING FROM 6-8AM
LIKE MANY OF THE EVENTS IN OS CUBOS, THESE SWIMMING CLASSES ARE COMMUNITY-LED AND INSTRUCTED BY VOLUNTEERS FROM THE COMMUNITY
marcelinho, 6 CONCERT TONIGHT!
fausto, 62
12 PM
11 AM
10 AM
9 AM
8 AM
7 AM
6 AM
Arts and crafts?
15
16
12PM - 6PM SHE’S CUTE...
THE M CUBOS ARE RESERVED FROM 3 - 6 PM EVERY SATURDAY TO ALLOW FAMILIES TO SPEND TIME TOGETHER. SOMETIMES, IF PLANED AHEAD, EVEN L CUBOS CAN BE RESERVED FOR MULTI-FAMILY HANGOUTS!
MARCOS, 17
CONCERT TONIGHT? HE’S CUTE...
luzia, 39
julia, 18
WEEKEND VOLLEYBALL AND BASKETBALL TOURNAMENTS IN THE M CUBOS ARE A POPULAR EVENT, ESPECIALLY AMONG TEENAGER! NEARBY COMMUNITIES EACH ASSEMBLE THEIR OWN TEAMS, ALTHOUGH SOMETIMES INDIVIDUAL PEOPLE WHO SHOW UP ASSEMBLE THEIR OWN TEAMS RIGHT THERE, ON THE SPOT, AS WELL!
looking forward to the concert tonight
marcelinho, 6
6 PM
5 PM
4 PM
3 PM
2 PM
1 PM
12 PM
fausto, 62
17
18
6PM - 12AM THE LANDSCAPE LOOKS SO DIFFERENT AT NIGHT! Hi, Michael Glassman
MARCOS, 17
LET’S DO IT
luzia, 39
MARCOS AND JULIA REALLY HIT IT UP AT THE CONCERT... Can’t wait to go to Os Cubos tomorrow again!
julia, 18
EVERY WEEKEND, STARTING AT 8PM, A PORT IS HOST TO A LIVE BAND WHO PERFORMS IN FRONT OF THE COMMUNITY WITH OS CUBOS AS A GLOWING AND DECORAING LANDSCAPE.
marcelinho, 6
12 PM
11 PM
10 PM
9 PM
8 PM
7 PM
6PM
fausto, 62
19
20
jose esc os cubos an inflatable fluvial metropolis
1/2 mi
1/8 mi
1/4 mi
Os Cubos (Portuguese for "The Cub surrounding the Billing Reservoir wit Cubos redefines the notion of the m the community's interaction with its for leisure, recreation, and communi
Different scales--small, medium, and surrounding informal communities co public spaces that provide an alterna the Brazilian aura of architectural ma
The materiality and ephemerality of conventional flotation devices and m new means for mobility and transpo the vision and current efforts of the c
Nonetheless, Os Cubos are a machi required immersion into the water to to explore the potential of a fluvial m
73 U N D E R G R A D UAT E
solar panel fabric the solar panel fabric is in charge of collecting energy during the daytime in order to power the cubo's daily activites as well as light it up at night
sample s cubo main occupiable space docking poles
part of the supporting structure, the docking poles allow visiting boats to park outside the cubo
the water filtration technology would provide the cubo users with a cleaner environment than the current waters can provide the communiy with, allowing for safer, more hygienic activities
supporting structure the supporting structures would hold the cubos and the accompanying filtration system stable, preventing them from floating around
camilla
Os Cubos (Portuguese for “The Cubes”) are solar-powered inflatable structures whose different scales provide the communities surrounding the Billing Reservoir with a fluvial metropolis, a city on water, of its bes") are solar-powered inflatable structures whose different scales provide the communities own. Surrounded byon water purifying structures, Os Cubos redefines the structures, notion of the th a fluvial metropolis, a city water, of its own. Surrounded by water purifying Osmodern water park by providing spaces that reactivate thereactivate existing water landscape, thefacilitating community’s interaction with its modern water park by providing spaces that the existing waterfacilitating landscape, resources and shedding light on theofnumber existing possibilities use the Billings Reservoir for leisure, resources and shedding light on the number existingofpossibilities to use the to Billings Reservoir recreation, and community creation, not just transportation. ity creation, not just transportation.
Different scales--small, medium, and large—correspond to intimate, social, and communal interactions d large--correspond toAs intimate, social, and communal interactions respectively. As the respectively. the surrounding informal communities continue to expand, These scales seek to respond ontinue to These scales seek to respond to new the community's ever-growing for new toexpand, the community’s ever-growing need for public spaces that provideneed an alternatative to their informal atative tosurroundings. their informal surroundings. Additionally, these floating masses seek exude and reflect aura of architectural Additionally, these floating masses seek exude and reflect the Brazilian assiveness and monumentality in Sao Paulo, albeitPaulo, through space ratherspace than materiality massiveness and monumentality in Sao albeit through rather than materiality.
The materiality andCubos ephemerality of the plasticfun, filmalluding used fortoOs inherently connotes fun, alluding to the the plastic film used for Os inherently connotes theCubos language of language of Yet, conventional flotation devices and modern water parks. Yet,potential the lightness modern water parks. the lightness of the materiality also showcases water's as a of the materiality also water’s potential a newtomeans mobility and transportation waste—particularly due to its ortation ofshowcases waste--particularly due to itsasability make for masses lighter-further carryingofthrough ability to make masses lighter—further carrying through the vision and current efforts of the city of Sao Paulo. city of Sao Paulo.
Nonetheless, Os Cubos are a machine: they are self-powered, water purifying spaces whose disconnect ine: they fromt are self-powered, purifyingimmersion spaces whose disconnect the land, and the a physical and symbolic the land, andwater the required into the water to fromt use them, aim to create o use them, aim to into create physical and symbolic transition into the the potential collectiveofmindset transition theacollective mindset needed to explore a fluvialneeded metropolis. metroplis.
A R C 4 0 4 G A N D E L S O N A S — S E N I O R I N D E P E N D E N T W O R K /A DVA N C E D D E S I G N S T U D I O
water filtration system
Ben denzer
Billings Reservoir bridge
Hanging schools under the bridge
infrastructure as exoskeleton This proposal sits as an addendum to the proposal for a Hidroanel Metropolitano de São Paulo. It seeks to focus further attention on the potential for infrastructure and local programming within the Billings Reservoir area. Potentialities for this poorer region have not been adequately addressed in the original proposal, which deals primarily with local infrastructural solutions for wealthier sections where the project exists primarily as a series of canals. The creation of Billings Reservoir (a man made geographical feature) has made small peninsulas which transportationally and infrustructurally (water, electricity, internet) separate communities that are in close geopgrahical proximity. This proposal seeks to solve these existing infrastructure needs in a way that allows for local and targeted programmatic growth. As an urban device of particular Brazilian significance, exoskeletons are under utilized in the Billings Reservoir area. The only example of note is the CEU Navigantes. The CEU’s external concrete structure supports classrooms, gyms, an auditorium, open spaces, etc. Students have also employed it as an exoskeletons to hold hanging gardens. The contribution of the Megastructuralists (Superstudio, Archigram, Paul Rudolph, etc) to this type of architectural typology is acknowledged. However, this proposal positions itself as Post-Megaform; embracing the typology as a means of creating infrustructural links between disparate locations while sensitizing its impact on the specific grounds it operates above. Bridges are megaforms that infrastructurally link separated locations while site specific program (schools, pools, parks, housing, etc) is hung from the exoskeletal infrustructural links. This proposal argues for a new exoskeletal bridge form as a linear way of organizing and connecting communities through infrustructural links and specific programatic inserts. The basic section of this structure is composed of reinforced concrete with embedded infrustructural tube. Vehicle and pedestrian through traffic occupies the top surface. Vertical pedestrian circulation occurs within structural legs. Stairwell entrance/exits along with resource links (water, electrical, internet) occur at regular intervals where floors can be hung.
(A)
Extends the geographical reach of CEU Navigantes by infrastructurally linking neighborhoods and adding more school buildings. Recreational facilities (parks, pools, half pipes) are also hung from the exoskeleton. A hanging footbridge provides a convenient pedestrian connection between two of the neighborhoods it intersects.
U N D E R G R A D UAT E
(A)
75
(B)
(B)
Connects roads in two separated parks. A pedestrian link in the form of a hanging park also connects the two peninsulas.
(C)
(C)
Two parks and an amphitheater are hung from the exoskeleton. Artist studios in the middle of the structure provide an isolated environment for work (awarded on a yearly residency program).
(D) Extension of central market road to connect two neighborhoods
(D)
Extends a central market street to a neighborhood which previously had no access (also connects neighborhood infrastructures). A craft school with workshops and a dock are hung from the exoskeleton to provide the market with a constant stream of goods. Parks are hung between the neighborhoods. A hanging island creates a more private parkspace accessible only by water.
(E)
(E)
In addition to linking the infrastructural flows of two disparate neighborhoods, this transportational link provides enough density to support a school which is hung from the exoskeleton along with sports fields, Olympic size swimming and diving pools, and a park.
(F)
(F)
Connects infrastructure between two neighborhoods and adds recreational facilities in the form of greenspace and skatepark.
(G)
(G)
Creates a protrusion of the neighborhood into the resevoir. Provides park and dock space along with rentals for boats and kayaks.
A R C 4 0 4 G A N D E L S O N A S — S E N I O R I N D E P E N D E N T W O R K /A DVA N C E D D E S I G N S T U D I O
Connects a neighborhood to greenspace (and links infrastructure and transportation to a neighborhood immediately past the greenspace).
common area
family bar
adjoined buildings
art installations
nonprivate
very private
art center architecture center
family pool
structural support
fluvial metropolis This project addresses ideas of incrementation, network and creative freedom. Self- incrementation: as the community evolves, more and more houses are getting self-built on a small plot of land. Accordingly, the number of community members increases constantly, and thus my project will address this constant growth through array of components, rather than a coherent whole. Depending on the number of community inhabitants and the demographic composition, the number of floating units and their program would accordingly adjust. I am looking for series of modulations that can be applied to any context and at any scale. Network: My project proposes to solve the problem of lack of water recreation facilities and personal spaces through providing certain tool-kit of elements, where separate smaller personal spaces can be constructed, similar to those of social network profile. The ledge of each element will provide circulation for all – similar to that how one can still peak onto your Facebook page. However dwellers are free to choose their association with clusters of interests, family units or community at large. Moreover, different degrees of freedom are possible: from very isolate private space to completely enclosed space where anyone can see. Self-expression: Through fixated elements provided to each member/group of a community, a real network of swimming pools, recreational centers and personal spaces would allow for circulation and more social activities within given community. This project also builds on the idea of empowering, rather than providing a direct solution, allowing community members to design for themselves any space they feel they are lacking with a given toolkit of elements and obeying simple DIY guide. The project aims to embody the idea of fluviality of community and create an extension of a community upon the water. Such floating network can be seen as an extension of the self-made architecture of the community.
MARYIA RUSAK
private houses
77 U N D E R G R A D UAT E
A R C 4 0 4 G A N D E L S O N A S — S E N I O R I N D E P E N D E N T W O R K /A DVA N C E D D E S I G N S T U D I O
Ben Denzer S E N I O R TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
Pure Mobility and Pure Place: Container Corporation of America and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies FAC U LTY ADVI S O R
Lucia Allais In 1960, Walter Paepcke (self-titled “prosaic boxmaker” and founder of Container Corporation of America: a company that produced paperboard packaging, i.e. cardboard boxes) was awarded, along with Mies van der Rohe (one of the canonical figures of modern architecture), a medal of distinction from the Architectural League of Chicago. In contrast to the modernist author with whom he shared the award, Paepke was a corporate manager. A level removed from the physicalities of cultural production, his corporate authorship existed at the level of goals and strategies. Paepcke’s Container Corporation of America (CCA ) advertised and produced the base unit of a mobile modernism: the advertising covered shippable consumer commerce cardboard box. In addition to CCA , Paepcke was responsible for Aspen, Colorado’s modern resurgence as a recreational and cultural center. There he founded the Goethe Bicentennial, the Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Aspen Executives’ Program, and the International Design Conference in Aspen. This thesis takes the advertising outputs of Paepcke’s CCA (classifying “advertising output” in the broadest sense to recognize how entities such as Aspen, the Aspen Institute, and the International Design Conference in Aspen functioned as such) as primary material for analysis in order to track the physical and graphic manifestations of midcentury corporate design’s opposing impulses towards “pure mobility” and “pure place.” Through the moving page, the moving body, and ultimately the moving place, I trace a corporate desire to embrace the realities of a mobile world while simultaneously creating a specific and grounded “place” within it. To do this, I look primarily at the work of Herbert Bayer. The key designer for both Paepcke’s CCA and Aspen Institute, Bayer transformed design strategies he developed at the Bauhaus (where he helped construct a new universal “subject” for design) into a kind of aesthetic “abstraction” suited to the development of a new corporate consumer. If consumers could be taught to like and feel comfortable with graphically abstract corporate outputs, so too would they become comfortable with the inherent conceptual abstractness of corporations themselves. Through such systems of graphic and spatial abstraction, curation became CCA’s most powerful corporate act.
clockwise from top left: CCA, package samples, CCA Annual Report, 1956. Hotel Jerome Winterskol ’55 Float, 1955. Ringle Collection, Aspen Historical Society. Endsheets, CCA Annual Report, 1948, 1951, 1955.
Kite at the IDCA, June 1967. Aspen Historical Society. Herbert Bayer, World Geo-Graphic Atlas, 1953. Wheels added by S-T-O-R-E-D.com Herbert Bayer, “diagram, extended field of vision,” 1935. herbert bayer: painter, designer, architect.
79 SENIOR THESIS
DENZER—BEN
Dalma Földesi S E N I O R TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
From Stage to Screen: The Bauhaus Apparatus between Theater and Cinema FAC U LTY ADVI S O R
Spyros Papapetros In this thesis, I argue that a distinct type of an apparatus originated at the Bauhaus—a liminal, medium unspecific, box-like, cinematic device that became, paradoxically, both a work of art and a reproducible, technological object. Encapsulating the art-technology dialectic, the apparatus accelerated the school’s transition towards a more objective (sachlich) agenda, attempting to consolidate artistic creation and mass production—a context crucial to the understanding of the operation of the apparatus. At the intersection of art and technology, the apparatus was metonymic for architecture and for the idea of the total work that would finally help resolve the dialectic. Combining the functionalism of other artifacts at the Bauhaus— chairs, lamps, advertising posters, books, or building plans— with the performativity and self-sufficiency of aesthetic objects, the apparatus materialized as a hybrid between the utilitarian, the performativeartistic, and the pedagogical. Often a false index of mechanization and electrification, the apparatus embodied the technological sublime. Spatializing in its presence, it worked at the scale of bodies— but it could have expanded to the scale of a building. By attempting to articulate an ontological theory of the apparatus at the Bauhaus, I hope to highlight its dimension as an architectural experiment, its profound role as a site for fusing art, technology, and spatial practice at the school, and its future reemergence in practices separate from, although influenced by, the school. In order to understand the thing-object dichotomy and the intermedial ontology of such apparatuses at the Bauhaus, I examine not only what the apparatuses were but also how they were received and reconceptualized over time. As things, they were technologically reproducible, carefully designed artifacts. As apparatuses, they mediated the image of the school as a whole; they expanded the definition of new media and the specificity of the medium; they enabled the possibility of an art-technology synthesis; and they constructed a new subject through defining the subject’s new relationship to the object. To establish the ontology of such apparatuses, I first ground my use of the term ‘apparatus.’ Then, having outlined my definition of the apparatus at the Bauhaus, I closely examine three apparatuses to mark the need to reclaim their thingness. My definition of the apparatus at the Bauhaus comprises a specific family of objects—ones that are not only technologically reproducible, medium unspecific, and mechanized but are also formally and conceptually interlinked. This definition, however, can be extended in scale, to include the building plans and theater models—Gropius’ Dessau building or Total Theater—and in scope, to include not only mechanized theatrical props but also artifacts, publications, and other products that operated as apparatuses in that they internalized (and then neutralized) the Bauhaus agenda’s inner contradictions.
81
F Ö L D E S I — DA L M A
counter-clockwise from top left: Hirschfeld-Mack und Mitarbeiter vor Lichtspielsapparat, 1923. 8.6 x 9.9 cm. The University of Melbourne Archives. From Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig, Hapkemeyer, Andreas, Stasny, Peter, and Museo D’arte Moderna. Ludwig HirschfeldMack: Bauhäusler Und Visionär / [Herausgeber, Andreas Hapkemeyer Und Peter Stasny]. Ostfildern: H. Cantz, 2000. Plate 29. László Moholy-Nagy, “Light Space Modulator (The Light Prop),” 1922-1930. Mobile construction, various metals, plastic, wood and
an electric engine. 151 x 70 x 70 cm. Busch-Reininger Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge. From: Passuth, Krisztina, and MoholyNagy, László. Moholy-Nagy. 1st Paperback ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, 177. Andor Weininger, Mechanical Stage Revue, 1926. Pencil and watercolor on paper. 18.1 x 24.2 cm. From: Weininger, Andor, Svestka, Jiri, Michaelsen, Katherine Jánszky, Kraus, Stefan, and Neuberger Museum. Andor Weininger. Düsseldorf: Kunstverein Für Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen, 1991, 71.
Mariya Rusak S E N I O R TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
Constructing the Soviet Modern: Politics of Domestic Spaces FAC U LTY ADVI S O R
M. Christine Boyer This research focuses specifically on the decades of the 1920s, 1960s and 1990s in the Soviet Union that marked radical restructuring of state ideologies, socio-political climate and economic production. The main argument of this research is that while housing policy in the Soviet Union and its rhetoric were strongly intertwined with ideology and biopolitics, the ultimate goal of Soviet social engineers was to construct a new and very specific Soviet modernity, distinct from the past and its counterparts from abroad. This paper addresses this specific version of Soviet modernity and it’s shifting meanings as the project of the Soviet Modern. Formative and performative functions were attached to domestic spaces and objects, while the private realm was subjugated to methods of industrial production and control. Domestic space was radicalized, rationalized and staged through various tools of state involvement. These interventions were attempts of state ideologists to construct a rigid framework of modernity in order to control irrational and potentially subversive domestic behaviors. However, constrained by lack of resources, centralized planning and inadequate production, Soviet modernity was incomplete. This lack of cohesion provided spaces for the maneuver of the Soviet dweller. Inadequacies of material provision and economic shortcomings created instances through which material artefacts exhibited superfluity of meanings and gave agency to the dweller. Reactions and deviations from prescribed ways of living can be attributed not only to the resistance to official ideology, but also to the resistance to the whole project of modernity. In the post-Soviet era the search for modernity acquired a different form shaped by free market in the absence of state involvement. Thus, the politics of domestic spaces in the Soviet Union was primarily subjugated to the quest for modernity to fulfill a political agenda. However, inertia in this quest continued long into the postSoviet era without any state participation.
R U S A K— M A R I YA
Misha Semenov S E N I O R TH E S I S S P R I N G 2015
Playing by the Rules: Examining the Interactions of Rules, Built Form, and Social Behavior in American Residential Communities FAC U LTY ADVI S O R S
Stan Allen and Alison Isenberg (History) Architects are used to thinking of the housing they build as a final, fixed form, but we all know that this is never the case; buildings are constantly undergoing a process of user-generated modification. What if architecture harnessed the power of the user instead of repressing it? My thesis holds up a critical lens to the interaction between built form, guiding rules, and the behavior of residents in five significant housing projects in the Americas designed to be expanded by their inhabitants. Key to the argument is a reconsideration of the modernist pedigrees put forth by the projects’ authors; while the designers of projects such as Quinta Monroy or Seaside maintain a list of precedents rooted in a Eurocentric high-architectural discourse, this thesis proposes that a thorough analysis of these projects requires the restoration of a different precedent: the North American model of a residential neighborhood governed by codes, covenants, and deeds meant to protect real estate values and maintain social stability, first applied on a massive scale in Levittown, New York. By using Levittown as a base case, this study offers a new model for the analysis of projects in Peru, Chile, and the United States as open systems with rules firmly rooted in an American social and economic model. Specific architectural and urban design features of each project serve as case studies: the initially built “nucleus”, windows, structural walls, mass-produced elements, and yards. How are these elements controlled, and how do they in turn control the inhabitants of these projects? How are rules encoded, enforced, and communicated? By questioning each project’s social agenda and analyzing its physical form architecturally—as planned and following occupancy—this study attempts to establish a firmer basis for the broader and more effective use of rules by architects, whether in low-income housing or high-end development, whether encoded in structure, custom, or law, adding a twist to the idea of environmental determinism by defining architectural production as more than just built form. In the process of building this new framework, it questions the need for these projects to justify themselves in relationship to questionably relevant modernist precedents. Ultimately, it argues that a new rules-based architecture can offer a viable model for the twenty-first-century architect to effect change on a broader scale.
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S E M E N OV — M I S H A
clockwise from top left: An ad for Baglione’s SpaceAge Home Improvements, from Thousand Lanes 6, no.1. This image of Quinta Monroy: http://www.mfa.fi/files/mfa/ edotemateriaalit/GA-AAIquique8.jpg
Ruskin Square in Seaside. Source: Gorlin Architects. The process for Architectural Review Board approval at Village Homes involves studying models to determine that solar rights are not violated. Source: Judy Corbet, Village Homes’ Solar House Designs.
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The Ph.D. Program
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 these primary areas: architecture, urbanism, landscape, and engineering/building technology, or within the scientific study of computation and technology. The History and Theory Track 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. The proseminars in the Fall are followed by collaborative workshops in the Spring generating polemical publications, exhibitions, films and other multimedia platforms. These workshops also act as one of the hubs of the interdisciplinary Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton, positioning architectural research within a wider field. A guest seminar series, supported by the School of Architecture and administered by the students in residence, forms a venue for ongoing discussions.
The Computation, Energy, and Technology in Architectural Track The architectural technology Ph.D. track for computation, energy, and architectural technology was launched in 2014. The new track is an addition to the Ph.D. program that will develop and research new techniques of embodied computation and new systems for energy and environmental performance. It will be supported by many connections to the School of Engineering and Applied Science, particularly with Computer Science and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment. New courses and curriculum for the track are being developed, and with the recent acquisition of a powerful industrial robotic arm and the planned renovation of the Architectural Laboratory, students will actively contribute to handson applied research in architecture while becoming experts in their field. The pro seminar for students in the Ph.D. track in Computation, Energy, and Technology in Architecture is organized as a research seminar to introduce the participants to scientific research methods in the context of design in Architecture and science in engineering. It is structured as a series of introductory presentations of exemplary methods based on case studies and a number of guest presentations from collaborating disciplines. The participants will identify an area of research in the first half of the semester and work on developing a research project by defining research methods, a hypothesis and an experimental component as we precedent analysis .
Program Committee Beatriz Colomina, History and Theory Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, Ph.D. Program Lucia Allais, History and Theory M. Christine Boyer, Urbanism Axel Kilian, Computational Design Forrest Meggers, Energy and Environment Spyridon Papapetros, History and Theory
Supporting Faculty
Recent Visiting Faculty
Sigrid M. Adriaenssens, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Jean-Louis Cohen Spring 2012, Fall 2012–Fall 2014 Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Elie R. Bou-Zeid, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering Eduardo Cadava, Department of English Media Technologies, Literary Theory, 19th-Century American Literature, Comparative Literature, Theories of Translation Esther da Costa Meyer, Department of Art and Archaeology 19th- and 20th-Century Architectural History Brigid Doherty, Departments of German and Art and Archeology 19th- and 20th-Century Art and Literary History, Aesthetics Adam Finkelstein, Department of Computer Science Computer Graphics, Digital Imaging, Rendering and Visualization Hal Foster, Department of Art and Archaeology 19th- and 20th-Century Art History, Cultural Theory Rubén Gallo, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures 20th-Century Literary and Cultural Theory, History of Latin America 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 Anson Rabinbach, Department of History 20th-Century European History, Intellectual History, History of Technology Barry P. Rand, Department of Electrical Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment Dan Steingart, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment Claire E. White, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Sylvia Lavin Fall 2009–2011, Fall 2013–2014 Chair of the Ph.D. in Architecture Program and Professor of Architectural History and Theory, UCLA John Rajchman Fall 2006 Adjunct Professor, Director of Modern Art M.A. Program, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University Elizabeth Grosz Spring 2006 Professor, Women’s Studies in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University Mirko Zardini Fall 2007 Director, Canadian Centre for Architecture
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Jasmine Benyamin (University of Wisconsin), Towards a (New) Objectivity: Photography in German Architectural Discourse 1900–1914 (2015) 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)
Lydia Kallipoliti (Syracuse University), MISSION GALATIC HOUSEHOLD: The Resurgence of Cosmological Imagination in the Architecture of the 18960s and 1970s (2013) Joy Knoblauch (University of Michigan), Going soft: Architecture and the human sciences in search of new institutional forms (1963–1974) (2012)
AnnMarie Brennan (University of Melbourne), Olivetti: A Working Model of Utopia (2011)
Roy Kozlovsky (Northeastern University), Representation of Children in Postwar Architecture (2008)
Craig Buckley (Yale University), Graphic Apparatuses: Architecture, Media, and the Reinvention of Assembly 1956–1973 (2013)
Daniel Lopez-Perez (University of San Diego), SKYSCRAPEROLOGY: Tall Buildings in History and Building Practice (1975–1984) (2013)
Mark Campbell (School of Architecture at the Architectural Association), A Beautiful Leisure: The Decadent Architectural Humanism of Geoffrey Scott, Bernard and Mary Berenson (2013)
Louis Martin (l’Université du Québec à Montréal), The Search for Theory in Architecture: Anglo-American Debates (1957–1976) (2002)
Sarah Deyong (Texas A&M University), Archigram and the City of Tomorrow (2008)
Joanna Merwood (Parsons School of Design), The Mechanization of Cladding: The Chicago Skyscraper and the Constructions of Architectural Modernity (2003)
Leonardo Diaz Borioli (ESTUDIO 3.14), Collective Autobiography Building Luis Barragán (2015)
Joaquim Moreno (Columbia University), From a Little Magazine to the City: Arquitecturas Bis (1974–85) (2010)
Zvi Efrat, The Object of Zionism: Architecture of Statehood in Israel, 1948–1973 (2014)
Ernestina Osorio (University of California, Los Angeles), Intersections of Architecture, Photography, and Personhood: Case Studies in Mexican Modernity (2006)
Inês Fernandes, Building Brasilia: Modern Architecture and National Identity in Brazil (1930–1960) (2003) Anthony Fontenot (Woodbury School of Architecture), Non-Design and the Non-Planned City (2013) Gina Greene (University of Pennsylvania), Children in Glass Houses: Toward a Hygienic, Eugenic Architecture for Children during the Third Republic in France (1870–1940) (2012) Romy Hecht (Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile), The Attack on Greenery: Critical Perceptions of the Man-Made Landscape, 1955–1969 (2009) Branden Hookway (Cornell University), Computational Environments of the 20th Century (2011) Lisa L. Hsieh (University of Minnesota), ArchiteXt: The Readable, Playable and Edible Architecture of Japanese New Wave (2013) Alicia Imperiale (Tyler School of Art-Architecture/ Temple University) Alternate Organics: The Aesthetics of Experimentation in Art, Technology & Architecture in Postwar Italy (2014) Karin Jaschke (University of Brighton), Mythical Journeys: Ethnography, Archaeology, and the Attraction of Tribal Cultures in the Work of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Haan (2012)
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) Beatriz Preciado (Université Paris VIII, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture from the Secret Museum to Playboy (2012) Enrique Ramirez (Ball State University), Airs of Modernity 1881–1914 (2013) Lutz Robbers (IKKM Weimar), Modern Architecture in the Age of Cinema: Mies van der Rohe and the Moving Image (2011) Ingeborg Rocker (Harvard University), Evolving Structures: The Architecture of the Digital Medium (2010) Rafael Segal (Harvard University), A Unitary Approach to Architecture—Alfred Neumann and the ‘Humanization of Space’ (2011) David Smiley (Barnard College), Pedestrian modern: modern architecture and the American Metropolis, 1935–1955 (2007)
PH.D. PROGRAM
Recently Completed Dissertations The wide range of possible research topics is illustrated by the following dissertations.
David Snyder (Shenkar College of Engineering and Design), The Jewish question and the modern metropolis: urban renewal in Prague and Warsaw, 1885–1950 (2007) Molly W. Steenson (Carnegie Mellon University), Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte & MIT ’s Architecture Machine Group (2014) Sara Stevens (University of British Columbia), Developing Expertise: The Architecture of Real Estate, 1908–1965 (2012) Irene Sunwoo (Bard College), Between the ‘Well-Laid Table’ and the ‘Marketplace’: Alvin Boyarsky’s Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy (2013) Els Verbakel (Technion Institute of Technology), Of Voids, Networks and Platforms: Post-War Visions for a European Transnational City: 1952–1958 (2013) Diana Kurkovsky West (Russian Computer Scientists Project, European University, St. Petersburg, Russia), CyberSovietica: Planning, Design, and the Cybernetics of Soviet Space, 1954–1986 (2013) Shundana Yusaf (University of Utah), Wireless Sites: Architecture in the Space of British Radio (1927–1945) (2011) Tamar Zinguer (The Cooper Union School of Architecture), Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys, 1836–1952 (2006)
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COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH PROJECTS —
94 Modern Historiography: Latin American Architecture 2012–13 and 2013–14 96 RADICAL PEDAGOGY© 2010–11 and 2011–12; exhibition 2013–ongoing 98 Playboy & Architecture: 1953–1979 2008–09 and 2009–10; exhibition 2012–ongoing
118 Urtzi Grau Replica! 120 Vanessa Grossman Managing Utopia: Architecture and French Municipal Communism, 1958-81 122 Margo Handwerker Public Displays of Effection: Ecological Art and Utility, 1969–1984 124 Evangelos Kotsioris Komp’iuter Architecture(s), 195x–198x
DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS —
100 Cristóbal Amunátegui Circles of Artifice
126 Anna-Maria Meister From Form to Norm: The Systematization of Values in German Design 192x–196x
102 José Aragüez The Architecture-Engineering Hybrid and the Formal Domain, 1957–2002
128 Matthew Mullane ‘Worthy Objects’: Architecture and Observation in Japan
104 Luis Avilés Postwar Rhetoric. Technology, History, Ornament (1947–1966)
130 Yetunde Olaiya Expert, Artifact, Fact: The Technopolitics of Architectural Production in French Black Africa, 1945-75
106 Joseph Bedford Hermeneutic-Phenomenology’s Architectural Genealogy: Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert (1968–1988) 108 Marc Britz Durand In Deutschland: Formal Economy, Financial Argumentation, and the Scarcity of Means in German Architecture from 1799 to 1848 110 Esther Choi The Organization of Life: Architecture, Biotechnics, and the Life Sciences in Great Britain, 1929–1950 112 Britt Eversole The Disenchantment with Democracy: Architectural Models of Creative Self-Organization, Italy 193x–196x 114 Daniela Fabricius Calculation and Risk: The Rational Turn in West German Architecture, 1965–1985 116 Ignacio Gonzalez Galan The Logics of Arredamento: Circulation and Display of the Italian Interior, 1928–1963
132 Masha Panteleyeva First they learn to play Jazz, next they sell out the Motherland. Youth and Modernism in Soviet Russia during the Thaw, 1954–1965 134 Clelia Pozzi “Old Forms Recast as New:” Restauro and its Techniques during the Political Modernization of the Italian Built Environment 136 Daria Ricchi From Storia to History: Literature and Fiction in Italian Architectural Writing, 1940–1957 138 Michael Su The Architecture of Synergy: R. Buckminster Fuller’s Theorization of a “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” (1915 to 1938) 140 Meredith TenHoor Food, Media and Spatial Politics from Les Halles to Rungis 142 Federica Vannucchi From Control to Discipline: Design and Power at the Milan Triennale, 1945–1973
PH.D. PROGRAM
Research topics in progress by students in the program include:
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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. Two years of proseminars in the Fall are followed by workshops in the Spring that also act as one of the hubs of the interdisciplinary Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton, positioning architectural research within a wider field.
PH.D. PROGRAM
Ph.D. Collaborative Research Projects
Modern Historiography: Latin American Architecture Research Seminar, 2012–13 and 2013–14 Professor Beatriz Colomina with students: Lluis Casanovas Blanco, Michael Faciejew, Justin Fowler, Evangelos Kotsioris, Matthew Mullane, Victoria Øye, Masha Panteleyeva, Clelia Pozzi and Nicholas Risteen Historiography is as much an analysis of historical method as it is a means of identifying blind spots in the historical record. As a vehicle for critical self-correction, the historiographic turn often appears in moments of generational transition or disciplinary introspection. Seeking to generate new contemporary practices through alternative readings of the past, this proseminar addressed the brief period from the 1930s to the early 1960s in which historians of modern architecture, architects, journalists, institutions, and governments from around the world trained their sights on Latin America. Beyond merely reevaluating past efforts, the seminar devoted attention to those aspects of historical practice that might constitute a “modern” historiography. Students explored the use of new media in exhibitions, governmental funding of architectural publications for purposes of cultural influence and exchange, and other modes of historical transmission. The case study of the construction of modern Latin American architecture is one where historiography converges with the future-oriented notion of the architectural project. Student research from this seminar was presented at the 2013 São Paolo conference ARCHITECTURAL ELECTIVE AFFINITIES: correspondences, transfers, inter/multidisciplinarity, as well as in workshops at the University of São Paolo in 2014.
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M O D E R N H I S TO R I O G R A P H Y — 2 012 –14
Radical Pedagogies Research Seminar, 2010–11 and 2011–12; exhibition, 2013–ongoing Professor Beatriz Colomina with students: Anthony Acciavatti, Juan Cristobal Amunategui, Jose Araguez Escobar, Joseph Bedford, Esther Choi, Britt Eversole, Daniela Fabricius, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan, Vanessa Grossman, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Federica Soletta and Federica Vannucchi “Radical Pedagogies” is an ongoing multi-year collaborative research project led by Beatriz Colomina with a team of Ph.D. students of the School of Architecture at Princeton University. It has so far involved three years of seminars, interviews, archival research, guest lectures and almost 80 contributors from more than two dozen countries. In this, and similar research projects conducted by the Ph.D. program at Princeton, architecture history and theory are taught and practiced as an experiment in and of themselves, exploring the potential for collaboration—in what is often taught to be a field of individual endeavor. “Radical Pedagogies” investigates a series of intense but short-lived experiments in architectural education that profoundly transformed the landscape, methods and politics of the discipline in the post-WWII years. As challenge to normative thinking, they questioned, redefined, and reshaped the postwar field of architecture. These experiments are radical in the literal meaning from the Latin radix (root), the basis or foundation of something. Radical pedagogies shook foundations and disturbed assumptions, rather than reinforce and disseminate them. They operated as small endeavors on the fringes of institutions but had long-lasting impact. Much of architectural teaching today still rests on the paradigms they introduced. The “Radical Pedagogies” exhibition has been presented at the 3rd Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2013), the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014, Special Mention), and the 7th Warsaw Under Construction Festival (2015). On this last occasion, the exhibition opens up new directions and a new density of global interconnections. Eastern Europe, Africa, East Asia and Australasia become the protagonists, opening new insights into pedagogical experimentation after 1945. Conceived as an interactive platform, the exhibition incorporates take-away texts, facsimiles, original publications and teaching documents, archival films, and implements interactive features through augmented reality. www.radical-pedagogies.com
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R A D I C A L P E DAG O GY© — 2 010 –12
Playboy & Architecture: 1953–1979 Research Seminar, 2008–09 and 2009–10; exhibition 2012–ongoing Professor Beatriz Colomina with students: Pep Avilés, Joseph Bedford, Marc Britz, Britt Eversole, Daniela Fabricius, Gina Greene, Vanessa Grossman, Margo Handwerker, Joy Knoblauch, Yetunde Olaiya, Enrique Ramirez, Daria Ricchi, Molly Steenson, and Federica Vannucchi from Princeton University The research seminar was dedicated to the study of Architecture in Playboy: 1953–1979. The thesis of this seminar was that Playboy played a crucial yet unacknowledged role in the cultivation of design culture in the USA. Through a range of strategies, the magazine integrated state-of-the-art designers and architects into a carefully constructed vision of a desirable contemporary lifestyle. The seminar explored the ways in which Playboy was ahead of professional and popular magazines in promoting modern architecture and design. The collaborative research seminar analyzed the magazine, secondary literature on Playboy and related archives; interviews with protagonists were also conducted. The research led to a large traveling exhibition: Playboy Architecture, 1953–1979. The exhibition showed how modern architecture — buildings, interiors, furniture, cities and product design — was mobilized to shape a new sexual and consumer identity for the American male and how architectural taste became critical to success in the art of seduction. It opened in September 2012 at the Bureau Europa/NAiM in Maastricht, the Netherlands. It traveled to Amsterdam in 2013 and was redesigned for a February 2014 show at the Deutsche Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany. Student research was published in a 2012 special issue of Volume dedicated to architectural interiors.
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P L AY B OY & A R C H IT E C T U R E — 2 0 0 8 –10
Cristóbal Amunátegui Circles of Artifice
In the Paris of the 1880s, amid the spectacle of the universal expositions and Baron Haussmann’s massive urban renewals, a group of architects, entertainers, engineers and financiers came together in a new kind of architectural venture: the design and management of several buildings for the entertainment of the crowds. Far from the postulates of the Beaux-Arts academic architecture through which the century is famously known, this handful of short-lived urban hippodromes, circuses, velodromes and skate-rinks displayed impressive mechanisms for the production and transformation of space, joining the collection of artifacts that reorganized the sensory economy of the modern subject in the second half of the nineteenth century. This dissertation is about those buildings, and their close engagement with fin-de-siècle aesthetic discourses concerned with “artifice.” Not unlike works in painting and literature, in overturning aesthetic codes inherited from neoclassical tradition, these interiors contributed to put the very notion of reality under pressure. Using the latest advancements in hydraulic and electric technology, and adapting mechanisms derived from the railway industry, moving stages gave way to urban pools in the lapse of an evening, just as massive iron-and-glass sliding roofs could turn interiors of erotically-charged spectacles into open air arenas dedicated to familial entertainment. Indeed, the myriad alterations to which space, matter and public were subjected made the buildings themselves into attractions, ones on offer to audiences in search of ever-more integrated “experiences.”
My dissertation suggests that central to the alliance of artifice and experience was the problem of circularity. The period’s fascination with panoramism was complicated and intensified by interiors that appealed to circularity in all its possible manifestations, from the autonomy traditionally associated with the circle to notions of historical and temporal cyclicality; from the implementation of rotational motion in architectural elements to the use of the circle as an apparatus for the administration of increasingly large urban audiences. This paved the way for an array of broader cultural transformations, not the least of which was the advent of new forms of land speculation, and the regimentation of modern leisure through means of class organization and distribution. The circle then became more than simple geometry in the service of Beaux-Arts academicism—it was the means by which aspects of the everyday could be cited, isolated, combined, transformed, or improved in search of new forms of social and aesthetic cohesion.
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A M U N ÁT E G U I — C R I S TÓ B A L
José Aragüez The Architecture-Engineering Hybrid and the Formal Domain, 1957–2002
As social, environmental and political concerns became increasingly pressing over the course of the twentieth century, the question of form in architecture kept taking on more and more forms. The understanding of form in nature, form as the reification of power structures, the psychology of formal perception, the quest for form’s “interiority,” form as the catalyst of participatory processes, the phenomenology of form, the relationship between form and formalism— the ubiquity of form in our field cannot be taken but as a marker of its significance. Though everywhere, however, “form” in architecture is far from having been sufficiently theorized. Rather, it tends to remain in the background of other narratives that are built into spheres peripheral to architecture. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to develop a new conceptualization of architectural form centered around questions of three-dimensional configuration and internal spatial arrangement—as opposed to those relating to external envelope, volumetric outline or mass, which I make correspond to the domain of shape.
can not be separated from the fact that, despite their obvious differences—Burt closer to being a geometer, Giorgini to an artist, and Balmond embodying a stronger intellectual inclination—their work can be jointly discussed as featuring a self-defined rigor underlying the apparently capricious. Giorgini’s general hypothesis entailed that, whether a point, a segment, a triangle, a parallelogram or a symmetrical mesh, any geometric unit can be taken through a deformational sequence in such a way that an asymmetrical structure would be obtained similar to those existing in nature, where only curved lines and surfaces, he believed, could be found. Burt’s research gravitated chiefly around the study of systems of space subdivision based on polyhedra with double-curved surfaces—so-called “saddle polyhedra”—with incidental reference to analogous cases with planar surfaces. Balmond conceived abstract principles in such a way that opportunism, instinct and the capacity to seize the immediate became central to make any one contingent condition along the formthinking process into another order.
I hypothesize and show that the medium through which to make this contribution in the realm of form is a particular lineage within the tradition of the architecture-engineering hybrid. This tradition is, in fact, older than that of the figure who falls unambiguously in either of the two categories, architect or engineer. Within it, the lineage my study delineates is one which, I argue, appeared only during the second half of the twentieth century. Three case studies are examined—Italian Vittorio Giorgini (1926-2010), Israeli Michaël Burt (b. 1937), and Sri Lankan-born, London-based Cecil Balmond (b. 1943). Instead of each separately being regarded as architect-engineers in any customary sense, it is their work that I read together as featuring distinctive aspects within the architecture-engineering hybrid. Those have to do primarily with an approach to design which, while deeply inflected by an engineering valance, nevertheless yields the full range of spatial articulations that are characteristically architectural.
Thus, whether through periodical continuity (Burt), geometrically controlled, topologically sound transformations (Giorgini) or sequences of relational templates (Balmond), all three sought to establish a consistent structure or logic originating what otherwise comes across as whimsical, random or just plain weird. It is in the negotiation of these two aspects, and therefore as an index of that which sets apart the production of each author in terms of such a negotiation, that the question of disposition will be posited as central—if composition emphasizes fixity and visual considerations, disposition will be taken here to release a sort of open order. As a result, this dissertation will capture form’s patterned idiosyncrasy, viz., a qualitative realm of form that is defined within the liminal space between the idiosyncratic and the lawful, or in other words, between that which falls outside received ways of grouping resemblances and differences, and that which is rule-governed.
Overlooked in the scholarship, the work of Giorgini, Burt and Balmond is thus examined here in its capacity to induce the platform from which to extend the bounds of possibility of the concept of architectural form. In that regard, the idiosyncratic character of their formal production is essential for the purposes of this project, for it allows to access such a concept beyond received formulations, most of which revolved around so-called “canonical” architecture instead. As I illustrate the engineering valance of their design procedures
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A R AG Ü E Z — J O S É
Luis Avilés Postwar Rhetoric. Technology, History, Ornament (1947–1966)
This study is an attempt to bring new light and gain a different perspective for the understanding of postwar architecture. Right after the Second World War, modern architecture entered a period of self-affirmation and defense of past accomplishments while being contested and opposed. The forerunners of modern architecture slowly moved from prominent attacking positions—which originally qualified their proposals as avant-gardist— to defensive ones, abandoning in turn many of the interwar normative precepts such as the banishment to ornament. Architectural discourse glided constantly between epideictic oratory, forensic debates, and deliberative opinions, challenging the persuasive capacity of its protagonists. Modern architecture was no longer about utopia but about eloquence. Meanwhile, the increasing sophistication of industrial modes of production expanded the aesthetic palette of architects combining standardization and expressive freedom under the same paradigm: new techniques and materials—plastics, polished metals, acrylics, or plywood just to name a few— flooded the market after the efforts of war economy. Beginning with the arrival of the European émigrés to the United States, this dissertation examines the influence of the industrial rhetoric of affluent societies in the development of postwar architecture, paying close attention to the adjustment of classical modernism and the frictions between emerging interpretations to legitimize their views within an international context. Rhetoric constitutes a privileged field to face this challenge. It not only provides an organizational method—the five chapters of the dissertation follow the classical and still widely accepted organization of rhetoric studies that was first proposed by Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria (I a.d.)—but also an epistemology: hidden behind literary metaphors, dialectic persuasiveness, and material gaiety stand many of the cultural and ideological assumptions that are historically relevant to understand the transition between the avantgardes and postmodernism. Beginning with technological and industrial achievements— Inventio—, the first chapter analyzes how an aesthetic consideration of mechanization triggered a reappraisal of geometric patterns and ornaments as legitimate companions for modern architecture. The second chapter—Dispositio— investigates the historical origins of fundamental concepts and expressive techniques of postwar architecture (such as texture) and their gentle assimilation in the architectural vocabulary. Starting with Moholy-Nagy’s posthumous
book Vision in motion (1947), this chapter examines the indebtedness of those concepts to the artistic avantgardes and the ideological transformations they required. The third chapter—Elocutio—deals with the debates around the never fully accepted vision of modern architecture as a style. Originally rejected by some of the harbingers of modernity such as Sigfried Giedion, the coiners of the label “International Style” Henry Russell-Hitchcock and Philip Johnson felt compelled to fine-tune their original syllogisms in order to respond to the new techno-cultural situation. Eventually, as every style, indeed relied in a codified grammar that had to be recalibrated to face the new challenges that society was experiencing. The fourth chapter departs from the revival of past architectures—Memoria—to gain new impulse for architecture production. The incorporation of the prehistory of the modern movement to the discourse through formerly disregarded figures—such as Louis Sullivan or Antoni Gaudí—, together with the demystification of foundational ones—Adolf Loos—also contributed to the expansion of the architectural lexicon. Finally, the last chapter—Pronuntiatio— pays attention to the sculptural effervescence and material gesticulations of architects such as Marcel Breuer, Edward Durrell Stone, Minoru Yamasaki, or Ernesto Nathan Rogers among others. The use of lattices, patterns, and textures in façade compositions materialized what Alois Riegl termed as Unendlich rapport, a continuous tissue of geometric abstract motifs that characterized the architecture of the period. The reemergence of ornament in postwar architecture constitutes a paramount historical stratum in the archaeology of postmodern architecture.
105 P H . D . A B S T R AC T S AV I L É S — LU I S
clockwise from top left: Frank B. Gilbreth, “Cyclograph of an Expert Surgeon Tying a Knot,” 1914. From Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 1948 László Moholy-Nagy, “The Transformation”, 1927 Herbert Bayer, “Einsamer Großstädter”, 1932 László Moholy-Nagy, “Space Modulator”, 1945 Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, Victor Lundy, et. al., Pavilion for the American Concrete and Masonry Association. Concrete Industries Exposition, Ohio, 1958 [Smithsonian Archives for American Art] Marcel Breuer, US Embassy in Den Haag, 1955–58 [Smithsonian Archives for American Art]
Joseph Bedford Hermeneutic-Phenomenology’s Architectural Genealogy: Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert (1968–1988) The advanced masters level course in the History and Theory of Architecture offered by Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert at the University of Essex in England between 1968 and 1978 was the first of its kind. It was the first taught-course in the history and theory of architecture that granted a degree. Degree courses prior to 1968 had only been in the building sciences and were largely in the service of developing principled technical knowledge by which the architectural profession hoped that it might lead the construction industry. But the newly founded course at Essex had an entirely different ambition. It aimed precisely to challenge the then dominant concern for technical knowledge in architecture. Its goal was to redefine architectural theory on the basis of meaning rather than method. Through a mixture of philosophy and history, it simultaneously diagnosed architecture’s dangerous imbrications with the extreme positivistic and rationalistic attitude towards science—seeing it as the very symptom of a crisis of nihilism in the West— and it offered a cure for the sick patient, in the recovery of architecture’s relationship to cultural traditions and to the basis of such traditions in the non-rational dimension of life. While the Essex course lasted only a decade, it fuelled an entire genealogy within Anglo-American architectural education over subsequent years. The major members of this
genealogy include Daniel Libeskind, Alberto Perez-Gomez, David Leatherbarrow and Peter Carl. The roots, stem and branches of this family tree have coursed with ideas drawn from phenomenological-hermeneutics. Through consistent readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, this genealogy has developed a particular understanding about the way that ideas are intertwined with practices. On the basis of these ideas a number of pedagogical strategies were developed in design studio to reconnect the embodied practical life-world that takes place within buildings to a higher-level content by which it could become more meaningful. This dissertation explores the history of this course and the impact of the ideas developed within it upon the teaching of architecture in England and North America from 1968 to the present. It offers an account of these efforts to transform the teaching of architecture and in particular how they interacted with other discourses and problems within architecture during this period and with the institutional conditions of the various schools in which these ideas were put into circulation.
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B E D F O R D — J O S E P H
Marc Britz Durand in Deutschland: Formal Economy, Financial Argumentation, and the Scarcity of Means in German Architecture from 1799 to 1848 As architectural educator, prominent French theorist JeanNicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) had a considerable influence on the German architectural production throughout the first half of the 19th century. Attracted by the French architect’s modern teaching method, a generation of young German architects became guest students in his course on architecture at the École Polytechnique in Paris and interns in Durand’s private atelier. In contrast to the rather unstructured education in their homelands, Durand provided the Germans with a codified system of architectural composition and a radically concise conception of the architectural object. For Durand, architecture was referential only to the history of its own solutions and thus divisible into genres of autonomous artefacts in the service of common public welfare. Durand propagated the idea that the prime objective of every architectural design lay in the achievement of the most fitting and the most economic disposition of a conventionally defined architectural repertoire within the ideal constraints of a building’s given genre. German students like Gottlob Georg Barth (1777–1848), Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray (1775–1845), Johann Friedrich Christian Hess (1785–1845), Leo von Klenze (1784–1845), Peter Cremer (1785–1863), and Adolph Anton von Vagedes (1777–1842) continued to practice along the lines of Durand’s teachings throughout their subsequent careers in the many capitals of the various German states. As court architects or state-employed architectural inspectors, they were forced to adjust and fine-tune Durand’s abstract universal theory of architectural disposition to the quite often hostile contingencies of their commissions. Guided by the will to stick to Durand’s generally classicizing architectural idiom and faced with the primary task of erecting public and private buildings under the pressure of material and financial scarcity, these site-specific adjustments took on many forms. Given these circumstances, Durand had involuntarily set the agenda for the Germans to follow with an ingenious conflation of architectural form, budget, and beauty: “All of the architect’s talent comes down to the solution of two problems: (1) in the case of private buildings, how to make the building as fit for its purpose as possible for a given sum; (2) in the case of public buildings, where fitness must be assumed, how to build at the least possible expense. It will thus be seen that in architecture there is no incompatibility, and no mere compatibility, between beauty and economy: for economy is one of the principle causes of beauty.” 1 Durand’s discovery that architectural form could be supported by a financial argument resonated in the many ways in which the German architects tried to match
their own sense of beauty to their patrons’ budgets. From the formulation and implementation of administrative guidelines for urban and rural planning to the reorganization of architectural education, including the erection of institutional buildings, and the renewal of architectural theory, Durand’s followers were forced to set his lucid theory of architectural fitness and economy to work in the muddled complexity of a nation struggling to emerge from provinciality. This dissertation will examine Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s architectural theory in correspondence to the architectural production of his former German students by analyzing the multiple compositional tactics and building techniques in which the German architects followed Durand’s economical dictum throughout their careers. The dissertation’s main focus will be on the notion of financial argumentation as a potentially subversive strategy to realize architectural objects according to specific formal preferences. Apart from highlighting Durand’s influence on Germany’s early modern architecture, the dissertation will thus describe the more practical problems related to the implementation of architectural projects against the financial and material scarcity in early 19th century Germany. Following the trajectory of the German disciples’ professional development and drawing from the different texts, buildings, projects, and biographies involved, the ultimate objective of the dissertation is to examine the theoretical conflation of architectural form and financial argumentation in Durand’s theory within the material constraints of a number of concrete examples ranging from Coudray’s failed theatre project in Weimar to Klenze’s successful museum in Munich.
1. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand; Précis of the Lectures on Architecture; The Getty Research Institute Publications Program, Texts and Documents; Los Angeles; 2000; p. 86
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Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray, Design Study, Paris, 1801 Leo Klenze, Design Study, Paris, c. 1804
B R IT Z — M A R C
from top:
Esther Choi The Organization of Life: Architecture, Biotechnics, and the Life Sciences in Great Britain, 1929–1950 In the decades between the two world wars, a group of modern architects, planners, and biologists were faced with the dilemma of how to redesign Great Britain. Reconstruction, and planning in particular, adopted an acute sense of urgency in the 1930s, as the exigencies of the economic collapse and the prospect of another war intensified the degeneration of a “civilization in crisis.” For the architects, planners, and biologists who sought to rebuild Britain, scientific concepts offered a vision for national regeneration that held allegiance to the epistemic virtues of truth and scientific objectivity. Translating biological order to all scales of life—from bodies and buildings to cities and nations—presented a rational template for the dominance hierarchy of social, political, and economic structures, while rendering a singular vision of history, growth, and civilization that could be understood by all. This dissertation focuses on the collaborations that took place between these architects, planners, and biologists to reconstruct Great Britain as a scientifically ordered world after the economic crash of 1929. Desperate for the nation to recoup, a number of scientists associated with the neoDarwinian synthesis surmised that just as environmental control could be used to alter micro-evolutionary patterns amongst plant and animal life over time, so, too, could the behavioral patterns of the British citizenry be redesigned through everyday interactions with their environment. Using practices borrowed from principles of Scientific Management, scientists collaborated with modern architects to develop metrics for human needs and behavior, which, in turn, informed the design of functional objects, buildings, and cities. Spanning twenty years, the case studies in this dissertation are examined from the vantage of biotechnics: Patrick Geddes’s late-nineteenth-century biologistic theory that the products of technological production civilize humanity by molding and choreographing human activity. Applied by architects and planners in compositions ranging from experimental furniture design to city planning, these projects fulfilled what Geddes (and later, Lewis Mumford) prophesized as the “biotechnic period” of the Anthropocene: a moment of technological development that would enable forms of eugenic optimization for humankind and set new normative standards for existence. Unlike previous Vitalist instantiations of biotechnical design, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which merged genetics with evolutionary biology, mobilized architecture to act as both a symbol of and dispositif for biological management and engineering. With living conditions seen as a matter of evolutionary survival, architectural projects commissioned by scientists
like Julian Huxley and Solly Zuckerman became the loci for sociobiological experiments. Evolutionary biology was used to understand cooperative social behavior and applied to modern housing projects in the reconstruction of London. Likewise, the design of modern village colleges and health centers aided sociobiological experiments that sought to reform the rural citizenry by cultivating standards of taste and habits. City planning schemes, proposed by scientists and architects alike, used the rhetoric of scientism to mitigate the subjugation of individual will to standardization and organization. These concerns also filtered through architecture and planning projects for the British Empire, particularly in West African nations. Unified by an interest in standardization, rationalization, and scientific progressivism, architects and biologists aspired to mold uniformity in an otherwise unstable world. Yet after World War I, belief in the possibilities of engineering adopted a science-fiction pitch, assigning architecture a crucial role: The built environment became a space onto which nascent fantasies of a collective identity based on evolutionary humanism could be projected. Though many larger-scale biotechnical proposals were never realized, they adopted an increasingly totalitarian tenor as the shadow of World War II loomed, unearthing Britain’s history with biologism, imperialism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism in unsettling ways. The case studies demonstrate that architectural production participated in the scientific aim to reconstruct the British populace by reorganizing and reconditioning the patterns of human activity. But they also suggest that a new aesthetic regime emerged through the biotechnical experiments in this interwar period, one that positioned modern architecture as a symbol of a scientifically derived, humanistic worldview, while reifying the image of Britain as a civilization of sovereign power, resiliency, and progress. Although architecture could never quite realize the utopian aspirations of these scientists, its entanglement with science catalyzed an important shift in the notion of subjectivity—from innate and uncovered (Vitalmystik or élan vital) to a model that could be radically altered and engineered. Likewise, although science seemingly conferred authority and calculation to the design process, freeing the architect from the responsibility of authorial will, it also granted architects the power to anticipate and shape the future form of life itself. These examples explore the discipline’s often contentious encounters with the inescapable ethical and biopolitical considerations attached to the technologies of life as architecture struggled with its ability to nature and de-nature the subject.
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C H O I — E S T H E R
Britt Eversole The Disenchantment with Democracy: Architectural Models of Self-Organization, Italy 193x–196x Political philosopher Norberto Bobbio has written: “I have to confess that…each and every day, I experience a flash of wonder, verging on incredulity, at the longevity of this chronic ailment that is our democracy.” Indeed, among Europe’s postwar democracies, none is more paradoxical than Italy. Despite, or perhaps because of its compromised origin—the creation of a formal democracy of rules and standards without substantive norms for how it would be implemented, reinforced and perpetuated—as well as its fickle political alliances, endless numbers of parties, ideological intransigence, and the public’s resignation to dysfunction, Italy’s democracy provided fuel for architects and urbanists to experiment with and sometimes against the State and the political system. Yet the bond between postwar Italian design and forms of governing has never been comprehensively studied. Questioning the relationship of political economy to design practices requires a historical study not of “how things got to be the way they are,” but of the alternatives explored, the hypotheses tested, the imagining of different futures, the roads not taken, and those moments when architects participated in government and in governing, formed their own political parties, joined existing parties or worked against them, wrote laws, made policy, worked with legislators and took politics into their own hands. This dissertation hypothesizes that rereading Italian architectural theory and experimentation from the 1930s to the 1960s as political theory offers the possibility of registering the growing disenchantment on the part of Italian architects with the paradoxes, aporias and limitations of liberal democracy. It is organized into six paradigms—party, institution, participation, bureaucracy, school and territory.
Case studies within each paradigm explicate the networks of power, policy, law, economics and activism into which architects and planners insinuated themselves. Architects were central in the nation’s rebirth, first during Reconstruction by imagining a post-Fascist, democratic Italy, and later, by posing alternatives to what came to be known as Italy’s “difficult democracy.” Italy’s post-Fascist democracy was neither total with regard to its form and ideas nor universally accepted. After designs that reflected, and in some cases challenged the new political system, the government’s unsuccessful attempts to implement effective planning policies to constrain unplanned urban growth posed new problems for architects. Urban dilemmas were not mere byproducts of the boom economico; they reflected the compromises and intransigence of parliamentarism and the inertia of the partitocrazia (the democracy of the parties). In short, this dissertation collects a series of experiments that range from efforts to give architectural form to liberal democracy, to projects that conclude that liberal democracy had become a threat to the city.
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E V E R S O L E — B R IT T
Daniela Fabricius Calculation and Risk: The Rational Turn in West German Architecture 1965–1985
In this study, calculation, and the related concepts of risk and rationalization, will provide the central mode of understanding a series of practices in West German architecture between the 1960s and the 1980s. As it will be defined here, calculation is distinct from the more rarified topic of mathematics in architecture, with the potential to address not only questions of aesthetics, form, and design but also those of economy. Mathematics has traditionally held a privileged, even mystical status in architecture; calculation, by contrast, is usually associated with the drudgeries of labor. Yet calculation has an expressive quality and proper aesthetic beyond that of mere number-crunching. Nor is it free of mystification, as the seemingly objective nature of calculation, its claims of exhaustive evidence, proof, and mastery (hence the shared etymology of accounting and accountability), make it particularly vulnerable to misplaced faith. Calculation is a form of prediction used to manage uncertainty and risk. In the 1980s, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens argued that modern industrial society was no longer instrumentally rational as it produced a series of new risks. These risks are not eliminated, but managed and integrated, forming a “risk society.” Several aspects in West Germany in the 1970s correspond to this theory, and indeed set the historical stage for Beck’s formulation. As West German architects turned increasingly away from functionalism and its perceived risks one paradoxical response was the return of a “radical rationalism.” Even with the influence of the Frankfurt School`s critique of instrumental reason, rationalism not only lingered, but intensified. Politically progressive architects like those at Ulm and the TU Berlin looked to systems theory and sociology for alternatives in architecture and planning; however, these were also used to rationalize government bureaucracies, industry, and national security. This universal use of calculation is one of the reasons why it is difficult to identify an architectural project in West Germany that used calculation in a manner consistent with an avant-garde. Case studies will focus on practices in West Germany that prioritize and thematize calculation visibly. Architecturally, this can be seen in an interest in abstract languages, numbers and formulas, quantifiable information, statistics, parametrics, and typology. As architectural information was quantified, calculation took place both at the scale of the building and of the city. Early examples will center around the Ulm School for Design, which was instrumental in introducing calculation into German architectural practices in the 1960s and 70s. Other case studies include the optimization of form in the
experimental engineering of Frei Otto, and the of geometric and typological systems in the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers. The development of Frankfurt am Main into a city of skyscrapers in the 1970s will illustrate the use of calculation and risk at the level of the postmodern city that became a financial capital. In the two decades that will be studied here calculation increasingly loses its basis in the real and approaches simulation in the form of predicted and projected futures. No longer applied teleologically, numbers are abstracted from their material referent. The examples here share a tendency towards the numerical on the one hand but also the production of a symbolic economy. With the absence of function, or more specifically Zweck, an architecture of calculation accumulates other meanings. Questions emerge around form, language, symbol, and utopia. But even these architectural examples cannot escape the “real” effects of calculation that occur on a social and economic level.
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Frei Otto/IL, “Multimedia” test of simultaneous measurements of the Olympics stadium model using cameras and gauges, c. 1968
Ignacio Gonzalez Galan The Logics of Arredamento: Circulation and Display of the Italian Interior 1928–1963
This dissertation examines the transformation of the architectural interior in Italy in the central decades of the 20th century through the lens of its circulation. Throughout this period, Italian discourse on interiors conceptualized its object of concern primarily as “arredamento”—a term meaning both furniture and the ensemble of elements that furnishes a livable space. While the word “interni” was also used at the time, the emphasis on “arredamento” signaled a distinct interest in the material elements that construct an environment, different both from the association between interior and interiority of the German philosophical tradition and the insistence on social control of French modern practices of the interior. Italian discourse transformed the interior from a unified and enclosed realm, as it was hitherto understood, into an ordered arrangement of elements that moved beyond stable boundaries. Curated displays of furniture and interior ensembles were central tools for the management of the interior’s circulation in the media and in the market. I will argue that the discourse of arredamento not only concerned the arrangement of elements within a room, but also the movement of goods, meanings and people throughout the territory. I will consider circulation as the central characteristic of modern liberal economies, systems of information and urban and territorial strategies of modern regimes of power. Circulate! In Italy, the circulation of arredamento was particularly entangled in narratives of national formation and eventually in its international dissemination. The national unification concluding in 1870 facilitated an internal market and migratory movements in a still predominantly rural society, and opened new routes of cultural circulation. Simultaneously, the nation state legitimated the forces that managed all forms of circulation, conducing to fascism as a maximum expression of these forms of control. Throughout the fascist period, a belated development of industrial production and the rise of mass media coexisted with the control of foreign trade and programs aiming at consolidating traditional familial structures. A thriving culture of arredamento unfolded in relation to these economic, cultural and social processes. This culture manifested in a particular attention to the market of applied arts, increasing publications concerned with the development of the modern interior and a series of programs developed by the fascist organization Dopolavoro addressing the household. This particular culture continued to play protagonist roles through the postwar, in the reconsideration of Italian identity after fascism and within the neorealist imaginaries of the country’s reconstruction. It also became a key actor of its so-called economic miracle ending in 1963. Italian industrial design products and its
associated imaginaries spread over international media and markets, questioning national boundaries while appealing to a supposedly idiosyncratic “taste” and “way of life.” Neither Fascism nor postwar democratic Italy, were unified centers of power or frictionless contexts for the processes of circulation governing the transformation of the interior. My work considers the diversity actors and media constituting these circulatory landscapes, which came both from the architecture profession and from an array of political, commercial and media agencies. Milanese architect Gio Ponti was central to this constellation, simultaneously concerned with the interior’s design and with its circulation: He was the editor of magazines such as Domus and Stile, directed institutions like Milano Triennale, and collaborated with the department store La Rinascente or the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Critics and designers such as Giulio Carlo Argan, Achille Castiglioni and Alberto Rosselli became key to a number of consequent circulatory enterprises, while the cinematographic studios Cinecittà before the war, the Riunione italiana per le mostre di arredamento in the postwar, and later the Associazione per il Disegno Industriale or the national television network RAI also developed their different agendas through architectural interiors, and built diverse constituencies around them (markets, audiences, workers and inhabitants also in circulation). In the different case studies I analyze, designs went beyond the representation and transmission of already formed social realities, and became active in their production: (1) interiors were considered to represent a civilization, while they rather incubated such an ideal formation; (2) they performed as cinematographic stages and reproduced specific social structures; (3) they aimed to form a popular taste for the construction of a post-fascist democratic society; (4) and they were designed to congeal new audiences in a booming economy. Exhibited chairs, photographed living rooms or showcased television sets, brought together different actors and audiences, negotiating their diverse cultural and economic interests and effects. When circulated in film stages, specialized magazines and commercial showrooms, interiors appeared to have no relation to any specific exterior. Constructed as rooms with no outside, windowless settings, interiors however remained attached to societal material conditions. In them, architecture exceeded the design of the object of furniture or interior and became a form of mediation between a new productive and commercial process and an increasingly larger audience. Throughout this period, the interior went from a taste-making chamber to a node in a communication network.
117 P H . D . A B S T R AC T S G O N Z A L E Z G A L A N — I G N AC I O
clockwise from top left: RAI Pavillion at the Milan Fair, Achile and Pier Giacomo Castiglione (1952)
Furnishing for the RIMA show, Ignazio Gardella (1946) Announcement of “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” Exhibition at MoMA, in Domus (1972) “Ambienti in Transformazione,” article by Gio Ponti in Il Corriere della Sera (1933)
Urtzi Grau 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-avant-garde 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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G R AU — U R T Z I
Courtesy UHF 2009
Vanessa Grossman Managing Utopia: Architecture and French Municipal Communism, 1958–81
The massive reshaping of French cities that took place at the hands of architects since the advent of World War II has long enjoyed a privileged status in the history of 20th century architecture. The new French urban architecture that emerged from this period, particularly from 1958 onward, has been historicized alternatively, as the evidence of Le Corbusier’s influence, as a symptom of European capitalist development, and as the context for the invention of the grands ensembles. However, the history of postwar French urban architecture has never fully accounted for the impacts of the decentralization of political power that was paradoxically fostered in France with the advent of the Fifth Republic. Twofold, its new constitution made the office of President stronger at the same time as it proclaimed the free administration of local authorities of the Republic. Henceforth, decentralization gradually found its echoes in the physical environment, and the city became a project in France. Yet, since the aftermath of France’s liberation the city was already the privileged ground for the pervasive influence of one of architecture’s most important institutional patrons, the French Communist Party (PCF). Because in postwar France the most effective field of action for communism was not the national, but the municipal level of government, mid-sized French cities became sites of opportunity for architects pursuing political change through design. Municipal communism acted in postwar France as a special political mode, where the construction of an ideal society was tested against the management of daily life—what I propose to call “managing utopia.” This dissertation contends that the PCF was a crucial agent to study the decentralization of power and the rise of the French city as an architectural project. The alliance between architects and Party organization was indispensable for the postwar success of architecture as a discursive and physical construct for political decentralization. From 1958 to French presidential election of 1981 municipal communism was an unwitting participant in France’s decentralization whilst communists’ ultimate ambition was a return to a national strategy rather than an ultimate dispersal of power. Architecture was promoted as a mode of both spatial and ideological control, transforming cities into veritable communist bastions that provided the Party with its most solid electoral base, and much of its cultural identity. The PCF took on the role of a paradoxical architectural bureaucracy on the municipal stage, trying to affect large-scale social change but ultimately helping to diffuse urban policies and architectural power. On the other hand, belonging to the Party became a way for architects
to legitimate their practice and gain access to architectural commissions in numerous communist municipalities. These architects were given the chance to develop long-term collaborations and projects, a number of which aspired to be experimental and alternative. Across multiple generations, they even assumed political positions as the architectesen-chef of urban operations and municipal council of cities, from André Lurçat, to the urbanist Michel Steinebach, and Renée Gailhoustet, in Saint-Denis, Pantin and Ivry-sur-Seine, respectively. As Paul Chemetov testified, “Communism for me was… an incredible universe…I am still marked by the activist experience, through the networks of friendship and all the philosophical or historical impregnation.” This intellectual fervor offered an alternative to modernist orthodoxy, with its mixture of late-Corbusean poetics and CIAM-inspired technocracy. For this evolving architectural network, which became for the most part professionally stigmatized, the urge to be reelected and the issue of political representation were rapidly incorporated into its architectural aesthetics, language and agenda. This network found a unique way for architectural culture and political culture to interact, and for social ideals to be implemented in the municipal scale. In these interactions the building became both a metonymy for the city and a unit of governance. The dissertation builds upon different cities and projects. Throughout four chapters, theoretical, formal and technical aspects of inventive urban architecture are analyzed in the context of the ideological dilemmas posed in France during the Cold War. The first chapter explores how, from 1944 to 1958, with the PCF’s symbolic ascension after liberation, the alliance between communist political culture and architectural network was formed on the municipal stage during statesponsored reconstruction. Lurçat’s 25-year work in SaintDenis since 1945 epitomizes the communist efforts of the period, at the same time as it influenced a new generation of architects swept into the vortex of communism at the Beaux-Arts. The next chapter examines how, from 1958 to 1968, the long-standing collaboration between mayors and architects reached its apogee when cities gradually gained more autonomy in a post-reconstruction era of economic growth. The proliferation of communal and social services, in addition to housing campaigns, helped to program the cities like Romainville and Saint-Ouen around a particular communistic lifestyle. Designed by complementarity rather than juxtaposition, each building acquired for the architects the status of a puzzle piece, spanning out from the block as a unit of governance. An early critique of massive production and search for new brutalist aesthetics were
clockwise from top right: Socio-Cultural Facilities, Renovation of Ivrysur-Seine’s City Center (îlot 1, 01.15.1970), Renée Gailhoustet, Fonds Gailhoustet. SIAF/ Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine/Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle Traits. Le journal des étudiants d’art de l’Union de la jeunesse républicaine de France (UJRF), no. 5 (1948?), “There is no abstract art”. “Drawings and texts from 3 seniors: Aragon, Le Corbusier, Gromaire“, Bibliothèque Nationale de France
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The first phase of Jeanne Hachette mixed-use complex under construction, designed by Jean Renaudie (non-dated; photographer unknown), Archives Municipales d’Ivry-sur-Seine
G R O S S M A N — VA N E S S A
allied to technological rationality in Pantin by Steinebach and the architect Jacques Kalisz, both members of the multidisciplinary Atelier d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture (AUA, 1960-85). Chapter three explores how the city came to the forefront of French political discourse in the years surrounding May 1968. By examining the debates that pervaded architectural culture at the time, it focuses on the AUA’s project for the Villeneuve de Grenoble-Échirolles. This innovative urban development later became a controversial precedent for the collaboration between socialists and communists. Thanks to its experience in communist municipalities, the AUA developed a work-process for this that contrasted with dominant mode of French architectural production. Two years after the setting up of the “Union of the Left” (1972-77), the architect Jean-Louis Cohen and the economist François Ascher organized, together with the PCF’s Federation of Isère, the conference “Pour un urbanisme…” in Grenoble. The event was designed to contrast the socialists’ proposal that urban policies could substitute for political and economical change. The final chapter analyzes how new ideas about urbanity deliberated in Grenoble were tested in the communist municipal ground. New notions about the rehabilitation of existing urban fabric inflected in the 1970s projects such as Gailhoustet and Renaudie’s for Ivry’s city-center, and Jean and Maria Deroche at Orly. Renaudie’s mixed-use complexes, linked by pyramidlike structures fanning outward in abundantly planted cascading terraces, favored an architectural expression of individuality that was directly opposed to the architectural standardization of the reconstruction years.
Margo Handwerker Public Displays of Effection: Ecological Art and Utility, 1969–1984
“Public Displays of Effection: Ecological Art and Utility, 1968–1984” examines a pivotal but neglected group of artists who rejected traditional notions of the art object and instead considered it as a tool for achieving environmental remediation. This innovative approach to the art object required a parallel transformation in the viewer, who instead became a user. This new dynamic gave these artworks an explicitly architectural logic—one that made them difficult to recognize as art, and yet enabled their viability. Because the works served a tangible function, they found financial support beyond conventional patronage and so withstood the decline of arts funding. The contemporary cultural landscape—from artist-run community gardens and free schools to public practice more broadly—is indebted to the legacy of this work, which has been overshadowed within scholarly criticism absent an account of such interaction as the most urgently needed form of art and architectural design. The first of these actors is artist and curator Gyorgy Kepes, professor in the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1945–74) and founder of its Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Kepes was an early champion of projects that both facilitated awareness about the Earth’s most pressing problems while simultaneously developing viable solutions. Some have written about the interdisciplinary efforts within Kepes’s curatorial oeuvre, but there has been little focus on his conception of the user for whom he designed these collaborations. The first chapter focuses specifically on Kepes’s later writings, namely two of his unpublished books: “Art on a Public Scale” (1970–74) and “Arts of Participation” (c. 1970–74). These unpublished transcripts evince Kepes’s longstanding but understudied interest in coordinating a shift in the user’s inter-spatial and interpersonal perspectives specifically for the purpose of reshaping their awareness of nature as part of the commonwealth. Another chapter is among the first extensive looks at artist Robert Smithson’s letter campaign to mining corporations in the years and months leading up to his untimely death. Smithson piggybacked on regulation of the mining industry, which required companies to reclaim their mines if not to their original state, then at least for some other “useful” purpose. The artist capitalized on the ambiguity of this term, offering to rebuild the mining industry’s sites and its image with Earthwork. Negotiations for the first of these projects were under discussion when the artist died in a plane crash, and his essay “Earth Art and Mining Reclamation” (1971) was
never published. Smithson’s wife and occasional collaborator Nancy Holt would continue the charge with her landfill reclamation works Dark Star Park (1979) in Arlington, Virginia and Sky Mound (1984–present) in Hackensack, New Jersey. The work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been subsumed under the category of Land art, a movement dominated by men and exemplified by such works as Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70). Heizer, though he made large-scale artworks using materials from the Earth, in no way sought to conserve the environment, nor did he engage viewers at the level of activism. Ukeles’s work, on the other hand, was both preservation-driven and public-qualities that hinged on the artist’s interest in making her work accessible enough to be used. The chapter devoted to her begins in 1969, when Ukeles wrote her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” in which she draws a comparison between art making, female care giving and sanitation work. Ukeles’s synthesis of the preservation of life with the preservation of a city generated what became an intensely public practice: her collaboration with the New York Department of Sanitation. Though completed in 1969, the manifesto was not published until 1971, when art historian Jack Burnham included part of Ukeles’s text in his Artforum article “Problems of criticism: art and technology” (1971). The chapter ends in 1984, when Ukeles began making artworks about Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill, which since and with her assistance is in the process of becoming a public park. Jack Burnham also promoted the early career of “problemsolving artists” Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison. The final chapter addresses the Harrisons multi-part “Survival Series,” a series of projects wherein the artists cultivated foodstuffs in a gallery setting. Their strategy was altogether different from contemporaneous attempts to revisit the landscape tradition. The couple was more interested in producing fertile landscapes than they were in creating immersive ones, such as Walter De Maria’s Earth Room (Munich, Germany; 1968). Their installations, which included “flat and upright” pastures and were often accompanied by “feasts,” offered restorative solutions to deforestation and a model for self-sufficient food production in the wake of increased industrial farming. They eventually magnified their interest in putting unproductive domesticated landscapes to good use as small-scale farms by putting unproductive landfills to good use as public parks, namely the Spoils’ Pile Reclamation (1976–78) in Lewiston, New York.
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H A N D W E R K E R — M A R G O
Evangelos Kotsioris Komp’iuter Architecture(s), 195x–198x
This dissertation will attempt to compose an architectural history of computerization during the Cold War, by focusing on the introduction, dissemination and use of the digital electronic computer in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. In doing so, this study will investigate the imbrications of architecture and computerization through three major binaries: the United States/Soviet Bloc, materiality/immateriality, and publicity/ secrecy. In this study, computerization, and its different modes of intersection with architecture during the Cold War, will provide the main vehicle to investigate and interpret a series of spatial phenomena and design practices that took shape between the 1950s and the 1980s. Computerization, as a process that increasingly characterized societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain after World War II, will be used as a lens to scrutinize and undermine the hierarchies between well-known oppositions of Cold War architectural culture, including: materiality and immateriality, perceivability and imperceivability, sitedness and sitelessness, publicity and secrecy. The non-human protagonist of this story—the digital electronic computer—played a decisive role in bringing the long-enduring problematics of these oppositions to the fore: its enigmatic ontological duality of hardware and software posed serious challenges to designers in both communicating its twofold nature and representing its operation to the wider public. For the United States and the Soviet Union, computerization became a site of contestation and a new benchmark of technological supremacy. Initially associated with the operations of the military, scientific institutions and the Space Race, the digital electronic computer was progressively considered as an omnipotent tool that could be utilized in multiple areas of governance, particularly ones which involved the co-processing of large amounts of data, such as statistics or the economy. The geopolitical, ideological and socio-economical dichotomy of the East and the West—thus— became the battleground for the development and application of computer technologies. Even if these technologies were implemented at a different pace in these two contexts, groups of scientists, bureaucrats and designers on both sides increasingly shared a particularly intense confidence in its multifarious capacities. The programmable electronic computer was progressively understood as an incredibly flexible tool that could serve military defense, scientific research, governance, and—ultimately—design purposes.
Computing power—a power of the “electronic age”—relied on the intricate coupling of both physical and non-physical elements. Its dissemination and use by governmental institutions was anticipated to render manual decisionmaking, and with it traditional notions of governmentality, obsolete. In this context, the development (or acquisition) of computing power on both sides of the Atlantic instigated a competition that resulted into a vast array of new systems for the collection, processing, storage, and retrieval of information, as well as an unprecedented number of data technologies, such as magnetic-core memory, real-time computing, data networks and electronic satellites. As a true product of the Cold War, the “computerization race” was a competition that was carried out simultaneously in public and secretly. The antagonistic situation of this race was nurtured by a reciprocal demonstration of technological competence and a shared uncertainty of the enemy’s true might: on the one hand, computerization of one’s nation became an accomplishment for public showcasing and exhibition; on the other, the development of computing power by the enemy created a field of undisclosed monitoring and espionage. Not unlike the computer itself, architecture was asked to operate like a “black box”; that is, to selectively make certain information available, while simultaneously keeping its inner workings to itself; to communicate the processes it housed to civilians and the enemy, without disclosing their security-sensitive content. And it is precisely between these two modes of operation, that architects, city planners and industrial designers were called to operate: to provide a physical environment for the secretive institutions that manufactures or used computers, and at the same time crystalize a powerful image of computing power that could be disseminated through media. from top: IBM employee working on the AN/FSQ-7 Maintenance Console of the SAGE System, the first computerized air surveillance system developed against Soviet attacks, 1957 Curious visitors by the IBM stand at the American National Exhibit in Moscow, 1959. Some of them wait for the RAMAC 305 computer to answer their questions on American culture; others hold their keepsake printouts A “pixelated” CCCP acronym formed by selectively lit-up office space modules on Novi-Arbatskyii Prospekt in Moscow during a national holiday, c. 1970
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KOT S I O R I S — E VA N G E LO S
Anna-Maria Meister From Form to Norm: The Systematization of Values in German Design 192x–196x
The search for form was a driving concern of architectural theorists in 19th century Germany. As a new nation-state sought a coherent aesthetics to represent its political unity, “good form” was presented as a reflection of “good ethics.” With the advent of full mechanization in the early 20th century, however, architecture underwent a scale change: once a public art devoted to representing the state, it became part of the new discipline of industrial design, and buildings came to be seen as objects among others. At the same time, large industrial machinery was scaled down to household appliances, which became objects of design as well. The mass-production of those objects provoked the regulation of their shape, form and physical appearance. Standards were set, tolerances were defined—negotiated by an ever-growing set of technical norms. Formerly relying on principles derived from nature, good form was now to be prescribed by absolute quantities. The search for “the good” gradually migrated from aesthetic theory to the design of (and with) technological specifications. My dissertation addresses “the norm” as design project in mid-20th century Germany, identifying it as a shared concern of bureaucratic authorities and creative producers who sought to bind together aesthetics and morals. Beyond their task of regulating object-producing machines, norms manifested and communicated desired social values. Whereas form-finding in the 19th century had been an individual undertaking, institutional frameworks became the primary sites for the production and implementation of 20th-Century aesthetic norms. Norms were both a designed project and design endeavor—conceived, administered, and disseminated by industrialist groups, state administrations, schools or art magazines. Design as authored by these institutional agents was not mere shaping or styling, but rather a way to extend the reach of aesthetics from a quest for “good form” towards a search for the “best format.” Institutions of different backgrounds and motivations partook in this agenda of formatting society—the norm was their shared tool. The first attempt to standardize norms on a national level came from the German Institute of Norm (DIN ), founded in 1917. Originally conceived to coordinate Germany’s military and industry, this technocratic organization soon broadened its ambitions to regulate the future for the “benefit of all of Germany.” The DIN created the Normenwerk to normalize German production—a systemt that broadly disseminated moral and aesthetic values, materialized as technological
specifications. Under the rhetoric of economic optimization, norms provided the instrument to streamline the momentum of industrial progress, which was seen as the gateway to a betterment of society. Norms proliferated and regulated more and more objects, boosted by the desire for social reform through technological growth. Schools soon followed suit. The Bauhochschule Weimar under Otto Bartning pushed towards a “new architecture” through typological method. The Dessau Bauhaus under Hannes Meyer educated the modern architect as a scientist who would operate through standardized processes, while dismissing “form-finding” as “purely artistic.” The logic of the norm both amplified and altered the disciplinary drive for new forms; German committees, programs and councils were created not only to disseminate normed objects, but to approve and administrate the values they embodied. The growing collection of norms mediated between large scale industrialization and the individual. Processes of homogenization and reduction left the consumer with only one available option—the screw, or the window. Idealized definitions of every-thing were circulated as parts of objects, buildings and cities. Where the A4 formatted administrative processes, the norming of a window was to format one’s view of the world. The norm prescribed behavioral codes by establishing specific relations between object and subject, and negotiating „tolerable errors” in things and people alike. The dynamic between production and reception of norms became reversible: curricula were standardized, while in turn normalizing students, and the normed door handle was both the physical manifestation of values and a normative object in German homes. The dissertation traces the dissemination and reception of objects both normed (such as the A4 paper format or the serialized window) and normalizing (such as Ernst Neufert’s Bauordnungslehre and Maßordnung) through three different German political systems, from the Weimar Republic through the Third Reich to postwar reconstruction. I will take the norm as an ontological model: its multiple temporalities of documentation and prescription, its material status as reproducible object defining reproducible objects, its respective role in the larger Normenwerk, its definition of tolerable deviation and minimally necessary precision. The operations of the norm system, designed to facilitate mass produced objects, will then be traced in the production of knowledge, of institutional values, and of politics. My case studies will span from the 1920s, when the first DIN -
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designed objects reached mass-consumers, to the 1960s, when the self-proclaimed morality instilled in “good objects” at the HfG Ulm was superseded by the design of processes and environments. Although aesthetic discourses surrounding the norm revolved around technological and economic advancement, the norm inspired strikingly vivid spiritual fantasies of moral virtue, embodying what Walter Hellmich, the DIN’s first director, called Idealistische Sachlichkeit (idealistic objectivity). The norm served as medium for re-enchantment, offering its reliable systematicity as projection screen for a new morality. Hellmich saw as one aspiration of the norm the creation of a Gewissensgemeinschaft (community of conscience), and Walter Porstmann called the A4 paper format he invented “the carrier of the spiritual traffic of the world.” Bruno Latour has argued that the advent of industrialization encouraged a delegation of ethics to machines. In Germany, however, what was regulated were not only tasks, but the very desire for codification: as if precision, tolerance, and the elimination of flaws could be outsourced to bureaucracy itself. Reform was seen as the necessary step to societal change on a national, and ultimately global, level—and it was communicated, disseminated and imagined through the norm.
M E I S T E R — A N N A- M A R I A
This dissertation aims to trace the progression from formfinding to norm-defining and its investment in moral and aesthetic values beyond the rhetoric of economic and technological advancements. I hope to embed the norm in the history of German design, scrutinizing tropes associated with Modern architecture (such as rationality, order and normativity) in relation to qualities often assigned to the norm as “rational” tool (such as neutrality, technocracy, efficiency). This dissertation as part of a larger intellectual project wants to undermine the assumed distinction between an enlightened rationality of technology and a re-enchanted ideology of aesthetics and morals. I pose the analysis of (literal and material) normalization processes as necessary for an understanding of Germany’s attempt to (re-)create values through design by reading the norm as the origin of both the design of information, and the design through information.
from top: Man as Normed Measure in Ernst Neufert’s ‘Bauentwurfslehre,’ 1936 The Normformat and its Entourage, c. 1930 Good Design for Better Societies: Design at the HfG Ulm
Matthew Mullane “Worthy Objects”: Architecture and Observation in Japan
As Japanese architects were observing the world to gain a foothold in the upheaval of modernization at the end of the 19th century, eager but prejudiced European and American commentators were also closely observing them, staunch in their conviction that the archipelago was devoid of architectural interest. James Fergusson, one of the first modern world historians of architecture, typified this position in his refusal of Japan as a “building race,” claiming that the country lacked any “worthy object” that could be called architecture. Meanwhile, against this constant denial, teachers invited from Europe were instructing young architecture students at the Tokyo Imperial University to design buildings for a new modern nation. Starting from these classrooms, the dissertation asks how architecture could transform from a disabused absence into a “worthy object.” My route of inquiry follows a crucial transformation of architectural epistemology in the late 19th century where the expectations of observation governed how a building could be described, historicized, designed and fundamentally known. Focusing specifically on the people and ideas galvanized by institutions like the Imperial University, I look to a time of unique disciplinary exchange during the mid-to-late Meiji period when architecture was a part of the same modernizing package as science and was rationalized through a shared language. I contend that the negotiation of making observable through these new vocabularies had a real impact on the material, formal, historical and theoretical strategies of making architecture during a period of profound flux. In pursuit of a more robust correlation between architecture and observation, I follow a paradigmatic shift traced recently by historians of science who find in the 19th century new strategies that put focus on the ontology of the studied object and the processes through which, per Lorraine Daston’s phrasing, it became “sturdy” and “amenable to sustained and probing investigation.” What this sustained investigation looked like mattered, and the guarantee granted by observation had a new aesthetic, a new “all-at-once-ness” that clearly visualized a “condensation of laborious, step-bystep procedures into an immediate (…) flash of intuition.” Evidence of this is seen in a preference for large mapping and graphing strategies that could generalize a minute observation into an image that spanned the entire world. The generalized “all-at-once-ness” of observation was exhibited in architecture writing of the period as a genre of architectural history that increasingly situated both historical and modern
styles of building in a world-sized framework. For many foreign commentators however, Japan’s wooden shrines and small houses refused to be generalized into the collective flash of world architecture. The proximity of development between modern architecture and modern science in Meiji Japan highlights a limitation to previous studies of architecture and observation: the absence of alternative observational epistemologies. In Japan during this time, the terminology and practice of observation was a topic of debate and criticism. European empiricism was challenged at every turn and was often altered to fit a new and increasingly large set of epistemological conundrums in science, politics and art. New representational strategies were a part of this shift and included the introduction of detailed architectural drawing and their claims to fidelity, documentary photography, the popular ichiran or “at a glance” perspective that showed architecture in a wide urban panorama, and new mapping strategies that showed Japanese culture as the result of global cultural transmission. The dissertation frames five modes of observation that saw the architectural object caught between changing epistemological paradigms in an era heavy with debates on Westernization and modernization. What constituted observability across these differing modes was subject to debate, but what remained constant was the reconciliation of pre-existing strategies of knowing architecture with new scientific language to create an architecture that could be presented to the world as comparatively modern. Each chapter situates a particular process towards architectural observability, spanning different scales from the observed and catalogued archaeological fragment to the worldly expression of the new Japanese Empire. Across these scalar leaps, Japanese architectural thinkers at the end of the 19th century negotiated worthiness from being an expression of being suitable to a building’s immediate environment to being worthy of standing in comparison with the world “all-at-once.”
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from top left: Ito- Chu-ta’s diagram of world “architectural evolution,” 1909 Ito- Chu-ta, “Architectural Dialogue” sketch, 1892 War on view at the Japan Panorama Hall A view of Tokyo included in Edward S. Morse’s 1886 book on Japanese domestic architecture
Yetunde Olaiya Expert, Artifact, Fact: The Technopolitics of Architectural Production in French Black Africa, 1945–75 After World War II, territories in French Black Africa – once considered the outer limits of la plus grande France – found themselves in an unfamiliar position: both in recognition of their wartime utility in resistance efforts and by pure serendipity, they became the centerpiece in an ambitious scheme to modernize the French overseas territories. The legacy of this scheme are the many civic buildings, housing settlements, and urban plans initiated in this period to improve living standards for France’s African subjects; but these were only one part of the story. The rest is that such colonial intervention had been made even more conspicuous by the rudimentary development that preceded it in these particular territories. Furthermore, tackling the climatic and sanitary concerns blamed for this rudimentary development in the tropics now presented the ultimate showcase for French ingenuity after the losses of the war. More than any other time and place, the cultivation of technical expertise became the crucial first step in the postwar modernization of French Black Africa. Between 1945 and 1975, French authorities therefore launched research ensembles to systematically document local conditions, advisory committees to standardize building solutions, and technical consultancies to convey this wealth of knowledge to the many architects and planners working in the tropics for the first time. My dissertation examines how the technical expertise cultivated within this elaborate apparatus of colonial development facilitated postwar architectural production in French Black Africa and thereby, enacted the colonial administration’s broader political objectives. The sort of entanglement outlined here between technical expertise and politics has been understood through the concept of techno-politics. Notably, techno-political readings have revealed how specific technological practices in colonial science, medicine, both shaped the exercise of political power and masked the other forms of agency present therein. Yet architecture, despite its earlier-noted centrality to modernization efforts, has only entered such readings so far in its simplest form as shelter from the elements. The goal of this dissertation is two-fold. On one hand, it introduces a broader analysis of architectural design to the discourse of techno-politics, which recognizes architecture’s inherent image-making role. Where architectural history itself struggles to articulate the complexity of postwar architectural production outside the West – either portraying it as a oneway traffic from imperial metropolis to colonial peripheries or privileging only the human actors – the dissertation, on the other hand, draws useful insights from techno-
political research. As such, the techno-politics of postwar architectural production in French Black Africa becomes not just a way to track the political implications of technical expertise generated in the colonial development apparatus at this time, but also, to uncover the broader spectrum of agencies involved in this process. The main question posed by the dissertation is therefore this: how was the particular assemblage forged, from technical expertise, politics, and several other factors, that facilitated postwar architectural production in French Black Africa? In this respect, the dissertation follows a precedent set by research into the construction of scientific facts and technological artifacts within science and technology studies. Initially, the standard methodology in this field was to identify a situation of complexity, to track its resolution, and in so doing, to determine the broader implications of that resolution. More recently, however, new methodologies have emerged that re-imagine this linear trajectory as a heterogeneous web of interactions. Rather than conventional human actors, scholars like Bruno Latour and Michel Callon instead track the agency of “actants,” which may be human or non-human on one hand and act as individual actors or networks on the other. To make the same methodological shift in this dissertation would be to address both the human (colonial administrators, architects, subject populations) and non-human (policies, materials, instruments) actants involved in postwar architectural production in French Black Africa while continually situating these individual actors within the broader apparatus of colonial development. My hypothesis is that such symmetrical analysis will help answer the dissertation’s research question. The dissertation engages this hypothesis from two angles. Chronologically, it charts the evolution of technical expertise within the colonial development apparatus over the three most active decades of operation; and thematically, it examines these successive periods through the respective entry-points of expert, artifact, and fact. Part one (194555) focuses on the French architect Jean-Henri Calsat, who emerged as an “expert” of tropical architecture through his advisory role in both CSTB (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment) and BCEOM (Bureau Central d’Équipement du Bâtiment), and design role on the 1950 master plan for Douala, Cameroun. Part two (1955-65) follows the implementation of a technological “artifact,” the mass-produced aluminum roof-umbrella, by French design ensemble ATEA-SETAP as part of their 1960 master plan
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for Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, commissioned by SCET (Société Central d’Équipement du Territoire). Part three (1965-75) traces the construction of the scientific “fact” constituted by the urban research of SMUH (Secrétariat des Missions d’Urbanisme et d’Habitat) and its successive outgrowths, MFU (Mission Française d’Urbanisme) and BEAU (Bureau d’Études et Aménagements Urbaine) in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. Where each of the dissertation’s parts offers a different narrative of techno-politics, read in conjunction, they reveal a larger transition from the ambitious projects of the immediate postwar period to the more sustainable bilateral development that continued after the independence of France’s African territories. By weaving together these micro and meta-narratives, the dissertation in turn seeks to bring specificity to discussions on postwar architectural production outside the West whilst proposing more accurate strategies for global development initiatives.
clockwise from top: Coverage of postwar architectural production in Côte d’Ivoire from special issue of Urbanisme (1969) Inauguration of the Houphouët-Boigny Bridge in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, on 15 March 1958. Council president of French Republic, Gaston Monnerville (center, cutting ribbon); and Ivorian president, Felix Houphouët-Boigny (far right, behind girl)
Massing model for Abidjan’s business district by ATEA-SETAP included in Mission 1959 (Abidjan: Ivorian Ministry of Public Works, 1959) Progressive phases of construction underneath mass-produced aluminum roof-umbrella shown in the ATEA-SETAP brochure, Habitat en Zone Tropicale Humide (1962)
O L A I YA — Y E T U N D E
Systematic documentation of sun paths published in BCEOM ’s Essaie sur l’Habitation Tropicale (1951)
Masha Panteleyeva First they learn to play Jazz, next they sell out the Motherland. Youth and Modernism in Soviet Architecture During the Thaw, 1954–1965 Stalin’s death in March 1953 signified the beginning of an ideological Spring for Soviet Society. It dismantled the Empire of “socialism in one country”, the neoclassical architecture that had signified it, as well as travel restrictions and foreign influence for Soviet architects. This was a time of tremendous optimism, but also uncertainty, as a new generation threatened to expose an ideological split within Soviet society: what melted under the thaw were not only the rigidity of the accepted doctrine but also the homogeneity of social order and ideology. In this context youth emerged as a crucial entity promising to help the state compensate for this split. This dissertation examines youth as a multivalent force: a cultural constituency, a generation of designers, and a unique spatial program, charged with the task of reconciling architectural modernism with political socialism into a new architectural paradigm. Soon after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev started his ventures into foreign policy, implementing a ‘soft’ approach that accepted a modern lifestyle and its association with the young generation. In architecture, this meant an official acceptance of modernism, which had been banned during Stalin and was now strategically rebranded as a ‘new socialist style.’ In the absence of a bourgeois class that in the West sustained the modernist view of the world, I propose that youth during the Thaw was a social basis for this modernist ‘heterotopia’, rendering the return of Modernism to Soviet architecture as the product of a negotiation between the authorities and youth. On the one hand, the postwar political machine attempted to enlist a new generation through state architectural commissions for youth, and on the other, with the rise of consumerism and informal sub-cultures, Soviet youth eventually undermined the ideological goals of the state. Ultimately, modernism and youth both became cultural forces of their own. Khrushchev was personally involved in architectural matters: the question of architectural style became his weapon in an attempt to devalue Stalinist ideology. He officially spoke against the excesses and superfluous embellishment of neoclassical architecture. His first move after seizing power was to replace the functionaries of the Stalin period with younger actors in all spheres of cultural and political life, yet he was not interested in investing architecture with particular ideological meaning. This lack of a strong direction from above produced considerable anxiety among the ‘old-timers’, but also granted a greater freedom of expression to the younger generation of architects: they began to look outwards for inspiration. The new leader proposed a new agenda for modernism, largely motivated by the need to build fast and cheap, and manifested in the large-scale conversion of the construction industry to flexible and modular solutions. Yet Soviet
acceptance of ‘modernism’ was driven not only by the ‘modernization’ of the building industry, but also by the change in the socio-cultural phenomena of the Thaw. Within overall cultural ‘softening’, it brought the emergence of freedom in experimentation in architectural theory and research for young generation of architects. After decades of travel embargoes, Khrushchev accepted authorized architects to travel abroad and allowed foreign coverage in Soviet architectural media: in 1961 the main source for foreign architecture – the Russian translation of L’Architecture d’Aujoud’hui was launched, presenting Western architecture as an acceptable influence. In Soviet sociology, youth was presented as a contested subject: on the one hand they were perceived as a new generation of builders of communism, on the other, as an autonomous and potentially subversive social group influenced by Western ideas. Youth were also increasingly visible in large cities, presenting a spatial challenge to the urban order: this was initiated by the massive displacement of young people from rural environments (with traditional forms of generational control) to the newly developed industrial cities (where youth more easily slipped out of social control). New freedoms were granted, but criticism and ideological ‘tightening’ also followed. This dissertation will focus on case studies that span the whole range of architectural repercussions of this dynamic: state-commissioned buildings for youth, such as the educational and recreational facilities associated with education reform; larger state projects such as the Virgin Lands Campaign initiated to increase the country’s agricultural production; experiments in modernism where a new generation of architects exercised their design freedom; and spatial manifestations of informal youth street subculture, inadvertently caused by the ‘softening’ of the state. These narratives will act as multiple slices through the development of architectural modernism during the Thaw. Each chapter will identify a specific and distinct interaction between architectural production, state ideology, and youth as a powerful social force within changing Soviet society. While the state manipulated the young generation in order to present itself as less formal through a modern architectural aesthetic, the newfound architectural freedoms of youth gave rise to informal spatial practices and designs that ultimately undermined state power. The state’s opportunistic turn to young generation caused a complex combination of political and architectural softening, where official freedoms inadvertently led to an ideological split. What began as a political alignment between youth and the state, eventually turned into a radical separation of the ‘60s generation’ from official patronage, both within the architectural profession and in street culture at large.
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clockwise from top left: Soviet Stilyagi (The Stylish Opposition). Moscow, 1959 Architect I. Pokrovsky demonstrates the model of the Pioneer Palace to N. S. Khrushchev, 1958 Artek Pioneer Camp, Crimea, 1959–60. Architect A. Polyansky The Communist Youth League volunteer construction site, 1971. “Few are lucky to live so generously — to give people cities” NER group in MARKHI (Moscow Architectural Institute), 1960 NER group. New Element of Settlement, 1960
Loktev, Kinetic City, 1965 Cafe Youth, Moscow, 1962
Clelia Pozzi “Old Forms Recast as New:” Restauro, its Techniques and the Modernization of the Italian Built Environment The history of Italian architecture in the first half of the 20th century is typically told as the emergence of a modern profession out of diverse practices which shared a concern for the artistic and literary past. Insofar as Benedetto Croce and his 1902 Aesthetics established historical interpretation as the task of all modern intellectual endeavors, modern architectural knowledge in Italy has been presented as driven either by the cultivation of ties with the humanistic tradition or by nation-building processes pursued through confrontation with the past. Against the grain of these narratives, and with an eye to filling an important lacuna about the place of science in this period of Italian history, the dissertation addresses the development of restauro and the unique technical and scientific kind of “knowing” that it contributed to architecture. The dissertation seeks to expose restauro as an apparatus, a complex of scientific and cultural techniques through which architectural pedagogues, practitioners and historians extracted and imprinted architectural knowledge into the built environment. In this context, to “build” architectural knowledge meant not only to encode historical and spatial information into built forms, but to transform architecture into a vehicle for educating the modern subject’s perception, spatial comportment and emotional response to the past. Focusing on these techniques and the institutional and discursive systems built around them, the dissertation examines the growth of restauro as a scientific practice and the ways in which it insinuated itself in the disciplining of 20th century Italian architecture. While the scientific ethos was integrated with ease into architectural education, and preservation practices became a legitimate part of the profession, the policing of what did and did not qualify as architecture to be preserved made restauro a site of contestation and a powerful agent in the definition of modernity. Modernity was a driving concern for restauro theorists and practitioners in early 20th century Italy. Whereas the parallel traditions of French restoration and British conservation attempted to seal off the built environment in the historical past—respectively, by returning it “completeness” and intervening with minimal maintenance—restauro sought to imprint it with a mark of modernity. Through oft-transformative procedures that bore the technological stamp of their time, restauro complicated the dense historical stratification of the Italian built environment. And more, by integrating old objects in the lives of contemporary viewers, restauro mediated historical change at a time when the Italian built environment
and society were being refigured by infrastructural, industrial and political transformations. With a temporal focus on the expanded first half of the 20th century, the dissertation addresses the modernization of the Italian built environment by studying the experimental apparatus of techniques, institutions and materials through which restauro theorists produced and externalized scientific knowledge about architecture, from Camillo Boito (1836– 1914) to Gustavo Giovannoni (1873–1947) to Cesare Brandi (1906–1988). This process entailed an intense technical effort to capture data about the built environment, circulate them in a shared vocabulary, manipulate them in laboratories, and eventually graft them back onto the built environment by means of design. Through this orchestration, the Crocean work of historical interpretation morphed into a Latourian technoscientific enterprise. In fact, the dissertation argues that out of the apparatus of restauro emerged a scientific practice that is part of the history of Italian architectural modernity just as much as other phenomena conventionally described in technological terms, such as the Futurist “cult of machines” or the industrial design of the 1960s. The dissertation addresses this transformation in architectural practices and epistemic strategies by dissecting the apparatus of restauro and interpreting its long-term effects on the configuration of architectural knowledge. This task will involve considering a wide range of restauro techniques affiliated with material science, such as: structural consolidation with reinforced concrete and epoxy glues; the cleaning of patinas with chemical compounds; or the reintegration of lacunae with the aid of Gestalt psychology. Educational institutions played a fundamental role in developing these techniques because they provided laboratories for testing methods and diagnostic tools, from Zeiss microscopes to X-ray machines. But more importantly, precisely because theses institutions addressed the problem of aesthetic enjoyment through science, they also fostered critical faculties that rendered restauro techniques stable through political change. The 20th century scientific eye of restauro was not neutral nor apolitical, but rather it was an interpreting eye, and thus armed with aesthetic judgment and adaptable to change. In the case studies of restauro techniques and schools I consider, a discussion of their judgment-inflected science also allows for problematizing the history of Italian modernism. Whereas previous literature emphasizes shifts in architectural and urban practices across the republican, Fascist and post-Fascist years, the dissertation stresses
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instead that techniques of restauro procured significant spatial and epistemological continuities. Techniques of urban demolitions, juxtaposition of old and new architecture and calibration of city streets endured throughout the early 20th century precisely for accustoming the modern eye to the effects of historical change, and teach city dwellers to recognize the past as consistent with modern needs. By equalizing the relation between past and present, restauro experts not only affected the understanding of what qualifies as “modern,” but transformed the built environment into a “training manual” for navigating historical change.
clockwise from top right: Camillo Boito, Porta Ticinese after its restauro, Milan, 1890s Scuola Superiore di Architettura, Rome, 1920 Paolo and Laura Mora work on fragments of the Mazzatosta Chapel at the Istituto Centrale del Restauro, Rome Gustavo Giovannoni, Benito Mussolini and others in Via dell’Impero after the demolition of Medieval and Renaissance structures, Rome, 1933
Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, 1893
P OZ Z I — C L E L I A
Chemistry Laboratory, Istituto Centrale del Restauro, Rome, 1939
Daria Ricchi From Storia to History: Literature and Fiction in Italian Architectural Writing, 1940–1957
In the decades surrounding World War II, Italy was host to an extraordinary abundance of architectural writing. Not merely significant in terms of quantity, these texts were unprecedentedly varied in the range of genres they encompassed. History, criticism, theory, journalism, and fiction all took architecture as their subject matter. This wide range of writerly modes, as distinct from one another in the nature of their prose as in their means of dissemination, was produced by an equally varied cast of figures such as Bruno Zevi, an architecture historian and politician, Giulio Carlo Argan an art historian, Italo Calvino, a fiction writer, and Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, writers and translators. Rather than converge on a single view of architecture, each form of writing embedded a different theory of architecture in its structure. By examining these differences, this dissertation will argue that writing rather than building practice became the primary means of architectural debate, and that writing about architecture was at that time both a topic for a specialized audience and a broader public. My dissertation roughly starts around 1940 and ends in 1957. It begins with multiple stories told under the form of myths. During World War II and in the early postwar, history is oriented toward the future. The preferred narrative is a form of fictitious, half-true story. Italian architectural historians and writers looked at America as the symbol of freedom and new possibilities free from a heavy past.
mythical period. As the title reads culture is synonymous with reality and cannot be hidden or told in a different way. It is the beginning of the well-known neorealist moment. History is considered an objective science. Chronicles, as the chronological recollection of events almost coincide with storytelling. History is concerned with the present condition to be told in a more straightforward and bare way. Main focus of this chapter is the magazine L’architettura cronache e storia, where the myth of America is downsized, and the weekly magazine L’espresso where Zevi holds his column. This is an example not only of architecture mingling with other disciplines, but also of how architectural history entered the general public domain via journalism, a new way of writing, and the popular press. Also writers such as the little-known Carlo Emilio Gadda, and popular authors, Elio Vittorini, Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg depicted scenes of everyday life with a pronounced emphasis on architectural settings. Architecture appeared in the background, but buildings and the expanding city also acted as protagonists. Besides depicting social life and its moral and intellectual values, these authors also gave an account of what was happening in the field of building construction and urban life, but without fictionalizing the bleak reality of that era. At this time fiction informed history and was part of history.
Both writers, Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini never visited the United States but they imagined it as a land for new possibilities. Cesare Pavese recognized in the writing of Midwestern American writers such as Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis a voice and a style to be imitated by Italian writers to discover their own regionalisms. Elio Vittorini, who founded the magazine Il Politecnico in 1945 asked other writers to imitate authors such as Hemingway whose truthful and almost journalistic account could be used to solve problems of the Italian reconstruction.
Calvino’s realist novel La speculazione edilizia (A Plunge into Real Estate – 1957) partly published in Botteghe Oscure, set the scene around building problems, representing the social and moral habits of that time. With this book The third chapter starts with this book, and does not have a temporal end. History writing turned to fantasy but also concerned the past and included a new attention to historicism. This turn to Fantasy, though, does not imply an abandonment of urban issues, even if within the genre of fiction. An interest in the city, in urbanity, permeates Calvino’s writing, from Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City to The Invisible cities.
The same overzealous tone characterized the first writings of a young Zevi who did not conceal his enthusiasm for the American mythical pioneers such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Like Giulio Carlo Argan, Zevi visited the United States in 1939 to study at Harvard graduating in 1943.
1957, a seminal year for ‘historicism,’ also marks a return to more conventional writing styles in history writing. Disillusion and skepticism become established, and the only solution against the present condition seems the retreat to the past or the escape to fantasy.
In the spring of 1950, Cesare Pavese wrote an article about his conception of myth in the magazine Cultura e Realtà [Culture and Reality]. Criticized and condemned by the communist party, Pavese’s article marks the end of this
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Michael Wen-Sen Su The Architecture of Synergy: R. Buckminster Fuller’s Theorization of a “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” (1915 to 1938) 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 asyet 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.”
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Meredith Tenhoor Food, Media and Spatial Politics from Les Halles To Rungis
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.
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T E N H O O R — M E R E D IT H
Federica Vannucchi From Control to Discipline: Design and Power at the Milan Triennale, 1945–1973
The history of architecture in the second half of the 20th century is threaded through by a continuous and schizophrenic quest for disciplinary organization. On the one hand, the boom of the postwar decades granted architecture a new relevance, and gave rise to numerous attempts to systematize architectural rules for controlling urban growth. On the other hand, this renewed prominence pushed architecture to establish itself as an autonomous field: a discipline, capable of resisting political pressure by force of its internal discursive coherence. Between control and disruption, regulation and deregulation, compliance and resistance, the quest for a disciplinary core was at the center of a power struggle between architects and a variety of external actors. This dissertation traces the coalescence of forces that led to architecture’s “disciplinary turn” by examining the history of one institution, the Milan Triennale. From 1945 to 1973, the Triennale served as a laboratory and testing ground for debating the relationship between architecture and power in the Italian context – a negotiation that produced what the dissertation calls “controlling mechanisms.” These were new types of planning practices, design strategies, discursive patterns, and modes of visual display, that could both shape architecture into a discipline and control the rebuilding of the Italian peninsula. The dissertation proposes that the Triennale contributed to the formation of the discipline by defining, testing, and resisting, various instruments of territorial, architectonic, aesthetic and visual control. Thus the Triennale is understood not simply as a space devoted to exhibitions but as a complex institutional apparatus bridging architectural, political and public spheres. The Triennale is known in architectural history for exhibitions that captivated an international public while capturing the essence of the Italian architectural mood. Every three years, the Palazzo dell’Arte opened its doors to an international audience looking for the newest industrial design, the latest interiors and the most radical architectural innovations. The exhibition’s mandate was unique: not only to “exhibit” but also to “produce” architectural experiments by gathering disparate strands under one thematic umbrella. The themes themselves were subject to intense negotiations between two committees, which had overlapping missions and memberships: the Study Center (Centro Studi), a group of architects responsible for the organization of the various venues, and the Council of Administration (Consiglio di Amministrazione), a political committee overseeing the activities of the Triennale. The preparatory meetings of the Study Center included a striking coterie of architects, from
late-modernists such as Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Franco Albini, Ignazio Gardella, Ludovico Belgioioso, Carlo Mollino, to the successive generation who contested the modern legacy, such as Giancarlo De Carlo, Marco Zanuso, Vittorio Gregotti and Aldo Rossi. This architectural who’s who was joined by an equally stellar cast of Italian intellectuals, such as Elio Vittorini, Umberto Eco, Enzo Paci and Marco Bellocchio. Through these lengthy debates, the Study Center effectively managed to produce thirty years of architectural discourse. In fact, behind the dazzling display, a deep architectural anxiety haunted the Palazzo. Repeatedly, the organizing committee asked: what is the conceptual and physical form of architecture today? At every exhibition, a new theoretical formulation of architecture was tested. What was evaluated was not only the public’s appreciation of architecture, or the contemporaneity of certain trends, but also –and inevitably– the architects’ intellectual control over their own discipline. As Manfredo Tafuri theorized in a lecture at the Istituto Universitario di Venezia in 1966, architecture had turned into a disciplinary study through the application of an intellectual control. Constructing an historical argument, the historian explained that this transformation had occurred during the Renaissance. By applying “methods of control” such as space, form and perspective, architects transformed architecture into a system of rules that governed design, rather than a set of more or less pragmatic construction methods. This dissertation borrows Tafuri’s conception of the architectural discipline as shaped by controlling systems, but follows the fate of these systems in the Italian postwar context, when architects, politicians, corporate patrons, and even the Vatican, sought to “discipline” architecture in its conceptual and physical form. Through this pattern of interference between architects and political actors, I will argue, architectural “control” shifted to architectural “discipline.” Whereas fascist Italy had used architecture for direct territorial control, in the postwar new strategies arose. In the face of a weakened state, political power could be interlaced with economic interests, to create instruments that could “control” the environment, “discipline” architects, and “communicate” to the consuming public. In this sense, architecture served as one of many cultural apparatuses that transformed the promise of the welfare state (a promise inherited from fascist modernism) into a normalizing society of control (which paved the way for postmodern disciplinarity).
from top: IX Triennale di Milano (1951), Lo studio delle proporzioni (The Study of Proportions), from Domus 261 (September 1951), 16 XIII Triennale of Milan (1964) dedicated to “Leisure.” The photograph illustrates Il Barnum centrale a quattro percorsi (The Central Barnum with Four Paths), from L’Architettura: cronache e storia 109 (November 1963), 442
Gianemilio Simonetti and Giancarlo De Carlo at the entrance of the XIV Triennale of Milan (1968), from Mioni, Angela, and Etra Connie Occhialini, eds., Giancarlo De Carlo: immagini e frammenti (Milan: Electa, 1995), 57
VA N N U C C H I — F E D E R I C A
Three objectives motivate my study: (1) To understand the evolution of disciplinary debates in relation to political power in Italy between 1945 and the early 1970s. (2) To reconsider the classical neo-Marxist conception of architecture that dominates Italian historiography from Benedetto Croce to Manfredo Tafuri, whereby architectural history is mainly moved by economic drives. A consequence of this concept is that architectural criticism assumes the form of a superficial layer, underneath which an economic reality proliferates. This study proposes that economic interests interlace with other means, and the latter are strong enough to activate structural changes in architectural history. In the place of a hierarchical relationship, I will seek to describe a circular dynamic, inspired by Carlo Ginzburg, whereby history proceeds by a constant exchange, circular in fact, between a determining power and the forms of this determination. What this historical model allows is the identification of the specific means – what I call architectural “controlling mechanisms” – responsible for these structural changes. (3) To provide a pre-history of the postmodern architectural discourse of “Autonomy”, especially as it was imported into American architectural academia beginning in the 1970s. By describing the specific socio-political conditions wherein in the Tendenza’s visions of architectural “purity” was institutionalized as an architectural agenda, the dissertation will reveal how interference between architectural problems and political interests were built into the disciplinary freedom that architecture sought in the late decades of the century.
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A crucial component of this historical dynamic was the requirement that these mechanisms be designed for “display” in the Palazzo dell’Arte. In other words, it was the “communicative” potential of architecture that raised its political stakes. As a medium, the exhibition appeared pluralistic. With its thematic variety, the Triennale was able to display a broad heterogeneity of architectural speculations: neighborhood plans, consumer products, management schemes, graphic strategies, theoretical pronouncements, and so on. But these were all ways to test from what stance architecture should draw its disciplinary strength: by “performing” like a law (as with the QT8 scheme, which became a legislative blueprint), by “persuading” like an advertisement (as with the Golden Compass, the first prize for industrial design), by “communicating” like a language (as with Vittorio Gregotti and Umberto Eco’s proposal for a “communicative” architecture), by fostering new social “processes” (as with De Carlo’s architecture for “the great number”), and so on. The Triennale, this dissertation will argue, was the place where legislation, linguistics, procedure, history and image—all crucial themes of postwar architectural discourse—were tested as possible modes of disciplinary control.
Princeton University School of Architecture Princeton, NJ  08544-5264 Main Office 609-258-3741 Programs Office 609-258-3641 Fax 609-258-4740 E-Mail soa @ princeton.edu Internet soa.princeton.edu Design: Omnivore Managing Editor: Fran Corcione Thesis review photographs: Daniel Claro Printed October 2015
In the United States, most registration boards require a degree from an accredited professional degree program as a prerequisite for licensure. The National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB ), which is the sole agency authorized to accredit professional degree programs in architecture offered by institutions with U.S. regional accreditation, recognizes three types of degrees: the Bachelor of Architecture, the Master of Architecture, and the Doctor of Architecture. A program may be granted an eight-year, three-year, or two-year term of accreditation, depending on the extent of its conformance with established educational standards. Doctor of Architecture and Master of Architecture degree programs may require a preprofessional undergraduate degree in architecture for admission. However, the preprofessional degree is not, by itself, recognized as an accredited degree. Princeton University, School of Architecture offers the following NAAB -accredited degree program(s) (If an institution offers more than one track for an M. Arch. or D. Arch. based on the type of undergraduate/preparatory education required, please list all tracks separately): Master of Architecture (non-preprofessional degree + 108 graduate credit hours) Master of Architecture (preprofessional degree + 72 graduate credit hours) Next accreditation visit for all programs: 2023
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