RE VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
Rumor 02.03 formlessfinder: Garrett Ricciardi (principal), Julian Rose (principal), Laura Britton, Tei Carpenter, Justin Doro, Nathan de Graff, Leo Henke, John Houser, Woo Hyun Lee, Eduardo Marques, Andrew Ostrowitz, Lindsay Ross, and Philip Tidwell
Product specialists: John at ACF Environmental; Steve and Mike at Allocco Recycling Company; Tracey at B.A.G. Corporation; Jeff at Build it Green! NYC; Greg and Keey at EPS Foam Control; Mitch at Foam Pack Industries; Tom at New York Sand and Stone; and Rand, Lauris, and Engineering consultants: Mark at Propex Nat Oppenheimer, Robert Silman Associates All images courtesy (Structural); Raj Patel, of formlessfinder. ARUP Acoustics; Mahadev Raman and David Jones, ARUP Mechanical
2011 P.S.1 Finalist: Bag Pile by formlessfinder Garrett Ricciardi & Julian Rose PS1 pavilions are usually light. This is because they are temporary, and until now temporary architecture has been equated with lightweight construction. But lightweight structures often miss opportunities — they are limited primarily to canopy types, lacking a meaningful connection to the ground or a real sense of interiority and enclosure. Worst of all, canopies provide only one type of space: an undifferentiated field. Being under one part of a canopy is rarely significantly different from being under any other part. formlessfinder instead seeks to provide a much richer — and more architectural — variety of experience through an intervention that is both temporary and massive. This combination becomes possible only when matter is left unfixed. Nothing is wasted when material is understood as part of a continuous cycle rather than as a raw resource to be fixed into architectural form. Bag Pile uses a palette of geotextile containers, products developed to control erosion and shifting material at a vast scale, in combination with heavy (gravel, sand) and light (recycled foam) fills to pack the PS1 courtyard with a tangle of columns, arches, and vaults. These elements are formed by combining heavy and light according to a simple structural principle — lightweight fill is used in overhead spans and tall vertical elements, which are always anchored to the ground and secured against wind loads through a ballast of heavy fill. Shipping and material costs are kept to a minimum not only by using industrial materials typically deployed at a much larger scale than that of the courtyard, but by sourcing materials locally — the heaviest material comes from less than a mile and a half from the site. Demolition costs are more or less eliminated by
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finding destinations in advance for all materials to be recycled and repurposed. In this way, secondary materials — typically hidden from view in infrastructure and landscape projects — become primary. There are a number of performative benefits of bringing so much mass to the site. The first is a significant thermal mass cooling effect. The gravel-filled columns and footings cool down each night, following diurnal temperature swings. Their large mass, combined with carefully arranged selfshading, causes them to heat slowly during the day, keeping the interior spaces of Bag Pile significantly cooler than ambient daytime temperatures. The mass also provides an acoustic benefit. In contrast to a lightweight structure, which typically allows sound to travel through unaffected, Bag Pile’s large elements have been carefully arranged to maximize reflection, absorption, and dispersal of sound, creating varied pockets of sound and an array of listening experiences. These inherent acoustic properties are augmented by an acoustic installation incorporated into the structure. At key moments, Bag Pile’s elements are miked and amplified, creating a kind of soundtrack that highlights the fluid, formless nature of the project: foam creaks as it shifts in the wind, gravel settles into or spills out of its geotextile containers, water drips at the pool’s ragged edge. The acoustic installation also underscores the project’s tactile dimensions. It has been designed to engage visitors’ bodies as much as their eyes, and many of the miked elements are moments that particularly encourage bodily interaction, from movable furniture to sponge bag water features to tangles of foam-filled columns so dense that visitors must force their way through. The result is not only a transformation of the courtyard but a true differentiation of space. Bag pile provides an opportunity for visitors to lose the courtyard and immerse themselves in a new world, exploring spaces that range from large collective interiors designed specifically for the Warm Up events to small, intimate spaces perfect for individual occupation on a summer’s day. And because these spaces are created with loose materials, the project remains dynamic, never fixed into a final form. Bag Pile thus offers not only a depth and variety of experience not yet seen in the PS1 YAP, but a radically new understanding of the relationship between architectural space, material, and form.
RE RE VIEW VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
Siegfried Ebeling SPACE AS MEMBRANE Edited and with an Afterword by Spyros Papapetros; Introduction by Walter Scheiffele; Translated by Pamela Johnston and Anna Kathryn Schoefert (London: AA Publications, 2010) 68 pages, color & b/w illustrations , 270 x 220 mm, Paperback, ISBN 978-1-902902-92-0
What if architecture was no longer 3-D or 2-D, mass or surface, object or space? And what if the architectural environment was envisioned not as an abstract continuum, but as a material envelope that grows organically from the human body, uniting its skin with the periphery of a city, a region, or a continent, and even the entire earthly atmosphere? Such a sprawling hypothesis informs the theoretical premise of the 1926 essay Space as Membrane,” written by former Bauhaus student, architect, and cosmological theorist Siegfried Ebeling. Read and praised by Mies van der Rohe, denounced by Walter Gropius, and presaging some of the technological innovations introduced across the Atlantic by Buckminster Fuller, Ebeling’s treatise has been the subject of a number of recent commentaries, yet the text itself remains unread, due mainly to the scarcity of the original publication. This is the first complete English translation of Ebeling’s original treatise, as well as the first contemporary edition of the text in any language. This book includes the full 1926 text by Ebeling, supplemented by critical essays by Walter Scheiffele and Spyros Papapetros with original drawings by Ebeling, as well as a brief biography of the German architect. Excerpts from the German text were first translated in the journal Pidgin in 2006 published by students in the Princeton School of Architecture. AnnaKathryn Schoefert’s translation was supported by a grant by the Princeton Humanities Research Council. The complete English edition was presented in a Media and Modernity seminar at the Princeton School of Architecture in October 2010 and in a graduate seminar at Cooper Union in February 2011.
above: Siegfried Ebeling, Space As Membrane, book cover, 1926; right and below: ‘All-metal circular house,’ elevation and plan, 1930–31.
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An excerpt from Ebeling’s text: If we look at existing housing, we come to the following conclusion: innumerable measurable (or as yet immeasurable) minute flows stemming from the breathing earth or the radiating space of the sky bombard the walls of our houses and either bounce off unharnessed or are neutralised in their cavities. While the so-called ‘breathing’ wall skin—made of wood, mud, stone or substitutes—may be able to regulate in a very crude way the relation between the natural climate and the artificial interior climate, it does nothing to prevent the human occupants from being exposed to the detrimental effects of subtler atmospheric fluctuations (such as thunderstorms, blizzards or the winds).... [A] progressive, creative, intellectual interpretation of nature has yet to find a parallel in the way we engage with the threedimensionality of architectural space: at present, materials and related services (e.g. thermo-technical) have a one-sided, physically defined character that works on our bodies in a correspondingly imbalanced way. The more we reveal nature’s material connections, and the more we feel the need to make our cities true urban landscapes the clearer it becomes that the character of the skin or membrane between the exterior space and the dimensions of the body is basically tied to the way in which the space is dimensioned and defined on a physio-psychical level.... Space is no longer perceived as a positive agency that exerts a certain psychological influence on the people who inhabit it and are exposed to its tensions, which they have to deal with mentally or experientially. Rather, space has to be perceived more as a negative, as something that merely creates the physiological preconditions under which the individual, in accordance with her or his psychological make-up, can develop in complete autonomy, free from all external influences, into a self-contained Being for oneself— a microcosm.
Teaching Architecture, Practicing Pedagogy: February 11–12, 2011
in general. Dara Kiese, a doctoral candidate in art history at CUNY, resuscitated the pivotal role Hannes Meyer played in installing a true archiA graduate student symposium tecture curriculum durdedicated to new research ing the waning days of the on the history of architectural Dessau Bauhaus. In her presentation on Bernard Huet’s education in the 20th century teachings, French scholar Juliette Pommier demonstrated the extent to which architecArchitecture schools have always led a ture schools were already invested in double-life of sorts, often negotiatbreaking down the traditional atelier ing a contested terrain between their system before May 1968. Similarly, in role as the primary point of entry for his presentation concerning architecarchitects-to-be, and as a site for ture education in Florence during the radical experimentation. This was a 60s and 70s, Manfredo di Robilant, a point made by Jean-Louis Cohen in his postdoctoral fellow at the University keynote for “Teaching Architecture, of Torino, demonstrated how Practicing Pedagogy,” a graduate Florence rivaled Venice as a student symposium dedicated to new hotbed of radical thinking. research on the history of architecThe site of architecture ture education in the twentieth century held at the School of Architecture education also received attention during the event. on February 11 and 12. PhD students Swiss architect Frida Irene Sunwoo, Vanessa Grossman, and Rosenberg’s presentation on Enrique Ramirez organized the event, the construction of the brutalist structure at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm theorized a one-to-one relationship between the construction of an
guided by the belief that a forum was needed to present new research on this topic. The February event presented a lens, historical and theoretical in nature, that complicated the legacies of architecture pedagogy. The eight papers making up the symposium program were mostly revisionist in nature and kept true to the spirit of experimentation alluded to in Cohen’s keynote. All addressed innovations at architecture schools worldwide, exploring pedagogy’s broader agency in shaping the built environment and architectural culture. An impressive range of topics was explored, revealing new histories and narratives, and offering necessary interpretations of familiar or overlooked topics. The papers followed two general kinds of investigations: whereas one group revisited the conceptual underpinnings of the more familiar narratives of architecture pedagogy, the other looked to the actual sites of architecture teaching for their analysis. Of the former, there was, for example, MIT student Alla Vronskaya’s study on Nikolai Ladovskii’s courses at the VkhUTEMAS demonstrated the extent to which American ideas about individualism, pragmatism, and psychology affected the Soviet avant-garde. Similarly, Clement Orillard’s analysis of Kevin Lynch’s methodologies showed the extent to which his most wellknown ideas originated not in Gyorgy Kepes’ phenomenology, but rather in John Dewey’s ideas about education
architecture school and the various courses to be taught in it. Environmental visualizations and computer science were the focus of Molly Steenson’s study of Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group at MIT, which postulated the role that extra-architectural studios played within the traditional contours of an architecture school. MIT’s Ana María Léon, who examined the parallel pedagogies at prisons and architecture schools in Chile during the Pinochet regime, also followed this approach. “Teaching Architecture, Practicing Pedagogy” also featured a group of respondents that inspired lively discussions among the presenters and the audience. Princeton’s Lucia Allais, Jean-Louis Violeau from ENSA Paris-
Malaquais, and Claire Zimmerman from the University of Michigan all presented responses to the papers that really set the tone for the event. And lastly, Joan Ockman’s pitchperfect closing remarks not only demonstrated how the history of pedagogy will always be a point of discussion in schools, but also instilled a sense of hope in the audience that such discussions will become more and more frequent here at Princeton.
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FACulty PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
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PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
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Taichung InfoBox Stan Allen Architect In 2009, SAA completed the master-plan for the Taichung Gateway, a 240-hectare mixed use quarter to be built on the site of the former Municipal Airport in Taichung, Taiwan. In order to raise awareness of the project, and to bring the public onto the site, a 12,000 s.f. bamboo pavilion has been built inside an existing hangar with a clear view of the vast site for the proposed Park.
RE RE view VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
SPRING 2011 LECTURE SERIES recap:
Models of design in the age of computation
Speakers in the spring lecture series reflected on the impact of computation on “models of design.” The series included the work of architects, artists, mathematicians, and the visualization of data. “Model” refers to both models of practice as well as the scientific sense of the model underlying the algorithms.
SPRING Studios 504, 506a/b
Marc Fornes from THEVERYMANY opened the series with a compelling presentation of his “Prototypical Computation” in the form of algorithmically generated full-scale surface topology installations. For Fornes his algorithmic models have also become his model of practice as an architect, learning from failures through prototypes. Meejin Yoon followed with a reflection on “Prototypes and Protocols” developed in the practice Höweler + Yoon Architecture. The firm operates through a range of scales frequently integrating custom prototyped electronics and interactive elements in the design.
Ben Fry and Casey Reas shared their artistic and scientific visualization work and discussed their process of designing with code, which also became the model for the widely adapted open source programming platform “Processing.” Lowering the entry threshold by embedding expertise in an open source platform enables Fry and Reas to develop their own work further but also exposes a much larger audience to this way of working and ultimately raising the quality of work overall. The final speaker of the series was Christian Derix, co-founder and member of the research and development group at Aedes London. Derix provided a unique insight into team work at the firm in responding to complex programmatic and human occupation challenges within the day-to-day practice of the firm. His work in particular expanded the computational focus to intangible and non geometric aspects of space. In parallel to the lectures series all the speakers visited with the second semester studio taught by Axel Kilian, allowing for a more in depth conversation with the students. All lectures were recorded and are available as streaming video from the visual resource collection of the School of Architecture. from top: Marc Fornes, Meejin Yoon, Fabian Scheurer, Helmut Pottmann, Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Christian Derix (photos: Dan Copenhaver ’11)
APOCALUXE NOW!
Princeton Envelope Group
phillipe rahm—arc 506b
jesse reiser—arch 506a
Alejandro Zaero-Polo—arc 504
The burning of fossil fuels to heat or cool buildings is the source of nearly 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions today. Following some resistance and procrastination, the whole industry is now mobilized in favor of sustainable development and arguing for improved heat insulation on outside walls, the use of renewable energies, consideration for the whole life cycle of materials, and more compact building designs. It is clear that these steps all have a definite objective, which is to combat global warming by reducing CO2 emissions. But over and above that goal, beyond such socially responsible and ecological objectives, might not climate be a new architectural language, a language for architecture rethought with meteorology in mind? Might it be possible to imagine climatic phenomena such as convection, conduction, or evaporation as new tools for architectural composition? Climate change is forcing us to rethink architecture radically, to shift our focus away from a purely visual and functional approach toward one that is more attentive to the invisible, climate-related aspects of space. Slipping from the solid to the void, from the visible to the invisible, from metric composition to thermal composition, architecture as meteorology opens up additional, more sensual, more variable dimensions in which limits fade away and solids evaporate. The task is no longer to build images and functions but to open up climates and interpretations. At the large scale, meteorological architecture explores the atmospheric and poetic potential of new construction techniques for ventilation, heating, dual-flow air renewal, and insulation. At the microscopic level, it plumbs novel domains of perception through skin contact, smell, and hormones. Between the infinitely small of the physiological and the infinitely vast of the meteorological, architecture must build sensual exchanges between body and space and invent new aesthetical philosophical approaches capable of making long-term changes to the form and the way we will inhabit buildings tomorrow. The studio will investigate a reverse process of the architectural project starting from the climatic parameters, then going to the program and the form, and finally to the site. Sustainability, globalization, and planetary climates will be the keywords driving the philosophy of our studio.
From architectural design practices the focus shifted to models of computational consultancies first with Fabian Scheurer from designtoproduction, who presented a critique of today’s tool set for complex form from his perspective as a developer of custom algorithms developed to bridge the gap between standard design tools and fabrication machines. Helmut Pottmann, professor for industrial geometry at TU Vienna and KAUST, as well as scientific advisor for the geometry consultancy Evolute, presented a scientific model form of the planar quad mesh algorithms, which represent a generalized approach to the constructability of freeform meshes.
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TOWARDS A METEOROLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE
ARC 506b—Rahm top: Matthew Storrie; above and right: Adrian Heid
“...the airport today has become new city... When we know that every day there are over one hundred thousand people in the air, we can consider it a foreshadowing of future society; no longer a society of sedentarization, but one of passage; no longer a nomad society, in the sense of great nomadic drifts, but one concentrated in the vector of transportation.” —Paul Virilio
The dawn of mass travel by jet in the early 1960s corresponded to the wholesale re-organization of airport infrastructure—as an extension and transfer zone from highway, the land-based modality, to airport terminals—the transfer zone to an air-based one. In the world of the terminal the relentless and systematic exploitation of “free” or layover time between arrivals and departures has given rise to the advent of the city-like agglomerations of uses for the in-transit population—a group already pre-screened, pre-selected, and predisposed to spend time and money within this circumscribed domain. This studio will explore the design of a micro-city—an airtropolis—appended to the new International Terminal at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. For 30 years Narita airport has been considered the central hub for connections into East Asia. Narita, however, is remote from Tokyo; it is an obsolete facility that has been superseded by major hubs on the Asian continent. In response to these pressures a new international terminal was completed at Tokyo’s old airport, Haneda, which benefits from its proximity to the metropolitan center and its access to high-speed rail. The federal and local governments, however, are now striving to create an attractor for international travelers as a way of re-centering Japan in the new Asia. Metropolitan planning initiatives have recognized the importance of developing a new urban center in proximity to Haneda. Rather than developing a “groundform” (a highly figured street and block structure based upon forces on networks and a figure-ground planning schema), we will develop a strategy based upon the creation of one large, yet complex, environmental envelope within and through which all of the elements of a city might develop.
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Simultaneously existing as both the architectural surface and its attachments, the envelope is a point of contact, a material link, between architecture and other social, political, and economic processes. Envelope is suddenly a loaded word across disciplines. Philosophers, anthropologists, artists, environmental engineers, product designers, marketing experts, and economists have identified it as a critical aspect of contemporary culture. In order to develop a unitary theory of the building envelope we have formed the Princeton Envelope Group, a think tank devoted to developing new architectural prototypes, conducting technical and theoretical research, and organizing public events and publications. Every member of the research studio will be in charge of developing a relevant envelope prototype and to undertake the necessary research to support it, including identifying the specific applications, talking to possible commissioners, consultants, etc. In this third and final edition of the Princeton Envelope Group we will attempt to challenge the four categories by choosing a project that will contain all of them simultaneously. We have selected an ongoing project in Earls Court, London, as a research domain. The project is an urban development by joint property owners Capco, Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, and Transport for London. The Earls Court Exhibition Centre will be demolished and replaced by 12,000,000 s.f. within a master plan developed by Terry Farrell. The prototypes for this year’s research are: —prototype for hybrid mix-use vertical envelope —prototype for large-scale, high-density, mix income housing complex: the contemporary mansion block —prototype for an inner city open retail complex: the future high street —prototype for a deep-plan employment building
ARC 506a—Reiser
pRE view PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
The School of Architecture is pleased to announce two new additions to the full-time faculty Lucia Allais, who has been in residence at the University for three years as a Berman-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows of the Council of the Humanities, will teach history and theory of architecture. A Princeton undergraduate alumnus and the first ever Berman-Cotsen Fellow in architecture, Allais brings wide body of knowledge to bear on both contemporary design issues and architectural history. Her scholarly work on the formation of post-WWII institutions reveals the intellectual roots of more recent developments on the field, while her sophisticated design background means she will be an integral part of the School’s design culture. Michael Meredith, principal of the architectural firm MOS, will join the design faculty. Meredith has been teaching at Harvard’s GSD, and in partnership with Hilary Sample, has produced some of the most compelling design proposals and built projects of their generation in the past five years. MOS is one of five teams of architects recently selected for “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” an exhibition to be held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012. Their work is widely published and exhibited, and significant new projects are underway. Michael’s unique ability to navigate between ideas and projects, between the digital and the real, between art and architecture, will make him a welcome addition to the School.
Matthew Clarke & Kai Franz win KPF Traveling Fellowship Two of the four 2011 KPF Travel Fellowships were awarded to Princeton students: Matthew Clarke for his proposal titled, “Girangaon, The Village of Mills, and Other Stories from the Past” (above), and Kai Franz for his proposal on “America’s Sites of Solitude” (below). Congratulations!
Princeton University School of Architecture Princeton, NJ 08544 ---------------------------------------------
ISSUE 02.03 spring 2011 ---------------------------------------------
RUMOR is the Princeton School of Architecture newsletter. RUMOR appears three times a year with news and reviews of the many activities at the School of Architecture: studios, classes and reviews; lectures events, conferences and faculty updates. RUMOR is by definition fragmentary and incomplete: a quick snapshot of the life of the School, telegraphic and immediate.
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