RE VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
Rumor 03.01 A Conversation between Michael maltzan and Stan Allen
Stan Allen: Your career has developed consistently in close contact with artists and the art world. Can you talk about what you have learned from those experiences, and how it affects your work and your way of thinking about architecture? I mention this in particular because the studio you will be teaching with Guy Nordenson will be looking at the intersections of art and architecture in Marfa, Texas. MICHAEL MALTZAN: My connection with artists and art culture came simply because most of my friends and colleagues were artists, having gone to architecture school at RISD. Because of that, much of my thinking about architecture’s relationship or presence in culture was as much through the lens of art, art history, art theory, and criticism, as it was through architectural history, theory, and criticism. It still is. At RISD, there wasn’t a substantial distinction between disciplines, but rather a real emphasis placed on ideas, and how you saw the world first. Only afterward, how you worked in that world, and how you made something about that world required you to ultimately become conversant and capable with the histories and contemporary practices and techniques of your discipline. I think because of those experiences I feel comfortable being in both of those worlds, art and architecture, simultaneously. I understand the subtle distinctions in the vocabularies, the ambitions, the instincts, what separates us, but also what connects us. Looking at art practice is also an important way for me personally to step outside of architecture when thinking about projects. While I feel deeply committed to architecture and its history, the field has become formally too self-propelling. If you look at much of the work now, it has gotten too good, too competent. It makes you wonder what the next great problem for architecture will be, or at least what the problem is at all. I’m looking for that problem in other places, and art has always been a good place to start.
Sa: As I think you know, I am particularly interested in the recently completed house for the painters Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell. It seemed to me a very radical to response to the existing Neutra house — and the long history of California modernism — to turn the new house inwards. So much of the rhetoric of modern architecture is based on dissolving the barrier between inside and outside, but you wrap this house in a nearly blank wall and orient the view to the interior courtyards. (I think of the famous Adolf Loos quip that “a civilized man does not look out of the window.”) There is something of this in the recently completed Carver Apartments as well, but my sense is that in that case it’s a response to the site and the need to create a protected enclave. Are these simply two instances where the site and program caused you to reconsider interiority as a working principle, or is this something that has a resonance with other projects in the office? MM: In both projects the intensity you mentioned was a response to the conditions of the site, but also grows out of one of the principle lines of interest in the overall work of the office. At the Carver Apartments, the proximity to the highway creates phenomenal visibility to and from the project between usually separated communities, but that social exposure and the pragmatics of noise necessitated a more interior life. Pittman/Dowell is located on the threshold of the mountains, and the exposure created by the classically modernist transparency of the Neutra house became very hard to sustain for Lari and Roy against the harsh context of the mountains. But I also became aware of a different type of exposure, and that had to do with Lari and Roy’s life. Both are very visible people. As professors, lecturers, and exhibiting artists, they are almost always present in the public realm, and I think that no matter who you are, or what you do, that intense exposure and visibility has become our common reality and condition of our lives. At both Carver, and especially at Pittman/ Dowell, I was fascinated by this newer dynamic
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Top and left: New Carver Apartments, Los Angeles; above: Pittman/Dowell Residence, Los Angeles.
at a cultural and social level, where the reality of our collective contemporary life, and our presence everywhere simultaneously seems like a new, and a real spatial problem for architecture. In the face of that reality, maybe a rethinking and renegotiation of our internal world is the more radical idea. The transparency and dissolving of the inside and outside is a modernist ideal, but not necessarily a contemporary idea. Sa: You could say that broadly speaking there are two distinct trajectories for architects of our generation. In one scenario, perhaps more typical in the US, architects develop highly experimental work in their early careers, and then when they win a competition or get larger scale commissions, they are faced with the challenge of translating that work into built form, often with a loss of complexity or sophistication. Others — and although I would associate it with Europe, it seem a closer fit for you — have tended to start from simpler forms, and as the complexity of the commissions increases (and perhaps the confidence in the office’s ability) higher levels of complexity are introduced. Does this seem accurate? And in your case, it also works against expectations to some degree, given your early experience in the office of Frank Gehry. Can you talk a bit about how you see the overall trajectory of the work? MM: I was conscious of those two different trajectories when I began, and I’ve gone the way I have partially because I believed that architecture is at its most full, complex, and influential form within culture when it is built, when it is undeniable. It changes the equation between the architect, the idea, and the audience. I was, and still am committed to that route of investigation and participation in architecture. As for the evolution from simpler to more complex form, you are right that in the beginning the types of commissions and the capabilities of the office lent themselves to a more reduced vocabulary, but your second point about working against expectations was more on my mind when I started. I was trying to find what was mine, and the only way I knew how to do it was to try and “clear the palette” and build a vocabulary or a direction to the work from a more distilled starting point. It was more about making a break from what was around me than a conscious idea about form. I was naïve though to think that I could do that with some anonymity, quietly, until I figured it out. It doesn’t happen that way anymore, and the work got known, and you get known of course for the work you have done, and not for what it is leading to. Interestingly for me, when I look at the trajectory of the work, I see a greater similarity in the spatial complexity of the work from start to now, while I would agree that the form complexity has evolved a great deal as you mentioned.
RE RE VIEW VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
Masters Thesis Projects: PROPERTy SPring 2011 Liz Diller, Thesis Director Assisted by David Allin
Each semester, the thesis students are challenged to make an architectural response to a general thematic question. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Thesis topics are one word themes, agreed upon by the faculty, that serve as a hinge point between architecture and questions of politics, culture, technology or society. The thematic organization of the final semester’s independent design research creates a shared point of departure for students, faculty and visiting critics.
Final Spring 2011 M.Arch. Thesis Review (counter-clockwise from top left): Natalie Jeremijenko; Matt McMahon with jurors; Jorge Gonzalez; Paul Lewis, Axel Kilian, Liz Diller, Jesse Reiser; Yu Cheng Koh; Vishaan Chackrabarti, Ric Scofidio, Didier Faustino; Timothy Hyde, Mark Wigley, Catherine Ingraham, Teddy Cruz, Anthony Vidler, Stan Allen; Sylvia Lavin, Wonne Ickx, Mabel Wilson, Ric Scofidio, Bryony Roberts; Anthony Vidler, Stan Allen; Jae Shin (photos: Dan Copenhaver).
The students have carved out a whole range of subthemes — little pieces of property within the larger theme of property, and what’s so interesting is the variety of different topics. And yet with all of these topics — which seem so exotic for a moment, they’re the topics that we’re faced with every day. Every moment that we do architecture we are crossing these kinds of thresholds: property issues, which suggest questions of politics and policies and economics and habits and negotiations…it’s in everything we do. The semester has brought out some tougher and more surgical investigations of these very particular themes. —Liz Diller
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Invited Critics, Final Jury Vishaan Chackrabarti Didier Faustino Sylvia Lavin Monica Ponce de Leon Ric Scofidio Anthony Vidler Mabel Wilson Sustainability is impossible until you’ve Teddy Cruz reconsidered property because you cannot exceed Timothy Hyde the property boundary right now. You can’t organize Wonne Ickx a large scale environmental system without running into property constraints. I was looking in the Catherine Ingraham projects for where the ecological began blur the Natalie Jeremijenko boundary in some way, whether it was the salt or the Jodi Newcombe wall or whatever that began to try to make the that Mark Wigley boundary blurry in some way. —Catherine Ingraham
It proves that certain words are definitely more volatile than others. I think that the quality and the criticality of those questions will solicit implicitly critical answers. I think this is how to relocate the discourse, how to locate the research, to locate other sites of investigation. The question is so fundamental that you cannot ignore it. You immediately have to complicate the process by addressing the political and economical means that often remain peripheral. —Teddy Cruz
So hypothetically it would be interesting to challenge the jury to detect the key word or at least what the second word is. I’m not so sure how good we would be at picking up that, which is just to say that generally architects are ventriloquists — they act as if the project is saying something, but if it was saying that, they actually wouldn’t have to say anything. I think the word property then, in this case, is neither in the mouth of the student nor on the walls but somewhere between, which is really interesting and, I suppose is a property question also. Who owns that territory? Do the students own it or does the jury own it? Why do we get the last word? That was my last word. —Mark Wigley
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What you’re describing in a way is the dilemma of thesis. It has a sense of finality, right? I mean you’re summing up your academic career with this single project and that’s an absolutely impossible ambition for any student, for any project, so I think if there’s any sort of message to give at the end, it’s to underscore the provisionality of everything that has been put on the table. I think this also speaks to the question of the theme, and I think we’ve always thought of the theme as a kind of provocation and a kind of jumping off point rather than a kind of check. It’s not like a sort of litmus test: did the person adequately address the theme of property? If you start with property and end up, I don’t know, with ergonomics or something, that to me counts as success, not failure, in this particular exercise. It’s very hard I think to undo that sense of the finality of thesis which is just deadly for the project, so I think you need to think of this as the beginning of an investigation, not the final answer. —Stan Allen
FACulty GUY NORDENSoN AND ASSOCIATES
PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
200 West street NEW YORK, NY
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PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
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RE PRE view VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
FACTS ON THE GROUND
WATERSHED 08 JUNE 2011
Fall 2011 lecture series
An atelier on the domain of water in 21st century architecture, urbanism and infrastructure Joy Knoblauch
On June 8, 2011, CAUI hosted an atelier on the domain of water in 21st century architecture, urbanism and infrastructure with presentations from a range of disciplines. As a whole, the Watershed workshop reinforced the importance of bridging between the detailed technocratic language of water and the spectacular pleasures and dangers of water at its many scales. The need for outreach was present in Anthony Acciavatti’s discussion of pamphlets that teach residents about the dangers and best practices for living behind a levee and in Antoine Grumbach’s discussion of the role that the watershed of the Seine could have in giving identity and cohesion to the sprawling communities in the territory of the Seine. As several participants mentioned, the improvement of water’s domain in the future will depend on assembling the political will necessary to realize any such project, thus placing architects in the role of liaison with the public in addition to their role as designers. To start the day, Mario Gandelsonas presented CAUI’s work on soft infrastructure and a case study on slow infrastructure in New Jersey followed by a series of ‘provocations’ aimed at framing the discussion about water. Graciela Schneier-Madanes of CNRS Urban Water Research Network presented the idea of a “water language” able to span the many constituencies, many types of water, and a brief history of the way regulation of water has already shaped the urban environment. Princeton University PhD student Anthony Acciavatti continued the excavation of the influence of government on development through the management of water in his presentation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Mississippi River Basin. Geographer Antoine Fremont, of Systèmes Productifs, Logistiques, Organisation des Transports et Travail, presented a freight-based urban typology of the city and its relation to rivers through history, ending with a proposal for inter-modal transportation infrastructure along a city’s edge. Joy Knoblauch, Princeton PhD candidate, developed CAUI’s call for the hybridization of urban and agricultural elements into an analysis of the aesthetic regimes which result from that mixture in two cases: the urbanization of agriculture in the New York City watersheds and in urban agriculture in Shenyang, China, Detroit, Michigan, and Brooklyn, New York. In the afternoon session, the discussion turned from provocations for design to design proposals themselves. Antoine Grumbach of Antoine Grumbach et Associés presented his work on the Grand Paris project to connect Paris and Le Havre into a unified region connected by transportation infrastructure along the 300 kilometers of the Seine. Henri Bava of Agence Ter presented a project for Hamburg which would similarly connect it with its hinterlands using an urban shipping port of flood-ready islands. Shifting gears, Veolia Environment representative Robert Bozza provided a glimpse of the practices of global capital which select and guide novel approaches to water use and waste management at the 300,000 person company, active in 73 countries. Moving to a local perspective, Pierre Mansat, Adjoint au Maire de Paris, and his colleague Dominique Alba, Director of APUR, described projects to bring Parisians into closer, cleaner and more fulfilling contact with water along the banks of the Seine and through projects to cool citizens in the summer. Ending the day’s presentations, Diana Agrest of Cooper Union presented drawings of water features highlighting their potential to be sources, sites and contexts for design, ranging from Crater Lake to the Bering Strait. In his closing remarks, Jean-Louis Cohen diagnosed a return of utopianism in the day’s discussion, but the mixture of disciplines, readings, and designs presented in the atelier are far from the pure utopias of the 20th century. The conversation at the atelier chose not to seek tabula rasa, technocratic solutions to the problems of water, infrastructure and environment. Instead, the participants were committed to incremental solutions which accept messy economic and political realities. In this, the day was typical of a new thread of architectural discourse suited to an age that accepts that everything that seems natural is largely constructed, that the environment depends on capital for its growth if not for its design, and that politics requires the production of aesthetics which can compel its various constituencies. It’s an age that grew up with such theoretical contradictions, and is now launched on asking, so what? How do those realizations help us to help ourselves? Where an earlier generation might have blanched at the instrumentalization of theory, the current conversation begins with the enrichment of the field produced by theory, and then continues with a robust base against which proposals can be tested. Exploring the domain of water in the 21st century is one part of figuring out how to approach a context wherein all solutions are incremental and always already politically and economically entangled in complex realities of industry, demographics and predictable disasters. In early 2012, the group of scholars and designers will meet in Los Angeles to continue the discussion of the ways that they can use their aesthetic expertise to alter the relation of environment, power and resource use at the architectural, urban and infrastructural scales.
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KISSING ARCHITECTURE SYLVIA LAVIN
Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this first installment of a new series of extended-essay length books, Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of “kissing” to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art—particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings—and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today. Initiating readers into the guilty pleasures of architecture that abandons the narrow focus on function, Lavin looks at recent work by Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others who choose to embrace the viewer in powerful affects and visual and sensory atmospheres. Addressing one of the most topical and significant developments in the current cultural scene, Kissing Architecture is a disarmingly incisive book that offers an entirely new way of seeing — and experiencing architecture in the age after representation. Kissing Architecture—Reception and book signing to follow Sylvia Lavin’s lecture at the School of Architecture Lecture at 6 pm in Betts Auditorium, Wednesday, November 9
LANDFORM BUILDING: ARCHITECTURE’S NEW TERRAIN Edited by Stan Allen and Marc McQuade Published by Lars MÜller AND PRINCETON SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, 2011 Green roofs, artificial mountains and geological forms; buildings you walk on or over; networks of ramps and warped surfaces; buildings that carve into the ground or landscapes lifted high into the air: all these are commonplace in architecture today. New technologies, new design techniques and a demand for enhanced environmental performance have provoked a re-thinking of architecture’s traditional relationship to the ground. Some of today’s most innovative buildings no longer occupy a given site but instead, construct the site itself. Landform Building sets out to examine the many manifestations of landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice: not as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon (architects working in the landscape) but as new design techniques, new formal strategies and technical problems within architecture. Landform Building—Launch to take place in the Atelier Bow Wow designed BMW/Guggenheim Pavilion at Houston St. and Second Ave., Saturday, September 17 at 5:30 pm, reception and book signing
As a public art form, architecture is of necessity a discipline of circumstance and situation. Buildings are realized through a complex calculation involving clients, codes, consultants, budgets, builders, regulatory agencies, technical, material and site constraints and the complex logistics of construction itself. As creative subjects, architects react to these demands, inventing in response to occasion of the commission, specifying and particularizing a given set of abstract variables. The practice of architecture tends to be messy and inconsistent precisely because it works with an imperfect reality. The fall lecture series will present a cross section of architects working today — a generation educated from the late 1970s to the early 1990’s who are today coming into their own with significant public and institutional building commissions. The series was assembled under three working hypotheses: 1. That in today’s information-driven, networked public realm, the compact, bounded form of the building retains a powerful social agency; indeed, architecture’s centripetal tendency might even be seen as a necessary counter to the current tendency toward cultural diffusion. Public buildings today are at once more open and permeable at the same time as they reassert the privilege of architecture to mark out boundaries and limits. 2. That there is a productive tension evident in the best of contemporary production between personal experimentation, or formal innovation, and the collective legibility necessary for an engaged public debate. Architecture unfolds in constant conversation with the history of the discipline, and each new building moves that conversation forward. 3. That the best contemporary public buildings anticipate — and actively engage — all of the multiple publics at play in contemporary society. These are practices that are less concerned to manage the meaning of their buildings, and more concerned with the consequences of their architecture as it operates in, and on, the world. Architects shape and reshape public life; working all over the world, these architects have made a high-stakes wager that architecture is still capable of provoking “differences that make a difference.”
All lectures take place at 6 pm in Betts Auditorium, Architecture Building. Lectures made possible by the Jean Labatut Memorial Lecture Fund. The School of Architecture, Princeton University, is registered with the AIA Continuing Education System (AIA/CES) and is committed to developing quality learning activities in accordance with the AIA/CES criteria. This series was organized by Stan Allen.
09.26.2011
Carme Pinos
10.05.2011
Michael Maltzan
11.07.2011
Liz Diller
11.09.2011
Sylvia Lavin
11.14.2011
Giancarlo Mazzanti
11.16.2011
PRESTON SCOTT COHEN
11.28.2011
Winy Maas
11.30.2011
Francisco Mangado
12.05.2011
Sou fujimoto
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pRE view PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- Fall 2011 ---------------------------------------------
BRANDON CLIFFORD
2011 SOM prize winner in architecture, design, and urban design
The Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation has announced that Brandon Clifford has been selected as the recipient of the 2011 SOM Prize, a $50,000 Research and Travel Fellowship. Brandon received his Master of Architecture degree in May 2011 from The School. Continuing a long-standing interest in translating past methods of design and making into a contemporary digital process, Brandon’s winning proposal takes a new approach to computer fabrication, putting it in context of historical practices of stereotomy. As he points out, “So much of the discussion surrounding digital design has focused on surface; we have lost the ability work with mass and volume.” Brandon will utilize his Fellowship to visit a series of historical sites that are key reference points for his topic. As Brandon explains, “volumetric stone structures have a character that cannot be duplicated with other materials, yet many times these volumes are disguised with rhetorical surface treatments. These treatments create the effect of softness, plasticity, and sometimes-organic nature. In addition to the hard and verifiable evidence such as geometry, this research will speculate, through the aid of comparison, as to why these desires are formalized.” The SOM Prize is awarded annually through a national competition. In July 2011, the SOM Foundation received 105 portfolio submissions from students at 45 US schools having accredited programs in architecture, design and urban design. The submissions were judged on the quality of the design portfolios, research proposals and travel itineraries.
Princeton University School of Architecture Princeton, NJ 08544 ---------------------------------------------
ISSUE 03.01 FALL 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. More to follow…
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