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Rumor 03.02 Nature City proposal by WORKac, for MoMA’s exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, opening February 2012
A Conversation with Joe Scanlan, Fritz Haeg, and Dan Wood
JOE SCANLAN: I just saw a picture of the proposed classroom for your Atelier course, a big, orange expedition tent placed smack in the middle of the New South lawn. It’s very compelling! It feels like a spaceship has landed, or explorers have arrived to begin extended research into this strange culture known as a university campus. Is that how it feels to you, preparing for this course. Are you embarking on an expedition? FRITZ HAEG: Yes, I really like that analogy to an expedition. An initial motivation for this project was to depart from the confines of conventional academic architecture. The privileged space of the academic environment is always interior: classrooms, libraries, studios, offices, dining halls, dormitories, etc. The non-interior spaces are typically residual left-over in-between spaces that are, at best, just meant to be pretty, ornamental, or recreational. So, yes, this project is like embarking on an expedition in a location that is both very familiar and unknown, very visible, but unseen. Did you ever pitch a tent in your backyard when you were a kid? Maybe it’s a bit like that....similar motivations to explore, find your own space, and to temporarily escape the institutional structures. JS: It sounds like you want to harness this space—put it under glass, so to speak—and see what it might reveal. We often talk about how college students learn as much through informal socializing as they do in formal classroom settings. The conversations that follow a seminar down the hall and out of the building might be more illuminating than the seminar itself. That has certainly been my experience, especially in my studio seminars, where confused and halting class discussions sometimes produce a flurry of studio activity. It is as if the information needs a different, less structured outlet in order to be manifested. Has that been your experiences? DAN WOOD: I am not sure that a focus on the “informal” doesn’t in a way trivialize the experiences and interactions that we hope to foster. In fact, some of the events, installations, and discussions that come out of this informal setting and arrange may, in fact, be quite organized, strident and “formal”—just self-generated and perhaps outside of the mainstream of the educational experience. For me, it is more a question of the “peripheral” that you are really describing, which is really at the heart of any creative venture. As we all know, the best ideas often come to us at the very moment we are thinking or doing something else. I think the kind of enforced peripherality that we are encouraging may indeed be a real source of inspiration and creativity.
FH: Yes, certainly, and that was in fact one of and so much better. I’m sure that’s happened to the fundamental aspects of the first season each of us, no? But it begs the question: How of the Sundown Schoolhouse, which I initiated do you set up and sustain a peripheral zone at my home in Los Angeles in 2006. Through the of creativity without it becoming the center? 12-week term, nine students visited for one How do you imagine the class maintaining that entire day a week from 8am until 8pm. In addispirit of being on the edge, so to speak? tion to our time spent with a wide range of DW: I was thinking more that the class is to visiting teachers, we shared morning movement set to be—in every possible way—peripheral to and yoga, prepared and ate all of our meals the larger institution. We will be outside, together, washed the dishes, cleaned up, and first of all, all the time, in direct conended the day with a social hour when friends trast with any typical class. (In February, were welcome to stop by and hang out. Of course this sense of being “outside” of the typical it was those moments between the supposedly learning environment will be very noticeprivileged formal school-time of focused disable I think!) Second, the class will be workcussion, when things settled—relaxing a bit, ing directly with existing student-run groups re-entering the quotidian, making connections— on campus, who already operate outside of the and some really essential dialogue emerged. proscribed activities and endeavors of the JS: I don’t normally have extended experiUniversity. Lastly, Fritz and I are working ences like that with my students, unless we to bring a number of speakers from outside of are on a field trip. One of the best class Princeton to engage the class in a series of discussions we ever had took place in a rented discussions about self-organization, activism, Buick LeSabre on our way back from a visit to creativity etc. Fritz himself, of course, is Dia:Beacon. (And yes, you can fit an entire not a member of our school and I think the very advanced sculpture class in a Buick LeSabre.) presence of all of the people working in wildly Still, twelve hours sounds like either a lot different contexts will inevitably lead to a of yoga, a lot of cooking and eating, or a lot lot of discussion and thinking outside of the of cleaning up. What other kinds of topics traditional Princeton box… would bubble up for discussion in between these FH: Yes, and perhaps the most fertile by-proddescribed events? uct of positioning ourselves outside of the FH: Most of the apparent focus of the confines of the established infrastructure is Schoolhouse days was on the regular series of that we will also become extremely visible, visiting teachers we had coming through—over inserting ourselves into the public realm of 24 of them from a variety of disciplines, over the University and student life. So much of the course of the 12 weeks. So we still did have what happens in the classrooms and studios that concentrated time with a teacher—but my remains hidden and invisible. This will be hope was to create an environment where the quite the opposite. students were in charge and at home, and it was the teachers who were visiting them on their Dan Wood and Fritz Haeg are teaching an Atelier own turf. And because each visitor spent relastudio in the Spring semester. The Atelier program tively little time with us, the core relationin Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts brings ships were student to student, not student to professional artists to campus for intensive teacher. In that way the dialog that emerged between the students could continue through collaborative work with students and faculty. the rest of our activities in a continual flow Proposed Atelier construction, from breakfast in the Princeton campus site, spring 2012 morning to happy hour at the end of the day, with the visitor there to continually redirect things. JS: Dan, your characterization of the peripheral reminds me of something the artist David Hammons once said, about how he feels his best work happens on the way to the studio rather than in the studio. And even once he’s there, the “big” piece he’s working on is getting all overworked and uptight, while some little thing he might do while talking on the phone or making tea would be freer,
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RE RE VIEW view PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- winter 2012 ---------------------------------------------
PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- winter 2012 ---------------------------------------------
Fall 2011 LECTURE SERIES recap: Facts on the ground
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 presented a cross section of architects working today: a generation educated from the late 1970s to the early 1990s who are today coming into their own with significant public and institutional building commissions.
clockwise from above: Nasra Nimaga, Ryan Johns, and Antonia Weiss (photos: Daniel Claro)
26 Sept—Carmé Piños
05 OCT—Michael Maltzan 07 nov—ELIZABETH DILLER 09 NOV—Sylvia Lavin
above: Preston Scott Cohen’s Herta and Paul Amir Building, Tel Aviv, 2011 (photo: Hufton and Crow)
below, clockwise from top left: Kenneth Frampton, Carmé Piños, Liz Diller, and Winy Maas (photos: Daniel Claro)
14 nov—Giancarlo Mazzanti
16 nov—Preston SCOTT COHEN 28 nov—Winy Maas
30 NOV—Francisco Mangado 01 dec—Kenneth Frampton special lecture for Alejandro Zaera-polo’s Envelope seminar 05 dec—sou Fujimoto
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MARFA army airfield with GUY NORDENSON and Michael Maltzan Fall 2011 STUDIO 505c
This studio will develop strategies, plans and building designs for a post-war art conservation center and art installation testing ground on the former Marfa Army Airfield (AAF) in Marfa, Texas. The site of Marfa AAF covers 2,750 acres (4.3 square miles) and is surrounded by the high West Texas desert. It was a training base for World War II pilots from 1942 until 1945, during which time it brought prosperity to the town of Marfa. It later served as a municipal airport until that too was abandoned in the 1980s. Today, the ruins of Marfa AAF are part of a private ranch owned by Brad Kelley. Donald Judd came to Marfa in 1971, long after Marfa AAF was decommissioned. By then, the community had adapted to the closure of the base, but it was by no means prosperous. In the forty years since Judd’s arrival, Marfa has reemerged as an unlikely wellspring for contemporary art and tourism. When Judd first approached Heiner Friedrich, co-founder of the Dia Art Foundation, to finance the construction of buildings for the permanent installation of artworks in Marfa, there was some discussion about purchasing Marfa AAF. Instead, the Dia purchased Fort DA Russell as the location for the Chinati Foundation. Chinati oversees the conservation and preservation of Donald Judd’s permanent installations on-site, as well as the installations of several other artists.
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CULTURE NOW with Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Ryan welch Fall 2011 studio 505a
The Culture Now Project, initiated by Thom Mayne at UCLA’s in 2010-2011 has been expanded as a collaborative effort of eleven universities including Rice, Kentucky, Syracuse, Rensselaer, Pratt, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, MIT, and Cornell. Culture Now investigates the contemporary American condition to shift perspectives in struggling U.S. cities. By integrating public policy, urban studies, contemporary culture and its spatial manifestations, Culture Now reframes the current conversation. Princeton’s contribution in the fall of 2011 was the studio “Localizing Networks: Physical Terminals for Web 2.0 Engines” taught by Alejandro Zaera-Polo with Ryan Welch. The phenomenon of Web 2.0 is marked by the rapidly evolving domains of e-commerce, social media, and social networking, which have changed how we create and make use of financial, social, and physical capital. These developments offer new platforms for social engagement and political action whose architectural implications are still a matter of speculation. The changes extend to all aspects of our daily life, reshaping the way we form communities and cultures, forge social structures, utilize resources, and engage in politics. This research will investigate ways in which architecture can calibrate physical engagement as an actor in the process of social networking and social media. We will look to specific companies within the Web 2.0 arena and examine how physical hubs for social interaction can work in concert with the network paradigms already available through the web and mobile devices. We will be drawing from sociology texts on actornetwork theory and assemblages for insight into how we can engage the human and non-human –the physical and the digital– actors in the understanding of network behavior. We will aim to establish a new set of quantitative and qualitative metrics for each project through which we can explore how architecture can become a crucial actor within these networks.
Correction: 200 West Street (Pei Cobb Freed & Partners with Guy Nordenson and Associates and Yolles Partnership) and World Trade Center Memorial Slurry Wall Bracing Structure (Guy Nordenson and Associates with Davis Brody Bond and Simpson Gumpertz & Heger) New York NY Photograph courtesy of Richard Barnes and Guy Nordenson and Associates.
Faculty PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- winter 2012 ---------------------------------------------
Birmingham new street station NEW ATRIUM AREA Alejandro Zaera-Polo architecture
RE RE VIEW VIEW PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- winter 2012 ---------------------------------------------
PRINCETON- school of ARCHITECTURE rumor- winter 2012 ---------------------------------------------
Fall 2011 events Media + Modernity
The Program in Media and Modernity promotes the interdisciplinary study of the unique cultural formations that came to prominence during the last century, with special attention paid to the interplay between culture and technology. The program centers on architecture, art, film, photography, literature, philosophy, music, history, and all forms of electronic media from radio to video, to information technology.
10.18.2011
Unfinished spaces
Film screening of the documentary Unfinished Spaces. The screening was followed by a round table conversation with architect Ricardo Porro, filmmaker Alysa Nahmias, Stan Allen, Beatriz Colomina, Rubén Gallo and John Loomis. This event was co-sponsored by the Program in Media and Modernity, the School of Architecture, and the Program in Latin American Studies.
“Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world.” —Fidel Castro (1961)
In 1961, three young, visionary architects were commissioned by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara to create Cuba’s National Art Schools on the grounds of a former golf course in Havana, Cuba. Construction of their radical designs began immediately and the school’s first classes soon followed. Dancers, musicians and artists from all over the country reveled in the beauty of the schools, but as the dream of the Revolution quickly became a reality, construction was abruptly halted and the architects and their designs were deemed irrelevant in the prevailing political climate. Forty years later the schools are in use, but remain unfinished and decaying. Castro has invited the exiled architects back to finish their unrealized dream. Unfinished Spaces features intimate footage of Fidel Castro, showing his devotion to creating a worldwide showcase for art, and it also documents the struggle and passion of three revolutionary artists. Directed by Alysa Nahmias (a 2006 Graduate of the School of Architecture) and Ben Murray, the film has been widely screened, including a screening at the Havana Film Festival in December 2011.
Displacement
Kassler lecture with Stanley Tigerman 19 October 2011
from top: Unfinished Spaces discussion with Stan Allen, John Loomis, Ricardo Porro, Alysa Nahmias, Beatriz Colomina, and Rubén Gallo (photo: Daniel Claro); Premier of Unfinished Spaces at the Havana Film Festival, Cuba, December 4, 2011 (photo: Alysa Nahmias); still from Unfinished Spaces, Fidel Castro playing golf
11.29.2011
Kissing vs. Complex: Hal foster and Sylvia Lavin moderated by Beatriz Colomina, director, program in media + modernity On 29 November, in a filled-to-capacity Betts Auditorium, Art and Archaeology Professor Hal Foster and Visiting Architecture Professor Sylvia Lavin debated the problems and possibilities of the relationship between architecture and contemporary art. The two-hour discussion, which was moderated by Beatriz Colomina, highlighted the differing positions in Lavin’s Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Foster’s The Art-Architecture Complex (Verso, 2011).
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12.07.2011
Anachronic architecture: Christopher wood
Christopher Wood (photo: Britt Eversole)
The final M+M event for Fall 2011 was a conversation with Yale University Art Historian Christopher Wood, who was a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Wood was joined by School of Architecture Professors Lucia Allais and Spyros Papapetros and Department of Art and Archeology Professor Christopher Heuer. The roundtable discussed Wood’s recent publications Anachronic Renaissance (Zone, 2010) and Forgery, Replica, Fiction (Chicago, 2008), in which he challenges the conventional story of how the modern work of art was born by showing how “substitutional” modes of artistic production survived alongside the invention of linguistic, authorial aesthetic systems. The conversation considered the application of Wood’s model to the history of Renaissance monuments, and speculated on the anachronic as a feature of architectural modernity itself.
Each year the School of Architecture invites an architect of the highest international distinction to deliver our most prestigious lecture, the Kenneth Kassler Lecture. The series was endowed in honor of Kenneth Kassler after his death in 1964. Kassler was a member of the Princeton Class of 1927 and received his MFA here in 1930. He was an instructor at the School from 1930 to 1933, and Chairman of the School’s Advisory Council. The inaugural Kenneth Kassler Lecture was given in 1966 by R. Buckminster Fuller; since that time, lecturers have included Peter Eisenman, Arata Isozaki, John Hejduk, Vincent Scully) Reyner Banham and Kazuyo Sejima. Since 2004, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Denise Scott Brown, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Kurt W. Forster, Toyo Ito and Rafael Moneo have been among those who have delivered that Kassler lecture.
“Stanley Tigerman combines the nonchalant imaginativeness of a dreamer with the pragmatic focus of a realist. His belief in the pedagogical dimension of the “project” of architecture accounts for the versatility of his work, which by far exceeds that of routine professional production. As a writer, Tigerman is a passionate polemicist; as an artist, an aphorist. One of Tigerman’s most idiosyncratic and important contributions to the architectural discussion is his relentless insistence on the architect’s ethic to interpret his or her physical, cultural, and sociological habitat. Tigerman is one of the few architects of his generation who has managed, in their built work, to retain the candid critical charge of speculative sketches and writings. Throughout Tigerman’s work, aesthetic demand goes face to face with ethical stipulation; to argue for the necessity of a dialogue between the two is Tigerman’s most insistent thesis.” From “Nine Clouds of Architecture” by Emmanuel Petit, curator of the exhibition Ceci n’est pas une reverie: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery, Fall 2011.
The School is pleased to Announce the forthcoming publication of the first two installments in a book series documenting the Kassler Lectures: Fuller’s 1966 lecture “World Man” and Toyo Ito’s 2009 lecture “Generative Order” will be published in 2012 by Princeton Architectural Press.
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CONSTRUCTED ATMOSPHERES Spring 2012 lecture series
02.22 Sean Lally + Michelle Addington Atelier lecture
03.05 Chip Lord
03.28 Stefano Boeri + Hiroshi Sambuichi Open house
04.09 Jeanne gang
04.11 AMID.cero9 (Cristina Díaz Moreno + Efrén García Grinda) + Laurent Stalder
04.18 Iñaki Ábalos + Michael Jakob
04.25 Jonathan Hill + Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Curated by Philippe Rahm, Labatut Visiting Professor, 2012 “We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air.” —Evangelista Torricelli, 1644 Architects regularly claim that the main subject of their discipline is “space.” Indeed, this is traditionally what differentiated architecture from sculpture: we can enter inside a work architecture where we have to stay outside of a work of sculpture: in front of it. If sculpture deals with the solid and its forms, architecture must treat the void and its atmosphere. But until recently, the architects have been unable to define the void in another way than designing the solid around it, because they had no real knowledge of the space, they didn’t really know this hollow in between the walls that they could neither catch nor see. But the vacuum has gradually won thickness: with Torricelli and Blaise Pascal in the 17th century the air has became heavy; in the 18th century, with Antoine Lavoisier and Daniel Rutherford, it became chemically decomposed into elementary particles of oxygen or nitrogen; it was charged by bacteria of a biological value with Louis Pasteur in the 19th century, and modulated by electromagnetic waves in the 20th century. If the architects of the past were reduced to work on the solid, today we are more and more able to work directly on space itself and to design its atmosphere by shaping temperature, smell, light or steam. For the architects and thinkers of the spring lecture series, architecture is becoming the art of constructed atmospheres. All lectures take place at 6pm 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.
Princeton University School of Architecture Princeton, NJ 08544 ---------------------------------------------
ISSUE 03.02 winter 2012 ---------------------------------------------
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.
03.02 p.08 Rumor 03.02 More to follow…