Y4 Arch Dsgn IV
August - December 2018
LANDSCAPES FOR ORNAMENT Translating the Identitarian traits of Bangkok’s markets LORENZO PERRI
The Grammar of Ornament - Owen Jones
Bangkok's markets are heterogeneous landfills of fragmented props - lined with ubiquitous stalls, makeshift kitchens and a large variety of temporary structures selling different food, clothes, and electronic gadgets. They feed the soul of local hungry observers and the pockets of international compulsive collectors. Markets - traditional, illegal, nocturnal or floating - always present a complex and allegorical urban condition, that exceeds their architectural stage-set - clashing the primitive flavour of ancestral routines with constantly updated sets of mirabilia. Furthermore, markets embody the long-standing tradition of informal trade within the community. In such a context, informality can be seen as an
effective response to pre-conceived societal structures, as an instrument to re-organize political and formal imposed conditions. It is rooted in people’s daily life, producing its own social, economic and cultural sphere, manifested through symbolically charged objects. Eventually, much more than a series of stalls, hawkers and customers, they offer an effective portrait of contemporary urban rituals - framing a crucial part of the image that Bangkok offers to its inhabitants and visitors. Markets shape a relevant context to counteract the deceiving flatness,caused lately by the growth of globalizing forces, and provide an opportunity to describe singularities and sub-cultures, through iconographic and architectural strategies.
|International Program in Design + Architecture | Room 409, Architecture Building |
| Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University | Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 Thailand |
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Indeed, within the increasingly cosmopolitan yet hierarchical Thai society, informality often breaks the boundaries created by cultural prejudices, establishing common ground able to enact symbolic communication. Especially when expressed through Pop icons and popular traditions, informality intuitively triggers authenticity and a sense of belonging, even among those who are the most reluctant to accept its exuberant and apparently scarcely refined language. The horizontal shared nature of informality, together with its visual richness, produces a perfect basis for a contemporary notion of ornament. The studio allows for aesthetic deviations and further stylistic elaborations, always requiring for an architectural high resolution. The relationships between informality and complexity will be questioned through the designed ornaments - to challenge not only the iconographical sources for architecture, but also the conventional meaning of elegance and vernacularity. We can therefore ask: what is an architectural ornament today? How can we go beyond its recent revival, manifested mainly through patterns generated by digital softwares and transformed into construction elements? We define ornament not just as an architectural detail, but as an adjective to life. We define ornament as an attribute arising from daily practices and the immanence of their products, the ornament as a medium to highlight singularities or represent the ordinary for the human senses. Through aesthetics and material qualities, it witnesses popular power and élitarian resemblance , evoking psychological pleasure and artistic beauty. Ornament is often found in the parts of a building that require peculiar attention: in a transformation zone, in between things, at the margins or perimeter - where a door meets a wall, a façade touches the ground, or even when a square meets the street. Those parts define the border of a designed shape or object. If specific features of a building are not manifesting themselves clearly, making use of ornament can guide people in space. The studio translates this interstitial condition of the ornament into a threshold between architecture as an enclosed discipline and the broader common sense - building a more shared aesthetic and functional understanding of the world. The ornament becomes a tool to restore both subjectivity and collective identity, an effective mechanism to deeply connect architecture with contemporary culture.
Phase1: Sampling
Ornamental
Iconography
“Where ornament comes from” 4 weeks(Culminating with 5th Sept Collective PinUp) + 1 week Field Trip(8th-16th Sept)
Dalston Anatomy - L.Vitturi.
“Every
Project has to be coming together of two things: an intriguing thematic idea, and a material form through which to think about it”W. Kentridge
Markets are populated by a mixed-semiotics of icons, goods, symbols, mechanic objects and spatial details - each of them with precise material properties and colour palette. People inhabit them with daily scripted movements, almost time based dances, performing various behavioural codes and sometimes even wearing casual uniforms. Markets in Bangkok are faceted landscapes of layered iconographies: privileged spaces to witness the encounter between Pop and Popular, still two of the most important categories for the richness of contemporary visual languages. Intertwined yet different, “Pop culture” feeds constantly from popular culture and vice versa; indeed, “pop” corresponds to a production of subjectivity – in terms of externally induced or altered tastes and induced necessities - that characterizes capitalist modes of production. It is deterritorialized by nature, while popular culture is profoundly territorial, rooted in habits, economies of production, social practices and contextual modes of living. Looking at the intersection between PoP and Popular, we aim to appropriate this extremely rich world of signs and materials sourced from ordinary rituals to foster ornamental experimentation. Each student will choose a market in Bangkok as his/her specific context (overlaps are admitted), but
|International Program in Design + Architecture | Room 409, Architecture Building |
| Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University | Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 Thailand |
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Y4 Arch Dsgn IV
August - December 2018
they won't define a priori a topic to be investigated within it. As curious drifters, they will document daily behaviours and collect material fragments, intuitively extracting from the clashes between them a thematic idea. Students will construct catalogues of props into the form of composite artifacts: assembled sculptures or tridimensional still lifes, crafted collages or taxonomic drawings. They will alter and then combine different pieces, pairing them with edited pictures and videos to creatively contextualize the iconographic interactions within the markets. These compounds will work as communicative boards for the public, building spontaneous visual relationships to enable symbolic mutual understanding.
customs, that informal iconography and complex architectural ornamentation have become an integral part of daily life, constantly expressed through heterogeneous built scenarios. Students will intuitively experience this fundamental dicothomy, investigating the urban fabric and focusing on the markets that can be identified with entire neighborhoods: Ballarò,Vucciria and Mercato del Capo. These markets are disseminated with hidden over-decorated churches and baroque secular buildings, whose spatial proximity with the stalls, selling any type of food and colourful goods, creates unexpected linguistic clashes. The iconographical language of daily routines happening in popular streets speaks with the elegance of baroque ornamentation: the informal and the refined are here indeed intimately connected, having relentlessly influenced each other over the centuries.
Deliverables:
La Vucciria - R. Guttuso
Field Trip(8th-16th Sept): Palermo, a case-study to experience intuitive linguistic connections. Estimated cost (per student): -airfare: 35500 THB -accommodation (8 nights): 7500 THB -travel insurance: 1000 THB -transportation (MiniVan 10 people): 2500 THB -Italy Tourist Visa (Type C for Thai): 2280 THB -travel insurance: 1000 THB Tot: 49780 THB (per student) Culturally, Palermo has been the centre of a millenarian history, where Arab domination has left great testimonies of its presence. The city is the point of union between Western and Oriental culture, and took influences both from the Byzantines and the Normans. Today, Sicilian tradition fits perfectly in this heterogeneous ground. The architecture of the city, in its language and construction processes, is a perfect example of syncretism. It is in its mélange of beliefs and cultures, fragmentation of aesthetic dialects and
3d Still-Life & Composite Collages + Video Footages (Specific market as an iconographical context)
Techniques: Cataloguing objects Altering material fragments Photographing Video Recording & Editing SCHEDULE Week Day
Date
Agenda
1
Mon 13-Aug No Class
Wed 15-Aug Introduction
2
Mon 20-Aug Tutorial
Wed 22-Aug Lecture+Tutorial
3
Mon 27-Aug Tutorial
Wed 29-Aug Lecture+Tutorial
4
Mon 03-Sep
Tutorial
Wed 05-Sep
COLLECTIVE PIN-UP
5
FIELD TRIP
|International Program in Design + Architecture | Room 409, Architecture Building |
| Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University | Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 Thailand |
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Phase 2:Crafting
Ornamental Strategies
“What ornament is” 5 weeks(MidTerm on the 2nd week)
Taxones Tabatinga - A. Baraya
“Architecture is partly based on the mediation of its former achievements as well as shortcomings.” A . Picon
At the time when the doctrine of imitation still prevailed in the arts, that is until the mid 18th century, theorists often remarked that whereas painting and sculpture often imitated nature, architecture had a propensity to imitate itself. The studio will challenge the strong self referential character of the architectural discipline,continuing with the firm belief that architecture follows culture - fundamentally being a tool to depict and embody reality. Architects cannot afford to propose aseptic, anorexic, and flat images; it needs to be as rich and differentiated as the world that surrounds us. We need to re-think how to address issues of specificity, symbolism and identity in our built environment: the crafting of appropriate ornaments can be an expressive, inclusive and enabling device. The iconographical compounds constructed in the previous weeks will work for each student as the basis for a consequently thorough architectural strategies. The context of the markets won't provide a specific brief/program for the ornamental apparatus; it will though create a fertile ground allowing architecture and its generative mechanisms to be deeply interwoven with reality. The students will dissect the topic investigated during the first phase into a set of variegated interactions not necessarily linked - between people, alive beings and unanimated objects or just between material fragments and tools - each of them becoming then the basis for different ornamental components, parts of an evolving and open architectural vocabulary.
Indeed, considering the ingredients from the daily realm of the markets directly valuable to conceive precise ornaments, represents a key point for the studio. Students will have to take this critically, understanding how to produce accurately designed pieces from unconventional sources, beyond the discipline. We will look back to Venturi's lesson -encouraging architects to not ignore the “ready-made” cultural expressions that would enable them to communicate with a wider public. However, to prevent architecture from being just a Post-Modernist act of mundane symbolic consumption and iconographic accumulation, the raw artifacts crafted from the market must undergo a further process of dissection and reassembling. Existent imagery and popular expressions cannot just be inherited and recycled; they need to be transformed and synthesized to create new consistent, yet ever-changing, systems of architectural values. Again, the aesthetic immanence of designed components needs to be conceived as a cultural media to craft new instances - pragmatic or symbolic - that go beyond a shallow formalism. Students will operate with bold assemblages, producing unexpected ornamental results: they will filter the found extravagant visual and material richness with design hierarchies, the figurativism of the everyday will meet a rigorous geometrical abstraction. Each week they will design a new ornament, focusing mainly on performative elements – architectural details that people and other objects can physically interact with. They will conceive them through complex drawings, outlined into a series of detailed and refined plates. Then, they will complete a consistent body of work with multiple texts, to ground and illustrate a shared design process in direct contact with the various actors populating the markets.
Radiolarian Prints - E. Haeckel
|International Program in Design + Architecture | Room 409, Architecture Building |
| Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University | Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 Thailand |
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Y4 Arch Dsgn IV
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Deliverables:
“What we call totem, that is to say both the entity itself and the class that it symbolizes, is designated in Aboriginal languages by terms that refer to very concrete physical predicates that are frequently hypostasized into moral qualities.” P. Descola
A2 portrait Book format: Ornamental Plates (5) + Illustrated Essays (5): text + sketches/pictures from the markets
Techniques: 3d Digital Modeling Digital Drawing Engraving + Painting Creative writing SCHEDULE Week Day
Date
Agenda
6
Mon 17-Sep
Tutorial
Wed 19-Sep
Tutorial
7
Mon 24-Sep
MIDTERM
Wed 26-Sep
MIDTERM
8
Mon 01-Oct
No Class
Wed 03-Oct
Tutorial
9
Mon 08-Oct
Tutorial
Wed 10-Oct
Tutorial
10
Mon 15-Oct
Tutorial
Wed
INTERNAL PIN-UP
17-Oct
Phase3:Testing Ornamental “What ornament does (aims to)”
Aggregates
6 weeks (Collective PinUp on the 3rd week)
Vara di Randazzo - Anonymous.
Forms of visual communication are a key component to represent power, social hierarchies, collective identity and subjectivity. The ornaments, conceived so far to express the juxtaposition between Pop and Popular, informality and complexity through architectural detailing, in this last phase must be brought back in context to shape physical aggregates and communicative devices. Students will start connecting the different ornamental pieces, coming from their drawn vocabulary. They will choose few of them, the whole compound or they will expand and elaborate just one of the previously designed fragments. The ornaments will act as symbolic bricks or functional components, to embody a consistent brief – a series of updated and assembled interactions, now mutually connected – through the design and the construction of a single totemic device. The idea of “totemic” won't constraint at all the morphology of the outcome, helping instead to frame its allegorical aesthetics and thus its pragmatic effects on the surroundings – both related to space and actors. A totem, indeed, is a spirit being, a sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe. Students will investigate this notion as a productive framework for an identitarian project, aiming to conceive the shaping and the assemblage of ornaments as a cultural act. To craft this aggregate, they will have to address issues of scale and holistic understanding, then constructing a device to deal with the dimensions of the body and the built environment of the markets. This could be a scale 1:1 symbolic complete model or a partial representation of a meta-element – a bigger spatial compound between the vocabulary of ornaments and the final interactive outcome. Eventually, they will document the performance arising from the clash between the ornamental device and the informal context of the markets, highlighting how this physical prototype modifies existing behaviours, routines and material symbolism - addressing the perception of current and updated identitarian traits.
|International Program in Design + Architecture | Room 409, Architecture Building |
| Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University | Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 Thailand |
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Y4 Arch Dsgn IV
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Deliverables:
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Ornamental Device: physical prototype, aggregate of multiple pieces. (Estimated Cost 5000/10000 THB) + Free document: Video or any other Story-Telling Medium to depict the interactions between the ornamental device and its specific market
-PeterMörtenböck, Helge Mooshammer, “Informal Market Worlds Atlas: The Architecture of Economic Pressure”, Naio10 Publishers, April 2015
Techniques:
-Philippe Descola, “Beyond Nature and culture”, The
Digital Prototyping 3d Physical Modeling Video Recording & Editing Story-Telling
University of Chicago Press, 2013 -Sam Jacob, “Make it Real: Architecture as Enactment”, July 2014 -Farshid Moussavi, “The Function of Ornament”, February 2006 -Oliver Domeisen, “The Quest for Ornament.” Architecture & Detail: Facades, 2009 -J.L. Nasar, ” Urban design aesthetics: The evaluative quality of building exteriors.” Environment and Behavior 26, 1994 -Nikos A. Salingaros, “Hierarchical cooperation in architecture, and the mathematical necessity for
Cabinet of Curiosities - D. Remps
Research (Locke Science Publishing Company) 17, 2000
SCHEDULE Week Day
ornament.” Journal of Architectural and Planning
-Kent Bloomer, “The Nature of Ornament: Rhythm and Metamorphosis in Architecture”, October 2000 -Adrian M. Small, “Delight, the Function of Ornament, an Exploration of its Relevance.” Thesis, Date
Agenda
RMIT, Delft University of Technology, Delft, 2009 -Trilling, James, “Ornament, A Modern Perspective”
11
Mon 22-Oct
Lecture+Tutorial
Wed 24-Oct
Tutorial
12
Mon 29-Oct
Tutorial
Wed 31-Oct
Tutorial
13
Mon 05-Nov COLLECTIVE PIN-UP
Thought. Translation Series), November 1997
Wed 07-Nov Lecture+Tutorial
-Juan José Lahuerta and Graham Thomson, “On
14
Mon 12-Nov Tutorial
Loos, Ornament and Crime: Columns of Smoke”
Wed 14-Nov Tutorial
Volume II, November 2015
15
Mon 19-Nov Portfolio + Final Product
-Owen Jones, “The Grammar of Ornament”, April
16
Wed
21-Nov
Portfolio + Final Product
Mon Wed
26-Nov 28-Nov
Rehearsal Final Rehearsal
Washington: University of Washington Press, 2003 -Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime”, Selected Essays. (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and
2010
|International Program in Design + Architecture | Room 409, Architecture Building |
| Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University | Phyathai Road, Bangkok 10330 Thailand |
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