WA/SA [waldrip architects/ s.a.] [architecture- los angeles]
Alberti, Sandro Superficial; 5 February, 2002 [text9]
Working 9-5, at...
‘WA/SA’, ‘Aloha8’, and ‘Working 9 to 5, at...’
are fictions of fen-om: [www.fen-om.com]
Meandering through the hallway at Perloff Hall (Architecture- UCLA; A+UD), I stumbled across the course descriptions for this first quarter of 2002. The usual, in many
Emotive architecture: ‘depression’
esting proposals.
respects. Ben Refuerzo refocusing on Route 66. Professor March continues his research on symmetry. Details continue to be evaluated in structures courses (the models are on exhibit and I got an idea from the one detailing an Aalvar Aalto connection at Saynatsalo, but that’s a story for another time). And in the middle of the general flow, of course, always some inter-
What seemed to be a Kostas Terzidis course hinted at the latent emotive potential of digital 3d. Until now, the focus in the use of 3d modeling programs has been to make deformations efficient for future machining processes, or to relate buildings and contexts via mathematical diagrams. But in the real world buildings attract for more ‘symbolic’ reasons, and modeling programs, traditionally employed by ‘animators’, are conductive to the depiction of emotions. And this is what was displayed on the hallway wall: emotive architecture. How to endue (+ imbue) buildings with emotional traits. Most of the student attempts were based o anthropomorphic transference, as it is it human gestures that viewers understand quite well, in the depiction of indexes (anthropomorphic representations of ‘love’= touching; ‘depression’= bowing down head; looking away= ‘dislike’; gathering together and looking in the direction of something more curvaceous= ‘ogling’; surrounding something grand and flowing with it= ‘praise’; something large compressing something small= ‘stress’; tip-toeing= ‘sneakiness’), and symbols (attraction= ‘love’; drooping and downward movement= depression; repulsion= ‘dislike’; centrality and brightness= ‘praise’; something large compressing something small= ‘stress’). Whatever they might be, these representations are not quite ‘icons’, since emotions are themselves abstract. However, the ‘representation’ of this project nevertheless fails to achieve the sophistication of the diagram (briefly, reviewing Charles Peirce’s semiotics: icon= a painting of fire, resembling its object; index= smoke, the effect of its object; symbol= the word ‘fire’, a learned convention of its object; and the diagram, as per Deleuze, would be that subjacent order of fire that allows for its glow, flow, consumption, etc.). Is it ‘evil’ (regressive), then, to attribute ‘personalities’ to buildings? Some of the A+UD students who walked by seemed to think so (one overheard extremist comment: “This is really sad!”). Of course, this reaction might have more to do with the presentation itself (compared to the digital output of so many other students
‘Dislike’
‘Love’
