Narratives of Impasto
Graduate Thesis 2022
Ayse Eda Tarakci
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Provocations
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Positions
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Positions
Thesis Statement
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Authors and readers create narratives. Writing is a creative action and so is reading. The text moves between a cycle of tensions of making and re-making. If architecture is evaluated as a text, it follows that the building undergoes the speculations of the architect and reinterpretaions of the user, environment, nature, society and many
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other forces. These exerted forces violate and transform the building until it eventually gains its own narrative. This thesis looks into the autonomous narratives of the built spaces and investigates how the architectural object emerges as an inert body simultaneously with all the other bodies among which it coexists.
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Keywords
1. Narrative
Graduate Thesis 2022
2. Worldbuilding 3. Metaphor 4. Violence 5. OOO
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Questions | Provocations
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1. How can a building narrate its story
2. How can architecture be under-
independent from that of the archi-
stood in terms of another concept?
tect's and the users?
How can a metaphor be constructed so that our indirect understanding of an entity lead us to an understanding of another entity?
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3. What does treshold mean in terms
5. How can a building be understood
of worldbuilding?
without overmining and undermining points of view? What does the neutral
4. Can violence that is enforced on
state of an architectural entity mean
an object lead us to acknowledge the
and what are its implications?
object itself? (puncturing vs framing)
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Provocations
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Week 02
Graduate Thesis 2022
Autonomy of medium I have been rethinking about architecture and design within the framework of OOO, and the thought of architecture being undermined to its functions or overmined to its impacts have inspired me to reconsider the architectural object as an object of its own. But how can the identity of a building be preserved while all the practical, social, environmental etc functions are still attributed to it? The way Graham Harman interprets the poem by Ortega y Gasset helped me to come up with a framework to reapproach to the architectural object. Our perception of an object is strictly limited to our human experience. In a world that humans are increasingly becoming decentralized and the point of view and perception of the other entities are becoming acknowledged, we can think that our human experience is not the defining factor for any existing object. The object exists outside of our understanding, and our perception of the object is limited only to a version of it. While it is not possible to understand the objects fully, it is possible to expand our understanding of an object. I believe the best way to try to understand something is trying to understand it through something else which I also dont fully understand. This is where art stands for me. I dont understand the art object and I will never understand it fully as it has infinite meanings. But I can understand a deeper concept through my understanding of the art object. 'The cypress is the ghost of a dead flame' The cypress and the flame are quite irrelevant objects. But one very loose commnality in their sillhouette ties them together in this metaphor
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and the flame and the inflammable are brought together in the world of this metaphor. With our human perspective, we cant fully understand the flame or the cypress but the delineation of one unlikely affinity between them enables us to see them in an entirely different way. Both objects are created anew within the world of this metaphor. I was looking for more practical examples of a metaphor that can change the way that we see things. Then I realized that the technique impasto is actually capable of doing that. The painting generates a narrative on its two dimensional surface through the composition of
the colors and the composition of the subject matter. There is an entire world built on the surface of the painting. And then some parts of the paint starts to depart from that surface. One world is constructed within the painting and the same world is also deconstructed as one realizes that the material of the painting doesnt belong to the world of the painting but is from our world. This clash of two worlds is capable of building a third world, a treshold world that rebuilds the world of the painting independent from its subject matter, or our understanding of it. We simply realize that the painting exists as a material object.
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Below Impasto on Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh.
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Below Wheat Filed with Cypresses | Vincent Van Gogh
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Week 02
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The author, the reader and the text The idea of the building and the breaking of the worlds through metaphors has pushed me to think about the narratives and the actors in the narratives and how architecture can be thought of in these terms. In a chapter of her book 'Changing my Mind' Zadie Smith is comparing the roles of the author and the reader from the approaches of Barthes and Nabokov. Barthes suggests that the reader is creating the text anew everytime she reads it and Nabokov defends that the author us the ultimate authority in the narrative. I can see the the validity of the arguiments of either side but for me this definition between the author and the reader is too binary. I believe that the text has autonomy to some extent and the text can rewrite its own narrative over time. The meanings, associations and contexts of the text are not static and as time passes the different elements of the text evolve to their own unique version. A text that immediately gains its autonomy can be observed in Ian Cheng's series of Emissaries. Ian Cheng is the designer of the main narratives and the audience ca interact with the narrative through AR and VR to some degree; but the micronarratives are constantly being written in realtime by AI. The characters learn, the story learns and the narrative evolves overtimeafter being written and rewritten and rewritten. I was trying to project the authority of narrative generation onto architecture. If the narrative of the architecture is undermined solely to the designation of the architect or the experience of the user then the spatial narrative would be approached in a rigid and a binary
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Graduate Thesis 2022
The author, the reader and the text The idea of the building and the breaking of the worlds through metaphors has pushed me to think about the narratives and the actors in the narratives and how architecture can be thought of in these terms. In a chapter of her book 'Changing my Mind' Zadie Smith is comparing the roles of the author and the reader from the approaches of Barthes and Nabokov. Barthes suggests that the reader is creating the text anew everytime she reads it and Nabokov defends that the author us the ultimate authority in the narrative. I can see the the validity of the arguiments of either side but for me this definition between the author and the reader is too binary. I believe that the text has autonomy to some extent and the text can rewrite its own narrative over time. The meanings, associations and contexts of the text are not static and as time passes the different elements of the text evolve to their own unique version. A text that immediately gains its autonomy can be observed in Ian Cheng's series of Emissaries. Ian Cheng is the designer of the main narratives and the audience ca interact with the narrative through AR and VR to some degree; but the micronarratives are constantly being written in realtime by AI. The characters learn, the story learns and the narrative evolves overtimeafter being written and rewritten and rewritten. I was trying to project the authority of narrative generation onto architecture. If the narrative of the architecture is undermined solely to the designation of the architect or the experience of the user then the spatial narrative would be approached in a rigid and a binary
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way. Architecture is smarter than that. The architect speculates a building and its impacts and its results during the design process. But once the building is built, the building starts taking over its own narrative and starts creating its own network of relationships and affinities. Seen in this way, architecture is already a storyteller and an entity of its own. I was trying to think of the ways of splitting this storyteller part of architecture (the object of architecture) from its more recognizable author and reader generated parts. This could be examined through multiple standpoints. Perhaps the voice of a third entity can be elevated (Nature, AI) that would create a parallel way of understanding the building and through the simultaneous generation of two worlds, the voice of the building itself can be-
come discernible. Another version of this can be through the creation of a greater metaphor that will break the undermining of the building to the functioning of the building.
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Below Data Projections on Walt Disney Concert Hall by Refik Anadol Jewish Museum by Libeskind
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Week 02
Graduate Thesis 2022
The author, the reader and the text The idea of the building and the breaking of the worlds through metaphors has pushed me to think about the narratives and the actors in the narratives and how architecture can be thought of in these terms. In a chapter of her book 'Changing my Mind' Zadie Smith is comparing the roles of the author and the reader from the approaches of Barthes and Nabokov. Barthes suggests that the reader is creating the text anew everytime she reads it and Nabokov defends that the author us the ultimate authority in the narrative. I can see the the validity of the arguiments of either side but for me this definition between the author and the reader is too binary. I believe that the text has autonomy to some extent and the text can rewrite its own narrative over time. The meanings, associations and contexts of the text are not static and as time passes the different elements of the text evolve to their own unique version. A text that immediately gains its autonomy can be observed in Ian Cheng's series of Emissaries. Ian Cheng is the designer of the main narratives and the audience ca interact with the narrative through AR and VR to some degree; but the micronarratives are constantly being written in realtime by AI. The characters learn, the story learns and the narrative evolves overtimeafter being written and rewritten and rewritten. I was trying to project the authority of narrative generation onto architecture. If the narrative of the architecture is undermined solely to the designation of the architect or the experience of the user then the spatial narrative would be approached in a rigid and a binary
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way. Architecture is smarter than that. The architect speculates a building and its impacts and its results during the design process. But once the building is built, the building starts taking over its own narrative and starts creating its own network of relationships and affinities. Seen in this way, architecture is already a storyteller and an entity of its own. I was trying to think of the ways of splitting this storyteller part of architecture (the object of architecture) from its more recognizable author and reader generated parts. This could be examined through multiple standpoints. Perhaps the voice of a third entity can be elevated (Nature, AI) that would create a parallel way of understanding the building and through the simultaneous generation of two worlds, the voice of the building itself can
Below Ian Cheng, Emissaries
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Week 03 This week for the workshop with Liam Young, we thought of the cities in Science Fiction movies and how the narratives for these unfamiliar cities came to be. In a lot of the cases, the imagined future cities challenge what humans mean for a city and what are the implications of a city without humans or with entities other than humans. In either way, the removal of t vhe human removes the function of the city and reduces the tall components of the once-city almost to totems. The workshop All cities are fictions. Their literal edges are nebulous, and their physical definitions are being endlessly rewritten, but their boundaries come into focus as shared narratives. The fiction of a city can weigh as much as its physical shadow. Such cities can exist on the network or as a consensus. They are shaped like stories and coalesce around common practices or conditions of belonging. They are lived and occupied, read and watched with consequence and meaning. They are products of culture and, in turn, produce culture. How we shape and engage the spaces around us is largely determined by mediums of fiction. In film, video games and literature we have always imagined alternative worlds as a means to understand our own world in new ways. Fictional worlds can act as sites in which to prototype new scenarios and emerging cultures. In their speculative streets, we play out unexpected and unintended futures, along with their associated social and political imaginaries. Speculative worlds are teleportation machines, where we can immerse ourselves in the various consequences of the decisions we face today. They can be both cautionary tales or roadmaps to an aspirational future. Architects once speculated on the impacts of industrialisation and then
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mass production, and now we must be narrating the imminent arrival of driverless cars, seamless augmented reality, or artificial intelligence. Ideology rarely evolves at the same pace as our technology but through the practices of worldbuilding we can imagine and speculate on the implications and consequences of these systems. The fictional worlds we design can give form to our most wondrous technological possibilities and gravest concerns. In this Provocations workshop we will travel on a journey through a collection of imaginary citiesand discuss the power of such fictions for us as designers and citizens of a world on the edge of apocalypse.
Below The Valley | Mad Max
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Graduate Thesis 2022
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Opposite Page Cappadocia Anarchitecture | Gordon Matta Clark Anarchitecture | Gordon Matta Clark
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Week 04
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Opposite Page Cappadocia Anarchitecture | Gordon Matta Clark Anarchitecture | Gordon Matta Clark
I was thinking aobut how the inertness of the architectural object be retained or revealed. I came accross 2 versions that this problem can be addressed. Take the example of Cappadocia. The initial volume can be acknowledged as the object and the architecture can be generated as a secondary narrative within the initial volume. This way, multiple narratives and worlds are built at the same time enabling there to be interactions and in-between worlds. Another way of keeping the architectural entity inert is the way Gordon Matta Clark has violated architectural bodies. The violence on the surfaces, the revealing of the structure and demonstration of the building components break the tight relationship of the building from its function. The result is the revealing of the building with its own narrative and the experience of the building along with all of its components. The tresholds define a lot about the architectural entity. Where one verson of it transforms into another version, both versions of the building become legible. When multiple worlds are built at once, then the other potential worlds that the object nests can be understood through our understanding of the worlds that are revealed.
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Anarchitecture | Gordon Matta Clark
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Week 05
Homer’s Odyssey chronicles the wife of Odysseus, Penelope, and the shroud she creates. For three years, awaiting the return of her husband from war, she weaves the shroud every day and undoes it every night. Moss’s opinion is that the state of architecture must also follow this unending cycle of creation and destruction, pertaining mainly to an architect’s own designs. He adds that an element of dissatisfaction accompanies this introspection, but having the conviction to make something, while also having the scepticism to take it apart drives the design cycle forward. Moss's Penelope theory suggests a connstant state of making and unmaking. The constant productions and destructions of the tresholds build infinite boundaries to different worlds.
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Opposite Page Sculpture by Sara Allen Prigodich Scupture by Tine Bek Scupture by Tine Bek
"I prefer a skepticism of all ordering mechanisms, rather than an allegiance to any one. The stretch between the two possibilities may be where a truth lies: the tension between options rather than the selection of one and the elimination of the other"
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Positions
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Week 6
Opposite Page Bernard Tschumi Manhattan Transcripts
Bernard Tschumi's drawings create tangible representations for non-physical conceptual ideas. He challenges the use of such drawings through his projects such as The Manhattan Transcripts. Rather than reading the drawings on the surface, including the important notion of spatiality and event: “Few dare to explore the relation between the formal elaboration of spaces and the invention of programmes, between the abstraction of architectural thought and the representation of events” “these events underlined the importance of a certain kind of relationship between abstraction and narrative – a complex juxtaposition of abstract concepts and immediate experience, contradictions, superimpositions and mutually exclusive sensibilities” Movement notation reminded Tschumi and his students that spaces are made to be used, the reading of that notation wasn’t meant to be precise, and rather it was a reminder of the close relationship between the boundaries of the space to the body. In Manhattan Transcripts, Tschumi imagines the negative spaces of the building as live medium, which has been cut into and violated by the movements of a foreign body
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Week 07 & 08 | the collapsing music box
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Opposite Page Pedro Reyes, Upcycled Music Box
In order to look into the interaction between the bodies, the bodies need to exist in a democratic medium where the hierarchy between the objects dissolve. The proposal involves design of a music box, which operates with its own mechanism and creates a world within its own boundaries. After this new ground and the rules of the new world are set, the music box is calibrated and the cycle begins. The music acts as an agent of time. The objects inside the music box are: people, the building, nature (flora). Each actor has its own cycle within the mechanism of the music box and when these cycles overlap, the objects start interacting and deforming each other. Through the deformations, each object gains unique qualities and transform into new entities. The power of the building to act on the other objects changing them and being changed by them confirms the building’s own power and autonomy as an object. ‘The cypress is the ghost of a dead flame’ Graham Harman interprets the poem by Ortega y Gasset in terms of its metaphorical quality. Our understanding of the flame is remade through our understanding of the cypress and vice versa, and the metaphor creates the objects anew. The music box too forces interactions between bodies and rebuilds our understanding of the objects it contains through thWeir interactions. The same interactions happen in our world too, but as there are so many actors, agents and catalysts these interactions become invisible to us. The music box secludes and allows the components to react in a controlled environment. Hence, the violence takes place almost like a chemical reaction in an experiment.
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For his works, Pedro Reyes (b. 1972 in Mexico City) uses architecture, sculpture, video, performance, and participation to promote collective and individual power of action in political, social, ecological, and educational situations. Having worked with weapons in the past, he is interested in addressing the systemic problems of the arms industry within a pacifist framework. In the new production to be presented
at Museum Tinguely Disarm Music Box (2020) he has repurposed gun parts to make music boxes that perform fragments of tunes from the countries where the guns were produced. Reyes is concerned with «upcycling»-transforming an instrument of death into a musical instrument that stands for dialog and exchange.
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a world within a world box - contained medium OOO - everything that is inside the box is an object The box has its own mechanism The mechanism is the nature of the box, a system of systems that sustains the cycles of the box's operation. The clockwork mechanism consists of bodies. Bodies of nature and bodies of architecture. The nature of the box is the architecture of the box. Bodies continuously clashing, interacting with each other and violating each other. Space is a consequent result of this violation. The space doesnt exist for the people, it exists and evolves with the people.
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In order to look into the interaction between the bodies, the bodies need to exist in a democratic medium where the hierarchy between the objects dissolve. The proposal involves design of a music box, which operates with its own mechanism and creates a world within its own boundaries. After this new ground and the rules of the new world are set, the music box is calibrated and the cycle begins. The music acts as an agent of time. The objects inside the music box are: people, the building, nature (flora). Each actor has its own cycle within the mechanism of the music box and when these cycles overlap, the objects start interacting and deforming each other. Through the deformations, each object gains unique qualities and transform into new entities. The power of the building to act on the other objects changing them and being changed by them confirms the building’s own power and autonomy as an object. ‘The cypress is the ghost of a dead flame’ Graham Harman interprets the poem by Ortega y Gasset in terms of its metaphorical quality. Our understanding of the flame is remade through our understanding of the cypress and vice versa, and the metaphor creates the objects anew. The music box too forces interactions between bodies and rebuilds our understanding of the objects it contains through thWeir interactions. The same interactions happen in our world too, but as there are so many actors, agents and catalysts these interactions become invisible to us. The music box secludes and allows the components to react in a controlled environment. Hence, the violence takes place almost like a chemical reaction in an experiment.
Sample Work
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Right: 2GAX, ClassRoom Artificial nature inspired from saturated colors, curvilinear rods and loose surfaces defined between rigid curves
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Right: 2GAX, ClassRoom Artificial nature inspired from saturated colors, curvilinear rods and loose surfaces defined between rigid curves
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Right: 2GAX, ClassRoom Artificial nature inspired from saturated colors, curvilinear rods and loose surfaces defined between rigid curves
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Concept
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` The image on the right represents the elements of the box. The mechanism, soft members in between and space transforming in a continuumm
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Bibliography
Fabrizi, Mariabruna. “A Visual Thinking Strategy: Oswald Mathias Ungers, Morphologie:...” SOCKS, 16 Feb. 2020, https://socks-studio. com/2020/02/16/a-visual-thinking-strategy-oswald-mathias-ungers-morphologie-city-metaphors-1982/. Haraway, Donna. "A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century." The international handbook of virtual learning environments. Springer, Dordrecht, 2006. 117-158. Harman, Graham. "The third table." (2012). Libeskind, Daniel. "Between the Lines: Extension to the Berlin Museum, with the Jewish Museum." Assemblage 12 (1990): 19-57. O.M. Ungers, City Metaphors, https://worldmaking.xyz/References/O.M.+Ungers%2C+City+Metaphors. Smith, Zadie. Changing my mind: Occasional essays. Penguin UK, 2009. Wiscombe, Tom. "Discreteness, or towards a flat ontology of architecture." Project 3 (2014): 34-43.
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