DIGITAl grotesque, Michael Hansmeyer
A D : F U T U R E D E TA I L R E V I E W 02
Reviewed by Muhammad Shamin sahrum
Never before has the architectural detail been more under scrutiny than that faced today. Past definition of the architectural detail are being re-defined and new ones are being found. One definition of the architectural detail explains it as “ a small piece of the whole, yet it has the power to characterize and define the entire building. Details tell us what a building is; they are fundamental to the life and personality of a space.” The latest issue of the Architectural Design is themed around ‘Future Details’. Which is to say that the field is moving towards an unknown future, open to new discoveries beyond the realm of mere physical buildings. Mark Garcia starts the conference off by stating that the smallest detail has been found, in the form of the Higgs Boson particle. But continues on to saying that “this neglect by architecture of the Higgs boson particle itself reflects a history of poor critical and theoretical writings on the architectural detail.” According to Mark, the “the detail has also at times been theoretically ignored or simply taken for granted, ” as theorists and architects fail to understand or create misleading and/ or undetailed histories and theories of details. Which is an irony considering that the detail is often found in architects sketchbooks as the initial building blocks of the building, a DNA strand as it were. While the field may or may have not turned a blind eye towards the ‘detail’. It is no doubt that the influence of the detail has been highly influential throughout architectural history. The classical past has seen architectural detail in the form of fluted columns and highly decorated cornices and extravagant ornamentations. Edward Ford, in his article ‘Detail as Narrative’, recognizes that while the greatest ‘technical tranformations’ of architecture have been from the 20th century, the detail witnessed a cycle. Explained in terms of ‘joints’ from Anatole de Baudot’s continuous joints, Gerrit Rietveld’s fragmented joints, to continuous joints again during the International Style, fragmented joints (Deconstruction) back to continuous joints with Parametricsm. He summarizes it by saying, “While technologically enabled they were not technologically driven. They are the result of aesthetic preference, not technical progress. We ended the century with a radically changed technology. Stylistically we are back where we started”. What is interesting however, is in the different ways in how architects view the ‘detail’. Not only focusing on what is visible, the term takes on a different meaning when it is invisible. The act of ‘un-detailing’ is according to Mark Garcia’s interview with Ben van Berkel, also a detail. The founder of UNstudio states in his ‘Four Points of the Detail’, of which the first point “ is ‘the detail of omission’, which is ‘entirely a matter of excluding’; one that ‘consists of an absence, a conscious discarding of a superfluous articulation’,” . His ‘Four Points of the Detail’ is a direct reference to Le Corbusier’s ‘Five Points Towards a New Architecture’ manifesto (1926). Through UNstudio’s numerous built projects, they have been able to test and demonstrate it’s idea on the detail such as the ‘non-detail’ where it paradoxically acts “to emphasize the new kinds of ‘notnon-details’ in other spaces of the architecture.” Going
even further to suggest the detail in designs can shift concepts. Niel Spiller views detail’s invisible nature in his tribute article to Lebbeus Woods titled “Detailing the Walled Garden For Lebbeus”, talks about the infinite possibilities of the detail in an imagined, augmented world. Spiller’s fascination with augmented reality’s overlapping of unseen forces and reality , was brought into the Garden for Lebbeus. Augmented reality, while gaining increasing usage, is “now used for all manner of relatively mundane applications”. According to Spiller architects have barely managed to scratch the surface of this technology. In the ‘Garden for Lebbeus’, vector storms move violently across the scenic garden, with relative calmness depending on the observers point of view. Ghosts roam around, gravity bends visual fields and snow storms fill the scene. Where does reality stop and the virtual begin within this scenario ? Spiller describes it as “an augmented-reality environment that proposed a sublime, beautiful storm bringing chaos, unable to be fully read or quantified viscerally or visually; to inject an alternative view of these technologies and stake another claim for them to be used in the service of architecture’s poetic theatre”. The detail in this instance is “time, velocity, multiple placements, points of view, gravity and ethereality”. Here we come to the ‘Future’ part of the ‘detail’. The strength of this issue lies in its effort to try speculate and take the current notion of ‘detail’ and extrapolate it further. Not just by analyzing things within architecture, but looking into other rapidly emerging fields such as biology, computing, information sciences, interaction design and new media among others. With increasingly ‘high-definition, high-resolution’ modes of operation, details are described by Mark Garcia as “now the super detail (massive quantities and qualities), hyper-real (ultrarealistic), info-details (massively digital, virtual or augmented reality or otherwise informationalised), infra-details (invisible/ intangible/ immaterial details) of architecture”. The future detail will come in all manner, shape and size. The detail is in scripts, interfaces, diagrams. They come from new hardware such as the voxeljet multi-material 3d rapid prototypes, which Michael Hansmeyer created Digital Grotesque (2013-14). It is becoming inseparable from the contemporary production of architecture and is able to reorganize and reassemble as we more further into computer-aided design. However, out from this will also spawn endless amounts of unwanted, useless and “completely inhuman details”. Mark Garcia describes a possibility where the architectural detail might be heading to an ‘event horizon’, where the detail would be unlike any of its precedent, becoming almost alien-like. Though all this talk of going into the unknown sounds exciting, history has proven time and time again that civilization repeats itself. Just as Edward Ford noted the cycle of the ‘joints’. It might take several more iterations of the detail, countless of generations later, that the detail would eventually reach ‘event horizon’ and evolve into something else completely. The question is, will architects be there to witness it? Will the profession even exist at that point in time? Edward Ford ends his article on a similar note by saying, “The future of detail is not a technical question any more than is the future of architecture”. With that we are left to ponder.
Bibliography: 1. Ford, E., ‘The Grand Work of Fiction: The Detail As Narrative’, p26-35, Architectural Design #230: Future Detail, (WILEY) 2014. 2. Garcia, M., ‘Histories,Theories and Futures of the Details of Architecture’, p14-25, Architectural Design #230: Future Detail, (WILEY) 2014. 3. Spiller, N., ’Detailing the Walled Garden for Lebbeus’, p118-127, Architectural Design #230: Future Detail, (WILEY) 2014. 4. Garcia, M., ‘Future Details of UNstudio Architectures: An Interview with Ben Van Berkel’, p52-61, Architectural Design #230: Future Detail, (WILEY) 2014