THEODORE LEDFORD
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Produced and printed at Wheeler Kearns Architects, Chicago. all original work and personal exploration done independently. Theodore Ledford. ________________
* THE CONSTRUCT * \ OF LANGUAGE /
(((FLUENT))) FORM& FLOW
RECYCLING ACCORDION
__THE RE*VAMPED __
E
* THE IMAGINED CITY * the mobility we dream of ....
BIG BOX RE-HOUSING HYPERCONSUMERISM IN THE POST_MODERN
PHALANSTÈRE
(( Contents )) MIES VAN DER ROHE LARGE FORMAT PHOTOGRAPHS
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SPACE STUDY & MODEL
looped crest
DESIGN/BUILD Student Apt. @ McGill
Confluence, X/Y
Oктябрьская, MOSCOW
Theodore Ledford
Oктябрьская, MOSCOW an unfinished competition entry
Exerts from the
BRONZE HORSEMAN Pushkin, 1833 ... Firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!’ Ay, ships of every flag shall come By waters they had never swum, And we shall revel, freely ranging.” ... Madder the weather grew, and ever Higher upswelled the roaring river And bubbled like a kettle, and whirled And like a maddened beast was hurled Swift on the city. All things routed Fled from its path, and all about it A sudden space was cleared; the flow Dashed in the cellars down below; Canals up to their gratings spouted. ... Poor mad Yevgeny circled, straining And in his veins the blood was leaping. He halted sullenly beneath The haughty Image, clenched his teeth And clasped his hands, as though some devil Possessed him, some dark power of evil, And shuddered, whispering angrily, “Ay, architect, with thy creation Of marvels.... Ah, beware of me!” And then, in wild precipitation He fled. (Translation by Waclaw Lednicki and published in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1955)
Designing a Moscow square meant to encapsulate the idea of TIME AS EXPERIENCED IN THE
RUSSIAN CITY.
Moscow Square
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Theodore Ledford
RUSSIAN HISTORY IN LANDSCAPE POST-SOVIET CAPITALISM
SOVIET/COMMUNIST ARCHITECTURE
EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCH
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Moscow Square
Theodore Ledford
Moscow Square
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Theodore Ledford
ideas for a 21st CENTURY LIBRARY submitted competition entry to design a mid-sized library for Cork, Ireland.
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Library - an Ideas Competition
PATHS OF KNOWLEDGE
Theodore Ledford
Library - an Ideas Competition
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Theodore Ledford
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Library - an Ideas Competition
Theodore Ledford
RECYCLING ACCORDION
REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE COMPETITION DESIGNING A PORTABLE RECYCLING FACILITY/STATION FOR THE STREETS & PARKS OF CHICAGO
Recycling Receptacle
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Theodore Ledford
`
SEE THE PROBLEM
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too much WASTE
6’ 8”
CLEAR BAGS AND CONTAINERS WILL REVEAL THE PROBLEM WE HIDE then ....
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IN
INFO
FO
LEARN THE PROBLEM
INFO PANELS EDUCATE AND PROMOTE RECYCLING TO REDUCE WASTE
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Recycling Receptacle
paper
metal / glass plastic
garbage
Theodore Ledford
THE BREAKDOWN!
Recycling Receptacle
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Theodore Ledford
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SPACE STUDY & MODEL
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8 Space Study
Theodore Ledford
8 Space Study
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Theodore Ledford
FLUENT FORM & FLOW competition to design
a town plan The fluidity of urban form and character in the city converge into urban organism. Without fluidity, cities become only isolated clusters of human activity. The human scale and activity in a city should spill and flow into all of a city’s components so that a current and flow of spatial urban areas and their relationships can be created and a city’s identity can be maintained. The fluid form and flow of Akureyri has been trampled and strangled, replaced by parking lots and roadways which isolate areas to cut off circulation. The area most unfortunately effected by Akureyri’s poor previous urban development has been its own central area. Akureyri’s own heart, its town center, has been cut off. To restore its vibrancy, the town and its centre must reconnect through revitalized vessels and passages of human activity. A fluency in form will guide a fluidity in movement and spatail experience. Through redirected flow and fluent form, a coherent, reunited urban entity may form from disparaged parts.
AKUREYRI, ICELANDE 16
Akureyri, Iceland
Theodore Ledford
parking scheme
infill density 1-2 floors 3-4 floors
land use
5-7 floors Residential
Office
Retail
Cutlural
Akureyri, Iceland
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Theodore Ledford
LANDSCAPE AS KNITWORK CREATING A NEW MODULAR LANGUAGE SET BETWEEN ORDER AND DISORDER
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Akureyri, Iceland
Theodore Ledford
Akureyri, Iceland
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Theodore Ledford
Confluence, X/Y
writing
Confluence: two linear expressions or entities flow as two and intersect, joining and meeting just briefly. Con-
sequently, a critical moment or position is created bearing confluence; thus being the finite and central point where they become familiar and one. Here’s a visual for you: X – get it? Confluence, applicable to so much; our lives, paths, voices, and thoughts, all are brought together by confluence. But how does confluence relate to our physical position on the planet, in this world? The enormity of the world perplexes its residents. So it deserves our understanding – we always like things smaller, under-control. Mapping is our means of organizing and understanding “the physical” of the world. It is a tool of navigation and has the capacity to direct and bring us together by making finite points in infinite. Like so much, we have sliced and chopped the curious contours of the earth into a mechanical spread of spherical lines – longitude and latitude. From this grid forms 64,442 intersection points between integer degrees lines of latitude and longitude on
looped crest
the planet. Of these points, 21,541 are on land and a loosely-knit, GPS-savvy web-based community has set forth on a
Poem assembled from various country/provincial/civc mottos.
mission to document and photograph each of these points. The undertaking has been named “The Confluence Project” and it hopes “to create an organized sampling of the world” via their website, confluence.org. Visiting their website is realizing the world. Every photo – whether a foggy grassy field covered in soviet-era power lines at 40°N 48°E in Azerbaijan, the backyard of a stucco-clad McMansion outside of Johannesburg at 26°S 28°E, or a bleak snow-blanketed and sun-drenched Antarctic landscape at 84°S 84°W – replaces the world’s vastness with
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O happy they, whose promised walls already rise,
New Brunswick
compatible intimacy. Astonishingly, otherwise random locations – an apartment complex outside Stockholm, a Cairo
For facts are male, words are female.
Maryland
desert junkyard, or a weather-bruised Filipino cinderblock café – become pivotal points in a web interconnecting the
North to the future,
Alaska
No better friend, no worse enemy,
1st Marine Division
Like political borders, they are instead hidden and unknown.
Such is the way to the stars.
St. Louis College
Confluence may be defined as a junction or meeting, but it’s also defined as a flowing together – a junction of two to
What shall we give in return for so much?
Belfast
We hope that better things will rise from the ashes.
Detroit
and the world are becoming confluent. But will we intersect and honour differences, or will we conjoin in favour of
Happy the city where citizens obey.
Dublin
unanimous similarity? Globalization will decide.
Invicta,
County of Kent
Fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom.
The University of Aberdeen
Distinguished by its swans,
Cyprus
It is Austria's destiny to rule the world.
Austria
Forward upward onward together,
Bahamas
We want to stay what we are,
Luxembourg
O fortunate ones, whose walls are now rising.
Saint John, New Brunswick
Loyal she began, loyal she remains,
Ontario
Liberty even when it comes late.
Minas Gerais, Brazil
Inasmuch
Norfolk Island
I remember
Quebec
Assorted Writing
world. For example, Chicago’s closest confluence point is 42°N 88°W (the backyard of a suburban Elk Grove home) and if you were to walk directly east 111° to the confluence point 42°N 23°E, you’d end up in Selishte, a Bulgarian village, on the property of a family owned grape-brandy business. No monument or marking exists for these points.
form one. A visual representation: Y. The two are strikingly, and quite curiously, different. The Confluence Project may be an indicator of not only degrees points, but also the rapidly accelerating notion of our age, that the individual
70°S 170°E Antartica
25°N 11°E Libya
URBAN DECADENCE
Theodore Ledford
in MONTRÉAL
Within the conundrum of the modern city, we understand a pervasive state of urban decadence: a state
of being in which a structure, originally built with the intent to encapsulate the idea of modernity, the symbolized city, has fallen into a state of decay. Symbols don’t come with eternal meaning. Planners and designers have become swept away in the temporal nature of modernity and symbolism – wherein the represented future becomes an emancipatory sanctuary, hiding and distancing the past. These structures feature dilapidated walls, crumbling bricks, and peeling paint, but also no longer possess the ability to impress – their glitter has rubbed off. They are unable to sustain the image of vitality and progress; their intended functions for society have disintegrated over time. Thus, these structures stand to haunt us; they give a place to memorialize past moments of desire and preconceived futures – places where we feel empty. Modernity becomes hinged on these exceptional, unsustainable moments of celebration. Within an urban context, these sites become lonely, non-integrated monades, which alienate us from our very own spatial and temporal conditions: we are not living the future imagined, both for Montreal and the world.
The Jamaica Pavillon Site in 2008
EXPO ‘67 _Understanding the Expo ‘67 site, we see a strange rendition of time-space compression. Here existed a skewed perspective of the world: dozens of nations condensed into a miniature community upon an island. For a year,
The Stadium maintains a double identity of both disdain and pride behind its illusionary status bolstered
by city officials and tourist guides. These mixed feelings are representative of urban decadence: a lurking past yet to be reconciled – twelve years of construction and a total cost of 1.352 billion dollars, for now. We see a piece of emancipatory architecture, the striking weight of concrete transforms into a weightless bird reaching for the sky, uniting modern man with the cosmos. But, as the building crumbles, we see this dreams turn void: its heavy weight becomes a harsh burden, man becomes straddled not just by the past, but by the past's imagined future.
Thinking about how to truly revitalize the Olympic Stadium and Expo '67 into a non-peripheral existence,
the world contained a shared time and geography on this
as potential living markers of daily urban experience, I see no end. The Olympic stadium is almost a tokenized
island. However, we understand these symbolic celebra-
space-ship. Montreal awed and cheered its arrival, citing its magnificence and stride towards a new world, but
tions as only temporal and elusive, for the Expo ‘67 site
it proved to be an alien device, not applicable or healthy in its context. It wouldn't just touch-down and return to
presented a false perception of world harmony. Addition-
space. Furthermore, the Expo '67 site, an artificial island, should just float away down the St. Lawrence into the
ally, we see a decontextualized site, upon an artificial
sea, for it remains a lonely detached island, belonging to a miniaturized geography and a perpetual kitsch which
island beyond the city. For these imaginary futures to be possible they had to exist off the map. The future becomes an unattainable dream, and modernity gets caught in its destructive lust - it survives as decadence.
isolates its time.
We see how these imaginary futures, and romanticized renditions of modernity, serve not to symbolize
the canon of progress but survive to haunt and curtail “future futures” - we regress. Progress proves temporal and a sour trap when constrained by a lingering inability to achieve sustainability.
Assorted Writing
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Theodore Ledford
__THE RE*VAMPED __
BIG BOX RE-HOUSING HYPERCONSUMERISM IN THE POST_MODERN
PHALANSTÈRE
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Big Box Re*Vamped
Theodore Ledford
eighteenth century : Charles Fourier’s phalanstère - a utopian response to mass-production & worker subjugation twenty-first century : the re-vamped big-box - re-appropriating the belly of hyperconsumerism &
époques organiques et époques critiques
consumer alienation
Big Box Re*Vamped
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Theodore Ledford
MIES VAN DER ROHE LARGE FORMAT PHOTOGRAPHS
Understanding Mies - constructing new perspectives utilizing a view point camera in a darkroom. 24
Understanding Mies
ABOVE: 860-80 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago LEFT: Illinois Institute of Technology, Chemistry Building, Chicago OPPOSITE: IIT Crown Hall (Upper Right + Lower Left), IIT Industrial Facilities (Upper Left + Lower Right) FOLLOWING PAGE: Neue Gallerie, Berlin
Theodore Ledford
Understanding Mies
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Theodore Ledford
NEUE NATIONALGALERIE,
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Understanding Mies
BERLIN
Theodore Ledford
* THE IMAGINED CITY * the mobility we dream of ....
TRAN SIT FUT URES
L A os
ngeles PANOPTICAN TRANSIT
CHI CAGO
Imagined Urban Mobilities
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Theodore Ledford
* THE CONSTRUCT * \ OF LANGUAGE / assembled dictionaries
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The Construct of Language
Theodore Ledford
C A - hallway/ bedroom adaptation. B - making space in a 4sqm room. C - desk for mobility/deconstruction dismounted door + attached wheels
C
DESIGN/BUILD Student Apt. @ McGill
+ dismembered cabinet
B A B Design / Build
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