Ud24_T01_"Framing the disorder" / BRUTHER

UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA

udd

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Framing the disorder

federico soriano Textos 2018-2019

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BRUTHER. 2G N.76. Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther

Konig, 2018.

The mock-up is a unique piece that intervenes at a crucial moment in our work. It marks the passage from the design phase to the building phase. It logically takes its place in the project’s sequence of phases—sketch, final draft, models, detailing, construction work—but it also remains somewhat foreign to the process. There is no contractual obligation to make a mock-up, but it is undoubtedly an event in the development from drawing to building. It is a hybrid object that suggests the building, but is also formally independent from it. It can be seen as an objet d’art, a temporary installation on the still bare plot of the site. And yet it is not without purpose. It sheds light on technical questions by showing the real texture, density and thickness of the building materials and of the structural pieces. The mock-up has a scientific component. It is a verification tool, almost straight out of a laboratory. Its slimness, its verticality suggests a sample, a king of architectural equivalent to the geological “core”, or the biopsy slide. So, the mock-up is both an act of industrial photography—since it’s a technical verification tool on a 1:1 scale—and an act of artistic photography, since it is also a “limited print.”

Regarding the Saint-Blaise project, this scientific component was deliberately lacking, however, because the mock-up proved to be narrower than the building’s structural frame, a rather particular frame since shaped like an oblique portico.

The Saint-Blaise mock-up is therefore more like a section of the building, a deliberately disconcerting section for being composed despite the habitual laws of gravity—heavy materials on top of transparent materials, without any obvious 1

structural logic. This section makes it possible to see the finish of the materials and the expressivity of the detail.

But this perception also lets the imagination that takes hold of the object come into play. We are no longer in the conceptual thinking of the project, which requires a certain perspective. The mock-up takes place in fact at the junction of two contexts: the “ideal” one of the project design, and the “concrete” one of the site. It is a small object but it enables a lot of “fine-tuning” between these two vast contexts. If something must move in the future building, it is not so much in the constructive mechanics revealed by the mock-up as in the shift towards a more general idea of the whole building.

The mock-up is our preferred orientation tool: nothing less than the building’s fate depends on wether it functions properly, or fails. The mock-up condenses an architectural image of our future building at the same time as it generates reflections. Although it is not exhibited in the public space, but in the provisional void of a building site, we can see it as a sort of “industrial steel life”, perhaps even a readymade. The mock-up contains both that richness and that ambivalence.

It is at one scientific, unusual, strange, but also familiar and mysterious. This is particularly the case with buildings such as ours that do not subject themselves to regulations that have already been standardized and identified, but voluntarily seek out a sort of instability which is at once formal, constructive and programmatic. As such, the mock-up is a worthy ally, testing our proposition and proposing new answers, indicating the architectural path we seek: a surprising mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, of the known and unknown.

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