Lunch7 Conversations

Lunch 7 University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall PO Box 400122 Charlottesville VA 22904-4122 Find us on the web: www.uvalunch.com Copyright Š 2011 University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, VA All rights reserved Editors: Nate Burgess, Jack Cochran, Joey Hays, Nicole Keroack Cover image by Daphne Lasky Printed in the United States by Carter Printing, Richmond, VA For future volumes, Lunch is accepting submissions from alumni, students, and former and current faculty of the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

The editors would like to thank the students, faculty, and alumni who submitted their work for publication, and the sixteen copy editors who helped construct the narrative and layout of the journal. We are grateful to Dean Kim Tanzer, Kimberly Wong, the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and the School of Architecture Foundation for their support and dedication that make Lunch possible each year.

Lunch 7 was supported by the University of Virginia Council for the Arts.

Special thanks also to Robin Dripps and Lucia Phinney for their contribution to this year’s journal.

lunch 7: CONVERSATIONS

CONVERSATIONS Lunch began as a student-initiated journal demonstrating the quality and range of work within the School of Architecture and beyond. The title of “lunch” refers to the notion of informal exchanges between students and faculty around a meal. In this seventh issue, we return to the original concept of conversation as a generative tool for creating the journal— encouraging debate and interaction among professionals, academics, and students.

The word “conversation” once referred to a person’s manner of being in a place, a person’s method of interacting with persons and things. Only later did the word narrow to reflect, specifically, the exchange of words.

We believe design is a continued conversation with the world in this broadest sense.

Lunch 7 encompasses design projects, transcribed conversations, and essays from all disciplines within the School of Architecture. We curated unexpected juxtapositions and overlaps between selected pieces, finding they gain strength through comparison and interaction. We hope that Lunch supports the School of Architecture in its broad scope and diversity of approaches.

Nate Burgess, Jack Cochran, Joey Hays, Nicole Keroack April 29, 2012

Advising Editors: Beth Bailey, Charles Sparkman Faculty Advisors: Iñaki Alday, Phoebe Crisman, Robin Dripps, Elizabeth K. Meyer Lunch Team: Dani Alexander, Adede Amenyah, Michelle Benoit, Brian Davis, Brianne Doak, Alan Ford, Ting Ting Jin, Peter Kempson, Nick Knodt, Marie Miller, James Moore, Katie Orr, Katherine Treppendahl, Abigail Whalen, Clayton Williams, Weishun Xu

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GEoff Manaugh, sarah peck, Cassim shepard post press plOT: Digital and analog discourse DAPHNE LASKY PAINTING FOR INSECTS randall winston Platforming: Localized, Open Source Infrastructures as Frameworks for Public Space james moore diversifying the discourse Charles sparkman recombinant fabrication

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LEVI BRYANT with brian davis

On Landscape ontology: objects, networks, and assemblages Alexa bush and nicole keroack acqua venezia: prototypes for a sustainable water economy MICHAEL BEAMAN and zaneta hong MATERIOLOGY daniel mowery eight stairways of rome Brad schuck dwelling for a fiddler Sanda Iliescu looking at leonardo

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Camilo Restrepo

grassroots architecture in a global marketplace maurice cox and betsy roettger the roots of music Jonathan coble and kirsten sparenborg ecoremod2 and falmouth field school camille behnke City to suburb: two charlottesville schools chelsea dewitt and dasha lebedeva EDGE ADAPTATIONS amadeo benetta and daniel larossa burma reframed

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RAFAEL MONEO

time, materiality, and the individual Justin Hershberger on craft JULIA PRICE, KURT MARSH, and ERIN ROOT terra nuova: building a new venetian ground W.G. CLARK with allison murphy CLARK HOUSE: lOCAL AND REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE Kristina hill with kate hayes and dasha lebedeva sand engines

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teresa gali-izard and julian raxworthy on management Ashley allis asylum lauren hackney memory, material, morphology: regeneration at marmet Joey hays disturbing pleasures of maintenance sarah cancienne and jen lynch living fossil to landscape machine

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EDUARDO ARROYO

Uncertainty and bravery laura sasso climate change and city dynamics beth bailey et al. re-bound chair oscar obando impressions of le corbusier sarah cancienne and Katherine treppendahl Strategies for good clean fun

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iÑaki alday and robin dripps re-valuIng research

POST PRESS PLOT digital and analog discourse a conversation with Geoff Manaugh, BldgBlog Sarah Peck, Landscape Urbanism Cassim SheparD, Urban omnibus

WITH Nathan Burgess, Mla 2013; JACOB FOX, mla 2013; JAMES MOORE, MLA 2013; JULIAN RAXWORTHY, LECTURER IN LANSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

manaugh, peck, shepard POST press PLOT

Where does architectural discourse take place today? While not yet fully valued in academic and professional contexts, blogging and social media platforms have become a critical mechanism for exchanging ideas about buildings and landscapes.

The Student Association of Landscape Architects (SALAD) organized a symposium in the University Rotunda in April 2012 to address the internet’s impact on publishing and theory. SALAD invited the editors of three blogs—Urban Omnibus, Landscape Urbanism, and BLDGBLOG—to discuss their work. The following conversation between bloggers, students, and faculty expanded on themes present in the bloggers’ individual presentations.

James Moore: Your presentations about your blogs today seemed to relate directly to your own personality and your ideas about making cities. How do you toe the line between satisfying a broader audience and maintaining a certain criticality? Does this represent a conflict?

Cassim Shepard: I don’t think it is a conflict. There is always an incentive or directive to grow one’s audience, but it is important to have a clear idea of the range of people you’d like to reach. In my case, I threw out a whole bunch of lists of identity tags that one might apply to the sorts of people that might be interested in the stuff that we put out there. It is about expanding the audience to a broader set of people than would normally come to, for example, Architectural League lectures to see a famous architect talk about his or her work.

But it’s also important to remind ourselves that it is not for everyone. It’s for people who think the material is interesting. That is an important criteria to allow us enough space to do what we think is interesting, knowing that we want to have a wide ranging appeal, but one that is not the most populist idea of what might be relevant.

I don’t know if that keeps us critical, so much as it keeps us at a certain level of rigor in selection of topic. It also helps us maintain a constant desire to make topics diverse, while having internal consistency or coherence. It’s about principles: does this thing represent a new way of thinking or a new way of acting that we think is a good idea? Even if the idea isn’t necessarily instrumental, it might be a fresh perspective. I would say it is an issue of coherence and principles vis-a-vis knowing who your audience is, rather than criticality and page views.

Sarah Peck: I think you need to start with the why. I am referring to a TED talk by Simon Sinek called “Start With Why”? I think you need to look at what you want to achieve. It doesn’t need to be grand or complex. It could be that I want to document every underground space. I want to explore. I want to write once a week.

The second thing to remember is the word “obvious.” What is obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. Even the act of regurgitating ideas, link love, and sharing puts a spin on things that people might find interesting. Be brave, be bold, write down what you think.

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Julian Raxworthy: It was interesting to hear two of you mention writing and stories.

When you do writing like that, you have an interesting fascination/jealousy relationship to what you are writing about. Is there a role for a rising practice evocative of Orson Welles, where we can create a creative hybrid space between the things we are discussing and a prose form of storytelling?

Geoff Manaugh: The value of design writing isn’t in trying to leverage a connoisseurlike opinion of what is positive or negative and how it falls into some sort of design legacy. Instead, it is in referring to an object or story or proposal or built project in a way that opens up the context within which that project can be discussed. For me, this involves pushing the future applications that a thing might have. Someone comes up with a new 3D printer or a new model for a landscape architecture firm.

Where might this be in 5 years? Maybe there is some weird new technology in the military. It might be incredible if Zaha Hadid could use it. Let’s think about that design possibility. These could be blog posts. They are instigations or proposals.

Oil and a gas companies use methods that could be absorbed into landscape architecture. There are things happening at Field Operations that would be useful for Exxon Mobil. Why not trying to start that conversation with a provocative blog post or bootstrapping a blog post into existence? This is a better use of a writer’s time than saying that a project is good or bad.

CS: Context is a powerful term and a powerful thing to provide. In my work at Urban Omnibus, very few of the contributors identify as writers. But we interview them or have them write content themselves. People involved in a design milieu may not be the most comfortable writing about themselves in the design literature. Part of my technical assistance is in helping them understand what they are doing.

I want the person whose work is being discussed to explain why their work is important to them. Another important part is explaining to my readers, who may trust my voice, what the context for a project is and why they should care. Sometimes this might be how it might be applied and sometimes how it might fit into traditions from different fields. I talked about genre creation, but a more important role for blogs is context revision. What are the various scales of reference in which something can fit, and how can we insist on a broader context for a piece of work without destroying the integrity of it? What is this broader context?

SP: You made me jump to something when you mentioned both writing and story.

There is data, information, and context. Stories pull on our emotions; there is lyricism, breath, and cadence. Each element is so important because it’s about transference of culture. It’s about passing on who we are from generation to generation.

We are undergoing a mass exodus of information from our brains right now and proliferation of data in an unprecedented way. We are tasked with a way of curating this data that makes sense. As designers we are engaged with the creative and the

GM: I don’t think printed matter is going to disappear, even if it literally only becomes the realm of a “do not disturb” sign printed somewhere. But I also think books have a utility and an enthusiastic tactility, and I don’t think they are going to go away because of something like an iPad. I like that I can go somewhere that doesn’t have access to an AT&T satellite and read something that isn’t shining a light in my face. Maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy or something.

manaugh, peck, shepard

Nate Burgess: I thought it was interesting that writing a book was mentioned. I wonder what opinions you have on physically printed material. Is print publishing going to go away? If not, do you find it useful? How can people that engage in this activity learn from what you do as bloggers?

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imaginative and the explorative. We like letting our brain wander in these random and tertiary ways.

I did a thing called the BLDGBLOG Book, which was based on BLDGBLOG. I found something really interesting, and I think it has critical implications. If you take something off of a blog and paste into a Word document and print it, a lot of times it is terrible. You will go read this thing and think it is unbelievable that anyone could ever read the website and ever find the author literate, not to mention that anyone would return to the website over and over again.

You have to find different ways to write that take advantage of the printed page. For example, you can’t take advantage of base linking strategies that link to the Wikipedia page for, say, the War of 1812. You have to actually say what it was. That is, there are rhetorical needs that come out of writing on a piece of paper.

On the other hand, there are people that take a critical essay and load it on a blog, and it is unreadable. Blogs and books don’t translate one to the other in a clear or crisp way.

Stupid things like the candy trail—having a picture at the bottom or top of the page—or finding interesting ways of using links that aren’t just the exact same New York Times story make people want to keep scrolling. That’s the challenge of blogging.

The implication is that if you want to write print books or magazine articles, it is a distinct art or craft. You need to write in a different way or a different circumstance.

Your readers might be hiking. They might be exhausted at the end of the day. They might be turning to your book for refuge instead of turning to the Internet in a very externally motivated way, wanting to find out what’s going on. One option is “I want to turn to the Internet and see what is happening in the world.” The other is “I want to get away.” These require very different styles of writing.

CS: I don’t think books are going to be a thing of the past any time soon. Geoff invokes the “Do Not Disturb Sign.” I think another reason is that a lot of people would have no idea how to decorate without them. I know I wouldn’t.

Since I have had the ability to operate in multiple media—making films, doing audio,

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writing—I’m a big believer in the idea that any creative project needs to be what it is supposed to be. Should this be a written piece, or is there a good reason for it to be a video? What would the particular advantage be to that particular medium?

One thing I like about the online context is that everything we’ve ever done is always there. We can study things longitudinally. So much of traditional mainstream media prioritizes opening day. For a landscape, the opening day is probably the least interesting day. A building starts to deteriorate right away so it makes sense that the opening day is so important. There is a cyclicality to the way the news media talks about events that I don’t feel bound by. That being said, I think the reason why books are interesting things, and a reason why I would like to make a book, is to mark a particular moment in time, which is an ironic thing, since we think of books as timeless.

If you are going to make something, the material should dictate the medium. I think an important aspect of this for books is that compendiums of online writing should mark a moment in time. There are aspects about the modes of how a book is experienced, like Geoff invoked, and there are aspects about the modes of how it exists in a variety of different time schemes.

SP: I don’t think that printed book is going away. I do think, however, that publishing is changing very quickly, and that publishing doesn’t know what publishing is doing. We now have the ability for every single person to be a publisher. This is making it easier and harder for everyone. The onus of responsibility is now on the reader to figure out what is good and what is not, and I think what is becoming scarce are good editors and critics. On the Internet, you start to develop a trust wrelationship with someone who will deliver good content. You start to develop patterns and grooves in virtual and visible Internet space. This is why Facebook is important. You know what it looks like and what it is going to do, and how you are going to spend your time.

Books are exponentially harder than blog posts: you have to work with and craft an idea, and put it somewhere so that someone else can interface with you. Online it is a conversation. We can react, come back later, change our minds. In a book, you can’t do that as easily. It takes a lot more time. The prize is going to go to editors and curators.

Jacob Fox: Where do you find all this stuff for your blogs? You all cut really interesting transects through disciplines. You represent a lot of ideas. Where are these discussions happening? Do these happen in person or on the Internet? Is the Internet doing a good job, or does the Internet just represent work from symposiums like this one?

GM: I’ve been noticing the rhythm of where these conversations take place. Twitter is a place where a lot of conversations happen. Twitter is a constant adrenaline rush, but you have very few sustained conversations with people. I find that one great thing about writing is that when you start writing it can lead to more of itself. If you

In terms of where I get material—it is everywhere. If you talk to a twelve-year-old about what kind of tree fort they want to live in, the next thing you get is a really interesting architectural answer. I mean, depending on the twelve-year-old you are talking to. This is why architecture is so exciting.

I think the reason why books Sarah mentioned how people want to talk about landscape. I want to emphatically emphasize that. Architects love to beat themselves up and say nobody cares about architecture. What they mean is “nobody wants to talk to me about Le Corbusier.”

manaugh, peck, shepard

It is the same with blogging. I will link to something on Twitter, and I regret having done it. If I had opened up a new post on Blogger, it would have led to more of itself. If you just resort to quick and dirty Facebook and twitter stuff, it evaporates.

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were to open up a comment on someone’s blog, it may only take five minutes or six minutes, but you can start a more substantial interaction with the author.

are interesting things, and a reason why I would like to make a book, is to mark a particular moment in time.

In reality, millions of people want to talk about architecture. If you can engage those people and find that audience, it is a great way to find people who say they have read your blog and discover material.

SP: I think Geoff answered your question in his opening sentence: an obsessive curiosity. It is an overwhelming child-like curiosity. You ask questions, find and seek.

In terms of the dialogue happening offline, I think it is at least 50% or more of the total conversation. People will contact me to allude to something buried deep in my blog at the end of a blog post that I have forgotten. This is an exciting thing.

CS: With Urban Omnibus, so much is rooted in individuals that there is a very particular relationship between online and offline content. Everything we put up involves at least one face-to-face conversation with someone who exists in the real world.

We are trying to create a conversation based on the fact that conversations weren’t bubbling up in a city-wide way between these different silos of professional experience or expertise. There were a lot of people who felt completely excluded from the way architects talk about their work, primarily people in city government. They are people who say, “I love this stuff, but I am mainly interested in how to get things get done.”

I think where these conversations are—and where new ideas and strategies are actually happening—is at the bar, the coffee shop, and the water cooler. So it’s just a matter of trying to be a fly on the wall for all those conversations.

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lasky Painting for insects

Painting for insects daphne lasky, M.ARCH 2011 Thesis critic: Robin Dripps During my thesis year, I pursued a course of research that imagines painting as a launching point for parametric explorations. My primary interest was the investigation of the two-dimensional logics that underpin the description of three-dimensional space, and the identification and development of fields that bring this to light. This thesis built upon my parametric investigations to argue that the manipulation of material properties facilitates the experience and communication of complex fields. In order to do this, I examined the use of color in a painting by Paolo Uccello, from his 15th century Battle of San Romano cycle.

As an architect, I am interested in this work because while I have the luxury of working in three-dimensional space, the painter is constrained to two dimensions.

This constraint drives a different set of choices about space, namely, the intense prioritization of the information to be communicated. Study of these choices generates insights about spatial fields and materials which can perhaps be expanded to the world of architecture.

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This painting, the 15th century Battle of San Romano (top) can be studied traditionally for its iconographic content, for its compositional arrangements, and for the indications of movement and rhythm present in the image. However, in these paintings, it is not just line and form, particularly in the guise of linear perspective, that indicate depth, but also the properties of color that determine our understanding of space. Brush strokes and pigment simultaneously represent themselves as marks made by a human hand, and refer to an imagined space that the viewer must construct for herself. opposite: The image sampler function in Grasshopper gathers information about color, in both its synthetic and component parts. Hue, chroma, and value work together in shifting ways to create colors. Hue refers to a color’s property as specifically red, green, blue, or yellow, etc. Chroma describes the perceived intensity of a specific color in relation to white or black. Value describes the perceived brightness of a color. These three measures are relatively independent aspects of color, and can work together in an infinite number of ways. Using manipulations of any of these components, painters can create colors and color combinations that describe a wide range of spatial relationships.

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Painting for insects

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lasky Painting for insects above, left: I was primarily interested in field-making through translation, field-making through the layering of data, and in finding ways of working through and across fields. following: The final series of drawings and paintings of fields is designed to slowly materialize each layer of information.

Color plays a role not only in communicating linked systems of data, but in facilitating the communication of a complex space. Further manipulations of color reinforce the systems present, and serve as touchstones that facilitate continual reorientation within the field. The layered use of color and attention to the physical properties of paint give the painting a presence in a shallow space, while referring to a complex field the viewer can construct for herself.

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Painting for insects

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winston Platforming

Platforming Localized, Open Source Infrastructures as Frameworks for Public Space rAndall winston, M.Arch 2011 thesis critic: peter waldman The condition of Los Angeles is critical. A sense of urgency compelled by an impending water shortage and rising energy costs is compounded by a nearly bankrupt city government and a stagnating unemployment rate. The city’s infrastructures—fecund hybridizations of nature, culture and the built environment— offer opportunities for change as the networks that underlie these environmental and economic crises.

Located in the Central Industrial area of downtown Los Angeles, designated a redevelopment project area by the city, Platforming serves as a model for community redevelopment by augmenting existing infrastructures to enable more resilient relationships between the natural and built environment, people and the resources we use. Localized harvesting and storing of water, energy, and biomass resources are envisioned within an open source network. Properties and their inhabitants become productive participants in a public utilities market where resources are bought, traded, and sold in distributed, peer-to-peer fashion. The city’s former role as builder, owner, and manager of large, one-way utilities evolves into market regulator and guarantor of a multiplicity of resources flowing bi-directionally and sourced from any building or landscape that produces energy, recycled water, or biomass. Within this network, a combination of loose and fixed design strategies embeds opportunities for job creation, social gathering, recreation, and civic empowerment.

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The city of Los Angeles envisions the Central Industrial area as the Clean Tech Corridor, a global hub for the research, commercialization and deployment of clean technologies.

While agreeing with these economic development goals, Platforming reinterprets “clean technology� to correspond to the gritty urban environment that characterizes the area as well as the inherent dynamism of technological innovation. Opportunities for more vibrant exchanges and experiences are created through digitally networked environments that intersect public and private spaces, fostering a kind of urbanism that is not necessarily clean or neatly resolved. The project is underpinned by four principles: distributed production, visible flows, sharing feedback, and public space.

DISTRIBUTED PRODUCTION All new and adaptively re-used public and private properties are not only required to achieve net-zero water and energy use, but must also install rainwater collecting and graywater recycling systems, energy generation systems, and biomass collection units that produce and/or store resources in excess of the minimum needs of occupants.

VISIBLE FLOWS The distributed production of water, energy, and biomass is made visible through required smart metering systems that measure and track resource use and production, and are linked to a digital public utilities market where resources can be bought, traded, and sold.

SHARING FEEDBACK The city is responsible for ensuring the bi-directional flow of privately generated energy and recycled water, whereby resources flow into and out of buildings and landscapes, to and from the larger public market. People take on more responsibility for the resources they use, pay less for them in a more competitive market, and benefit from the open sharing of resource-related ideas.

PUBLIC ACCESSIBILITY A network of public spaces and pathways is woven into new and existing developments, linked by a re-engineered Los Angeles River.

The river as a conduit for the movement of water, power and freight is expanded to include pedestrians and habitable public space, creating additional real estate and a stronger link between residents and a major, constitutive part of their environment.

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Platforming

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Platforming

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Platforming

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DIVERSIFYING THE DISCOURSE A CALL FOR STUDENT VOICES OUTSIDE THE STUDIO James Moore, MLA 2013

After a long day of classroom discussion and downloads, model cut-andpasting, computer point-and-clicking, and collective brain-bashing we, the design students, are called to cram our bodies into flip-down seats and steel ourselves for a presentation whose contents are largely an unknown.

Some gather up front with pens in hand and laptops set to record. Others jockey for position in the back so that they might slip out the door with a phone to their ear at the first sign of a cliché font or conflicting color scheme. At their best, lectures awaken the spirit. They present new ideas or reframe old ones in a different light. At their worst they can be dull as toast, overly esoteric, or self-glorifying.

How can this format rise above mere transmission? Surely, the oneway monologue would benefit from additional options for dialogue. The question and answer, often the only chance one might have to elevate the event, is often treated as an afterthought, or leftover time. Many students duck and run at the end of a two hour lecture. The “So What Did You Think of the Lecture?” exchanged the following day between classmates is often the end of any reflection. Rarely does this conversation leave the building and enter the community. Rarer still does someone formally engage with what they have seen and heard, outline the argument, weigh it against their own ideas, and share their insights with others. If our school goes

diversifying the discourse

Writing is—like drawing, photography, and modeling—a design practice and it benefits from exposure to the public. When given a design problem, we are taught that sites are not empty, but full of previous conditions, histories, and phenomena. And so it is with writing. There is never truly a “blank page.” There exists a tremendous history of thoughts and ideas that undergird our words though often we feel dumbfounded when given a vague prompt. This is why a rigorous review of lectures can be such a useful place to begin to develop students’ writing. This is also an opportunity to learn how to write for a larger audience. Often student writing is only subjected to the criticism of professors and is left to molder in a drawer. Writing for a larger public is a critical skill. It demands that we write with a spark of elegance and simplicity. It demands that we think outside of our architectural “–isms” and address an audience who every day confront, question and experience the spatial consequences of design.

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through the trouble of scheduling, paying, and hosting speakers, then we should make every attempt to use those events to create a sustained dialogue within the institution and the world.

The Student Association of Landscape Architecture and Design (SALAD) in the fall of 2011 began a program that hopes to encourage thoughtful and passionate engagement with select lectures and then transmit them to the larger discipline.

With the support of our department and faculty, we reached out to The Dirt, the professional blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects. The demand for constant content strains even with the best-staffed blog, and The Dirt is no exception.

SALAD (thanks to the university’s support) was able to offer compensation, editorial assistance, and coordination to the student authors. The Dirt published four of our articles in the fall of 2011 and hopes to continue (if not increase) this pace. Each article received over 1,500 views and spurred comments from readers across the nation.

Three students—Brian Davis, Dasha Lebedeva, and Peter Malandra—contributed four articles to The Dirt, covering a wide range of issues. The authors offer insights on the ideas of professionals, but also bring to the articles their own concerns and begin to grapple with the ground between the two. Here, we will provide a short introduction to each, but encourage you to go read them in full yourself, comment on them, and continue the conversation.

In Dasha Lebedeva’s article on Camilo Restrepo, she demonstrates the power that language can have in describing the potential within a public space. Calling pure formalism a fossil, a fixed frozen object, unresponsive to the swiftly changing social conditions in Medellin, Colombia, Restrepo advocates for designers to “perform architecture as a thoughtful action for the management and administration of space.”

With his combination of high-theory and fervent social activism—“For the poor, the best,” he says—Restrepo calls us all to examine the relationships between concept and material practice.

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Peter Malandra covers the highly conceptual Dutch designer Ronald Rietveld, who is similarly concerned with the complexities of intervening in public space, but who comes from a very different geographical background than Restrepo. He calls for designers to explicitly engage the strategic and catalytic in their writing, representation and design. Though we may have heard this again and again, Rietveld’s proposals show how this cliché might be invigorated with creativity and a somewhat perverse sense of humor. His projects cause us to ask how far into the future designers can maintain control, and what happens when they open up their project to uncertainty.

Peter Malandra’s second article has Michael Vergason tracing his use of drawing throughout his personal and professional history—from his travels in Italy and beyond—to careful site reading and research. In lieu of the typical discussions on expanded digital techniques, Pete shows us how refreshing it is to be reminded how much one can glean from the simple discipline of observation and inquiry through drawing.

Finally, Brian Davis investigates the ideas of restoration ecologist Steven Handel.

Handel presented much of his work, including the Fresh Kills Landfill project, as a simple act of stewardship, but Davis pushes the conversation further by bringing in Handel’s own interests. Davis points out that as an ecologist, Handel is just as concerned with the orchestration of agents and actors as the medium of his work (humans, bees) as he is with the traditional subjects of restoration (flora and soil).

Davis also questions whether “stewardship,” a term used by Handel, is the only way to consider our relationship to the landscape and looks to the term “kinship” as an alternative.

Though this experiment has been in large part a success, there is room for improvement. In these matters, time and resources are always a concern. Students are taxed for free time as it is and have difficulty doing extensive research around the issues raised by a lecturer. The articles by themselves might not individually trigger a conversation; if we asked each student to look at previous articles and reference a connection to at least one of them, a chain of dialogue might be formed. Professors might also be brought in to peer-review, and the resulting discussion might yield interesting content. Also, there is the tricky editorial balance of how to retain a critical lens while respecting the professionals who go out of their way to share their ideas and work with us. We don’t want a surplus of snark, nor do we want to shill for our visitors. We hold our school work to a high standard; so should we our work with guests.

Are lectures a critical component of our discourse? We think so, but only so far as they push our conversations further. Initiatives that empower students to respond thoughtfully and share their thoughts with their peers and the larger world might play a role in turning the lecture from a terminal point to the beginning of something much, much larger.

Courtesy Marcus Brooks

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diversifying the discourse

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RECOMBINANT FABRICATION AN AUTOMATED WORKFLOW OF DATA MANAGEMENT, RECURSIVE EVOLUTION, AND CNC FABRICATION Charles Sparkman, M.arch 2012 critic: ROBIN DRIPPs Winner of the 2012 robert j. huskey research exhibition

However, as emerging ways of making bridge the divide between design-thinking and making/fabrication, they radically alter the role of the designer. Instead of mastering a single skill or craft, designers are expected to navigate complex workflows across analog and digital media, thereby uniting design and making into an integrated action.

Furthermore, the traditional hierarchy of skills taught in schools (where a student might learn drawing, drafting, and CAD in a linear sequence) is being replaced by nonlinear paths, which produce designers that are agile and conversant in moving rapidly between modes of representation and fabrication. It is no longer possible to work in a single media, which precludes iteration and translation of design ideas across systems and scales. Workflows, therefore, facilitate a larger conversation between designers and other disciplines, affording us the opportunity to insert foreign bodies of knowledge into complex design processes.

sparkman RECOMBINANT FABRICATION

THE WORKFLOW IS THE MESSAGE It starts out so simple. With pencil and paper, we begin design education, only to discover an ever-expanding world of digital modeling, scripting, and CNC fabrication.

We weigh these emerging media against notions of analog craft and find great expression in synthetic (analog and digital) forms. Yet, as we navigate ways of making we precariously lean towards a single mode—or sometimes a single application—that accommodates a particular aesthetic, often relying upon a single media to manifest design intent into physical form.

The following project is not a demonstration of a single way of making, but an example of a workflow. Therefore, discrete ways of making are treated as components within a recursive sequence of steps. The workflow is portable and dynamic, open to accommodate additional components so that it becomes a robust conversation between multiple disciplines and ways of making.

RECOMBINANT BOOKSHELF This project synthesizes research in architecture, design, computer science, and fabrication into a recursive workflow. The workflow accesses data stored in a user’s Amazon account (dimensions of purchased and suggested books) to generate customized, CNC-fabricated bookshelves. With a click of a mouse-button, a user can order a unique, extensible bookshelf to fit their exact needs. The recursive workflow choreographs a latent dataset into a digital model, a sequence of CNC toolpaths, a series of CNC-routed plywood panels, and finally into a sanded and assembled shelf.

The script mines the user’s Amazon account for the dimensions of their books, calculates their required shelf space, and generates individual shelf modules. Then, the script organizes shelf modules into a unique assembly and calculates the slotted joinery between each module. Next, the script generates and exports CNC toolpaths (for a computer-aided router) and exports a manual of assembly for the entire bookshelf. Finally, the script calculates the smallest possible volume of the assembly so that they can be flat-packed and shipped to the user.

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1 DATA INPUT FROM AMAZON

2 Shelf calculation

3 organization + Joinery

A Visual Basic script imports the heights, widths, and depths of the user’s Amazon books (purchased and suggested) as a data tree.

The script calculates the required shelf space and generates shelf sizes using the dimensions from Amazon.

A recursive script organizes shelves into a larger assembly and solves the slotted joinery between modules.

Title

The Republic; Plato Delirious New York; Koolhaas Ways of Seeing; Berger Mythologies; Barthes The Visual Culture Reader; Mirzoeff The Vision Machine; Virilio Camera Lucida; Barthes The Pillars of the Earth; Follett Thousand Plateaus; Deleuze The Poetics of Space Planet of Slums; Davis Society of the Spectacle; Debord The Production of Space; Lefebvre The Land I'm Bound to; Leigh A Mind of Its Own; Friedman Marcel Breuer, Architect; Hyman Eero Saarinen; Merkel The Fountainhead; Rand The Prince; Machiavelli The Art of War; Tzu Purgatory; Dante Inferno; Dante Design and Form; Itten The Art of Color; Itten The Bauhaus: 1919-1933; Droste Clark and Menefee; Jensen Emergence; Johnson Collage City; Rowe The Eyes of the Skin; Pallasmaa A Natural History of the Senses Build-on; Klanten Tom Kundig, Houses; Ngo Postmodernism; Jameson Metro Stop Paris; Dallas Invisible Cities; Calvino Cosmicomics; Calvino The Baron in the Trees; Calvino Numbers in the Dark; Calvino Difficult Loves; Calvino Mr. Palomar; Calvino Marcovaldo; Calvino The Plague; Camus The Metamorphosis; Kafka The Myth of Sisyphus; Camus The Fall; Camus The Stranger; Camus

Height Width Depth Owns 7.6 7.6 9.4 9.7 7.8 7.9 8 10.1 9.1 8.2 8.1 9.1 8.4 9.1 9.2 9 9 9.2 8 7.3 8.8 8.2 9 11.3 8.2 12.1 7.7 8.4 10.8 11.7 9.2 9 6.8 8 8 6.9 8 12.2 9.1 8.8 11 11.5 8.4 8.8 11.6 8

5.1 5 7.3 7.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.8 6.1 5.4 5.4 7.2 5.3 6 6.3 6 6.1 6.1 5.4 5.6 5.9 5.1 5.9 10 5.1 9.6 5.3 11 10.5 10.2 7.3 6.5 4.1 5.4 5.2 4.2 8 11.6 7.4 5.8 10.9 11.4 5.5 6 8.3 5.8

cnc router cutting toolpaths

1 0.9 1.3 0.6 0.6 0.7 0.9 2.5 0.3 0.5 0.3 0.6 0.3 0.9 2.2 0.7 1.4 0.7 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.4 1.1 1 0.9 1 0.3 0.4 1.4 1.3 0.8 1.8 0.3 0.5 1.1 1 0.5 1 0.3 0.8 1.1 1.4 0.7 0.8 0.6 0.4

1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

18 x 12 x 12 14 x 9 x 12

24 x 10 x 12

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24 x 8 x 12

24 x 12 x 12

17 x 18 x 12

24 x 9 x 12

cnc routed sheets

layout of shelf assembly

4 Toolpath Optimization

5 Fabrication + Assembly

6 Extensive Shelves

The script generates toolpaths for CNC fabrication and compiles cutsheets that minimize material waste. Additionally, the script exports a unique manual of assembly so the end-user can construct the shelves.

See PHOTOGRAPHIC sequence Below

The assembly is left open-jointed so the user can insert additional shelves as they accumulate books off of their Amazon “suggested” list.

The shelves are fabricated by a CNC router and assembled manually by the user.

RECOMBINANT FABRICATION

sparkman

infinite iterations using the workflow

CUTSHEETS FOR CNC ROUTER

EXTENSIVE SHELVES SLOT INTO ASSEMBLY

INITIAL ASSEMBLY

EXTENSIVE SHELVES SLOT INTO ASSEMBLY

slotted shelf joinery

completed shelf joinery

assembly with books

37 97

on landscape ontology objects, networks, and assemblages A CONVERSATION WITH LEVI BRYANT These days the term “landscape� is included frequently as part of several growing and exciting fields of inquiry concerned with settlement and occupation: landscape urbanism, landscape ecology, landscape archeology, and landscape architecture, among others. Despite this, an ontological1 definition of exactly what a landscape is or might be remains problematic and ambiguous. As a result, the methods and implications for research and the construction of new knowledge in these fields remains generally trapped within anthropogenic and hermeneutic conceptions of the world. These limitations narrow the range of possibilities for understanding and action in a landscape still predicated on art-historical concepts.

Levi Bryant is a professor of philosophy and the author of the recentlyreleased Democracy of Objects, as well as co-editor of O-Zone, a new journal of object-oriented studies. As an object-oriented philosopher, Dr. Bryant aims to push beyond the boundaries of subjectivity and questions of human access in order to build a philosophy that grapples with reality.

In recent years the work of Dr. Bryant and others such as Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, and Ian Bogost is opening up new, actionable ways of thinking and working in the world.

I became interested in the work of Professor Bryant through conversations with Rebekah Dye (MLA 2013), because his ideas seemed to hold a

WITH BRIAN DAVIS, MLA 2012

bryant + davis on lnandscape ontology A 47.3 foot diameter tunnel boring machine emerges near Niagara falls tunneled 6.3 miles at depths of 500 feet under the Niagara escarpment as part of the Ontario Power Generation project (courtesy Ontario Power Generation).

window open to escape from totalizing overly conceptual metaphors for ‘systems, mappings, and flows’ in technocratic and bombastic terms. In fall 2011, Dr. Bryant and I had the chance to discuss his work and its intersections with ideas of wilderness, landscape, control mechanisms and the ambivalence of utopian fictions in affecting public space.

Brian Davis: You refer to your particular object-oriented ontology as onticology, which rests on the eponymous ontic principle2 meaning that beings or entities consist in producing difference. Two concepts of onticology which you have established as important are wilderness and potentiality. In fields concerned with an idea of landscape­­ —geography, ecology, archeology, landscape architecture, art history, forestry, etc.—variants of these concepts figure prominently. Does onticology offer a definition for landscape?

Levi Bryant: I am suspicious of concepts like landscape and environment because, in the popular imagination, they seem to imply fixed containers that are already there and that entities must adapt to. These concepts, I believe, point in the right direction, but don’t quite go far enough. For this reason, I have tried to replace the concepts of landscape and environment with the concept of “regimes of attraction.” In my view, landscapes and environments are not something other than objects, but are rather networks or assemblages of objects. In other words, within the framework of onticology there is nothing but objects and relations between objects, though I insist that objects can be severed from their relations and that not every object is related to every other object. A regime of attraction is a set of relations among objects. I refer to these relations as “regimes of attraction” because these relations evoke or activate potentials within the objects related, leading them to actualize themselves in particular ways. For example, right now it’s very cold in my house because the temperature has dropped and my heat isn’t currently working. This is a regime of attraction

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These dimensional perspective collages diagram the way an operating instrument can create a landscape as part of my thesis project “Landscapes and Instruments” which builds on Dewey’s instrumental theory of knowledge.

involving my home, the position of the planet, weather patterns, my body, etc. This regime of attraction leads my body to actualize itself in various ways. For example, the skin about my fingers is tight and it is now hard to type as I write this. These relations between entities generate a particular actuality or local manifestation in my body. A key point here is that landscapes are not fixed and static, but, because the objects involved in the regime of attraction are acting and reacting to one another, are perpetually unfolding and changing. They can’t be pinned down once and for all. For example, my body nonetheless emits heat, vying with the coolness of the room.

I would thus refer to a landscape as a regime of attraction defined by a field of relations among a variety of different objects that presides over the local manifestations of the objects within this regime of attraction. In short, landscapes are networks or assemblages. They investigate what I call “cartographies” of entities and their relations in network time-space. I do not wish to step on the toes of landscape theorists as I have more to learn from them than they have to learn from me, but I’m inclined to suggest that landscape thought can be divided into two domains: landscape analytics and landscape activism. Landscape analytics might be thought as the cartography of the space-time of these relations between entities or objects, investigating both how they interact to produce various local manifestations, and how they compose a “virtual map” of the potentialities or tendencies that reside within these regimes of attraction; the paths along these changes is unfolding and possible.

Landscape activism, by contrast, is not merely a cartography of space-time

BD: Onticology seeks to reconcile the critical, discursive aspects of Kantian critique3 with an insistence that objects of the world have their own irreducible alterity by providing an affirmative definition of difference.4 You’ve characterized this as a refusal to reduce objects to their cultural representations without remainder. What do mechanisms of control—wire fences, cell membranes, code language—play in this process of differencing?

bryant + davis on lnandscape ontology

assemblages of objects, but rather is the attempt to intervene in landscapes or regimes of attraction so as to form them in ways to produce particular desired local manifestations. This work of design can range from the trivial to the profound. It might consist of something as simple as interior design that strives to produce particular types of affects in people that occupy a room, to revolutionary transformations of social relations that through the artful arrangement of objects open vectors where humans and nonhumans become able to relate in entirely new ways, escaping claustrophobic and oppressive regimes of attraction that both quelled the possibility of these relations and generated misery for those occupying these regimes of attraction.

LB: It seems to me that there is only a metaphorical relation between cell membranes and entities like control-wire fences and code languages, though I’ll have to think about this some more. Every object necessarily has a membrane of some sort or another that regulates its relationship to other entities in the world. This is part of what it means to say—in the framework of onticology—that objects are withdrawn from one another. Objects never directly encounter one another, but rather encounter each other through the distorting lenses of their membranes. Put differently, every object metabolizes the other entities of the world through its membrane. Membranes, of course, need not be films like a skin, but can just as easily be the structure of the object or linguistic and conceptual codes.

By contrast, when we talk about something like a control-wire fence it seems that we’re talking about something a bit more complex than a membrane. Entities like control-wire fences are not membranes, so much as objects that function as intermediaries between one or more objects and one or more other objects. In the case of a control-wire fence you have an entity bound by one membrane (the entities on one side of the fence) related to an entity bounded by another membrane (the control-wire fence) relating to entities with yet another membrane (the entities on the other side of the fence). There is thus a transmission of affect that is translated from one entity to another with the fence serving as an intermediary such that the affect can be transformed and modified quite a bit as we all experience when dealing with “red tape” and bureaucracies. In this regard, the control-wire fence is what Marshall McLuhan refers to as a “medium.” It is both an object in its own right and an object that transports and transforms the other objects for which it serves as an intermediary.

There are all sorts of significant implications that follow from entities that function in this way, some positive, others horrific.

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“Landscapes and Instruments” strategizes projects through action plans and manuals, as opposed to mappings and perspectival representations to explore alternative forms of agency in the landscape and the city.

BD: There seems to be a lot of similarity in your philosophy, and speculative realism more broadly, and the tradition of the utopian project within design practice. In design practice these are typically fictions where the objective is to suggest new relations and possible futures, a practice that stretches back to the Utopian works of Plato.5 In this design practice representation is always at issue. How is representation considered in object-oriented ontology, and how is it related to the agency of the medium of representation?

LB: Within the framework of onticology fictions are themselves real entities. In my own work I am always trying to emphasize the materiality of texts and identities, the fact that they are entities in their own right that circulate throughout the world and that affect other entities and objects. Now clearly Joseph K. in Kafka’s work is not a real person that breaths, eats, is murdered, and so on, but nonetheless The Trial and The Castle are real entities that circulate throughout the world and that affect people in a variety of ways. We can elect to live as Joseph K., seeing our place of employment or our country or our circumstances as the Castle or the Court; and in this way we can be led to interact with the world about us in ways that we otherwise might not do.

Two lovers can read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past or watch The Secretary or

Levi Bryant’s ideas on landscape ontology explicitly call for studying landscapes as networks and assemblages, suggesting a deeper reading of the works of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett might be helpful. The potency of considering the objects of a landscape with all of the richness of their regimes of attraction and their affective properties seems to hold some promise for moving towards new understandings of landscape that grapple with the autonomy of things. In many ways it is simply a return to our roots. Frederick Law Olmsted in his 1866 Report to the Commissioners of Brooklyn called for rigor and precision in park design, referring to the circulation system, the rides, the walks, the seats, the playing ground, the skating fields, and places of refreshment as the objects of the landscape. Further study might show the landscape itself to be a certain genre of that special type of object called a medium.

But that will have to wait.

bryant + davis on lnandscape ontology

Punch Drunk Love and discover new ways of loving, living their love, and feeling. Did these affects already exist in them, or did the work cultivate these affects? I lean in the direction that fabricators of fictions invent affects rather than finding them ready made, and in doing so they invent the possibility of new collectives and forms of living and feeling. This is why the domain of fiction is a site of both micro- and macro-politics, for it is both the site where the imagining of alternative forms of collectivity are rendered available and the site where oppressive collectivities are maintained through the construction of dark affects. This, I believe, is much of what John Protevi is getting at in his work, Political Affect.

[This interview is an excerpt from the full length version which originally appeared November 5th, 2011, on my landscape blog FASLANYC. It is part of an ongoing project to offer an ontological definition of landscape practice; earlier essays have focused on territorialization, potentiality, and generative capacity, with essays on difference, and media forthcoming.]

1. Also known as metaphysics, ontology is concerned with the fundamental nature of being or existence; a landscape ontology is interested in exploring the aspects of a landscape that are fundamental. For instance, are there things— characteristics, aspects, relations—that are found in every form that any kind of landscape might take? Or is it always nebulous and up for discussion and misappropriation?

2. “Eponymous ontic principle” is just a fancy way of referring to the main principle of Levi Bryant’s particular form of philosphy. “Object-oriented ontology” is interested in how objects distinguish themselves with their own inherent traits, rather than only being understood relationship to each other.

3. Kantian critique is broadly understood as a rejection of metaphysics and ontology and an assertion that philosophy can only deal with questions of human perception of reality, not reality itself. To use a late-night college discussion topic, when we discuss the color red, do we see the same color?

4. An affirmative definition of difference is drawn directly from the work of Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.

It is the idea that difference is not the same as being “distinguished from something” but rather as making a difference through becoming, such as a lightning strike, or a humming noise.

5. Plato’s The Republic is typically cited as the first utopian philosophical work. The idea of Utopia and the recurrence of the Utopian project is something which is seen periodically in design practice. One can see many examples of utopian thought in the pages of this journal.

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1 RAINWATER HARVESTING tensile fabric roof gathers rain steel supporting ribs brass support for water basins four tiered water filtration system existing well head pipe with high pressure pump stepped seating for water infiltration sand filter and storage

2 REUSUABLE CONTAINERS

3 TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

ACQUA VENEZIA PROTOTYPES FOR A SUSTAINABLE WATER ECONOMY alexa bush, MLA 2012 nicole keroack, M.ARCH 2012 AIA WASHINGTON UNBUILT HONOR AWARD 2012 AECOM URBANSOS 2011 TOP TEN

4

5 FOG HARVESTING

SALTWATER EVAPORATION clear plastic condensation surface catches and channels freshwater tubes collect and transport condensed freshwater supports removable salt collection pins water evaporation pan

steel arch frame gathers rain tension cables anchor rotating mesh panels rotating mesh panels collect condensed fog carried by wind catchment trays collect water from meshes promenade walkway tubes convey water to collection points

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SUBSIDENCE, HABITAT LOSS, AND ECONOMiC MONOCULTURE Venice faces the dual challenges of global sea level rise and local subsidence within the lagoon. Salt water destroys historic buildings and foundations, and the costs of maintenance drive many residents out of the city. The historic decision to divert all rivers from the mainland outside of the lagoon in order to prevent siltation has robbed the lagoon of sediment. The tides, in part due to changes in the morphology of the inlets, remove more sediment than they deliver.

The Venetian lagoon sits atop layers of aquifers that extend 1000 meters below the surface. During the 20th century, groundwater extraction for industrial and urban use was a major contributor to subsidence and has subsequently been banned in Venice.

A ban is anticipated in 2012 on all groundwater extraction throughout the lagoon.

Several forces have also led to the loss of marsh habitat in the Venetian lagoon.

Erosion and the disruption of river born sediment deposition have caused the lagoon to turn from a shallow, variegated tidal marsh into open bay. Land building for human settlement and industry have filled wetlands, and the dredging of navigation canals and the wakes created by motorboats have further compromised the health of wetlands in the lagoon.

bush + keroack

After its decline as a major global trading center, Venice has struggled to reinvent its economy. Many of these attempts, such as the industrial port, have severely degraded the ecology of the lagoon while their economic successes are mixed at best. Venice is highly dependent on tourism, but the demands of these tourists on the sewerage and waste systems of the city jeopardize the physical structures of the city.

acqua venezia

The petrochemical factories constructed at Porto Marghera in the early 20th century have contributed dioxins, PCBs, mercury and other chemical compounds to the water and subsurface soils of the lagoon, which have been fatal to flora and fauna.

THE CHALLENGE Located in a brackish lagoon, Venice has always struggled with how to procure freshwater to support human settlement. This plan proposes to reimagine the hydrologic infrastructure of Venice by cultivating local or “guerilla� methods of harvesting water rather than depleting distant freshwater sources. Local freshwater procurement could support habitat restoration and creation. The lagoon supports a variety of habitat types, and the addition of new water infrastructures could create microhabitats and improve water quality.

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80

foggy days/month

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rainwater

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channeled by roofs and campi

condenses on meshes collects in tubes

evaporates condenses and collects

filtered and stored in cistern drinking water

TRANSIT ALONG VAPORETTO ROUTES

collects along transit routes agricultural use

FRESH WATER

BRACKISH WATER

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SALT

ballast water for ships industrial use

cistern “watershed� and function

A NEW HYDROLOGIC INFRASTRUCTURE FOR VENICE Our proposal rethinks the water systems in Venice, looking across scales from the procurement of water to its distribution. It leverages the tourist industry to help support these new systems and empowers a more sustainable tourism through eliminating plastic water bottle waste and reliance on distant aquifer supplies.

Securing freshwater was an essential precondition to the settlement of Venice, and the construction of cisterns began as early as the 9th century. Over 6000 cisterns exist beneath the surface in Venice. Largely ignored since the introduction of an aqueduct in 1884, only about 200 wellheads remain, having become a prized object for 19th and 20th century art collectors across the world. All of the campi, or public squares, in Venice are graded to direct rainwater into cisterns, and all adjacent roves to the campi are piped to drain runoff into the below ground cistern. Our proposal would restore the network of cisterns in Venice, making them available as public fountains. The sand filter would be repaired and brought into line with modern standards, and a water filter would be added above ground to bring water to drinking quality. A lever on the pump would pull water through these filters. Cistern fountains would collect rain off city surfaces and could be supplemented with freshwater gathered throughout the lagoon.

Tourists would be able to purchase containers at several key locations throughout the city. They could put down a deposit and then choose to keep the container as a souvenir or return it for their deposit. The bottles can be easily stacked for transport to washing facilities on outer islands. The container could be filled throughout the city at cistern fountains and containers would be manufactured on the island of Murano, which is known historically for its distinctive glass. Our proposal would help develop a market for local glass and create a more meaningful economic exchange for tourists.

bush + keroack acqua venezia new cisterns in the historic core harvest rainwater

container purchase and return centers

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transportation systems Italians, for example, have the highest per capita consumption of bottled water in the world. Collecting these bottles in Venice presents major challenges, as garbage is collected by hand at a great cost to the city. Our proposal addresses the local problem of bottled water consumption, as well as the additional pressures of the tourist economy, which can bring an additional 50-60,000 visitors, and their trash, a day.

For transporting water and containers throughout the lagoon, we propose to use existing vaporetto routes that connect Venice with the other islands around the lagoon, allowing hydrologic and transportation infrastructures to support one another.

Many of the abandoned islands in the lagoon could become the hubs of the new water systems for Venice, acting as areas of water collection, container distribution, manufacture and cleaning. The new connections between these islands could be coupled with increases to vaporetto service, increasing the economic viability and connections to these islands for both residents and tourists. This transportation could be the catalyst for a new future for the islands. The fog harvesters could also form a lagoon promenade, allowing the inhabitation of the lagoon in new ways, helping the lagoon to become part of the identity of Venice once again, and to take tourist pressure off the historic core.

solar rays

water conveyed across pans

Rather than use energy-intensive methods, we propose solar evaporation to harvest water from the lagoon. Shallow floating pans will let in water which will evaporate and run along the upper surface of the trays into a collection system that runs through the pans. These conveyance tubes will be linked to walkways creating new inhabitable spaces in the lagoon. Salt remains as a byproduct that could be used for industry.

container washing facilities

salt processing

Abandoned islands can be repurposed to become hubs for the transport and processing of water supplies.

bush + keroack acqua venezia fog harvesting

fog harvester creates new social space

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MATERIOLOGY Michael Leighton Beaman Virginia Teaching Fellow Zaneta Hong Lecturer in Architecture + Landscape Architecture Materiology, the study of materials, can never be its own discipline, because it is already a component of every discipline. It cannot be a study at a specific scale, because it is already a study at every scale – quantum to cosmological. This endeavor is visceral and computational, individual and universal, immediate and mediated, intense and subtle. Most important is the realization that with every new study material potentials are revealed.

What materiology seeks to do is not reiterate information readily expressed, but to unearth overlooked or marginalized data about any given material and to re-cast those findings into categories of information that define each material as a multiplicity of potentials. This effort is simultaneously an archeological and projective project,

beaman+ hong MATERIOLOGY

looking to the systems at work that form these materials as well as defining new trajectories for each. While this approach yields a formation of potentials unique to each material, three core concerns have emerged.

The first is the extraction of information embedded in a material. Information requires a metric in which to be translated, and a point of view to assign value to those metrics.

The second is the division and recombination of that information into data sets, each of which expose the qualities of that material. These include inherent, imbued, composite, physical and application qualities. Inherent qualities represent a material’s physical and chemical properties, formal expression, or application. Materials acquire imbued qualities as a result of processes applied to them. This exhibition constitutes various combinations of inherent, imbued, composite, state or physical, and application qualities into categories of potentials. Together they constitute an organization of a material’s potential. The third concern is the dissemination or the act of communicating and transmitting these potentials in a way that makes them relatable. These potentials are what we are searching for when we construct our own investigations; and in this way, define material misuses and material innovations as nothing more than new points of view.

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MATERIOLOGY

beaman+ hong

eight stairways of rome daniel mowery, m. arch 2012 carlo pelliccia travelling fellow 2011

stair as negative space | Tempietto of San Pietro, Montorio, Bramante, 1502 A monument commemorating St. Peter’s martyrdom beside S. Pietro in Montorio, the Tempietto’s heaviness is enhanced through the contrasts of light and shadow. Sometimes forgotten, its stair is carved out of the ground, leading to a secluded and sacred space, marking the crucifixion of St. Peter.

mowery eight stairways of rome

Stairs are necessary to negotiate movement upon and around the seven hills that comprise the city of Rome. While some stairs may wind down into a cellar, others weave the fabric of the city together. Yet, others suggest a heavenly ascension or the merging of historical and cultural phenomena. Stairs mediate the human scale, cradling our every step and forming places of rest for the body. They are the intersection of forms, the experienced walk between scales, and the manifestation of a larger set of urban and architectural issues. Stairs are positioned within the scale of the larger urban environment, linking disparate parts of the city in magical and inspiring ways. As stairs change in scale and character in response to their urban

stair as axis | Piazza del Campidoglio, Michelangelo, begun 1538 This stair creates a strong axial procession within the city through its broad flight of steps. Its character strengthens a procession from street, to piazza, to Palace, and to the sky.

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context, they transform the way we perceive processional space. Hierarchical views, sun trajectories, material changes, and alignments all contribute to the development of each procession’s character; each stair then can be seen as a critical juncture of larger forms that synthesize and weave together our surroundings. Design must be grounded in the earth; it must be accountable, carefully placed in its surroundings. By ignoring the forms of our past, our interpretations become meaningless, placeless.

Through my drawings in Rome I went to discover—to understand, find, and articulate meaning through the process of form-making.

stair as volume | Giardini Farnesiani, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, 1555 A formal procession connecting an ancient axis to pleasure gardens, this stair carries and reintroduces its visitors from enclosed caves and grottoes to sweeping plinths that look across the city. Moving from exterior to interior, this volumetric sequence of stairs redefines its material use and circulation, aligning simple geometries to embrace multiple circulation routes horizontally while leading its inhabitants vertically.

mowery eight stairways of rome

Rome My experiences in Rome express the beginning of my intentions, through an understanding of a design space and its application to the process of architecture.

While in Rome, I visualized how forms, in drawing and diagramming, relate to and develop their contexts, revealing a reoccurring set of compositions and shapes that address the meaning of design. The result was an acknowledgement and discovery of how similar forms continually reoccur throughout time and space, and how multiple forms that are composed and juxtaposed in relationship to each other, are

stair as center | Musei Vaticani: Entrance Hall, Giuseppe Momo, 1929-32 Once both the beginning and end, the entrance and exit of the Vatican Museum, this stair’s double helix form resolves two opposing movements in circulation. Through a marble clad funnel, where stairs become ramps and ramps become stairs, while also simultaneously winding up and down, this stair constructs a center that delicately suspends its inhabitants, creating a spectacle of moving from ground to sky and sky to ground.

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revealed through the investigation of multiple sets of Roman steps. These reoccurring principles can be applied as a methodology to modulating future designs, with the simple realization that each place is given meaning through the interpretation of form.

Design Design must respond to both the artificial and natural: natural things, such as lightness and darkness, heaviness and lightness, fullness and absence; and artificial things, such as circularity and squareness, dreams and imagination, ugliness and beauty. Design also requires interpretation: intention and perception, abstraction and

stair as theater | Piazza de Spagna, Alessandro Specchi, 1723-1726 Also known as the Spanish Steps and perhaps the best venue to people-watch, this procession forms a theatrical space that affords an interplay of spectacle, rest, and view between the upper and lower halves of the city.

mowery eight stairways of rome

realization, embracement and rejection. Design needs space; without space, neither the natural things nor artificial things can exist. Without a medium both the natural and artificial would be without form. By having space, both a circle and a square can be observed; fullness and absence can now be experienced. Through space, design is possible. The act of drawing allowed me to discover the natural and artificial manifest in form. In Rome, these forms established meaning throughout the city and landscape, through my drawings, and my own discoveries were established between the placement of lead and paper—the placement of line within space.

stair as movement | MAXXI Museum, Zaha Hadid, 2009 Hadid’s project is void of ornamentation and expresses a stair of movement, flowing up and around, just as the MAXXI seems to flow through its context.

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Form Design and its result, form, are the synthesis of both the natural and artificial, embedded with intention and abstraction, perception and realization, and the generation of meaning. To me, design is a process that reveals itself over time. Design exists through the interpretation of certain basic things, both artificial and natural, that continuously reappear, articulated through simple forms. Form is a manifestation of design. The process of form-making, of iteration, of designing, where the syntheses of both natural and artificial things occur in their compositions within space. This was the focus of my research, to understand the forms engraved in our reality, to understand our past forms and develop a methodology of form-making, a process to develop my own meaning, my own forms, through design.

stair as enclosure | Palazzo del Quirinale Through the alleys of the Palazzo Quirinale, a stair leads residents to a small, nestled parking lot within Rome’s urban fabric. Although inconspicuous, the narrow steps are flush against the wall and bound by buildings on either side.

mowery eight stairways of rome

Through the lens of the stair, I have explored the physical manifestation of form and the resulting experiences and connections to their urban site context. Often, I found an overlap, the manifestation, a synthesis of multiple readings of the city. I understood each stair as an attempt to resolve the tensions between the human desires to move with the identity of city. Although in this exploration of Rome I had chosen to focus particularly on the physicality of its steps, the intention and synthesis I have returned home with has allowed me to understand how public spaces within cities can both cradle the human form while also addressing both the artificial and natural things that manifest themselves.

stair as urban connection | Piazza del Popolo and Pincian, Giuseppe Valadier, 1809-1822 An urban procession of pedestrians and vehicles in both plan and section, this stairway frames views up the city’s gardens and back to St. Peter’s. This procession’s double back-weaving ramp and its Fontana del Nettuno is a broad large-scale gesture that unites garden to city visually while simultaneously physically separating the viewers.

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Dwelling for a Fiddler Brad Schuck, M.Arch 2011 Lecturer, Department of ARchitecture Thesis Critics: Earl Mark and Peter Waldman Digitization of trades related to design and making has become dangerously generalized. A ‘copy/paste’ generation has emerged, adopting concepts and construction methods whose context is overshadowed by time, material and cost efficiency. Geotechnical responsiveness and experiential versatility have not been realized.

Contemporary assemblages of the most complex and simple nature struggle to embody a sense of regionalized identity. As a result, the practice of place-making faces endangerment.

I am primarily interested in exploring the trajectory of architecture and industrial design within a neo-industrialized climate. Labor markets have become increasingly fragmented in the construction industry. Digital design and fabrication are still both relatively young components within the architectural realm, compared to the automotive, naval and aircraft industries. Rather than directing focus on why the architectural core has waited to confront the ‘technology gap’ between itself and peripheral fields, I want to synthesize the fundamental ways of making in both architecture and industrial design. In order to do so, I have selected a site and program that requires a careful cross-pollination between the trades.

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Dwelling for a fiddler

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gestural representation of the bridge | dimensional reverberation within the fiddle belly / hybrid depiction of space

sketches

arbitrary intersections of arithmetic clothoids

sound reflection paths according to snell’s law

kinetic operations and systems

topographical relationship to origin of sound

schuck Dwelling for a fiddler kinetic operations and systems

From 1775 to 1850, more than 25,000 Gaelic-speaking Scots migrated to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. As a result, many Scottish trades and customs were introduced to North America at the time, such as the fiddle. While the population of Gaelicspeaking residents in Cape Breton rose to over 100,000 by the mid-twentieth century, that number has fallen in present-day to below 1,000. Many customs have diminished over time, but master carpentry remains unchanged. Nova Scotia is still home to some of the most accomplished fiddle makers in the world.

The appropriation of craft relative to a given context is vital to preserving and building upon any region. This research focuses on intersections between architecture and industrial design through the creation of a dwelling. Its performative essence is inspired by an indigenous artifact of mythological execution in its craft—the Gaelic fiddle. An understanding of precedent methodologies and exploration of modern media are synthesized to create a process-manifesto.

Careful observation of both the linear assemblage of a violin and the unique role of each component provides a fundamental series of variables. A conclusion is drawn as to whether man or machine should be employed (regarding time, craft, quality, control, efficiency, and performance).

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schuck Dwelling for a fiddler

“Dwelling for a Fiddler in Nova Scotia� is a physical manifestation of form, function, and assembly that celebrates the vernacular artifact. The romantic craft of fiddle-making is metaphorically introduced to hyper-ergonomic modes of fabrication. An architectural language results in their poetic translation. Seasonally-minded occupation and remote utility resources played informative roles in determining the proposed programmatic requirements of the project.

My proposal commissions local craftsman, culture, laborers, and resources in a viable economic model. The process of designing, fabricating, constructing, and maintaining the prototype will be based on the balanced appropriation of architectural, industrial, and cultural manifestations. Material, off-site fabrication, on-site assembly, geotechnical performance, kinetically operable range, and life cycle assessment are all areas of consideration.

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looking at leonardo Sanda iliescu Associate Professor of art and Architecture As the concept of the field has come to play a major role in design practice and pedagogy over the last two decades, appreciation of architecture’s formal qualities has been eclipsed by interest in its contextualizing power: its ability to reveal relationships between inhabited places and their broader human and natural contexts. Yet any rejection of figural concerns in favor of context and open-ended flows upsets a delicate balance in the design process. At its best, this balance brings together the two forces pulling at the designer: one in the direction of form, the other towards context. One way to probe this essential balance—and encourage design students’ sustained attention to both form and site in design—is to study the analogous problem of the figure-ground in the visual arts.

For the artist, the background of a painting is not something one can merely “fill in.” Similarly, the designer cannot address the many problems and opportunities of site simply by supplying descriptive data and applying numerical analysis to a given piece of land. For both painter and designer, the challenge of the creative process is to remain equally open to both formal and contextual possibilities. One artist who achieved Leonardo da Vinci Sketches for the Madonna and Child with A Cat (recto and verso), ca. 1505-8 (The British Museum, London: #1856-6-21-1)

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Leonardo is a useful precedent in first-year design studios partly because of his profound passion for the figure. Unlike Leonardo, however, most of us tend to fall into the habit of ignoring the ground that surrounds and supports—indeed makes possible—all figures. This is especially true for beginners. Every beginning design teacher interested in opening his or her students’ aesthetic sensibility to more than just the formal object faces the difficulty of overcoming the almost gravitational pull of the figure. Not unlike the scene depicted in Leonardo’s sketch Allegory: Rain of Material Possessions from Clouds to Earth, young students’ imaginations seem littered with figural objects, each as tyrannical as it is mute and as opaque as it is unrelated to anything beyond its own closed boundaries.

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this balance with an astonishing degree of success was Leonardo da Vinci. As a draftsman who studied the forms of figures with extraordinary precision and unrivaled sensitivity, Leonardo invented formal and narrative ways to transition from a figurecentric world to one that conceives of ground as an essential partner to the figure.

Figure 1: Leonardo da Vinci, Allegory: Rain of Material Possessions from Clouds to Earth, ca. 1498 (Courtesy of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; Windsor Royal Library: #12698)

Occasionally, as in his Allegory, Leonardo ridiculed the material figure with wry, selfdeprecating humor (fig. 1). Here the downpour of objects beating down upon the ground includes not only symbols of political power and wealth (necklaces, a papal tiara, and a cardinal’s hat), but also the architect’s and painter’s own emblematic tools (triangles, rulers, and stretched canvases). Yet more than such narrative challenges— more, that is, than articulating any of the practical and psychological burdens that material figures inevitably place on us—Leonardo wished to challenge the figure in aesthetic ways. As a painter and draftsman, he explored the formal dilemmas posed by the figure and its ground. Through drawing and sketching, he both celebrated and challenged the figure’s centrality. He emulated, echoed, and destroyed the figure.

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Figure 2: Leonardo da Vinci, Sketches for the Madonna and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John the Baptist (recto and verso), ca. 1505-8 (The British Museum, London: #1875-6-12-17)

Through studying the same figure over and over again he sought to understand its profound loneliness, fragility, and isolation. While revealing the figure’s inherent stillness, opacity, and closure, he also invented ways to animate it. He rendered it at once open and bounded, transparent and tactile.

From his earliest sketches to his late Deluge studies, Leonardo set himself the task of understanding the figure in its infinite potential relationships to the ground. This task is inherently dialectical—simultaneously destructive and revelatory. As the figure dissolves into its ground—as it disappears and re-appears—it becomes both a figure and a ground. An oscillating ground-figure emerges as a new optical and tactile phenomenon, something that we call a field.

First Exercise: Overlapping Blind Contours The dense array of overlapping lines in Leonardo’s figure studies conveys a powerful sense of touch. As a result of the overlapping of many poses, the ground becomes palpably heavy, as if it were molded clay, or some other visceral material, bending, swaying, and folding within a deep, pulsating space. In this study of The Madonna with Saint Anne distinctions are lost and figures dissolve, becoming a dark field that, however, also acts figuratively: a nocturnal presence composed of interwoven relationships (fig. 2).

Inspired by Leonardo, the students’ first exercise for Lessons in Making aimed to highlight the two-dimensional plane’s visceral tactility—a quality shared by both painting and drawing. In 1863, the painter Delacroix, whose drawings bear striking resemblances to Leonardo’s, wrote in his sketchbook: “the type of emotion peculiar to painting is, so to speak, tangible.”

In overlapping blind contour studies, students traced contours without looking at the paper but gazing instead at their subjects. Patiently, the gaze and drawing tool move

As students focused on the experience of seeing while blindly touching the paper, the drawing as a finished product ceased to matter quite so much. Drawing became a dynamic process of study. The drawing surface became more open to exploration and less something one sought to control. Students saw that the drawing surface can surprise us as it reveals traces of experience both intensely tactile and visual (fig. 4).

Second Exercise: Overlapping Gesture Studies As a complement to the slow, deliberate blind process, students drew much faster, impetuous gesture studies in their second exercise. In doing so, they sought to understand each object not as a still form but as a set of expressive movements. As they drew, they were encouraged to ask not what an object looked like, but what it did. For instance, a tall slender figure that reaches upward can suggest forceful motion against gravity; a flat surface spreading across the page evokes stillness and repose; a circular shape suggests the comforting enclosure of embracing arms or the whirling motion of a spinning top (fig. 5).

looking at leonardo

Unlike conventional “blind contour� exercises in which the artist renders only one definitive outline, students traced many contours overlapping transparently on the same page. Each trace began at a unique point and denoted its own particular journey of the eye and hand. The result was a vibrating, transparent drawing space that recorded the unfolding of many related approximations. As multiple traces overlapped, there was a greater chance of relationships emerging. Gradually, isolated figures became open figures intimately responsive to their grounds (fig. 3).

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together, linked by the sense of touch and awareness of motion and space.

Figure 3: overlapping blind contours,student work (Bryonne Levy), 2011

Leonardo was the inventor and first practitioner of the gesture study: a classical drawing exercise for which, along with Rembrandt, he remains an unrivaled master. His quickly scratched studies of figures in various postures evoke a startling sense of spiraling motion within a perfectly poised composition of still lines on a flat surface. One way he animates his lines is by suggesting dance-like fluid movements of individual figures: the twisting of a torso or the turning of a face. Sometimes he inscribes the literal path of movements, for example the trajectory of a bird, or the patterns of flowing water.

Yet Leonardo’s sketches also move in a different way, seemingly animated by a psychological or interior motion. A figure might gaze in a particular direction, reaching

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outside itself and pointing towards another figure. Overlapping this first gesture are other traces of that same figure, with its face and gaze turned in slightly different ways. As viewers, these transparent traces overlap in our imagination as one gentle, yet strangely still movement.

This sense of calm amidst swirling motion is peculiar to Leonardo. A child’s torso might move one way, while his arm gestures in the opposite direction, the two achieving a sort of balance or precarious stillness. This is perhaps because the viewer is constantly reminded that this is after all simply a collection of sometimes crude, quickly scratched ink lines. Like the trajectory of Leonardo’s bird flight studies, these lines suggest another motion: the movement of the artist’s own hand. The drawing hand echoes subject’s movements. This double motion—the subject’s leaning, and the artist’s tracing— achieve a different sort of meaning as a poetic togetherness. The drawn figure is one with the drawing hand. The act of drawing becomes a kind of mime, the enacting of movements seen and felt.

Third Exercise: Open Contour Drawings Inspired by Leonardo’s sparse, luminous sketches, students drew their subjects as open contour studies. Here forms were realized though series of incomplete and discontinuous lines. The white, black, or gray ground of the paper flows freely in and out of both figures and grounds, both inside and outside material forms (fig. 6).

Leonardo’s fastest sketches were often such open contour drawings that recall much later studies by modern masters such as Picasso and Matisse (fig. 8). Aside from practical efficiency and speed, why would Leonardo deliberately practice these seemingly incomplete, casual studies? The question seems especially poignant for an artist so dedicated to recording the minutest of details and subtlest of nuances of individual forms.

Leonardo used open contour drawing as a way of starting a more detailed and longer study. The technique allowed him to begin not with any one portion of his subject, but all over and with the form as a whole. In this he anticipated Cezanne’s advice for painters “to address the whole canvas at once.”

Yet for Leonardo, the open contour study was not only a way to begin. It was also a way of achieving a final concise sense of openness. After many detailed and dense studies of a figure, Leonardo often drew an open contour on the back of the drawing. As much as it was a beginning, this sparse technique became a summary and distillation of prior discoveries. This is the case of the St. Anne verso study, which follows the densely worked, overlapping gesture studies on the sheet’s recto side. Leonardo began and ended the drawing as an open field: a surface that encourages multiple simultaneous relationships of figures to each other and to the ground.

Paradoxically, literal discontinuities in Leonardo’s open contours encourage powerful implied connections. In the St. Anne verso study, broken lines across the drawing

iliescu looking at leonardo student work, 2011 (clockwise from top) Figure 6: open contours on recycled ground (Sheila Borkar); Figure 4: overlapping blind contours (Anna McMillan); Figure 5: gesture study (Kate Lemly); Figure 9: blind contours on recycled ground (Sheila Borkar)

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Figure 7: Henri Matisse, Themes with Variations, F8, 1941 (Musee de Grenoble; photo: Andre Morin; Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society—ARS, NY)

space encourage our gaze to leap freely from one figure to another. For instance, at the drawing’s top, the closely intertwined heads of Mary and Anne are both defined by similar discontinuous strokes. This rhythmic consistency in the careful spacing and alignment of strokes leads our gaze back and forth between Mary and St. Anne, creating a common field of echoing, pulsating lines. Our attention moves swiftly from Anne’s crisscrossing head, bands towards a similar pattern of flowing parallels on Mary’s hair and then downwards, along Mary’s left shoulder and her left arm reaching towards Christ. The drawing does not represent separate figures, but a vibrating sense of connection and intense closeness between grandmother, mother, child, and cousin.

Fields Just as Leonardo did not deny the figure but rather discovered ways in which it becomes meaningful through its relationships with the ground, so too the beginning designer need not dismiss the role of material figures. Part of learning to draw is learning that the figure is diminished when it is an absolute and unchallenged focus of attention. Similarly, part of learning to design on a particular site is learning that built forms are impoverished when they have no connection to their surroundings, or when such forms are conceived of as self-sufficient or pure.

In learning to balance formal abstraction with a close attention to extrinsic qualities of context and site, the beginning student discovers the special eloquence that figures and

Looking at Leonardo

Following a week of drawing exercises inspired by Leonardo, students worked on a collage exercise called Fields. Their formal goal was to reinterpret figures they found in the trash or the recycling bin. Using found paper and cardboard they created abstract compositions inspired by the experience of listening to recordings of bird songs.

However, the sound recordings presented not only the bird songs but also the sound of wind rustling through grasses and reeds, the croaking of frogs, the buzzing of bees, distant bird calls, or the sounds of traffic. This ambient sound was important—without it the bird’s song would have no depth and no emotional resonance.

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grounds acquire when they are seen as profoundly connected with one another. In other words, the student begins to design by drawing overlapping, transparent fields.

By orchestrating figure-ground reversals in their collages, students celebrated the ground as an essential participant and equal partner to the figure. Paradoxically, as figures relinquished some of their centrality, as contours opened and reached outwards, as boundaries were trespassed and lines extended, each individual figure became richer and more expressive, as both a figure and a new and unexpected ground (fig. 10, 11).

As in the sound recordings, everything mattered in these collages. Grounds and figures alternated, creating a visual vibration analogous to music. Such vibrations were created by carefully processing and re-assembling found figures—fragments of posters, used coffee filters, pieces of discarded architectural models. The lesson of these fields was both an aesthetic and an ethical one. Beauty is not a rarefied or ideal quality. It is rather a question of relationships: of one thing adjusting itself in response to another.

Figure 10: field collage, student work (David Schmidt), 2011

Figure 11: field collage, student work (Brian Hill), 2011

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grassroots architecture in a global marketplace a conversation with camilo restrepo Principal, Camilo restrepo arquitectos ATLAS: Agencia translatina di Arquitectura Camilo Restrepo, an architect from Medellin, Colombia, visited the School of Architecture in September 2012. Restrepo presented a lecture and led a workshop with students from the landscape architecture and architecture departments. The following discussion between Restrepo and students and faculty from the School of Architecture covered alternative forums for architectural discourse, the opportunity for architecture to engage in globalizing economic networks, and the distinction between disciplines.

Nathan Burgess: In your talk, you described how in Medellin, you felt like you needed to advertise or develop more of an architectural discourse around the city. In the US, we have a similar condition, where architects have isolated themselves from the general public and other disciplines.

How can architecture become more relevant in society today?

Camilo Restrepo: I think that architects, like other professions, deal with two sides of the same coin. On one side, architecture for society needs to be rethought. On the other, architecture for architects has some issues that need to be rethought.

For the first time, due to the crash of the economic system, uncertainty covers the world in an unprecedented way. But what appears in one with Nathan Burgess, Mla 2013; Seth Denizen, mla 2012; Brian Davis, MLA 2012; Schaefer Somers, LEcturer in architecture

When there is this kind of uncertainty, the first thing that pops up into theoretical or architectonic approach is morality. What you see now is a very dogmatic condition— the dispute between good and bad. It shouldn’t be like that. Architects need to step aside, create a kind of independence, and focus on what can bring development to the practice. I’m not interested in what is new in architecture, but I am interested in how to locate change. Where does change happen in architecture? Does it happen on the architect’s drafting tables; does it happen in the universities; does it happen in technology; does it happen in the way we understand space; does it happen in the way we can cross information between disciplines; is it in the way that we understand we are not simply artists? I think it is important to continue questioning what it means to be an architect.

restrepo GRASSROOTS ARCHITECTURE

place as a necessity may be the answer to someone else’s curse. It is a paradox that 65% of the food produced in Havana, Cuba, is produced inside the city. But they take that model, of course, because their economical system does not allow them to have a different source for food and supplies. But other cities that belong to stronger economical systems may learn from Havana. I understand that Philadelphia has a strong urban farming program. But the reason why they are doing it is different than Havana. If they exchange experiences, it will strengthen both places. They can create new models for production and creation of the landscape.

Seth Denizen: This is getting at something I found interesting in your talk. In the United States, if you have a flagship architectural project and you get it published in the Architectural Record, then you have contributed to the professional discourse. You have a much more loose and diffuse way of exchanging ideas in Medellin. It isn’t in the Architectural Record, but it is changing the way architecture is thought. I want to hear more about how this network you have developed works in Medellin.

Camilo Restrepo: There is no architectural scene in Colombia. This is different from Spain, where they are so good at putting ideas together and circulating them, that it doesn’t matter if the economy isn’t working. They have hundreds and hundreds of publications. From El Croquis to pamphlets made by a photocopy machine. Mansilla + Tuñón have a small publication on their webpage called Circo. Circo includes work from Stan Allen to Steven Holl. You simply print it from their webpage and read it.

In Colombia, there is nowhere to publish. The generation before us taught us to be generous. They invited us to dinner, to share projects with them, to collaborate with them in a very horizontal way. Besides being colleagues, we are friends.

That sounds very simple in a way, but being friends with colleagues helps to create projects in common. Not for being published, but to have ideas and to circulate work. We publish not to make statements, not to say we are this or that, but more to permeate society in a way that will give architecture a value. The last years have proven that architecture can generate a lot of interest for a country, for a society, for its needs. We are learning to do that.

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What is interesting about what is happening in Medellin is that you can solve, participate, and operate within social problems without creating iconic architecture, without having a Guggenheim effect, if you know what I mean.

It is very paradoxical—we learned from Bogota and Barcelona. In the 90s they fell apart.

Now they want to connect Bogota to the world. They want to be the cultural capital of Latin America. They are doing it the opposite way. They hired Steven Holl to do a project in the national university. They did a huge competition inviting Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, and other famous architects of the world. In Medellin, we are doing it with local talent. What Bogota has done has been done everywhere in the world. What we are doing is new. It is more about being conscious of the limits of what we can do with architecture. We can think of architecture as a cultural service as well.

SD: How do you create a publication that represents what you do? Students are currently trying to understand how to put together a publication, Lunch, that represents a vast diversity of types of work done at the architecture school.

CR: What distinguishes our profession from other fields is that everyone experiences architecture every day without noticing it. This allows architecture to connect with people in a very concrete way. If you put together a medical publication, this is too hermetic. Only doctors understand this. Only when you translate these issues into a very common language, you touch and connect society and the scientific world. When you talk about architecture, you can use concepts such as city, public, common, community, environment, you have a lot of issues that become public interest.

I think that most interesting publications of architecture are the kind you can buy in the supermarket; these touch a wide range of subjects. Some magazines in Argentina, Spain, and Holland can be bought in the supermarket, and the texts are very critical and beautiful at the same time. If architects limit ourselves to publishing what is interesting to us and ignoring what engages the public, we are wasting our time.

NB: Do you see yourself, as an architect, as a driver of change or responding to changes? You mentioned architecture as a service. To what degree do you see architecture as serving a larger political system, or driving a larger system?

CR: I see architecture as a service that doesn’t need to be a fool in the system.

Sometimes crimes can be committed. Too much nostalgia has been put into the system right now. You see some interventions built just because they have the word “social” included, but they aren’t necessarily good.

What are the values that we put into professional discussions? I see a lot of rubbish circulating in publications right now because of these excuses. You see a house that is made of wood with a roof that is a palm tree or something. It was made with the community, and therefore it is good architecture? Are we giving value to the process or to the product? Are we being conscious that this doesn’t bring anything to architecture, but may bring something to the community? I think critical values are quite twisted

CR: What I see is that you see a lot of tourism for charity. What I We do not publish to make see is that there is a colonizing statements, to say we are this or that, approach to the information that circulates. There is a lot interest but more to permeate society in a in Latin America, but there is a way that will give architecture a value. lot of nostalgia involved. The challenge is not to create shelter for the poor, to create a better world. It is impossible to do it from architecture. Architecture is not this superman kind of profession that is extra-efficient.

But architecture can point out and bring life to things that we didn’t think before as possible. Architecture makes things appear on the map in a way. So I believe that what needs to be thought right now is how can we reengage our problems—architecture itself—to make the profession itself sustainable.

GRASSROOTS ARCHITECTURE

SD: What do you mean that it doesn’t bring anything to architecture?

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recently. Not everything that has the last name of “social” or “sustainable” is a good thing. Just because it takes the people into account doesn’t mean that it is good.

If we keep feeding the system with all that crap about sustainable and social issues in such a careless and light way, it will only become a style. A hundred years ago architecture was interested in a different set of issues, like Le Corbusier’s machine as a way for living. But these issues still circulate too much. Architects are an endangered species. You see these publications and you read the text—what the hell are they talking about? It is a great work because it works with society. Everything works with society. When you put an iPod into the market it is related to society. I was talking a little about Bruno Latour in the workshop. All things are uncertain to society. But how can we relate with it? Does the non-human have a voice in this assembly of voices?

Things have changed, but architecture doesn’t seem to be making change in its most structural conditions.

NB: The modernists propped up architecture, as you say, on a different set of ideas— the machine as a solution to social problems. Now we prop up architecture with issues of sustainability. I wonder if there was a condition at any point when architecture was not propped up on a pedestal of issues. Is there a way to get out of this cycle?

CR: We need a new definition of space today, and what architecture does in it. In the studio we tried to work toward architecture as the administration, production, and management of space. A very thin line divides people. This can be a line in the floor, a glass façade. Look at the Arab Spring protest. This is a claim for space, to have participation. What is architecture saying about this? What is an Arab city now? I haven’t seen a single text about it. Then again, I am from Colombia. We are not part of a system where people are constantly informed, connected to a network.

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Orquideorama (courtesy www.sergiogomez.co)

SD: How does your architecture relate to the shaping of space in the post-cartel years of Medellin?

CR: I think that it is not that we had the opportunity to be involved in that. We built that opportunity. It is not just that the mayor came and said all architects should do this or that. You have to provide politicians with tools to interact with society. There is no politician that has an agenda of their own. It is very strange if a politician has his own agenda. You have to get in touch with them and propose a new way for living. We have been engaged with politicians, with universities, with other professionals, trying to construct a different sense for the city.

We created architects by organizing their educational programs. We were the curators of an architectural festival in Medellin. We are trying to permeate the system. It’s not only about buildings, but if you don’t create this layer where people give value to what you do, it’s very difficult for buildings to appear suddenly. This is the most radical and difficult part. Sometimes humans are animals with habits. To change minds is very difficult. It takes a lot effort and money to create one built square meter of concrete.

You have to make people believe in you.

Schaefer Somers: How do you create the space in life to spark this change? We have discussions about pro-bono culture here at the architecture school. How do you

We have never had this welfare state that somehow you have had in the United States, Europe, and Canada. I know it was wrong grammatically speaking to mention at my lecture that we are entering an age that goes from Solitary to Solidarity. This is not a period anymore for being solitary. Maybe nobody will pay you for your ideas. Maybe someone else will copy your ideas. But that’s fine. If someone else has the media or technology to do it, that’s fine, as long as somebody does it. If it is useful, let somebody do it, even if it is not you.

GRASSROOTS ARCHITECTURE

CR: It’s a mixture of fear and optimism. You have to be optimistic that things can be different. I’m 37, and I didn’t have a teenage “wild life” that you are supposed to have. At 16 you are supposed to be sneaking into someone’s room, having some adventures. This was a time of war. Maybe we all got this fear of losing it all that makes us conscious that we have to be optimistic. We have to put all our time, education, exchange to make things a little bit better.

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balance giving back, your 1%, with commercial enterprises?

SS: Is there a way to quantify architecture as an instrument of change?

CR: There is a nice example of a theory-action for development formulated by Gastón Acurio. If the demand for Peruvian cuisine around the world increases, then people will pay more for the kilogram of onion, lemons, creating a complete web of new demand for hyper-local products and supplies. This means that ordering a Peruvian meal at a restaurant in New York implies that social and economic systems have been constructed, creating new dynamics to provide a certain product in a place. The discussion centers around how branding food can create a web of consumption that works together to create architecture in public space and the eco-social benefits that can be derived from that increase of demand. It’s an opportunity to link entities from the realm of data to the realm of the physical as public space.

When you join the dots, you create a new map of information that is not architectonic.

But spaces become very important. Imagine the infrastructure needed to create one Peruvian dish in a public square in Moscow. How much organization does it take?

How do you create an agency to make it happen?

The Bartlett Architecture School in London call themselves a school for the built environment. There is some “positive poison” in that. They build environments. They create no distinction between architecture, geography, theory, biology. When they call themselves a faculty of the built environment, they are saying something very strong. I think they are pointing out something very important for education. Is there a difference between natural and artificial? They are the same. This glass has the same materials as your bones. It is not alive but it has the same ingredients in a different amount. I find something similar between cooking and architecture. You mix together ingredients. There is definitely some alchemy involved.

Brian Davis: So is there a fundamental difference between the practice of architecture,

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landscape architecture, and something like cooking? You would argue that fundamentally these are the same practice?

CR: Every profession has its own values. I am against specialization. When you specialize too much, you lose the big picture. A fundamental thing is that we share a common ground, which is space.

Maybe you saw that Rem Koolhaas The challenge is not to create was the invited guest for Wired magazine. He invites different people shelter for the poor, to create to talk about space. At the end, it is a better world. It is impossible the same concept that we are talking about. Space is one of these social to do it from architecture...But institutions across professions, such architecture can point out and as freedom or democracy.

bring life to things that we didn’t

What was the idea of freedom for the USSR? It was not our idea of think before as possible. freedom, but they for sure had one.

In each group, society, condition, there are some values or principles that give structure to society, even if they have different interpretations. We tend to say that Greeks were the most democratic society of all or that they created democracy. If you were a woman, you didn’t have the same rights as a man.

Richard Rorty said that truth is a construction; you build the idea of truth according to your conditions. Latour says that truth is everything that circulates, that goes around.

What’s true?

SD: What you were talking about is the idea that disciplinary distinctions are not important. But what you are really getting at is that there are no meaningful distinctions in the ways we think about cooking or architecture. But wouldn’t you have to admit that there are differences, precisely because of the economies and market forces we are subject to and the disciplinary boundaries we are constrained by?

CR: What creates the difference between disciplines are the tools that create the disciplines. The timing of cooking is completely different. You spend an hour, and you make a terribly good meal. If you are an architect, in an hour you make a terribly good sketch—if you are lucky. You see that the timing and the tools are very different, but the experience and relations are the same.

When someone sits near a building and feels the difference between sun and shade, it is not that different from someone tasting a meal and finding it delicious. The frame we use to relate to the world is the difference. The world itself does not change. The frame that Isaac Newton created for gravity is very different from the frame of Einstein, but gravity doesn’t change.

CR: I think that necessity is the mother of opportunities. Here in the United States, you have contact with the best universities, the best teachers, the best programs. You have contact with the best technology you can afford. You create knowledge. That doesn’t happen in Latin America. You have a huge gravity of knowledge. You can focus on architecture. You need a tool, you have the tool. You need the technology, you have the technology. If we could revive Le Corbusier, he would walk through the hallways.

restrepo GRASSROOTS ARCHITECTURE

SD: I think you are terribly right that we bring about these understandings of disciplines.

But I feel that at the end of the day, we are very constrained by the economics of our disciplines. Our disciplinary boundaries are only meaningful in that they create markets and clients we have to deal with. These things do not exist in the free space of thought and our ability to frame what we know. This is something we are dealing with as we move from this world of free thought into the economy of the world. When we are talking about disciplines, it means all this crap we have to deal with.

Why, with such good education, do so many US architects go corporate? There is an idea of the individual architect that creates something behind him with a lot of weight, with society, with materials. You can count on your fingers really good contemporary U.S. architects. Is it the legal framework that makes you afraid that you will make a mistake? If this is so, why don’t architects get together to change this framework?

Steven Holl, Stan Allen, James Corner, Diller and Scofidio and Renfro—they are doing great jobs. They are trying to push things a little bit further. I think parametrics will not change architecture. It is just a tool. Maybe I am too optimistic, but I see so many opportunities. Maybe you are too much into it so that you do not see it.

SD: I also think we should not discount the education that you got in Medellin. It is an education in how society is constructed, and what it looks like when it falls apart.

Growing up in the United States is a form of education, and some of it is downright poisonous. I think there are implications for architectural education here. Shouldn’t we also learn how to exist in the world so we can learn from it? The more important education probably never happens inside an institution.

CR: I will have to add something regarding your point. It is not that we get educated, in those terms. We are a society under construction. The big difference between Europe, the United States, and Latin America is that you don’t take risks as a society. For us, daily life is so uncertain that we are willing to take risks. If everything goes wrong, nothing will happen—we are already messed up. If something good happens, that’s great. We are irresponsibly experimental in that way.

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The Roots of Music maurice cox and Betsy roettger Associate Professors of Architecture with Shiguang chen, daniel mowery, Oscar obando, and charles sparkman, m.arch 2012 In the fall of 2010, twenty-six graduate students led by professors Maurice Cox and Betsy Roettger traveled to New Orleans as part of the School of Architecture’s Dew Travel Studio—a joint architecture and landscape architecture studio that for the past several years has focused on the rebuilding of New Orleans. Over the week-long field trip, students engaged “a real-world, nonprofit client,” the Roots of Music, a nationally acclaimed, year-round music education program.

The students engaged with the program’s children, executive director Allison Reinhardt and founder Derrick Tabb, a jazz musician, to envision a new permanent home for the program.

photographs courtesy Luke Paskevich

cox + roettger THE ROOTS OF MUSIC

The Andrew J. Bell Junior High School Shiguang Chen Derrick Tabb, the director of The Roots of Music, describes being saved during his time in the marching band at Andrew Bell. Besides the personal connection to this place, this majestic school is one of many vacant schools deteriorating with no plans for renovation. By choosing to work with this site, we hope to show how a campus might be formed with ways of renovating pieces of the existing building over time. Shiguang Chen’s scheme laid out a processional space on axis with the main existing structure. This move pushed the building program to the side of the site, leaving a public and marching plaza connecting the new and existing structures. A tower rises above the city’s low building line to create a beacon for neighborhood kids.

The four projects featured illustrate the goals that guided the design semester: 1) How do you teach empathy in the education of an architect? 2) How do you create a climate of engagement in the community one is serving? 3) How do you foster a demand for design excellence in everyday life and with everyday programs? Integrating those three qualities can produce an extraordinary design proposal that reflects the organization’s values.

Empathy is an essential quality when designing for the needs of those whose life experience is different than one’s own. As architects we are often asked to think of others, and give evidence of serious regard for their collective voice in the design decisions that we make. Designing for The Roots of Music required students to walk in the shoes of children who were survivors of Katrina, and focus on a specific cultural identity—music and marching bands—within a rich discussion of the complex issues facing the city. While students engaged in discussions about the post-Katrina ecological, political, and economic systems in desperate need of redesign, they were also able to

go back to a specific set of kids, who had all survived the storm and envision a place tied to music as the way to reconnect to traditions and their own neighborhoods. This brought us back to the question of empathy—understanding that these designs were not about us but instead reflected an understanding of others.

To bridge the gap between emerging designers learning their craft and the middleschool-age kids in The Roots of Music program learning their craft, we created a teaching workshop. We explained to children what an architect does and how they could become an architect. Only afterwards did we show them buildings with programs similar to their own, and began to ask questions to learn about their own visions for the Roots of Music. The children very much enjoyed being at The Roots of Music and also understood the importance of the mandatory time spent doing homework with tutors

cox + roettger THE ROOTS OF MUSIC

The Wheatley School Daniel Mowery There was an effort by a local preservation group to save the Wheatley school which, was slated for demolition.

Unfortunately, the school is now gone. This unique modern school that took up half a city block had been discussed as a possible site for the Roots of Music as an anchor for the Treme neighborhood.

Daniel Mowery’s scheme reclaims the existing school building and forms new spaces for the program’s need for marching and instruction. Reacting to the flat, broad, and elevated structure of the 1950’s elementary school, the proposal creates two heavy vertical bars that stretch perpendicular to the Wheatley’s horizontal momentum, holding classrooms and an indoor marching space. Together they form an enclosed courtyard for private outdoor marching band practices, while also creating an identity for the Roots of Music that can be seen from a distance. The idea to constantly march throughout the site informed the spatial organization of both interior and exterior space; a twenty-foot wide corridor weaves through, over, and under both new and existing buildings, creating dynamic sequence of spaces for the band. The proposed design allows for the building to not be in opposition to the march, but instead reinforces the role of marching within the Roots of Music through its form.

just as much as learning their instruments. After their initial burst of youthful excitement about the possibilities to house their music program, we were surprised by the serious turn in the conversation.

We came to New Orleans assuming that children there would be preoccupied with the challenges of living with flooding. Instead, The Roots of Music children were most concerned about safety from crime, gangs, and other challenges daily life in a lowincome urban area. With our eyes opened, we reconsidered the questions we came prepared to pose: about infrastructure, water, and political systems. Responding instead to the students’ expressed concerns, many of the projects tried to embody the concept of a safe haven for the students.

The U.Va. students struggled with the safety issue. How do you promote a sense of openness to the public or reconnect to street life while providing safety for the children?

How do you create a safe haven for kids in a city that floods? How do the demands of a music program with considerable outdoor marching space fit on tight urban infill sites? To address these challenges, students began using strategies that introduced level changes, courtyard-type schemes, and thoughtful landscape design.

The need for a considerable amount of indoor and outdoor practice marching space became a great impetus for grand processional spaces, which could be integrated with larger neighborhood patterns. Since this after-school program operates only during the afternoon, the building spaces could be used for other programs or even to create revenue during the remaining hours. After meeting with The Roots of Music Board, students were urged to be entrepreneurial in their thinking about additional programs and adapting the building to different users.

So what are the benefits of engaging real clients, especially when traveling to an unknown location? Students learn to picture who and what they might be designing for. It also gives students the motivation to push their own limits both through innovation but also workable resolution of the client’s needs. To make their work relevant, students must learn how to communicate outside the academy and the discipline of architecture.

The community engagement pushed the students to clarify their intentions and to be more specific about how they were representing the values of the organization through the spaces they envision.

In the end, we hope our engagement with the Roots of Music will help them on their journey to create a permanent, iconic new home. We selected the four sites with the Roots of Music—two for their personal histories and two for their strategic visibility in the city. We offered a total of twenty-six design proposals, demonstrating multiple ways to interpret their needs and accommodate alternative futures. The Roots of Music were invited to imagine new ways of re-using buildings, thinking of rooftops as marching spaces, and coexisting with water—not as something to fear but to incorporate and even celebrate on site.

cox + roettger THE ROOTS OF MUSIC

The Warren Easton School, Canal Street Oscar Obando On a streetcar line andadjacent to a thriving charter high school, the Canal Street Site made this large vacant block key site to connect to the city and neighborhood. Oscar Obando’s project used the Roots of Music building program along the periphery of the block to form an open elevated courtyard connecting to the high school. The multi-purpose open space could be shared by the students of Warren Easton by day and the Roots of Music students in the evenings.

The building itself is conceived as a series of “school houses” that run along the west side of this courtyard with a large multi-purpose performance space capping the north end. The interior of the building’s circulation is designed to simulate the audio effect of staggered house façades within these neighborhood streets. Furthermore, the circulation allows for multiple paths to run alongside or through the courtyard­—enabling the choreography of multiple marching paths and performances both inside and outside the building.

Because of our ability to empathize through direct engagement while simultaneously advocating for design excellence, the student work resonated with people far outside our discipline and even entered the present day political discourse of New Orleans.

The School of Architecture was asked to join forces with a New Orleans preservation advocacy group, DOCOMOMO US/Louisiana to feature the student work in their grassroots campaign to stop the imminent demolition of the Phillis Wheatley School, one of the four sites studied. On June 16, 2011 the Recovery School District Superintendent, John White, issued a statement explaining the RSD reasons for going forward with the demolition plans. In his statement he also acknowledged the efforts of our students to envision an alternative future for the historic school. Our effort was perceived as the last effort to save the Phillis Wheatley School. We consider that a success.

cox + roettger THE ROOTS OF MUSIC

I-10 Site Charles Sparkman There are studies underway looking to tear down this elevated piece of the I-10 interstate and try to restore the once thriving boulevard below. This site pieces together properties along I-10 with the potential to design a building both as a billboard to the city and as a catalyst for change on the street level.

Charles Sparkman’s project envisioned a marching circuit leading the students from an entry forecourt, through an interior practice hall, and to a public park and playing field. The sequence enables the Roots of Music to engage the surrounding neighborhood and reclaim the underside of the elevated highway as a public amenity. The entry forecourt protects the Roots of Music’s library and classroom spaces from the busy street, provides a space of gathering, and offers separate entrances for the students and public. The public spaces (an auditorium and practice hall) cantilever toward the highway, lending the building a heightened urban presence to commuters on I-10. The building’s tight envelope allows half the site to be developed as a public park and marching space.

ecoReMOD2 Falmouth Field School jonathan coble, M.ARCH + Muep 2011 kirsten sparenborg, MAH 2012

CRITIC: JOHN QUALE Jonathan Coble: As John Quale began to speak to the Greenbuild 2006 audience about the origins of the ecoMOD project as a cost effective response to the award winning Trojan Goat Solar Decathlon entry from 2002, his excitement about the potential of the project came across as clearly as his warm disposition. The audience tilted their heads with intrigue, nodded along, and became engrossed in the ‘decision web’ graphics, process drawings, and photographs of ecoMOD 1. When the presentation ended, the room hummed. The question “How can I get involved?” seemed to be on the minds of many, and it was certainly on mine. It was part of the reason, in fact, that I decided to pursue my Master’s degrees at the University of Virginia.

In the Spring of 2011 in Falmouth, Jamaica, ecoREMOD2 began as ecoMOD 5. With the help of Louis Nelson from the Department of Architectural History, a site had been chosen, and a partner organization had agreed to help and house our team of 20+ undergraduate and graduate students. The semester of studio work yielded a strong final design, and initial site work had already begun to prepare for its implementation when the project’s momentum suddenly halted. A land

coble + sparenborg

Heroically, Falmouth Heritage Renewal (FHR), our partner organization, identified another building site and client within days. So rather than building from day one as we had intended, we began to work with our new client, Marja Ramsay and his family, on the design of 10 Albert Street. While we hoped to be as minimal as possible, surgical even, with our interventions, our experts on loan from the Falmouth Field School determined the existing home to be so termite ridden, a complete rebuild and addition would be necessary to fulfill Marja’s needs.

ecoremod2 and FAlmouth field school

tenure dispute between the site’s actual owner and its presumed owner, a condition our group knew to be a consistent issue in the Caribbean, flared days before the major building portion of ecoMOD5 began. “So then what?” we all asked, feeling deflated and hopeless.

ecoREMOD2 kit of parts diagram

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ecoREMOD2 current conditions (courtesy KeVaugh Harding)

As it followed, the project would be renamed ecoREMOD2 to reflect the changing scope of work, the first week in Jamaica would be used for design, the second for site preparation, the third for foundation work, and the fourth for framing and rough carpentry. The millwork and finish carpentry would be coordinated and completed by FHR after our departure.

In these weeks, the group worked through land-crab infestations, unworkable soil conditions, power outages and the occasional beach excursion to craft a measured site plan and a series of workable construction drawings. Apart from a temporary scarcity of building and site materials, things moved forward. As the team began to pack their suitcases for the trip back home, the site walls had been laid, the foundations poured, and the floor framing cut and set. While not complete, the project’s momentum had been restored.

Sadly, weeks after our departure, the pulse of the project plummeted yet again. By order of the local Parish Council, a stop-work order was issued for 10 Albert Street.

With the majority of the framing completed and the millwork sitting at the FHR shop ready to install, the project would be put on hold for over five months.

At present, Marja is back working with FHR to complete his home. The roofing system has been installed in the new home, and the team is working on floor framing and roofing in the addition.

coble + sparenborg ecoremod2 and FAlmouth field school ecoREMOD2 current conditions (courtesy KeVaugh Harding)

documentation photos and building plan

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hand-drawn roof plan of Falmouth

Kirsten Sparenborg: For four weeks the locus of our activities—drawing, designing, deconstructing, and constructing—in Falmouth was 10 Albert Street. Every day we walked to work at our site about six blocks from our home base at the Baptist Manse, headquarters of Falmouth Heritage Renewal (FHR). We caught glances and occasionally comments as we trudged to work in concrete-stained pants or carrying our large drawing boards.

I frequently took detours with my sketchbook throughout our time there. Trying to be less conspicuous, I enjoyed overhearing household conversations in Jamaican patois, children playing, a variety of music on the radios. The barrier between the household and the street is permeable in places where buildings “breathe,” ventilated rather than air-conditioned. Sometimes, residents approached me to ask what I was doing, and I explained our Field School experience, particularly our partnership with FHR in rebuilding the house on Albert Street. They asked if their houses could be helped, and I explained the mission of FHR and the great work they are doing to preserve historic buildings in Falmouth, a town celebrated for its treasury of Georgian architecture and vernacular board houses built by free blacks in the 1800s. Scholars and preservationists admire this historic town, including the 200+ attendees of the 2012 Vernacular Architecture Forum, organized by Louis Nelson. Even Royal Caribbean Cruise Line recognized Falmouth’s rich heritage, though they saw it as an opportunity to exploit, choosing it as the site for their gated wharf, Historic Falmouth, which opened in 2011.

coble + sparenborg

The goal of this ecoREMOD project was to make one historic board house, built without plumbing, viable by preserving the house (in this case, salvaging and rebuilding, due to extensive termite damage) and adding new kitchen and bath facilities designed to complement and not obscure the board house. Making the historic house livable sustains not only the house, but the town of Falmouth. This is likewise the mission of FHR, “to accurately preserve and restore the historic buildings of Falmouth, Jamaica, while improving the lives of its residents.” Though Falmouth is designated as a historic district, enforcement by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust will not prevent demolition. Resident owners who value Falmouth as an architectural, cultural, and economic resource must choose to adopt an approach of sustainability through preservation. Whenever a resident decides to preserve a historic house and build necessary facilities incrementally, instead of demolishing a historic building altogether and replacing it with a modern concrete house, the architectural heritage of Falmouth is honored, one building at a time.

ecoremod2 and FAlmouth field school

Despite the interests of outsiders, the true stewards of Falmouth’s heritage are its residents.

on site construction photos

the UVa project team included: Stephanie Arbieto, Doug Dickerson, Laura Devine, Mike Goddard, Brandon Moul, John O’Hara, Jessica Underhill, Shiguang Chen, Libby Engel, Matt Jungclaus, Effie Nicholaou, Ali Lauzon, Leah Wener, and Professors Paxton Marshall, Louis Nelson, Nancy Takahashi, and John Quale

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city to suburb two charlottesville Schools CamilLe Behnke, ph.d. student HIstory of art and architecture critic: daniel bluestone Early twentieth century schools, such as Charlottesville’s McGuffey Elementary and Lane High School, were designed as embodiments of civic identity, citizenship, and traditional values. By the post-war period, however, school architecture, like that of Greenbrier Elementary and Charlottesville High School, represented modernity, mass suburbia, and new trends in child psychology. This essay investigates the social and cultural factors behind the siting and design of Charlottesville schools.

How did the perception of the school change in the course of the twentieth century? How did schools relate to their students’ neighborhoods— either by architectural design, community functions, or representations of childhood? What broader twentieth century education and planning theories existed that are reflected in these two local public schools?

LANE HIGH’S CIVIC IDENTITY Throughout the twentieth century, the ideal school site shifted as the school’s position within American culture was reshaped. Early twentieth century schools were substantial, prominent expressions of a school’s new stature as a civic institution. Henry Barnard inspired these architectural ideals in the mid-nineteenth century, writing: The style of the exterior should exhibit good, architectural proportion... It should bear a favorable comparison, in respect to attractiveness, convenience and durability, with other public edifices... Every school-house should be a temple, consecrated in prayer to the physical, intellectual, and moral culture of every child in the community, and be associated in every heart with the earliest and strongest impressions of truth, justice, patriotism, and religion.1

behnke CITY TO SUBURB section and plans showing the context of Lane (top) and Greenbrier (bottom)

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These civic buildings were often in dense areas in the center of town and situated directly on major streets or on axis at the end of the street. Planners such as Clarence Perry argued that schools should be a neighborhood center—both physically central and spiritually central to the neighborhood culture. “The public school…is in a real sense a civic institution. It flies the national flag. It is the one conspicuous governmental edifice that is found in every local community, and because of its importance it deserves a dignified site.”2 Jacob Riis, an early 20th century social reformer, reacting against urban blight such as saloons, prostitution, and crime, asserted that the schoolhouse should be the virtuous heart of a city and “create neighborhood regeneration as well as ethical renovation.”3 Constructed in the 1930s with funding from the Works Progress Administration, Charlottesville’s Lane High School, in its grand position on a hill at the edge of downtown was surely intended to make a spiritual and moral mark on the neighborhood.

In 1940, Lane High School opened on Preston Avenue at the intersection with McIntire Road. As the only high school in Charlottesville for white students, the site needed to be centrally located. The choice was a complicated one due to meager city finances, rising racial tensions and a scarcity of large central lots. In addition to heavy pollution in Schenk’s Branch, a creek that ran through Charlottesville’s impoverished and industrial neighborhoods, the Lane High School site was surrounded to the north, west, and south by what white Charlottesville had deemed African-American slums.

The property included existing African-American homes along Preston Avenue.

Charlottesville resident Rebecca McGinnis recalls: “When Lane High School was built, the blacks (who lived on the site) had to give up their homes. Their opposition didn’t mean anything.”4 The African-American communities were also dotted with heavy industry—a lumber yard, fuel packaging, and a pencil manufacturing company occupied the northern side just across the railroad tracks. Despite its faults, the site was economically feasible; any other lot of this size in the central downtown would have been cost-prohibitive.5 The designers of Lane High School also struggled with how to properly site their building. The previous residences faced southwest along Preston Avenue; however, this would have placed Lane’s facade directly facing Vinegar Hill, a predominantly African-American community.6 During a period of growing racial tensions, the designers decided to rotate Lane High School forty-five degrees, thereby directing its entry axis towards downtown. The rotation also enabled a large plaza in front which underlined its position as a civic monument to public education.

School was seen as a community amenity and a hub of cultural activity. Even before Lane opened, the School Board was in the process of formulating the policy for public use of the high school grounds, including adult education, community assemblies, and political rallies.7 Shortly after it opened, Rabbi Albert Lewis took advantage of Lane’s new auditorium for a “Public Forum,” a venue for community discussion on citizenship and democracy.8 Lane also served as a center for war-time military classes,

behnke CITY TO SUBURB Lane High School (top) and Greenbrier Elementary (bottom)

scrap-drives, and bond campaigns. Lane won prizes for its collection of over 158 tons of scrap and for the sale of over $490,000 in war bonds—a Virginia record.9 After decades of World Wars had decreased faith in society and increased concern about youth and the future, discussions of democratic ideals permeated the community and thus the school—both its activities and its architecture.

Lane High School is clearly an example of a monumental architectural declaration of civic virtue and democracy. Lane’s republican iconography has basic semblances to the Charlottesville Court House—the city’s first major civic institution. The architecture of the courthouse has a similar solid brick mass, two-story columns, triangular pediment, and cupola. While the courthouse represented the justice being served, the high school and its stoic neo-classicism embodied the belief that democracy relied on an educated citizenry and that schools played a vital civic role in the broader society.10 The high school, designed by Pendleton S. Clark, is a prominent central pavilion with substantial flanking wings. There are three pairs of main entry doors atop an imposing procession of stairs. The plaza paves a grand entry bordered by large landscaped lawns. The immediate neighborhood of Lane was only two- and three-story structures; however, Lane dwarfed its neighbors and rose to connect to the important high rise structures near downtown.

Lane High School was replaced by a new high school at the periphery of the city in 1974. One might ask: why is it that only thirty years after the city of Charlottesville spent over half a million dollars building a prestigious high school building would they

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completely abandon it for a new one on the outskirts of town?11 The answer lies, in part, in modernist ideals, childrearing philosophies, and post-war housing markets.

The same phenomenon was occurring to Charlottesville’s elementary schools as downtown McGuffey was traded for new suburban Greenbrier.

GREENBRIER’S SUBURBAN SITE In the 1950s, Charlottesville’s public schools began to move to radial positions on the far edges of town, enveloped by landscape and surrounded by small, planned suburban communities. This movement followed the changing notion of childhood.

The child was no longer seen as a miniature adult, a citizen in training, but was instead thought of as a unique, fragile, and emotionally-charged entity deserving of certain rights such as free play, access to nature, and security. With federal aid, post-World War II suburban developments flourished as baby boomers moved their new families to the large plots on the outskirts of town. The school was experiencing parallels to residential architecture: less people, more space. By the mid-century, the notion of school and education had moved completely away from its position as a civic entity and was expressing a new domestic ideology that saw schools as primarily connected to home. The glass and steel Modernist schools merged with the topography, engaged the landscape, and mimicked the low, rambling ranch homes.

The schools were designed to double as community parks and play centers.

In 1962, Greenbrier Elementary was the first school built following desegregation. It was built in the heart of a garden suburb with which it shares a name. 1960s and 1970s real estate advertisements highlighted the neighborhood’s family and school oriented atmosphere with titles such as “Children Can Walk to School—In Greenbrier” and “Greenbrier Drive—Built For Family Living.”12 The Greenbrier demographic was primarily white, upper-class, home-owners, and the neighborhood experienced “nearly no social ills”.13 The two largest parks in Charlottesville, Pen Park and McIntire Park, bordered the sites of both Greenbrier and Charlottesville High. A third park, Greenbrier Park, connected to the school with a footbridge and walking trails and offered 28 acres of undeveloped area.14 Greenbrier Elementary was perfectly situated for the hands-on learning that was invading the contemporary curriculum. In a 1947 publication entitled How to Choose a School Site, Mark Shibles explains: “A goodly proportion of the activities of a modern school program occur out-of-doors, and for them the school grounds are more important than the building.”15 Greenbrier School was clearly planned with the outdoors in mind, with a large landscaped courtyard, wooded amphitheater, expansive athletic fields, and a nearby stream.

The neighborhood’s communal feel extends to the informal and unpretentious postwar architecture of the school. The proud civic stature of McGuffey and Lane was replaced by a stripped-down, transparent, and emotionally liberating educational environment. Ogata agrees in her essay “Building for Learning in Postwar American Elementary Schools”: “Unlike prewar public school buildings that embodied

ornamentation

U.S. Post Office

Albemarle County Court

Christ Episcopal Church High Street + 1st Street founded 1826

front steps

Charlottesville Y.M.C.A. Main Street + 2nd Street 1909

columns at porch

Library (Historical Society) Jefferson Street + 2nd Street 1921

white trim

Elks Lodge (Juvenille Court)

Charlottesville Y.M.C.A.

steep roof

clear entry

behnke

Library (Historical Society) 1921

Albemarle County Court Charlottesville Y.M.C.A. Jefferson Street + Park Street Main Street + 2nd Street 1909

CITY TO SUBURB

Albemarle County Court Jefferson Street + Park Street

LANE CIVIC CONTEXT

Greenbrier neighborhood homes

vegetated border

low roof

plate-glass windows

front porch

thin posts

brick exterior

white trim

Greenbrier elementary school

GREENBRIER SUBURBIA

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discipline, the postwar elementary school was designed to be friendly.”16 They were modern forms that supported experimental methods of teaching and a “persistently romantic notion of childhood.”17 The Charlottesville-based firm Baker, Heyward, and Llorens Architects were selected to implement these postwar values and strategies at Greenbrier.

Greenbrier’s design differs most significantly from previous school buildings in its height. Greenbrier is unusually compact—in many places it reaches only thirteen feet high. There were several contextual reasons for its height, including accessibility, aesthetics, child scale, ease of expansion, and safety. After decades of wars, bombings, and then the Cold War, fear had crept into the minds of suburban American parents and educators, and despite the optimism of post-war society, single-story schools and home structures calmed nerves and ensured the safety of the children with their simple and quick evacuation routes.

Educators desired schools and classrooms that would provide security and be inviting, promote self-realization and emphasize togetherness, and encourage creativity within conformity. Greenbrier’s low interior ceiling and flexible rooms replicate the interior of a residential space and the design rejects the former monumental spaces in favor of the child’s scale.18 Greenbrier’s abundance of windows stemmed from concerns about children’s health and exposure to nature as studies on the effects of light on children’s learning, productivity, and comfort surfaced such as those conducted by Caudill, Rowlett, and Scott, the architects of Charlottesville High School.19 Greenbrier’s low silhouette has significant plate-glass windows and steel supported cantilevers that accentuate the horizontality and create a transparent, permeable system that allowed interconnectedness with the outdoors.

Growing concern for children’s safety combined with the importance of automobile circulation altered the way Greenbrier interacted with the street. Unlike Lane High School, Greenbrier’s entry is neither in the front nor in the center. It is also not pedestrian-oriented. Instead, cars proceed down a long drive along the south side of the building, secluding the entry from outside traffic and locating it deep within the site.

The school’s entry almost resembles a service entrance, out of view and neglected in style, while the playground becomes the public face—if there even is one.

Something gained, something lost Greenbrier was indeed an idyllic setting for a family home and school. Clifford Clark in American Family Home describes the model suburban neighborhood as a “peaceful refuge where life is more informal … there is plenty of yard room for the children and where they can enjoy a maximum of outdoor living.”20 The suburban landscape was ideal for the cultivation of the family bond; a neighborhood school provided an added depth to the community as a whole by offering a site where parents could play with their children and families could engage with each other. However, a great deal was also lost in this rush to suburbanize. The

behnke CITY TO SUBURB

complexity of society was lost—its racial diversity, its commercial life, and the proximity to work and to the center of government. All of this was left behind when school suburbanized and abandoned the center of the city. We retreated from the idea of promoting citizenship and critical engagement with the world.

1. Henry Barnard, School Architecture. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1970), 41 2. Clarence Perry, Wayne D. Heydecker, E P. Goodrich, Shelby M. Harrison, Thomas Adams, Edward M. Bassett, and Robert H. Whitten. Neighborhood and Community Planning: Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, (New York: 1929), 72 3. William Cutler, III, “Cathedral of Culture: The Schoolhouse in American Educational Thought and Practice since 1820,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 29 No. 1 (Spring 1989), 30 4. Wilma T. Mangione, editor, “Recollections of Rebecca McGinness,” From Porch Swings To Patios: An Oral History Project of Charlottesville Neighborhoods, 1914-1980, (The City of Charlottesville, 1990) 5. Daniel Bluestone, Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2011) 6. Bluestone, Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory 7. A.G. Balz, Letter, School Board Notes, University of Virginia Small Special Collections, September 1940 8. A.G. Balz Letter, School Board Notes 9. Charlottesville Daily Progress 1940s; Association of Retired Teachers. Bicentennial Study of Charlottesville’s Public Education, (Charlottesville, 1976), 21 10. Cutler, Cathedral of Culture, 17 11. Association of Retired Teachers, Bicentennial Study of Charlottesville Public Education, 20 12. Daily Progress, March 1964, May 1974 13. School Board Report, University of Virginia Small Special Collections, 1974 14. School Board Report, 1974; www.charlottesville.org 15. Mark Shibles, How to Choose a School Site, (Cambridge: New England School Development Council, 1947), 1 16. Amy Ogata, “Building for learning in postwar American elementary schools.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (67.4, 2008: 562-591), 569 17. Ogata, “Building for Learning”, 563 18. Ogata, “Building for Learning”, 566 19. Ogata, “Building for Learning”, 566 20. Clifford Clark, The American Family Home, 1800-1960, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 231

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edge adaptations MULTIPLE LINES OF ADAPTATION IN GRADUALLY SHIFTING SYSTEMS chelsea dewitt, MLA 2013 dasha lebedeva, MLA 2013 critic: jorg sieweke Historically, the Mississippi River shifted course freely every 1,000 – 2,000 years, depositing sediment and creating new land at its delta. Since 1927, in response to a catastrophic flood, the Army Corps of Engineers has adopted a policy of rigid control of the river’s morphology and flows. A system of levees, spillways, dredged channels, and control structures has protected developed areas from floods and provided navigable routes for shipping operations. Consequently, sediment traveling down the river shoots out to the Gulf of Mexico instead of accumulating in the marshes where it’s most needed. This land loss, coupled with global climate change and the resulting rise in sea level, is predicted to cause 3,800 – 5,200 square miles of wetland loss by the year 2100. In addition to the essential ecological functions that will be impacted, New Orleans, one of the most vibrant cities on the Gulf Coast, will be left exposed to storm surges and hurricanes.

Control structures, such as the one at Old River that currently ensures 70% of water flow is directed to the Mississippi and 30% to the Atchafalaya, cannot be relied upon indefinitely. We predict that the Mississippi’s shift to the Atchafalaya basin, while potentially catastrophic for cities like New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is inevitable within the next century.

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edge adaptations

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The proposal assumes that by the year 2010, with global supplies of oil decreasing, predominant modes of transportation will begin to shift to walking, biking and public transit. With the shift of the river’s flow, dredging operations in the channel will become less economically feasible, resulting in the shrinking and eventual abandonment of the port facilities. This newly available high ground on the natural levee will allow the population to become concentrated in dense clusters on the city’s edge.

2020

2020

2040 2100

2100 The coastal and city edges provide two lines of defense against the rising sea level, coastal erosion and shifting river flow illustrated in these sequential maps.

As the first line of defense, our strategy for the coastal edge includes the adaptation of coastal ecosystems to a more saline, warmer environment by planting mangroves.

Currently, the coastal wetlands are primarily dominated by cordgrass marshes, which give way to other brackish and freshwater species further inland. Patches of mangrove can be seen on the barrier islands and are spreading and replacing the cordgrass in some areas.

dewitt + lebedeva edge adaptations

This project proposes the proactive approach of allowing a gradual shift of the Mississippi river to the Atchafalaya basin at 1% per year over 40 years, a strategy set forth in the EPA’s 1987 report, “Long-Term Plan of Action for Saving Louisiana’s Wetlands.” This would gradually reverse the ratio set at the Old River Control Structure from 30% flow into the Atchafalaya and 70% flow into the Mississippi to 70% into the Atchafalaya and 30% into the Mississippi.

The city edge, a natural levee, is the second line of defense against rising sea level and coastal erosion. By 2010, most buildings will be clustered in areas of the city that have an elevation above sea level and those that remain in low-lying areas will be adapted to periodic floods. We propose for storm water to be collected in hydric parks and channels and to be pumped out to the river channel, in addition to the current system of pumping to Lake Pontchartrain.

With warmer global temperatures and changing salinity in the delta, mangroves, an adaptive plant community, may begin to replace the formerly fresh and brackish wetlands. Like cordgrass, which is currently the dominant wetland species, mangroves provide nursery habitat for fish and mollusks, protect from storm surges, help to stabilize soil, and accrete sediment.

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existing coastal edge

coastal edge, 2050 We imagine that small coastal communities are able to continue historic inhabitation patterns by adapting housing typologies to a watery, dynamic environment. These fishing communities are clustered behind the protection of barrier islands and natural levees, with boating as the primary mode of transportation. The mangroves provide a new habitat to many species of fish and birds, which aid in sustaining small commercial fishing operations in the area. This new edge is also used as a launching point for recreation and scientific excursions.

dewitt + lebedeva edge adaptations existing city edge

city edge, 2050

Currently, the port facilities, located on a box levee over the water’s edge, are inaccessible to the public. Our proposal suggests that the box levee will be dismantled, leaving some pilings as a substrate for oysters and other aquatic organisms. The natural levee that remains is converted into a faceted surface that channels stormwater and creates pools with a gradient of salinities, a microcosm of the current delta ecosystem.

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BURMA [RE]FRAMED AMADEO BENNETTA, m.arch 2011 DANIEL LaROSSA, M.ARCH 2011 WINNER, SCHOOL 4 BURMA COMPETITION Burma [Re]Framed proposes a fluid design process through which architects can proactively, and pragmatically, address inherently localized issues while incorporating a global perspective.

Burma [Re]Framed began as a competition entry for a modular, deployable school. The competition, run by the British non-profit Building Trust International, called for design solutions responding to the lack of property ownership rights for Burmese refugees living in Thailand. For us, the truly international reach of the project also raised the significant question of how architects can create lasting, positive projects for a culture and context 8,000 miles distant.

Burma [Re]Framed serves as our initial response to this issue. The project posits that architecture can be both progressive in its application and sensitive to its setting. Rather than revolutionizing refugee housing or reductively designing in a foreign vernacular, we are attempting to marry international norms of factory fabrication with localized construction and

bennetta + larossa BURMA [RE]FRAMED

material systems familiar to the Burmese population. This design paradigm has forced us to reconsider the very nature of artifact. By creating and visualizing not only physical spaces, but systems, the already complicated relationship between designer, non-profit, contractor, and client has been further blurred. Coupled with the physical separation between all parties, the project is currently a series of digital drawings, conversations, and explorations with the common goal of empowering a once isolated community. While Burma [Re]Framed is by no measure a solution to the endemic problems facing this group, we believe it can serve as a model for not only a more fluid design process, but also a better design product.

[RE]SETTLE Derived from a critical examination of the political, geographic, and cultural factors impacting this transient community, Burma [Re]Framed provides a modular, structural aluminum assembly system (applicable worldwide) married to a panel system, locally crafted in the language of the inhabiting culture. At Kwe Ka Bung, this adaptation of bamboo screens creates both an external weather barrier and internal room divider.

By reconsidering the restrictions of land ownership into an opportunity for flexible community space, Burma [Re]Framed acts as a local/global bridge, providing at-risk communities with a space around which the population can learn, grow, and thrive.

exterior bamboo screens

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[RE]ASSEMBLE Burma [Re]Framed utilizes an adaptable framework of globally sourced structural aluminum and heavy-duty, waterproof fabric in conjunction with locally crafted, modular, bamboo panels. By creating entirely flatpacked components, Burma [Re]Framed can be rapidly reassembled from a flatbed truck into a courtyard campus, a single building, or even as independent, multi-use units deployable throughout a refugee settlement. Additionally, the daily operability of the fabric enclosures can be used to capture prevailing winds, shelter from seasonal rains and modulate changing solar conditions.

bennetta + larossa BURMA [RE]FRAMED [re]assemble axonometric diagram

TRANSPORT Mitsubishi Fuso

UNLOAD 7m x 10m assembly area

FRAME piers and aluminum

ASSEMBLE braces and deck

ENCLOSE fabric and panel

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[RE]CONFIGURE Burma [Re]Framed offers flexibility not just at the site scale, but within individual bays in order to provide a range of community services. Specifically, 1 meter x 2 meter bamboo panels can be bolted to the frame utilizing a wing-nut mechanical fastener.

The manageable size and weight of these panels allows for rapid reconfiguration of classroom spaces. Through the simple operation of adding or subtracting panels, two or more classrooms can be reconfigured, providing the physical fabric for functions critical to maintaining community ties—from holidays, to celebrations, to elections.

bennetta + larossa BURMA [RE]FRAMED courtyard and classroom section

scaling diagram

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[RE]GROUP In conclusion, Burma [Re]Framed seeks to address not only the pragmatic requirements of the school, but also the significant challenges facing refugee populations forced from not only their homelands, but also their communities. As such, we believe that providing a physical place to regroup and to reclaim community bonds is essential. By intelligently harnessing the potential of globalized trade systems (frame and fabric) with locally sourced materials and resources (crafted panels), we believe that Burma [Re]Framed will empower Burmese refugees of all ages. The manual adaptability of the frames, panels and fabric creates a range of spaces encompassing youth education, vocational training, sustainable agriculture, arts and culture. This adaptable building system reframes the continuing vitality of a displaced culture at a personal and community level.

adult education and reception

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Time, Materiality, and the Individual A conversation with Rafael Moneo 2012 Thomas Jefferson Medalist in Architecture Spanish architect Rafael Moneo was selected by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the University of Virginia as the 2012 Thomas Jefferson Medalist in Architecture. Widely known for his written and built work, Moneo has consistently advocated against adherence to an architectural “style” in favor of a broader discourse shaped by the individual architect’s intelligence, reading of the particularities of the site, and the materials with which one should build. He sees all architecture as highly embedded in the world, within a political and economic system, and while it is not strictly determined by these decisions, he sees architecture as a deliberate choice of selection on the part of the architect.

This sort of empowerment on the part of the architect—a call to be relevant and involved in the social and political issues of the day—is part of what makes Moneo’s own work so powerful. While his lecture discussed in depth a number of Moneo’s own significant contributions to the practice, students and faculty sat down with him to discuss a broader range of topics and issues, from how to teach architecture and design to the role of “style” and the fragmentation of contemporary architectural discourse.

Iñaki Alday: I would like to examine the past thirty years of contemporary architecture in Spain. During the 30 years of war between 1920 and 1950, architects knew what to do and did it without hesitation. In Spain, I have the perception that the thirty-year crisis of war left us without a sense of powerful heroes. The resistance in Spain was always fighting. I am beginning to see a parallel between what was happening in Spain in the 1950s and the optimistic mentality of decades of architecture in Spain and in contemporary discourse in general.

WITH IÑaki Alday, CHair of Department of architecture; Cammy Brothers, Associate ProFessor of architectural history; Robin Dripps, Professor of Architecture; ShiqIAO li, WEedon Professor; yi li, b.arch 2012; and David gies, Commonwealth professor of spanish

In a way, many things changed in the last thirty to forty years. When I was in my 20s, the fantasy of a utopian transformation of the world could still be seen as the promise, and it was a moment of connection between architecture and the political cause.

Ideologies gave a foundation and provided content to architecture. It would be difficult to say that this happens now. There is a lack of the common utopia, or some idea that society shares a common social project. Instead, our practice has turned toward diversity. Today, architecture is driven by isolated theory. You wouldn’t be able to make chapters within the latest architecture books by saying “I can make this approach” or “use this school.” Instead, you need to get specific about architects when you talk about contemporary architecture. You must mention Koolhaas or Herzog and De Meuron or Zaha Hadid or Sejima. You could say that some kind of school developed around technocratic architecture like Norman Foster or Renzo Piano, but they don’t have the daring glamour of the architectural image that you are looking for. If you are looking for that glamour, you will find instead this shattered collection of names.

moneo time, materiality, and the individual

Rafael Moneo: I wonder if it makes sense to go back to the Spanish situation for talking about how we approach architecture everywhere in the world today, since 1950s Spain was under special circumstances. Our cities were hit very hard, and it can be said that it broke down the connection with the idea of modernity. In Spain in the 1950s, there was an attempt to regain what was seen as the “orthodoxy,” or to get back to the roots of modernity. They believed that this still represented a way to transform or to change our society. Today’s circumstances have nothing to do with that. When something happens, nowadays, we don’t know the actual truth. In a way, modernism is dead in Europe. We should not entertain the discussion of whether modernity was understood in the same way globally as in Europe, but rather understand, generically, that modernity wavered between two powers, and ultimately stood behind the “orthodoxy.”

So, I wouldn’t draw a parallel between what happens now and how it was in the 1950s. Talking about the particular situation in Spain, it happens that new political life came together with many public works to be built. Many architects between the 1940s and 1970s had the fortune of making works and cresting cultural waves. They had the opportunity of displaying a lot of different alternatives to architecture that makes Spanish architecture very attractive to foreigners, even today.

Robin Dripps: One of the things that we read in your book [Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects] is that you took on the challenge of writing about your colleagues, critically. When you wrote about Venturi, etc., that was actually an amazingly risky intervention because you took them on and found something good in every work, and therefore could make a synthetic argument.

It wasn’t explicit there, but I can see in the way that you are thinking that there is a willingness to look at many diverse things and imagine that there is something in common there, instead of seeing them all as different. Is that what we are seeing now?

RM: I think that I should come back by underlining the fact that architecture is in

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the hands of individuals now, and that those individuals don’t have the authority to become heads of something that can be associated with a school or a more comprehensive general movement.

Take a figure like Venturi, to choose an American architect. Venturi’s incisive perspective has helped architects to pursue complexity and to resist homogeneity.

I think that the way he looked at architecture and presented himself as a critic able to change how a building ought to be seen was tremendously useful and valuable.

And yet, we could say that Venturi did not follow the agenda that he pointed out in Complexity and Contradiction, and moved instead in a divergent way, and then was caught in his attempt to be polemical by his colleagues. Or we could say, like some of Venturi’s colleagues, that Venturi didn’t have the strength or the capacity for developing a style, especially compared to the architects in the ‘30s, who thought about material like Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier stated that “from new materials like concrete, we will be able to find style.” The complexity of Venturi was against the latter simplification of things, which I like. At the end, though, Venturi cannot be studied by himself.

Consider someone like Rem Koolhaas. He has taught us so When I was in my 20s, the fantasy of many things and had followers, and may be considered to a utopian transformation of the world be tracing something like a could still be seen as the promise, and style. He often has students who prefer to act by following it was a moment of connection between the Koolhaas diagrammatic architecture and the political cause. approach of dismembering the program of a building.

But it doesn’t give a body of architecture a sense of stylistic continuity. Something that has been so valuable as the notion of style is no longer powerful for describing architectural history.

That is a change in the case of architecture. Architecture schools today attempt to describe ways of designing how to design. In a way, paradoxically, we are enjoying much more sophisticated materials and more sophisticated means of affording construction. The new means of construction has much more to do with a new means of representation and has driven architecture far more than it ought to do.

Even the notion of continuity that normally has been used by art historians and critics has become complicated. For example, we are able to look at how the Renaissance evolved and ended in the Baroque, and we are able to follow that going into the Rococo. Today, it is difficult to trace the contribution of Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas.

There is a connection, but we don’t have the formal vocabulary or formal repertoire to interpret the work of Koolhaas. There is an inability to establish what used to be the threads for making a narrative of architectural history.

RM: With regard to the Gehry building, I would not say that the titanium cladding is the difference. Rather I would talk about what the building is, and how the building is constructed. The building starts, as often happens, from a rather conventional idea of what a building is. In this case, Gehry starts with the auditorium itself—which works in the most normal or straightforward way. He wraps this space with a less conventional titanium skin, with an energy that races from itself. The broken volumes in the latest Gehry building are more concerned with rapid tranformative schemes.

The end, however, is much more conventional, except for the curtain wall finishing and the way it is constructed. In the case of the school, the architects have a plastic idea of what they are looking for, and they know how to create formal fragmentation, or to put blocks occupying space in the manner of an early abstract painter like Kandinsky.

moneo time, materiality, and the individual

Shiquao Li: I passed by Los Angeles and went to a street called North Grand Avenue.

I saw three buildings: one of them is yours, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels; next to yours is the school by Wolf Prix; and then the Walt Disney concert hall. I was astounded by this in two ways: first, I saw a beautiful space in your building that disappears until you get to the lobby of Disney Hall; second, I noticed the thickness of materials for your external wall—how wide concrete poured in the cathedral moves to the nominal thickness of a curtain wall, and then to a thin stainless panel. Can you comment on that situation? Does this panel speak of the contemporary condition?

If you look at my building, it has a total edge approach that makes it quite different in a way, while still trying to be respectful of the relationship between building and city, and dealing with the site. My building is dealing with sacred space, with space for people to believe. I am plugging into a tradition. These spaces could provide resonances with the traditions of the church and church-goers, but are much more hybrid. You can understand the design in relation to typology. For example, the axes of the Cathedral invert the traditional relationship between chapel and nave. Churches like the Gothic and Byzantine have verticality and a sense of light, and truth embedded in materials.

I tried to build a building that contains truth in the concrete, worked out in a different way than it often is in the United States, but in a way that could be related to the role that stone has played in Christian religious architecture.

Cammy Brothers: One of the things that strikes me about your position and your architecture is your relationship to architecture and time. You have written about this.

You are interested in architecture that aspires to last and see this as not common in the architectural culture today. There is a book by Marvin Trachtenberg, a medievalist, as you know, and in this book, he takes up this problem that takes a point of critique against contemporary architectural culture because he sees it as not interested in lasting, and he links it, similarly with you, to the idea of authorship, the idea that the architect wants to fix the building against change. Could you comment on this?

RM: I don’t have an answer, but I can provide some ideas. To begin, time is a slippery term in both philosophy and science. This is true whether you’re reading Deleuze or

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scientific texts since the 1930s and 1940s. But let’s keep time in the more mundane way to think about it.

I realize that today, we would like everything to be ephemeral. Similarly, even in today’s culture of image, we are much less keen to value images. Take, for example, analytical or historical painters, trying to capture a moment in time. In the end, they are fixing an image, the way we see, the way we perceive something in a way that is worthless to attempt today. If you draw a parallel between art history and architecture, you are able to say that this is what we would like to have in architecture. Architecture has this sense of an ephemeral condition that at the end captures exlusively this moment in which the mind of the architect has thought about architecture today, and in this sense, everything is finished. I like architecture because it is something that has the ability to disappear, to provide the chance for people to come, to give another opinion.

Coming back to this issue of time: I could have taken Aldo Rossi instead of taking Venturi, and see how Aldo Rossi disappeared, aesthetically speaking, but who left me with a hint about connecting theory and practice. At the end, though, you ought to admit that a built work isn’t so much this individual statement and is just a collective historical statement of what a city is. Therefore, I’d like better to think that the idea of lasting is not for a building to be labeled as a monument or a historical piece to be preserved, as much as that in its own nature, a building ought to admit that it is going to last. Venturi in 1965, when he was writing Complexity and Contradiction, reacted to or addressed crucial issues of the moment. But the construction of a building could last 7, 8, 10 years.

This brings me to believe that you can’t be so in love with the moment in which you are designing that you should fail to consider architecture in a set of coordinates that keeps in mind both the moment that acts to provide a cultural answer, and something about the building that exceeds or goes further away from the moment itself.

David Gies: You’ve mentioned all these people—Venturi, Koolhaas, Hadid, Rossi—but you’ve never mentioned Calatrava.

RM: I wouldn’t mention Calatrava. I brought Calatrava to the GSD in 1986 for a lecture, and he was in those days a very intelligent and decently talented architect. The way he approached structure was extremely inspiring, I must say. Since then, I think that his projects have taken on this repeating motif ad nauseam. People say that the true description of architecture occurs in the gothic cathedral, but Calatrava has overexploited his notion of the gothic and repeated form, losing the inspiration and novelty he once had. There are some works that are better than others, and the better ones are usually without program, where they might just be containers for a market or that might be assimilated into other needs. You do have to recognize that Calatrava’s work has aspects that are good, but that is mostly what has continued forward from his work in the 1980s.

Yi Li: I have a question about learning architecture, especially for us students that are graduating. For most of us undergraduates facing graduation, we have two choices,

I would say that to be a good educated person in architecture, you need to be able to enjoy what all architecture has done throughout history. Therefore, I wouldn’t say that every student should take a class on, for example, the theory of proportion. And yet, for someone who wants to enlarge what has been his or her education, to know something about proportion wouldn’t fall out of this education. Probably these things are changing between your age and mine. I think, though, that to be close to somebody who you think knows something about architecture is also very useful. To have the sensation and enjoyment of the proximity of a master, somebody who you would learn from.

moneo

RM: I wouldn’t dare to say how people learn. 40-50 years ago it was easier to establish an architectural curriculum. Many things were expected of an architect, and we would try to give students everything that they needed to achieve these expectations.

time, materiality, and the individual

we can either go into the practice and enter the workforce, or go back to school. In your past work you spent two years in Rome, that is, learning from a place. So I was just curious, how do you go about learning from work, from school, and from a place?

How does that contribute to your view on architecture?

Also, in my day, travel was useful. Today, travel is so much easier. It is so easy to get a ticket to travel, but people don’t travel anymore to see buildings. If I asked you about Rem Koolhaas, how many of you have gone to see his library in Seattle? A few—but no more. All of us believe that we know perfectly about these buildings, but we don’t. Travel has always been , not just since the 18th century, an important way.

We don’t try to think about how Gothic arches and naves work, without seeing them.

I wouldn’t want to say authoritatively or exactly [how learning happens], but to put together pleasure and knowledge, that would be the recipe.

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ON CRAFT JUSTIN HERSHBERGER, M.ARCH 2011 Craftsmanship is a process. It does not come easily—it must be sought.

Obstacles and failures inevitably dot the journey, but the rewards are worth the hardship. As the son of a cabinetmaker, I came to value making at an early age. Working with my hands was encouraged and celebrated; I was not just told that it was better to make it yourself than to buy it from another, I was shown. Along with an emphasis on craft and making came a deep respect for the craftsman. The maker was not an abstract entity, he or she was someone to work with and learn from, which is an idea that I carry with me today. In developing my own skill set, I was often disappointed by the results; however, the desire for a more precise, more intentional outcome pushed me to try again. These are lessons I learned from my father and from his father, and they are the lessons I seek in others’ work.

Design does not always involve carpentry, furniture making, or other manual skills that are often equated with craftsmanship. Does that mean a designer who does not work with his/her hands cannot be a craftsman?

Perhaps the best definition of the craftsman comes from Richard Sennett, who begins his book The Craftsman by describing three professionals: a carpenter working intently on a piece of marquetry, a lab technician pondering where an experiment went wrong, and an obsessive conductor working late into the night with his orchestra. The conclusion Sennett draws is that “the carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake.” Likewise, the designer can, and should, strive for craftsmanship.

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hershberger on craft

As designers, we cannot fully grasp every trade or process, but we can engage and collaborate with the craftsman, tradesman, or builder as we create our own work.

Intention, craft, and iteration are three tools for imbuing my own work with beauty and meaning. These tools help me, as designer and sometimes maker, to understand my own work better. Because of the increased understanding of my own process, analyzing the work becomes clearer and more deliberate. Because of this self reflection (and sometimes external review or critique), I am able to learn and engage the work more fully than I would be able without the aid of intention, craft, and iteration.

A designer’s intentions are imbedded in his or her design process. A quick, focused sketch can have as powerful an impact on a project as a highly articulated final model. A designer must consider the intentions behind each type of document. The most provocative and useful work comes when the designer knows how to convey those intentions through his or her work. My goal is that the documents I make— sketches, drawings, models, mockups, etc.—convey an intention about my work and design philosophy in general. I value craft and beauty in my work because I hope that intention will be communicated to others involved with the work, either as critics, collaborators, or builders. I believe that making reveals one’s intentions, I am intentional about making.

I am not concerned with prescribing the tools that are used to create well crafted work. The choice to use specific tools or methods is a highly subjective choice, as subjective as which material or construction type to use. I do, however, believe that it is important to know the limits and possibilities of tools to utilize their full capacity.

These parameters greatly influence the choice of tool or method and, therefore, can shape how one works. The exploration and process of making is far more important

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to me that the use of a specific tool, method, or form. Making can be digital, physical, two-dimensional, three-dimensional, small scale, large scale, full scale, etc. Craft is in the hands of the designer or maker, not the tool or method.

Iteration is crucial in my design process. The right solution is rarely the first solution.

If it is, the only way to prove it is to juxtapose it with other ideas. I make decisions through an analysis of how well the design responds to a given set of ideas and issues, which can be quite broad—site, contextual, cultural, environmental, financial, client desires, etc. Clear articulation of the design criteria establishes the intentions for a project by which a designer can then analyze each iteration. The clarity of one’s intentions will have a significant impact on the ability to study and glean ideas from each iteration. My ability to study and glean ideas from each iteration is only limited by my ability to clearly articulate my intentions for the specific model, sketch, or drawing, and more generally, for the project or task.

A craftsman is not defined by the type of work he or she does. Likewise, employing craft does not predetermine the aesthetics or character of the work. Material and process do not define the craftsman—intention and dedication do. Craftsmanship will reveal a deep connection to one’s work, a connection that is lacking in the minds and actions of too many. Shortly after describing ways in which working with craftsmanship inevitably makes life harder for his carpenter, lab technician, and conductor, Sennett

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declares, “it’s certainly possible to get by in life without dedication.” We all know that because we have all seen many examples—it is the easier condition to observe. “The craftsman,” he continues, “represents the special human condition of being engaged” (emphasis in original). Craftsmanship is a challenging, risky, yet beautiful, fulfilling process. Engage that process.

References: Crawford, Matthew B. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. New York: The Penguin Press, 2009.

Pye, David. The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Rev. ed. London: Herbert Press, 1995.

Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

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Terra nuova building a new venetian ground julia price, MLA 2011 erin root, m.arch + mla 2012 kurt marsh, m.arch + mla 2012 2011 asla Honor award

CRITIC: jorg sieweke

The city of Venice emerged incrementally from its lagoon habitat as the result of technological innovations that allowed people to build solid ground from marshy substrate. The relationship of urban occupation to the ephemeral morphology of the lagoon can be traced through the city’s history as a sequence of adaptations aimed at preserving a unique symbiosis. Starting in the 14th century, siltation from the many rivers that emptied into the lagoon threatened to shift the morphology toward that of a delta, and connect Venice to the mainland. This trend was fought by an impressive campaign of river diversions that spanned into the 17th century. Now, without the rivers adding sediment to the lagoon and with the increasing threat of storm surge and sea level rise, Venice is instead fighting to keep the lagoon from slowly becoming part of the Adriatic.

Campaigns to fight the increasing occurrence of flood, or acqua alta, have focused on centralized intervention—massive flood barriers (the MOSE project)—at each of the lagoon’s three mouths to combat the inevitable.

This heavy-handed approach is akin to the major river diversions that first reversed the morphological trend. It fails to recognize the rich Venetian history of dispersed smaller-scale adaptations and management

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terra nuova

price, root, marsh

needle lace punto en ariz (in the air) begin with one point and move transversely

vellum, paper or linen ground

begins with a larger framework, voids are filled using a seperate logic bobbine lace

with multiple bobbins, knot around the field of needles.

left: Venetian lace making history; from the 16th to the 18th centuries, lace was an essential part of Venice’s culture and economy. The two types of lace each of a unique logic that enables variation in density of thread, thereby differentiation of topography. right: proposed ground building “Lace�: Learning from the logic of lace making, this new geotextile consists of both perforated and woven elements, transforming it from a two-dimensional mat to a three-dimensional structure that can be adapted to the specific site condition and build up layers of sediment over time.

practices that governed the daily existence of Venice and her lagoon: floating mills that could be moved to take advantage of shifting wind and tidal patterns, managing wetlands and salt marshes for continued production of salt and maintaining a diversity of marine and avian species, emerging technologies for supporting and building ground, and complex networks of circulation. This proposal builds on this tradition of understanding and adapting and encourages the re-imagining of Venice as a more connected place where social and environmental health are seen as inextricable parts of a comprehensive lagoon ecosystem.

Beginning in the 1980s, it has increasingly been recognized that contemporary development, boat traffic, and fishing has so severely damaged the biodiversity and morphology of the lagoon that deleterious effects are being observed in the structural stability of the city, the cleanliness of the water, and levels of flooding. To repair some of this harm and supplement the storm surge protection of the MOSE, a campaign has been established to restore and construct new salt marshes and mudflats in the most eroded and exposed parts of the lagoon. Current construction practices use sediment dredged from transportation channels to rebuild the salt marshes that have been

price, root, marsh TERRA NUOVA

destroyed due to erosion or inundation. Perimeters of tubular gravel-filled sacks are laid out in forms that attempt to mimic natural morphologies. Dredge material is then pumped in from various places around the lagoon without concern for the particular sedimentary needs of the sites. It is pumped in quickly and without adequate regard for attaining the elevations or soil stratification needed for healthy marsh formations.

This practice results in monolithic structures that are often too high to allow tidal pools and creeks to form. They function more like islands than healthy wetlands. The gabion edges of these formations, while effective in preventing erosion control, are too rigid to allow for any topographic variation along the perimeters and restrict the necessary exchanges of sediment and nutrients along the wetland edge.

In addition to these operational issues, there also exists a physical and intellectual isolation between the people of Venice and ecological processes and issues that surround them. In the past, the city was populated by residents with an inherent connection to the larger lagoon and an understanding of the particular context of this amphibious urbanism. Now, however, the city is filled to capacity with tourists from all over the world who have little exposure to the lagoon or ability to have a positive

above: proposed lagoon park landscape

below: proposed floating wetland waterscape

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contribution to its future. If a bodily experience of the lagoon’s ecology is made an integral part of the city of Venice, then perhaps the city can become more ecologically and socially resilient over the long-term through this more accurate and diverse understanding of the city by both tourists and residents.

Terra Nuova addresses these shortcomings through the development of an aquatic geotextile that could be employed throughout the lagoon as part of a new groundbuilding regime of incremental sediment accretion and supplementation. The geotextile uses patterns of perforations that open and expand like gills to capture and hold sediment. This is applied in layers and pulled and contorted into gradient conditions by a system of flexible woven strips that provides further variations in density and texture along the surface. The layered combination of these two systems creates a surface that gradually thickens and thins in section and opens and closes in plan. This would encourage a slow and varied buildup of ground and the shifting emergence of a diversity of lagoon morphologies and interdependent ecosystems.

These wetland-forming operations would be especially important in areas around the lagoon where ecological health has deteriorated and where heavy boat traffic and tidal influx has led to problems with erosion of lagoon’s floor and its many edges.

To protect against this erosion, the gradient between channel and accreting ground would be thickened. The inner edge of the varying geotextile would be porous to allow for a healthy exchange of water and minerals while an outer edge of protection would

price, root, marsh TERRA NUOVA Proposed tidal stairs: new stairs react to tidal flux by extending and retracting vertically, allowing human access to the lagoon and floating wetlands during all times of day. LED lights brigten as the tide rises.

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be created out of a network of floating treatment wetland islands. These islands are made of a matrix of recycled plastic curls that supports plant growth and provides habitat for marine invertebrates. The network floats in response to tidal flux and storm surge and provides buffering from harmful boat wakes and waves. The connected network of wetland pads would be anchored in places with a branching web that would thicken the assembly in section to better protect the ground from wave action and aid the dangling roots of the plants in creating habitat for juvenile fish and other lagoon species. The pattern that the floating walkway/wetland network takes is a response to curving paths identified as desired connections between the main islands of Venice to the network of smaller islands that surrounds the city, or areas in need of protection from coastal erosion.

In places, the network of territories, called a ‘voronoi pattern’ creates a walkway that snakes through the floating network and allows residents and visitors in Venice to occupy this emerging world of ecological activity. The walkway would be accessed through a new typology of stairs that would attach at key places along the hard floating wetland construction and walkway geometry

This new multifunctional operation of ground building and floating networks would bring the richness of the lagoon’s ecology into closer proximity with the city of Venice and give it a more evocative and accessible presence within the lagoon. By diversifying and protecting the ecological activity within the lagoon, and allowing people to experience these processes, the project aims to change the perception of Venice from that of a postcard image of narrow alleys and gondola-filled canals to a fantastic city in which the urban fabric, history, and practices are inextricably connected to the processes that constitute this unique lagoon environment.

price, root, marsh TERRA NUOVA

vertical stone edges of the city and other lagoon islands. These large terracing stairs would retract and extend in the z-axis as an evocative new register of tidal flux that allows for constant access to the water. The new pathway would also open new social spaces for the city. It would provide new publicly accessible waterfronts in emerging residential zones and allow pedestrian access to some of the city’s mysterious and beautiful network of peripheral islands that are currently marginalized and underused.

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clark house LOCAL AND REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE A CONVERSATION WITH WG CLARK PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE Allison Murphy: Could you tell me a little about how you interpret region and place in your work? It seems to me that you want to find ways to emulate regional design without replicating it. Would that be an accurate understanding of your work?

W.G. Clark: I often refer to barns and pigsties and silos and things because I am fascinated by the fact that people love them. It’s as though we can sense their goodness, as opposed to strip malls or theme parks, which we all seem to abhor because we sense their corruption or madness or lack of belonging. That is the only reference I make to those things. I love to say, “I’m not a regional architect. I’m a local architect,” which most people would find insulting. Yet I mean it in the sense that I don’t care about the region. It’s too big! How am I going to represent a region? I want to pay particularly close attention to a place where I am, meaning what I can see from there.

AM: So the site specifically?

WGC: Yes, the site specifically. And that’s what I tend to do, because my work is modern. It’s not about recalling verandas and it’s not about moss hanging from trees. It is modern. It is sharp. It is critical. It is rigorous. And it is tough.

with ALLISON MURPHY, BA ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 2012

clark + murphy clark house courtesy Kelly Hitzing

AM: Let’s talk about your house, Clark House. How or why did you pick this site? What was your design process? Are there any specific aspects of this site you decided to incorporate into the building?

WGC: There are very few vacant lots in Charlottesville and a lot of them are either owned by very wealthy people or they are on difficult sites. I always appreciated this site. I have always admired the hillside because of its roughness, with trees fallen down, like it is wilderness. And because it is in town, not in a county or a subdivision, I pretend that this house is just a little piece of a wall around the city of Charlottesville.

I tried to make it vertical and prismatic so that it countered the rough texture of the woods; that’s why this is so perfect and slick.

AM: I notice in some of your buildings you have a central fireplace and chimney. What is the origin of that?

WGC: Now, there is only one division in my whole house; it is a fireplace. My grandfather built a cabin when I was a little tiny boy and it only had one division. It had a bunk room over here, then the fireplace, and the kitchen behind it. That’s this house.

AM: You mentioned that you worked with Venturi. How did that influence what you do now?

WGC: I learned something important. I went to Philadelphia from here because Philadelphia in 1965 was red hot. It was red hot in terms of the social movements; it was red hot in terms of architecture. Penn was red hot. I got a call from Robert

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clark + murphy clark house

Venturi one evening, and he said, “I hear you can draw. We’re doing a competition, the Yale Mathematics Building. Can you come and help us?” I did not particularly wish to emulate Venturi’s work, but I admired the rigor with which he pursued his work and the intelligence of it. So I learned a huge lesson, and I keep trying to pass it on: Don’t go looking for somebody you want to be like, go looking for somebody you admire, whether they are doing work you want to do or not. What you need is to get a rigorous foundation in how to run a first-class office. So that is what he gave me.

AM: And then, eventually, you went to South Carolina.

WGC: Yes, I did. People were just heading to the compass points—Vermont, Colorado, every direction. I started noticing that nobody was heading to the South. Naïvely I said “I can’t understand that. I’m from the South. I enjoy working with people from the South.” Charleston blew my mind because of its beauty. Again naïvely, I said, “If they did this once, they can do it again. Nobody here is trying. I’m going to make them try.”

So I went South and settled into what was the longest row to hoe that I could ever have imagined, because they [Southerners] hated everything modern, despised it. I managed to find five or six smart people there who appreciated what I was trying to do, who hired me to do Middleton Inn, Croffead House, Reid House. We won some competitions, and so I made it through there without being destroyed. But it wasn’t for lack of their trying. It was not a smart thing to do. I should have gone somewhere where modern work was appreciated and revered rather than someplace it was hated.

AM: What is your relationship with the South like today?

WGC: I am not an architect of the South. Virginia almost was a Northern state during the war—very close. I’m not interested in being of the South. If somebody said, “What are you?” I would say “I’m an architect.” I would never say I’m an architect of the South, though my buildings are predominantly built in the South. In fact, if I look hard enough I’ll probably figure out that they are all built in the South. But this has nothing to do with the South; it’s just where I was.

Maybe in my heart, I feel something for the region since I grew up here. I mean, I love Albemarle County and think it’s probably the most beautiful place in the world, as beautiful as Tuscany. But it’s not of the South.

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Sand Engines KRISTINA HILL ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE with KATE HAYES, MLA 2013 DASHA LEBEDEVA, MLA 2013

Dasha Lebedeva proposed a sand engine that erodes to reveal a network of structures and concrete rubble that become habitat for oysters and other shellfish.

hill, hayes, lebedeva Sand EngineS

The idea of a design that incorporates and reveals fluxes in the environment has become a kind of fascination for landscape architects and urban designers. Most proposed projects that have sought to engage processes have revealed either the cleansing of polluted water or plant growth and successional trends. Coastal processes offer an entirely different scale of phenomena, however, and new landscape-scale designs have enormous potential to help coastal cities adapt to climate change. They can also become a spectacular aesthetic experience, which in its own way may help us adapt by changing our expectations.

Sandy coasts are constantly in flux. An armature of active sand flows serves as a storm barrier on the East Coast, literally like a muscular arm flexing to ward off blows. Along Virginia’s Atlantic shoreline about 200,000 cubic yards of sand move north every year as a result of waves churning the beach, which are in turn driven by winds. Winter storms and hurricanes also move enormous amounts of sand, changing the profile of the beach and the map of the coast. The dynamics of sand movement will change as the relative sea level continues to rise at a faster and faster rate; more sand will be set in motion and removed from today’s beaches. Geologists believe that much of this sand was put into play initially by glacial deposits. Without the erosive effects of glaciers adding sand to the system, sandy beaches are essentially artifacts of a different era of dynamics— bound to disappear as the oceans rise and no new sand is available to replace the old deposits. Beach replenishment by bulldozers occurs every winter on many US beaches,

This conceptual cut and fill diagram shows Kate Hayes’ sand engine’s gradual movement from its initial construction to it’s migration towards the shore. Influenced by wind, waves, long-shore current, and biota, the sand engine will ultimately thicken the existing beach, providing more recreational space and habitat to the Willoughby Spit community.

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but is relatively insignificant in scale—although the price tag is high. Despite expensive efforts to keep our beaches, the dynamic armature that has protected our coastlines for 20,000 years is about to melt away.

The Dutch face the same problem. Their current national policy is to widen their beach and dune system to protect their low-lying cities from inundation during storms; they are extending this policy of protection for daily high tides as well, by moving from adding small increments of sand each year to what they call “mega-nourishment” projects.

Instead of adding a million cubic yards of sand, the Dutch are now designing projects that are twenty-times larger at a single location. There are two cost advantages to this strategy: first, work is done less often, once in twenty years rather than annually, and second, more of the dredged sand is placed in deep water—which is less expensive than placing it on the beach, which requires long steel tubes and bulldozers operated by human workers. Placing sand in deeper water is initially cheaper, and the work of moving it to the beach is done by wind and waves (which work for free). This movement of sand also creates a less-compacted beach more likely to be composed of sediment sizes that are appropriate for the amount of wave energy and type of habitat that existed there before erosion occurred. In Dutch this strategy is known as the Zandmotor (sand engine) and it has turned a hum-drum section of the Dutch coast into a hot spot for surfers and a spectacle of dynamic erosion.

In spring of 2011, our first-year landscape architecture studio explored options for applying the logic of the Zandmotor to the Virginia coast. Because we believe that our interactions with these large-scale landscape armatures can play an essential role in defining what it means to be human in a particular era, we put the functional storm-protection goals of the Zandmotor side by side with an effort to explore the aesthetic experiences it could produce. Our reasoning was that if people were able to perceive the dynamics of erosion and accretion that would occur seasonally and over two decades of dynamic “flexing,” they might be more able to accept change over time and the need to adapt. Our very human refusal to accept poignant changes winter

spring

constructing SAND ENGINE

summer

dredging

autumn

sculpting

winter

spring

summer

autumn

dynamic transforming stabilizing

NATURAL PROCESSES SAND GAUGE

constructing

forming

module forming building

deconstructing

As the constructed sand engine gradually moves towards the shore, the modular sand gauge facilitates in the creation of dunes and the establishment of a new American Beachgrass community.

hill, hayes, lebedeva Sand EngineS

that include the loss of familiar landscapes is mal-adaptive when these changes are a consequence of an altered system state, and therefore have become unavoidable.

The increasing rate of sea level rise can perhaps be slowed, but it can no longer be avoided. In addition to protective designs, aesthetic strategies are urgently needed that might help humans understand their own potential resourcefulness and maybe also expand their compassion to include people different from themselves. The basic premise we used was that a massive dredging effort could be used, as in the Netherlands, to build a “sand engine.� This very large island or promontory of sand

This design is based on the natural, dynamic processes endemic to this Norfolk, Virginia, coastline region and is highlighted through intentional choreographed moments of exposure to the elements and enclosure, across scales. This designed spatial sequence is rooted in the community of Willoughby Spit and begins on the neighborhood street. One moves through a new dune ecotone and out to the end of a forced perspective, armature dock where one is completely exposed to the elements. From this vantage point, one can watch the impact of the wind, current, and wave forces on the two sand engine islands over both the short and long term. The overall design goal is to ensue a new appreciation and understanding of these forces and flows into the Willlougby Spit community.

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On the mainland, a sand gauge system of modular sand fences and boardwalks influences the movement and flows of sand and people to highlight moments of exposure and enclosure based on layout. The sand fence and boardwalk is composed of linear stretches of path and corner moments of place. These corner spaces’ orientation amplify exposure and enclosure to the prevailing winds and “catch� American Beachgrass rhizomes arriving with the migration of the sand across the beach.

The modularity of the boardwalk gives the system flexibility and the capacity to add or remove sections of the boardwalk as the dunes change.

hill, hayes, lebedeva Sand EngineS Dasha proposes porous concrete layers, supported by a network of scaffolding, and piles of concrete rubble form an artificial reef for oysters and mollusks to colonize after the sand engine erodes.

would erode, accreting sand on the beaches and building dunes, as in the Dutch precedent. Subsequent storms and tides would erode the new beaches and dunes slowly, requiring a new sand engine to be re-built every twenty years or so. Our studio designed versions of the sand engine and smaller interventions on the beach itself that we called “sand gauges”—intended to reveal the fluctuations in accumulation and erosion of sand that coastal processes and human action produce as a cyclical (and Sisyphean) perpetual-motion cyborg; part human, part not.

For her sand gauge, Kate Hayes proposed a boardwalk system that mimics the ability of beach grasses to grow upwards and expand via rhizomes as sand is deposited on them. Her boardwalk is a modular system that can grow upwards like a scaffold, with new sections placed into a framework provided by sections underneath as those lower sections are submerged in new sand dunes. This produces larger dunes by creating a lee zone behind the boardwalk sections, as well as an irregular boardwalk surface that will rise and fall with the sand as it accumulates and erodes. Alternatively, the sections can be left at their maximum height as the dunes erode to reveal the maximum height reached by the dunes as the sand was accreting.

Dasha Lebedeva proposed a sand engine that leaves behind a multi-purpose scaffolding acting as an artificial reef below the water and a circulation network above.

The sand engine is a layering of concrete rubble piles, scrapped crane towers from the area’s active shipping industry, and dredged sand material unloaded among

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these structures. Walkways connecting the towers allow for access to the islands, while below, a porous concrete surface provides a substrate for oysters and other mollusks.

As the sand erodes from the sand engine and accumulates on shore, the sand gauge, a set of fin-shaped steel walls, marks the process. The growth of the beach registers both horizontally and vertically relative to the stationary fins. These installations record natural processes, provide shade, break up the continuity of the long beach line, and enable mole crabs and other species to persist in the protected wave-shadow of these structures. Occupying the spaces between these fins, a person’s attention is drawn to the impressive scale of wave energy that drives erosion, like sitting on a rocky headland and watching the surf.

1. SCAFFOLDING CONSTRUCTED

3. SAND BEGINS TO ERODE

2. SAND PLACED

4. SAND THICKENS SHORELINE

Dasha proposed a sand engine that erodes to reveal a network of structures and concrete rubble that become habitat for oysters and other shellfish.

hill, hayes, lebedeva Sand EngineS As the beach thickens with the accumulation of sand, this change is made more visible as it registers both horizontally and vertically against the forms of the steel fin-shaped walls. A corresponding set of walls at the back of the beach similarly marks the growth of the sand dunes.

Kate and Dasha’s proposals are examples of design interventions that might heighten a beachgoer’s sense of poignancy, but also might increase a perception of human resourcefulness and our ability to work with the dynamics of a new system state.

Designed interventions in landscape-scale armatures, as well as interventions at the body scale, are a poetic language of emotional references. These designs, and the associated meanings that they develop over time, are the lost language we need to rediscover if we are going to adapt successfully to climate change.

1. Julie Bargmann, myself, and many other designers emphasized process-oriented approaches in the 1980’s and 1990’s, examples of which appeared in Landscape Journal’s exhibit issue on “Eco-Revelatory Design” in 1998. More recently, various writers and designers have tried to re-brand this broad and exciting area of work as landscape urbanism or ecological urbanism, as if it is their unique, new idea. In fact, designers all over the world have been developing important examples of design with dynamic processes that flesh out the older ideas of Olmsted, Geddes, McHarg, Spirn and others since the 1980’s, using ecological insights and a fascination with revealing change that were both inspired by and shared with the environmental art movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s.

2. The most recent large-scale beach nourishment project at Virginia Beach was known as “Operation Big Beach,” and was funded by $120 million in federal tax dollars. This effort built a 300 foot wide shallow beach along the entire oceanfront of Virginia Beach, about 3.5 miles long.

3. Home - De Zandmotor. March 20, 2012. www.dezandmotor.nl 4. Hill, Kristina, “Crisis, Poignancy and the Sublime,” Topos 76 (September, 2011): 47-50.

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ON MANAGEMENT A CONVERSATION with TERESA GALI-IZARD principal, architectura agronomia S.L.P. julian raxworthy, lecturer in landscape architecture Teresa Gali-Izard, a landscape architect from Barcelona, Spain, visited the School of Architecture in March 2012. Gali-Izard and Raxworthy were candidates for the Reuben Rainey endowed chair position in landscape architecture. The following discussion covers alternative forms of urban parks and the relationship between design and management.

Isaac Hametz: Could you start by talking a little bit about your approach to design?

Teresa Gali-Izard: When we started 25 years ago, the profession of landscape architecture didn’t exist in Spain. I studied agronomy because of that. I wasn’t sure whether I should study architecture or agronomy but my father recommended that I study agronomy because I would have more tools to affront this new profession.

WITH isaac hametz, Mla 2013; AND joey hays, mla 2012

JR: If you think about the projects in Barcelona, they don’t really have a culture of maintenance over there. How has it gone with your proposition, and the reality of trying to implement maintenance in places that have no municipality that wants to work with those systems?

gali-izard + raxworthy ON MANAGEMENT

I studied agronomy but I wanted to be a landscape architect. In the late 1990s I started working with Batlle y Roig as an agronomist. I worked on parks and gardens.

They didn’t work with time and with management, so focused my work on how living systems work in a project. I worked for plants, not for people. This was my initial conceptual approach, but after that I started working for people.

TG: It’s true, but I’m convinced there is a very interesting way to work with that. Since the Olympics, in Barcelona, in terms of public space it’s good, but it’s not about the greenery, or about management. It is not easy to introduce management in this world of architects. They don’t have this conception of time; they have to control everything.

If you work with living systems you have to be more flexible. I work to control very well some parts of the projects and some parts I leave unpredictable. I think it’s important to include some living harmony between those two in the projects.

IH: In terms of your landfill project [Dipósit controlat de la Vall d’en Joan], I’m interested in the management. At least half of the project is management because you are selecting crops—the leguminous crops to manage soil. How do you manage the crop rotations?

TG: We proposed to do the management for three years. It was good because we had a lot of funding at that moment, perhaps too much. We introduced cows for weeding and it was fantastic. It was a moment in our career when we learned a lot about the importance of planning the work. We built a new topography and we realized that the process of building was also important. In Spain we have to work with limiting factors.

The main ones are aridity and storms, and they are opposites. So in the process of building landscapes you have these two constraints, and they are very important tools for explaining the management of the project.

IH: It’s exciting to me because I’m working on a similar project that uses crop systems with fibrous roots and tap roots and symbiotic relationships to build soil. Did your project work?

TG: Yes, we did some analytics before. You have to prove that it works. I think that in places where resources are limited, people have to be creative. I am interested in the efficiency of the landscape architecture project as a basic principle. We can add richness only after we have been efficient. Spain is a poor country. Landscaping

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is built by farmers with efficiency because they use it as a medium to survive, so its countryside is one of the best schools of landscape architecture in the world.

Joey Hays: How important are the metrics? How important is it to understand exactly how strong the storm is? If it is unpredictable, how do you measure it?

TG: I always work with numbers, with the dimension of things. I need to know exactly the distribution of water throughout the year. Just with that it is possible to do a project. We have a lot of tools to work with if we go inside the details. In my opinion, European schools of landscape architecture don’t go inside the problems. They touch a lot of subjects, but not deeply. I think that if we work with the existing landscape, with the weather, with the soil, with the potentiality of the place then we If you are building something have a lot of tools to work with. If you artificial then you have to manage design a living system that works, it will be nice for people.

it and you have to spend money to do that. It’s like a machine.

IH: If the nature of what you are trying to do is solve problems, how do you decide which problem to solve?

TG: Sometimes there are no problems, only potentialities. Every project is different.

In general we work for living systems in cities where they are artificial. We have to think about the degree of artificiality. If you are building something very artificial then you have to manage it and you have to spend money to do that. I am interested in how this new artificial living system will work in the future if it needs extensive or intensive management.

It’s like a machine. We have to be clear which process we are studying and in order to know exactly what we are doing, and what the repercussion is for the future.

I read Beth Meyer’s manifesto and I am very close to what she calls hypernature. You have to be very clear when designing with living systems, because we are losing this culture of nature. I think landscape architects need to have a clear explanation why our profession is important.

IH: 50% of people live in cities, but space is outside of cities. If we typically design in cities, what do landscape architects have to offer to agricultural landscapes outside the city?

TG: I think we can work with that, but without losing the objective—that is to produce.

Maybe we can improve the situation, but I think that if it’s productive in the long term, in not exploiting the soil, then I think as an objective, it does quite well. Maybe you have to do a rotation and understand the soil science, but you do not have to have an aesthetic. The health of the place is more important.

JR: If we consider that most local governments no longer have budgets for gardening anymore, and if most of the work is done by contractors who have only certain types

gali-izard + raxworthy

TG: I dealt with this reality with the Plaza del Desierto with Eduardo Arroyo. We did a calendar for the garden to show all the maintenance. We wanted to show how each tool works. We proposed some training of the willows. We planted a lot of them, but the idea was that the garden would work based on the gardener’s talents. The calendar showed how we could manage the willows. The result is that one day every two months gardeners come in who don’t know the material. We have lost the image of the gardener as a cultivator who explains to you how the plant works.

ON MANAGEMENT

of equipment, what sort of horticultural forms are going to arrive because of changes like people coming in once a month for two hours with chain saws?

JR: How do you work with this violence of the un-experienced gardener?

TG: I start with the selection of gardeners and with management; they build the project.

IH: Isn’t it a problem that landscape architects aren’t out there doing it? If designers haven’t been out there working in the soil, with the plants, how can they choose the right gardener?

TG: It’s a contradiction and we have to resolve this in the schools. We have to work together, the gardener and the landscape architect. It’s a special relationship. You have to continue the management, sometimes even when you are not paid. I have been doing that in several projects because it was a way to learn by doing. Landscape architects have to work with this large and deep reality we have, from the gardeners to the limiting factors. Our methodology to approach public projects is based on pragmatics. If you have gardeners that cut without thinking, then you have to work with them from the start because that is the reality.

JR: What if there is no public service anymore, but we do have density of people?

In Australia we have land care, where local people maintain their landscapes. What happens if you choose the community instead of the gardener? You build your palette out of capabilities?

TG: We are now working in gardens with this idea. We work together with the client in the same way as if he was a student of landscape architecture. Our objective is to extract his potentialities so that the client is designing her own garden. In our last one, our client (who is the mother of one of my best friends) had a path, and she wanted to change it. We helped her work with each stone in proposing a new way to distribute them. She does the project and we correct the result. She is happy because she understands what is she doing, and how complex design can be.

JR: It’s like a game. Where you start out with a limited quantity—a real amount—and then you have to redistribute according to budget.

TG: Yes, but we are also opening a world for her. We said that she had to work with every stone, see the shape of every one, and do the new proposal one hundred times before achieving a result, and that is what a garden is: an approach, an experience.

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IH: This expands what is expected from landscape architects. You need a set of skills that allow you to navigate a larger public process. When you’re dealing with a large public, a large subset of mixed backgrounds, the nature of that conversation is much more complicated. If we are paying just as much time to the social dynamics as the natural dynamics, how do you navigate that?

TG: I work with natural systems. I don’t like that someone would design for me a natural place. If you try to please everyone, then everyone will cross each other. We don’t have to be so protective of people. If a natural system works, why would you have to decide who gets it? If it works, if it is thought through in the short, medium, and long term, then people will be happy.

IH: Even if the project works and it’s beautiful, there may be someone who gets mad because so much money was spent on it.

TG: This is interesting because I am critical of projects that are not efficient. In the design process, people don’t have to participate, because we are the specialists, but they have to be free to use it. We have to build something so that people are free to discover. I don’t think we have to protect people from their culture.

In the Valencia Park competition, we designed a rule. Here we didn’t have many limiting factors: flat area, and good water, air, and soil. We designed an extensive and efficient management plan for an intensive use because it is located in a very dense place. We designed with the logic of the irrigation machines that will manage the new park. The result—the hardware—was easy to manage: a grassy field and trees. We then proposed a software of vegetal events. We designed a program throughout the year that relates to nature.

dimensional drawing for maintenance operations of the Valencia Park Competition (all images couresty Arquitectura Agronomia S.L.P.)

gali-izard + raxworthy

TG: No, with the irrigation program, we designed the big plots that would be planted with grass. In the interstitial parts and on the edges, we planted trees (the hardware, the fixed part). We designed with the logic of the machines, even though it is hidden, to acquire efficiency in the extensive management. After that we designed a program of events—for example, to cut the grass in lines for paths or to plant a field of flowers.

We worked from the start with wear and tear. The objective of the park was not to produce crops, but to produce vegetal events for people. Here we also introduced the culture of the people, but after these basic rules. This is a new model of a park, and it needs a director. We planned to have a web page to explain what is happening in the park. Gardeners would introduce different types of cultures and would participate also in the process of building it. This park is a museum in real time where events are “exhibitions” that become knowledge that increases over the years.

ON MANAGEMENT

JR: Is it just an irrigation program?

JR: Wouldn’t you need a redundant formal structure that stands up if some parts of the maintenance system doesn’t work? If the director or the events stop, then you need another park underneath?

TG: Yes, there is a skeleton underneath—the hardware—and the events are the software. If you have a lot of money, you can do a lot of events. The park will be alive if people are integrated into it.

This project is my card, my presentation, after 25 years of experience. It’s an infrastructure for efficiency and a source of knowledge about nature. In this project, diversity increases year after year, but also experience, colors, and textures. It’s a living museum, inside a dense city, that offers to the citizens the idea of change and the dynamics of nature. We need good gardeners and we need a director—a landscape architect.

JH: As a designer, do you set this in motion with a director and then move on to other projects in other cities with new directors? Do you have ties to all of the projects?

TG: I think that this is a new approach. It has to be adaptable. If the next year I am not here, I will present this project to the municipalities of Spain to be the director of one of these parks.

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Asylum Ashley allis, MUEP 2012 “We neither starve nor torture them into reason; we meet them as friends and brothers; we cultivate their affections; interest their feelings; arouse their attention, and excite their hopes; we cheer the desponding, soothe the irritated, and repress the gay; in a word, we treat them as human beings, deserving of attention and care, rather than as criminals and outlaws, meriting not even our compassion.”

– Dr. Francis Stribling, 18371

The “Western Lunatic Asylum” in Staunton, Virginia, was conceived in 1825, making it the fifth mental health institution in the country.2 Renamed “Western State Hospital” in 1894, its central administration buildings stand today as the oldest intact buildings used for early mental health treatment in the United States. A 2011 fellowship sponsored by the Garden Club of Virginia facilitated my research, which has sought to situate the historic theories and practices of healing and restorative landscape design at the site in the original contexts of time, place, and commonly practiced mental health treatments.

allis asylum

By 1828, the site was occupied and progressing the theories of moral medicine. Dr. Stribling, the first superintendent, joined other hospital administrators nationally and internationally to advocate for this new way of treating the infirm and destitute. Stribling had observed the mentally ill, confined to prisons and almshouses, restrained, mistreated, and bereft of any means to heal or recover. Moral medicine provided stability in an environment away from the familiar and distracting associations of home, and often on the outskirts of town or in the country where clean breezes and fresh springs flowed. Nutritious meals and care with personal hygiene helped to establish routine and order. Treating the patients with kindness and as rational human beings was thought to quietly cure the ill. Fundamental to this movement was the occupation of the patients’ minds through exercise, employment, and amusements, which remains the basis of the physical remnants of the hospital’s landscape today.

The early 19th century landscape I discovered went beyond the picturesque terraced front lawn, enclosed by a wrought-iron fence and complete with a gazebo and twin fountains. Certainly this lawn, as pleasure grounds, provided respite and calmness to many patients, particularly women. Well into the early 20th century, women were considered to be weaker and more susceptible to immoral influences. Pleasure grounds created a controlled environment to uplift the patients’ morality and promote healthful exercise. The fence was originally designed not to keep patients in, but to keep the townspeople out.3 By 1848, public parks were just becoming recognizable as essential infrastructure in American towns and cities. The popularity of Western State’s manicured grounds amongst Staunton’s residents threatened the patients’ seclusion and overall treatment structure. Within the fenced grounds, patients enjoyed lawn games, picnics, walks, and carriage rides as a means to exercise, reduce stress, and take in the fresh air. Beyond the visible achievements of the picturesque landscape lies the less

William Small plan, 1826

early Western State plan

Western State Hospital plan, 1949

original scheme for Western State hospital, partially built and reflected in the Central Administration Building

the five original buildings and the female lodge designed and constructed by Dr. Stribling and Thomas Blackburn

depicting hospital core expansion

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Old Western State Hospital site plan, 2011

Key 1. Gazebo

11. Chapel and Kitchen, 1841, 1870

21. Cemetery

2. Twin Fountains and Arrival Drive

12. Female Wards, 1886, 1891, 1894

22. Prison Yard

3. Asylum Creek

13. Byrd Building, 1929

23. Dairy Barn, 1927-1930

4. Pleasure Grounds

14. Byrd Courtyard

24. Residences, c.1930s

5. Administration Building, 1828

15. Garages and Parking, 1952

25. Power Plant, 1950

6. South Building, 1844

16. Wheary Building, 1935

26. Coal Trestle

7. Brookdale Condominiums, 1844

17. Prison tower

27. Virginia Central Railroad

8. Bindery Condominiums, 1838

18. Residences, 1938

28. DeJarnette Building, 1921

9. Sales Office, 1828

19. Maintenance Shop, 1949

29. Original Service Entrance

10. Laundry, 1865

20. Gas Holder, 1953

30. Original Main Entrance

allis asylum early scene from the front lawn (courtesy University of Virginia Special Collections)

recognized role of the male patients, who performed much of the hospital’s essential labor and maintenance, including grading the terraces, planting and tending gardens, making bricks, and constructing buildings, walls, and pathways.

Male patients of rural Virginia were accustomed to manual labor, and this work not only benefited the hospital, but it also provided patients with physical and mental occupation. The documented successes of the employment quickly lead the hospital to establish an extensive production landscape. The hospital’s land holdings were constantly expanding for use as orchards, pasture, and vegetable gardens and for access to greater water supplies as the hospital grew. By 1955, the hospital had sprawled from 64 to 1,363 acres of land.4 In leaner times, such as during the Civil War, this self-sufficiency greatly benefitted the operation of the institution. Patients were readily committed to such institutions for causes and afflictions that we would never recognize as a mental disorder today, including loss of property, religious excitement, hard study, disappointed love, jealousy, and domestic troubles.5 Therefore, many were physically and mentally able to handle the duties of labor, although over time, these efforts were exploited.

Dr. Stribling and the superintendents who followed him played an integral role in the physical manifestation of the hospital as a self-contained campus, a garden, and a production landscape. The hospital superintendents either worked in close partnership with the architects or designed buildings and the elements of the grounds themselves. These interventions on the site closely corresponded with each superintendent’s theories on treating the mentally ill. Dr. Stribling firmly thought that

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wrought iron enclosure by Garber and Connel of Staunton, 1855

hospital cemetery, 1848-2001

arrival court fountain, administration building, portico, and landscape design by Thomas Blackburn, 1828

allis asylum

the hospital should never exceed 400 patients. In the mid-1800s, the buildings and grounds displayed great detail and attention to design and orderly site planning. After Stribling’s passing in 1873, the hospital began to grow to accommodate more and more patients. Over-crowded conditions and the introduction of restraints kept more patients contained within the buildings and walled courtyards, while mental illness as a disease became increasingly misunderstood and feared among the public.

The hospital evolved into a human warehouse through the 1940s, with behemoth structures constructed to contain the patients out of view from the public eye. This containment was exasperated with the development of invasive treatments and experimental pharmaceuticals. Patients that remained physically able continued to farm to support the hospital’s nutritional needs through the 1950s, when labor laws began to impede such practices. As the old site of Western State Hospital aged and overflowed, a new sprawling campus began construction in the suburbs of Staunton in the 1946, and relocation was completed in 1976.

Due to the more recent and memorable history of containment, it is not unusual for a passerby to view such a looming site on the hillside with trepidation. Institutional sites like mental institutions often carry a negative impression based on our narrow understandings of mental health treatment over time. Certainly the latter part of the hospital’s occupation warrants regret and unease, but once we begin to unravel the layers of history communicated through the site, we discover the original intention of a true asylum as a place of shelter, protection, and support.

1. Western State Hospital Annual Report (1837), University of Virginia Collections.

2. Ashley Allis, Old Western State Hospital (Garden Club of Virginia, 2011).

3. Bryan Clark Green, In Jefferson’s Shadow: The Architecture of Thomas R. Blackburn (Richmond VA, 2006), 63.

4. Western State Hospital, Annual Report of the President and Directors of the Western Lunatic Asylum to the Legislature of Virginia, with the Report of the Superintendent and Physician (Staunton VA, 1838 and 1955), University of Virginia Collections.

5. Ibid., 1842.

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memory, material, morphology regeneration at marmet Lauren Hackney, M.Arch + MLA 2011 THesis Advisors: john quale and bill sherman

The entire gradient of the land has economic value: the mountains, for timber, coal, sandstone, and other mined/quarried materials; the river, for transport and industry. The Kanawha floodplain has developed as an intertwining urban fabric of industrial and residential precincts.

hackney Memory, material, morphology

This thesis examines a site in West Virginia using a multi-scalar research framework to engage a landscape where community, ecologic, and public health are caught in a damaging feedback loop with energy and material extraction.

This proposal is intended to be a catalyst for regeneration of the stifled cultural, ecological, and social practices that shape settlement on this site and in this region.

It defines ‘public works’ not as a singular act for a singular function, but as an opportunity to re-imagine the public realm at the scales of memory (site), material (actions), and morphology (systems) on a site that is both a fragment of a city and a prototype within a regional matrix of altered and cleared sites.

The Marmet Locks site is re-envisioned not as a disposal site for overburden, but instead as a layered construct of inscribed histories and possibilities and a point of exchange, where the succession of visceral spaces, temporal processes, and community-based actions cultivates exchange among the site’s fluctuating ecologies and occupations.

The economic valuation often casts off the surface as overburden, stifling the lateral and vertical ecologies of the land and generating vast scales of disturbance.

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Research partners: Virginia Tech West Virginia University Marshall University Charleston Area Medical Center Funding partners: DuPont Massey Energy Non-Profit and Community Groups (dissemination) NeighborWoods: The Greenway Initiative Charleston land trust Friends of the Kanawha Trestle Trail West Virginia Division of Culture and History / WV Memory Project Appalachian College Association / Digital Library of Appalachia (cultural landscape database) The Education Alliance Charleston Area Alliance

Smart Futures West Virginia’s Promise – The Alliance for Youth Kanawha Coalition for Community Health Improvement Charleston-Kanawha Housing Appalachian Harvest Charleston East End Charleston Young Professionals Appalachian Voices Governmental grant resources, site maintenance: EPA Army Corps of Engineers / Huntington District (USACE)

hackney Memory, material, morphology

PROPOSED COLLABORATIONS

The phasing is an accumulation of actions at multiple scales that are both physical and cultural—from infrastructural improvements for adjacent neighborhoods, to physical restructuring of the site, to collective re-envisioning of this site’s potential to galvanize and change local and regional dynamics. The relationship between industry, resources, and settlement has spatial and temporal implications for public and ecological health, resource availability, and economic stability. This proposal engages spatial and temporal cycles of settlement.

Programmatic hubs: Mountaineer Food Bank Huntington District Waterways Association NeighborWoods / The Greenway Initiative

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botanic laboratory edge

serviceberry clumps

formwork bench/drainage

vegetable plots

path

skate park

hackney Memory, material, morphology

This section-perspective moves through botanic laboratory and garden terrace edge, and looks toward the skate park/ amphitheater, the Kanawha River, and the pioneer grove. This site is a construction site in continuous flux; this proposal re-imagines the Marmet Locks site as a publicprivate partnership that gradually constructs the succession of spatial, temporal, and community operations that cultivate exchange.

pioneer grove

existing Marmet Locks site

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In Deccan Traverses: the Making of Bangalore’s Terrain, Mathur and da Cunha articulate landscape as the ground for habitation (the particular site), everyday practices (the actions that define that habitation), and the vocabulary of the land (the systems, both constructed and natural, that shape habitation and practices). Two walks through the site—one along the river, one along the road and through the botanic laboratory—chart the varied experiences through a set of characters who engage the site in different ways.

hackney Memory, material, morphology

botanic laboratory

floodway seams

plaza-community center

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disturbing pleasures of maintenance Joey hays, MLA 2012 thesis critics: kristina hill AND jorg sieweke By constructing a hybrid of the concepts of ‘maintenance’ and ‘design,’ we can fundamentally shift the practice of landscape architecture from an event to an iterative process. Designers can create spaces that embrace the changes inherent in existing, historic, and future conditions of a site.

Tweaking site-specific cultural and ecological processes and measuring their performance with designed monitors will improve landscape performance and aid in evaluating when, what, and who should be disturbing. Such disturbing rituals could enhance the maintenance regimes not only of parks and private spaces, but those of urban, regional and national vegetal and water systems, as they did prior to European colonization.1 Designers must let go of their colonial desires to demonstrate control in the creation of static types of space and discover the economic and ecological potentials in local disturbing maintenance regimes.

Aligning with contemporary theory in design and ecology, Disturbing Pleasures of Maintenance (DPM) asks designers to incorporate disturbance as a maintenance regime—to define maintenance as a design practice. DPM incorporate wild and accidental processes, rather than arresting them with idealized, static, and monocultural surface treatments, popular in most award-winning design proposals today. My

hays DISTURBING PLEASURES OF MAINTENANCE

thesis shifts the negative association of ‘wild’ and ‘accidental’ to one of pleasure through the active participation with disturbances, many of which are essential to ecosystem function.

For a traditional maintenance plan if one exists, a maintenance worker checks off boxes on a map along specified points at specified intervals, recording changes based upon a single visual moment. The plan is handed off at the end of a project. DPM aims to initiate the conversation with the maintenance crew from the start, as these are the folks who will ensure the project survives. Throughout the design and maintenance of these places, DPM sets this spatially and temporally static ‘maintenance plan’ document in motion—iterating the map according to the ecological, economic and social systems generated on and off the site. Through rigorous monitoring, analysis, research and experimentation, these iterative maintenance regimes eventually reduce maintenance costs, create aesthetic surprises, and reveal site-defining processes that enable adaptation, reinforcing the need to implement designs that utilize disturbance as maintenance.

expanding the scope of design: rituals and monitors In ecology, disturbances have been defined as “environmental fluctuations and destructive events” which alter the resources available to the species in a system.2 The Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis (IDH) proposes the value of an intermediate recurrence of disturbances in regulating species diversity.3 One might define cultural disturbances, such as the Occupy protests of 2011, as intermediate disruptions in political and cultural systems with aims to maintain a healthy distribution of resources within a particular group or society. This de-homogenization of space and place depends upon the periodic disruption of the daily, seasonal, and annual routines of human beings, forming a system of cultural checks and balances to prevent the cultural monotony prescribed by modernization. DPM call for designers to research

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the economic, ecological and social potentials in surprise, to make compelling arguments for the cycle of imagery that challenges the idealized assumptions of beauty by monitoring and mining data. Disconnecting culture from its familiar trope of positive associations will require making explicit the multiple benefits of change as an expanded aesthetic experience.

Landscape architect Maria Reimer defines an expanded aesthetic experience as “transgressing the cognitive limitations of beauty, compelling the subject to produce, reproduce and elaborate itself and the surrounding; to ‘re-scape’ itself repeatedly.”

She proposes a landscape aesthetic that “allows for radically new patterns of environmental agency and new forms of material interaction to emerge.”4 Within Reimer’s concept of emerging material interactions, my interest lies in the dialectic between non-human initiated pleasurable disturbances and human-initiated disturbing pleasures. Disturbing pleasures are actions taken by humans to change a system, such as a controlled burn, and pleasurable disturbances are designed responses to anticipated system changes, such as an occupiable drainage pond.

The aesthetic of surprise in pleasurable disturbances is based in on-site processes and thus is constantly changing. Aesthetic indeterminacy requires designs for pleasurable disturbances to rely heavily on an economic incentive. Economic strategies depend on long term vision and construction cost savings, often requiring institutional support to span generations. The conviction of the economic incentive requires up-to-date, scientifically accurate projections for the potential outcomes, based on historic records, precedents, and foresight from multiple disciplines.

As a design practice, designers of disturbing maintenance regimes would direct this synthesis of projections. Design-build-maintain firms would need to create a maintenance division, and designers would collect additional fees for the research and analysis in determining the disturbing maintenance regime. I will now review three projects that together define a dialectical relationship between disturbing pleasures and pleasurable disturbances.

Rijkswaterstraat | zandmotor South Holland authorities and the national government of Holland created a sand engine that constructs a wider beach and dunes through the pleasurable disturbances of wind and wave action. Critical of conventional beach construction, the Zandmotor

The diagrams display the projected redistribution of sand along the coast at five-year intervals. (Courtesy Rijkswaterstaat and the provincial authority of South Holland)

hays DISTURBING PLEASURES OF MAINTENANCE

maintains 15 km of its coastline by building a beach that is meant to disappear. The forces of wind and waves push the sand into place instead of bulldozing. Before dumping 21.5 million cubic meters of sand in the shape of a hook, a rigorous analysis of the existing and projected conditions was undertaken, including the movements of sand in water based on currents and wave action, the careful consideration of a nearby contaminated dumping ground, and the logistics of acquiring and moving this quantity of sand in a public setting. Once established, the Zandmotor will push sand over ten to twenty years rather than spreading fresh sand along the beach via bulldozer every five years. By slowing down the process and reducing compaction, the Zandmotor enables other organisms to accrete in the sand, and creates an occupiable recreational space that changes over time, creating a stronger coastline.

Through rigorous monitoring, the Zandmotor may prove a better strategy for the design and maintenance coastlines elsewhere as sea levels rise. It is this rigor in the analysis of the existing processes and monitoring throughout that the DPM calls for designers to become part of. Pleasurable disturbances also create opportunities for designers to work with the aesthetic experience of loss, and the cycle of imagery that denotes the poignancy of change, which is crucial to any adaptation.

MVVA | GENERAL MILLS HEADQUARTERS’ ENTRANCE PARK In 1988, Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates, Inc. (MVVA) proposed a prairie burn regime for the entrance walk to the headquarters of General Mills, one of the largest grain cereal corporations in the world. Disturbing pleasures distinguish themselves from other maintenance practices by contrasting cultural norms. Typically

General Mills headquarters entrance walk (Courtesy MVVA Inc.)

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corporate campuses surround their modern headquarters with lawn, trees, and stable water features to create a ‘pleasing visual backdrop’ to views framed by the windows in their offices. MVVA’s burn regime disturbs this cultural expectation with the regionally appropriate and company specific prairie burn. As a grain corporation, General Mills depends upon the water and vegetative systems of the open prairie to grow their grains. Prairies benefit from ‘good’ fire ecology because the native grasses have been fire adapted and a moderate fire will burn off competitive invasive species, reflected in the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis. Undermining the hegemonic symbol of the corporate lawn, MVVA created an abstracted prairie with birch trees (not fire adapted) to enhance the performative aspects of the disturbance regime. The CEO at the time found the burned imagery pleasurable; however, when a new CEO was appointed in 2000, he had the project demolished and replaced with a corporate lawn. The disturbing pleasure in burning was not clear. Perhaps if the increased biodiversity of General Mills’ entrance prairie had more tangible evidence—economic evidence—of its productivity, the aesthetic of the charred landscape would improve in the mind of the corporate client. In the U.S., to “get burned” is a bad thing, but the critical aspect of MVVA’s project promotes the renewal of vegetation beyond the shortterm loss. Here pleasure is redefined as engagement with an action—with a cycle of images—rather than the singular static lawn. The act of participation, the burning, becomes disturbingly pleasurable when the effects are multiple and long-lasting.

TURENSCAPE | SHENYANG ARCHITECTURAL UNIVERSITY Chinese landscape architecture firm Turenscape designed “Golden Rice” fields at Shenyang Architectural University. Turenscape’s disturbing pleasure asks city-bound Chinese college students to reconsider the multiple benefits of farming by engaging the students in the process of growing and harvesting rice. Turenscape questions the accepted college campus landscape of lawn-covered quads by designing active rice fields. The once pervading peasant farmer under Mao is quickly being replaced by the businessman due to the rapid industrialization of China’s countryside. Turenscape’s campus reverses this trend. Students who go to college to get a job in the city, are now engaged in farming at the institution that was meant to set them free. After harvesting

The Future of Maintenance The Zandmotor, MVVA’s entrance prairie, and Turenscape’s campus are models of progressive integration of maintenance regimes into design practice. Drawing from this, Disturbing Pleasures of Maintenance would require a maintenance division within firms that would monitor and maintain relationships with multiple projects over much longer periods of time. It also demands thorough research into the history of a site, local knowledge of the existing ecology, and perpetual research and experimentation with enhanced monitoring and communication technologies to improve design iterations. Designers also must experiment with aesthetic experiences that compress time and project future scenarios to help people understand the greater value of iterative design. Backed by monitored data, these long-term projections will convince clients to develop a maintenance regime based on disturbances that may be critical of accepted practices.

hays DISTURBING PLEASURES OF MAINTENANCE

the rice, it is packaged, branded as “Golden Rice” and sold to visitors of the school.

The process has become an identity for the school, an economic generator, and a cultural catalyst. Leaving 10% of the rice stalks unharvested for the birds and other biota, the project connects students to the cycles of imagery within soil, water, plants, and animals—to reality—rather than the singular idealized image of lawn covered quads.

1. Mann, Charles C.. 1491: new revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print.

2. Pickett, Steward T., and P. S. White. The ecology of natural disturbance and patch dynamics. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1985. Print.

3. Shea, Katriona, Stephen Roxburgh, and Emily Rauschert. “Moving from Pattern to Process: Coexistence Mechanisms Under Intermediate Disturbance Regimes.” Ecology Letters 7 (2004): 491-508. Print.

4. Hellström Reimer, Maria. “Unsettling eco-scapes—aesthetic performances for sustainable futures.” Journal of Landscape Architecture Spring.9 (2010): 29. Print.

Shenyang University Campus, Shenyarg China (courtesy of Turenscape)

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LIVING FOSSIL TO LANDSCAPE MACHINE Sarah Cancienne, M.arch 2012 Jen Lynch, mla 2012 critic: jorg sieweke 2011 AECOM Urban SOS competition hONORABLE MENTION Venice’s lagoon should have vanished centuries ago, silted by alpine sediments into terra firma or swept away by the tides of the Adriatic. As a landscape type, it is sustained only through the engineered balance of its hydrological and geomorphological parameters—the sedimentation from its rivers and erosion by its tides.

During the Renaissance, the threat to the lagoon by sedimentation from its rivers was addressed through the application of a rule-based system of 11 hydrological principles to the landscape. These principles were a combination of geological analysis, scientific hypotheses, and associated civic laws that instructed citizens and governmental bodies on strategies for managing the Lagoon. These rules played out at various scales— major rivers were re-routed and drainage patterns were geometrized across terra firma. The balance between ground and water within the Lagoon was dramatically altered through the application of this logic to the landscape. Depriving the Lagoon of its sediment, the natural process of lagoon sedimentation and land-building was lost, and in an ironic

cancienne + lynch LIVING FOSSIL TO LANDSCAPE MACHINE

testament to the power of Venice’s relationship to its ecosystem, the city began to slowly sink. Six centuries later, the effects of the Lagoon’s sediment loss and wetland erosion are increasingly felt within the city. The Lagoon’s deepening bathemetry and exaggerated tidal channels now cause acqua alta, the famous seasonal flooding of Venice’s pedestrian sidewalks.

For centuries, the solution to Venice’s sediment deprivation problem has been dealt with by series of concrete seawalls and constructed islands built from compacted dirt. These strategies have proved short-sighted and incongruous with the dynamic nature of the lagoon. The exemplification of this “calcification” strategy is the MOSE floodgates, which attempt to control the effects of the rising Adriatic tide and prevent the scouring of the lagoon channels.

Our design proposes a more flexible, fluid, and passive strategy for rebuilding a balance between the environmental, economic, and cultural forces that have historically defined and sustained the Lagoon. To reintroduce sediments to the Lagoon, the Brenta River is re-diverted through its original course and into different parts of the southern Lagoon through smaller diversions. The diversions are fluctuated to strategically distribute sediment throughout the southern Lagoon, mimicking the shifting fan of the river deltas that originally formed the Lagoon’s ground. The timing of these fluctuations is synchronized with the seasonal water and sediment levels of the Brenta and with the currents caused by seasonal winds, the Bora and Sirocco, which steer and accelerate sediment deposition.

proposed delta growth and sediment disposition

proposed calcification to modulation process

cancienne + lynch LIVING FOSSIL TO LANDSCAPE MACHINE

The MOSE floodgates, seen in one way as the ultimate seawall, are also flexible and have the ability to engineer tidal conditions within the Lagoon. The MOSE, used in concert with the fluctuating Brenta diversions, creates optimal tidal conditions and increases the potential of the wind as a vector. The MOSE gates and Renaissance river diversions, symbolic of environmental stagnation, are now made flexible and, together, they can be seen as forming a complete landscape machine, capable of striking ideal relationships between the opposing forces of sedimentation and tides that define the lagoon as a dialectical landscape.

fresh water must be kept out of the lagoon

straight channels drain most efficiently

rivers with no turbidity do not raise their beds or stretch the delta into the sea

the sea is the lowest of all surface waters

turbidity increases when flow slows

embanking and canalizing improves flow

Brondolo provides sea level

water levels rise when rivers meet

clear canals are more easily navigated than turbid canals

constant flow neither rises nor falls

keep separate: large alpine rivers carrying sediment; local drainage canals carrying turbid runoff from hills and marshes; and clear-running streams runnning from the fontanile

buildings

materials

flows

interfaces

left: 11 historic hydrological principles of Nicolo Zen (1557); above: new hydrological principles

cancienne + lynch LIVING FOSSIL TO LANDSCAPE MACHINE

In our proposal, these large scale processes (the engineering of river diversions and tides) are influenced by a finer grained, adaptive kit of parts, accelerating the accretion of sediments and regeneration of wetlands. The resulting landscape would be a large campground-park, where individuals interface with the ecosystem by participating in different activities where their camping “trash� would be converted into land building material: the opposite of leave-no-trace camping.

uncertainty and bravery a conversation with eduardo arroyo principal, no.mad Arquitectos On February first, 2012, the architecture school was turned on its head.

For ten days, the entire school participated in the Belmont Vortex, a local competition to reimagine a significant bridge in downtown Charlottesville.

Eduardo Arroyo, a renowned Spanish architect and founder of NO.MAD Arquitectos, was invited to inspire and guide the teams. His work embraces the uncertainties of public space. Lunch convened a group of students and faculty to discuss the ideas behind his work, and his participation in the Belmont Vortex. The following conversation focuses on an important element in Arroyo’s work and in contemporary discourse: uncertainty. How do designers intervene in urban space when the conditions are constantly changing? How do design interventions, such as a bridge, shape the urban fabric around them? How are these then shaped by those who use the spaces every day?

Nick Knodt: I’d be curious to hear how your projects discussed during Monday’s [January 30th] lecture—the football stadium and Plaza Del Desierto—have been utilized through time.

Eduardo Arroyo: The good thing about public space is that you never know how it is going to be used. Even if you make a big effort to program a public space, defining the exact things that you want people or the population to do in certain areas, they won’t use the paths you have decided; they will make their own. To avoid this conflict between designer intent and actual use, we approach public space in a way that people will have to choose what to do, to avoid the idea that the architect imposes the programmatic use of the public space. At the same time, I think that the idea behind Plaza Del Desierto was that once you make people relate spaces inside their homes to similar spaces outside of them, you have established a bridge between dimension and use. It is very nice to see how people have chosen certain parts of the square; they appropriate them for themselves. So you find ten old guys meeting on one of the

WITH nick Knodt, M.Arch 2015; and Robin Dripps, professor of architecture

arroyo uncertainty and bravery Arroyo meets with a student team during the Belmont Bridge competition (courtesy Marcus Brooks).

benches, like they would in living rooms. Or, you find two girls reading books, like they were hidden in some forest. And in that sense, the public space becomes a part of the population. It’s not something that the town hall gives to the city; it’s their own space. It is the same with topography. We created these mountains so that everybody could climb up and decipher the square, but the skaters took them for themselves.

We didn’t think about that. New things arise.

Robin Dripps: Throughout history, architecture has attempted to create a sense of stability within a volatile world by an act of radical reduction in the complexity of pressures that it takes into its formal structure. While this is understandable and often desirable, the outcome can also result in an artifact no longer valued within a changed framework. But making something look complex, a style of complexity, it is not a solution either. I therefore am interested in how one might establish a framework that mediates between this desire for stability and yet can accommodate change.

EA: I think it’s an act of braveness. It’s an assumption that I have taken because I believe in a certain way of working. The system of working to us was more important than the result itself. And to me one of the values of this working system is that you avoid a style. Of course you need to have your tools for defining and expressing architecture that are close to a style, but they don’t come from the beginning. They are something that appears because you need to define architecture at the end. When you work with indeterminism, you can become more precise. With determinism, you think you are being more precise, but the answer to the exterior problems is creating a gap between your stylistic failure and the position you need to answer these problems.

If you have reality in front of you, you don’t have a style, and you are able to move with total freedom, deeper and more precise, because you don’t have any kind of pre-thought forms or pre-thought ways of approaching style or architecture. Without prejudgement—I just want to know the truth, with the risk, of course, of failure.

RD: One of the things I see in architecture is that determinism is highly edited. In other

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words, what are the things we’re allowed to deal with? One doesn’t have to look for indeterminacy. It surrounds us. It happens.

EA: We cannot work with everything in front of us; that would make it an impossible job. That’s the highest form of determinism. I believe architects are the best filter between what exists and what can be used for our work. Once again, being brave in architecture means not avoiding these difficulties, and facing them, even if they generate a higher degree of indeterminism. I think indeterminism is powerless to fear.

It’s like, more indeterminism, more fear. What kind of personality do you want? If you would love your work to be indeterminate, and you are not afraid of the result, then you have made a big step toward the resolution.

RD: Then you need a clear way of evaluating what is coming out of this system. Do you have any suggestions for how to facilitate free-form experimental processes of design?

EA: The first thing I believe in is self-criticism. Once you think what you are doing is nice, then you are on your way out. To be your best critic means that you can place yourself in different positions, like someone who might think your system of working is not correct. Normally when we see processes of design, or Sometimes we imagine we make thinking—I’m not just talking about design or form, but about relationships and parameters and all of thinking inside of forms—we this, but in the end, the one that thinks— see the processes in a linear way. Linear processes, from decides—is the one that rules. the beginning to the end, are always incorrect. You have to be critical enough to know that one path is wrong and then you have to come back. You can only do it by yourself.

There are no computers, no machines that will help you with that, because machines don’t think. Sometimes we imagine we make relationships and parameters and all of this, but in the end, the one that thinks—decides—is the one that rules. If you have a lot of information about what things are happening in your time, you might be able to know that what you are doing has already been done. If you are in a cave, and working by yourself, and do not know what is around, then you might commit the same mistakes.

So both are good, one is from the inside: your experience, your knowledge. And the other is from the outside; you have the information and know what is being done in many places.

RD: I can imagine many architects who would be very much ill-at-ease with a lack of control. Is this a personality issue or is the person we’re actually educating in school—I don’t mean just architecture school, but kindergarten onward—set up with a sense of agency that is implausible at best?

RD: I agree and wonder if this is a personality trait or outcome of education. At an earlier time in my life I was involved with improvisational music, and was studying classical music. I found that even among friends, agreement on substantial musical ideas were impossible. The point of contention was always control of the score.

For those anticipating a predictable result, the uncertainty of having to immediately respond to unexpected musical moments and actually survive was an intolerable proposition. Is this an inherent trait of personality or a product of education? And of course, this raises the question of what we ought to value.

arroyo uncertainty and bravery

EA: That’s a good question, because I think that the architecture that I love is really impersonal. But at the same time, what you’re saying is true. I believe that even most of the historical architects who have developed a recognizable style end their lives with an “I don’t care about anything anymore.” I think that the very good buildings from the architects in the past that I love, Wright or Corbusier, are the ones that are ornery. I think it has to do with the end of personality. The ones that get rid of the links with society because society is demanding that you to behave in certain ways. I think it’s an effect of personality that you are able to dive into a problem in a riskier way than any others.

EA: But you know, I think in the end, I would put myself in that first group also.

Even John Cage pretended that everything was out of control, but at the end there was something that linked them, not unpredictably. Even if you think that it’s 100% indeterminism, it’s not true. There’s something in even the way that you are relating to what is appearing, how you conduct it. It’s already a kind of personal attitude.

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Climate Change AND city Dynamics Inspiration for Resilient Design Laura Sasso, MLA 2011 thesis critic: kristina hill The nexus of climate change, urbanization, and the design of the public realm is the starting point for a rich discussion about the potential of landscape architecture at a time of unprecedented environmental and social change. More than anytime in modern civilization, the built environment is intricately linked to environmental phenomenon.

Climate change is a proven phenomenon in which anthropogenic causes are altering the function of the atmosphere. Site-specific impacts from climate change are difficult to predict because the future rate of greenhouse gas emissions is an unknown variable and our ability to predict is only as accurate as the data integrated into the scientific models.

However, what is known is that shifting climatic patterns are already directly impacting the quality of life of individuals around the globe. By the end of the last decade over half of the world’s global population shifted to cities and the United Nations predicts that the trend will continue.

Global Scale: Climate Change Climate change is often connected to the individual through the representation of its impacts. The impacts vary by region and they are not distributed equally or equitably around the world. In some regions disastrous floods are becoming more prevalent. In other regions the lack of water is causing calamities.

Disasters are tangible examples of climate change. However, focusing the primary attention on the impacts rather than the root causes reveals only part of the picture for a complex issue. Sociologist Anthony Giddens coined the term Giddens’s paradox, which argues:

sasso Climate Change + City Dynamics

Complex socio-ecological interdependencies are opening a dialogue about effective ways for the profession of landscape architecture to engage in the challenge. The design of public infrastructure takes center stage in the challenge as a place to support a dialogue for social and ecological resilience. Landscape architects have the potential to create innovative, imaginative, transformative and equitable responses as they participate in the greatest challenge of this generation.

. . . since the dangers posed by global warming aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of the day-to-day life, many will sit on their hands and do nothing of concrete nature about them.

Yet waiting until such disasters become visible and acute­—in the shape of catastrophes that are irrefutably the result of climate change—before being stirred to serious action will be too late.1 Climate change is linked to human behavior and cultural norms. It is directly connected to the way in which we live our lives everyday and the ethics embedded in the design of our built environment. The design of the public realm around infrastructure could help to build an understanding about the linkage between systems by helping to support climate literacy and inspire beneficial behavioral changes.

Optimistically, climate change brings both the motivation and the urgency to rethink existing urban design and to continue to expand the boundaries of landscape architecture. Ideally it is an opportunity to integrate and support greater social and ecological resilience in the built environments.

Regional Scale: City Dynamics Historically, city systems have dynamically changed in response to shifting conditions.

Some of the changes have been detrimental to social and environmental systems and others arguably have created a more sustainable relationship. The difference now is that environmental and social changes are occurring at an unprecedented rate and they are difficult to predict. If cities are understood as testing sites for adaptive design proposals they can provide hands-on learning opportunities.

Similar to the climate, cities are complex, interconnected systems. In Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows outlines three components of systems: “elements, interconnections and a function or purpose.”2 All three components of city systems

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will be impacted by climate change. Building robust city systems will necessitate the need for innovative frameworks for design. For designed systems this will include building in redundancies and spaces that accommodate environmental fluctuations.

For social systems, the public realm of infrastructure can support resilience through the development of collective memory, revealing place-based stories and strengthening social networks.

Urbanization is inspiring from the perspective of human connectivity and creativity: cities bring people with diverse backgrounds together. From these diverse sets of expertise and experiences, cities are becoming centers for innovation. Hannah Arendt articulated the powerful potential of the public realm to support agency by opining that “[while] strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.�3 The challenges in the 21st century will need the power derived from collaboration and connectivity.

A deficit of knowledge exists about the processes in urban ecosystems. The desire to adapt urban environments is inspiring innovative collaborations to increase our understanding about city systems. MIT’s trans-disciplinary SENSEable City Laboratory researches the linkages between city dwellers, the built environment, and city processes. Through technological innovations their projects are empowering social networks to aid the collection of important data about city processes. At a time of unprecedented climate variability, intelligent city-based experiments are critically important for the development of informed, resilient designs.

existing condiditons: street ponding

Landscape architects are well equipped to engage in strategies that challenge normative development patterns. The profession has a long history of creative problem solving at multiple scales, analyzing system dynamics and collaborating across disciplinary boundaries. In Meskimmon’s theories on the cosmopolitan imagination, she agues that aesthetics are “a politics that operates at the interface of materiality and imagination, the individual and the social, the local and the global.

Cosmopolitism asks how we might connect through dialogue rather than monologue, our response-ability to our responsibilities within a world community.�4

sasso Climate Change + City Dynamics

Body Scale: Resilient Design The issue of climate change is both daunting due to the risks associated with uncertainty and provoking because innovative designs are an essential part of adapting to challenges. Landscape architects are well situated to engage in the issue of climate change because the profession strives to create experiences that operate at the interface between natural systems and human systems. The intention of resilient designs is to generate social and ecological systems that can recover from disturbance; in a word, they are adaptable.

Landscape architecture can help to initiate a dialogue about climate change through design. Incorporating informal educational opportunities into everyday experiences is an important bottom-up approach for building climate literacy and improving the health of communities. Ideally design responses will be a rich combination of imaginative strategies, grounded by an understanding of local context and global connectivity.

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social and spatial adaptation: flexible arrangement, diversity of uses

block party

community meeting

living in St. Roch survey

flower festival

Through my research on the community of St. Roch, it is clear that climate change will exasperate existing social and ecological vulnerabilities. St. Roch has been underrepresented in city politics as evidenced by the lack of basic drainage infrastructure at the start of the in the 21st century. Even with less than an inch of rain, water becomes an obstacle to mobility and a threat to human health in the community. Ponding in the street prevents access to cars and reduces walkability.

In addition, stagnate water becomes a fertile breeding ground for mosquitos, which increases public health risks.

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Design Research: Grounded Structuration Hurricane Katrina validates Giddens’s paradox, although there are many contemporary global examples where environmental catastrophes are coupled with social disasters.

Understanding that the time to act is before another environmental catastrophe occurs, my thesis was developed in a post-Katrina context. Grounded Structuration explores the potential of using a catastrophe as a way to reinvigorate St. Roch’s imagination and aims to articulate a resilient future for the community located in the city of New Orleans.

During the initial phase I engaged with the community in a dialogue about existing problems and future aspirations. Strikingly, the participants from St. Roch do not perceive the public realm as their own; the lack of personal safety in public places governs behavioral patterns in the community. The design strategy sought to reverse the negative perception of the public realm through innovative retrofits in the neighborhood infrastructure. The multifunctional, decentralized drainage infrastructure revealed aspects of the dynamic delta landscape, improved the drainage system and supported the development of social networks. The resilient design approach responded to context-specific social inequities and ecological vulnerabilities.

As mentioned, landscape architects can take a leading role in the complex issues of urbanization, climate change and the design of the public realm. Designing with intention carries a far greater responsibility with climate change. Resilient design strategies that stimulate transformational experiences would be a tremendous contribution to the global challenge of climate change.

1. Giddens, Anthony. The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

2. Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Edited by Diana Wright. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.

3. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1959.

4. Meskimmon, Marsh. Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. London: Routledge, 2011.

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re-BOund Chair beth Bailey, MLA 2011; Callie Broadus, B.ARch 2012; Hugo Fenaux, B.ARch 2012; Brittany Olivari, B.Arch 2012; Adam POliner, B.Arch 2012

critic: Melissa Goldman The chair is a tool suited to the human form. Chairs have developed over time to accommodate rest, interaction, work, and comfort. A group of five undergraduate and graduate students collaborated to develop an aggregating, modular, and kinetic system that adjusts to external forces and needs of the user. This project explores the relationship between the human body and the act of sitting, working, standing, etc. The course, led by professor and fabrication manager Melissa Goldman, required the students to explore the methods of ‘pop-up’—the cut, the score, the fold, the joint—in order to produce a portable structure that could bear

bailey et al. re-bound chair above: exploded axon demonstrating assembly of parts: routed plywood, washers, metal rod, elastic band below: infinite assembly of aggregated units

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weight. Experimentation with various material and fabrication techniques coupled with an iterative process allowed the students to explore these pop-up mechanisms extensively. The chair/table/bench is made of digitally fabricated sections of plywood connected with an innovative and simple system of bungees, tracks, rods, and washers.

The chair/table/bench responds to the weight of the human form, changing with the subtle contours, movements, and shifts of a body. It transforms in response to the type of interaction or encounter, whether as a fully stable table, at rest, or as a chair/bench, or in any imaginable combination in between when held in tension.

full-scale iterations and detail photographs of joint and track system

bailey et al. re-bound chair right: diagrams illustrating full kinetic range-from table to chair below: the chair is completely interactive and responds to the weight of the human body

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impressions of le corbusier oscar obando, M.ARCH 2012

Critic: W.G. Clark “A house built to order, on an interesting site, is a masterpiece of incongruity—a monstrous thing.” -Le Corbusier These three-dimensional spatial investigations look to de-laminate Le Corbusier’s intentions from his 1920’s ‘white period’ to his later work abroad in India, Tunisia, and Argentina. The work is catalyzed through an analysis of the four iterations (shown on the last page) preceding the built version of Villa Savoye (1928-31) that give light to Le Corbusier’s fight and struggle with the Modern age.

In Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier assembles a powerful composition of the structural qualities enabled by his discovery of the Dom-ino House and the perceptual qualities of his Purist paintings with Amédée Ozenfant. A constant duality is encountered between the painter and the engineer, whom he employs through a number of modules to develop a variety of scales and rhythms through his buildings. A regulating vertical dimension, the échelle humaine, is applied to the height of windowsills, window heads, doors, and ceilings, while the spacing of columns in plan is determined by the tracé automatique—5 meters to accommodate two 2.5 meter wide window frames within each bay. This was the case in Villa Savoye until it was built. The column spacing dropped to 4.75 meters, resulting in a subtle mis-alignment between the windows and columns.

Villa Savoye starts out as a series of symmetrically and monumentally expressed programmatic volumes. The house is composed in an implied

obando impressions of le corbusier Villa Guiette, a small urban infill house, uses the section to play between large and small spaces. Similar to the second floor of Villa Savoye, though working in section in this case, the terracing diagonal cuts the building in half between more public spaces at the bottom floor and private spaces above. This spatial device is re-enforced here through the use of stairs up the side of the building’s interior.

‘nine-square plan’ with a few piloti, organized around an elevated terrace. Behind this terrace rests a circulation core that climbs up to define the highest point of the building.

Here, the driveway for an automobile singularly ends at a garage positioned opposite the drive’s entrance underneath the building. This initial design shows a duality that re-occurs throughout the house’s design process: a conflict between symmetry and balance and the dynamism of idiosyncratic spatial requirements.

A number of programs remain consistent to the final design, while some are suddenly edited out. The major consistencies are, first floor: two service apartments and a drive leading to a garage under the house; second floor: bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living space organized around an elevated terrace with an exclusive stairway connecting to the landscape; and the third floor: a master suite and roof garden. After the first iteration, the following series of houses begin to epitomize “The Five Points of a New Architecture:” a piloti grid, an open plan, a free façade, horizontal strip-windows, and a roof garden.

The designs start small; a 5 meter nine-square grid of walls and pilotis play with horizontal and vertical orientations through the use of 1 meter long cantilevered abutments on the second floor facades. The secondary stair to the terrace is extended to the outside of the building’s rectangular perimeter as an expressive, singular object.

The houses begin to explore the sequence of the automobile through a continuous driveway along the underside of the building. Initially, this driveway is rounded out of a small corner of the first floor volume and offset from the center, creating an L shape in plan with just enough space to park or drive a car.

The desire for symmetry and geometric order is suspended momentarily as it returns in the fourth iteration. A large half-circle drive, a module determined by an automobile’s turning radius, pushes back and defines the curved glass wall on the ground floor. To

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accommodate this gesture under the house’s footprint, two new bays are aggregated to the width and length of the plan—increasing the 3x3 nine-square plan to a 4x4 sixteen-square grid, at 5 meter modules. Furthermore, a ramp is introduced at this stage, dislocating the center line of piloti. The final design of Villa Savoye gains a spiral staircase through the entirety of the house but loses the staircase to the terrace. The third floor master suite and the fourth floor roof-garden are compressed into the second-story volume. The house is an assemblage of geometric elements: a volume woven with interior and exterior spaces and freed from the restrictions of solid masonry structure typical

While seeking pure aesthetics and the machine spirit, Le Cobusier worked with heavy and complex structures. Villa Shodhan employs a spatial organizing technique similar to the second floor of Villa Savoye that divides the building along a diagonal and terraces between column bays.

obando impressions of le corbusier

of European cities at the time. All of Le Corbusier’s ambitions of modern architecture were loaded into Villa Savoye. The houses shown here examine the blurring of Corbusier’s purist art and architecture, a game of architectural grammar that defined the machine aesthetic. Le Corbusier uses an interplay of rhythmic, geometric, and plastic operations as a methodological, not categorical, technique to form space. His struggle to achieve clarity under an ideal logical and intellectual framework created unique geometric solutions to a variety of contexts, objects, and scales where ambiguous and inexplicable elements persist.

In Shodhan, Corbusier employs this diagonal technique in section as well as in plan, creating a complex puzzle of woven concrete walls. The result is a spatial labyrinth of cruciform columns, primary and secondary stairs, a large ramp, and an assortment of lofted bedrooms. The cube shaped house’s deep brise soleil walls and roof exaggerate the building’s appearance of an ancient ruin excavated from the earth.

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Villa Baizeau is organized using interlocking terraces in section. This creates a push and pull of one-story and two-story spaces through a vertical sequence of the house. One passes through spaces as they come; they open up, and close up.

obando impressions of le corbusier Villa Curutchet, an urban infill house, embraces elements found in Savoye to organize its spatial sequence. The ramp from ground floor lifts one up to an open court that divides the house in two masses—the front mass for service to Dr. Curutchet’s office, and the other, his private residence. Also like Savoye, the use of piloti allows an autonomy for nonload bearing walls to gently curve and massage around circulation flows and objects such as bath tubs, toilets, beds, etc. The interior space is designed like a piece of furniture interacting with the human scale. (following) These four iterations of Villa Savoye show the evolution of the building’s design from a stacked monolithic series of boxes to the final composition. From the second iteration on, accommodating the automobile within the module of column bays became the impetus for determining the buildings scale, sequence, and composition (iteration 4 not shown).

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iteration 5

iteration 3

iteration 2

iteration 1

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obando

strategies for good clean fun sarah cancienne, m.arch 2012 katherine treppendahl, M.arch 2012 critics: Charlie menefee karolin Moellmann The issues facing present-day Manchester, Virginia, are many—a polluted riverfront prone to sewer overflows, abandoned industrial infrastructure, an isolating flood barrier. We propose to re-frame these conspicuous problems as resources that can restore the James River ecology, revitalize Manchester’s economy, and invite new forms of public exchange. Among the industries that might thrive in such a re-imagined landscape are fishing, mussel cultivation, forestry, and tourism, but the primary industry we would like to introduce is whiskey production.

Since a large portion of Manchester is located in the James River’s 200-year flood plain, it was not well-suited for residential development. Instead, due to its connection to shipping and railroads, it developed into a major industrial zone. Many industries took root along the river’s edge where an industrial canal (now abandoned) provided power and water for some of the factories.

cancienne+treppendahl good clean fun

Manchester mirrors Richmond across the James River, historically positioned as the city of industry opposite the city of commerce. These two municipalities maintained an interdependent relationship long before Manchester became incorporated into Richmond in 1910. Because the eastern fall line crosses the James River at Richmond, the river is impassable to boats. The port of Richmond was located south of the city, on the Manchester side of the James. A large network of railroads crossed the river, connecting the two cities and facilitating a network of local, regional, and national imports and exports.

In this era of shrinking cities, much of Manchester’s industry has fled, leaving behind large antiquated structures for which few can find alternate uses. Additionally, the area suffered from severe flooding in 1972 due to Hurricane Agnes, damaging large sections of Manchester. This led to the construction of a monolithic, multi-million dollar floodwall that creates a physical and visual barrier between Manchester and the river.

The complex present conditions of Manchester are further revealed in its relationship to the local ecology. For instance, the city’s Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) system effectively uses the river as an extension of the sewage system. While the city’s sewage is usually sent to a treatment plant before being released into the river, during heavy rain events, it enters directly into the river. Our site in Manchester contains three CSO outlets, and these were opened over a hundred times in this past year, sending untreated raw sewage and pollutants into the James.

Regardless of these infrastructural antagonisms between the city and the river, the greater Richmond area remains deeply tied to the river. All of the city’s drinking water is filtered river water, and despite the polluted quality of the James, a robust network of parks has been built around and within it. These parks are further upriver from Manchester, where many of the CSO outlets are located, and they are better developed on the north side of the James. Overall, north Richmond has remained vibrant, economically viable and tied to the river, while Manchester has not. The floodwall cuts it off from view to both downtown Richmond and the James River.

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industrial history

flood defenses

floodplain

CSO system

Today, Manchester is a place to pass through, not to stop—a wasted place disconnected from Richmond’s larger park circuits, a zone populated by vacant buildings and parking lots, an industrial graveyard where no one wants to live or visit.

Our intervention reopens the defunct canal to increase flow from the James River, creating a public park landscape shaped by the process of water filtration. This landscape connects into the CSO outlet system, mediating the release of sewage into the river by removing harmful pollutants before they re-enter the ecosystem. This approach to cleaning the river not only helps restore the James River’s ecological system, but also creates an engaging public space and an abundance of inexpensive potable water for the city. The water will be used for industrial services and will generate hydroelectric power, laying out a strong backbone for new industry development. An eighty foot tall barley silo, one of the tallest structures in Manchester, abuts the site we have identified for the water distillation park. Some of this barley could

water barley pool whiskey fishing cinema ice skating skate park

cancienne+treppendahl good clean fun linear park

industrial flow

public access

water system

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easily be transported across the street and processed in our distillery. The distillery’s byproducts (whiskey, beer, jobs, biofuel, cattle feed) will act as an economic generator for Manchester and a source of cultural pride.

The water filtration/distillation landscape will define a new park typology for the area and model a new idea of public space in a broader sense—a realm of open engagement and recreation, integrated meaningfully with productive industry and regenerative ecologies. The building provides a frame for exchanges between systems: the water distillation plant and whiskey distillery share a building space and mechanical processes with a series of public pools. The two zones exchange water, heat, and cooling in a productive, symbiotic relationship. Programmatic overlaps, such as poolside bars and saunas heated by barley roasting kilns, are facilitated through the double structure of folding concrete panels that house mechanical components and shaped spaces required for exchanges.

cancienne+treppendahl GOOD CLEAN FUN

The architecture of this project also challenges the idea of ground by completely integrating itself as a landscape machine that processes water, a position quite different from the adversarial stance that the heavy floodwall takes toward the river.

In order to address the flood wall and provide an alternative to its existing monofunctional program and tyrannical relationship to the ground, our building must transgress the floodwall and re-assert Manchester’s connection to the river and to the larger city of Richmond. This gesture creates a significant impetus for a burgeoning public space and allows Manchester to revisit its dialogue with downtown Richmond.

As the river water becomes cleaner, the ecology becomes richer, the potential for new industries increases, public space becomes more vibrant, and a new cultural identity emerges for Manchester and its citizens.

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RE-valuing Research A CONVERSATION WITH ROBIN DRipps, PROFESSOR of ArchitecturE iÑaki alday, Chair of the Department of ArchitecturE The students of Spring 2012 Paper Matters course, including Lunch 7 editors, sat down with the new chair of the Architecture department, Iñaki Alday and Professor Robin Dripps, to discuss the idea of conversation as it relates to changes in the school and new directions in the study and practice of architecture.

Alday and members of the faculty are responsible for many changes to School of Architecture during the last academic year, including a new format for reviews, that involves a debate at the end of the sessions to allow for a cross-sectional discussion on what the school as an entity was doing, rather than limit discussion to a single studio. In January, the entire school engaged in a vertical charette entitled the “Belmont Vortex Studio,” run by visiting critic Eduardo Arroyo, of NO.MAD Arquitectos. This ten day design exercise gave students the means to interact with each other in an entirely new way, and to see a direct interaction between themselves and the communities that will one day support them as designers. Finally, the school has been undergoing a series of curricular and faculty changes as Alday pushes the school to abandon the independent silos of academia in favor of a more discursive design concept.

Iñaki Alday: Today, we must think at a large scale. It something we cannot afford to do without. Take, for example, the single-family house. What does it mean to do a single-family house now in an ecological crisis? Even from this very clear and simple architectural problem, we cannot think in one discipline’s lens. We also cannot forbid the development of a single family house, because there is a lot of complexity happening at this scale.

A single family house is a complex series of relations. Take, for example, the Eduardo Arroyo house in El Escorial. That is a highly complex

WITH Nicole Keroack, M.ARch 2012; and Nathan Burgess, MlA 2013

Nathan Burgess: In my own work, one of the reasons why I at times feel the desire to get smaller and smaller with projects is due to fear: the larger the scale of the work that you set bounds for, the larger the network of systems you need to engage with. One of the responses is to get smaller. If I design a little garden, maybe I can get comfortable with the overwhelming complexity in any small issue. How can you reengage architecture with larger scales while still remaining critical?

You can wander in circles,

alday + dripps re-valuing design research

architecture that is related to many scales and personal, social, and geographical issues. By rigorously understanding and putting all that together it becomes a wonderful architectural piece. It is an example of how a process has multiple scales and complexity. It doesn’t make a shortcut at any moment. It is consistent to the end.

There are no banal sudden decisions that simplify the solution.

Robin Dripps: I think the answer is which is not helpful, or you can simple. A garden will always have to be make ovals that start at the understood as operating within a larger context. The fundamental infrastructure core of an idea, move out into of even the smallest garden will be the world and then return to intimately linked to larger networks.

Irrigation, soil development, microclimatic evaluate the proposal. influences, resource transport, etc., are a few obvious pieces that depend on and can even influence larger networks. The interactions between such vastly different scales is not always apparent so that an obligation of designing small ought to be sure that local decisions make sense relative to the larger networks and have a positive impact in the larger context.

NB: Trying to develop solutions that allow people to deal with complexity while still arriving at a resolved proposition seems like a concern for design studios. One of the issues within studios that I have been a part of is trying to get at the complexity within one work, while also developing a spatial proposition connected to those issues. This is a serious challenge.

IA: You can wander in circles, which is not helpful, or you can make ovals that start at the core of an idea, move out into the world and then return to evaluate the proposal. The proposition is not something that appears in a particular moment in time, it is about engaging in criticism and going back, and then coming back again.

It’s about asking: “What do you want to address? What do you want to solve with your research?” Wh­­en you are doing this process, you are framing a problem and a set of problems, and you are looking for solutions. You are going back out and bringing them back again, not simply wandering.

RD: Commitment and risk are critical to advancing design research. Having an idea means accepting the risk that you might be wrong. But the failure to commit to an

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idea leaves you with nothing to go on. It is helpful for me to recognize that the validity of an initiating idea is not as important as is the process by which I then reflect on that idea to make it valid. By situating your initial intuition within a larger critical framework you might discover you were wrong. But, if so, you also now can see why and then more effectively reframe your hypothesis. The condition that you are describing is a lack of commitment probably due to anxiety about committing to something that you do not know the answer to at this point. The better approach would be to just commit and get going and then figure out where you are headed. At least this sets a process in motion.

Nicole Keroack: So I think what you are talking about, what Nate is alluding to as a problem, is not a separation between research and design. What you are talking about is a recursive process, where you are constantly responding, and simultaneously going back, and finding more information, and testing ideas.

RD: There is no credible way to separate design and research. When you look at the etymological origins of the various words describing invention, creation, searching, and researching, you find a remarkable consistency in how they overlap.

By situating your initial intuition within a larger critical framework you might discover you were

IA: This is exactly our strength, because there are much better researchers, in every field, and our strength is this capacity to propose, research, and propose. This is distinctive for us.

wrong. But, if so, you also

NK: And I think this mode of research relates to this new initiative within the now can see why and then school of architecture to break down more effectively reframe your the silos of the independent disciplines.

If reserach and design is all about the hypothesis. confluence of these different types of knowledge, then breaking down the barriers between disciplines facilitates the architectural design-research process. Then you can borrow knowledge and incorporate it, and test it.

NB: What youre both describing is then a conversational approach to designing something, where the first thing you do is ask a question. For example, I stated that my studio did not work out for a certain reason, but you tell me that I need to think about it, to frame it differently to get a response.

RD: Yes. This reframing often becomes the most creative part of design. We might find that even the most overlooked and humble acts have more significance than imagined. For instance when I open the tap to get water at my house, what is actually set in motion? Where is that water coming from and where will it end up? Immediately I develop an image of the whole county and its water infrastructure and with this the divisive politics of water. I recall the many periods of drought and how water was at least

alday + dripps

IA: Our committment in the end is to solve problems. It’s very simplistic, but, when you are designing, it is this process of proposing, and stepping back, and criticizing.

It is trying to frame the problem—not what is your problem, but what is the problem.

What you are looking for is the substantial problem that you are trying to address.

And this is completely different, because we can create our own problems in a safe environment, in which nothing actually happens. When you have to go and be relevant, you are no longer just proposing your problem, you are identifying important problems and you are using your knowledge and capacity to solve them. It’s very different because one is highly relevant, and the other irrelevant. In other disciplines, there is no doubt, if you are a doctor, you are solving a person’s knee problem, not your knee problem. Even artists are relevant because they show another way of looking at a problem, and it is not a matter of personal issues, it’s about involvement in the world. Now we have big problems in society and all of us have different capacities to help to solve them.

re-valuing design research

for a moment more valued. I wonder about the effect my local action will have on the larger ecologies. At this moment, the humble tap has transcended its instrumental value and become part of the political and ecological context. How we design with this understanding is the challenge.

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[The term 'lunch' is an informal derivation of the word luncheon. The colloquialism of the term coupled with some 'talk of you and me' speaks to the core intention of this collection. lunch is inspired by chance; by chance discussions that grow from a meal in a shared setting and by chance discussions that alter or challenge views of the space and place we inhabit. lunch provides for the meeting of diverse voices in common place tended by a casual atmosphere.

To lunch suggests an escape from the day's work; perhaps even a break. The works collected in previous editions of lunch mix a range of studies, conversations, drawings, statements, and stories that together aspire to reflect the student and educational experience at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.]

Kevin Bell, M.Arch 2006 Matthew Ibarra, M.Arch 2006 Ryan Moody, M.Arch 2007