lunch 4: Margin

lunch volume 4 : margin

lunch volume 4 : margin

University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall P.O. Box 400122 Charlottesville VA 22904-4122

volume 4

margin

volume 4

margin

University of Virginia School of Architecture

RECIPE: lunch University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall PO Box 400122 Charlottesville VA 22904-4122 Find us on the web: www.arch.virginia.edu/lunch Copyright Š 2009 University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, VA All rights reserved.

Editors: Noah Bolton, Robert Couch, and Lauren Hackney Cover image by Suzanne Mathew Printed in the United States by Carter Printing, Richmond, VA For future volumes, lunch is accepting submissions from alumni, students, former and current faculty of the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Digital materials and submission inquiries should be sent to the lunchbox at archlunch@virginia.edu.

The editors would like to thank the students, faculty, and alumni who submitted their work for publication, and the eleven fantastic copy editors who helped us construct the narrative of the journal.

We are grateful to Ellen Cathey, Elizabeth Fortune, Erica Spangler, Dean Karen Van Lengen, Derry Voysey Wade, the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and the School of Architecture Foundation for their support and dedication that make lunch possible each year.

Special thanks to the Architecture Class of 1983 for their generous support of this year’s journal.

Finally, many thanks to our faculty advisors: Phoebe Crisman, Beth Meyer, and Jeff Ponitz.

To support lunch, please contact: School of Architecture Foundation PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4122 434.924.7149 http://www.arch.virginia.edu/alumni/giving

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number is available.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9771024-8-8 ISSN: 1931-7786

lunch volume 4: margin

margin Margin describes a physical condition of demarcation:

a line drawn, a border

established, an edge of a place, a point of transition from one state to another: an extreme condition isolated from, or by, its defining construct. Margins are inherently bound to a particular condition that defines them.

As a print journal, we begin with the most tangible condition: the hand and the page.

When a writer fills a blank page with text, its edges become margins, the negative space to the positive subject. These margins mediate between the stories on the page and the literal edge of the page, and between the stories on the page and the hands of the reader; a space of empathy, margins are spaces for rewriting, perceiving, questioning, locating. They are palimpsests, traces of a previous condition [the blank page] and sites for collective reaction [the blank page and the writer and reader].

The following projects dwell in spatial, material, and liminal margins at many scales and in many contexts, but share fundamental implications with the hand, the page: margins are particular, specific, activated by the words, thoughts, and actions that inhabit them.

Charlottesville, Virginia April 17, 2009

EDITORS: Noah Bolton | Robert Couch | Lauren Hackney

LUNCH TEAM: AJ Artemel Mary Becica Megan Driscoll Ryan Ives Sarah Kunkel

David Malda Suzanne Mathew Alison Quade James Quarles Kurt Petschke

Julia Price Jessica Terdeman Randall Winston

Sanda Iliescu

OPENNESS, INCOMPLETENESS, & THE BEAUTY OF MARGINS Jay Cantrell

Theaters of construction Heidi Leinbach

[re]Activating riverview Zoe Edgecomb

Representing the Industrial Landscape John Quale

ecoMOD SHELTER Jeff Ponitz

[de]materialized [de]light Craig Borum

MIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA Daphne Lasky | Noah Bolton

past walls future borders Ryan Ives

One photo, please Louis Nelson

Preservation, People, and Place Andrea Hubbell

senior service house Susie Ranney

cabbagetown Robert Couch

South by Southeast Serena Nelson

Moses is dead. Can we kill the expressway?

Shanti Fjord Levy

FINDING COMPLEXITY IN THE POST-SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE Emily Williamson

Inhabiting the Watershed Nataly Gattegno

Sun City and the Suburban Desert Insil Lee | Justin Sculthorpe

M.A.D.E. IN VEGAS Kurt Petschke

BASECAMP: HAWAII!

2 22 28 36 42 54 60 78 94 100 108 112 122 130 138 152 162 172 178

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.

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

Jack’s Box (Kitchen Table Collage, Sanda Iliescu).

Note: All photographs by Sanda Iliescu unless otherwise noted.

Openness, Incompleteness, and the Beauty of Margins Sanda Iliescu Associate Professor in Art and Architecture

Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt and painter Robert Slutzky are visual artists who also composed with words. Through writing, each shaped our understanding of the artistic project as one that includes both making and ideas about how and why we make art. Ideas in Slutzky’s Transparency essays and LeWitt’s Sentences and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art continue to inspire me, perhaps more now then when I first encountered them as a student.

As I now teach art to students at the University of Virginia, two questions come to mind. Beyond their personal generosity and encouragement what have these two mentors offered me? Why should their works and words continue to influence my artwork, writing, and teaching? My most concise answer is that LeWitt and Slutzky have made conceptually clear as well as viscerally tangible for me the concept of artistic openness—openness as a way of making and experiencing art, and also openness as an aesthetic attitude that values incompleteness and the beauty of margins.

I. Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #394 at the University of Virginia (lead draftsman: Roland Lusk; draftspersons: Patrick Costello, Lauren Hackney, Erin Hannegan, Maggie Hansen, Tom Hogge, Hama Kim, Michael Petrus, Rachel Singel, Supriya Sudan)

Sol LeWitt taught me to remain open to unexpected forms of beauty. Consider the idea of a simple, repetitive structure.

Repetition? How can that be? As a young

student, I believed art should represent the complexities and contradictions of life, and that it should celebrate expression and emotion. From LeWitt I learned that simplicity and structure have their own elegance and eloquence. At times, repetition is not dull at all but conveys a deeply felt sense of humanity.

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Draftsperson Rachel Singel works on Wall Drawing #394.

Like a recipe, LeWitt’s instructions for wall drawings tell us how to make a wall-sized composition. The full title for his Wall Drawing #394 reads: White wall 12 in. square grid drawn in pencil In each square one of twelve kinds of lines: straight, not-straight, or broken; horizontal median, vertical median, diagonal left or diagonal right; drawn in black crayon.

Yet, as every cook knows, not all dishes based on the same recipe turn out the same. “Even if the same draftsperson follows the same plan twice,” wrote LeWitt in 1971, “there would be two different works of art. No one can do the same thing twice.” Wall Drawing #394 as executed at the University of Virginia Art Museum in January, 2009 by 12 students, alumni, and faculty is unique. It represents the labor, decisions, and experiences of a particular team working at a particular place and time. Rather than a reproduction or recreation, this drawing is a re-enactment of LeWitt’s original recipe. To see the uniqueness of this reenactment, it is necessary to look at the story of how this artwork was created, not just at the end result. We must, in a sense, look at the margins.

Over the span of ten days we worked on scaffolding, not unlike workers welding steel or pouring concrete.

Under the guidance of LeWitt draftsman Roland Lusk, eleven pairs of hands made this unique drawing in a unique place. We measured and re-measured; we calculated dimensions, we sanded and painted small imperfections—scratches, bumps, specks caught in the white base paint. By the fourth day, staff at the museum were getting worried: we had not yet drawn a single line. We were nervous but also felt engrossed in the work. We discovered how imperfect and complex this “empty” wall was, how its edges bowed in and out.

We had to adjust the grid: not the specified 12 inches, but 12 1/8 inches by 12 1/16 inches. The squares at the margins became critical: they had to vary imperceptibly, getting slightly larger or smaller, accommodating the irregular curving of side walls, floor, and ceiling.

On the fourth day we began drawing immeasurably delicate graphite lines: thin and silvery like gossamer.

By the fifth day we had constructed our geometrical spider web. On the sixth day we practiced making bold, dark crayon lines on a separate wall board. The “not-straight” lines were drawn entirely free-hand and proved difficult: hand and crayon move freely, and the wrist rotates as the crayon traces a line, its thickness equal to the crayon’s diameter. Once the path’s thickness has been

is dark yet still open, still showing the wall’s minute texture. Looked at closely, each line’s inner surface has an effect of irradiance: a quality that recalls the peculiar luminosity of dark areas in a drawing by Georges Seurat. From a distance, the “not straight” line is also open, yet in a different way. Each one of us imagined different metaphors: a wave, a sound, the outline of a hill, a snake, the motion of fish, a fragment of a human silhouette. LeWitt’s deliberately neutral, non-biased description of a curve as “not-straight” encourages a wide-open field of possibilities. At the end, “broken” lines became my favorites: they occupy a middle position, somewhere in-between the “straight” and the “not straight.” Like stitching lines, they sew together white and black. The broken line is deliberately incomplete, and imperfect. Also, perhaps, the most imaginary. An axis.

A rhythm. A margin. A border. A place where one territory on a map adjoins another.

But unlike maps, LeWitt’s lines are not only visual. They concern all our senses and our sense of balance and gravity. They are about the sense of smell: the scent of crayons and fresh paint. They invite us to get close and imagine we “touch” the lines’ interior textures. While we drew these lines, we literally touched the wall, which helped us keep our balance, to judge gravity and weight.

We came to know this wall. Bright, luminous white: impenetrable, yet generous and expansive.

Open and imperfect. Small ridges, a graining that seems like smooth, sunlit sand seen under water.

Little bumps evenly dispersed as a luminous field. But also, while we drew together, we heard a field of sound. The soft, repetitive tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap of crayons touching the wall while leaving small deposits of waxy black. Occasionally, we heard a harsh scraping sound. A line did not come out right: it was too wide, or uneven, or opaque—the wall’s pores closed. The line was scraped, the wall area washed, and repainted. The next day, when the paint dried, a pair of hands

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

progresses from a faint, barely visible impression to a bold, geometrical statement. At the end, it

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faintly marked, the hand traces and re-traces that same journey perhaps 50 or 60 times. The line

began again, cautiously re-delineating a new journey. Erasing was a part of making.

On February 6, the day of the opening of the show, “The Hand and Soul,” a little boy walked through LeWitt’s Incomplete, Open Cube 7/18, before the museum guard could stop him.

Upon first visiting the exhibit, my 11-year-old son, Gabriel, had also wanted to walk through the sculpture. I stopped him, but I was thrilled at seeing this impulse. I too imagined the same journey through and around LeWitt’s open form. Similarly, as I look at Wall Drawing #394, my eyes meander in an out of its many incomplete, open squares. As we made the drawing, it was important that we left such serendipitous squares open: not closed (with all four sides drawn in), but freely spilling their white inner shapes outwards, towards other areas of the drawing.

Unlike most LeWitt line-based drawings, Wall Drawing #394 is open in yet another way. LeWitt specified that it is “up to the draftsman” to decide which line (among 12 possible options) goes inside each grid unit. We had not one, but 12 draftspersons. How can so many people decide: how can we all participate? Having each of us compose a different area of the drawing would likely fragment it into different, potentially isolated zones. Wanting to disperse ourselves throughout the field, we began in an egalitarian, aleatoric way by pulling numbers out of a hat. The numbers 1

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A not-straight line of Wall Drawing #394 (photograph by Kirk Martini); Incomplete, Open Cube (Sol LeWitt).

to 300 indicated the location of individual grid units. Each draftsperson (or group of two) got 30 locations sprinkled at random over the wall. Each decided, according to his or her whim or rule, 30 lines at 30 locations. We assembled these decisions as the map for the overall drawing. We discussed it as a group and judged it. Josef Albers (Robert Slutzky’s teacher) had argued that “every square inch of the surface is as important as every other square inch.” In trying to prevent visual hierarchies and render every grid unit equally important, we made adjustments to our aleatoric diagram and shifted lines around. We eliminated closed figures, such as complete squares or symmetrical star shapes. We hoped to create an “open” field, an expansive “all-over” composition. Our intention was to let each viewer meander freely, like a child running in and out of LeWitt’s Incomplete, Open Cube.

Attracted by an artwork’s physical presence, and its immediate, sensual forms, we tend to ignore the process of making and conceiving. Part of this process is physical, the shaping and re-shaping of materials. Another part is mental: the thinking and refining of a concept. Sol LeWitt took this usually neglected conceptual part and turned it into a center. He proposed that drawing is an idea about how to make a drawing. LeWitt’s wall drawings are simple, therefore easy to remember and evanescent—drawn, and then, after a period of weeks or years, white-washed. Unlike most artworks, they endure not as physical artifacts, but as remembered acts and experiences.

“Ideas,” wrote Sol LeWitt, “cannot be owned. They belong to whomever understands them.” Art as an idea is an open, democratic proposition. This statement is not as radical as we might imagine. Art in a public museum is open to all. Walk inside and look. See something that thrills you. Imagine an idea about it.

Make a connection. By engaging in this way of understanding and experiencing art, we become part owners: we participate in the life of a public institution.

The concept of “drawing as idea” renders drawing rational and therefore teachable. Drawing, which is usually considered the most personal and idiosyncratic art form, becomes public and discursive. While offering unique individual experiences, drawing can also be collaborative and take on the large scale of architecture.

In making LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #394 at the University of Virginia, we collaborated—we labored together.

Our shared experiences were possible because we had a rational map: LeWitt’s terse, economical instructions.

This rational map or plan allowed the drawing to expand to the size of a room or the architecture of the museum. Yet LeWitt’s wall drawing is also unlike architecture in its temporality and fragility. Wall Drawing #394 is deliberately ephemeral: at the end of April, 2009, the museum will scrape, wash, and whitewash the wall. Another layer of paint will receive other artworks. Perhaps at some future point, other hands will

make another wall drawing on this same wall. This ephemerality is at the heart of Sol LeWitt’s composition. The precision and delicacy of the hand-drawn lines moves us in part because we know they are not forever. They endure imaginatively, not as physical objects but as ideas.

Consider a poem written by an American poet (Wallace Stevens), with a French title (Anglais Mort

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II. Poem Drawing (A Little Less…)

is provided by the music of a German composer (Brahms). America. France. England. Italy.

Germany. The opening line of this poem, “A little less returned for him each spring,” suggests both openness and incompleteness. This, however, is not the bold, heroic incompleteness of LeWitt.

It is the incompleteness of loss. A little less: a failure to return, a dimming of light, a lessening of energy, a failure to bloom.

This sequence of 24 drawings grew from my readings of this poem. I started by simply writing and re-writing the poem’s lines in cursive, flowing handwriting. I wrote with my right hand, and, for the sake of balance, I also wrote with my left hand, as reversed or mirror writing. I wrote slowly, while sensing my entire body. I wished to create physical, tactile drawings that expressed both love and a sense of loss.

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

à Florence), about an Englishman, dying in an Italian city (Florence), a man whose greatest solace

Draftsperson Supriya Sudan touches up a broken line.

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Any hand-written note (a recipe, to do list, a prayer, an address) evidences the motions of a person.

A way of scribbling or scratching one’s letters, of linking and spacing lines reveals the grip of the hand, a speed of movement, an inclination. While my mother was dying in 2004, the only drawing

one of her handwritten notes brings her back in an immediate and profound way, a way more potent than any object or photograph.

Like LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #394, this drawing project is rational. Paradoxically, it is also highly irrational. Writing a poem is a rational act that can also be taken to irrational extremes. Kevin Sullivan, a computer science professor at UVa who designed a code that follows the process of Poem Drawing, calculated that in the course of this project I wrote by hand a total of 4,900 lines.

This rational number implies madness. Why, after all, should one write the same thing 4,900 times? Poem Drawing is an homage to my mother: a human being who, like all of us, was rational and simultaneously irrational. She was a pragmatic thinker and a mad dreamer.

Poem Drawing is intimate, not large or heroic. It is dirty, dusty, and impure. It is about loss: the necessity to think of death rationally, and the impossibility of doing so. It is not made of black and white, but in-between grays. Poem Drawing is a meditation on memory. I write the poem and then erase it. I re-write and erase again. Erasure is not deletion. Erasure remains open and incomplete. It creates fragments, bits and pieces: stains and smudges, tiny grooves in the paper, gray dust. Like erasure, death is not an absolute: it is not complete closure. It leaves so much behind. Perhaps, as Stevens suggests, death is transformation.

Anglais Mort à Florence A little less returned for him each spring.

Music began to fail him. Brahms, although

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

fingers swollen by medication, thin, transparent tubes linked to transparent veins. Now, finding

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I was able to make of her was a sketch of her hand. A small hand lying on a pillow in the hospital,

His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight, Certain of its uncertainty, in which That dark companion left him unconsoled For a self returning mostly memory.

Only last year he said that the naked moon Was not the moon he used to see, to feel (In the pale coherences of moon and mood When he was young), naked and alien, More leanly shining in a lankier sky.

Stevens’ poem describes a condition of being in-between. It suggests traversing and perhaps transgressing boundaries: between music and self (the Englishman and Brahms), between nature and culture (music and the moon), between past and present (youth and age). The poem invokes hope (the hope of spring, beginnings, and music), and also hopelessness (failure to return, diminishment, and death).

Poem Drawing (Sanda Iliescu; photograph by Kirk Martini).

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The poem’s title is a curt impersonal announcement, as if in a newspaper: Englishman dead in Florence.

It tells us the Englishman is an expatriate—an outsider. Like the moon he often contemplates, this “lean” Englishman is “naked and alien.” He treasures his memories, remembering another home of his youth.

Neither of this place nor of that, this nameless man is a loner. Why else such a cold, impersonal notice of his death? The man is not described as a musician, pianist, or poet, but merely as a dead man. He is not dying, but dead. He is a man at the end or margin of life. Like the edge of a painting, death seems sharp and crisp.

By itself, the title suggests death is brutal. Under its sway, even the moon “grows” cadaverous: Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.

He used his reason, exercised his will, Turning in time to Brahms, as alternate Order and rationality is perhaps our one brightest hope. Faced with the devastation of disease that distorts even his visions of the moon, the Englishman proposes order and luminous rationality: he uses his reason and exercises his will.

Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s instructions for wall drawings, I designed a script: a set of simple instructions that allow for successive sequences of writing and erasing. Write the poem. Erase. Re-write the poem, this time a little less (one line less). Erase. Re-write, again a little less (two lines less). Erase. Re-write the poem, again a little less (this time three lines less. Erase… and so on. Written rigorously, Poem Drawing is a simple, doubly-recursive script: Prepare 24 sheets of drawing paper numbered sequentially from #1 to #24.

1. Go to drawing #1. If the drawing is blank, write the poem’s all 24 lines, then go to step 2.

Otherwise, erase the drawing and re-write the poem one line less than in the version you have just erased. (For example, if you have just erased the poem’s first 24 lines, then write down the poem’s first 23 lines; if you have just erased the poem’s first 23 lines, then write the poem’s first 22 lines, and so on.) If the drawing now has only one line written on it—the drawing’s first line—with everything else erased, then the drawing process is complete. Otherwise, go to step 2.

2. Go to next drawing in sequence. If the paper is blank (with no drawing and no erasures), write the poem’s first 24 lines and then return to step 1. Otherwise, erase the drawing and re-write the poem, this time one line less than in the version you have just erased. Repeat step 2.

The first drawing (Poem Drawing #1) is almost all emptiness. Here the incompleteness is essentially one of loss, of gray ghosts, and dust. The drawing is a palimpsest of 24 successive actions: 24 writings and 24 erasures are overlapped. The Greek word palimpsestus, literally to rub smooth, comes from palin, meaning “again,” and psen, meaning “to rub smooth.” The word “again” implies a structured repetition in time: write and erase again, and then again.

The great surprise of this project is that each time I wrote, I saw something new. Miraculous discoveries were embedded in a process and a poem I thought I knew so well. I noticed, for instance, that the darkest moment in the poem is its middle, thirteenth line: “Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.” On either side of this, I discovered gradual, waving motions: a rising towards hope, a sinking to despair. I discovered, or rather Stevens showed me, that hope is as much about the past as it is about the future: hope has to do with a potential for memory. The Englishman becomes one with the music of Brahms through remembering his earlier visions of Brahms. He becomes one with the moon (and nature) through remembering the moon of his youth. These transformations are possible because he remains capable of experiencing the present while

Iliescu As I wrote, I remembered. I listened. I heard the repetition of one line three times, at equal intervals. But he remembered the time when he stood alone. This line first appears at the end of a stanza, then re-appears as the mid-point of the stanza, and, in the poem’s last stanza, it becomes the opening line. The end becomes a beginning.

In speech. He was that music and himself.

They were particles of order, a single majesty: But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

simultaneously remembering the past.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police; But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He yielded himself to that single majesty; But he remembered the time when he stood alone, When to be and delight to be seemed to be one, Before the colors deepened and grew small.

III. Two paintings by Robert Slutzky: Blue Cross (1999), & Untitled (n.d.)

Before the colors deepened and grew small. How can colors grow small? I cannot ask such a question without remembering my teacher, the painter Robert Slutzky. He taught me the structure and the “shape” of color. Color not as decoration, but as space. Color both understood and felt. Color simultaneously as idea and delightful optical vibration.

Color next to color. Color not alone, but in relation to other colors. The question “what is your favorite color?” made little sense to Robert Slutzky. All are beautiful, or none, depending on how

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they are arranged. So in paintings such as Untitled (1999), which I like to call “Blue Cross Painting,” and Untitled (n.d.), we see not any one color but color adjacencies.

When looking at “Blue Cross Painting,” I often squint my eyes. Usually, I am first drawn to an unlikely pair: intense blue next to vibrating purple. These two colors seem so unlike each other and yet so balanced. The purple has a peculiar optical zest or “zing.” Purples usually do for they bring together two extremes of the spectrum: violet (next to invisible ultraviolet), and, at the opposite extreme, red (next to invisible infrared).

An overlap of extremes, purples are rare, precious, and powerful. As if to subdue the power and zest of purple, Slutzky placed it below the blue. The lighter blue occupies a larger area and seems to float on top.

Deferentially, the smaller purple slides below. Blue and purple form an active, precarious equilibrium. Each hue is equally important. Each remains distinctly itself.

I slide my eyes across the gray at the painting’s center—a gray that is a mixture of all the painting’s hues—I see, at the very top margin, a tiny sliver of orange. The blue reaches towards and aligns with its complement, orange. Small, yet powerfully bright, this patch of orange flame floats up there: it might be easy to miss, but for its saturation. It exists at the margin, almost an outsider.

Seeing the relationship of blue to orange makes me consider the canvas as a whole. Its various hues are structured as complementary pairs. Red reaches to its opposite, green. Blue reaches to its opposite, orange.

Purple reaches to its opposite, yellow. The rainbow’s hues are set in diagonal opposition. Like all of Slutzky’s paintings, this composition is a meditation on the rainbow, on ROYGBIV, or, as the poet John Hollader puts it, an imaginary character named Roy G. Biv: The painter said: “If one were to imagine a bluish orange, it would have to feel like a southwesterly north wind.” “No,” that would be a reddish green,” said the other painter.” “It is all the same to me,” said Roy G. Biv. (John Hollander, Spectral Emanations, New York: Atheneum, 1978) “Blue Cross Painting” is part of a series Slutzky called his tic-tac-toe paintings. Tic-tac-toe is a child’s game, a simple and playful structure from the everyday. Two verticals crossed by two horizontals describe nine equal places, what architects call “the nine-square.” More spatial than the cross, the tic-tac-toe has an empty space at its center.

All the colors in “Blue Cross Painting” are fragments of large tic-tac-toe figures, each made by broad bands.

In Untitled (n.d.), the tic-tac-toe figures are drawn with very thin lines. In both cases, the tic-tac-toes extend beyond the margins. The canvas is incomplete, a fragment of a larger imaginary world. A world expands beyond the margins and the painting is but a window, a view into that world. That bright orange bit at the top of the “Blue Cross Painting” is but a fragment: the little toe of a much larger, orange tic-tac-toe.

Brilliant, pure hues always occur at the edges of Slutzky’s canvases. The center is often gray. This central gray recalls the luminosity of light and air—the sky on an overcast winter day or the underside of summer clouds—but also, paradoxically, the solidity of stone.

In Untitled (n.d.), colors “grow small” and become color: yellow gray at the top, rose-gray in the middle,

Iliescu blue-gray below. Next to the grays, the painting shows intensely colored lines—some razor sharp and brilliantly pure, others slightly more muted and wider. These lines bring to mind a description from Homer, “the rosy-fingered dawn.”

In their intensity, the colored fingers of Untitled (n.d.) might easily dominate and overshadow the subtle grays. This does not happen because, while de-saturated, the ground is structured.

Like the lines, it too is shaped as a collection of nine-square figures. Once we recognize Slutzky’s recurrent tic-tac-toes, the gray ceases to be just a ground and becomes an active field. The grays push forward, while the lines, despite their vivacity, recede. No longer figures—or fingers—lines are now fissures, or elongated cuts within the gray field. These slits offer fragmentary views of an intensely brilliant world that lies beyond the grays: a distant, yet vibrant landscape of the sun (or the moon). The grays are up-close and appear filled with terrestrial possibility. Slutzky’s colored

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

Wall Drawing #394 (Sol LeWitt); Blue Cross Painting, Untitled (n.d.). (Robert Slutzky).

grays suggest substances we remember: granite, slate, fog, mist, or vapor.

IV. Kitchen Table Collages At the edges of my daily routines, I find bits and pieces: torn fragments and scraps, the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. Pieces discarded from my book manuscript, to do lists, grocery lists, brown paper bags in which I pack my son’s daily lunch. Occasionally I arrange these small fragments on my kitchen table. Some I save; others I toss; a few of them make their way into a collage.

“Kitchen Table Collages” are meditations in shades of brown: not Slutzky’s luminous grays—not a distant, heroic sky—but a look up close to the earth. Browns are impure grays, grays with a bit of warmth added. They are incomplete, open grays: grays that fail to achieve neutrality. Yet, like Slutztky’s grays, the browns of these collages are mixed and at times complicated: red-browns, yellow browns, gray browns, and almost-white browns. The solid, middle-tone brown is like my mother’s kitchen table. Yellow browns recall sand, shells, and pebbles. Shades of coppery, orange brown evoke the colors of clay in Virginia. Brown is the color old things—old paper-backs, old shoes, old silver. Brown is also the color of spring and fall, the in-between seasons—new twigs and shoots, freshly plowed earth, autumn leaves.

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How do I assemble all these earthy fragments and incongruous brown bits? How do I connect the lines of printed text, the hand-written notes (my husband’s editing of the book manuscript, our grocery list)? My mother loved to embroider and she left me a collection of brightly colored

others are embroidered. Unlike drawn lines, sewn lines cast tiny shadows.

As in Slutzky’s paintings, the center remains sparse and nearly empty. Yet this emptiness is not cool gray, but a warmer, golden white. It suggests the tactile emptiness of a freshly cleaned kitchen table or writing desk. Scraps of paper from the recycling bin or the edges of my desk suggest titles: Peas in a Pod, Eva, Flight, Maria’s Box, Jack’s Box. Color occurs more at the margins of the collage than at its center. It is at their edges that we touch things such as a piece of paper or a book. Here at the margins, the imaginary world of the collage meets the real world of touch.

Remembering my mother’s embroideries, I strive to make things that invite the viewer up close.

Unlike LeWitt or Slutzky, I seek a sense of intimacy. These collages mirror the size of handheld objects. They recall every day, useful things: a book or yellow notepad, a sewing box. The size of a floor tile is usually 12 by 12 inches. A poem printed on a page takes no more than 8 ½ by 11 inches. Yet this tiny space is also infinite, a space of imagination or what we might call the soul.

There are times when the soul needs to soar, to create a vast wall drawing that takes up an entire room. There are other times when the landscape of dreams needs no more than what Robert Slutzky called his “wing span:” the dimension defined by his outstretched arms or about 5 feet.

There are also times when the space of the soul can be constructed within the intimate and modest space of a handheld page.

V. Drawings and Collages as Ethical Metaphors: my students’ work

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

scraps, candy wrappers. In the collages, some lines are drawn with colored pencil or pen and

Iliescu

cotton threads. I use these threads to stitch and sew together pieces of paper: printed strips, paper

It is fitting that, in discussing openness, I should end with my students. Their passionate research and boundless energy reframes the lessons of LeWitt and Slutzky in surprising and unanticipated ways. These young artists and designers continually reinterpret our shared past, extending and transforming its margins.

During my second year teaching at the University of Virginia, three fourth year undergraduates, Kristi Dykema, Hana Kim, and Kate Snyder, approached me with the idea of teaching a studio class in painting and drawing within the School of Architecture. Our discussions lead to a very different kind of studio course: a studio that was as much about making tangible objects as it was about exploring ideas about how and why we make. Unlike a typical studio class or theory seminar, this class would combine practical lessons in painting, drawing and collage making, with exploring theoretical and historical concepts through reading and writing.

Over the years, what began as an informal seminar with three students meeting at my studio grew into two full courses: Drawing and Collage Making and Painting and Public Art. Like Sol LeWitt and Bob Slutzky, we stress the process rather then the artistic product, and define painting and drawing “as activities on a flat plane.” We use traditional artistic methods (watercolor and ink Untitled (N.D.) (Robert Slutzky); Mr. Ed (Kitchen Table Collage, Sanda Iliescu).

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Sara Altman, Tom Hogge, and Sarah Shelton: “Drip Field” Inspired by the collaborative and scripted wall drawings of Sol Lewitt and the intensely textured “chalk” drawings of Cy Twombly, our “Drip Field” establishes a framework for the construction of a modular, scalable wall drawing.

We selected a forgotten, un-celebrated yet intensely used strip of space in Campbell Hall, where a large clock above suggested the issue of time. Superimposed washes of white and black create the ground for a grid that foregrounds time as a critical element. A horizontal datum establishes hours, a vertical datum, minutes: in LeWittian fashion, this determines a particular location for a particular drawing act in time. Each of us worked alone, gradually assembling a field of dense vertical drips balancing a layered ground of horizontal brush strokes.

on paper, acrylics on canvas) as well as unusual tools and materials (sidewalk chalk, earth, trash, recycled materials). Intellectually, our intention is to research the difficult relationship between life and art. Our fundamental, yet not uncontested, premise is that aesthetic form and ethical content, while conceptually distinct, represent deeply interrelated ways of seeing and experiencing

revelations actually matter.”

While we spend much time reading, writing and discussing ideas, the forms we make with our hands do not merely illustrate intellectual concepts. Rather, forms challenge, transform or transcend concepts. As students engage in a cyclical process from image to idea, and from idea to image, they occasionally encounter moments of transparent overlaps: instances in which forms speak to us both intellectually and sensually. This overlap remains elusive and unpredictable: something at the margins or edges of consciousness.

Alison Davids: “Cat’s Cradle” Through a careful and patient drawing process, I repeat small gestures again and again. I accumulate bits of information and strive to construct relationships. I place together the beginning pages of different books: each is transformed when placed next to its neighbors. Their divergent themes awkwardly abut one another until the significance of each becomes connected to the other and to the whole with bold red line. Every story connected to every other story, represented by two words.

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

and make it matter…not simply to transform ideas or revelations into matter, but to make those

Iliescu

the world. As contemporary artist Estella Conwin Majosos writes, we hope to “search for the good

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Iliescu These drawings and paintings explore ideas of boundary. Some boundaries are physical edges one can touch, like the skin of the body and the walls of a building; others grow from thought and belief, like notions of social identity and divisions of space as city or as nature.

Yet these boundaries are not opaque, but fluid and mutable.

How do margins blur? How do they shift and transform into something new?

How does the individual transcend the self to become a group? And what effect does a group have on individuals that lie outside—at the margins? What is the boundary of a city? Where does nature begin and city end? What might happen at the intersections of two seemingly separate beings or systems?

Sara Altman: “Porcelain Figures”

openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins

Sarah Shelton: “Circles and Squares” and “City Nature”

Each day, as a kind of ritual or meditation, I carefully consider the form of two small porcelain figures: their contours and reflections, the nature of inbetween spaces, the way their outlines redefine the margins of surrounding space. I explore the nature of depth and flatness: how a range of lines and tones can seek to suggest both.

The exploration repeats every day. It is an intimate celebration of two simple, everyday objects; not objects common to everyone, but instead specific, personal, and known in a ritualistic way. I seek ways of abstracting the figures, letting them become a field, while preserving their inherent and essential delicacy.

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Tom Hogge: “Folded” “Folded” abstracts the paper airplane as a series of folding actions with a specific set of instructions: 1. Use one vertical and one horizontal line to divide the paper into quarters.

2. Use one vertical and one horizontal line that extend to the edges of the page to divide one of those quarters into quarters.

3. Choose one point. Label this point [1] and continue numbering endpoints around the page with consecutive integers to [8].

4. Make a forward fold along the imagined line created by [1] and [3]. Unfold.

5. Make a backward fold along the imagined line between [1] and [4]. Unfold.

6. Alternate forward folds between [1] and [odd integers] with backward folds between [1] and [even integers], making at least 3 total folds.

The installation of “Folded” changes depending on the artist, the number of sheets of paper employed, and the available wall space. Depending on light conditions, the dynamic bas-relief surface reveals different qualities of light, and varied hues of white.

Iliescu openness, incompleteness, and the beauty of margins Lauren Hackney: “Maple leaves” These studies explore drawing and making as a dynamic process as well as the idea that something marginal – normally forgotten or discarded – is beautiful in its recording and revelation of ritual and weathering. These sequential studies of a sugar maple in autumn explore the dynamic balance between what is empty and what is filled, both in the literal subject and its associated phenomena and in the recording of this process through drawing. As the leaves fall, the hierarchy of the tree shifts; the edges of the branching structure, and the spaces they frame, express its elemental structure.

The absence of leaves becomes as descriptive as their presence was only weeks earlier.

“The Hand and the Soul” exhibit of the work of Sol LeWitt, Robert Slutzky, and Sanda Iliescu closed on April 19, 2009. Sanda Iliescu’s book, with the same title, was released on April 1, 2009. She is an associate professor in the Department of Art and the Department of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

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Entablature fragment in the Capitoline Museum

Theaters of construction Theater of Marcellus, The Flavian Amphitheater, and The Capitoline Museum Jay Cantrell M.Arch 2009

Hundreds of years of disaster and pillage have gradually exposed the building sections of the Theater of Marcellus and the Flavian Amphitheater, revealing the nature of construction in their ruinous state. In addition to these two theaters, a fragment of the entablature section of the Capitoline Museum is superimposed over the exposed brickwork, now visible at eye level, emphasizing the massive scale of the entablature.

These drawings capture the intensity of the Italian sunlight, rendered singularly in chiaroscuro, and other times layered over images of tenebroso in the superimposed radial plans of the Theater of Marcellus. Images of Rome are usually associated with the line quality of Piranesi’s engravings as the penultimate way of capturing Rome’s architecture. These drawings explore how varied levels of texture and surface, beyond the line, allow further investigation of the physical surface that resembles the texture of a ruin. This is a reverse technique of the old master’s way of painting a drawing.

Now there is a drawing over a painting. A line very carefully done, juxtaposed to the rigor and energy of a trowel mark or a brush stroke that correlates to the quality of the ruins.

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Theater of Marcellus

Flavian Amphitheater

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Theaters of construction

Cantrell

Day and night at the Theater Marcellus

Cantrell Theaters of construction Plan and section of Theater Marcellus

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Site studies utilize collage as a method for recording the layers of the site.

[re]activating riverview Heidi Leinbach M.Arch 2008

ENGAGING FRAMEWORKS Suburban schools today are operating above their maximum capacity and are in need of a systematic strategy to address growth in surrounding neighborhoods. Riverview High School in Sarasota, Florida, currently housing 2,000 students within a school designed for 500 students, is no exception to this. The need to create additional classrooms and group learning spaces has been a question addressed by the school for decades through many additions that neither recognize site conditions nor the framework established by architect Paul Rudolph in 1952. The proposed solution is to clean the slate by razing the Rudolph school; however, by doing so, the institution denies the history of the site to future occupants.

This project looks to a different solution that retains the original building and reactivates the site, an urban proposal addressing impending growth to engage the surrounding community. The learning experience created in the school is, therefore, one of direct engagement with the fabric of the city and the river’s edge; Riverview becomes a seam stitching together education, ecologies and public programs to be shared with Sarasota’s community.

The immediacy of the Philippe Creek’s tidal range and the climate of western Florida make the addition not only a reaction to the original modernist campus, but also an addition that is, by necessity, sensitive to the existing site ecologies. Guided by site operations of measurement, movement, and filtering, the essential experience of the site is shaped by free access to water, the reestablishment of ground, and the creation of shade.

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Leinbach [re] activating riverview Movement

Filter

Measurement

Movement + Measurement + Filter

pedagogy research: experiential learning To make this course of study an active venture, the elements of traditional childhood crafts are essential as metaphor and also to physically depict connections as manifestations within these weavings. All three [cutting, weaving and sewing] were methods developed by Froebel, a German pedagogue who created the concept of kindergarten in 1837, to give children in his kindergarten an active way to learn.1 These methods of learning reappeared one-hundred years later at the Bauhaus, where individually-directed instruction emphasized craft: in some cases, the only way to learn was to make.2

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Leinbach

00: Water Flow: Precondition

01: Create Shade

02: Make the Frame

03: Define Path

04: Expand Process for Growth

05: Fully Occupy the Site

[re] activating riverview

Sequence of Site Occupation

Cutting, Weaving and Sewing: thinking as making Cutting is a rupture that both creates separation and paradoxically makes connections between the field that is being separated and the space that is captured in between. Weaving makes connections through interactions of differing axes, establishing hierarchy that responds to sectional changes made to the composition by the acts of moving over and under; materially ubiquitous, connections are made paper to paper or thread to thread. Sewing physically seams together all the pieces and reinforces connections by contrasting the field of weaving. It differs materially from the woven field, bringing together contrasting elements.

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Leinbach [re] activating riverview thesis proposal The most successful and productive learning environments are ones that directly connect to the surrounding environment, creating a daily immediate and physical learning experience for multiple generations of students, teachers and community members. This thesis attempts to reveal the most essential qualities or forces that shape a space for learning in the experiential learning pedagogy. It examines a process of making connections to site and to diurnal sequences through architecture and landscape, creating an epigenesic experiential learning environment for students.

NOTES 1. Resnick, Mitchel. Technologies for lifelong kindergarten. Educational Technology Research and Development; 1998, Volume 46, Number 4, 43-55.

2. Bayer, Herbert. Bauhaus: 1919-1928; New York : Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Cited by Wagner, Mimi, and Ann Gansemer-Topf: Learning by Teaching Others: a Qualitative Study Exploring the Benefits of Peer Teaching. Landscape Journal; 2005, Vol. 24 Issue 2, 198-208.

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Representing the Industrial Landscape A Study Through Painting Zoé Edgecomb M.L.A, M.Arch 2008

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, artists have been painting and photographing the landscapes created by new technologies. Beyond mere documentation, these works have revealed attitudes toward landscape and toward the changes brought by modernity. This study first examines meanings and intentions behind pictorializations of the industrial landscape. It culminates in a series of sketches, paintings, and photographs drawn from weekly visits to the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s Charlottesville wastewater treatment facility. These attempt to show the industrial landscape as complex, temporal, and contextualized within natural and human processes.

The choice of a sewage treatment plant as a subject raised many questions: What is beauty? What hidden systems lie behind our pristine lives? What can a painting communicate? Should it be a didactic instrument? Is formal beauty enough? Is accuracy necessary?

The act of representing the landscape and the intentions behind it are not as universal as we might believe. Likewise, the framing of the view, made scientific by techniques of Brunelleschian perspective, has a history that coincides with the societal changes brought by capitalism and industrialization. Implicit in this methodology are ideas of possession of the land: the double meaning of the word “prospect” illustrates this.

The industrial landscape has been photographed by figures such as Edward Burtynsky, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and John Pfahl. Paintings have been done most famously by Charles Scheeler. Most of these works treat their subject formally, examining light and shadow, elegant geometry, and the sublimity implied by their large scale. Early representations questioned the implications behind the intrusion of the railroad into the pastoral countryside. A tension was often evident between this and a celebration of Progress. Later, photographers such as Emmett Gowin drew attention to the destructive impact of industries such as mining and manufacturing.

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representing the industrial landscape

Edgecomb

secondary. With these thoughts in mind, the study shifted from research to visual exploration.

In working on the RWSA site, both pictorial and analytical methods of representation were employed. Plein air sketches from single viewpoints were re-interpreted as paintings. Concurrently, technical information was gleaned from tours with plant managers. Linked with aerial photography from Google Earth, the paintings began to express a sense of the complex spatial and biological functioning of the plant. Sequential photographs helped to visualize these physical processes.

Finally, a series of photographs was produced which looked at the elements of the plant in a completely abstract way, paying attention only to formal composition, color and shape. Together, these disparate ways of seeing combined in a effort to reveal the systemic nature of these landscapes rather than merely presenting them as views.

As a functional landscape, the water treatment plant is evidence of our dependence on and connection with industrial process. The Rivanna plant utilizes electrical energy, bacteria, and recycled methane gas to convert a polluted influent to a pristine effluent that can re-enter the river.

The landscape of the plant, devoid of human figures, nevertheless speaks of our connection with the land, however abstracted. The circular basins, surge pumps, and valves are the machine evidence of our habits of consumption. This is a system that is intimately connected to the hydrologic cycle,

representing the industrial landscape

relationships to landscape context and the processual nature of the works themselves remained

Edgecomb

Even as environmental awareness began to inform the representation of the industrial landscape,

the nutrient cycle, and the cycle of life. It is illustrative of our position within nature, rather than outside. Yet the process of looking and recording inevitably involves a distancing. These studies are still abstractions.

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ecoMOD Shelter John Quale Project Director, Assistant Professor of Architecture Paxton Marshall, Engineering Director, Professor, SEAS Jeff Erkelens, Construction Director, SARC Jeff Herlitz, Research Assistant, SARC Sarita Herman, Research Assistant, SARC Ernest Bowden, Graduate Teaching Assistant, SEAS Ping Guan, Graduate Teaching Assistant, SEAS Benjamin Kidd, Graduate Teaching Assistant, SEAS Farhad Omar, Graduate Teaching Assistant, SEAS

collaborations in temporary dwelling construction As the design continues for ecoMOD4 in the spring of 2009, the team is developing a single family detached house for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville, as well as townhouse versions of the modules to be considered for use on another site.

The team is also studying variations of the design as multi-family dwellings for two other non-profit organizations. The idea of bringing ecoMOD to the market place (beyond the prototypes) could become a reality in 2009.

The beginning of the ecoMOD4 design process started in the Fall of 2008 with a warm-up exercise to give everyone a chance to get their hands dirty and learn how to work collaboratively. Five interdisciplinary teams designed and built a shelter made entirely from reclaimed building materials and one ‘connector’ material (i.e. duct table or twine or screws, etc.). They had a spending limit of $10, but most teams spent less than that. Two team members from each team had to spend the night in the shelter, and each shelter was evaluated using temperature and humidity sensors, as well as various criteria for ‘firmness, commodity and delight’ as defined by the ecoMOD seminar students. The project was essentially a short version of the ecoMOD ‘design, build, evaluate’ process.

Looking inside the completed “Hoodie” structure.

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Quale ecoMOD SHELTER The “Dome” shelter is a “Buckminster Fuller” design made with recycled cardboard and duct tape.

Team members: Joe Medwid, Juliana Villabona, Rebekah Berlin, Whitney Newton.

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Quale ecoMOD SHELTER The “Light Shell” is created from timber frames, sheets of metal, plexiglass, and beer bottles full of water.

Team members : Edric Barnes, Del Hepler, Winnie Lai, Tommy Schaperkotter.

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Quale ecoMOD SHELTER

The “Roll Reversal” shelter is made from recycled newspaper, recycled soda cans and duct tape. Soda cans are overlapped to create a waterproof roofing system to protect the newspaper walls.

Team members: Katie Stranix, Clare van Montfrans, Tessa Wheeler, Cory Caldwell.

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Quale ecoMOD SHELTER Modeled after a Conestoga wagon, the “Hoodie� shelter is made with discarded welded wire mesh, plastic sheets, and wood palettes from a construction site.

Team members: James Perakis, Bernie Doherty, Melissa Pancurak, Andrew Zacharias.

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Quale ecoMOD SHELTER The “Cloud� shelter is created from recycled paper, garbage bags, and bamboo. The seams for the insulation pockets are made with a typical curling iron.

Team members: Ryan Wall, Chris Oesterling, Mingming Lei, Courtney Mallow.

John Quale has been the Project Director of ecoMOD since its inception in 2004. He is also a 1993 alumnus of the UVA M.Arch program. ecoMOD is a multi-disciplinary research and design/build/evaluate project that involves architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, historic preservation, business, environmental science, planning and economics students in all phases of the project. ecoMOD aims to create a series of ecological, modular and affordable house prototypes that both study the environmental and economic potential of prefabrication and challenge the U.S. modular/manufactured housing industry to explore this potential. The fourth house, currently in design, is being developed for Habitat for Humanity of Charlottesville, and will be constructed during Summer 2009.

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View from entrance, IATH offices

[de]materialIZED [de]Light: manufacturing phenomena Jeff Ponitz Lecturer ODE TO A COFFEE SLEEVE Like most objects destined for quick disposal, the coffee sleeve’s existence seems predicated more on commodity than delight: it is designed to put just enough space between one’s hand and a scalding cup of coffee, for a matter of minutes before being discarded. While we rarely think of commercial packaging like a coffee sleeve as a designed object, it is remarkable for its efficiency and utility: it is mass-produced cheaply with a minimum of material and assembled simply; recyclable, and made of recycled material; ships flat and expands to create a volumetric enclosure; and adjusts to accommodate a range of conditions (tall, grande, venti, and everything in between).

These minutiae go largely unnoticed, but for those who have felt the soothing sensation of a comfortably warm cup of coffee in their hand, there is a tactile delight stemming from the commodity of the coffee sleeve—derived from the sleeve not as an object, but as an energy threshold that captures and redistributes heat to create microenvironmental comfort. The successful design of this experience is dependent upon an understanding of the phenomena at hand (“Careful, the beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot”) as well as an understanding of material properties and processes (cardboard is non-conductive, lightweight, and easy to cut and fold) that can be exploited to control that phenomena.

A semi-permanent installation at the offices of The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) provided an opportunity to explore these synergies between manufacturing and phenomenology at an architectural scale.

IATH wished to subdivide its existing reception space to create a new work space and form a permeable threshold between the reception space and existing offices, bringing daylight into the reception space and allowing staff to notice visitors. A pair of offset screens were fabricated and installed to selectively filter light, sound, views, and circulation at this threshold while giving IATH a public face as an environment of technical and creative research.

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View from corridor, IATH offices

Ponitz To maximize phenomenal performance with a minimum of material, a modular assembly system was developed for the screens through a series of full-scale mockups. The basic module is not unlike a coffee sleeve, cut and folded to create a volumetric enclosure. Size constraints of the material sheet and the laser cutter bed determine the size of the module, utilizing 96% of each sheet. Assembled without adhesives or fasteners in offset courses, similar to brickwork, each course is enmeshed with those above and below to create a structurally redundant network of paper and to form three interstitial cavities. These cavities are accessed by openings within each module that serve multiple functions: large apertures allow light into and through the outer cavities and reduce

[de]materialized [de]light

MANUFACTURING

the overall weight of the assembly, while smaller perforations control light within the central cavity and obscure views to create privacy. The variable sizes of these apertures and perforations control larger field conditions for the front and back of each screen. Each field operates by its own logic, reacting to structural, environmental, or programmatic requirements: a perforation field may compress at eye level for a standing visitor and expand at eye level for a sitting office worker to give simultaneous privacy and visibility; an aperture field expands towards the top of the screen to reduce weight and maximize daylight.

After assembly, the entire screen can collapse and expand like an accordion, affecting its depth and visual density; this flexibility enhances control over the geometry and performance of the screen, but compromises its lateral stability. A suspended, trapeze-like framework of CNC-routed plates and stainless steel rods compresses the screen into a structurally rigid assembly, and establishes a geometry that thickens where necessary to obscure the desks behind it.

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Performance control fields:

Aperture field : structure, light

Perforation field : privacy, light

Ponitz The IATH reception screens rely upon commodities of material, fabrication, and assembly to create functional objects that separate public from private, screen views, and direct circulation.

These commodities also create instruments that capture and transmit light—energy thresholds that are activated by time and movement. They record and amplify the movement of the sun over the course of a day or year, untouched by sunlight in the summer but wholly saturated on a winter morning. They dematerialize and rematerialize to differentiate experiences of entrance and exit, and visitor and occupant. At some point, the screen becomes constructed not of paper, but of light, sound, and the other energies collected within it—in this moment, the functional becomes

[de]materialized [de]light

PHENOMENA

phenomenal. Architects are constantly faced with the challenge of designing the immaterial using material means—we are in the business of creating moments and movements, but rely upon sticks and stones to make it happen. Like the sensation of holding a warm cup of coffee, these moments of synergy between the material and immaterial are what gives us delight in a place.

View from work space

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MIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA layfayette park, Detroit, Michigan Craig Borum Principal, PLY Architecture Karl Daubmann Principal, PLY Architecture Karen M’Closkey Principal, PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture

This project is an installation to honor Mies van der Rohe, and was the winning entry for a two-stage competition to revitalize the central area of the pedestrian shopping center of Lafayette Park. The project creates a bas relief surface by placing a collection of customized pre-cast concrete tiles symmetrically within the plaza, yet asymmetrically in the “z” axis. This simple modification allows one end of the plaza to be elevated above grade for seating, while the other end of plaza remains easily accessible from the adjacent sidewalks. At its terminus, the surfaces continues vertically, forming a wall behind which stairs rise to the pedestrian areas of the Lafayette Park Towers.

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PLY Architecture

In the Mies Plaza, a process of transformation is employed that allows for surface and its underlying technology to collapse into a singular fabrication. The regularized module of the tile distorts to allow for permeability within the field.

Lines cast into the tiles give texture to the surface and make small channels where water flows. Cast lines are continuous across the field of tiles and experientially loosens the rigidity of the underlying grid.

mIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA

At the Farnsworth House (1945-1951), Mies Van der Rohe went to great length to suppress the performative surface controlling the drainage of the terrace in favor of an uncompromising flat horizontal surface of travertine pavers.

Farnsworth House plan and terrace location

Farnsworth House terrace strategy inverted

Terrace section drainage dispersed

Sloped for seating

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In the proposed plaza, the overall drainage patterns become the expression of the surface. The entire plaza slopes towards the northern edge which creates an area of relatively wetter planting beds within which four trees are opportunistically located. At the scale of individual tiles, however, local areas of drainage are dispersed equally throughout the entire plaza and form a field of small planting areas.

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mIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA

PLY Architecture

While the formwork has a concave pattern, the cast tiles possess an inverted convex geometry.

PLY Architecture mIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA The samples with round grooves were created with a 1/2� round bit. The sample tiles created from the round bit formwork were found to be softer to the touch, cast more visually dynamic shadows and moved water more explicitly and were therefore chosen for the plaza construction.

Grooving adds directionality to the tiles and guides water flow over the tile surfaces. The skewed geometry of the tiles leads to a distortion of the groove patterns.

Despite the use of a limited number of tile types, a complex variety of planting areas and tile geometries emerge from the assembly process. The desire for the plaza was to create a simple, continuous and articulated surface that animates light, water and program. To this end, the grooving of the tiles intensifies the continuity of the surface. This continuity allows for a reading of a larger surface rather than simply that of individual tiles.

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Constructed from laser-cut recycled paper, these projects developed as two of a number of brief essays exploring the use of newly developing digital processes in conjunction with computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) fabrication.

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PLY_surfaces and PLY_paper lights emerge from research into customizable paper systems constructed of two layers of precisely cut 100% recyclable synthetic paper, and interlocked to achieve a structural rigidity without the need of a secondary frame or infrastructure. With PLY_paper lights, bending caused by interlocking of the two layers result in a thickened shell that captures and manipulates light.

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PLY_paper Lights Craig Borum and Karl Daubmann (principals) Jeana Ripple, Kristen Little, Jen Maigret, Michael Powers, Maria Walker.

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PLY_surfaces Craig Borum and Karl Daubmann (principals) Jeana Ripple

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The tile types find a balance between the number of distinct geometries and the number of multiples of each required for efficient production. While the surface could have been produced with one tile type, this would have still required a set number of multiple formworks to facilitate high quantity casting.

The plaza surface was designed to take advantage of 5 tile types and their mirrored components 10 tile types produce 200 tiles. The minimum twisting of the forms did not preclude the tiles to be stacked for storage and shipping.

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The regularized module of the tile distorts to allow for permeability within the field. Lines cast into the tiles give texture to the surface and make small channels where water flows. Cast lines are continuous across the field of tiles and experientially loosens the rigidity of the underlying grid.

Areas of inflection emerge as tiles multiply. These two morphological variations result in a small number of tile types, but a large diversity of inflection areas within the field of tiles.

Areas of inflection define paths of water movement across tile surfaces. Within the repetitive tiled surface emerges a complex array of vectorial movement. The directionality of these paths inscribes a second set of ephemeral lines of water across the surface.

PLY Architecture mIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA If distributed over the course of a flat grade, the movement of water over the surface remains localized. In this diagram, water moves from light to dark zones and intensities are concentric. Water percolation occurs equally across the field of permeability.

When distributed over a sloped grade, the movement of water bridges tiles and becomes dynamic.

Water movement is directional and relative intensities of percolation across the field are unequal.

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The assembly of the individual tiles creates voids that define planting areas. The planting strategy is organized on a four foot module, with alternating bands corresponding to four plant species. In order to avoid straight rows of a single species, the grid is rotated, allowing a variety of plants to be placed within individual tile openings.

PLY Architecture April/May

mIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA

The planting strategy as banding across the entire plaza.

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PLY Architecture House Plaza, inverts the discrete treatment of water by exposing it on the surface.

Rich materiality and performance are collapsed into a single, dynamic surface. The permeability of the surface collects and percolates water, enabling a plant material to emerge throughout the field of the surface. Ultimately, the project celebrates the materiality of water both in its ephemerality and longevity.

mIES VAN DER ROHE PLAZA

This project renders water visible. The plaza, in dialogue with Mies’ Farnsworth

The bas relief strategy is used not only for the overall figure in the plaza, but within the individual concrete tiles. The fabrication of the tiles emerged out of investigations into “book-matching” as inspired by Mies’ trademark use of large slabs of material cut into rectangles and book-matched symmetrically about their joints.

The visual striations inherent in stone became score lines in the concrete, directing water into the field of planting beds throughout the plaza. The strategy of pattern (mirroring, rotating, doubling, flipping) attempts to synthesize the figurative and the abstract, the aesthetic and the functional. Material and program - seating, paving, permeability and planting are combined into a single figure.

Mies van der Rohe Plaza (2004) was a collaboration between PLY and PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture. Craig Borum (PLY), Karl Daubmann (PLY), Karen M’Closkey (PEG), with Carl Lorenz and Jen Maigret. Construction phase included: Matt Battin, Peter Stavenger and Michael Powers.

Craig Borum is a tenured Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan.

He has also taught at the University of Cincinnati and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He received his B.S. Arch in 1988 and M.Arch in 1996 from the University of Virginia. Mr. Borum practiced architecture independently in Charlottesville, VA and Washington, DC before establishing PLY Architecture in 1999.

Karl Daubmann is a tenured Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at the Boston Architectural Center, Roger Williams University, and the University of Cincinnati. He received his B.Arch from Roger Williams University and a SMArchS with a concentration in Design and Computation from MIT. www.plyarch.com

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Jerusalem straddles the border between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Jerusalem’s stone walls have been built and rebuilt, expanded and contracted, no less than fourteen times throughout its history.

Past walls Future Borders Daphne Lasky M.Arch 2011 Noah Bolton M.Arch 2009

The situation on the ground today in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict manifests itself through the building and defining of barriers and territories in order to define whose land is whose and potentially what is and what is not holy. The fight to stake out this land for a specific group long precedes the current conflict in the region. The city of Jerusalem alone has seen the definition of its boundaries morph continuously since its establishment 5,000 years ago. Today’s boundaries, however temporary, play an important role in shaping the daily lives of individuals (both Israeli and Palestinian), and in influencing future social and political events in Jerusalem.

The highly contested status of present-day Jerusalem obscures the fact that Jerusalem has always been a city in flux. While many religious and ethnic groups are quick to lay eternal claim to the city, they seldom remember Jerusalem’s haphazard, sporadic, and oft-interrupted expansion from a three-acre Jebusite settlement to a 125-km2 city. Today, Jerusalem has multiple sets of borders that encompass overlapping holy, historical, legal, military, and demographic districts. On a geopolitical scale, the Green Line, the 1949 cease-fire line between Israel and Jordan, and the rough border of a future Palestinian State, runs through the city from North to South. The Separation Barrier currently under construction by the Israeli government creates a physical border to Jerusalem’s East and ignores both the Green Line and Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries. Both the Green Line and the Separation Barrier are militarilydetermined borders designed to defend and claim holy sites in Jerusalem’s historic city center, the bounds of which have themselves expanded and contracted as religious practices evolve and change.

As calls for the division of Jerusalem intensify, and as Israeli military infrastructure in the region becomes more pronounced, Jerusalem once again stands at the brink of an historical change. Designers have a critical role to play in making visible future possibilities in Jerusalem and, in doing so, enabling an engaged and informed public discourse. Architectural investigations into the nature of borders and the spatial challenges of various border scenarios have the potential to not only test and question existing political ideas, but to generate a set of new ideas based upon a shared understanding of culture, memory, and place.

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walls of the old city jaffa gate

kidron valley jerusalem pearl hotel (out of business)

A Marginal Peace Daphne Lasky

The northwest corner of Jerusalem’s Old City is located on the margins of Israeli West Jerusalem and Palestinian East Jerusalem. Spanning what was once a No Man’s Land, and reaching from the walls of the Old City to the beginnings of the Israeli Central Business District, the site speaks volumes about the relationship between past, present, and future in Jerusalem and on either side of the Green Line.

From 1948-1967, the site was part of a closed military zone between Israeli West Jerusalem and Jordanian-administered East Jerusalem. In the years following the Six-Day War, a promenade and small archeological garden were constructed on the site. The corner is currently being developed as a transit station for the still-under-construction Jerusalem Light Rail System.

Despite the current building activity at the site, the future of this corner is uncertain as long as the political horizon remains hazy. Numerous proposals for a divided Jerusalem as a component of a twostate settlement place a border through this corner, either on the Green Line or close to it. The form and nature of border infrastructure at this site has the ability to greatly affect the connection between Israeli West Jerusalem and the Old City and impact public perception of a peace agreement.

This essay examines the challenges and opportunities present in a border regime similar to the one laid out in the 2003 Geneva Accord. The Geneva Accord is a detailed model final status agreement between Israel and Palestine and was negotiated by prominent Israeli and Palestinian politicians and academics, though it is not an official government document. The Accord builds upon the Clinton Parameters resulting from the 2000 Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and so can reasonably be studied as one potential outcome of future peace negotiations.

Jerusalem is situated in the Judean Mountains, between the coastal plain to the west and the low-lying desert to the east. The Old City is surrounded by steep valleys which have historically determined Jerusalem’s boundaries. The Green Line runs immediately to the west of the walled Old City. Today, the 1km2 Old City is home to approximately 36,000 residents (Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2007).

jaf west je b

jaffa road leads to west jerusalem central business district

walls of the old city

the green line and no man’s land, 1948-1967

past walls future borders

Lasky | Bolton

notre dame monastery

sultan suleiman road to damascus gate and east jerusalem

extents of the historic basin

church of the holy sepulchre

temple mount/haram al-sharif

western wall

walls of the old city

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border

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palestinian jerusalem Machne Yehuda Market

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west Jerusalem central business district Jaffa gate protected route to the Jewish quarter

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Links along Jaffa Road connecting West Jerusalem to the Old City will potentially be strained and broken by the creation of international borders along the Green Line.

In section and in plan, the Jaffa Gate promenade is uncomfortably situated between an international border and a highway.

crossing to east jerusalem

borders and broken links The Geneva Accord stipulates that Jerusalem will be divided into Israeli West Jerusalem and Palestinian East Jerusalem. Borders are drawn so that, to the extent possible under the limits of territorial contiguity, Jewish neighborhoods will become a part of Israel, and Palestinian neighborhoods will become a part of Palestine. A physical border will be erected between the two cities with a series of crossing points to allow for cross-border cooperation and development.

In the Old City, where physical borders are impracticable and undesirable, a wall will not be erected. Rather, though sovereignty will be divided between Israel and Palestine, the area will be placed under a level of joint security control, with checkpoints established at the seven traditional

past walls future borders

Lasky | Bolton

jaffa road leads to west jerusalem central business district

gates to the Old City. Israelis and Palestinians will be allowed to enter and exit through their respective gates, and once inside the Old City, to travel freely between the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Armenian quarters.

While the borders drawn by the Geneva Accord respect current ethnic neighborhoods and allow for nearly unrestricted access to holy sites for all individuals, the spatial configuration of these borders has the possibility to place stress on the connection of Israeli West Jerusalem to the Old City and its Jewish Quarter.

Most evident in plan, in a divided Jerusalem a narrow bottleneck will connect West Jerusalem to the Jewish Quarter, with only one Israeli vehicular access road to the Old City. In recognition of this challenge, the Geneva Accord specifies that a road from Jaffa Gate through the Armenian Quarter to Zion Gate and the Jewish Quarter will be set aside as a protected route for Israeli vehicles and pedestrians, though the road itself will remain under Palestinian sovereignty.

The pedestrian approach to the Old City from West Jerusalem will change significantly as the border is brought to the edge of Jaffa Road, the traditional entrance to the Old City. Today, pedestrian intensity along Jaffa Road decreases as the road leaves the Central Business District and nears the city walls. This underutilized zone between City Hall and Jaffa Gate will be made vulnerable by the presence of a border and associated security infrastructure along its eastern edge. An existing highway that runs parallel to the pedestrian promenade further compounds this compressed condition. In the face of a new border regime, this long and narrow unprogrammed space is not generous enough to sustain a meaningful relationship between West Jerusalem and the Old City.

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water management system

new public institutions new access road

The spatial location of Jerusalem’s “holiness” has grown and shifted as religious practices in the city have evolved.

pedestrian crossing to palestine

strategies The marginal space at the edge of Israeli West Jerusalem holds a key to establishing a strong connection between West Jerusalem and the Old City, even as borders act to divide Jerusalem in two. As knowledge of Jerusalem’s historically fluctuating borders grants license to designers to reshape the city’s edge, an awareness of systems beyond the religious and the political -- including ecology, transportation, and culture -- offers a springboard into new conceptions of public space in Jerusalem.

CIRCUMVENT: The use of Jaffa Road as a vehicular link between the city center and the Old

past walls future borders

Lasky | Bolton

road narrowed, park expanded

City might be supplemented by the use of Yitshak Kariv, an existing street leading from the historic King David Hotel to the Jaffa Gate.

EXPAND: The margin between the city walls and the road may be further expanded through the careful treatment of the neglected strip of land between the promenade and Road 60. This land, which slopes downhill towards the Kidron Valley, has the potential to make visible flows of water through the city, and in doing so to connect downtown Jerusalem to the biblical pools and cisterns that still exist to the west and south of the Old City.

ANCHOR: The plaza at the northwest corner of the Old City could be reinvigorated with new public institutions. The existing plaza is currently underutilized, and Jerusalem Pearl Hotel across the street is out of business. Replacing the privately-owned hotel with public institutions and spaces would expand the viewshed of Jaffa Gate towards downtown Jerusalem, and would bring a vibrant intensity of activity and use back to the site. Ultimately, the revitalization of this site extends downtown Jerusalem towards the historic city center, and allows the Old City to filter up towards the new. As Israeli West Jerusalem and Palestinian East Jerusalem continue to develop, this anchored site will become a logical meeting point between the two cities, pointing to a future in which strong margins slowly morph into seams.

Scenarios such as this one will unfold many times along the complex Israel-Palestine border. Each instance deserves thoughtful consideration in order to establish edges that respond affirmatively to the needs of their communities. A deep reservoir of margin strategies will allow designers to advance positive political developments, and to create spaces of connection and continuity.

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Appropriating an Architecture of Division Noah Bolton

The barrier being built today around the West Bank territory in Israel can be seen as the greatest architectural move implemented by the Israeli government in order to define a border and stake out what is and isn’t theirs. The barrier morphs between solid concrete wall and unrelenting fencing, weaving in and out of neighborhoods and towns that sit on the operational “green line” separating the West Bank territory from Israel proper. Opponents say that it is ruining the livelihood of both the Palestinians and Israelis (mostly Palestinians) and is in violation of international law. The proponents of the barrier argue that it is saving lives.

This wall, however solid, is a porous barrier. Thousands of people and goods cross this line everyday.

As of now, flows of people, goods, and services funnel themselves through strategic checkpoints established along the wall. These links become vital outlets and important opportunities for exchange.

This project seeks to challenge these checkpoints and asks, “How can these places be reinterpreted in a way that continues to provide security but also promotes a new cultural exchange?” How can they become generative rather the degenerative?” These checkpoints can be re-imagined in order to provide vital goods and services to both Israelis and Palestinians, creating places of commercial exchange, schooling, and medical care.

(Photographs by Daphne Lasky)

past walls future borders

Lasky | Bolton

Diagram of the checkpoints that surround Jerusalem

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Plan sketches explore new strategies and opportunities for border crossings.

Typical Palestinian experience at checkpoint

Typical Israeli experience at checkpoint

Lasky | Bolton past walls future borders Checkpoints are time-consuming by design. These section diagrams depict the time discrepancy in crossing a checkpoint as an Israeli versus as a Palestinian. As illustrated, the experience is much more fluid for Israelis than Palestinians. Sometimes people spend hours waiting at particular checkpoints, only to be turned away because they don’t have the correct identification card or for some other opaque reason. At other times, individuals only spend moments as they move from one territory to another. Because of the confluence of people and goods in these spaces, microeconomies grow in order to serve the crowds passing through.

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Site plan and strategy of new checkpoint.

Interior view of checkpoint.

Lasky | Bolton past walls future borders

These microeconomies, or markets, provide those waiting in line with food products and other consumables. Building on these microeconomies, my proposal begins to plug other services into the checkpoint. I attempt to transform the checkpoint from a strictly linear process of crossing back and forth over a boundary into a more meaningful experience. The checkpoint then provides new destinations and motivations to utilize the space. Schools, established markets, and other services are woven into the checkpoints imbuing the entire event with more significance and meaning. The hope is that through economic exchange a new cultural exchange will simultaneously flourish.

Model of new border crossing.

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(Photograph by Daphne Lasky)

Approaching the entrance of the checkpoint

View of model looking into the covered path of the checkpoint.

Lasky | Bolton past walls future borders As the checkpoint grows over time, and even after the security wall becomes insignificant, these junctures cannot be removed because of their established value. The infrastructure of the wall is consumed and made integral to the checkpoint, remaining as a memory of the once physically divided landscape.

Daphne Lasky began her work in Jerusalem in 2007 as the recipient of a Katherine Wasserman Davis Projects for Peace grant. Her research on borders, border crossings, and walled cities has taken her to Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Territories. She has led workshops on border issues in Jerusalem at the University of Massachussetts, Harvard University, and Middlebury College.

Noah Bolton developed this project in Spring 2008 in a graduate studio under the direction of Assistant Professor of Architecture Nataly Gattegno. His interest in working with this topic stems from an inherent interest in exploring issues of Jewish identity in architecture.

The projects presented in this article should be understood as only two of the many spatial investigations of borders in Israel and Palestine undertaken by architects and designers. Our hope in presenting this work is to encourage and support a productive dialogue on approaches to future borders in Israel and Palestine, and to engage the larger discourse on architecture’s role as a potential generator of positive solutions to complex cultural conflicts.

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“One Photo Please?”

Ryan Ives M.L.A 2011

These portraits were made during a year I spent photographing in India, beginning in September 2005.

The images were initiated by the people photographed, who approached me on the street and asked, “One photo please?”

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In the spring of 2001, I spent a semester photographing in Nepal. I photographed people in a way that I hoped could overcome some of the problematic issues inherent in photographing in foreign countries.

These include a general tendency for an American audience to view images from a place such as India as exotic, timeless or simply colorful.

This generalized and reductive perception of India and Indian people is a complex cultural misconception that is reinforced by many popular media sources.

Ives power dynamic between photographer and subject, and my own biases and misunderstandings to overcome.

“one photo please?�

In addition to problems of audience perception, there is also an unequal

The methodology I developed for making images in Nepal included: only photographing people I had gotten to know, encouraging people to look directly at the lens, pairing the images with excerpts from interviews and giving people prints of their images.

Living in a village in Eastern Nepal while doing this work was one of the most engrossing and immersive experiences of my life, but because of the constraints I placed on myself, the images are a little formulaic. I went to India to revisit these issues and to try to find a new methodology for working in foreign countries.

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Soon after arriving in India, I noticed how frequently people were approaching me on the street and asking me to take their picture. I realized that these requests could be the basis of a project.

I cannot say exactly why people were approaching me on the street and asking me to take their picture. I see people’s poses as influenced by mass media, as a reflection of perceptions of American culture (or more broadly “western” culture), as a provocation by the presence of a camera, or as kids having fun. I like to think that these images are attempts to communicate something to people halfway around the world.

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“one photo please?”

Ives

St. Peter’s Anglican Church, elevation by Grace Goldstein and section by Charles Smith

Falmouth Field School 2008

Preservation, People, and Place The UVA Falmouth Field School in Historic Preservation Louis Nelson Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Architectural History

The Caribbean is architecturally complex, culturally dynamic, and remarkably understudied. Occupied by indigenous peoples for millennia, settled by Europeans by the sixteenth century, and heavily peopled by Africans through enslavement since the seventeenth century, the earlier cultural landscapes of the region are marked by subjugation, creolization, accommodation, and resistance. Under a regular battery of hurricanes and occasional earthquakes and volcanic activity, architecture in the Caribbean has also adapted to a challenging and often volatile climate. More recent historic landscapes speak to the challenges of economic survival after the collapse of the plantation regimes and before (and now during) the rise of tourism as a viable industry. The rich yet fragile historic landscapes of the Caribbean speak to the complexities of cultures, the intensities of climate, and the struggle for economic survival. As a place with so much to offer and where so much is at risk, the Caribbean is an ideal laboratory for the study of the many dimensions of historic preservation.

The University of Virginia’s Falmouth Field School in Historic Preservation has for the last three years been doing just that. For a month each summer, soon after graduation, I travel with fifteen or so advanced undergraduate and graduate students from UVA and other programs (including Mary Washington, Columbia, and others) to live and work in the small town of Falmouth, located on the north coast of Jamaica between the major tourism centers of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. Falmouth was founded in the late eighteenth century to be the major port center for the many highly productive sugar plantations along the north coast. The spectacular range of colonnaded, two-story masonry and frame merchants’ houses that line Market Street are clear evidence of the town’s prosperity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Falmouth was also an economic center for free black and enslaved artisans, and a handful of small, one and two room frame buildings are evidence of the town’s complex economic and racial composition. After emancipation in the 1830s and a railroad line that bypassed the town in the later nineteenth century, Falmouth languished, struggling to maintain its building fabric. Until recent decades, most new construction followed the model of smaller, one-story, timber frame houses reminiscent of those built by the town’s early artisans. The concrete block construction that now characterizes so much of the Caribbean is the most recent layer of architectural fabric in the town.

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Falmouth Courthouse, elevation by Todd Mattocks

Good Hope Bath, plan by Callie Williams

Falmouth All-Age-School, elevation by Colin Curley

Nelson close detail the surviving historic fabric of the town. On an island prone to rot, insect infestation and hurricanes, any one of these buildings might simply be gone the next time we return. It is incredibly important that we spend time to produce careful measured drawings of the buildings we see as a record of a fast eroding historic landscape and to stabilize their fabric. To this end, students are divided into teams of three or four and assigned to a particular drawing—usually a plan, elevation or set of details—of a threatened building in town. The field drawings are governed by HABS standards and careful measurements are usually taken to the quarter inch scale. Daily pin-ups give faculty the opportunity to review progress in unhurried conditions and give all the students the opportunity to see their colleagues’ field drawings. Depending on the complexity of the building, these field drawings usually take a few days, giving

preservation, people, and place

One of the first priorities of the field school program is to examine and record in

those with little drawing experience time to watch the process unfold. By the end of the field school, every student no matter their background has executed a field drawing. Once complete, the student in charge of the field drawing retires to our make shift studio to translate the field drawing into a finished hardline in pencil. These are translated into drawings for the permanent record back in the United States. Over the past few years, I have been assisted in overseeing this process by Ed Chappell, Director of Architectural Research from Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Chappell is a long time advocate for Falmouth and a great support to the field school. In addition to assisting teams, Ed helps to identify threatened buildings that are critically in need of recordation. The finished field drawings become a permanent record of town’s historic building stock and simultaneously they serve as the working drawings for active preservation of the town’s historic fabric.

Of course, preservation never happens in a vacuum and teams of American students tend to attract local attention. Teams of four students always include a public advocate whose job is to field questions from curious locals and to communicate the significance of the buildings and the importance of their preservation. In fact, this type of casual public engagement is so productive that we have also begun a program of oral histories. These interviews often shed new light on buildings that we would otherwise have missed. Many of the town’s oldest residents speak of the significance of the early nineteenth-century courthouse not as a political but a social center. They remember fondly the dances held in the building’s great courtroom-turned-ballroom in the evenings. Ten shillings, reports one man, would pay for a night of dancing to four o’clock in the morning to bands from Kingston. Others noted the dramatic change in vehicular traffic. They remembered when the streets were occupied by horses, foot traffic, and the occasional cart. Seen through their eyes, Falmouth has certainly changed.

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Students inspecting floor joist at 16 Cornwall Street

Grinding and slaking of lime burn

Nelson establishing the Falmouth Field School, UVA partnered with Falmouth Heritage Renewal (FHR), a non-profit organization that has for nearly twenty years worked to stabilize the town’s fragile historic fabric. FHR has been a partner from the beginning, providing safe, clean housing and regular, local cuisine at a reasonable cost. The field school has the pleasure of occupying a partially restored, partially refurbished early nineteenth-century Masonic Hall that serves as a wood shop on the ground floor and dormitory space above. A pleasant rear courtyard is the center of most field school meals and social life, allowing students to live in the very heart of town. But more significant than its practical assistance is the ideological and programmatic framework established by FHR and its articulated goals. These are 1) recording and restoring the built environment; 2) providing a lab for the training of local artisans in restoration

preservation, people, and place

Of course, UVA has not accomplished this work on its own­- far from it, in fact. In

technology; 3) improving the housing stock for local residents and 4) building a foundation for heritage tourism and eventual economic vitality.

In partnering with FHR, students have the opportunity to participate in its active program of crafts training and hands-on historic preservation programs that take place year round. One of FHR’s primary intentions is the stabilization and preservation of the smaller historic buildings in town. In many cases, the restoration of these buildings depends on the working drawings generated by students of the previous summer. A large number of these smaller houses stand abandoned while many underprivileged (often elderly) Jamaicans struggle to find decent housing. By restoring these small historic houses and returning them to the housing stock at below-market rates, FHR simultaneously addresses economic, social, and preservation challenges. Thus far, FHR has worked on twenty of these small houses. Many of these buildings stood open to the elements. Some had failing roofs and some were simply rotting in place.

To realize this work, FHR has a team of full-time Jamaican carpenters and masons who have been trained by American preservation craftsmen who volunteer their time for the project. One of the most active professional volunteers for this component of the program is Matt Webster, Director of Preservation at Drayton Hall, a National Trust site in South Carolina. Having worked on a number of significant early American buildings in the South, Matt brings his expertise to the Caribbean. During the course of the field school, each student spends at least one day under the tutelage of a Jamaican carpenter and a Jamaican mason, usually working on one of the town’s small houses.

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Nelson Jamaicans in their trade. Not only do these young people learn foundational carpentry and masonry skills, they learn essential workplace survival skills, such as how to relate to supervisors and co-workers. This important program not only provides labor for the hard work of hand-executed restoration, it provides vocational training, and it disseminates preferred preservation practices among those entering the building trades. As observed by one of our interviewees, “without opportunities for young people, the town will die.”

This past summer, the Falmouth Field School partnered with Jillian Galle, historical archaeologist at Monticello—home of DAACS, the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery—who ran a parallel field school in historical archaeology,

preservation, people, and place

These full-time artisans also oversee an apprenticeship program that trains young

integrating archaeology and historic preservation as sibling programs intent on understanding Jamaica’s historic landscapes. Galle’s excavation site was the slave village of Stewart’s Castle, a major plantation just outside of Falmouth. With her own team of students from both UVA and the University of the West Indies, Galle unearthed the material evidence of the lives of Afro-Jamaicans while my students examined the surviving architecture of their urban counterparts. Students in both programs also enjoyed the opportunity of exchange, archaeologists recording buildings and working with carpenters and preservationists screening test pits and cataloging artifacts. Such exchanges were a remarkable opportunity for interdisciplinary exposure.

In so many ways, the Falmouth Field School is an education in the complex technical, social, economic, political, and practical dimensions of historic preservation. It is my hope that the program continues to expand and that other universities and institutions also begin to partner with Falmouth Heritage Renewal, joining the University of Virginia, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Monticello, the University of the West Indies, the Jamaica National Heritage Trust and other organizations in the effort to stabilize and preserve Falmouth’s remarkable architectural heritage, making a better Jamaica with and for Jamaicans.

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senior service house Andrea Brooke Hubbell M.Arch 2008

Effective housing solutions for seniors will lead to housing/service models that support the needs of facility residents as well as the social, political, educational, recreational, and health needs of community residents.

This project proposes the design of a service house for senior citizens in New Orleans.

Most current models of housing for seniors segregate the population by locating such housing in a removed, suburban context. These models are independent, self-serving and disengaged from the community. This design challenges those models by locating housing in an existing urban context, incorporating services for both facility residents and the surrounding neighborhood.

By providing services to the neighborhood The Service House allows independent seniors to remain in their homes to age-in-place and delays the move to institutional nursing facilities. To foster a relationship between The Service house and community the design strives to connect the facility with the neighborhood through both its built form and the design of the surrounding landscape.

Primary questions explored through the design process include: +

How can independence and assistance be made complementary in housing for seniors?

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How can community services be better connected with neighborhood housing to allow independent seniors to age in place?

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How can housing design integrate seniors with the community rather than segregate them from it?

Secondary questions explored to support the primary questions include: +

How can a large-scale institutional program be successfully inserted into an existing urban fabric of varying scale and density?

+

How can interior and exterior spaces be interwoven to create a greater connection to nature and its therapeutic qualities?

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With a significant increase in the senior population, the demand for affordable supportive senior housing has surpassed supply. In New Orleans the dire housing situation has and Rita senior population has returned to the city to live independently in their own homes but vitally needed community resources that assist this population have not returned. The Service House occupies a block in the Central City neighborhood on

Hubbell

been exacerbated since hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Half of the pre-Katrina

is of significant historic importance to the neighborhood and to the city.

Because this area of New Orleans is located at an average of five feet above sea level, it saw little flood damage from the 2005 hurricanes. The higher elevation and close proximity to the Central Business District, French Quarter, and Universities has prompted plans from the city to revitalize the boulevard into a cultural corridor with retail shops and a Civil Rights Museum. Surrounding the boulevard are singlefamily and duplex residences with speculation about the development of multi-family

senior service house

Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, an area that once thrived as a commercial corridor and

affordable housing in the area. The site was chosen because of its relative proximity to existing and future services and because of the potential a project like this has to contribute in rebuilding the neighborhood.

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Figure 1: Cabbagetown homes and street, c. 1910-1920

Cabbagetown How a City Undermined Tradition Susie Ranney B.AR.H 2009

Mill and community interpenetrated each other into a seamless web of relationships…. The mill…was not an irrelevance; it called the community into being, and it sustained the community with the wealth it produced and its intrinsic power over community life.

David Carlton, Mill and Town In South Carolina 1 Frequently located in isolated rural settings, the communities built as textile mill towns in the Antebellum South were constructed to serve the governing companies’ best interests. Such isolation allowed a company, which owned all components of the mill village, to control every aspect of its workers’ lives. Yet as steam power replaced water power at the turn of the twentieth century, factories began to move away from remote watercourses towards increasingly populated areas. The change from rural to urban compromised many primary instruments of factory control over villages and workers. Jacob Elsas, founder of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Company, attempted to appropriate the rural mill village in the bustling city of Atlanta without seeming to consider the impact of context and location. In 1881, Elsas erected a new mill on the ruins of the Atlanta Rolling Mill, a ten acre site less than one mile east of the downtown (Figure 1).2 Despite the company’s adherence to the proven rural model, the urban context of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill’s company town undermined the traditional mill village paternalism.

Built as an instrument of management control, the typical rural mill village of the late nineteenth century “reflected rural expectations as well as practical considerations.”3 A three-story brick mill, company store, and superintendents’ cottages sat across the property from the grid rows of generic “vernacular” three- to four-room frame houses, personal gardens, and livestock pens (Figures 3, 4 and 5).4

Mediating the

space between these working neighborhoods and the mill sector would be the town’s church, school, infirmary, and activity center (including athletic fields).5

The village

makeup promoted contentment among the laborers by offering a sustainable mixture of personal farming and communal work. As steam-engines replaced water power, mills were able to move away from previously required positions along watercourses to unincorporated “mill hills” on the outskirts of towns.6 Proximity to incorporated

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Figure 2: Factory Lot, Mill Grounds, and Oakland Cemetery, Sanborn Fire Map, Atlanta, Ga., 1911

cities provided workers with the illusion of belonging to a greater community - to which they had no actual ties - while allowing mill owners to avoid civic taxes.7 Many urban mills followed the original rural model with relative success, maintaining isolation while fulfilling each population’s needs and desires.

The owners of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill attempted to appropriate the rural mill village model to the bustling city of Atlanta without seeming to consider the vast differences in context.

Hardly isolated, the village that would become Cabbagetown resided within a densely packed community known for prostitution, liquor trafficking, petty crime, and housing for the majority of Atlanta’s itinerant population. An African-American ghetto lay directly to the south and the central commercial and industrial district of Atlanta lay to the north, directly across the train tracks that formed the northern boundary of the mill property (Figure 1).8

Unlike rural mills,

where the owner or superintendent of the mill often lived in the village or nearby, the Elsas family had grown increasingly wealthy by the 1890’s and lived in a completely different section of the city. The separation of the mill head - physically, economically, and socially - greatly impacted the worker loyalty and perceptions of the company for which they worked.9 This connection between employees and the greater community rather than between employee and employer removed a great deal of power from the factory. Overcrowding in the mill village encouraged workers to look for alternative housing and pushed them out into the city. In 1900, Oscar Elsas estimated that approximately 40% of the work force resided outside of the company housing and commuted to work on foot or via the nearby streetcar line. By 1918, this number had increased to two-thirds of the force, allowing Fulton workers to achieve greater contact with the broader white working class institutions and social campaigns. Furthermore, the Elsases neglected

to provide sufficient yard space for the cultivation of gardens or livestock10, or a dedicated company store from which the workers might purchase necessary items, forcing them to purchase food from pricey Atlanta markets.11 Even though the mill developed welfare programs much earlier than its competitors, workers felt few ties to the mill and even consciously positioned themselves

Regardless of a factory’s location, the main goals of the mill village were to facilitate labor recruitment while providing a means of labor control through threat or act of eviction.12 Following the lead of Hannibal Kimball, owner of the urban Atlanta Cotton Factory, Elsas provided worker housing from the outset of mill construction in 1881.13 Fulton housing offered lower rents, better housing stock, and a shorter distance to work compared to surrounding areas. From the village’s conception, the company also offered lawn care, sanitation, and garbage removal.14 Fulton Bag constructed a modest community of one- to two-story shotgun houses typical of rural mill villages

Cabbagetown

an employee-employer hierarchy.

Ranney

outside of the mill’s reach, undermining the traditional purpose of the mill village in establishing

across the street from the factory (Figure 2). Known as Factory Lot, the original housing stood on a triangular tract of land adjacent to both the factory and Oakland Cemetery. A few more rows of housing were added in 1886, but the next major addition occurred in 1895 along with the

Figure 3: Factory Lot Company Housing, showing Cabbagetown, c. 1881

Figure 4: Cabbagetown homes and street c. 1910-1920

Figure 5: Red J. Store on Carroll Street, Cabbagetown, c. 1910-1920

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Figure 6: Fulton workers, Cabbagetown, 1914-1915

opening of a second, even larger mill.15 The enlargement of the factory doubled the workforce, which company housing already struggled to support. From this point forth, the work force far exceeded the accommodations that the company could provide, even after the 1895 addition of several blocks of two-story, four-unit tenement houses designed to hold workers’ large, extended families. The company continued to enlarge the village through periodic construction of new units of company housing until 1905, including an additional 100 units accompanying the commencement of a night shift for the factory.16 In 1905, the last housing project added fourteen single-story homes adjacent to Pearl Street’s streetcar line.17 Because Fulton Bag did not provide a commissary, workers and the surrounding community created their own commercial center of family-run stores almost exclusively on Carroll Street. By the 1920s, six markets, two butchers, a druggist, a furniture store, and a barber were listed as businesses on Carroll Street (Figure 4).18

While a streetcar line connected the village with the

rest of the city, most of the families could not spare the time or money to travel to the inner city for goods. This need provoked the establishment of welfare institutions, headquartered in another of Fulton Bag’s original housing establishments, the “Textile Hotel.” However, by 1900 Elsas considered the hotel to be a failure, and he closed it, renting out the rooms as a boarding house.19 In 1902, the Methodist House Settlement Mission took over use of the building from Elsas, and in 1906, the Wesley House settlement facility emerged. Fulton Bag rented the facility free of charge to the Mission in addition to a $50 monthly donation. Described as “Atlanta’s original full-fledged settlement house,” Wesley House’s accommodations ultimately included a library, auditorium, athletic facilities, a night school,20 a free medical center and clinic, and a nursery. Elsas viewed the welfare programs of Wesley House as means to improve employee morale, stabilize employment, and to create loyalty.21

Attempting to act as a “good corporate

parent,” Elsas funded a company baseball team and the country’s first specialized foot clinic.22 The

settlement workers and welfare programs attempted to “inculcate” beneficial and civilized virtues into the “drifting and unambitious” class of mill workers.23 While the early-twentieth-century factory worker stereotype depicted the men, women, and

obvious mill connections; workers only briefly patronized mill-sponsored services as the companyprovided luncheons and other benefits that would potentially intrude on their personal lives, habits, and autonomy. Although workers perceived the absence of the Elsas name from Wesley House as somewhat suspicious, the majority of workers considered the settlement house to be a helpful organization that offered an alternative to mill life and an opportunity for advancement away from the trappings of the mill.25 The Elsas name and sponsorship greatly contributed to the Textile Hotel’s demise—workers desired to evade the company’s direct control of their personal lives and consequently drifted to boarding houses in the community.26

Cabbagetown

to undermine and control the workers’ lives. Consequently, the workers were highly suspicious of

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children as ignorant, the people themselves were well-aware of typical factory attitudes and aims

Figure 7: Cabbagetown home, c. 1910-1920

Figure 8: Cabbagetown homes, c. 1910-1920

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Figure 9: Cabbagetown home with laundry, c. 1910-1920

Although Fulton Bag provided multiple types of aid for its workers, the workers consistently rejected the company’s attempts to infiltrate their lives. Not only did the people collectively regard home life as a private and intimate affair off-limits to company officials, they also feared the potential consequences of company control over their lives. According to Fulton Bag reports, the company felt that “when we try to help them they think we are trying to make money out of them,” which respect to the workers’ declining medical and welfare services.27 But mistrust was not the only reason that workers stayed out of factory housing. Multiple documents reveal complaints of chinch (bed) bugs, poor sanitation, and the general lack of superficial appeal.28 Furthermore, there existed a stigma of living in company housing, particularly with regards to Factory Lot, which workers directly associated with the “drudgeries and corporation control of mill life.”29 Workers themselves formed a social hierarchy, assigning preference to living on the “Hill” as opposed to the “Lot.”30 Even more unfortunate than those living on the Lot were the unlucky residents of “Chinch Row,” the shabbiest and more derelict row of housing in the mill village.31

Living in slum conditions merely perpetuated the general public’s stereotype of the

textile workers as the downtrodden of the working class of Appalachia.32 Although the conditions of urban and rural factory workers differed, generally both sets of workers originated from the same socio-economic class, sharing a “common, complex heritage with their counterparts across the textile South.”33 The patriarchal family was central to their regional culture as the “basic institution, source of loyalty, labor system, and metaphor.”34 According to Clifford Kuhn, the attributes of the textile factory workers dominating the industrial South were varied but shared: “touchy independence;” customs of mutuality and self reliance; lively oral discourse; complex and blended musical traditions; faith and sacrifice; endurance and persistence; roving and migratory disposition.35

In Cabbagetown, unfortunately, few traces of this highly layered and

complex people group exist architecturally. Yet the disposition of the former inhabitants is highly visible in their interpretations of and responses to the company interference in their lives.

The workers’ tendency to resist was deeply ingrained; their distrust of management’s interference in their personal lives, their lack of material ambition, and the congested conditions of the village were manifested in the physical neglect of the structures.36

As previously mentioned,

the continuous expansion of the Fulton Bag enterprise always outpaced the capacities of company

1896; by the 1930s, that number had risen to 2,700.37 The high cost of living in Atlanta meant tight clustering of village houses, denying the workers supplemental gardening. Emma Burton, superintendent of Wesley House, reported housing conditions of twelve people in a two-room house. Forced by overcrowding into the adjacent white working class neighborhoods, workers had to contend with higher rents and longer commutes.38 The horrid conditions of the Factory Town sent a clear message to the workers: they were not the main concern of the company. By 1914, both the United States Commission on Industrial

Cabbagetown

problem the company encountered with the work force. Fulton Bag employed 700 workers by

Ranney

housing. Overcrowding appears throughout Fulton Bag documentation as a recurring, primary

Relations as well as the Atlanta Sanitation Department had condemned Fulton Bag’s housing as a major health and moral hazard. Until 1915, workers used outdoor latrine closets located at the back of every few houses. These latrines emptied into an iron trough sewage system that the mill had flushed two or three times daily. On one street, eleven houses shared two outside double latrines.39 Furthermore, the thin clapboard walls of the homes did little to provide any insulation or protection; the houses of Chinch Row are described as “mockeries of true homes,”40 and one operative declares, “It is a sin for people to live in such places, as they have to live in here.”41 Factory Lot, the rural village in the midst of the city, had grown into Factory Town, the urban slum. While Jacob Elsas sought to improve the lot of the workers through welfare programs, his son Oscar remained unconcerned with improving the circumstances of his work force and instead blamed the workers for their miserable conditions. Fulton Bag invested very little in housing improvements while consistently updating technology and machinery in the mill. Even the homes of shabby surrounding neighborhoods had basic amenities lacking in the mill village. While electricity ran in the mills as early as the 1890s,42 not until the 1950s were the houses wired for lights to replace kerosene lamps and coal heaters.43 The mill’s disinterest was readily apparent to the workers.

The urban context of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in Atlanta rendered primary instruments of mill control null and void. The immersion of the mill and village within the city interfered with the mill’s authority by allowing increased contact with and reliance on the outside world. The high cost of urban living and the lack of space did not allow for supplemental farming or communal productive work and created overcrowding issues compounded by disease and sanitation problems.

Unlike the rural mill owner, who lived on-site or nearby, the Elsases lived far-off site and occupied a completely different socio-economic group. This separation not only made the Elsases unrelatable to the workers, but their perceived superiority cast mill output as a priority over the workers, who believed that the Elsases considered them expendable. In both urban and rural settings, the workforce originated from a common general source, sharing a heritage of independence, resistance, and privacy. The people were the same, the built structures were very similar, but the context and layout were different. In the case of Cabbagetown and the Fulton Bag and Cotton Company, this change in context undermined the traditional model.

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Figure 10: Cabbagetown street, c. 1910-1920

Notes 1. David Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 22.

2. “Encyclopedia: Cabbagetown (Atlanta),” NationMaster, 14 Dec., 2008, <http://www.nationmaster.com/ encyclopedia/Cabbagetown-(Atlanta)> 3. Jacqueline Dowd Hall et al., “Cotton Mill People: Work, Community, and Protest in the Textile South, 18801940,” The American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 2 (Apr. 1986), 247.

4. Ibid.

5. William H. Phillips, “Southern Textile Villages on the Eve of World War II: The Courtenay Mill of South Carolina,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 45, no. 2 (Jun., 1985), 272.

6. Ibid, 247.

7. Ibid.

8. Gary M. Fink, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914-1915 (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1993), 39.

9. Clifford Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 141.

10. Ibid, 23, 63.

11. Fulton Bag and Cotton Company, “Draft of Statement on House and Commissary,” Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection (Atlanta, Ga: Georgia Institute of Technology), 14 Dec., 2008.

12. Fink, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914-1915, 26-7.

13. Ibid, 17.

14. Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills, 23.

15. National Park Service. “Historic Preservation Certification Application: Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills,” Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

16. Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills, 23.

17. National Park Service. “Historic Preservation Certification Application: Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills,” Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid, 23.

20. Ibid, 65.

21. Fink, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914-1915, 27.

22. National Park Service. “Historic Preservation Certification Application: Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills,” Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

25. Ibid, 23.

26. Ibid, 64.

27. National Park Service. “Historic Preservation Certification Application: Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills,” Historic Preservation Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

28. Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills, 62.

29. This partition became so defined that difficulties existed with integration of the groups.

30. Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills, 62.

31. Ibid, 18, 56.

Cabbagetown

24. Ibid, 65.

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23. Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills, 66.

32. Ibid, 59.

33. Ibid 34. Ibid 35. Ibid, 64.

36. Drew Jubera, “Cabbagetown: One Man’s Vision,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution, November 13, 1988, Sunday Magazine, M/4.

37. “Testimony of Emma Burton, 17-27 Mar. 1915,” Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection (Atlanta, Ga: Georgia Institute of Technology), 14 Dec., 2008, 6.

38. Ibid, 44.

39. Ibid, 62.

40. “Testimony of Operative #226, 13 July 1919,” Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection (Atlanta, Ga: Georgia Institute of Technology), 14 Dec., 2008.

41. Fink, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914-1915, 26.

42. National Park Service, “Cabbagetown District,” National Park Service, Atlanta: A National Register of Historic Places Travel Itinerary.

Figures 1. Cabbagetown homes and street. Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., phonograph, c. 1910-1920, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection.

2. Factory Lot, Mill Grounds, and Oakland Cemetery, Sanborn Fire Map, sheet 474a, Atlanta, Ga., vol. 4, 1911, Digital Sanborn Map Database.

3. Factory Lot Company Housing, showing mill and Oakland Cemetery, Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., c. 1881, Clifford M. Kuhn, Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta’s Fulton Mills (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 18.

4. Cabbagetown homes and street, Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., phonograph, c. 1910-1920, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection.

5. Red J. Store on Carroll Street, Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., phonograph, c. 1910-1920, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection.

6. Fulton Workers, Pullen Library, Special Collections Dept., Georgia State University.

7. Cabbagetown home, Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., phonograph, c. 1910-1920, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection.

8. Cabbagetown homes and street, Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., phonograph, c. 1910-1920, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection.

9. Cabbagetown home with hanging laundry, Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., phonograph, c. 19101920, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection.

10. Cabbagetown street, Cabbagetown, Atlanta, Ga., phonograph, c. 1910-1920, Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Digital Collection.

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Interstate waysides viewed from the road. (images by author)

South by southeast transgressing the I-85 corridor Robert Couch M.Arch 2009

transgression and interstate 85, south carolina This project investigates the existing networks of exchange facilitated by the I-85 corridor between Charlotte, NC and Greenville, SC and the transgressive1 territories that are the by-products of this system. Research and analysis focus on the relationships between the preconditions to the Interstate Highway system and its current configuration, investigating the economies of production and consumption that are coincident to this high-speed infrastructural system.

South Carolinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s section of Interstate 85 is 106 miles of pavement running south from North Carolina to Georgia. It constitutes a portion of the route that stretches from Montgomery, Alabama to Petersburg, Virginia. Driving this stretch of highway renders the adjacent territory not so much as a sequence of discrete spaces but as a continuous landscape in service of its main occupants: truck drivers and leisure travelers. The wayside attractions found along this network are commonly located beyond the edge of municipal regulations and often support marginal practices.

These places of grab-and-go consumption include tourist traps, firework stands, chain restaurants, pornographic retailers, strip malls, strip clubs, peach sheds, and truck stops.

The spatial occupation of this highway fringe not only reflects the global consumptive culture that the interstate fuels but also the local cultural and social practices that it bypasses. The resulting aggregation is a regularly spaced consumer landscape that borrows freely from everyday architectural strategies and vernacular elements to make local goods attractive to the highway consumer.

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Urban And Industrial Growth Along I-85 Opportunities for inhabiting the overlap between local and global practices of production/consumption are explored by mapping traffic flows in relation to urban and industrial growth. Dark grey areas indicate early 1980’s urban centers while the light grey areas indicate current city limits. Traffic is represented as a thickened line along the path of I-85.

THE BOOM BELT From the start, the upstate region of South Carolina felt the impact of the interstate highway and the economic boom that accompanied its construction. In a 2003 New York Times article Jack Millwood of Gaffney, SC is quoted as saying that prior to the arrival of the interstate “we were the poor Old South. There was nothing but textiles, and that was dying.”2 In the ten years following the initial construction of I-85 land values in Greenville County doubled, with most of the increase occurring along the interstate corridor.3 In the seven years following the announcement of the new interstate, nearly $50 million was invested in more than a dozen new plants and businesses along I-85 in Spartanburg County. Construction permits increased 250% in the same time period.4 This increase in employment helped to compensate for the loss of jobs in the textile industry due to automation and global outsourcing.

Couch South by southeast BUBBA MAKES WHEELS The largest, and most recent, economic impact to the region was the influx of the automobile industry, specifically the German automobile manufacturer BMW. BMW’s US Factory is located at the midpoint of South Carolina’s section of I-85 and is clearly visible from the interstate. The company requires their regional parts suppliers to similarly locate in close proximity to I-85 to facilitate just-in-time delivery of their products. Since 1986 around 200 auto suppliers have invested $11 billion in South Carolina. BMW, along with its suppliers of peripheral parts, has invested about $4 billion of this amount since 1992 alone.5 The interstate, however, was not enough to bring new industry to this region; rather, it served as a catalyst to activate existing socio-economic features such as cheap labor, low taxes, the absence of unions, and lax zoning ordinances. In addition to its proximity to I-85, the BMW plant was located here to take advantage of nearby international airports, the east coast’s fourth largest port in Charleston, SC, a favorable climate and an abundance of bourgeois amenities. These cultural and climatic conditions were highlighted in a 1993 article in Business Week magazine in which BMW officials noted that South Carolina “had in its favor a temperate climate, year-round golf, and, as the dollar declined against the mark, inexpensive antebellum mansions.”6

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highway consumption of peaches Mapping the historic territory of peach production in relation to the interstate highway and wayside fruit stands reveals areas of overlap between local production and highway consumption.

THE TASTIER PEACH Commercial production and regional marketing of peaches in South Carolina began in the 1850s. The first interstate shipment of South Carolina peaches was made in the 1870s.7 US HWY-29 served an important role in the early transport of fresh peaches to interstate markets prior to the construction of I-85.More recently, the peach industry has steadily declined from cultivation on 42,000 acres in 1989 to approximately 18,000 acres in 2006. Despite this decline, the South Carolina peach industry is still valued at $35 million and remains number two in US fresh peach production and interstate shipments.8 The upstate or piedmont region, through which I-85 travels, produces the majority of the crop with 46.2%.

The peach crop is slowly being overtaken, not only by a changing climate but also by the encroachment of industries and commercial outlets supported by the interstate. Sunny Slopes fruit stand at Exit 90 on I-85 is owned by the Caggiano family who has been growing peaches since 1928, but recently on increasingly less land. Mia Caggiano states in the New York Times that â&#x20AC;&#x153;we sold the orchards to the mall,â&#x20AC;? referring to the

Couch South by southeast Prime Outlet Mall at Exit 90 in Gaffney that typifies the highway consumer culture now prevalent along this stretch of interstate.9 As a result of this change, peach sales have migrated to wayside sheds along I-85, strategically located to exploit the increase in highway tourism and regional traffic from the interstate highway.

The growth of this highway commerce was coincident with the growth of the peach industry, peaking in 1984 with a crop of over 480,000 tons,10 and resulted in a cross-bred territory where these stands could flourish. Some of these sheds, most notably those operated by Abbott Farms, sell much more than just peaches including items such as fireworks, chow chow11, and discount cigarettes at their multiple locations. This marketing takes full advantage of the interstate exchange network of I-85 which allows for the cross-border consumption of discounted goods and quick transportation of fireworks from South Carolina to North Carolina where the sale of such items is prohibited.

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the productive value of transgression Infrastructural, climatic, and economic preconditions allowed for the growth of peach production, German automobile assembly, and highway consumption in Upstate South Carolina. Diverse wayside typologies have arisen at the intersections of these industries to take advantage of the consumptive needs and desires of those traveling along I-85 in this region. These waysides transgress in their spatial occupation of the highway fringe and in the marginalized activities that often occur there. The occupation of the interstate highway by a transient group further exposes the limits between global and local networks, varying speeds of interaction, and scales of exchange.

This overlapping of global and regional territories allows for outsiders to transgress the spatial, social, and economic limits of local systems and for a cross-breeding of productive and consumptive practices.

In contemporary thought, the idea of transgression is critical to defining social, spatial, and cultural limits. In this research, transgression is applied as a method for testing the limits of accepted consumer practices, “exceeding its limits but not destroying it.”12 It allows for an investigation of new spatial and programmatic operations that engage the edge of the interstate. In this way, transgression becomes a dynamic component in the reconception of these fringe conditions and wayside sites. It acknowledges existing patterns in order to anticipate unintended spatial occupations that challenge current consumer practices. In labeling these spaces as transgressive, it is possible to transcend their currently abject status to “recognize the potential creative fecundity of transgressive experiences”14 located along the fringe of I-85.

Overlap of productive and consumptive practices at highway fringe.

NOTES: 1. This definition of transgression is taken specifically from Michel Foucault and more generally from Georges Bataille.

3. Federal Highway Administration, “I-85 The Boom Belt South Carolina,” US Department of Transportation, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/boombelt.htm (accessed December 15, 2008).

4. Ibid.

Couch

2. Phil Patton, “Driving; The Changing South Finds Its Way on I-85,” New York Times, July 11, 2003.

6. Dean Foust and Maria Mallory, “The Boom Belt,” Business Week, September 27, 1993.

7. South Carolina Peach Council, “SC Peach Farming History,” http://www.scpeach.com/ farmhistory.htm (accessed December 15, 2008).

8. Roy Roberson, “South Carolina Peach Operation High Tech, But Family Oriented,” Southeast Farm Press, August 9, 2006, and John D. Ridley, “The Peach Industry in South Carolina” in Second Annual Peach Symposium (Wageningen, Netherlands: International Society for Horticultural Science).

9. “Driving; The Changing South Finds Its Way on I-85.”

10. “SC Peach Farming History.”

11. Chow chow is a pickled relish regionally associated with the southern United States. It is served cold and can be eaten by itself or used as a condiment.

South by southeast

5. “Driving; The Changing South Finds Its Way on I-85.”

12. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (San Fransisco: First City Lights Books, 1986).

13. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology.

Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984; v. 2 (New York: New Press, 1998), 73.

14. William A. Cohen, “Introduction: Locating Filth,” in Filth : Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, Cohen and Ryan Johnson, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), XV.

This project was conducted during the Design Research Seminar, Fall 2008 with faculty advisors William Morrish and John Quale.

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Moses is dead. Can we kill the Expressway?

The South Bronx Community Takes Back the River Serena Nelson M.lA, M.Arch 2009 A MARGINAL TERRITORY

Once a center for commerce and industry along the South Bronx River, the territory adjacent to the Sheridan Expressway had become an economically stranded zone marked by a concrete thruway used only by sporadic local truck traffic. Though the ambitious expressway project, originally planned by Robert Moses in 1958, was meant to connect the Cross Bronx Expressway to the Bruckner Expressway, it was never completed. Its remnant spur now acts as a divide between the South Bronx community and the riverfront, further diminishing the already sparse access residents have to parks and recreational space.

FROM EXPRESSWAY TO GREENWAY

With the South Bronx River Watershed Alliance [SBRWA] as client, the goal of the Bronx River Studio was to imagine the removal of the Sheridan Expressway and plan an ambitious configuration of market rate and public housing, retail and public landscape spaces along the reclaimed river territory. Through the inspirational efforts of a number of community non-profit organizations like SBRWA and the environmental justice organization SSB or Sustainable South Bronx [founded by resident-turned-activist Majora Carter], the concept of replacing the expressway with a landscape that would benefit South Bronx residents became critical to grass-roots community development campaigns.

Throughout the design process UVa students met and collaborated with representatives of both SBRWA and SSB and local residents to discuss the needs of the community and to generate ideas as to how this project could help to develop a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable South Bronx.

Earthwork cut/fill strategy: build up soil-remediating terraces, cut in wetlands to create new flow patterns for water and people on the site

130

Nelson This proposal first establishes a process for revitalizing a public landscape, the Sheridan Lands, along the South Bronx River. A later phase implements the development of mixed-use housing and community hubs that strengthen connections between the neighborhood residents and existing community resources.

In the first phase of redevelopment the project reclaims the former industrial territory between the Sheridan Expressway and the river as a zone of soil remediation which, for the first time in decades, draws residents towards the riverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge. Access walks create direct links between the residential neighborhoods of the South Bronx, allowing community members to engage in remediation efforts and to take advantage of a system of Greenway trails that will line the waterfront. Earth work is a major component of first-phase site restructuring. River banks are cut at strategic points along the waterway to support wetland re-growth. Soil and building materials removed from the expressway and wetland swales are used to create terraces planted with cover crops that add phosphates to the soil to stabilize contaminants remnant from heavy industry. At site access points, community

moses is dead. can we kill the expressway?

A PROPOSAL FOR THE SHERIDAN LANDS

members are able to contribute composting material for soil remediation, so that after a few seasons the terraces would be capable of supporting community gardens.

As the site develops, access points become pathways down to the river and serve to filter and connect storm water and cleaned waste water back to the Bronx River. In the second phase of redevelopment, the remediated terraces structure a series of community hubs distributed along each block of the 1.4 mile stretch within a configuration of mixed-use residential buildings. These hubs, including composting centers, urban farming initiatives, material cycling efforts, green industries and cultural centers, would serve as resources for educational, social and economic networking with the community.

Before/ after view of the Sheridan corridor after conversion to pedestrian thruway: Multi-use buildings form a street edge along the former Sheridan. Ground surfaces are carved and concrete rubble repurposed for stormwater collection areas along the pedestrian corridor.

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Phased views from river/ greenway look back toward the neighborhood; sitework phasing diagrams show build-up of terraces and site access points.

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moses is dead. can we kill the expressway?

Nelson

Conceptual sections through community hubs: from top, Materials Cycling, Green Industry/Job Training, Cultural Center, and Composting.

Nelson In investigating the history of the South Bronx community and the present-day site, it soon became clear that the role of the designer, perhaps both architect and landscape architect, is critical in planning and integrating concepts at such a large scale. The need to address a host of infrastructural, social, economic, ecological and architectural issues within one design solution requires the kind of synthetic design that landscape architects practice at UVa. In hearing ideas from community members on what was needed in the South Bronx and sharing our own notions as to goals of sustainability, both were informed and the vision was strengthened. One important objective Kristina Hill and the UVa studio put forward was the sustainable design of water systems, such as storm and sewer. Integrating green roofs, living machines, storm water storage and filtration, the studio held up the goal that the Bronx River might one day be swimmable again. To the project as a whole, we sought to integrate these systems in to a network of architectural and landscape spaces that served as community amenities. The need for strengthening of economic networks through job-training centers, and urban farming concepts were forefront in the minds of SBRWA and SSB representatives and residents who saw the need and the potential to address these

moses is dead. can we kill the expressway?

A DESIGNERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S ROLE IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

issues through design.

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“. . .The divided individual of the contemporary city looks for forces instead of forms, for the incorporated instead of the distant, for the haptic instead of the optic, the rhizomatic instead of the figurative....How can architecture act in the terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason?

Undoubtedly, through attention to continuity: not the continuity of the planned, efficient, and legitimated city, but of the flows, the energies, the rhythms established by the passing of the time and the loss of limits. . . . We should treat the residual city with a contradictory complicity that will not shatter the elements that maintain its continuity in space and time.” [From “Terrain vague” by Rubio Ignasi Sola-Morales in Escala, vol. 40, no. 191-192, 2002. 11-14]

fINDING cOMPLEXITY in the post-suburban landscape Shanti Fjord Levy M.Arch, M.LA 2008

1. INTRODUCTION In this project, I investigate a suburban retail strip condition where landscape identity has been suppressed in favor of a narrow set of commercial imperatives. Zoning regulations, parcel boundaries, and the requirements of retail systems, overlaid on sites, convince us that nothing else is really there. Underlying these sites is a set of economic assumptions that are less and less viable. At the same time, when you look closely, you can see that latent networks of occupants and flows set up a tentative cultural and ecological armature that, if slowly reinforced, could be the basis for viable places.

The site of investigation is an ordinary strip retail shopping center in Charlottesville, VA which expresses the vacancies and ruptures common in automobile-centered developments. I have chosen this site partly because of its common elements and history, which do not mark the site as exceptional or particularly noteworthy. The majority of the shopping center was converted from farmland in the 1980s as part of the large scale development of the Route 29 corridor. The site, populated now with primarily lower-tier tenants, has frequent vacancies and an air of decline. The large scale grading that shaped the site obscures two smaller streams within it, as well as the presence of the larger Meadowcreek floodplain, Rivanna trail forest system, and c.1970s low-income housing behind its loading docks and fences.

How can we use the unique remnants that have resulted from commercial development to create an infrastructure that will support a new conception of the public realm? This aim could guide a process of incremental urbanism, building a landscape density through the aggregation of multiple efforts over time. I propose that we learn how to see what is already there as the key set of resources, implementing minimal interventions to reinforce the efficacy of these resources and to strengthen relationships into a network that is dense with interactions, wildness and productivity.

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Site Extrapolations: Recovery of a Landscape Structure Current corridor: Route 29 as structure causes fragmentation, disconnection, heightened experiential distance.

Proposed Emphasis Shift: Topographical/hydrological crossgrain becomes primary structure; small-scale network is strengthened and created.

Proposed Emphasis Shift/ Urban Forest: Vegetative matrix becomes second key ordering system; forest bolstered as key urban infrastructure.

New Landscape Identity/ Junctures as Catalysts: Overlay of newly created small-scale networks, vegetated infrastructure, underlying hydrological order; variable built density and junctures become critical points of intensity and interactions.

This project conjectures that, if a diverse group of both human and non-human forces appropriates a site such as this one, and advances multiple and dissonant interests, the site will regain the vitality needed to sustain it past its current lifecycle. By destabilizing the singular, commercial intentions

orders the site, and seeing these as points of opportunity.

2. SITE READING AND EXTRAPOLATION In an effort to find and reveal the fullness and character of the site as it exists, I returned periodically throughout the seasons to walk, observe, and photograph. This process of ground-truthing allows certain aspects of the site to develop agency in the process of development.

Walking, the site reveals itself. This is a landscape of consumption but not productivity. Under surveillance, people are not invited to modify or participate in this landscape. Instead, our bodies out of scale, we feel the vulnerability of exposure. This is an automatic landscape, where we do not have to think or see and there is little impetus to touch or smell or notice. Here, people rarely interact outside of the protocol of transaction. And, the segregation of uses, spaces, and people severs and obscures adjacencies, creating an exaggerated sense of experiential distance. There is a topographic amnesia here.

At the same time, there is an intricate drawing of the passage of time on weathered surfaces. After a rain, the old courses of streams register quietly on the pavement, while their hidden release is explosive in the forest below. Wild garden rooms generate themselves in secret. People and animals carve their own narrow paths over mulch and groundcovers and weeds, inscribing tactile scale.

FINDING COMPLEXTIY IN THE POST - SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE

resilient and adaptable. This process begins by finding moments of weakness in the control that

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that regulate the site in favor of a multiplicity of forces, this aggregation of places can become

The possibilities are palpable along the edges between zoned land-uses. The edges are spaces that are manipulated, appropriated to a livable scale, but also wild spaces, free spaces, spaces of trash and rusted, stolen shopping carts and leggy, blooming dogwood trees. Spaces of uncertainty, of surprise, concealment, a vegetated thickness and a vacancy of both definition and surveillance.

EXTRAPOLATIONS: Observations gathered on-site speak to larger landscape systems that have become suppressed in the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s development, and offer possibilities for future regeneration. Remnants of the larger vegetated matrix link the site to a larger order and reveal evidence of a fragmented network that already exists. The regional geologic order becomes visible in the scoured bed of a storm water channel.

I propose that change first occurs in how we envision the site. From a dominant single transportation corridor, Route 29, which follows the grain of the bedrock and functions as a divisive line, I propose we shift emphasis to the cross grain of the drainage ways. With the Rivanna walking trail at its core, this cross grain becomes the underlying order for a new network of small scale passages, water infrastructure, forest, and public space.

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paths

porous ground/planting

thresholds

retaining walls

Sites of Opportunity Nurturing a process whereby the singular projected intention is destabilized and gives way to a multiplicity of forces will allow the site to become resilient and adaptable. The process of strengthening the continuity between this site and the flows and inhabitants that support it could begin by finding moments of weakness in the control that orders the site, and seeing these as points of opportunity.

steep slopes

drainage

Levy Zoning laws bind this and all sites like it into over-articulated parcels. Buffer zones ensure that the spaces between parcels be unusable, as well as dictate a considerable expenditure on planting and maintenance of required components. Meanwhile, established methods for commercial development generate multiple kinds of space superfluous to retail needs.

Mapped on the site, these residual spaces become our working zones as designers, business owners, government officials, and citizens as places for immediate action. Sites of opportunity include paths, porous ground, retaining walls, steep slopes, entrances, drainage ways, and places that lie dormant, waiting vacantly for some future or fleeting use. Seen in aggregate, they compose a significant portion of the site. They offer the possibility of a new public infrastructure acting at the seams, the series of apertures in the siteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current use, available for transformation.

Looking outward in scale, it is also key to consider how the site extends into a broad network of public investment. Three adjacent, separate multi-million-dollar publicly funded infrastructure projects (for a new road, a rebuilt sewer interceptor, stream restoration) could, if considered with more hybridized goals, use their resources toward much more significant public benefit. These become urban scale sites of opportunity to dove-tail with imperatives for public space and to help weave the separated strip into the urban network.

FINDING COMPLEXITY IN THE POST - SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE

3. FINDING SITES OF OPPORTUNITY

walls

Plan diagram: Mapped on a transect through the strip mall, the sites of opportunity compose a significant area immediately available for reimagining.

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29 North

Park Rooms: Transformation from parking lot to productive space over time.

Site Transect: Front to Back From the Route 29 corridor to the housing and stream valley to the east, the site has an exaggerated contrast and disconnect between its visible business ‘front’ and wild, hidden ‘back.’

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meadow creek

FINDING COMPLEXITY IN THE POST - SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE

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4. FOUR INTERVENTIONS Rather than considering a single master plan or set design interventions for the site, this project starts with a series of independent interventions. “Hedgerow Spine” takes the trajectory of an historic stream, now the primary buried stormwater pipe, and conjectures how this might develop over time into an extension of the urban forest and act as the backbone of the site. “Water Alley” posits how the strips between parking spaces might transform to initially foster pedestrian movement and water filtration, support informal economies, and eventually spur the replatting of the parking lot into smaller scale lots for diverse redevelopment. “Threshold Garden” selectively demolishes a vacant portion of the building block, proposing a series of overlapping rooms to connect the parking lot with the forest, the stream valley, new community gardens, and the adjacent neighborhoods to the east. “Park Rooms” creates a street edge along a proposed road through the site, and slowly regenerates this vast expanse of asphalt for increasingly intensive, productive occupation over time.

Initial interventions hope to: be scalable; not be interdependent; address key edges/intersections; capitalize on existing opportunities; and change over time.

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FINDING COMPLEXITY IN THE POST - SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE

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Levy FINDING COMPLEXITY IN THE POST - SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE

Park Room colonizes parking lots to foster a diversity of public uses. Responding to the areas of greatest vacancy, the location of storm infrastructure, projected future circulation, and current slopes, the space is divided into a series of “rooms” that can undergo reclamation and reinvention independently.

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Existing site, transformed incrementally over time.

AGENTS OF CHANGE State: Department of Game & Inland Fisheries, VDOT City: Charlottesville Arts Council, Charlottesville Environmental Planning, Charlottesville Parks & Recreation, Rivanna Sewer and Water Authority Citizen: Charlottesville Neighborhood Alliance, local clubs Business: Business owners, Property owner/manager

5. COLLABORATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS In order to share resources, increase stakeholders in the place and encourage a sense of ownership,

how much complexity it is capable of generating.

6. FROM SITE TO PRINCIPLES This site is just one in a repetition of sites with like conditions in this small city alone. In applying a similar approach to the whole series of sites, each generating its own permutations, a new public network can emerge.

Guiding this process are a set of principles: Respond to local particularities to find ways of strengthening the identity of place.

Identify gaps in commercial requirements as sites for immediate change.

Focus on connective edges.

Value intersections as moments of investment to maximize interactions.

Digest and re-imagine the material legacy of outdated modes.

Implement scaled interventions, valuing economy of initial acts.

Foster extensions and cross-pollinizations of uses and groups already occupying the site.

Create places of intensive vegetated immersion.

Create spatial enclosure and layering to define places of multiple scales.

Visibly express flows and the passage of time, encouraging comfort with places in flux.

Promote temporary uses and informal economies

FINDING COMPLEXITY IN THE POST - SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE

whether each change is worth implementing, we can consider what activities it will foster. That is,

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multiple cooperating agents are projected to shepherd this transformation. As a test to determine

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inhabiting the WATERSHED Emily Williamson M.Arch 2009

construction and intention The following two projects operate within radically different contexts and with very different intentions­â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the first in Charlottesville with a conceptual focus, and the second in Cape Coast, Ghana with an emphasis on constructability. Both propose reorganizing a community to perform like a watershed.

The watershed condition inherently contains a dense network of hierarchical relationships of brooks, streams, and rivers. These continually reshape the land, creating a diversity of ecological zones in which plants and animals thrive. They operate vertically and horizontally, connecting the ground to the sky and the ridge to the valley. They are also highly adaptable in their ability to accommodate flooding and drought.

If society could restructure the community or city to connect into and become a part of this system, this armature would provide not only a sustainable and flexible framework that plugs into its ecological context, but also a democratic social agenda in which the individual and collective take responsibility for, uphold, adapt, and improve upon the system they have helped create. The projects below suggest ways of applying the concept of the watershed to the construction of real places that can work to accomplish both of these goals.

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James River watershed condition

James River watershed typologies

Barracks Road: human infrastucture + water movement + potential connections

Williamson If Barracks Road could be restructured to perform like a watershed, then the new urban condition would not only be able to collect, store, filter, distribute and absorb water to mitigate runoff, but also provide opportunities for new modes of inhabitation. Explorations of the watershed condition, thickened ground, high density fields, constructed topography and inhabitation reveal this new organization.

The site exists at the intersection of Meadowbrook Creek and a small stream that runs perpendicular to Route 29. At this crossroads, a large retention basin would become the center for major water

INHABITING THE WATERSHED

Restructuring barracks road

collection and public gathering, connecting to the larger watershed by linking both to the Dell and to the retention basin adjacent to the John Paul Jones arena.

Valleys and ridges would create the structure for the ground while simultaneously allowing for the passage of water [valley system] and people [ridge system]. Dwellings would become the seam between the two and serve to both store water in the structural ribs that connect each unit and distribute water across the units down in the valley below. In addition to this new water and social infrastructure, the shells of the existing buildings would remain and become either gardens along the ridges or retention basins along the valleys. Their structure would be used to create a complex roof canopy system that would distribute water to the dwelling seams and provide opportunities for new public space beneath.

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Green space + porosity + rain distribution canopy + housing

Ridge + creek + basin

Ridge + valley paths

Canopies +building voids

Ridge + valley paths

Canopies + building voids

Ridge + valley seams

Water collection

Water filtration

Water distribution

Williamson canopy systems would become open space for gathering while providing another layer of filtration for the water before it reached the largest retention basin. Porosity would vary throughout the system depending upon how much water needed to be absorbed and filtered and how much needed to be distributed, collected, and stored.

INHABITING THE WATERSHED

Interconnected zones of different sizes and heights formed by the negative spaces between the

Inhabiting the seam between ridge + valley

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Kit-of-parts: roof, edge, ridge, weir, and ground

Williamson A complex cultural and spatial network organizes the Zongo urban fabric. The typical house, its extensions into the landscape and water infrastructure, and the shared seams between semi-private and private spaces generate the primary system. The mosques, madrasas, and retail space provide public infrastructure along its edges. While the Western understanding of house often implies a single private unit for a nuclear family subdivided into parts assigned to different activities, conditions in the Zongo suggest a very different conception of dwelling.

The inside and outside are of equal importance and satisfy different needs for the

INHABITING THE WATERSHED

The ZONGO: WATER INFRASTRUCTURE + PUBLIC LIFE

inhabitants. Just as the inside provides privacy and shelter from the sun and rain, the outside hosts public exchange and facilitates washing and cooking. Shared courtyards are central to this living condition and the more private, interior spaces usually enclose it. However, as the inhabitants require more space, new components of the house are added to either the courtyard itself or to the structure’s outer edges. These spaces have the potential to become bathhouses, shelter for tenants, kitchens, storage, or porches.

Because they are located along the seam between semi-private and private, they also have a greater potential to become shared space. The bathhouses in particular are inherently tied to the public realm in their connection to the open drains that run through the Zongo and Cape Coast communities and out to the ocean.

Presently, this system of habitation is unsanitary, inefficient, and an inhibitor of movement and gathering in the public space through which it operates. If, however, the community altered its organization and components to perform like those of a watershed, this strategy could spread to the more private realm of the house. The new armature would not only resolve issues of sanitation and erosion, but also provide new opportunities for public life. The network of relationships among the watershed’s components—collection, filtration, storage, distribution, and absorption—will provide the framework for this system. Rather than creating a master plan for the community, new components will be added “piece meal,” incrementally replacing the deteriorating urban fabric as needed. These new components—roof, edge, ridge, weir, and ground—would slowly accrete to form a new water and social infrastructure.

Integral to the project is a sustainable design approach that privileges a bottom-up strategy, where the community drives the entire process from beginning to end.

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Roof

courtyard hip roof

inverted hip roof

Edge

hip roof

distribution

collection + small gathering

Ridge

collection + horizontal filtration

large gathering stairs

Weir

steep slope stairs

path

goat pen

cultivation

Ground

large gathering

filtration - large gathering

shed roof

collection + vertical filtration

bath house

shallow slope ramp

ritual washing

wall

retention zone

terrace

Williamson

multiple butterfly roofs

INHABITING THE WATERSHED

butterfly roof

“Restructuring Barracks Road” was initiated during Robin Dripps’ Waterworks Studio in Spring 2008.

“The Zongo: Water Infrastructure + Public Life” developed during the 2008-2009 Independent Design Research Studio. Clark Construction funded a trip to Ghana in Fall 2008 dedicated to this research. Robin Dripps, Gina Haney, Scot French, and Maurice Cox provided invaluable insight and collaboration.

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Sun City and the Suburban Desert Synthetic Recombinations in an Extreme Environment Nataly Gattegno Assistant Professor of Architecture

“Synthetic recombination” is a method of exploring the implications of designing—of living—at the edge of our comfort zones, at the frontier of our habitable surroundings. I developed this methodology through my own research and practice, and through a series of design studios at the University of Virginia; my goal has been to explore the relationships between energy and form in the constructed environment—between the diverse kinds of energy embodied and used by buildings and landscapes.

In recent years I’ve taught two studios that have tested this method in the laboratory of the city of Phoenix, in an effort to reconcile what would seem to be two antithetical conditions that define contemporary Phoenix: extreme climate and extreme sprawl. How can the intense heat, aridity, and blistering sunshine of the desert be reconciled with the vast and still-growing expanses of single-family homes cooled by central air, surrounded by golf courses, and bordered by artificial lakes? Can the synthetic recombination of this unlikely suburbia and its desert context produce a new hybrid of place and landscape—a designed environment integrated with its natural ecosystems, as well as with local market forces?

Illustrated here are a series of speculations, experiments, and provocations for rethinking the future growth of Phoenix; all were created by upper-level students in my studios, titled “Extreme Environments.” The individual projects are located in the northwestern suburbs of Phoenix, between a gated community called Pueblo El Mirage, a few miles west of Sun City, and a wash created by the Agua Fria River. The site exemplifies one of the archetypal conditions of Phoenix, and indeed of many booming Western cities: the threshold between the subdivision, the tract home and the golf course, and the desert—which is also the threshold between our culture (our consumption) and nature.

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Taylor Burgess, B.S. Arch 2008 The skin of the structure is mutable, allowing apertures to directly engage their surroundings. The cells contract and densify to create more shade, or open up to ventilate. A larger scale shading device explores the distribution of shade on the site and the potential emergence of microclimates of occupation and oases of vegetation.

Homes and vegetation are located wherever shade is prevalent while sun-filled zones are given back to the desert. Testing the shading device at the scale of the single home reveals possible modes of occupation finely calibrated to the surrounding environment. The microclimates that operate at the scale of the site perform at the scale of the home.

A section perspective through the housing prototype explores solar, ventilation, and occupation patterns.

Gattegno Sun City and the Suburban Desert Physical model experiments explore possible surface and material transformations that calibrate ventilation and light.

A solar chart of the housing units informs the organization and distribution of the large scale shading device.

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Elyse Kelly, B.S. Arch 2008 (above): Analysis of the Agua Fria River Wash and the nesting of a subdivision into the existing systems of water, vegetation and infrastructure.

Jennifer Siomacco, B.S. Arch 2008 (below): Physical site models explore the relationship between housing, new infrastructure and the desert wash. The site plan investigates the braiding of the systems on the site, their potential recombination and occupation.

Gattegno urban designer and critic Michael Sorkin has termed the “ageographic” nature of sprawl—its tendency to produce generic environments with little or no relationship to context. In Phoenix this ageographic development is everywhere: the single family home, the subdivision, the golf course, the commercial strip and the shopping mall, seemingly endless repetitions of the same type, advancing through the desert, producing eventually and inevitably a palpable sense of disorientation. Our proposals sought to counter this ageography through sustained engagement with site, with its temporal systems, its infrastructure, its desert morphology. The lushness of the gated country club of El Mirage contrasted sharply with the dry, harsh, and dusty landscape of the Agua Fria wash. The students and I were struck by the vast yet sparse landscape of single-family houses, by the

Sun City and the Suburban Desert

The students’ proposals explored the possibility of taking on what the

consistent horizon line of gated communities and perimeter walls. We were encountering, and struggling to understand, a very different urban model than those of the Northeastern cities we were accustomed to, or of the European patterns some of us knew. To our eyes, Phoenix was endless, low, and seemingly (strangely) vacant.

To understand and engage the site, we embarked upon a hypercontextual reading of place; we analyzed climate, weather, seasons, energy, hydrology, technology, and communications, and these became our primary design components. We were working in El Mirage, but we could have been almost anywhere in the sprawling metropolis of Maricopa County (one of the fastest-growing in the United States). The city and its suburbs were no longer a neutral and empty canvas in the desert, but sites full of potential to examine, harvest, collect, and study, sites where water, energy, people, flora, and fauna were understood as dynamic systems. In this sense our projects harnessed what was extreme and used it as an organizational device, a design tool, a way of intervening by integrating and synthesizing multiple site ecologies. The results were highly recombined and reconfigured amalgamations of programs, systems, activities, topography, and morphology.

Our proposals explored the dynamics of seasonality, program, and performance, while also experimenting with their capacity to generate form and organize space—to offer new alternatives for desert development. We

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Recombination of desert suburbia: Golfing above, living below, water storage underground, a shade garden and a desert garden.

Connection of golfing community to existing mountain runoff water.

Gattegno The site is composed with elements of desert suburbia: water collection, distribution, dwelling organization, circulation, golfing.

The site section reveals the proximity of the project to the ground; the new â&#x20AC;&#x153;golfing groundâ&#x20AC;? emerges above the dwellings.

The golf course is both public space and infrastructure, acting as water conduit, collector and storage device. Sometimes green and sometimes barren, the project strategically locates itself to optimize the amount of water that flows through it. Infrastructure and occupation are inextricably linked.

Sun City and the Suburban Desert

Carrie Norman, B.S. Arch 2006

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explored, for instance, how water harvesting, solar collection, shade, and dune formation might transform a typical planned community; how a golf course might take advantage of topography and orientation to collect water, irrigate fields, and provide shade for housing; how a suburban shading device might generate diverse microclimates at ground level and spawn desert growth; how evaporative cooling towers might naturally ventilate and chill buildings and at the same time become hydroponic growing structures. Through such means we sought to create new adjacencies, new syntheses of artificial and natural. We accepted the place as it was, focusing not upon large transformations of existing urban patterns but instead on strategic adaptations, on new syntheses.

We also sought to integrate into our designs the dramatic changes that desert environments can experienceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;diurnally, seasonally, annually, and perennially.

This prompted us to explore how building programs might be adapted accordingly â&#x20AC;&#x201D;for instance, how activities might adjust to daily climate and seasonal variation, rather than being predetermined by zoning codes or space planning. If public spaces are the spaces of transaction, communication, debate, and exchange, might they be construed as dynamic spaces, as spaces that might be relocated and recombined? Conceptualized as potentially shifting and changing, transforming and relocating, depending on the availability of shade, water, and energy? Could public space be a wired, networked, technological place, as opposed to a stark plaza in the blistering heat? Could public space shift with the seasons, becoming the golf course in winter, the mall in summer? Could it be co-programmed with new infrastructure? Could the wind turbine power station be a new kind of civic space?

With its vast patchwork of gated communities, behind the ten foot- high subdivision walls that surround oases of lawns and programmable sprinklers, goose ponds and golf clubs, Phoenix illustrates the strange interdependence of infrastructure and recreation. Golfing is a prime industry, supplying participants with lawns as lush as those in Virginia, irrigating extensive desert tracts, providing intricate courses for golf carts. In our proposals, such recreational places were treated not only as infrastructural landscapes but also public spaces.

We synthesized the golfing green with housing, energy generation, water collection, agriculture, and community space. Our goal was to create new spaces that would be playful and unexpected amalgams of activity, generating a diverse and changing map of occupation. Spaces that were hot and dry in the daytime

Gattegno inhabitation; places that were golf courses during the cool sunny months became water collectors and purifiers in the summer monsoon season. In these ways public space was synthesized with seasonally changing programs, and coupled with the productivity of energy collection and harvesting.

Today we are more aware than ever that energy and water are central to urban sustainability. A community prospers and grows only to the extent that it can sustain the resources to survive and thrive. Could Phoenix become a strategically densified—sustainable—city by adapting its current patterns and generating networked zones of higher intensity and concentration? In this way a new urban system might emerge—a system keenly responsive to its extreme environment.

Sun City and the Suburban Desert

became active community centers at night; shaded zones harbored outdoor

Extreme environments require risk. Our large goal here is to prompt us to critically rethink how we develop the desert, to recognize the limits of current approaches and to explore how our current desert landscapes—El Mirage and the many landscapes just like El Mirage—can be adapted to become comfortable, productive, and sustainable. But to make this happen, we’ll need to step outside our comfort zones—into the extreme.

This article was first published in Lab Report 02, a publication of the Phoenix Urban Research Lab @ ASU. The student work presented was executed in the Spring of 2006 and Fall of 2007 in Professor Gattegno’s fourth-year studios at the University of Virginia.

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Mesh screen mediates the desert sun for pedestrians observing native plants while waiting for mass transit. The parking garage beyond is retrofitted with solar panels and solar reflectors to capture energy and disperse ambient light throughout the housing development.

Solar arrays (plastic discs) emerge out of the roof above a light mesh canopy. Housing unit clusters (white plastic boxes) attach to the stripped down garage structure. The interior of the garage is linked to the leisurescape (white bristol board and porch screen), which carries people to the rail system (black plastic and metal rods).

M.A.D.E. in Vegas: Machine Augmented Detritus Ecologies Insil Lee M.Arch 2008 Justin Sculthorpe M.Arch 2008

The speculative projects undertaken in our studio, led by Assistant Professor Jason Johnson in 2008, were set in the year 2108. The goal was to design interventions or machines that are projections one hundred years into the future predicated upon current ideas, ecologies, practices, and contexts. The identity of Las Vegas is characterized by the endless barrage of single-serving tourist experiences and the expanding suburban periphery.

Both drain regional resources and raise serious

concerns about whether Las Vegas can sustain itself. We focused on four issues that, to us, were integral to the problems facing Las Vegas but at the same time held clues to solutions. These issues were transportation, housing, energy, and water. The goal is to create a work of science fiction, a synthesis of existing ideas to address future issues.

TRANSPORTATION Though our travel around Las Vegas was predominantly in cars, there is a monorail that runs one block over and parallel to the strip linking many of the casinos. While this infrastructure currently has a back-of-house feel, our projection for 2108 would bring it to the forefront as a machine augmented monorail that would bring goods, services, high occupancy vehicles and people from the periphery of the city to the center.

HOUSING Our projection for 2108 includes a growth boundary to prevent the further spread of the Las Vegas suburbs and to encourage citizens to re-colonize the city center. We envision that after the monorail has infiltrated the city, ubiquitous parking garages could be stripped down and re-imagined as armatures for housing and related services.

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Currently, the swimming pools serve only as places of retreat and recreation. In 2108, they are also holding tanks for water used to irrigate hydroponic gardens within the garage below.

From left to right: A garage is converted into a water collection/filtration facility and a housing development. The leisurescape emerges out of a garage and connects to the rail station. As mass transit picks up passengers, a crane above delivers a bedroom suite. Another converted garage beyond becomes a solar power station and another housing development.

Lee | Sculthorpe To reduce Las Vegas’ massive strain on regional water sources, we propose purifying the wastewater from the casinos and housing units in “water follies,” recreational pools set within former parking garages, that allow residents to have both a physical and visual connection to this precious desert resource. After being purified, the water is pumped to productive landscapes on site that grow the housing colony’s food.

M.A.D.E. IN VEGAS

WATER

ENERGY Though currently the heavy use of cars and the extravagant signage in Las Vegas make the city a fossil fuel drain, the area is also a hotbed for alternative fuel development. The projection for 2108 addresses the fossil fuel use of Las Vegas by assigning solar collection stations to former garages that are in optimum positions to harness solar energy.

LEISURESCAPE The element that ties all these pieces together is the leisurescape, an elevated desert park of native vegetation and soil re-introduced into the center of the city. The interstitial spaces between the leisurescape and the ground are utilized as either shaded walking areas or enclosed spaces for businesses, community services or entertainment.

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From left to right: Water follies pierce the roof of a converted garage. Underneath are enclosed spaces for businesses and community amenities and services. Elevated walkways connect housing units on different levels, while the roof truss houses bars and dance clubs. Housing units are offset: one personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roof is another personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s patio.

From left to right: Residents pick cucumbers from a hydroponic garden. Translucent walkways connect housing units, gardens and vertical circulation and allow light to penetrate.

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M.A.D.E. IN VEGAS

Lee | Sculthorpe

basecamp: hawaii!

Kurt Petschke M.Arch 2009

plastic paradise BASECAMP: HAWAII! operates within an expanded discourse on sustainability and design. Its primary objective is to reveal our everyday participation in global productive and consumptive flows and the very real material effects this participation has on an extreme, remote location. Here, the BASECAMP demonstrates how revaluing â&#x20AC;&#x153;wasteâ&#x20AC;? has the potential to empower undesirable materials in ways that ultimately alter our everyday bad behavior.

Above: floating habitats and plastic extraction Left: combining offshore structure, flotsam collection, sea habitat, and aquatic recreation

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Plastic superhighway, tourist routes, and seamounts in summer

Leisure activities and plastic extraction

Petschke BASECAMP: HAWAII! Loudoun Seamount: Summer Convergences

The BASECAMP works within the open ocean north of Hawaii where there is an enormous amount of floating plastic debris originating from all over the Pacific Rim. Currently twice the size of Texas, this floating “landfill” is the result of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a permanent mega-scale circulation of water where high atmospheric pressure weakens surface currents and winds, causing marine debris to aggregate. Here, plastic outweighs plankton six to one. The neighboring Northwest Hawaiian Island archipelago (NWHI) is particularly at risk because of factors that operate on multiple temporal and spatial scales. On the ocean-basin scale, the convergence of westerly winds in the mid-latitudes and easterly winds in the tropics shifts according to seasonal, inter-annual, and storm event timescales, resulting in a dense superhighway of marine debris that periodically collides with the NWHI as it moves in and out of the floating “landfill.” Attached to seamounts adjacent to the NWHI archipelago, the BASECAMP operates between the northern, summertime position of this garbage superhighway and its southern, wintertime position within the fragile ecosystems of the NWHI.

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Top to bottom: flotsam collection, boardwalks, habitat variation, active surfaces

Seabird Habitat

Petschke

Plastic Habitat

BASECAMP: HAWAII!

Zooplankton Habitat

Snowbird Habitat

Ribcage

Windrows

Sea Level

Seamount

Loudoun Seamount: Exploded Axonometric

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Tourist promenade and plastic gleaning

Habitat surfaces above and below the waterline

Petschke BASECAMP: HAWAII! The BASECAMP supports an autonomous, offshore economy founded on the usurpation of an established tourist industry and the exploration, extraction, and exportation of plastic marine debris. The result is a re-adaptation and hybridization of island morphologies, exploitative offshore technologies, and leisurely tourist activities. The program emerges out of this overlay, exploring the possibilities of reprocessing immense waste in the service of creating something just and beautiful, all the while sipping on a mai tai in the setting sun.

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