ROME
ROME dwgs pics texts 2016
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ROME
104 sketches, 1 essay, and a couple of pictures. There, architecture whispers continuity, and presence. There, buildings stand proudly as would any column in a hall of a king. Autonomous but at the same time rooted with deep narratives and values, architecture there nurtures fundamentally the human condition and mind.
Rome is: where where where where a a a a a
architecture begins. amateur fire dancers perform you can find potato on pizza there is a lack of haribou options
neat place to draw. place to talk to the masters place for misinterpretations never ending mystery. never ending dream.
pg. 4-107 sketches = “draw what you think not what you see” sketches = visual notes sketches = an excuse to procrasinate
pg.108-109 amateur pictures of memorable things
pg. 110-111 an essay on architecture for, by, and on Alberti “points to continuity”
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~104 sketches
NOTE: - there will be no perspective sketches, why not just take a picture instead? - there will be no atmospheric shading or wutnot, the drawings are about conveying clearly the architectural idea - if not stated a place don’t bother looking for it, it came from my mind
*all dwgs done with a muji 0.38pt pen
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the entrance to the baths of Baia,reinforced four times.
a circular shed with a deep hole inside on the property of Villa Lante
a block on our way to Villa Dei Misteri
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screen covering for repairs.
a wall
capri rooftops
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points to continuity Leon Battista Alberti
This particular essay is a personal endeavor on my part to establishing
a set of grounding positions for reference in writing De Re Aedifictoria. The essay is perhaps also for those who do not wish to fully invest in comprehending 10 books, but only want a general understanding of contemporary discourse.
My thoughts here explore the role of the architect, and what are architecture’s fundamental definitions and conditions.
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sorry to other readers for the mark ups and notes...
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Architecture to itself A building can be architecture, but architecture does not necessarily need
to be a building. Most people closely associate architects to builders, but
the architect in actuality does not construct buildings but rather construct ideas about them. An architectural exercise is primarily an intellectual
interpretation. This interpretation is reached in a conversation between the spirit of the place, the will of people, and the ideas of the architect.
Architecture and architectural theory are interchangeable, for both think
about what a building can mean and what it should do. Architecture is alive; it whispers and sometimes shouts perfection in its visually proportional narratives and mystical depth and complexity. It is a dream of the built
environment in the past, present, and future that architecture manifests.
Architecture is a way of thinking both critically and projectively about the world.
Architecture to subjects Architecture is truth. It manifests the intentions, and dreams of society
for its subjects to confront. The architectural productions of power give people a political agency to engage when the politics of governance and
the will of those in charge are intentionally formalized, presented, and made vulnerable for society through architecture.
Architecture reinforces
but also weakens the ideology of government. By creating architecture, the
edifice is produced as a sign of reference for stability, but by physicalizing ideology subjugates it to attack and revolt. This is the political power
of architecture to interpret and reveal a set of truths for judgement, and through its articulation educate to produce new forms of subjectivity.
Educating these new subjects create individuals who become self-conscious and critical of their current environment and position in relationship to the world.
The Architectural Specter The architect is a brain worker, a linguistic expert that is bound to
translate the pure abstractions of ideas into a grounded physical reality. The way we conceptualize and embody our creation has the potential to be
translated in an abundance of mediums from drawings to models to buildings. While painters work with paints, sculptures with stone, poets with words;
the language of architecture is buildings. Buildings test our dreams about
architecture to the world, setting up a game of endurance against the values of society. It is society who uses our creations, and it is society who will ultimately destroy or nurture our legacy.
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Does a building need to be built today in order to test and convey ideas? Often buildings join in the discussion too late, and take a long time to realize, their initial social commentary and critical discourse lost through time and the forces of economy. Can paper architecture or more like digitalized paper architecture parallel the pace of society.
Architecture is a conversation with buildings. Of thinking what they are and what they should be. Buildings as characters, another layer of subjects in society?
Reminds me of Georges Bataille “Against Architecture” and Slavoj Zizek’s example of how Soviet Union communism preached collectivity but the architecture produced was hard, strong, authoritarian and hierarchical.
Architecture or Revolution
It is weird how we have basic education classes on music, art, literature in high school but not on architecture. The public have an general respect and appreciation for these other creative productions whereas architecture is always dismissive, unfamiliar, and always perceived as excess. Can architecture educate, produce, and inspire curiosity in architecture and the environment? Can architecture reorientate and produce new positions and experiences?
Architects work now with images. The image has the most powerful potential to convey and proliferate concepts. Victor Hugo’s printing press has supplanted architecture’s narrative capabilities is true to a certain extent but it does not mean architecture need to always be confined to built form, images allow an even quicker response from subjects than text in contemporary society. Built work are now leveled off with the other potential mediums like writing, drawing, and models with post-internet generating a global audience in parallel with the contextual subjects of the built work both equally exposed to the work.
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Agency It is clear in the process of building construction the split role between architects and builders. The architect no longer resides within the field of construction, but works with a certain degree of abstraction offsite
. This fissure is unprecedented before the time of the Renaissance, where builders do not plan or conceptualized architecture off site but rather in situ. The architect of the age of rebirth is freed from the physical
labor in order to invest time in conditioning the mind through the study of classic antiquity, issues of current society, and the exercise of multiple arts. Only through an in-depth training of culture enables the purpose of architecture to not merely represent but interpret conditions of society
and mark edifice with clear agency and purpose. The act of interpretation is
important and intricately tied to the agency of the architect. Architectural
interpretations can simultaneous embed both a projective and critical project addressing the past, present, and future. Unlike the explicit mimesis of idea
in the other arts, architecture demands a constant conversation with the idea of objects through a banal everyday habitation and use of forms. In a state
of perpetual negotiation, the discipline is situated in a constant process of iteration between times, using multiple mediums to translate a response by and for society.
The iterations are done through drawing and writing about buildings; the
builder deals with the onsite practicalities and labor of construction. The agency of the drawing is crucial in marking this professional distinction which also emphasizes a specific condition, relationship, and narrative
that the builder must embody in the work. The drawing as design becomes
as important as the building itself, perhaps even more important since it
enables a precise creation of distinct multiples. The consistent multiples
alludes to the control of a single architect to generate the abstract in the idea, the annotative device which is the drawing, and the purely physical which is the building. The drawing as the blueprint between the abstract and the articulated whole establishes a high degree of precision for the
builder’s execution in order to reflect the proportional harmony, structural
rigor, and functionality intended by the architect. This demand for scientific precision gives primary authorship and hierarchical power to the architect. Authorship The Renaissance gives emphasis on the individual, the Renaissance man with diverse practices, interests and talents. The hero architect is also an
expert philosopher, sculptor, poet, and painter. The arts once inhabited in the domain of buildings now become their own particular distinctive fields exercised by the individual. Buildings were
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For some reason architecture’s most influential medium might not be buildings but books. Vitruvius 10 books, Alberti’s 10 books, Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, Aldo Rossi’s The architecture of the city, Venturi’s Complexities and Contradictions, and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York are crucial works that have been hugely influential in generating and defining work.
Architecture should be rooted in the familiar, take subjects on a unexpected set of effects, and then return to the familiar once again. Like a magician’s performance where the magician takes the audience on a ride starting from the ordinary, making an effect, and returning to the ordinary once again.
Mario Carpo “The Alphabet and the Algorithm” - Alberti as the first digital architect who uses drawing to render buildings to be able to be mass produced and copied. He also rethinks the classical idea of self-organization both aesthetically and visually through introducing mathematical systems to govern geometry and the orders. Alberti as the first digital architect to utilize the diagram to represent and conceptualize an abstract notion of a building.
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once the host for all of the arts , its walls the canvas
for paintings and literature, its shell a carving block for sculpture. The Renaissance pulls the arts out of the host of buildings and establishes
distinct cultural practices for the individual. The Arts gain autonomy, with paintings bounded by picture frames, and sculptures as stand-alone figures;
architecture merely becomes another means of cultural production. While the
building is no longer the host for the other arts, it is the Renaissance man
that starts to blur the distinction between the established forms of cultural production. However, the acts of architecture still demand a certain border or demarcation of architectural agency. The discipline is always defined in relationship to something else. Its knowledge is interdisciplinary but its problems must be addressed within the discipline. One crucial conditional relationship that has been produced through the establishment of the two
point perspective and my own emphasis on universal mathematical harmony is
the problematics of homogenous space. This condition is described most simple in my quote; “The city is like a great house and the house in its turn a small city.�
Parts to a Whole I seek to establish a revised proportional emphasis on the Vitruvian order by emphasizing their decorative potential to regulate narrative and tie a
relationship between the parts to the whole. This part to whole relationship must proliferate as a structuring device in all aspects of architectural manifestation in considering formalism, aesthetics, and the city.
The city is a living organism, with parts old and new, all breathing a
narrative of continuity for hosting humanity and its creations. Buildings are the fundamental material for the city fabric. It establishes temenos
conditions, facilitate the production of culture and identity and provide an abundance of quality spaces for living. The city and the building must be
tied together in formal consistency, and politics. The ruling of state and
the management of the household must share the same level of complexity and strategy of governance in this context. Household management of the family
is the smallest basic unit of governance, both the family and the collective of a city represent a gathering of like-minded individuals balanced between
collectivity and independence. Therefore in conceptualizing the house and the city, one must consider the visual consistency of form, materiality, interior partitioning, and public space; a smoothing of hierarchy in order to provide an equal field for harmonious subjects.
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Architecture is about making connections but about understand what is and isn’t architecture using the research and collaborations with other disciplines as a wall to push against.
The age old project of architecture that everyone after Alberti is still trying to solve. Ref the projects of Eisenman, Jose Oubrerie, MOS, Early parametric design was trying to produce heterogeneous space but has now be reduced to a worship of technology and doing things just because it can be done. However I think there is merit in the reemergence of post modern figures in stressing a paradox as an architectural trope to produce flexibility but also richness; not just free plans.
Today’s cities are as diverse, multivalent, and complex just like its population. The city of continuity no longer exists.
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The agency of form of the exterior must reflect order contextually to the will of the place. This order is
manifested in the game of proportion, an expression of natural beauty of
scalable pure geometries established in relationship to both the structured eloquent resonance of musical chords and the classical orders of Vitruvius; concinnitas. In the façade exercise of Palazzo Rucellai, the single window unit is utilized to generate a measurable frame of mediation between the
public and private space. The sequential window elements of private space
support the public through is scaled organization to the street. The façade is purposefully left unfinished on the left end to suggest a projective
continuity of a gridded system, while the systematic order and composition of level division displays a level of negotiation between the variations
of the city. The purpose of the façade is to stitch together the radically different buildings in context, to accept instability and variation of the
context and translate it in the way the brick masonry patterns are framed in place by the rigidity of the orders. Each façade is a solved mathematical problem, a mosaic of detailed and pure geometry precisely laid out in general consensus.
The façade has a certain level of perceivable complexity in its layered
manner, with elements on a canvas full of shallow and thick lines, almost as if the builder constructed the overlapping sequences of drawings projected
onto a building backboard. The orders and ornament as the smallest elements
in an architect’s repertoire is freed from structural constraints and brings
a delicate scale of geometry to animate these mat surfaces. Ornament reduces scale, to bring legibility of building’s purpose . Like oversized bulletin boards, the compositions of the facade are negotiations of dualities in
themselves, allowing subjects to read the exterior and inert workings of
buildings. By definition, ornament is the residue of history, a consistent
representation of past archetypes and forms. Noted by Vitruvius, the stone
Doric column with its thinning top and concave facts are descendants of the tree trunks used to erect the Greek temples of old. The details of wood
construction and the textual quality of the material are carried over as
redundant semiotic ornament for the stone Doric column. Here, Vitruvius’s
myth depicts architecture as something that becomes itself when it acts as an imitation of its invisible qualities.
Architecture conceptualized as a set of parts, pieced from the smallest
sculpted grapes to the stretching arms of the Doric columns constitute a coherent continuity of urban fabric bound together through mathematical relationships.
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Relatable to modernism’s pursuits of an ideal through the international style; a universal scientific truth of a way of doing things grounded in the processes and methods produced by the infiltration of technology from production to everyday life. Similar to D’arcy Thompson and the parametrics interest in systems that branch and produce continuity. Always a smoothing, a visual coherence and abstract uniformity but instead of referencing history reference nature.
The façade or shell of a building might be the only agency architects still have with structural engineers, interior designers, landscape architects, acoustic engineers, etc etc etc staking an expertise claim on the design of the building, perhaps the architect is now either the facilitator of these conversations or as one of its actors as designers of the façade as the form and threshold of the building.
Some contemporary buildings are just big ornaments ex. The Bird’s Nest, or most of Bjarke Ingel’s architectural projects are formally shallow articulations that do not offer depth but a sudden moment of excitement, that to me is not architecture and is boring.
Another myth is Laugier’s Primitive Hut where the structure is already there but waiting to be discovered to become architecture.
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ROME
ROME