Chronotopics

ARCH 662.006 Winter 2015 Taubman College

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The Michigan Trail

Review by Young-Tack Oh

The thesis entitled “The Engine,” by Brooke Fairbanks addresses the semi nomadic practice of migrant workers in Michigan. As demonstrated by the thesis,there is a significant population that tends to the seasonal harvesting of the region’s extensive agricultural land. The proposal aims to improve and enhance theliving conditions of the workers with respect to the inherent mobile nature of their lifestyle. As such, infrastructural, domestic, and social spaces need to be made flexible. The fragmentation of the typical domestic program has been a successful tactic. Reviewer, Malcolm McCullough, duly noted that the project was careful not to merely put appliances on wheels. There is an honest consideration for social dynamics and needs of the dynamic community. The idea of the stationary dock and travelling vessel is most effective. Personally, if pictures are available, the project would benefit from representations of existing conditions. An extensive analysis of their daily routines would serve to better tailor to the needs. It becomes difficult to truly gauge the success of the proposal without a comparison. At the final review, the project should not be compared to other typical container projects by LOT-EK or Rocio Romero; notions of standardization and the physical environment in which the architecture situates itself may be similar but it should be made absolutely clear that the user is drastically unique and different. The accurate data and statistics reflect the indispensability of this transient population and the dependency of the local population on them for the safe collection and delivery of valuable produce.

I entirely respect the author’s caution to immediately address the socio-political issues of the project. However, it would seem that those very issues may provide the intriguing fodder to make the proposal stand out and to be seen in a different light as that of LOT-EK or Romero. Photographer Iain McKell takes pictures of countryside travelers, or gypsies, and may be a good source of inspiration strictly for representation purposes (as they are a different demographic). The current renders are effective in describing the human scale in relation to the architecture. The application of the author’s own distinct aesthetic would add humane values of use and habitation. Perhaps it becomes dirtier and weathered with traces of DIY repairs. The workers need to be portrayed as an important part of the work force, legal or illegal. Perhaps there needs to be a program to hide as well. The potential political charge of the project offers additional challenges that are worth pursuing. Hank Bought A Bus and Alejandro Aravena of Elemental may be another source of inspiration.

It was noted that ‘63% of their days are spent on picking and harvesting.’ Having an uncle who operates a humble orchard, this is because the workers are paid by the weight or number of produce they pick (or perhaps it is by the hour). Being in a seasonal business, there is a limited amount of time for the workers to earn the bulk of their living for the term. It would mean sacrificing time for breaks, leisure, dining, and sleeping. Consequently, a focus on the living conditions of off seasons may be beneficial and more relevant. The project reflects the thoughtful and caring intentions of the architect while also being pivotal in demonstrating the social capabilities of architecture.

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“Death Rehearsal”

A review by Zachary Gong

“Death Rehearsal”, by Carol Nung, is a project about life and death: derived from the contemporary Japanese practice of the “pre-funeral,” it plays a fun yet dangerous game with the divergent experiences of celebrating death.  On the one hand, pre-funerals are constructed as joyous and near-whimsical celebrations of someone’s passing-to-come, replete with karaoke and lavish (or, kitschy) dining, drinking and dancing.  These ceremonies, from which Nung’s project is directly derived, appear to be simultaneously quirky, surreal and intensely immediate: celebrating a loved one’s passing while in their living presence is an experience that collapses a whole range of emotional and cognitive registers into a single pastiche that finds a way to question the millennia-old traditions that cultures have engrained within them to honor the dead.

On the other hand, “Death Rehearsal” is architectural proposal as procession, in which the author is authoring both the procession and the stops along the way.  The “stops” here are re-interpretations of the many stages of mourning, acknowledgement and traditional and medical treatment of the recently deceased as they are prepared for a final stop (here, burial).  The project hinges on this duo of parallel experiences: her architectural procession is to be taken both by those (the dead and their loved ones) in actual mourning via a true funeral, as well as those partaking in Nung’s take on the pre-funeral.

Where the “pre-funeral” is an exacting and potent point of departure for the project, Nung seems to keep at arm’s length the powerful and troubling tone of this modern practice.  To put it in the same room, literally, as actual funerary processes is both an ambitious structure and a problematic move.  Pre-funerals seem to succeed brilliantly at producing a confounding tone and attitude, confusing mourning and celebration, conflating rigid ritual and ludic appropriation.  “Death Rehearsal” muddies this otherwise beautiful and real life parody by taking the two distinct populations (real funerals, pre-funerals) through the same spaces.  This produces a muddied tone, where any one of her follies/processional architectures has to accommodate both sets of tonal ranges, thereby negating all tone.  That the architecture can solve (logistically) its way through accommodating both sets of “publics” is far less interesting than how the architecture might accommodate the tones, attitudes and emotional states of these very different experiences.

I would love to see the project address head on the potentials brought to bear by the pre-funeral.  Representationally, the project is equally muddied and exists somewhere between determined systems architecture and moody, ethereal (deathly) spaces.  Nung does introduce a language of folly and carnival at points, but these do not yet engage the issues of two radically different subjects, the dead and the (humorously, somehow) near-dead.  Humor and mourning need to find a way to co-exist, or more they need to find a way to be at war.  The architecture of “Death Rehearsal” might seek to be the battleground, the scaffolding or the substrate on which this war plays out.

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On the Fence

A review by Tim Dudas

Whether physical or imaginary, borders are typically man made delineations determining where a particular territory stops and another starts. A map makes the clear distinction of who either side of the border belongs to and although a physical line is not draw in the landscape where two countries meet, any built environment in the vicinity has a clear author and affiliation. It’s either one side or the other; there is no grey zone.

This is the precise situation Parisa Mard is intercepting with her proposal of O-Zone, a country sprawling as an offset of various common and exceptional borders. Due to desertification people are being displaced but left with nowhere to go. Inhabiting the in-between, the project positions itself to make use of the left-over and given-up land by neighboring countries; it provides a place of refuge and possibly much more. While the country serves the ones looking for a temporary place to live until they can move on with their lives as planned, it is also structured as a ‘real’ country with a government that has plans for a future of its own not one merely in service of temporary residents.

The evolution of these spaces is natural, however, with respect to their radical implementation they seem to be on the fence about the intention working through the project.

“The idea that architecture is able to change society is out of date; but I continue to believe that architecture can produce concrete material stimuli that can lead to a change of this sort. It can provoke situations.” -Giancarlo De Carlo

This quote was taken from the thesis profile of Bordering Lines by Jessica Timmer completed at Taubman College in 2011. Timmer is also looking at borders as a platform for social provocation and response for how architecture might intervene. She is specifically looking at the highly contested border between the U.S. and Mexico and the amount of lives lost in the treacherous migration across it. The thesis proposes an architecture of aid, shelter, and the dispersal of camouflage and information (essentially how architecture can begin to work towards helping people cross the border). Throughout the proposal an underlying military expertise leads the project with a precise method of execution, this consistency helps the project establish a firm position. Maybe there is an opportunity for O-Zone to similarly embrace its creation out of natural constraints and leverage its unknown future.

Lastly, the proposal by Timmer accepts and admits that what it’s doing may be wrong and doesn’t try to justify it. Instead, it suggests that the intention is an architecture that doesn’t deal with the effects of situations but works towards stirring up questions and fostering change. Through the proposal of O-Zone, Mard is already taking a strong position towards how people live and interact with the world as we know it, perhaps she can move forward by unapologetically pushing that which might make us necessarily uncomfortable.

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FAMOUS FOLLIES

A review of “Follies“ by Brooke Fairbanks 

Exploring the quality and condition of incomplete architecture, the thesis project by Tim Dudas defined both the unfinished and the incomplete. With incomplete being the main focus, it was distinctly defined as something that does not have all of the necessary parts. Further the ability for something to be considered incomplete rests on whether a particular event, the apocalypse, occurring. The apocalypse is the event that reveals what is complete and what is incomplete.

Utilizing narrative as a formula for constructing and illustrating the incomplete, text from a story is directly represented based on the details provided in it. The image above illustrates a city based on the description provided in a novel. The houses are all elevated on stilts. The enlarged fishing pole acts as the folly that highlights there is something incomplete about the image. The fishing pole suggests that water is coming, but instead its size and representation makes it more symbolic. It does not function like a fishing pole, which heightens its symbolic nature. The elevated houses themselves already act as a primary indicator of water in the future. The water might flood in and out, but the houses are protected because of being situated high above.

As another example, the image above also uses a more symbolic representation of a gate that speaks to something else existing within it. The gate acts as a folly in this narrative, but again, it gets flattened in the image to becoming more of a symbolic rather than an indicator of incompleteness. 

Originally focusing on a concept of the incomplete, the thesis develops further into focusing on anticipation. The follies in the drawings, such as the fishing pole and gate, lend themselves more to anticipating a future, rather than illustrating an incompleteness. 

As a tool of anticipation, the folly can operate parallel to history and thus express an alternative history for famous buildings. Famous buildings might have once been an unfinished version of a folly. In a second life, famous buildings were built without function and thus existed as a folly. 

Through narrative, how can this thesis seek out the story of an alternative life for a famous building that now exists with functional and operational means? Do famous buildings from a certain time period or of a certain type lend themselves more to once being a folly?

The designing of a folly acts as the precursor to built architecture. Instead of diagrams and sketches, the folly itself is the trial and error test subject for understanding the capacities of architecture. 

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Stalemate

The infrequent yet persistent exception to the rules of resolution known as a stalemate is applicable to architecture as it is to chess. The work of Kate Giglio seeks out these exceptional draws between political oppositions, as made tangible my buildings, and aims to disrupt the status quo. By identifying various sites around the world, the work succeeds in defining the Stalemate typology beyond any doubt, and through its multifaceted approach to its analysis and representation is very effective in unpacking the embodied conflict.

Touching on current discursive themes such as historical preservation and exacerbation of ruin value, the work draws attention to and raises awareness about curious and interesting political situations that, though in need of resolution, are too far from the public eye to really be resolved. The future architectural interventions, wisely implemented in but one of the many identified sites, will finally decide the work’s endgame. Is it enough to simply stand by and point at the problem, or is it the place of the architect to attempt to resolve the dilemma through an additional intervention? Is the spacialisation through diagram of the condition sufficient as architecture, or will a pavilion, folly, programmed space or grafted extension, serving monument to the stalemate, be the final realization of the ideas presented? Or, rather than pulling focus to the work of singular designer spatially and temporally removed from the context, will we see alternative states of resolution from the viewpoint of the parties involved? We will see.

With the semester coming to an imminent end, Giglio needs to decide on this keystone of her project, the final piece that will unify and direct the work. The gameboard is masterfully set, the pieces are all arrayed and the clock is ticking. It is up to Gigio now to play her set up to its conclusion.

Though the serial method of analysis and representation through the different approaches to conflicts generates excellent drawings that are as good alone as they are as part of a series, one of the most striking artefacts of the work is the chess set of actors within the conflicts. Seen throughout the drawings it is useful as a tool, but the physical artefact, where the character and inventiveness of the pieces and so far the best demonstration of Kate’s intuition as a designer, goes underutilized.

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Outer Zone

The work of Parisa Mard proposes a potential future in which the global problem of environmental refugees is addressed through the creative of a ubiquitous area of exclusion, the interstitial super-country called the Outer Zone.

By thickening the borders on a map, the work specialises and reifies the sometimes ignored, often contested, and always politicised conditions at the edge of sovereign nations. The Amazon Rainforest, the Sahara Desert, the Himalayas and even Lake Tanganyika are converted to sites of necessary intervention, as global temperature extreming pushes entire populations from their solitarily impoverished nations into the resource, transportation, habitation hyper-network that is the O-Zone.

The work as active on and makes a pretty ambitious jump in scale, beginning with the narrative and legislation that leads to the development of the O-Zone, and almost instantly arrives at the implementation of city scale interventions. The top-down approach to the informal and bottom up disorder that refugee camps, natural disasters, and mass migration have always been is jarring, especially when the results are represented as regional scale mega projects condense and stretch cities into areas a few hundred metres wide and millions of kilometers long, respectively.

The work overlooks the decades between the O-Zone’s inception and its establishment as a fully realised economic and social powerhouse, running rail lines between the various natural resources its octopus-like tentacles suck on and the soaring skyscrapers on stilts that house its anti-citizens. It forgoes the Dadaab-like mega-slums that would inevitably spring up as entire sections of contents seek asylum between their wealthy global neighbours in favour of an utopian vision of life when the dust has settled when it is in fact this transition that is its most interesting aspect. It is the road map from Tartarus to Elysium that demonstrates an understanding of the qualities of and framing of both.

In attempting to even illustrate the multifarious conditions that would be made manifest by the O-Zone’s appearance, the work threatens to become a series of map-based diagrams that say little about the people and environments that are really at the heart of the issue. The intense study of a singular location, taking into account its current ecological and political landscape as it develops to its ultimate state would allow Parisa to delve deep into the architectural design aspect of her proposition while simultaneously fleshing out the story of the O-Zone.

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Paper Monuments

“Intentionally Unbuilt”, a thesis by Michelangelo LaTona explores the architectural drawing as a representational technique that embodies monuments of a specific time.

LaTona has begun his process by developing a curation of nine intentionally unbuilt monuments in New York City.

LaTona argues that the architectural drawing has a timeless ability to capture a city’s time stamp through its independence from dated materials and construction techniques. He states that “built architecture will never be as powerful in remembering the true history as the representation of it”.

To further understand how these drawings envelop a time and monumental persona, he developed a criteria for monumental drawings, which included site (abstract paper), materials (pencil, lead, ink), and developable area (bounds of the paper).

As a means to generate new forms and interpretations of the architectural drawing, LaTona transformed the nine two-dimensional monuments onto a new site. This collaging exercise used the array of projects as site surroundings and contexts to each other.

The curation and criteria of the intentionally unbuilt is impressive, but I begin to question LaTona’s future intentions. If the intention is to further study, articulate and reinterpret the nine monuments of New York City, I believe it could be pushed further. To maintain the theme of working within the representational style of the architectural drawing, LaTona could zoom into material or joint details, to analyze or re-imagine the different scales of the monuments. Alternatively, the architectural two-dimensional drawings have the ability to be reconceived as three-dimensional objects. How far could the monuments be re-imagined?

LaTona could also have the opportunity of creating his own curation of intentionally unbuilt monuments. The exercise of developing a monument every hour, day or week to emulate specific events and moments could drive the argument further. The monuments would represent a time and memory so specific to the second, that no built form would be able to capture the same essence.

This thesis project has the opportunity to further explore the nine drawings or begin a new set of intentionally unbuilt structures that embody contemporary moments. The author has the ability to decide the future intentions and representational techniques to further his argument.

Carmen Petersen

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Animating Architecture

In this thesis, Carmen Petersen investigates the means ofanimating the inanimate forms of architecture, to create an interactive andrepresentational relationship between the user and the space similar to that of a puppeteer and puppet. The thesis takes a typical hospital patient room of a ceberal palsy child as the primary applied typological site, willing to recuperate the palsy child from the bald, sanitary, programed, blank childhood by creatively operating the puppet architecture.

The thesis approaches the problem successively in two ways: how to leverage the unproductive everyday life of the palsy child to create necessary childhood leisure (where the theory of everyday would come into play), and what is the mechanical interface to facilitate the architectural puppetry (responsive, interface architecture).

To leverage the palsy child’s everyday life, the thesis first studies what his everyday life is all about: “constant care and constant therapy in pediatric facilities house, caught and tangled in the strings”.

To design the mechanical interface, the thesis leverages the therapy mechanism, especially the child’s body movement, ranging from full body movement to finger muscle articulations tangled in strings. The motion, the everyday exercise of the child, conducted by the strings, controls aspects of architecture, triggers the re-composition of the architecture, alters the relationship between the child and the architecture, and eventually tells the story designed by the child.

Reviewers Catie Newell and Thomas Moran had critiqued this thesis, first and foremost, from the point it departures: Does the palsy child really wants to live a conventional childhood with lots of leisure? What conventional people consider good life may quite possibly not be the one that the disabled community consider. The thesis needs a bit more efforts at the beginning rendering what the palsy child really expects, in order to proposing a convincing proposition on why the child should participate the architecture this way.

The second critique brought up by the reviewers is the use of strings and the mechanization of body. Although the thesis intends to transform the hospital room into the puppet of the child, the reviewers felt in common that the child is like the puppet of architecture. Reviewers didn’t tell where the feeling came from. I think it comes from the use of strings, the way strings tie to the body, the representation, the composition of architecture being above and child being below, the contrast between the solidity and perpetuity of the architecture and the immaturity and fragility of palsy child.

It is the most fantastic story in itself, that the most fantastic story could be presented by the small, motionless, fragile child controlling the gigantic yet dynamic architecture, once the strings touch the body gently and intangibly, the power of the children is scaled up by the mechanism, the composition of the child on the bed in the room is challenged, the architecture loses its solidity and perpetuity and becomes more fragmentary and somehow puffy—an architecture conventionally considered wired but rational and sensible for the palsy child. Maybe just a child and a responsive puffy architecture constantly changing its appearance, either or not with a bed, strings or anything else. Architecture becomes his voice, to express, to explore, to communicate, to imagine.

Also, other medium that are more tangible to the palsy child could be thought to supplement the triggering interface. Besides motion-to-motion mechanism, sound, breath, smell, temperature, above the head, behind the back, on the body, can create a more compelling atmosphere facilitating multi-sensory imagination of the child.

By Youyou Chen

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In Praise of Dust

In Praise of Dust by Young-Tack Oh aims to alter the contemporary perception of dust in the domestic setting. The project starts with disclosing the size and dispersion of dust, which is usually rendered unspecific as a result of the myth of cleaning. The materialistic content and the configuration of dust are manipulated as the index of activities and lifestyle of the inhabitants. The project further discusses how modernist understanding of hygiene and cleanliness changes the value of aesthetics. The diminishing use of carpets, curtains, cornices and decorative ornaments in modernist architectural setting illustrated the urge for sanitisation. The Victorian moulding is taken as an example to demonstrate how architects and decorative elements threatened health hygiene and cleanliness. Different articulation of surface are explored to reposition dust inside a domestic setting.

It is an interesting perspective of the project to take dust, which was historically rendered invisible and insignificant, to be the primary inhabitant of an architecture. While it is closely related to architecture, in which the daily repetitive routine of housewives and janitors are to collect and get rid of dust, both in the interior or at the exterior facade of their domestic setting. The introduction of decorative moulding, functions as dust collector and displayer, creates an architecture with the tolerance for dust to coexist within the livelihood. Apart from the notion of time and ageing through the accumulation of dust, the display of dust would be an interesting way for one to personalise their own domestic setting. Given that the components of dust is closely related to the daily activities of the inhabitants, a visual representation of dust could serve as an alternative way one could decorate their home, other than hanging picture frames or painting the walls with different colours. Perhaps the question would be what is the ultimate goal for the display of dust, and to whom it poses the meaning. The project might be benefited from the introduction of a specific site context and type of inhabitants. Would the display be merely the indication of the zone and type of activities of the household, a demonstration of residue space in the house where the accumulation of dust take place? Would the dust be able to reflect the personal detail of the household, such as the health condition or the living habit, such that doctors could easily diagnosis the disease of their patients without undergoing the complicated procedures of examination? Or would the dust house be an experimental scenario, in which one must cohabit with dust, and explore how would it changes the lifestyle of the future generation and the configuration of a domestic setting?

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Structuring the Infinite Narrative

  “Fairytale Airport Creature Terrain” a thesis by Youyou Chen     

               The thesis aims at re-presenting the essential qualities of transitional spaces  through the lens of the narrative in an effort to call attention to the phenomenological properties of transitional spaces.  The thesis seems to center around the implied theme of contemporary urban identity,using the logic of transitional spaces and the airport as the venue within which to address this topic. 

                The narrative of the thesis seems to be structured around three elements  the mobius strip, the  aircraft carrier and the politics of Chinese water/air rights.  The mobius strip seems to parallel the overall nature of transitional spaces, creating a sense of timelessness, allowing for an infinite number of potential moments to start from, and allowing the experience to be dictated based on user preference but with unpredictable outcomes.  The thesis uses the mobius strip to structure the narrative so that multiple narratives can emerge from a single story, depending on the order in which the user chooses to read them.  Rather than presenting a single continuous narrative, told from different perspectives, the narrative might better represent the overall goals of the thesis by being structured as a series of short stories.   The short stories could stand as separate stories, that when read together all imply a totalizing message.  This message could be interpreted differently depending on the order in which the short stories are read.  Rather than implying this by allowing different characters to read and present different versions of the same story told from their perspective, this would be a way to allow the audience to discover for themselves the various different scenarios represented within the thesis.  J.G. Ballard's Short Stories could be a good precedent to look at for general ideas on how to structure stories and how a collection of disparate stories can still be read as a total text.  Similarly Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is structured in a way that could help the thesis, both in its literal organization and in how he uses language itself.  The language Calvino uses and the metaphors he attributes to particular circumstances within the text paint beautiful images.  Looking into how he structures these short stories, and the way he uses the metaphor as a device to allow readers access to the stories could be valuable tools that could aid in clarifying the thesis' narrative.  Also looking at Short Stories: London in Two and  a Half Dimensions by C.J. Lim could be a good precedent for understanding ways of pairing and developing short stories and the images that accompany them.   The narrative seems to have a defined direction and intent but the way it is being communicated at this point does not allow outsiders the ability to easily access it.  

               The above precedents could help develop a format for structuring the language of the narrative to help make the text and argument clearer overall.  Images would also really help add clarity to the storyline.  Finding a way to make the images clarify, particular complex points within the story, would be incredibly helpful.  Allowing the major points of the story to be told simply through images is a challenge the thesis should take on.  As designers, and working in a design profession, we respond best when any text is paired with an equally engaging visual.  The ideal circumstance would be to both develop a text that "paints a picture" and a visual language that helps clarify and expand upon the text.  The idea of the scroll is an interesting and fitting representation format for the narrative.  However the content and form of the representation needs to be developed for it to be used within the structure of the scroll.  

               Overall the thesis could really benefit in attempting to find methods to clarify the content that seems to already be present in the overall narrative.  This will allow people to access and comment on the project in more constructive ways, allowing the thesis to push the ideas and concepts even further.  

Katherine Giglio

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Residence of Curiosities

“Domesticating Archives” a thesis by Lauren R. Tucker

This thesis project stems from an interest in the archive.  More specifically, Tucker is interested in “architecture’s mediation in our relationship to objects and items that we save and keep”.  She argues that architecture in a broad sense fosters in us a tendency to collect and keep material things.  The archive may be considered paradigmatic of this belief in both its attempt to halt material entropy and also its sole purpose of collecting.  Yet, an infinite collection of physical artifacts in one building cannot be possible due to the finite nature of our world. Tucker’s thesis proposes the question, “What happens when an archive like the Beinecke archive at Yale University exhausts its available physical space for storage, and turns to the residential/domestic scale?”

This question offers not a solution to the problem, but an interesting temporary relief.  If houses, attics, domestic spaces begin to take on the responsibility of the archive the results of interest are three-fold.  One, the archive’s spatial needs are fulfilled for a time.  Two, a situational relationship between domestic space and institutional requirements rarely experienced materializes.  Three, novel architectural work can be deployed on, within and against existing homes in New Haven, CT thanks to this specific situational “what if”.

The architectural consequences are beginning to be presented and discussed, but are not yet at their peak.  A possible direction for the work is to latch onto a specific house within New Haven, CT in which to play-out the narrative.  Rather than generic axonometric diagrams of possible alterations to a house-like representation, the designer could give us John Doe’s specific house and less generic architectural operations generated thanks to the particular formal elements of Doe’s home.

Choosing a specific house would also allow Tucker to present interesting scalar shifts into the project.  Alterations to the house at the architectural scale can lead to situational details of the inhabitant looking for a spoon for cereal, but passing over hundreds of spoons that are part of the collection.  Collections of furniture packed like sardines into domestic space might begin to create novel architectural elements (eg. a floor of grand pianos or a wall of bicycle frames).  Considering the scale of the detail critics have presented thoughts about the installation of security cameras and how that simple change would alter the way one inhabits their own home.

Regarding the deliverables, the collaged perspectives have good conceptual legs under them and succeed in Tucker’s aim for a cabinet of curiosity feel.   They offer a good look at the experience of these odd, museum-like domestic spaces, which the audience needs.  The nuance in the plan drawings requires this more experiential look at the spaces.  Yet, the collages lack the sense of density that the plans imply.  More loyalty on the part of the collages to what is represented in plan in terms of density would really step up the strength of Tucker’s investigation.

A couple aspects of the project that need development and resolution are how the act of hoarding and the spaces of storage containers fit into the theme of the project, and how to architecturally treat domestic spaces the have taken on the role of storage or exhibit.  The aedicule has been a passing reference of interest of Tucker’s and seems an extremely useful concept for developing an architectural language within the home.

A concern of both the designer and a few particular critics thus far is the share-economy feel of the project.  Air B-n-B has been brought up on multiple occasions in regard to the tone and view point of this project.  The plausibility of the situation for some detracts from the project, but for others strengthens the argument.  It seems that revealing the alterations to the house on the exterior may add to the Air B-n-B issue.  Regardless of what designer intends, representation and presentation will both play major roles in the legibility of intent.  A fine-tuning of both the deliverables and how Tucker verbally portrays them will be important considerations moving forward.

A series of perspectives would function well as a method of showing the story.  One can imagine a view of a row of domestic facades, one of which is central.  The next view is framed by the front door jamb which foregrounds a collage much like what Tucker has produced already.  Following this the aedicule (or whatever architectural typology is developed) makes its appearance displaying hundreds if not thousands of precious items.  The next final views may develop details that highlight what life might be like in this particular home.  Is that just a cereal box or is it the box Elvis Presley ate from the day he died?

by Michelangelo LaTona

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Dynamic Stasis: On An Architecture Of Stalemates

A review of the “Stalemate” thesis projectby Katherine Giglio (M.Arch ’15)

 The game of chess holds varied interest and potential when it comes to the thinking about architecture and urbanism: the untold number of planning studios enamored with moving game pieces around a scaled downtown corridor; the parametricdevotees inscribing forms according to the physical and spatial generations ofrooks and knights.  As a metaphor and existing set of logics, chess is a wellspring for academic design inspirations.  Risk, Monopoly (and, yes, The Game of Life) may better serve those looking at the world with a more cynical lens, but chess embodies a particular reality that Katherine Giglio has keenly chosen to investigate: the Stalemate.

 For Giglio, the world is rife with stalemates, those circumstances (historical, cultural, political, financial) in which the prolonged status quo relates two or more parties in a moment of inoperable tension—one week or one hundred years has passed and there is no clear way to determine a resolution, a winner or a loser.  She has focused on six particular contemporary moments across Europe that she has categorized as such to work towards a methodology through which she’s pitted the game-circumstance of stalemate (that found on the board in chess) against and next to these six “real world” stalemates.  Crucial to her work at these six “sites” is the deployment of a particular tactic—each derived from the logics of chess and particular figurations of the stalemate condition—and the insistence that the project is not geared towards generating resolutions to these six conundrums.  The sites, varied in scale, context and their particular defining stalemate-ness, are inherently off-radar, whose very nature as stalemate renders them uninteresting to a media and discursive spotlight searching for scenes of tragedy, heroism or concrete resolution. These sites offer no such gore or glory.

 The “architectural” effort is still in development, but Giglio has worked to establish a clear Site-Tactic-Diagram construct for each of her sites, using various aspects of chess’ rules and motifs to begin building a diagrammatic and visual language through which the project is delivered.  Ultimately, Giglio plans to narrow her focus from the six studies down to (one?  I hope) a smaller set, developing more richly the research into the worldly stalemate context and the architectural intervention therein.  The endgame, then, will be the proposal of one or more (temporary) interventions at one (or more) of these sites that aims to heighten, amplify or intensify the visualization and architectural experience of these stalemates that may only exists as ethereal (within a political, cultural or economic consciousness).

 It can’t be denied that the “stalemate” condition is perhaps the most charged moment on a chessboard due to the varied circumstances through which it can occur.  Giglio has done well to identify this as her conceptual site for working. That said, the project unearths several points that need be addressed when considering a project of this type. The first is the project’s key moment of translation: that from the chess board to the ground.  The stalemate is clearly a strong metaphorical starting gun for the project, but what Giglio has yet to fully establish are the terms by which she can confidently classify or identify stalemate-ness in the built/inhabited world around us.   It seems highly unlikely that the author’s ultimate aim is to prop-up the status quo, or in other words, to work towards the continuation of an equilibrium condition. By their very definitions, these circumstances require zero input (active participation and energy, respectively), so it’s curious that a final aim would be to do so.  A light, constrained hand is one thing, but total complicity is another altogether.

 By the finite rules of the chessboard, a “stalemate” can be reached by several conditions.  What is important to consider, however, is that stalemate is ultimately an endgame condition.  The stalemate is not a state of persistence, but a singular moment at which a game is completed.  Giglio is seeking to break into and explore circumstances of prolonged stasis, which at this point seem to imply a status quo of equal and opposite pressures. What is so intriguing about stalemates is that they are rarely reached as a result of compromise between two opponents: most often, one player is desperately seeking victory, the other frantically attempting to compose a stalemate. So too do her worldly stalemates operate: not as static framed vistas, but calm/vacated spaces highly charged with unseen energies.  I want to see these energies.

 Before breaking down the established logics of chess into constituent tactics, it may benefit the author to look at chess and its stalemates as the complex and dynamic systems that they are.  Rather than dismantling them into further base diagrams—here rendered as passive, static object-field vignettes (in the need for the 6x6…six tactics for six sites)—Giglio should think of chess holistically: a field of constant potentials, reactions, predictive measures, defense, offense, efficiency of decision-making.  Along these same lines (and as mentioned in the recent review of the work by faculty), the project would do well to have a singular site as its focus.  Multiples (like the dizzying 6x6) have found a way to self-fracture the lens onto both chess and the development of definitions for real world stalemates.  A single dynamic site, worked on through a holistically rendered chess lens.

Armed with such a focus, the project can start to uncover a range of critical issues associated with both the project (chess, Central Europe) as well as the meta-project (unfolding a metaphor out into the world).  Rules will begin to alter other rules, worlds with intermingle (chess thinking, city thinking) and the design and representational efforts will only benefit from this type of hyper-focused confusion and overlap.  That said, care is certainly needed when putting chess (finite, clear, inalienable logics) and worldly conflict (the opposite) into the vacuum together.

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In Praise of Dust

Through his work on In Praise of Dust, Young-Tack Oh investigates and re-positions our relationship to dust within the contemporary domestic setting. The work and proposition arrives through research and documentation into the nature of dust, its origin and constitution, as well as its architectural implications. The presentation was successful in its depth and clarity; YT authored clear diagrams and visuals communicating the scales of dust and its composition. The work examines architecture’s explicit relationship to dust through design attempts to limit its presence, primarily in the form of “clean rooms.” The authored shared the results of a visit to the University’s clean room and the nature of the architectural system that creates a space free of dust. This research provides the project with an understanding of one extreme response to the presence of dust, and is valuable in calibrating a novel or alternative design situation.

 In Praise of Dust also considers dust within the context of architectural ornamentation and accumulation, in ornamentation’s ability to collect and visually display dust. Ultimately, the research positioned potential futures for the project in the form of a juxtaposition of a Victorian setting with the Smithson’s House of the future. This proposition provokes a discussion of the role of dust in the domestic setting and the impact of design on its visibility.

The critics posited a number of potential trajectories, that claim dust either as celebratory or purged. Is the intent to change our relationship to dust through design? The design of a set of highly articulated ornamental objects that don’t collect dust - or highly articulated ornaments that would increasingly and further display the accumulation of dust. The critics emphasized that it seems important to attach dust to an articulated surface. Suggested potentially designing a surface coating - borrowing from things that are used to trap dust. Is germaphobia at play in the thesis work? Could the textures provoke anti-germaphobia? Is there a counter-narrative - in the way that children now respond to hyper-sanitation with allergies?

There are multiple potential futures for the work in its present state, which can incorporate the suggestions proffered. Is it possible to reimagine Victorian decoration schemes and habits within a contemporary moment - imbuing their propensity for excess and display in the service of the presentation of dust? The project will need to decide if purging or excess is the appropriate path to take - a hybrid design is possible, but may result in a hedging of bets and a weakening of a thorough, dedicated, and elegant investigation thus far.

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Dissolving House

Landfill is not the only end of articles of everyday use.Through the lens of archive, Lauren Tucker has provide us an alternation to“arrest entropy on the road from consumption to the landfill”. Dissolving House is such a project, where both the collector and the architecture “supports a propensity to hoard”, imagining “a future residential typology of ordering and safekeeping and novel sites of encounter with material information”.  

Where do the domestic articles of everyday use come from? “Acquisitions at the personal and institutional level create a surplus of materials”.

Why archiving the domestic articles? Benjamin has referred the interior as phantasmagorias, which, for the private man, represents the universe. The domestic articles are more than self-referential. The collection of the articles is the expression of the collector’s personality. The placement of the articles is the trace of the collector’s everyday life. And the spatial quality that altered by the articles is also informational. In Dissolving House, all above is transformed into the value of curiosity, which is considered by Barbara Benedict “primarily an empirical appetite, rather than an intellectual one”. Curiosity of anonymous private man’s life has provided primary ideological impetus for the project to be imagined.

Dissolving House operates “within a landscape of storage - attic, formal archive, and off-site self storage”. Each one serves a different purpose. Attic is the autonomous storage, the most private and accessible storage, the RAM. Formal archive is the curated archive, the most public and persistent archive, the hard drive. Off-site self storage is “a contemporary cabinet of curiosity”, spontaneous archive, the cue to a larger archiving system, the cloud.

Dissolving House instantiates a typical American single family house exploring multiple possibilities to open up the institutional archiving realm within the realm of residential storage.  Issues including resolving public access and circulation within private domain, attaching sanctuary in tradition of aedicule in order to alienate the articles with the place where they originate.

The project explores the subject in space. It may be worthy to also think about how the project operates in time. If the project prolong the process of articles from consumption to landfill, what the surplus of time, transformed from the surplus of materials, engenders. What scale of time does the house occupy?

The subject of Dissolving House is domestic everyday life of individuals. It is a revolutionary view of the power of domestic space in mediating the relationship between individuals and saved articles. It is at the same time a view of the powerlessness of institutions in archiving domestic lives in the individual scale to project a phantasmagoric view of the world.

By Youyou Chen

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Architectural Ventriloquism and Spatial Marionettes

Could architecture become a marionette that inhabitants could puppeteer? The highly specified program and user makes for a poetic project that necessitates architecture to provide physical therapy and mental comfort for patients with cerebral palsy. The daily routine of patients, as analyzed by the architect, offers insight into how the rooms are ‘spaces that are lived in but are never homes.’

One of the biggest challenges of the project is perhaps the mechanism. By that, I mean less about the complexity or feasibility of it, but the direct relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet. During the review, there was an encouragement to explore more marionette techniques. However, how many of those commands could the puppeteer actually perform/carry out, considering their limited extent of movement?

Banal artifacts like levers, dials, buttons, and switches are capable of changing environments within an instant. The actions related to this gadgetry are pulling, turning, pushing, and flicking. Not only are the actions different, but they have physical connections with the body or hand. These operations may be more physically demanding to the patient but can bridge the distance between action and response. [Analogous to how different motions of the wand produce different spells for Harry Potter?] The precedent of the marionette is useful in indexing how one system can be manipulated for varying effects, but perhaps it isn’t a single string system that dictates the range of possibilities of movement or scene changes. Could the lever be too big with tactile surfaces? Can it respond to temperature, sound, time? How subtle are the changes in the architecture and how aggressive is the related movement? Or does the degree of change depend on the amount of energy exerted into the system?

Consider the implications of the incentivized or expected. The fantasy that enters the room should be triggered by curiosity and the urge to explore within the sedentary confines of the bed. Through this process, the puppeteer may find himself or herself contorting and pushing the limits of their own body beyond the prescribed physical therapy exercises.

Could the opposite happen, whereby the architecture nudges the patient or whispers into his/her ear? There is much fascination into how the fantasy returns to reality, if at all. Would it slide in from the right, and then disappear back to the left, where it came from? The effects of scene shifts may dissipate over time, even if the puppeteer doesn’t understand the mechanism. If one can expect where the light comes from, or where the walls rotate, the anticipation may null the senses or the need to experience that specific event again.

Technicalities aside, the effects of the project are provoking and ingenious, beyond the setting of the patient’s room.  Actions can encourage shifts and changes in an otherwise static environment. Our understanding of architecture is no longer as a stationary entity but of response.

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Off/On

The premise of the project Off/On by Zachary Gong is to explore the potential of architecture and also the role of architect in the production of mediation, through the lens of theatricality and leisure. The project starts with addressing the binaries captured in architecture, the spectator and the spectacle; the labour and the leisure...etc. The ultimate goal is to generate form at both furniture and building scale that capture the binaries.

The first part of the project, Co-Seating, consisted of two incomplete chairs side to back joint together. The prototypes designed illustrate the possibilities of appropriation, by changing the number and configuration of the entity, generating a range of programs that define the space. The preset form of the chair restrains the face direction and the posture of the users, resulting in limited variability of the configuration possibilities, at the same time, insufficient specificity to each of the configuration generated.

The variability could be enhanced through an increase in level of appropriation. One of the advantages of using a physical model of a Co-Seating to explore the idea of appropriation is to provide the users with a tangible artifact to “play” with. The designed  intention of appropriation may be made more vivid by adding wheels to the legs of the chair, like an office chair, enhancing the mobility of the chair. The authorization of appropriation could even be extended to the assemblage of the chair, by providing the users with the prefabricated cut sheet and an ikea manual. The user will be able to appropriate the different parts of the chair and define its level of completeness. Perhaps detournement could happen to bring the seat into a more extreme context. Reference to the reinterpretation of the Ron Arad’s Tom Vac chair during the Clerkenwell Design Week 2014, several designers delineated the seat and re-interrupted it into a lifeguard’s chair, a four-wheeled kart and a swing. The Tom Vac chair is taken as an object and reappropriated with different elements to generate alternative meaning. While the variability of possible configuration should be enhanced, the specificity of effect of each configuration should be rendered more explicit. Cultural and historical reference of posture, form and configuration of chairs can be drawn to generate more defined appropriation.

The unpolished wood material successfully rendered the Co-Seating as an unfinished prototype that is open for interpretation and appropriation, which could be applied similarly on the Co-Housing prototype. However, given the difference in scale and complexity between a house and a furniture, how would appropriation be executed differently? When developers are duplicating towers of apartments with identical layout, how would the Co-Housing enhances the level of personalisation of the dwellers within the prefabricated setting? How would the instability of appropriation be introduced to a concrete setting that is prescribed to contain habits? How would the appropriation redefine a house and the lifestyle of the dwellers? And what would the role of architects be if appropriation could be done not only by the architects?

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Intentionally Unbuilt

Reviewed by Brooke Fairbanks 

In the project “Intentionally Unbuilt” by Michelangelo LaTona, we are reminded of and asked to question the ability of the hand drawing.  Hand drawing was one of the earliest forms of architectural representation and communication. It allows for precise and detailed two dimensional views of a form. With the current development of digital modeling programs, hand drawing has been pushed aside in the representation seen around the studio environment. This thesis attempts to celebrate the hand drawing technique, while still staying modern and utilizing the digital means to overlay a certain “marble paper” aesthetic.

LaTona uses the hand drawing technique to redraw historical unbuilt monuments of New York. These monuments exist solely in the form of hand drawn representation. The hand drawing is the end for the unbuilt, whereas the construction drawing can be viewed as the next step for built work. By redrawing the unbuilt monuments, he is re-exposing and extending their significance as a piece of history. In a way, this breathes new life into the historical drawings and an awareness of their existence.

The interest in curating a series of unbuilt monuments stems from questioning the ability of a built monument to truthfully reflect a society during a certain period of time. He argues that the unbuilt monuments provide better insight to a society as a whole, because built monuments are highly influenced by a singular power figure. He emphasizes the importance of the unbuilt as key indicators of the culture, values, and ideas of the society in New York City.

The intention of gaining a better insight into the society as a whole seems valid, but can that be done simply through representation and the redrawing of these unbuilt monuments? The simple hand drawing may provide some insight as to why the monument was unbuilt to begin with, but other factors undetected, such as scale and materiality are left out. The thesis should seek more than just representation, and speak more to the conditions and intentions of the unbuilt monument.

The translation of the hand drawing into collages exposes a flaw in the two dimensional hand drawings. With the lack of information to understanding them three-dimensionally, the detailed hand drawings become flat and reduced to an icon in form. The collages use repeated elements from the curated set of hand drawings and start to create the effect of the use of a stamp instead of constructed collages. Moving forward, how can this thesis use other techniques, besides simply redrawing, to highlight a new life for these unbuilt monuments and expose their cultural significance?