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Latent Color
2010-02-24
The Work of the Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia is perhaps the clearest example of architecture being pushed into machine-hood at the beginning of the 20th century, albeit with a strange and often overlooked twist.
In his Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Sant’Elia rails against neoclassical ornament as "supreme imbecility“. In point 4 of his Manifesto, he states that "Decoration as an element superimposed on architecture is absurd, and that the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials.“ This point has become virtually lost in architectural history, due to the ubiquity of Sant’Elia’s black-and-white renders of power stations, ports, and hotels in print.
His work, seen in its true intended colors, takes on an entirely new life, one of rich, rusty affect incongruent with the extreme monochromatics of his time. The vivid color gradients expose a supressed trajectory of Modernism, one which simultaneously eschews decoration but desires emotional relief from the machine aesthetic it is promoting.
Thanks to Todd Gannon.
This idea of the imperfection of the evolutionary chain, and the swapping of behaviors begins to define a ‘minor biology’ which is critical to understanding the interrelation of features and behaviors in species. Their relation is in fact fluid and messy, which brings into question ‘clean’ models of natural selection being bandied around by many biologically-minded architects.
(Image: The Toucan’s large beak is not a result of sexual selection or edible fruit size as often assumed. It is rather a thermoregulating device—a massive radiator—which dumps heat during flight. The thermoregulatory function is an exaptation, a beneficial byproduct, of other evolutionary pathways.)
The Pandoran jungle is exceptional but still materially consistent, which is its beauty. Systems are intricately interwoven, color and light features are never separated from formal features, and creatures don't exceed their exceptional mechanics. Extreme biodiversity generates a hallucinogenic ecology. Familiar features are hybridized with alien features: pterodactyl wing morphologies transform at the tips into dragonfly wing morphologies, rhinos have peacock and hammerhead shark features, horses shimmer with multicolor abalone shell skin, wolves move like insects, and everything exhibits characteristics of bioluminescent marine life. Species emerge as categorical novum from radical reassemblies of features and behaviors.
The story is more or less inert. It is a Shakespearian backdrop that allows the context to unfold. Atmospheres and sensations, generally side-effects of narratives, become primary drivers. Exquisite.
(modelled and rendered by Julien Duquesnoy)
According to James and Carol Gould in their book Animal Architects: "the idiosyncratic edifices and decorating schemes of different males and their constant fussing to try new variants... implies an element of something like individual style."
Contemporary experiments into HVAC system hybridization, including embedding air, heat, and fluid flow into architectural surfaces, are indebted to Banham's identification of the supression of mechanical system logic in architecture. EMERGENT is exploring how to move beyond Banham's humanist/ rationalist approach, however, toward one which might include ambient spatial effects and morphological possibilities.
Proto structural-mechanical hybrid: Olivetti Factory by Marco Zanuso, 1955
Vampire running! from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.
The Rose window reveals how ornament, driven by both geometrical and structural logics, begins to define an architecture which is informed by computation and efficiency, but which cannot be reduced to those factors. It is in nature where we see a similar open-ended logic: performance is everywhere, but it is always messy, always wildly variable, never optimal. Excesses are always intermixed with efficiencies.
EMERGENT, an internationally recognized design office operating at the forefront of digital design since 1999. The office's work is driven by models of biology and computation as well as by contemporary design sensibilities. EMERGENT's work stands out in terms of its synthesis of form, pattern, color, and technology. In particular, EMERGENT is known for its ability to blend aesthetic and engineering issues into singular, irreducible constructions.
EMERGENT's work questions the dialectic of excess and efficiency in architecture, in favor of a more complex understanding of both through biological thinking. The cyclical process of mutation and selection in nature provides a model for making architecture which is ecological in the broadest sense of the word. This feedback logic is lived in the office through ‘messy computation’, which involves custom digital workflows designed to deal with heterogeneous inputs, anomalies, and performance criteria. Our interest is, however, not in promoting particular design techniques, but rather in the formal, spatial, and atmospheric effects produced at the back end.
EMERGENT has developed an international reputation through competitions entries, exhibitions of work at major institutions, and publications in over 250 books and magazines in 50 countries. ICON Magazine, in its May 2009 issue, named Principal Tom Wiscombe one of the “top 20 architects in the world who are making the future and transforming the way we work”.
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