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On Mass Vs. Graphics: A Conversation
Excerpted from Objects Models Worlds
On Mass Vs. Graphics
Joe Ledbetter / Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe I’m really excited about our ongoing project together — to think about what happens to architecture as a toy or a model, but also to think about a toy or model as architecture. One of the things that interests both of us is the relation between mass and graphics, and how graphics can be used to alter the reading of mass. Some graphic moves can reinforce boundaries, while others can create ambiguity. We both sometimes use fake reflections or shadows across objects to these ends. . . when did you start doing that?
Joe Ledbetter I’m really excited about this project as well. It’s challenging and a bit out of my wheelhouse which makes it all the more thrilling. I know I’m still trying to wrestle with the idea of architecture as a toy and a toy as architecture. Where do the definitions overlap? Maybe definitions are too limiting? In any case, I can’t wait to really tackle this together.
I began playing with artificial highlights and shadows when I first began to work in 3D back in 2004. I stumbled across this idea as I was trying to replicate 2D characters from my paintings into designer toys. I instantly found it created a really unique and interesting look — something that stood out from the crowd. Holding the toy in my hands, it seemed superimposed because it somewhat defied reality and the nature of light and the physical environment. It felt subversive against nature in a playful way.
Architecture however is an entirely different animal. You really have the opportunity to play on these massive scales and work with the sun, different times of the day, seasons, weather, hard shadows, etc., not to mention taking into account the angles at which people will see and experience the structures. You get to dictate how people view your work to some extent, though at the same time you can’t control when they will experience it. The variables seem a bit overwhelming to me. How much are you thinking about creating natural and artificial shadows, reflections, etc. while you’re designing? Are you thinking a lot about how natural shadows will cast? How much do you leave it up to chance and let the environment do whatever it’s going to do?
TW I totally agree that objects are so much more intriguing when they defy reality, or are as you say, are “subversive against nature.” Architectural design software reached a point about 20 years ago when it could perfectly recreate natural shadows, and that always bothered me. What is the purpose of mirroring reality as we already know it or modelling things we can easily predict? When I was a kid, I remember loving off-world sci-fi scenes where there were 10 moons or 3 suns, casting multiple shadows and reflections, and destabilizing “earthiness.”
So yes, at some point about 7 years ago, I started thinking about how to remove a building from its relational atmospheric network and put it in an alternate one. We invented what we called the “light studio” which was a kind of miniature digital stage where we lit digital models using all artificial lights. We used grids of fluorescents, fields of starlights, and even strange illuminated objects just out of the scene — all with the intent of defamiliarizing the way architecture reflects its context. We eventually took these shadows and reflections and physically embedded them into the architecture as different materials and facade types. When the building is built, you get the feeling that it is not quite meant for this world although it may exist in it.
It’s interesting that you began to anticipate 3D toy designs in your paintings, and that those shade/shadow effects somehow remained in the actual 3D object. What was a kind of strategy of increasing realism becomes a technique of speculative realism. It is a kind of magic trick, where at first you think you are seeing a figure with some features graphically emphasized, but you then realize that the graphics are actually destabilizing the figure, making it vibrate. Architecture is really hard to make vibrate like that! It is so big and there are so many cultural projections on it, and of course there is gravity that always keeps it pinned in place. Do you ever use fake gravity?
JL I’ve found that I have become more interested in defying gravity the longer I design toys. I suppose the limitations of gravity have always been a challenge for people throughout the ages. I love finding new ways to balance a toy or give the illusion that the figure is jumping or even flying. I’ve always felt that a static pose can often be quite boring.
Some of my favorite examples are my charging Ram, the “Pelican’t” and my Wolfgang figure who is leaping in excitement. A more recent project involves a stack of characters hitching a ride on a scooter. Here I am trying to create the sense of weight and movement, all while balancing an impossible stack of creatures. But none of that is using “fake gravity,” which I suppose is the opposite of defying it. By “fake gravity” you mean emphasizing and exaggerating weight and gravity’s effects?
TW For me the term “fake” implies a world of imagination rather than scientism where things follow known laws. I love the idea of gravities pulling massive and tiny things together but not the idea that it is a universalizing force pulling architecture into low, bottom-heavy structures close to the ground. That inadvertently sets everything into a hierarchy, and mirrors the quality of the earth as a bunch of matter sedimented around a point. I prefer quantum “spooky action at a distance” to gravity — all though they are both technically “laws” of physics, SAAD seems almost impossible. SAAD creates weird communications and mirroring effects between things that make the world seem animate and mysteriously ecological. I also love that the term “fake” adds a funny, lighthearted quality to “gravity” which is something very heavy and dark and serious, as in dark humor.
When I look at your Wolfgang figure, I see you not only defying gravity, but creating a kind of alternate physics. His tongue is heavy and hits the ground, but then his leg is weightless but poised and his skull and eyes are literally able to penetrate the shell of his body. The laws of gravity and recoil and magnetism all seem to be in play, and operating differentially rather than uniformly. It’s one thing when, in cartoon reality, Wiley Coyote tries to catch a flying anvil and his arms stretch out, but another when you make physical models like you do with everyday physics operating in the background. It’s a lot like how I try to “defer” landing in my architecture — through illusion and sleight of hand. I love the way you do that in your stack-of-figures piece, by setting it on a puffy cloud of dust (with stars). Great move. While rationally you know it’s a structural device, you just don’t care because its precariousness is what drives the imagination.
The Inner Life of Models
LOG 50: Model Behavior, Fall 2020
Bruce Nauman described his “Model for a Trench and 4 Buried Passages” (1979), as a concept model for a subterranean space at an unknown, “much larger” scale. When confronted with this piece, the viewer is forced to speculate what it might be like to encounter it on a vast, almost planetary scale, and what its purpose might be. Is it a supercollider? A mausoleum? Originally shown in Nauman’s studio, the sculpture raised the surreal possibility that everything in the room could also be a model of some other, giant thing. Taken as a precedent, Nauman’s piece illustrates the crucial power of scale, which tells us more than anything else what a particular construct is for. Architecture too often becomes a mirror of the human medium scale, crystallizing our routinized sense of our position as primary and special. Upending scale expands our vision of reality to include things that exist equally but on radically different registers, like galaxies, mountains, and corona viruses. Architecture today should embrace the potential of the miniature and the gigantic in our contemporary experience.
In buildings, we always associate the scale of things with the number of pieces from which they appear to be made. One of the reasons the CCTV Tower by OMA seems charming and toylike is that its envelope features an overscaled channel pattern that overpowers the regularizing grid of its glass curtain wall and stands out against its background of conventional buildings, with their refined articulation. The result is a building that appears smaller than it is, making the entire city seem strange. Or consider Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, which is parted out into unexpectedly small “textile blocks” and consequently feels more like a Mesoamerican temple than a residence. A related technique from the world of special effects, known as “greebling,” involves the almost maniacal addition of fine surface detail and subdivisions to small, in-camera models so that they resemble vast technical objects like spacecraft. When medieval architects began designing smaller containers like reliquaries, baldachins, and tabernacles that had previously been the purview of other guilds, these quickly became vehicles for mixed-scale and mixed-material speculations. Tiny vaults and oriels were combined with out-of-scale jewels; miniature castles were topped with crystal turrets; structures were clad in too-big walrus plaques and crowned with oversized golden eagles. Freed from the structural logistics and construction techniques that limited larger works, these “micro-architectures,” as the historian François Bucher called them, ceased to function as replicas of full-scale architecture and became instead lively collections of multiscalar objects in the general form of a known type. Composite entities such as these never resolve into a unity, as in tired models of part-to-whole, but remain bundles of parts that continually catch your attention one-by-one.
Buildings Are Toys Are Buildings
Excerpted from Objects Models Worlds
On Mass Vs. Graphics
Joe Ledbetter / Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe I’m really excited about our ongoing project together — to think about what happens to architecture as a toy or a model, but also to think about a toy or model as architecture. One of the things that interests both of us is the relation between mass and graphics, and how graphics can be used to alter the reading of mass. Some graphic moves can reinforce boundaries, while others can create ambiguity. We both sometimes use fake reflections or shadows across objects to these ends. . . when did you start doing that?
Joe Ledbetter I’m really excited about this project as well. It’s challenging and a bit out of my wheelhouse which makes it all the more thrilling. I know I’m still trying to wrestle with the idea of architecture as a toy and a toy as architecture. Where do the definitions overlap? Maybe definitions are too limiting? In any case, I can’t wait to really tackle this together.
I began playing with artificial highlights and shadows when I first began to work in 3D back in 2004. I stumbled across this idea as I was trying to replicate 2D characters from my paintings into designer toys. I instantly found it created a really unique and interesting look — something that stood out from the crowd. Holding the toy in my hands, it seemed superimposed because it somewhat defied reality and the nature of light and the physical environment. It felt subversive against nature in a playful way.
Architecture however is an entirely different animal. You really have the opportunity to play on these massive scales and work with the sun, different times of the day, seasons, weather, hard shadows, etc., not to mention taking into account the angles at which people will see and experience the structures. You get to dictate how people view your work to some extent, though at the same time you can’t control when they will experience it. The variables seem a bit overwhelming to me. How much are you thinking about creating natural and artificial shadows, reflections, etc. while you’re designing? Are you thinking a lot about how natural shadows will cast? How much do you leave it up to chance and let the environment do whatever it’s going to do?
TW I totally agree that objects are so much more intriguing when they defy reality, or are as you say, are “subversive against nature.” Architectural design software reached a point about 20 years ago when it could perfectly recreate natural shadows, and that always bothered me. What is the purpose of mirroring reality as we already know it or modelling things we can easily predict? When I was a kid, I remember loving off-world sci-fi scenes where there were 10 moons or 3 suns, casting multiple shadows and reflections, and destabilizing “earthiness.”
So yes, at some point about 7 years ago, I started thinking about how to remove a building from its relational atmospheric network and put it in an alternate one. We invented what we called the “light studio” which was a kind of miniature digital stage where we lit digital models using all artificial lights. We used grids of fluorescents, fields of starlights, and even strange illuminated objects just out of the scene — all with the intent of defamiliarizing the way architecture reflects its context. We eventually took these shadows and reflections and physically embedded them into the architecture as different materials and facade types. When the building is built, you get the feeling that it is not quite meant for this world although it may exist in it.
It’s interesting that you began to anticipate 3D toy designs in your paintings, and that those shade/shadow effects somehow remained in the actual 3D object. What was a kind of strategy of increasing realism becomes a technique of speculative realism. It is a kind of magic trick, where at first you think you are seeing a figure with some features graphically emphasized, but you then realize that the graphics are actually destabilizing the figure, making it vibrate. Architecture is really hard to make vibrate like that! It is so big and there are so many cultural projections on it, and of course there is gravity that always keeps it pinned in place. Do you ever use fake gravity?
JL I’ve found that I have become more interested in defying gravity the longer I design toys. I suppose the limitations of gravity have always been a challenge for people throughout the ages. I love finding new ways to balance a toy or give the illusion that the figure is jumping or even flying. I’ve always felt that a static pose can often be quite boring.
Some of my favorite examples are my charging Ram, the “Pelican’t” and my Wolfgang figure who is leaping in excitement. A more recent project involves a stack of characters hitching a ride on a scooter. Here I am trying to create the sense of weight and movement, all while balancing an impossible stack of creatures. But none of that is using “fake gravity,” which I suppose is the opposite of defying it. By “fake gravity” you mean emphasizing and exaggerating weight and gravity’s effects?
TW For me the term “fake” implies a world of imagination rather than scientism where things follow known laws. I love the idea of gravities pulling massive and tiny things together but not the idea that it is a universalizing force pulling architecture into low, bottom-heavy structures close to the ground. That inadvertently sets everything into a hierarchy, and mirrors the quality of the earth as a bunch of matter sedimented around a point. I prefer quantum “spooky action at a distance” to gravity — all though they are both technically “laws” of physics, SAAD seems almost impossible. SAAD creates weird communications and mirroring effects between things that make the world seem animate and mysteriously ecological. I also love that the term “fake” adds a funny, lighthearted quality to “gravity” which is something very heavy and dark and serious, as in dark humor.
When I look at your Wolfgang figure, I see you not only defying gravity, but creating a kind of alternate physics. His tongue is heavy and hits the ground, but then his leg is weightless but poised and his skull and eyes are literally able to penetrate the shell of his body. The laws of gravity and recoil and magnetism all seem to be in play, and operating differentially rather than uniformly. It’s one thing when, in cartoon reality, Wiley Coyote tries to catch a flying anvil and his arms stretch out, but another when you make physical models like you do with everyday physics operating in the background. It’s a lot like how I try to “defer” landing in my architecture — through illusion and sleight of hand. I love the way you do that in your stack-of-figures piece, by setting it on a puffy cloud of dust (with stars). Great move. While rationally you know it’s a structural device, you just don’t care because its precariousness is what drives the imagination.
A Specific Theory of Models
AD: On Beauty, September/October 2019
Architecture needs new
scales of engagement. The scope of anthropocentric attention is one of
familiarity and comfort, defined by and for the human hand and eye. It turns
all the diverse and wild entities of the world into things “for us,” as if all
the snowflakes, gas giants, polar bears, kittens, and aircraft carriers of the
world existed only to serve the human mind. Now is the time for architects to
engage with the massive variety of entities and scales that make up reality, as
unsettling and unfamiliar as that might be. Freed from allegiance to the human
scale, architecture can refocus on challenging our expectations of what our
access to reality is like. In the philosopher Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013) we see what can
happen when we shift our attention from the human scale to that of the
half-life of plutonium or the slowly shifting drone of the standing pressure
wave over the Atlantic Ocean.We might also consider
objects at a scale much smaller than human existence: “hypo-objects,” perhaps.
In place of the human scale, we might jointly leverage the resources of the
vast and the miniature, conceiving architecture at the scale of planets or
toys. The aim would be to enchant the familiar by flattening assumed scale
hierarchies onto a single ontological plane, as in
the film Men in Black, when a jewel
on the collar of a cat is found to contain a galaxy. ...
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TWA Monograph
Kasra Press, 2017While this turn towards objects could be misunderstood as a simplistic focus on gratuitous things torn from all context, in fact it has more to do with shifting focus towards the alluring qualities of things-in-themselves, while at the same time, realizing their fundamental inaccessibility. Consider a Bengal tiger, Kubrick’s monolith, a Mexican crystal cave, a blood-comb jellyfish: each has an inaccessible interior life which is not reducible to bundles of external relations. For architecture, this does not mean that relations do not exist, but rather that architectural entities might relate at a distance without literally flowing into or becoming one another. In any case, architecture would cease to be a hollow conduit of flows and instead become a nesting of objects within objects. This points to a new form of coherence in architecture, which theorist John McMorrough has spoken about as the space “between collage and emergence,” where objects simultaneously retain discreteness, but enter into...
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Tom Wiscombe Interview with
Zachary Tate Porter
Offramp 11: Ground, Spring/Summer 2016
At first it was an intuition about severing and drawing out the connection between a building and its landing, but now I have begun to see it as crucial to a larger framework of thought. I think of buildings as worlds, not as extensions of World or Nature, terms I find to be a very slippery subject at this point in time. Those terms too often generalize and reduce the huge variety in form, scale, and agency of entities that make them up, favoring a kind of ontological lump. If architecture itself is a world, that means it might have a continuous boundary. Like a planet let’s say, versus a landscape. While those two things may sound related, one is a circle that has an inside and an outside, and the other is a line that implies surface and goes on forever. I think that the idea of architecture as landscape is now exhausted, and I think the conflation of the two actually degrades both and kills their specificity as concrete entities.
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None More Black
Hatch: On the State of Quick Images, Spring 2015
So, what you heard were my smart friends basically saying, “But seriously, are you talking about a new project of autonomy? And, if so, in what terms and how do you deal with context which is there, like it or not?” So, what I was fighting for in the review, and what we’re all fighting for in the studio right now, is the idea that over the last ten years, mass media has begun a campaign to make architecture provincial. We always hear about context, as if architecture could be drawn forth from it. I will tell you, it cannot. So in studio we are turning the volume up to eleven to see how we could be contextual but in a radically different way, by being so self-reflexive that the building literally creates a new world and then begins to influence and remake its context. That is why we are using the “light studio” I mentioned earlier—the light studio is of this earth but also not of this earth. It is real but it has no determinate scale. The effects it produces might range from something like a toy to something like a black hole. This interest is related to Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, or rethinking the world in terms of things which are massively distributed and disassociated with anthropocentric notions of scale.
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The Object Turn: A Conversation
Log 33, Winter 2015
In architecture, a similar shift is underway. Formal experimentation based on smooth manifolds and continuous variation – both generalizing models despite claims to the contrary – seems exhausted as a project. Instead, an alternative is gaining traction, one focused on a world made of discrete, withdrawn entities, things that vex and exceed definition through relations alone. This impulse decenters the human–object or mind–world relation that weaves through architecture as phenomenology or other modes of direct human access, instead tapping into a strange sub-phenomenal world that we can’t see or know but can try to imagine. It forces a reevaluation of the discourse of sensation and superficiality in architecture, opening up the possibility of crossing over between how things appear and their strange inner realities. In Guerilla Metaphysics, Graham talks about this crossing over in terms of allure, which could be understood as a combination of allusion – we can only allude to objects to which we have no direct access – and alluring, that is, powerfully seductive. Reorienting toward objects also injects life back into the concept of difference in kind over difference in degree, which ’90s architectural discourse promised but ultimately failed to deliver...
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Towards a Flat Ontology of Architecture
Project: Issue 3, Spring 2014
Consider the orca.
A biologist might tell you that orcas are, like any creature, the product of DNA mutation coupled with natural selection over time, as if that explained everything about the evocative thing right there in front of our eyes. In that worldview, the orca is simultaneously reduced to an outcome of interactions of tiny atomic units and of enormous ecological systems. In a theoretical and popular world obsessed with networks, flows, and processes, it seems like the orca must also be a network or a flow or a process; to a hammer everything looks like a nail. But this denies the specificity and discreetness of the orca: the depth of its slick black rubbery skin, the alien figuration of its white patches, its toy-like scalelessness. Rather than undermining the orca by attempting to justify or generalize it, why not instead embrace its specificity as an object, with all of its mysterious, irreducible character and inclinations?
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A biologist might tell you that orcas are, like any creature, the product of DNA mutation coupled with natural selection over time, as if that explained everything about the evocative thing right there in front of our eyes. In that worldview, the orca is simultaneously reduced to an outcome of interactions of tiny atomic units and of enormous ecological systems. In a theoretical and popular world obsessed with networks, flows, and processes, it seems like the orca must also be a network or a flow or a process; to a hammer everything looks like a nail. But this denies the specificity and discreetness of the orca: the depth of its slick black rubbery skin, the alien figuration of its white patches, its toy-like scalelessness. Rather than undermining the orca by attempting to justify or generalize it, why not instead embrace its specificity as an object, with all of its mysterious, irreducible character and inclinations?
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Burrasca Interview
Spring 2014
1. What is Architecture?
Architecture is the characterization of the transition from world to interior.
2. Which is the role of theory in Architecture?
You can't have architecture without theory. You can have buildings but not architecture.
3. What is the role of digital in your working method?
The digital in architecture is now in its third generation. The contemporary digital is about hybridizing techniques, making your own tools and workflows and avoiding single platforms. The most important thing now is to erase any trace or index of digital technique, and produce work that is unfamiliar and magical.
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Architecture is the characterization of the transition from world to interior.
2. Which is the role of theory in Architecture?
You can't have architecture without theory. You can have buildings but not architecture.
3. What is the role of digital in your working method?
The digital in architecture is now in its third generation. The contemporary digital is about hybridizing techniques, making your own tools and workflows and avoiding single platforms. The most important thing now is to erase any trace or index of digital technique, and produce work that is unfamiliar and magical.
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New Models of Coherency
YsoA Louis I. Kahn Studio, 2014
While this turn towards objects could be misunderstood as a simplistic focus on gratuitous things torn from all context, in fact it has more to do with shifting focus towards the alluring qualities of things-in-themselves, while at the same time, realizing their fundamental inaccessibility. Consider a Bengal tiger, Kubrick’s monolith, a Mexican crystal cave, a blood-comb jellyfish: each has an inaccessible interior life which is not reducible to bundles of external relations. For architecture, this does not mean that relations do not exist, but rather that architectural entities might relate at a distance without literally flowing into or becoming one another. In any case, architecture would cease to be a hollow conduit of flows and instead become a nesting of objects within objects. This points to a new form of coherence in architecture, which theorist John McMorrough has spoken about as the space “between collage and emergence,” where objects simultaneously retain discreteness, but enter into...
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Interview by Jeffrey Inaba
Volume #3, November, 2013
Well let me start by saying that I am suspicious of an architecture that is justified by or supposedly generated by climate or climate control. A climate is inherently an air, a heat, an intensity, really the opposite of an architectural object. If you delegate architecture to being a kind of consequence of forces or flows in a particular context, you have a logical conundrum. First, you are saying that something that preceded the architectural object can justify its existence without the object having to do so through the effects that it produces. Second, you are assuming that it is possible to generate architecture out of things which are not architecture, that is, not germane to the discipline. Both of those things sound like very strange propositions to me at this point, and I know you are not yourself proposing them. I am just following the idea down the rabbit hole.
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Beyond Assembly
Material Beyond Materials, January, 2009There are a multitude of different approaches regarding the application and significance of composites in contemporary design, many of which are represented by the speakers who participated in the SCI-Arc-hosted conference, "Material Beyond Materials-Composite Tectonics." The event centered on investigating the relationships that currently exist between technological advances in materials, innovations in the building industry, and contemporary design discourse and pedagogy. This book documents one of the largest events SCI-Arc has ever organized and probably the first one with a direct emphasis on advanced materials and their use in the architecture field.
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Subdivisions, Squishing, and Objects in Objects
suckerPUNCH, March, 2013
For the past two years I have been focusing on the relationships between objects, and what I call ‘the problem of subdivisions’. ‘Subdivisions’ has two meanings for me. The first is in terms of how buildings can be dealt with in terms of wholes rather than part-to-whole relations. I am tired of how building massing, interior, articulation, and ground tend to be dealt with hierarchically in contemporary architecture, or one after the other, towards a consequent and linear relation of systems and subsystems.
Imagine instead a horizontal plane, where massing, interior, articulation, and ground are things-in-themselves, and can all influence each other equally but differently. One cannot usurp or subjugate another. Each has some degree of autonomy, although they communicate with one another, push into or anticipate one another, anything just short of fusing together. I call this ‘Objects in Objects on Objects’. Specifically, we are considering enclosing objects, internal objects, and ground objects, an objective which links back to Kipnis’ ‘box-in-a-box’ problem in Towards a New Architecture (1993) . Whether these objects are inside one another or on top of one another, they retain their discrete character. The silhouette of an internal object is just as important as the silhouette of the enclosing object, as in an aquarium full of fish. The ground in this model is no longer the receiver of architecture, but rather a pulled-up, dug-out architectural object in its own right, which communicates with other architectural objects and the land it inhabits.
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Imagine instead a horizontal plane, where massing, interior, articulation, and ground are things-in-themselves, and can all influence each other equally but differently. One cannot usurp or subjugate another. Each has some degree of autonomy, although they communicate with one another, push into or anticipate one another, anything just short of fusing together. I call this ‘Objects in Objects on Objects’. Specifically, we are considering enclosing objects, internal objects, and ground objects, an objective which links back to Kipnis’ ‘box-in-a-box’ problem in Towards a New Architecture (1993) . Whether these objects are inside one another or on top of one another, they retain their discrete character. The silhouette of an internal object is just as important as the silhouette of the enclosing object, as in an aquarium full of fish. The ground in this model is no longer the receiver of architecture, but rather a pulled-up, dug-out architectural object in its own right, which communicates with other architectural objects and the land it inhabits.
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Structural Ecologies
AADCU Monograph, 2009A menagerie of geometries has been developed in the office over the past few years which we use for various projects. They are really prototypes, neither a chunk of building nor a detail. These prototypes are studies of structural, mechanical, and circulatory behavior, particularly in terms of their feedback, collapse, or hybridization as systems. All projects are driven by one or more prototypes, in combination with more prosaic issues of building massing and program. Prototypes are sometimes digitally animated to reveal their range of behavior, in terms of geometric syntax, growth patterns, depth variability, and transformative capabilities such as delaminating, branching, cellularizing, lightening, or thickening. Beam‐branes, surface‐to‐strand hybrids, and hydronic armatures constitute geometric/performative species that link recent projects within a kind of taxonomy.
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Interview: Objects vs. Parts
Estonian Academy of the Arts, March, 2013
Yes, I am currently consciously avoiding some of the discourse on correlated systems and part-to-whole relations, which have both become dogma, especially in light of wide acceptance of certain digital techniques, in the last decade. It’s that moment, which of course happens every so often, that things which seem solid melt into air, as Marx said in his moment. It is actually funny how a theoretic framework- let’s say, for the sake of discussion, a Deleuzian framework- which is ostensibly about intensive forces, affiliations, and relations can become so entrenched and inflexible. Deleuzian thinking is by no means exhausted, to be clear, but the minute we start believing that any theory from outside architecture can fully describe the complex web of aesthetics, materiality, technology, and politics that constitutes architecture, we have a problem.
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Emergent Models of Architectural Practice
Perspecta 38, 2006The idea that innovation, whether scientific, technological, or architectural, is a byproduct of artistic chance or a result of singular genius can no longer be sustained in the 21st century. Complexity theory reveals that innovation - the creation of the new - is the direct result of bottom-up- evolutionary processes. Science knows this; industry is learning. Architecture is just beginning to engage the concept.
In order to move into this space of innovation, architects will have to accept the value of multiplicity and dynamic feedback over the retrograde nature of authority. They will have to accept that architecture might not be about essences and theoretical positions, but rather about exchanges of techniques, expertise and materialities in multiple industries. They will have to accept the architecture is no longer a heroic center, but one micro-intelligence among many...
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In order to move into this space of innovation, architects will have to accept the value of multiplicity and dynamic feedback over the retrograde nature of authority. They will have to accept that architecture might not be about essences and theoretical positions, but rather about exchanges of techniques, expertise and materialities in multiple industries. They will have to accept the architecture is no longer a heroic center, but one micro-intelligence among many...
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Interview: Yale Constructs
Constructs Yale Architecture, November, 2012
You can’t describe good architecture in terms of its contexts, it always exceeds it context. Look at the white Bengal tiger. Evolution is a terrible way to understand bengal-tigerness. It is reductive, either downwards into parts or upwards into superunities, as in concepts of ecology and so on. You can’t draw forth buildings from information in general, and certainly not from vague notions of Nature or World. And by the way, buildings don’t evolve. That is why I have such a problem with contemporary architecture that is described in terms of the forces or processes that suppossedly generated it, and how architecture solves this or that problem. Animals don’t solve problems, they just are. Architecture does not exist to solve problems either, although obviously buildings do to some extent. Architecture is about freedom, imagination, and mystery. Science is about knowledge. The two are incongruent. Certainly when we talk about the discipline of architecture, we are talking about the humanities and not science.
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Patchiness
OnRamp, SCI-Arc, October, 2012
One of the most interesting architectural payoffs of this new realm is patchiness. Patchiness in terms of the variegated visual effect of a calico cat but also in terms of the “irregular in quality, performance, or intensity”.2 Again, what appears to be a lack, becomes a productive source of strength and beauty. The patchy is different from the parametric in the sense that it is not obsessed with establishing continuity via linear gradients but rather it creates intensive coherence through messy crossovers and sudden shifts in character or capacity. These shifts can be figural and high contrast as in tattoos, or have fuzzy boundaries as in the cat’s furry, rough-edged spots. It remains to be seen the degree to which patchy composite materiality and the aesthetics of patchiness can approach one another and productively align. This should not be a goal of patchiness but rather a possibility. For now, we can happily watch as experiments begin to pop up around SCI-Arc in an almost unconscious desire to move toward patchy, hybrid, composite materiality and away from 20th century material adjacencies, the aesthetics of the linear gradient, and theoretical constructs that favor seamlessness.
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Extreme Integration
AD: Exuberance, March, 2010
In Terry Gilliam‘s 1985 film Brazil, there is an unforgettable scene where Robert De Niro, a guerrilla air-conditioning repairman, responds to an urgent call for help from a sweating man. He has intercepted a call directed to the totalitarian State parodied in the film, and drops in out of nowhere to assist. De Niro removes a standardized interior panel from a wall, and mechanical systems behind literally pour out onto the floor, in a shower of sparks and feeble pulsations. As he makes illegal repairs to the jumble of tubes and wires and ducts, he reveals his motivation: “I came into this game for the action, the excitement, going anywhere. I travel light, get in, get out, wherever there’s trouble.”
Brazil depicts a dystopian world in decline characterized by failing infrastructure and decadent culture. In its focus on dysfunctional infrastructure, this scene in particular speaks to architecture: it takes place at the threshold between the extended visible world and the intensive technological systems and forces that underlie it. These worlds are alternately at odds with or effects of one another: one is dysfunctional, the other merely keeps up appearances. De Niro’s guerrilla operative is the unlikely agent of change.
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Brazil depicts a dystopian world in decline characterized by failing infrastructure and decadent culture. In its focus on dysfunctional infrastructure, this scene in particular speaks to architecture: it takes place at the threshold between the extended visible world and the intensive technological systems and forces that underlie it. These worlds are alternately at odds with or effects of one another: one is dysfunctional, the other merely keeps up appearances. De Niro’s guerrilla operative is the unlikely agent of change.
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