On Tectonic Fictions: Gannon + Wiscombe
From Objects Models Worlds (2021)
Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe: Todd, you and I generally agree that tectonics shouldn’t be left out of discussions of architecture. But it does seem like there are so few fresh approaches to the subject these days — we seem to be deadlocked into either the positivist camp, where technology is bound up with ideas about progress, or the postmodern camp, where expression is understood as independent from building. I think it’s time to move away from that binary and into a more speculative territory.
I think aesthetics have to lead regardless. That doesn’t preclude architecture from engaging in strange, playful approaches to building. It just can’t be a truthful expression or it’s DOA. In my office, we kind of stumbled on these ideas of “metaseams” and
“supercomponents” by operating in that grey zone. We discovered that we could make a building appear more toylike, for example, by messing with familiar tectonic devices. I think control of scale is crucial for producing magical effects in architecture, and you can’t be a wizard without control of tectonics.
Todd Gannon: I agree, tectonics is crucial — it’s as important to an architect as grammar is to a writer. There is no way around it. You simply have to know how to put something together. Of course, tectonics is about more than putting things together. It has to do with putting things together expressively, artfully.
Unfortunately, tectonics in architecture often stands less for artful construction, which will always involve artifice (imagination, invention, magic), than for truthful
construction — the idea that there is a right way and a wrong way to put something together. Too many architects fail to realize that those shamans who proclaim to know the truth — and some of them can be quite convincing — are really just using artful rhetoric to promote a personal preference.
There is no such thing as “truth” to construction. No such thing as a “natural” material. These ideas suggest that there is some essential rightness to how we use and assemble wood, brick, glass, or steel. That’s nonsense. Wood in its natural state is a tree! By the time it gets to the building site, it has been sawn, dried, milled, trimmed to fit, sanded smooth, sealed with chemicals — there’s nothing “natural” about it. From the sawmill to the carpentry shop to the job site, woodworking is all artifice. Think about it, if Lou Kahn had asked a tree what it wanted to be, can you imagine one saying, “I want to be a 2x4? Of course, like all construction methods, carpentry involves conventions, and adhering to them helps guarantee known results. And like all materials, wood has certain properties that tend to come to the fore when it is worked conventionally. But that doesn’t mean that those conventions are the only way we can do it, or that those material properties involve some quasi-religious “truth” or “essence” of wood. They merely rehearse and reinforce old habits and expectations.
Art — and architecture is an art form — has to do with breaking old habits, with denying expectations, with inventing new ways of putting things together, with conjuring new effects that materials can engender. It comes from doing things differently. That’s what I think you are trying to do with your unconventional tectonic assemblies. Rather than simply throw out the expression of construction as a contemporary ambition (as many of our friends and colleagues have done), you are attempting to reimagine it, to get out from under the thumb of old habits and conventions and make way for new possibilities. That kind of work requires a high degree of expertise, a mastery of conventional construction, a deep knowledge of materials and their properties. But it also involves a kind of calculated irreverence, a refusal to follow the rules or to serve up what’s expected. It involves doing things the “wrong way” on purpose, which, when successful, demonstrates the arbitrariness of the “right way.” This, I think, is where your work really stands out.
TW: Yes I think one of the most difficult and most rewarding things in architecture is to maintain a sense of naivete in a highly technical world. Staying in the realm of the unknown in front of all the “known.” As you say, those shamans of engineering and industry project a sense of inevitability toward building, as if all of those little pieces of material are all architecture will ever be made from. It’s like shopping at Walmart . . . imagine if your life had to be constructed only out of the things available there! Of course history tells us that the materials we have available to us at any given time are not fundamental but rather continuously evolve, perhaps because materials science makes a discovery and architects leap, or as I prefer to think, because architects lay out a new vision of the world, anticipating a new tectonic regime that industry then races to develop. Either way, you just can’t get a carved stone column capital anymore because global markets are geared up for international style modernism — those guilds literally don’t exist anymore. On the other hand, you have new meta-materials — not yet fully embraced by the market — like composites that fuse multiple layers of construction in thin sandwiches, making trabeated construction obsolete, or structural foam blocks that can be milled and stacked like giant masonry (an idea I got from Peter Testa).
One of the most important things that meta-materials do is allow magic back into the equation. If you can’t see fully or resolve which element is doing what work because it is too flat and integrated or too mega-and rough, you are left in a state of disbelief and wonder, whereas looking at a bolt and a washer, you pretty much know how the world works and can take it apart in your mind.
So yes, I am committed to making discoveries across the whole field of architecture, which has to include tectonic inventions. I’m always surprised when architects recoil from that, because it is essentially giving control of the specifics of the architectural object to others. I call this “articulation for free” which is the kind of free you don’t want — like columns where they “need to be” or exposed hardware or facade panels that look like a computer mesh. One of the ways I approach tectonics is to question the entrenched logic of the subdivision of things in architecture. Bricks, sticks, shingles, and panels are right about the size of a human able to lift and move them, which is tied to a pre-fordist economy of labor vs. heavy things, followed by a fordist economy of mass production of things that can be stacked and stored. In the posthuman era we find ourselves in, I think that the link to the human scale needs to be broken. Very big things are connected to very small things, as we see in the news every day — Tim Morton captures this best in what he calls “the time of hyperobjects.” Remaining tied to the human “medium scale” becomes almost a form of ignorance! For me, all conceptual justifications aside, the visuality of the medium scale just doesn’t resonate anymore.
In my work I want to create doubt as to a thing’s true scale and how it was built, not by simply suppressing all traces of construction (thanks for noticing that Todd) but by massively scaling up things we thought we knew like panels and joints in combination with other tricks like using shadows or tattoos to generate “out of scale” surface features. The metaseams of the Taichung City Center defy any pattern of construction seams we know, and the super-panels we used in the Kinmen Port Terminal look like metal but are coated composite, allowing for extraordinarily long panel lengths with hard left and right bends that would be impossible off a straight coil of metal. The supercomponents of our recent West Hollywood Sunset Spectacular have the effect of making the object look like a toy, or a model at smaller scale, blown up. It makes you rethink reality instead of just mirroring the world we know.
I recently invited Joe Ledbetter, the vinyl toy designer, over to my office. I’ve always been drawn to his ability to both undermine and reinforce mass edges with weird seams and fake graphic elements, and became even more convinced when he got here that we have an overlapping sensibility. We are working on a project together now.
TG: That’s great. Vinyl toys are right up your alley! Architecture is always at its most interesting when it’s moving into the unknown, when it’s giving us a window onto something we haven’t seen before. It’s just a fact that there’s more unknown stuff than known stuff in the universe. Come on, there’s more unknown stuff than known stuff on my desk! I’m not being facetious. I am only conscious of a tiny sliver of what’s going on, whether the frame of reference is the universe or my desk. Just about all of what’s there buzzes along without providing me the least amount of access to the buzz. Object-oriented philosophers like Tim Morton and Graham Harman, two characters with whom you and I have had some very productive conversations, have provided poignant reminders of this state of affairs throughout their work. Architecture, which for far too long has been driven by a ridiculous Howard Roark-style we-know-everything-already arrogance, could learn a lot from the humility of their insights.
I like your phrase “articulation for free,” and agree that we should resist it. Too many architects forget that articulation is arbitrary — it’s not determined by the material or the building assembly. Of course, there are very well known conventions we tend to see a lot, but these are not absolutes. Where to subdivide is always up to the architect. Classical columns provide a useful example. If you go to the Acropolis, you’ll see columns that were constructed out of stacked lozenges of stone but then very cleverly detailed to downplay the reading of the stack in favor of the image of a monolithic column shaft. Fluting on the columns help erase the visual presence of the stacked joints, but a very cool — and nearly invisible — kind of detailing called anathyrosis, which holds the lozenges together and provides a very tight joint between them, more forcefully promotes the monolithic fiction. There’s a very long history to the kind of tectonic expertise we are talking about!
So, the ancient Greeks were already expert at subverting scalar expectations. They didn’t see any reason to limit articulation to celebrating the mundane facts of building assembly, to making every building an index of the labor required to make it. Whether they were recounting myths or building temples, the Greeks were storytellers, fabulists. Your work comes straight out of that tradition. The Greeks were brilliant in the way they played with the scale of building elements. Today, there’s a whole industry that works against their inventiveness, their crafty tectonic storytelling. Too much building today always tells the same story — How It’s Made — and always tells it with the same pieces, usually no bigger than 4 feet by 8 feet, about as big as one person can carry. The thing is, once you get beyond the scale of a house, that logic doesn’t hold up.
Today, not just building construction but the whole world is filled with strange scalar disjunctions. Think of a billboard. You’re driving down the highway and then out of nowhere there’s a giant cheeseburger, or a supermodel, or an iphone, or whatever else lit up overhead. As denizens of the twenty-first century, we are totally unperturbed by the idea of a giant cheeseburger hovering above the landscape. And yet most architects (and clients!) remain beholden to a completely outdated set of scalar expectations in our buildings. Which is weirder?
At Sunset Spectacular, you have very little interest in telling the “How It’s Made” story by honestly expressing structural componentry. At any given moment, the project will be displaying contemporary art alongside supermodels, and iphones, and maybe even a few cheeseburgers. And at every given moment, it will be there as an object, glimmering and mysterious over Sunset, telling its own stories through its strange tectonic vocabulary. For those of us with an interest in building construction, there is a fascinating story about how this thing actually goes together. For everybody else, there are other stories — stories that mingle the images on the screen (importantly, no longer beholden to rectilinear proportions and those familiar 14-foot by 48-foot billboard dimensions) with the arresting forms of the tower itself. And like the stories that still fascinate us at ancient Greek sites, the tectonic stories at Sunset Spectacular — stories told as much through digital images as through curious zippered seams, and jagged edges, and perforated surfaces, and unlikely building assemblies — are mostly fiction.
TW: I think good fiction always has a basis in the real. The best science fiction is the kind that shows us what a new reality might be like, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. To do that it needs to be convincing and get you to suspend disbelief. I’m not a huge fan of a lot of “visionary architecture” because it often creates a kind of dreamlike state of perception, like a cartoon. Cartoons are great, but you always know that they are a caricature of reality rather than an alternate reality altogether. That said, have you seen this cartoon The Amazing World of Gumball? It’s a mixed-reality TV show that crosses over between the hardcore reality of suburban vernacular and shopping malls and cartoon animation, and it is clearly using realism as a way of getting you to question the cartoon genre itself. In one episode, Gumball gets a hold of a “universal” remote control and is suddenly able to control cause and effect in our everyday world. It gets really weird and destabilizes what you think are the boundaries between an imagined world and reality.
In suspending disbelief in architecture, as in science fiction, the key is to add enough detail that supports the world you want to build. It needs to give you a sense that the thing was constructed, even if you don’t know how, or by whom. It needs to give you a sense of scale, even if that scale is massive and alien or miniature, and it needs to not be totally smooth. That may sound like a strange recipe, but it is one we see all the time being used in science fiction for a reason — it is convincing. Greebling, or the use of fine detail to produce a sense of realism and increase the perception of scale, is one such technique. A greebled surface, versus a smooth surface, immediately snaps you into another scale and technological realm. The smooth version remains unconvincing and cartoonish. Another technique, as in Kubrick’s 2001, is to add indeterminate panel joints and access panels to denote a construction that is not of today, yet still intelligible.
The point I’d like to make is that the introduction of fictional detail to architecture is something that is too often subverted by the realities of the “articulation for free” we were just discussing. I think it is crucial that architects resist the expression of things that do not contribute to the world they want to build. It is difficult, since we so often build using materials from the cottage building industry, which is what it is. And by the way, I’m not suggesting that architecture should use techniques from science fiction. We have our own version of greebling, for instance in Wright’s Ennis House. The Mayan-ish concrete textile blocks accumulated all over the skin makes an already massive house appear even larger, as well as producing a sense of indeterminacy of type and time. Or, on the other hand, Otto Wagner’s stone upholstery on his Postsparkasse, including upscaled rivets, that makes the building appear to be smaller than it is. One of my all-time favorites is OMA’s CCTV building in Beijing, which has semi-fictional cross-hatch across its facade, making the already toy-like massing appear even smaller. The mega-scale articulation of the cross-hatch grabs your attention, so the micro articulation of the glass curtain wall, which references human scale, can fall to the background. The story goes that structural force lines and diagonals are being reified on the face of the building, but if you look more closely, you see that the facade channels are not even connected to the steel, nor are they always located where structure is. I’d argue that their primary function is to add “detail” that produces an alienating scale effect, supporting a new real.
This is not an argument for fineness or detail per se. It is an argument for an enchantment of tectonics within architecture, something that is too often left in a zombie state. In fact, I prefer less detail and absolutely no hardware. Hardware is one of the easiest ways to lose control of your world, as it too often reveals, grotesquely, the level of technological development of an era. An iPhone’s sleek, hardwareless design shows us what reality looks like now, as did the rotary phone of the 1950’s, with its external machine parts and clunky hardware. I always liked Arthur C. Clarke’s statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” because I do see a relationship between building technology and magical effects. Building technology is too often denigrated by true “disciplinarians” in architecture, as if everything architecture needs to evolve today was already available at the time of Palladio. I disagree with that, and while I have no wish to express signs of technological proficiency or progress in my work, I just don’t think you can produce magic without expertise. Hiding technology, as in the iPhone, is impossible in the hand of an amateur.
TG: “Enchantment of tectonics” is a big part of what makes great buildings great. The best architects push tectonics well past “best practices” in pursuit of art. Think of Mies’s insane plug-welded connections at the Farnsworth House — so much labor concealed in the name of abstraction! Norman Foster and Richard Rogers played a similar game in their first building, Reliance Controls, in 1967.
Look at the steel connections. The columns, beams, and purlins are all the same width. This is not a very efficient use of steel — the purlins are much wider than they need to be and the overhanging steel is unnecessary. But maintaining identical dimensions (along with some tricky welding, all ground away as at Farnsworth) allows all the flanges to line up and appear to slide through each other. The overhanging steel carries the strong horizontal line of the beam past the corner, helping the building to take on the abstract qualities of a drawing. There’s more: Almost all of the x-bracing was not required structurally, but Foster fought with his engineer, Tony Hunt, to keep it because he liked how it looked. Even funnier, Hunt recommended using X-bracing to stiffen the black water tower in front, but Foster insisted on a much more expensive unbraced frame because the tower was a quotation of the tower at the Smithsons’ Hunstanton School, which didn’t have any bracing!
Though High Tech is often thought to have to do with truthful construction, its best practitioners pushed their tectonic ambitions well past the point of honest expression into the realm of tectonic fiction. At their best, High Tech architects worked to produce a kind of poetry of precision, to imagine a world a lot like our own but with a crucial difference: In this fictional world, everything comes together perfectly; everything fits just so. You can almost hear the satisfying click! as one piece slots into the next. It takes an incredible amount of technical skill to pull this off, of course, but an honest accounting of the techniques involved would undermine the fictional sense of precision that is the ultimate goal.
So, High Tech architects tried to imagine a world of precision uber alles. Theirs is a world in which what we already know functions at the highest level, which makes it (paradoxically) both conservative and visionary at the same time. You work toward a different, though somewhat related, fiction, one that is far less beholden to what we already know. Precision is part of it, but it’s a far cry from the comforting nut-and-bolt precision of High Tech. Yours is a world where new families of forms are held together in strange new configurations through metaseams, supercomponents, greebling, and other techniques. It’s a world where we don’t already know how the objects we interact with every day came to be, a world in which precision doesn’t operate to comfort us but rather to remind us, by refusing to obviate how a building goes together, that there is plenty we don’t know about the world, that there are significant gaps in our knowledge. And it’s from those gaps that magic and art spring.