The Problem of Subdivisions, or Why We Love Snow Globes

The process of designing, detailing, and creating working drawings for construction tends to be one of subdividing large things into small things that can be handled and transported. This has the side effect of impressing the human scale on buildings, which some may find satisfying, but we find problematic. Wouldn’t it be great if architecture didn’t resemble its everyday limits and traces of its manufacture, such as limits in metal panel, glass unit, and stone sizes?

We are by no means arguing for a fantasy project, where materiality is ignored- that is a sure way to have no effect on architecture in the world. What we are rooting for is the idea of architects controlling subdivisions in buildings by suspending the aesthetic relation to humans. This allows us to control the reading of scale which is one of the most powerful effects in architecture. Was it built by giants? By aliens? How was this made and for whom? This approach requires us to rethink the outsized power standardized systems have come to have over our design thinking. It’s time to stop shopping and selecting and start inventing-- we have given away too much.

Another, maybe more fundamental, issue we have with subdivision thinking is the way internal spaces of buildings are often broken up by packing them with floors and walls, like an apple cut with an apple-cutter. We prefer the idea of objects nested within objects over infilling and packing. This approach produces a loose, playful relationship between architectural containers and their interior compartments, and between compartments and other compartments. Radically different scales of space and interstitial realms can be created, allowing for unexpected diagonal views and circulation of people, air, and light. Imagine spaces inside buildings that are vast and three-dimensional like mountain ranges or coral reefs. A snow globe is maybe the best metaphor for two reasons: one, it is a container of independent worlds, and two, its inner objects never conform to their container. In any case, we propose that floors should not be treated like infill trays cut at mass edges, but rather be constrained to internal objects, leaving gaps. Walls should never infill between floors as if every level is a different Revit game board; they should have vertical continuity where possible to create vertiginous spaces.

Within the age-old discussion of part-to-whole relations in architecture, this is an appealing new avenue: things can be simultaneously an independent thing and a part of something else. Think of things inside of things inside of things all the way down, from universes to galaxies to planets to bodies to molecules to cells, on and on: none of these is lesser than the other just because it is smaller--each thing has its own aesthetics and life. This flattened relationship has been referred to by contemporary philosopher Levi Bryant as a “strange mereology”-- mereology, as in the study of part-to-whole relations, and strange because this approach denies hierarchies in our understanding of everything in the world, in favor of everything existing equally but differently. The ubiquitous statement that “the whole is greater than the parts” is thrown out the window.

Throw it Down

“Throw it down” is our office’s primary design method. It involves working with low-resolution chunks in quick iterations using discrete transformations. Although most of our work takes place in the computer, throwing things down, even if not literally with human hands, allows us to produce a sense of playful, effortless immediacy that is too easily lost in digital finessing.

Parts might be massive or tiny. They always appear as diverse collections and sometimes as copy-scale sets. However you see them, they will never be deformed, broken, or fused with other things. They persevere. The only ways we manipulate them are to move, rotate, scale, copy, and slice —that’s it. “Throw it down” means: don’t finesse a composition; make it fast and messy and don’t be afraid to jam things together.

Tectonic Fictions

Architects today too often operate in a mode of selection rather than invention, as if we have no control over construction and materials anymore. Our position is that architects must lead in the realm of tectonics precisely because industry is economically invested in producing what it is already tooled up to do; without architects, construction can’t evolve.

TWA is on a special mission against what we call “articulation for free” which is basically what happens to architecture when the architect relies on existing systems and materials to produce effects. There are all kinds of articulation for free, from bricks and mortar to cast-in-place concrete, to standard metal panel and glazing systems, on and on. Architectural effects become so much less magical when buildings are designed as compilations of these kinds of articulation. A better role for architects is as inventors, rather than managers of products. This is how Le Corbusier broke through with his Villa Savoye.

Architecture that mirrors known construction tries to convince us that the everyday reality which surrounds us is the only reality possible. This is not the highest and best use of our expertise. Architecture ought to aim to challenge the world we often uncritically accept, and to show us that other forms of reality are possible. Articulation for free is therefore not free at all; it costs our discipline its autonomy and reduces its space of invention.

There are many different approaches we’ve used to create what we call “tectonic fictions” instead of accepting articulation for free. Fake or suppressed joints, huge panels, exaggerated structure, fake shadows and reflections, and cartoon silhouettes are all part of our toolbox intended to undermine tectonic expectations. Tattoos slide around on forms, sometimes emphasizing, sometimes de-emphasizing features, and creating a second or ambiguous reading of forms. Metaseams are graphic seams that may or may not be related to tectonic joints. They tend to visually break mass down into very large pieces, unsettling our reading of scale. Supercomponents are components of buildings like giant model kit parts, with radically different sizes and shapes and embedded building systems. Tectonic fictions, if they are to be believed, require a magician's sleight of hand with the technology of the day.

Science Fiction and the Familiar/ Alien

There is a tenuous relationship between ‘the new’ in architecture and visions of the future. The new is a broad category, as it can equally refer to architecture recycled from the past, if done intentionally, as much as architecture that appears ‘futuristic.’ It is probably most often used to identify a minor tweak to the world we know. Identifying a piece of architecture as new means that it breaks current disciplinary habits, in a way noticeable to either academics or laypeople, or both. That moment of breakage might be a short-lived contribution, or it might resonate across history as an epochal shift. In any case, the new always becomes old, because it eventually looks old.

Futurism, while honorable for its goal of unsettling the present, often falls flat because it falls into aesthetic cliche. Steampunk, with its industrial era tech grafted into starships, is one of the worst offenders in the latest round of Netflix sci-fi offerings, but there are many others. You can’t recycle the future, like you can’t recycle the new. It only works once. Italian Futurists from the early 1900s, with their obsession with dynamism and motion and the new machine age was shocking at the time. They literally meant to give a shock treatment to Italy, which they saw as dying under the weight of its own history. But today, their work, such as Sant’Elia’s Citta Nuova, appears much more entrenched in the Art Deco of their time, with a futuristic sheen. This is not a failure, it is the nature of futurism itself.

Science fiction is not the same as futurism. Science fiction-- and we are talking about hard-core science fiction here, not space drama-- side steps the problems of futurism. It is not necessarily predictive, so it can avoid that particular trap, and it is also not necessarily concerned with social and political critique (what a relief!). Science fiction, when it’s good, is above all an aesthetic practice, telling us what reality could look like, while also reminding us of the darkness, alienness, and wonder of the universe. Science fiction, like architecture, involves speculation in the realms of technology, materiality, energy, and physics, and it always involves craft. The care and detail of science fiction environments in film remind us of how active you have to be as a designer to convince the audience that an invented world is real, that physics are different, that aluminum can be transparent. The key is in creating scenes that intersect familiar elements with alien ones, because a totally alien universe will be either cartoonish or altogether illegible. For architecture, engaging science fiction and its method of the familiar/ alien is much more productive than an endless search for the new.