I wasn't sure who to send this to. For one, the internet hates history, and destroys it. It is nearly impossible to find maps and documents that haven't been updated within a year or so. Another problem is that I know for a fact the construction of this building happened over a large span of time (half a decade or so), by different groups of people. And I’m not sure how to go about tracing this, and even if I were, it would probably be, it probably is, a waste of time. I don't expect any response, though comments are welcome, especially if you could direct me to the person to whom this letter should have been sent.
And so this letter is addressed to the Architect(s) of Bridgewater-Raritan High School.
For four years, I attended BRHS, and I openly complained about it. The school's design, I mean. Everyone did. The buildings were ugly. Everything was red and there was far too much brick; this was Bridgewater, not Newark. The design seemed at once impersonal, an institution of crushing proportions, and isolated, among a sea of parked cars. The architecture hated us. It mocked us daily. None of the buildings were directly connected, so students were forced to walk outside in between class.
It was said the campus had been designed by a drunk Californian architect as a sick joke. Central Jersey is not LA. It snows here.
It was as though the architect had pretended to accommodate the climate with a covered walkway that stretched to connect most of the buildings, and a squat canopy between the new two-story monster and its nearest neighbor, but hadn't actually. The covered walkway is narrow enough that when windy, rain blows from one side to the other, soaking everything and everyone in between. But it is heavy enough to require structural support of its own, coming in the form of rectilinear columns every six feet or so - a red army narrowing the path even more. And the canopy so generously shading those below from sun and snow? It stops ten feet short of actually doing its job; there is no way to escape from the 1000 Building without getting wet if it happens to be raining at all.
The buildings are scattered about every which way, with little to differentiate them. They are unstacked bricks without grout to hold them together. There aren't enough windows, except where there are too many. The school as a whole is two-faced: approaching from one side and you are swallowed by it a hundred yards away, approach from the other and it is invisible until it consumes you entirely.
And yet, as much as I have hated it solemnly for four years, and even now cringe at the thought of the place, it is treacherously beautiful. It resists itself in a handful obscure moments. It is trying to be a beast that cannot be beaten down, that cannot be understood. It is trying to make its inhabitants hate it, so they will be forced to focus, and to learn what they came to learn. It is trying to impose order on an orderless student body of teenagers who want nothing but rebellion and anarchy.
But, you see, it is a teenager, too. It fails at what it wants so much to do. It is imperfect because it understands imperfect is part of learning. Its parts are flung about in every which way and it remains open to the less-than ideal weather that assault it on a daily basis. It stops short of doing what we want it to, because it knows we can't stand to be completely protected, to be smothered.
And there are moments here that are undeniably beautiful, disgracefully so. A large section of one of the library's classrooms juts out of the harmonious solid blocks that define the individual buildings. It is tantalizingly symmetrical, grotesquely so, and yet completely out of place, offending whoever dares to look at it.
Walking between the buildings is terrifying, because there is nothing and no one there. An unavoidable mountain pass. And yes, of course you are expecting something to happen. But it doesn’t, and so you glance back at those mountains, feeling lucking to have cheated death. You didn’t, but you feel as if you have. Thrill without actual danger.
And of course, we want to get soaked and sunburnt and frostbitten. We want to be reminded of our suffering so as to be reminded of our existence. The sprawl, critiquing suburbia’s own, works only on this scale to give us of humanity’s most primal needs: an exposed reminder of reality.
Even the plan works in certain places. The artists and musicians and theater students have winding corridors to contemplate their art, but remain close enough to the cafeteria / big city hub to remain in contact with the rest of "society".
It is completely detached from the site, save the looping arms that envelope it in an overgrown, gangly sort of way. And except in the northwest corner, where it rises from the ground like an ancient ruin sunken into the earth. It defies its nature, here, by defying all else. It is at once sloping and flat. It is its own landscape.
The windows become sacred at sunrise. They become blinding, disorienting, and demand attention despite. Public school though it might be, this is a religion. Reverence is expected.
Because it is gorgeously obscene. It doesn’t want to be. It doesn’t know how to be. But it is.
Sir, your architecture is a disaster, but only because it is trying so hard to be.
Signed,
Architecture Student and BRHS Graduate
04 June 2009
Dear Sir,
05 May 2009
Actuality's absence and a reliance on representation
ABSTRACT
This paper analyzes the differences between truth as an abstract idea and concrete representations of this truth. The importance of this explication reflects its medium: regarding the speech and content, how the two should play a role in the argument for or against limitations of free speech; regarding formal intentions and human experience within architecture, how the process of design should or should not be reconsidered and reshaped. Despite truth’s instabilities and intangibilities, despite the fact that we cannot purely convey our ideas without communication or give a space meaning without form, I would contend that because these shadows of reality are all that we have, they should be allowed to develop and mutate as our knowledge, perception, and interest changes. Words are not just noise; form is not just an imposed system. The two are worth pursuing and protecting because it encapsulates the pursuit and protection of their more abstract counterparts.
AN INSTABLE TRUTH
Regardless of whether or not it is possible for truth to exist outside of abstraction, it is in its most comprehensible way conceptual, or a collection of ideas, one that merits discussion for the understanding of our own being, one that is fundamental to human philosophy and development. As all ideas, realized in reality or not, these can be represented. The most common type of representation of truth is language: spoken, written, or signed. However, truth can be diagrammed through a multitude of media. Art or science, exploratory or analytical, these representations provoke response, and again, most often via words, but this is not necessarily exclusively linguistic. Since this progression of logic lends itself to supports of the ideology that truth is not only dynamic – as Linda Ray Pratt of the academic sphere writes, “truth is not certain, or stable” (99) – but intangible and impossible to pierce its way through what we know to be our realm of reality, it produces a significant amount of resistance: people like to know things, they like to understand and for all of their senses to match up without misalignment to their experience, and these contested symmetrical truths confuse and misinform that experience outside of their control. How truth is represented, the media, the lighting and maintenance of the scene, effects our perception of what truth is, but also our perception of our living experience. Truth is a collective, not limited to what any one type of physical representation of any one conceptual model might be. It is up to us to make these parallel lines converge.
It is important to come to terms with the fact that all of these forms are not the actual embodiment of truth; they are projections, shadows of understanding that allow the discussion to continue. This returns to Pratt’s idea that even when we think we have decided upon some scientific truth, we become aware of our own uncertainty. Our representative truths are sequential but fleeting. Running concurrently alongside them is the concept that allows for the possibility of separation of form from context. Through the debate regarding restrictions on free speech, for example, most authors, aligning on little else, would argue it is possible to divide speech and what we understand to be reality – that is to say, speech in the abstract, speech on anything and everything and nothing – from what is being spoken about, or the context of their communication.
And this can be applied to most, if not all, of these representations of truth. Architecture, too, is often analyzed as an empty shell; the actual human experience and interaction with a building is disregarded while attention is turned to formal elements of design. Most critics and theorists would assent that in both speech and architecture, context far outweighs its cloak in importance, regarding the impossible quest for truth. Others, though, recognize that speech itself, or the form of architecture on its own, can contribute significantly to the discussion of truth, though its influence may be noticeably subtler.
SHADOWS OF REALITY
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave sets up a scenario where shadows are literally the only reality known to a set of people:
The prisoners name the projected images and make predictions and try to better understand their world, as limited as it might seem to outsiders. Their need to understand and their need to define are not unlike our own, and it might be said that to us, too, shadows are all that there is. Maybe there is no truth projecting the shadows; maybe they can be seen as forms on their own. If so, the sanity and well being of the society, of our society, would rely on constant discussion of these shadows, of this existence. True meaning may be unknown or misunderstood, but that intangible truth must be protected.
THE WHAT AND HOW OF SPEECH
In this allegory, shadows are the manifestation of what is real, a physical symbol of an idea. Regarding communication, speech could be recognized as the shadow of what is being spoken about, a way to represent or portray an idea, as some sort of secondary medium is required to do so. Similarly, a building or physical elements of architecture are shadows of the meaning or experience masked by design. The separation of the sign from what it signifies comes up often in critiques of both language and architecture.
An early perspective on this topic comes from British liberal thinker, John Stuart Mill. He writes that speech is beneficial whether it is proven to be right or not, in explaining why speech should not ever be suppressed: “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error” (10). By saying this, Mill recognizes there is a difference between speech on its own and what is being said. In fact, Mill emphasizes the importance of the former in saying all speech, right or wrong, should be expressed. However, also dealing with the suppression of discussion, he writes of instances when “the words [that] convey it cease to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small portion of those they were originally employed to communicate” (23). Without constant expression of opinion, the ideas disintegrate, and only a handful of words stand alone to signify the original thought. Mill’s tone suggests that these words are not enough, can never be enough to completely capture the essence of a truth, but are nonetheless all we have. So Mill’s separation of form and meaning has to do with tolerance – we cannot ever have the real thing, so we should expose ourselves to everything that might be some fragment of truth.
CENSORING COMMUNICATION
Beyond speculation and hypothesizing, it is important to explore how these theories might play out in an actual situation. Noam Chomsky of MIT became involved in the Faurisson affair when he came to the defense of Robert Faurisson, academic holocaust denier, purely on the grounds that everyone should have the right to express their opinion, true or not, offensive or not. Chomsky’s defense of speech as a concept was detached from the defense others tried to pin on him, a defense of the validity of what was being said. The American’s perspective is that there is nothing wrong with allowing any variety of speech since truth will emerge as truth, and our understanding will increase with our understanding of both sides of any argument. Chomsky writes of the incident, “Some time ago I was asked to sign a petition in defense of Robert Faurisson’s ‘freedom of speech and expression.’ The petition said absolutely nothing about the character, quality or validity of his research, but restricted itself quite explicitly to a defense of elementary rights that are taken for granted in democratic societies, calling upon university and government officials to ‘do everything possible to ensure the [Faurisson’s] safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.’ I signed without hesitation” (1).
American theorist and historian John Durham Peters calls for a new liberalism, but does so by examining the broader liberal tradition. Again, there is a highlighted difference between the group’s defense of the right to speak and their defense of the content of that speech: “Liberals are confident that any doctrine, good, bad, or ugly, should be allowed its innings in the open air. […] ‘Let truth and falsehood grapple’ say some liberals in the fashion of a Roman emperor declaring the gladiatorial contests open” (7). While not stressing the benefits of the “bad or ugly” speech, Peters says its presence is a necessity, that speech should be defended regardless of what it represents. In an amused sort of way, he refers to free speech as a “stubborn utopia [that] will not go away” (20), implying restrictions to the way we say things will always be there, whether we establish them or not, but all the while retaining the optimism that perhaps the communication of some truth might work its way past these obstacles.
Another American scholar to argue that free speech cannot actually exist is Stanley Fish. Since we value the content of what is being said, Fish sees restrictions on free speech as having a positive effect overall; we stay true to these principles and the contextual qualities of speech become even more important. He also points out restrictions of speech do not restrict us from actual pursuit of truth or knowledge, since that is found instead on the interior. “The good news is that precisely because speech is never ‘free’ in the two senses required – free of consequence and free from state pressure – speech always matters, is always doing work because everything we say impinges on the world in ways indistinguishable from the effects of physical action, we must take the responsibility for our verbal performances – all of them – and not assume that they are being taken care of by a clause in the Constitution” (114). Speech being fundamentally limited by the reactions it provokes means what we say matters, but the right to speak does not. Fish’s line of division deals primarily with a value of ideas over the value of speech, or meaning over noise.
But because in most cases, we do value meaning over the noise – though Baudrillard would disagree – meaningless noise is, of course, meaningless. Nonsensical gibberish and racial slurs both mean nothing unless we attach meaning to them. And since meaning needs this secondary translation to be spread from person to person, since it relies on communication to be shared and reviewed and examined before it dies, some noise is necessary to record reality and to question it.
MEANING OF REALITY
Regarding their relationship to reality, American architect and professor Michael Benedikt compares written language to a building:
Like Fish, Benedikt recognizes that perhaps there is no truth behind Plato’s shadows, but does not allow that to stand as an excuse for conformity and near nihilism. He contends that we make our own shadows anyway, so making them all the same is useless, and anyone can make a shadow. Free architecture, like free speech, does not necessarily produce good architecture, but does allow for the creation of real architecture, or architecture that we can find meaning in. It seeks to understand something about itself, and seeks to redefine the shadows on the wall of our cave.
FORMAL DESIGN’S CREEPING INFLUENCE
Like language, the form of architecture can be found meaningless without context, without human interaction or interpretation of their experience. As Mill, Chomsky, Peters, or Fish would suggest about speech and content, the two architectural equivalents can be separated and one could defend or attack either form or context on their own, but truth and understanding is much more easily found in the latter of the two. Form is structure and / or ornamentation, but by itself, it is not architecture. Like a corpse, it is a body without a soul, so can hardly be the person it physically represents. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is quoted as saying, “Architecture glorifies and eternalizes something. When there is nothing to glorify, there is no architecture” (Pallasmaa 242). It is the human element that makes it architecture, that gives it meaning and weight in our world. We define Wittgenstein’s “something” by our interactions with architecture, by injecting our own meaning.
Juhani Pallasmaa, Finish architect and theorist of the mid-twentieth century, finds, “Design has become so intensely a kind of game with form that the reality of how a building is experienced has been overlooked” (243). As obsession with the formal aspect of composition and style overrides the impact of experience, ignorance towards the human condition grows and we are left with a building. One might call it beautiful, or strong, or interesting for some historical allusion it makes, but it remains empty of any emotion. Pallasmaa writes, “The quality of architecture does not lie in the sense of reality that it expresses, but in quite the reverse, in architecture’s capacity for awakening our imagination” (245). Reality to Pallasmaa is real reality, Plato’s travelers through the cave road who cast shadows; but the combination of individual realities, or Benedikt’s and Pratt’s understanding of a truth in flux, Pallasmaa’s “reverse,” is what does influence us and our understanding of meaning.
Still dependent upon the physical to produce effect, we are chained to the manifestations of an unknown and indefinite truth, just as opinions thought but not spoken can never move beyond the mind of their initial conception. A void cannot imply ideas. That outside envelope is important, too, but the intangible contents must also somehow be conveyed. Architecture can be restricted by form, by means of code or convention, but restricting meaning is virtually impossible – meaning comes only from human explication, from the outside, not from the creator of the architecture him- or herself. In the words of Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, “Architecture is constantly subject to reinterpretation. In no way can architecture today claim permanence of meaning” (249). Tschumi’s realization about the adaptive, animated quality of architecture releases a great deal of responsibility from the architect / speaker equivalent here, because one cannot possibly predict all future outcomes of a space designed to fit only one program, nor can you know what meaning the building’s users will take from it, whether or not you impart your own meaning into the architecture.
DIAGRAMMING TRUTH
All these overqualified people say you can separate speech, as sound, from what you communicate, or form of architecture from its meaning, and these are the consequences, etc. Despite their multiple and varied voices of reason, to operate on this set of Siamese twins, you would kill them both. Speech without an idea is nothing, but so is an idea without speech. Form without meaning is just form, but meaning without form is incomprehensible. All of these philosophers and academics and theorists use the separation of the two for their own agenda – that the restriction of one is the saving grace of the other, in the instance of Fish, or that one has become too overbearing on its partner, as Pallasmaa suggests. But the two are codependent, feeding off of each other happily. Truth’s reliance on its outer shell is important to understand, and I would contend that form is also important in the investigation of truth, maybe not to the extent of meaning found inside experience, but in a subtler, curiously refined way; what you see is what you get, and it is that initial encounter that leads you inside.
As Benedikt writes, “reality [may not be] so obliging as to be, in itself, meaningful, [but you] cannot catch the world unaware and naked of meaning” (10). An uncertain reality implies multiple meanings, and the necessity for multiple shadows. If shadows are all that we have, we must record and represent these projections of an original but now missing truth. Free speech is necessary, free form is necessary, so that we can do this, so that our fluctuating understanding is balanced. All too often, meaning and experience of reality is sacrificed thoughtlessly, and written off as a sacrifice for responsibility. But a greater responsibility, and an impossible task, is to chart these unbounded and unseen lands through audio, visual, and experiential means. In doing so, our words and our buildings, become the idea and the meaning; the sign becomes the signified, temporarily, and for one fleeting instance, we see truth, an unreachable point on the horizon, simultaneously tormenting and inspiring us.
10 April 2009
(TELE)VISION and (talk)itecture: a textual collage
Snakes and ladders indeed. A forewarning of what follows: There is a lot I want to say here, and this is due in part to the exhaustive suppression of my writing that has occurred this semester – this would seem ironic to anyone who knows my academic schedule swapped Interp for Critical Histories in January – so if what follows is a sort of incomprehensible rambling of subjects seemingly unrelated to the nature of my project, I can only suggest in a Baudrillardian way that my urge to convey my intent relies more heavily upon the fact that I get to write anything at all. Also, I think and design by writing, so most of my ideas are far from completely formed, much less developed and applied, and the disorganized nature of this “manifesto” would better lend itself to serve as the compositional equivalent of an intensively studious sketch (or maybe collage). Rem Koolhaas begins Delirious New York by pointing out, “The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence” but explains his problem in composing this book is quite the opposite (overload of information from all directions): the “irreconcilable” and “discontinuous” nature of the unnatural in Manhattan can only be resolved by language, and though I’m certainly not going to compare myself to Rem (ha!), it is with that discontinuity and confused outpour of data that I begin an understanding of how to approach (TELE)VISION C.
Considering this, I begin with the subject of ambiguity. In an article for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes that ideas are “in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.” While he applies this argument to scientific discoveries, from telephones to dinosaur bones, it works its way into every aspect of our lives, whether we are aware of the phenomenon or not. For instance, it would seem that in recent weeks, there has been a strange obsession with ambiguity by those around me. Sort of. Lectures (Spike’s just yesterday), classes (an argument in Interp about how truth is represented), things I’ve read on my own (Eisenman, for one, on “presentness” in architecture existing as a flux condition), and casual conversations (over milkshakes) have all brought up the topic. And it’s probably just me. Sometimes, you end up looking for something by accident. This intentional accident seems paradoxical by its very existence, and yet serves as the best sort of flint for the spark of an idea. Ambiguity is not necessarily my approach to this assignment, but certainly contributes.
It’s funny, though, because I’ve tried to distance myself so far from making ambiguous decisions in my designs, so I’ve forgotten that I don’t need to be able to explain everything just yet. Ambiguity, to me, is something that cannot yet be described further at the current moment in time, but is a filler much like “TBD”: it isn’t important to understand at this second, but that doesn’t mean you never can or never will.
On a similar note, Pablo recently asked whether I tripped and fell into this “basement of architecture,” referring to the nearly all-encompassing topic of projection (just ask Robin Evans – projection is everywhere!), or if I knew what I was doing, and proceeded cautiously by “dipping my toe into the water.” While I usually don’t condone mixing metaphors in such a way, I think his question merits significant consideration. While dipping my toe in / peered into the musty cellar through a cracked door, I sort of lost my balance and fell down a few of the steps, but not all of them.
And “basement” was an interesting choice of words. On this type of space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “[I]t is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.” As much as I want to explore these depths further, dream a little and come about some logical understanding of projection as a tool of design and representation, I’ve accepted the fact that I have to come to terms with the qualities of this subterranean archive; I don’t expect or even hope to learn very much about projection systems yet, though I have attempted to cram a significant amount of material into these last couple of days. Rather, I’ll be taking a candle with me, as Bachelard suggests, and using projection selectively.
How, exactly? Well, In a process similar to my previous iteration of the Flagstaff project, I’m going to regenerate my set of frames (possibly more than four, to be mixed and matched later at my discretion) using actual systems of projection, and these frames will once again manipulate the way my form folds and bends, cultivating a relationship between the visual and the experiential effects of my manipulation of the site. More about this duality later.
On one of my recent trips to New York City, I spent a lot of time in the Urban Center bookstore, and stumbled upon a page from a book I can’t remember that dealt with the impact digital media has had on our execution of design. The book must have been either relatively uninteresting or overpriced, because I didn’t buy it that day, but I did steal a snapshot on my cell phone of the page I found most relevant to my current studio project. Part of the page reads: “Video’s gift to the architect is the gift of articulating time. Space can be shown to change. It can be rendered in flux as a series of changing relationships. […] Space can be revealed as a multiplicity of unfolding journeys, a series of performed architectural events that invite us to enter.”
Through the frames, which appear and disappear as one moves through the space, specific views come into focus. Emphasizing the distance from the viewer, the scene that unfolds inside of it intensified by its concurrent movement. The assortment the screens required for (TELE)VISION C further complicates the multiplicity of framing motion. To me, they serve as a temporary replacement for reality in this respect. With that in mind, it is my intent not to designate seating arrangements for specific viewing areas. Yes, of course I will provide places to pause, to review and reflect on the image itself, but more important to my project is the idea of moving past, moving beyond to something different. It is architecture of peregrination. The hill is used mostly as a transition space now, and due to its location, this would be nearly impossible to deny. People move into the park or out to the city; people move down the slope or up it; people move to the structured knowledge basis of the university or to the aesthetic appreciation of Phipps; people move through in direct lines that disregard paved paths and avoid benches. They do need to pause, freeze the frame and maybe even rewind, but they should then to move on after that. Wouldn’t want to be late for class.
At Peter Greenaway’s suggestion, I am not going to conform to conventional ratios of frame size, allowing these products of projection to exist on their own accord: “Painting, the theater, […] opera and ballet, […] cinema, and certainly television, exist disciplined within a fixed frame. […] We restrict and confine, crop, cut, shear, prune, chop, manacle, bind, imprison, and join the chaos of visual realities. Of course, it is very practical [but] it is a convention and should be open to much questioning.” Regarding the first part of this quote, architecture is noticeably absent from his list. And as a discipline, it is not so fixed by conventional frames. But at the same time, there is a default (rectilinear façade, anyone?), and essentially it is a structure made up of three-dimensional frames. Site restrictions, building codes, and cultural conventions dictate these frames. Scattered, overlapping and intersecting, ordered only by an external sequence, this new frame is simultaneously a portal, a screen, a wall, and because the frame is incomplete (like the previous project, complete enclosure ceases to exist), paradoxically boundless.
The reason these frames still work is the same reason television works and is so captivating. It is a reason embedded in language, actually. The prefix tele means “operating at a distance” – it works because what is operating, the cityscape or distant flora, or the film (at an infinite distant away), is far from the vision or the view.
The combining of frames comes from the film-editing process itself, of which Harun Farocki writes, “One monitor shows the already edited material, and the other monitor the raw material, which the videomaker may or may not add the work-in-progress. He or she becomes accustomed to thinking of two images at the same time, rather than sequentially.” Alternatively, it could come from Paul Virilio’s concept regarding television: “Here, the event does not take place, or, more precisely, it takes place twice, the topical aspect yielding to the teletopical aspect, the unity of time and place being split between the emission and reception of signals, here and there at the same time, thanks to the power of electromagnetic interactivity.” While there may be an actual sequence that exists, that’s not how they’re conceptualized or understood by their user. It exists outside of functionality and any concrete physical affiliation.
One thing I was surprised never came up in any of my crits on (TELE)VISION B was a question asking how it related to my first part of the project (A). It wasn’t crucial to the explanation of my design or any particular deliberate move I made, but I was sort of anxious to answer it nonetheless. And so I’ll answer it now. Although my analysis of Atonement’s opening scene stemmed from how sound could be used to perceive space, or how a composed music score, celebrating the motifs of time and sequence, could be combined with physical movement to produce a greater understanding of that space, I became ultimately more interested in that secondary variable, the physical movement through the restrictions of the scene. Because it wasn’t just one thing, the subject, moving. What really fascinated me was the conflict between the movement of the subject and the movement of the camera. Their dance was not coordinated, but neither were they unaware of each other. In a sort of abstract pas de deux, they feed off of each other, but move in different directions, creating a sort of elastic tension and release. And the music does this too, in a way that is to me subtler, but I am not an avid musician, so the visual movement engages me further.
So I stole this idea from my previous project, because it’s much more fun if you pretend it is a covert operation, and applied it to my plan at Flagstaff (I’m a sustainable designer – I recycle my old ideas). The form would move one way, acting as camera, seeing all from weird angles under strange lighting, while the people, the subject, my Briony equivalent, would move another, in sync but not synchronized, acknowledging but not understanding, feeling some connection but not quite seeing it. For my final swing at the piñata that is Schenley Park (candy!), this is some of the momentum bringing the bat around. I was never very good at bunting anyway.
Despite my emphasis on the dynamic, I’m also concerned with the conflict between this movement and the stillness allowed to coexist. To return to Bachelard, “[E]very corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is a germ of a room, or of a house.” The location of Flagstaff hill lends itself primarily to the demands of student life – it’s primary static use is a place to study or, the opposite, a place to temporarily forget academia. This internal contrast in functionality is interesting, too, but the openness and variety in the site alone permits this to occur. Spaces created by the folds will sometimes be smaller nooks or more private enclosures, while simultaneously remaining open (for reasons of safety and maintenance).
The folds. Probably should be higher up in this essay, but have settled here instead (not that this essay has had very much organization). The Deleuzian fold (and who else can claim such possession over this word?) is “a flexible or an elastic body [that] still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending moments, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.”
The idea to have these folds was a part of coming to term with material realities (again, I still haven’t decided on these particulars, but I was thinking some sort of stone, and with preexisting “folds” or breaks among the surfaces designed to be flat and fold among them, allowing the undesignable to play a part, among other reasons). There is a certain power that resonates within the fold, allowing for discontinuity through continuity, as all jointing would. My folds undulate through the landscape, creating the Loch Ness effect from the knot project, to imply something underneath.
Meanwhile, stone doesn’t want to be folded. The creases emerge, but can be filled in with nonmaterial. With light. The number of folds is dependent on the frames and the site, but easily mutable to provide a sufficient amount of lighting to secure the safety of the environment and ensure comfort without polluting the space with overbearing fluorescents. These various lines of light suggest movement without direction.
And I was thinking solar-powered? Plenty of large flat surfaces to choose from. (And could you put speakers in with the lights? Oh wait, I forgot, this is architecture school – we can do anything.)
How the land reacts to the folds is something of a tug-of-war. I wanted to quote something from Morphosis’s The Crawford House, but can’t seem to find it at the moment – essentially it speak of how the earth revolts against the wall’s arrogant stance, chews it and spits it back out, and the two battle it out. It was an interesting concept to me: how the landscape would conform to man, and how it would rebel against his tyranny. And so it was and still is my intention to have the earth segmented in a way similar to the folding planes, as if the form bursts forth from the earth, and at the same time the earth is what is pushing these pieces, segmenting them at its own accord.
The spaces that remain open, and the spaces created between two of the structures, could be used for a variety of things besides movie viewing. Lounging, resting, studying, reading, climbing, walking, biking, skating, running, rolling, picnicking, acting, singing, performing, practicing, kite-flying, and gaming, for starters. I don’t think these spaces need to be designated for specific programmatic elements for any of these activities to work.
From voids to solids – these other inbetween places can serve as the required utilities (storage and restrooms). They would be easily integrated into the rest of the plan, and only found on the outskirts of the site (maybe?). Hidden but not invisible, they could function smoothly without stripping any dignity from the design.
Despite the emphasis put on winter activity (“no, really”), major arenas or ski slopes are unnecessary here. Pittsburgh’s weather is unpredictable on its best day, and most people who find themselves on Flagstaff during snowfall want only to sled, perhaps make a snowman / snowangel or two. Although I’ve considered putting something before the treeline at the west point of the park to discourage sledders from continuing into the street and will leave broadways of clearing for people without proficient steering, I don’t plan on actually manipulating the land to add to any of these winter experiences. It seems superfluous and costly.
That’s not to say winter will have no effect on the installed structures and new landforms. Charles Baudelaire writes, “Isn’t it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn’t winter add to the poetry of a house? The winter cottage sat at the end of a little valley, shut in by rather high mountains; and it seemed to be swathed in shrubs.” He suggests the universe or external conditions manipulate our perception of the object of the structure, and that the simplicity of these words are what we connect to most, where we find joy and comfort in our experience. Covered in a blanket of white (I’m aware of how cliché this sounds, but it is a metaphor that everyone understands), the landscape becomes one again, forgetting any prejudice against the alien forms and holding them close. Winter is clean and contemporary, but slow, a time when lines disappear and it becomes okay to sit on the ground (because you’re wearing snowpants). Spring is beautiful in a muddy sort of way, melted and sticky, but when no one is watching, you take a gooey bite out of the chocolate bar you sat on. Summer is kinetic and precariously balanced among the clouds of heat. Autumn is only anticipation and a frenzied search for something before lockdown for the natural (and academic) landscape begins. And we begin again. The seasons, and the weather, is only amplified by the presence of these slabs of newness.
So I suppose I should wrap this up, because it was only suppose to be a few paragraphs long and I really should work on other aspects of the studio project. Beyond the theoretical, I mean. It got a lot more concise and concrete towards the end, anticipating this moment. There is no conclusion, because I haven’t finished yet (ask me in May) and my intentions will change as the results of these ideas begin to take shape. And so it goes.
28 March 2009
Bare necessities of education
In a nation founded on the principles of democratic rule, one of the most coveted rights Americans cling to is their freedom of expression. Taken for granted as if in an abstracted and theoretical lab-country, the functionality of this right often deteriorates when confronted with the problems that it generates as a sort of democratic backwash. An educational setting heightens these apparent conflicts, introducing large groups of impressionable minds to new freedoms, a new sense of individuality, while still imposing restrictions on their words and actions. The question is one of rank, that is to say, determining where free speech fits among our system of values in an educational setting. There exists a related disagreement between groups of scholars, regarding what things prove to be most essential for the security of education as a system, or what value set is to be placed above other priorities for the sake of education’s own functionality. Absolutists regard the Constitution’s definition of free speech as the ultimate priority worth protecting, in any setting or scenario. Others would contend context merits the dissolution of this right, and the safety of the individual is to be valued above it. At odds with both of these groups are those who see education’s goal as being the pursuit of truth, and their crusade allows them to knock down free speech and individuals’ well-being a few pegs, letting knowledge rise to the top priority in pursuit. These three divisions among academics share some common values and approaches, but their ultimate arguments differentiate them enough to make any middle-ground appear especially faint. As they develop their impressions of education’s fundamental base, the cornerstone marking it from other programmatic institutions, we have no choice but to check the geometry of this scholastic structure and wonder just how many corners it can and should have.
Having already established that democracy is a necessary tool in the political realm for the functionality of our nation, there are many scholars who assert it is also the driving force in the development of our educational system. Robert M. O'Neil argues that the nature of an institution of higher education is just as democratic as the popular vote, and so the legislation of our government, mainly the Constitution, should translate as accurately as possible to this particular setting. "All public colleges and universities," he writes, "are bounded by the First Amendment [and many private campuses] pride themselves on observing the standards of expression at least as high" (15). As he analyzes speech codes, regulations within a certain setting that limit or ban speech beyond actual legal limitations, O'Neil also remains concerned with what a university ought and ought not to do. By implementing such restrictions, colleges are stepping out of their jurisdiction and their fundamental duty to their students. He quotes Committee A of the American Association of University Professors as stating, "By proscribing any ideas, a university sets an example that profoundly disserves its academic mission ... [A] college or university sets a perilous course if it seeks to differentiate between high-value and low-value speech" (qtd. in O'Neil 22). Not only does this prescribe "a certain arrogance" about the power they hold (22), but it also reveals the educational system as subjective, opening the floor to discover flaws in its subjectivity. That's not to say these universities should turn the other way and sacrifice individual comfort and safety to let free speech run its course, but, "[a]bove all, universities should approach racism, homophobia, sexism, and anti-Semitism through what they do best - education" (25). O'Neil recognizes the problems that unrestricted speech can cause, but also acknowledges its necessity in an open environment that calls for discussion and debate, given "the very nature of a university as a place of free inquiry" (22). Similarly, Rodney A. Smolla’s approach to education is heavily dependant upon preexisting Constitutional values. Recognizing that “freedom of speech has its costs, and tolerance of even the speech of the intolerant is one of them” (169), Smolla is willing to take in free speech despite its negative effects. Balanced in their current composition, he finds the First Amendment provides for him a solid enough foundation on its own. Although he sympathizes with victims of hate speech, a consequence of some free expression, and calls for the humanization of institutions dealing with the sort of scenarios related to the application of these laws. Again, he sees free speech as being a fundamental element not just to our nation, but to our educational systems. He approaches the disturbing dehumanization of racism, etc. with a degree of optimism and with O’Neil’s logic about education’s core contribution: "In a just society, reason and tolerance must triumph over prejudice and hate. But that triumph is best achieved through education, not coercion" (169).
There are some who would contend that free speech has no place in an academic setting, that educational institutions' priorities should be focused on the protection of the individual. Kathryn Abrams testifies that free speech, in its current absolute form, is completely unnecessary in an academic setting and that "we need limits on free expression in intellectual life" (1). She writes, "First Amendment rhetoric and principles are being applied in contexts where incursions on expression are accomplished not by legal restrictions or sanctions, but by protests, condemnations or requests for inclusions" (4), implying institutions recognize they are stepping out of their place to implement restrictions they have no right to enact only to concede to public pressure. It is "when our legal and cultural reluctance to place other values in the balance with expression begins replicating itself in the moral deliberations of potential speakers" that the problems begin to occur (5). When the harm of an individual is dismissed to take up an issue of free speech, the university is failing to protect, failing to provide and safe and comfortable environment to learn. Stanley Fish sees "democracy [as] a system of political organization, not a model for organizing every aspect of daily life" (Democracy and Education 2). And because we value the context of what is being said, not the act of speech on its own, restrictions on speech increase our value of this non-free speech. Context is far more important than the absolutists allow us to believe, and "the democracy is a system of political organization, not a model for organizing every aspect of daily life" (There's No Such Thing 118). Fish answers his own question about whether or not universities are the right place for free speech, though not required by the Constitution to do so: "If the answer were 'yes,' it would be hard to say why there would be any need for classes, or examinations, or departments, or disciplines, or libraries, since freedom of expression requires nothing but a soapbox" (107). The utilities of a university require something more, and the existing levels of control in an academic setting are there for a reason. Restrictions allow us to value more what is being said, putting into action once again the gears of the university, and this value of knowledge is an essential element to understanding the function of such an institution.
Recovering ideas from John Stuart Mill, some scholars recognize free speech as essential to intellectual and societal progress, because we cannot know if something that goes unsaid, for reasons of internal or external restriction of the speech, could have contributed to our understanding of truth. Linda Ray Pratt sees knowledge as a dynamic energy, something that can be achieved, at least temporarily, with the help of academic freedom. “Truth,” she writes, “is not certain, or stable” (99), and education is the vehicle by which we can chase it. It is not just a goal, but an “'awkward responsibility' of those who sought to provide guidance in an uncertain universe of ideas” (104), including professors and administrators of the university. This search for knowledge is dependent on an exchange of ideas, and Pratt “still believe[s] that the university must be the resource and refuge for th[is] free exchange” (110). By instilling professors with this freedom of expression, they can explore possible outlets of truth and pass on these ideas to their students. Without being able to teach, to speak, truth and knowledge cannot be pursued. According to John Durham Peters, limitations imposed on speech interfere with the main goals of an institution of higher education, again, the main goal being knowledge. Retaining the modernist approach that there can be an end game, Peters reminds us that "liberalism is a part of the story about overcoming suffering (enduring offensive speech), and pain turns out to be a secret key to the puzzle of how the public life of democratic solidarity might work” (22). Peters goes as far as to suggest the views of the offensive can be beneficial, too, raising awareness and allowing for the address of moral concerns, as "one can oppose censorship while maintaining a capacity for judgments about the value and quality of cultural forms" (9).
Following Louis Sullivan’s mantra “that form ever follows function,” education’s program should be reliant on its basic functions. In the past, this might have been to seek out a certain truth, investing heavily in the idea that we should value this quest for knowledge and understanding of the world around us above all. As the public became more interested in protecting the individual, in providing a safe atmosphere for students to learn, the well-being of participants in an academic setting became more important. And put into an ultra-democratic context, more recent times would dictate that we open the floor to students; the idea that free speech should be valued above both safety and an uncertain truth stems off of an obsession with control, making out the administration of education to be something of a business manager. But today’s educational systems are less focused in their objectives, more contextually defined by the subjects they teach, the students that attend, the professors that teach, the alum that donate, their location, their history – laws involving free speech and individual safety should reflect this. Form, after all, can and should depend on things other than pure functionality, or architecture would dissolve completely into engineering, cease to exist, and spaces would have no effect on their inhabitants. Although the pursuit of truth is still a worthy goal, it has been long forgotten; the commercialization of campuses has tainted all three of these aims. Perhaps by returning to this loftier ideal, where education is less of a societal obligation and more something that requires the ambition to learn, more something that requires the desire to embark on an impossible task not very unlike filling a small bucket with every raindrop that falls towards the earth, academia can shed the corrupt layer of political dust that has developed in its darker rooms.
21 November 2008
Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc, John Ruskin, and the Big Bad Wolf of Industry: why the three little pigs were in way over their heads
Architecture could easily be defined as a science, an art, or a business, but cannot be so simply labeled. As a system so open to the rest of the world, it allows technology, humanity, and all other impossibly vague and eternally dynamic factors to flow through it with immediate impact and constant change. How the change provokes reaction among society is how our view of architecture, and our view of culture as a whole, initiates the new direction civilization chooses to take. During the Industrial Revolution, technology stuck its nose in everyone’s business, whether they slammed the door on its face or welcomed it in with open arms; architecture can hardly be an exception to this rule. Two major critics experiencing the change, Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc and John Ruskin, shared the opinion that architecture should remain honest to humanity, but had differing views on how new technology might be utilized by architects of the nineteenth century. As technology continues to change the way we perceive the arts today, it also changes how we manipulate the world around us through structural design and composition.
From the meager beginnings of the development of industry as a major force in Europe, and later in America, the housing of the machine existed as a major issue to be addressed. Pierson, in his analysis of early industrial architecture, suggests that the form of the building was infinitely dependent upon meeting “the requirements of power-driven machinery” (2). In fact, the technical specifications of these new machines, even in their simplest forms, dictated the “association with the planning and building of factories [to] the names of engineers, not architects“ (2). The factory was from the start an extension of the machine that it housed, thus the architecture was not rightly architecture, that is to say, not built around people but some other dictating the decision-making of a design. Despite easily apparent complications with this new architectural theory, the rationale behind it, the energy that seized hopeful nations, nullified these issues to some. There was something exciting about the new prospect that “[man’s energy] was limited only by the capacity of the machine itself; and the number of machines which could be set in motion was limited only by the amount of power which could be brought to bear upon them” (2). Their limitations were blown out of the water, economic profit seeming infinitely large, and they saw no alternative outcome save their success.
Not all the world was so easy to accept this drastic turn of events, as change is never immediately well received; there will always be negative impacts on parts of society, and the people who notice them. One man particularly fond of detail was John Ruskin, a theorist who had very strong feelings about the happenings of his time. Of the resultant mass increase in labor, he felt that it was “fundamentally undermined by mechanization, the division of labor, and a capitalist system that increasingly alienated workers from the products of their efforts” (Raizman 10). He also observed that art had an improving quality on the human spirit, and could be the saving grace of society, despite the wrath of industry. In his Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin writes as an aside:
As machines continued to grow in size and complexity, there arose a demand of more suitable architecture, and materials. At one point, Pierson discusses the use of wooden gears and their becoming obsolete, despite high efficiency, because they could not take the strain of the machines (6). This breakdown and rejection of the organic can begin to reflect the backbreaking nature of the work itself and its toll on the workers of these factories – if wooden gears, which had been perfectly suitable before, could not withstand the crushing power of new machinery, how could men be expected to work the same number of hours with these machines? This change in materials was not overlooked by Ruskin, who recognized this and called for a reversal of progress on this front.
In the “Lamp of Truth,” Ruskin spills out his woes about what he considers to be dishonest elements of architecture. “A direct falsity of assertion respecting the nature of material, or the quantity of labour” dissolves the human quality of architecture (59), and Ruskin goes all out in calling each lie “an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin” (84). Structural honesty determines the nobility of the building, thus the level of respect and appreciation it receives. One sublayer of his accusations includes the use of unnatural materials, despite advancing technologies that make metal, etc. a necessity:
Ruskin is completely enamored with ornamentation, its intricacies and its functioning role as a transfer of personality from the craftsman to the craft, so it is no wonder that he views the use of machine-generated ornament as a degradation of architecture, and a lie. The “two entirely distinct sources of agreeableness” of ornamentation as defined by Ruskin are “the abstract beauty of its forms [and] the sense of human labour and care spent upon it” (82-83). Although it takes him more than a few pages to articulate it as he becomes obsessed with the richness and admirable qualities of man-made ornament, the machine-made elements are just as much a lie to the viewer of a building as the use of wood painted to look like stone.
Not long after Ruskin’s emergence on the world as a theorist set on reforming the progress at hand through book after book critiquing the Industrial Revolution at hand, French architect and theorist Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc began to similarly explore the honest nature of material and its interaction with the architecture it was used to create. He asserts that “stone, marble, wood, cast or wrought iron, and the various forms of baked clay have widely different properties: in view of this variety and even opposition of character in the several materials, the form that suits one of them cannot suit the other” (169), going on to critique his peers for not paying attention to the properties of such materials and using them in a careless, dishonest way. In fact, he accuses them of not utilizing new materials at all – not exactly what Ruskin is calling for. Any attempts have been “timid” and lack any change in how they are used – again, almost the exact opposite of what Ruskin is saying in his Seven Lamps. The composition of a structure should, according to Viollet-Le-Duc, derive from the materials used and the assembly process of the construction, and forgetting this is the first fallacy that will inevitably domino its way into poor architecture (171).
The new way that Viollet-Le-Duc suggests architects use metals in their design is actually not very new, although in an artistically historical sense it is so. Inspired by the organic world, by the form of creatures (182), including bone structure and joints, he proposes these unnatural materials take on a natural form. The absolute inclusion of both natural form alongside mechanical qualities of iron is strange at first, especially after reading Ruskin’s definition of structural honesty. Viollet-Le-Duc seeks to emphasize the imagination, “the power given to man to unite and combine in his mind thinks that have struck his senses” (197), and when previous have these two clashing properties had such an impact on society? The change in technology produces new juxtapositions as it is layered along with historical technologies and the ever throbbing heart of progression in civilization.
As Stearns puts it, “It was, in sum, as basic a change in human history as has occurred since the advent of settled agriculture (25).” Change is imminent and constant, whether or not artists, theorists, and society at large choose to accept the fact. From caves to cows to cities to cars to computers and beyond, human nature is about evolution and the intricacies of a dynamic organism. The implications this has on culture are apparent through society’s reactions to its own art, and of course through the art itself. Architecture, an experiential art form not restricted to visual, physical, or acoustical means, is paradoxical in nature because it is a supposedly static form committed to the site and the spaces it creates, but at the same time is composed of wholly dynamic elements unavoidably linked to all that is outside. And unlike the other categories of art, architecture is embedded with responsibilities to protect and cultivate a society so that it may continue successfully.
Ruskin’s infatuation with the love handles of an imperfect architecture is not so delusional as it might seem. If architecture is about experience, the more humanity is embedded into its cracks and hiccups, the more we can feel its curves and get into the spaces that the creator slaved over – and to appreciate that construction on this other level. Meanwhile, Viollet-Le-Duc had every right to call-out the Pinocchios of the nineteenth century. Truth allows for precision and understanding; it also allows for mistakes and confusion, adding a convoluted layer of humanity – everybody lies. But when architecture becomes less than these things, when it becomes simplified down to Modernist ideals and the stripping of all ornament, the mechanization of structure itself, it becomes nothing more than a singular symbol. Although Viollet-Le-Duc’s theories and practice did make an impressionist on the Modernist movement, like a bad game of telephone, some of the key words were lost. The definition of purity and truth shift dramatically as the twentieth century progresses at a speed comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution, with a similar lack of attention paid to the shuffling of cards under the table.
As the twenty-first century unfolds, architects scramble to conceive these structures in the hopes that their buildings, their metaphorical children, will outlive them a hundred times over; they will influence the conception of hundreds, thousands of other buildings scattered across the globe; they will impact design, art, culture; they will mark some milestone in humanity’s ever-shifting sphere of history. In that sense, an architect is immortal: even as his buildings crumble, his art lives on through the art of others. But in all of these lofty ideals and a Ruskin-like faith that terms will improve if only one loves and believes in art enough, there lacks a fundamental stability that encourages society to share a similar faith in architecture. Technology adds to this unrest and skepticism; one major example of this is the fact that so many architects and clients are unwilling to embrace the digital resources at hand, and continue to rely on analog preconstruction representations as a crutch. The way that technology is being utilized now is far from maxed-out. Currently, computers are being used to replace what was once done by hand (i.e. drafting in a program like AutoCAD instead of hand-drafting a structure), most often to save time and decrease the chance of human error. Potentially, though, technology could be used to reorganize the fundamentals from the bottom up, rather than top down – how things are looking now. Improvements have certainly been made in all aspects of the field, from design to construction to business relations – architecture is, after all, an all-spanning discipline that envelops a range of subjects – but the improvements tend to lack the dynamic directionality necessary to implement a change of the capacity aforementioned by Stearns. Many have suggested that architecture is the marriage of science and art: if both of these two facilities has not only embraced new technologies but have played a role in their development, why should architecture be left behind? Social responsibility and morality, though pertinent to all occupiable structures, sometimes contribute our cautious, circulatory approach towards new technology. Beyond this, our fear of change lacks justification.
When the Big Bad Wolf is a few doors down, about to blow down another house, it’s probably not such a good time to add detailing to your brick dwelling. It might also not be the best time to get out your wireless keyboard and mouse and generate wolf-proof algorithms for structural modifications. But maybe there exists some middle ground from which we can begin to understand the complexities of architecture in a new light.
