(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.