Objects Contained and Manifested

This I believe architecture should be not just an extension of site, but also an extension of the object contained. Where the house manifests itself based on what it houses, assuming some of the characteristics from the thing within. All good architecture does this, some people just call it adapting to client, and really it's just arguing semantics if I left it at that, but it's not just adapting to the client. Its adapting to the site, something that we are taught from our first year in architecture, Carol Burns addresses this well, she states:

In architectural design, the demands of relating a building to a physical location are necessary and inevitable; the site is initially construed and finally achieved in the architectural work. The problems attendant to siting have a pervasive and profound impact on buildings. Nontheless, architectural theory and criticism have tended to address siting issues with descriptive or analytic references to specific exemplary projects. This approach exclusively reveals through circumstantial strategies the lack of a clear conceptual basis for the notion of site within architecture. Because of its intrinsic importance and generative potential, the conceptual content for site must be made available for study and opened to question as a means to disclose and , ultimately, to challenge the motives and precepts of the discipline.

But what if we consider the future site too? The object-scape. The things that will be in the building after it is built. Sometimes we design things like libraries, museums, factories, and galleries, that store things other than people. So we need to consider the qualities intrinsic to the books, warships, turbines, and art that we are putting in these unbuilt structures, before we design them. When we design something, as architects we are taught to think about site, program, and concept. There are a host of other things we have to consider too: Light, structure, materiality, form, space, order, datum, hierarchy, context, history, and others. We get so caught up in all of these that I think we fail to remember what it is that inhabits this building that we're making. In the end, its really the object contained that informs the things like light and structure. When you are building something you should ask yourself what is the nature of this object, is it light or heavy, subtle or outspoken. If it is outspoken and light then you might take a different approach to structuring it than you would if it were subtle and heavy. What the thing is begins to effect how you design it.

Houses are the easiest, because often we deal with the object contained directly. They are our client. They can tell us what they want and how they want it. In a way I feel the client picks an architect to design his or her house because they can relate to them. They have some of the same characteristics and beliefs. So when designing a house for a person you can more easily ascertain what that person would be like if they were a house. How they'd manifest their character in its features, layout, and functions. But designing something large-scale is a bit more difficult, it could house numerous things from The Mona Lisa to a WWII submarine. You have to do your research, figure out the object's history, its present. You have to ask yourself as the designer: What would you experience walking into the object in action

When I designed a film center for Ruston in junior year, I thought about what the program called for and wondered what I should make my concept. I realized that my concept was kind of spelled out for me before I began. It was building as film. The first thing I did was to dissect what film was, and what a film was. I took examples from books on how plot was formed, how the introduction led to rising action and built up to a climactic event. I categorized all the program as active or latent, relating it to either the image or the frame on a film strip. After all this was done. I put all of it into a design for a building. It got rave reviews. Every time I personally look at what the characteristics are of the object contained I guarantee myself success.

There are about three good examples that I can think of right now. The first being Snohetta's Opera House in Oslo. Craig Dykers did an excellent job with it. The opera center is a great example of exemplary architecture and also exemplifies my beliefs and theories on architecture. When looking at the opera house you ask yourself what does it house, people, instruments, but while we design them to be acoustically sound, it seems we forget that they house music. According to what I believe architecture should do I would first look at musics personality and its character. This could be hard considering there are so many kinds. But since its an opera house we assume that opera will be played. When you look at an opera, it is similar to a play in that it has acts, and the excitement increases as the opera plays out. If its a good opera it takes the audience with it, into its crescendo. I feel that Snohetta not only acknowledged the site well, taking some cues from the mountains in the background and color and material cues from the waterway in the foreground, but the also shaped the building to have a crescendo feeling and experience that takes the people with it. I believe that his is better architecture than say, I. M. Pei's Symphony Hall. They both house music and both take a visually sweeping approach to it, But Pei is content to leave the audience on the ground. He is also content to keep the mass of the building heavy both in form and material, neither of which are personified in good music. Craig Dykers made a light flowing building (which is hard to do because of its hard and pronounced angles), and it really captures the personality of the object it contains, music.

My second example is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. I feel that, after looking through some of the sculptures and paintings that are in it, he designed it around the spirit of the sculpture and painting. Since most of the works in it are fairly abstract he took an abstract approach to the making of it. He obviously the use of light not only in its architectural vocabulary but also as it pertains to sculpture and painting. The building itself is a sculpture which is reminiscent of the days when ships filled the waterway in front of it. It is an abstraction of their sails. I feel that he (even though he's a sculptor) took a more valid approach than Louis Kahn did when he made the Kimbell. Although, I could argue that since the art in the Kimbell is more classical, the building itself makes a large nod to the classical forms and styles of architecture. I feel Gehry does it better, because he is dealing with not only the architectural issue of how light gets in the building, which is something Kahn does too. Gehry is also dealing with how light reflects off of the building, and how it displays itself when there is no natural light to be had; something Kahn failed to consider when he built his museum. This is truly an acknowledgment by Gehry of the objects the Guggenheim contains. This could be why more famous architects picked it than any other building for the most important building since 1980 (it was the top pick for Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Micheal Holzer, Daniel Libeskind, and 23 other top architects, deans, and critics out of 52 people).

The third case that I'm going to make is for Zaha Hadid's Performing Art Center. When the normal everyday Joe thinks of a performing art center he thinks of a place where you go to watch people. In other words the thing being housed is people. The architect might have a bit more to say about it but it is nothing more substantial and if it is, then not by much. What I realize, and what I think Zaha Hadid realized, is that the object in this case is a performance. Performance is a noun but it doesn't really fall into the person, place, or thing categories. Its an idea, and most people overlook ideas when architecting things. They deal with mainly tangible items, site, context, etc. But performance is something to be acknowledged, and to assess its character you have to ask what it is to perform and why one performs. Performance is something everything does,It is natural. Birds and apes do it for mate selection, humans have evolved to do it for entertainment. It is both ancient and modern, necessity and luxury. It is organic, and I think Zaha realized this when she was making the center. The center shed light, has presence and is organic, I feel all of these exemplify my theory.

I really think these are some of the best examples, the first two more than the last. A few more examples that I know of are a couple chapels by Tadao Ando begin to really speak about God and what he is and his characteristics (as Ando sees them of course). He is firmly rooted, rigid and luminescent, and this perception of God's character begins to inform how he structures it, the atmosphere of it, the experience, the sequence, the materiality. It informs the whole of the building. And I think that he really hit the nail on the head with that one. I won't go into much more detail than that but I think It is grand.

I know Frank Lloyd Wright would agree with me when I take my stance on building as an extension of site, as he is probably the best example of this that most architects can think of. I think he'd agree with me when I said the future object-scape becomes the site too. When used together they can become really useful dictates for what the building really is. I use them a great deal and if you're looking at great architecture the right way you'll see other people using this theory too.

How to own a view.

This was the required reading that I'll write about.

Carol Burns, "On Site: Architectural Preoccupations" Drawing Building Text, ed. A. Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991) 147-165

He writes, Emerson points out that aesthetic and mathematical conceptions are fundamentally different but intimately bound to one another: The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.  But none of them owns the landscape.  There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can intergrate all the parts, that is , the poet.  This is the best part of these men's farms, yet this their warranty deeds give no title.

Basically he says that you can own land but not the landscape.  I'm on the fence about this one, I feel that you can own a landscape, you just have to be rich enough to buy all the land in visible range.  But I do agree that landscape is the conglomeration of numerous plots of land and the buildings on them, Combined with the environment of course.  I think that its one thing we forget about.  We concern ourselves with how people view the building itself and view landscape from the building.  We think about these because we're taught to identify the best spot on the site and then NOT build on it.  But I think we often forget about how our building fits into the landscape, or the sillouhette.  I think once we concern ourselves with that then we will be able to make the building tie into the surroundings better than we already do.

Subjectivity and The Gale

well, the results are in and I couldn't post it before now, but I didn't win. However I'm really happy with the end result and think that it could have won given a different set of judges.  Here's the link

tsplines.com/contest

and here's my entry.

like I said, I'm really happy with it and proud of it.  Maybe next time.  Check in a couple weeks when I post pictures of my entry for the local pumpkin carving contest.  At RAW.

Handwork, Craft, and the Animus

This week the readings were these:

Bruce Metcalf, "The Hand at the Heart of Craft" from American Craft, Aug./Sept. 00, Vol. 60,
No. 4 (New York: American Craft Council, 2000) 54-61, 66
Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, "1.2 The Hand and the Machine" and
"4.0 Processes We Do Not See," Refabricating Architecture (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004) 4-7, 68-101
David Pye, "The Workmanship of Risk and the Workmanship of Certainty"
The Nature of Art and Workmanship, Chapters 1,2, and 4 (London: Studio Vista, 1968) 5-10, 13-24


but I only intend to write about the first one as the two others failed to hold my attention as I was reviewing them.

As a kind of background for Bruce Metcalf, I feel I need to let you know that this excerpt was taken from a speech he made to a group of goldsmiths at a big conference where I assume he received an award. So he is presumably a jeweler. He decided on this occupation while he was trying college for the last time and took a jewelry class on a whim.  But basically he outlines the need for craft and handworks and the difference between the two of them. His first paragraph says it pretty well.


It's tough to figure out what "craft" really is.  Some argue that the core of craft lies in utility -- that craft is distinguished by usefulness.  But that efficient definition has the unfortunate effect of  insisting that many kinds of objects, from silver centerpieces to comtemporary sculpture in clay and glass, are not craft, As an alternative, one could propose that craft is identified by the traditional mediums of metal, clay, fiber, wood, glass, except that plastics, found objects and dozens of other materials have been used to make craft objects. So this definition is incomplete, too.  Nonetheless, there remains one absolutely necessary component of any craft object - - it must be made substantially by hand.


Like I said before, he says it pretty well.  But just because he's eloquent doesn't mean that he's right.  Now I'm not the agreeable sort, and I'm not going to agree with him.  Because, I think he contradicts himself.  Not directly, but mainly in the implications that makes later when he starts to get past the miraculous inter-workings of the hands.  He starts to talk on page 56 of an awakening and the apprenticeship that follows. He says





The excitement of awakening to one's gifts is no more than an introduction, the first chapter to a long book.  All students of craft undergo years of training.  There's so much to learn, So many skills to perfect. It turns out that becoming skillful actually changers the brain. . . All crafts demand exceptional motor control, from the rapid dexterity required by glassblowing to the subtle coordination required in weaving.  Bodily intelligence can thus be seen as a biological and cognitive foundation to all craft practice.

So, here's where I make my qualm.  I think digital modeling can be craft,  And not according to a new description,  but in accordance with the one he just gave.  First I'll start by saying that in the school of architecture they introduce you to a program called rhino, and rhino is fairly useful for making boxes and things with minimal curvature, but to make things that really are organic you have to use plug-ins.  Specifically one called T-splines,  alot of people use it.  Zaha and HOK are the two that occur to me the quickest.  But the first time I used it, something just clicked, and I was overwhelmed by the fact that I had found my niche.  But even though I was naturally talented I still had to work on it.  The software isn't easy to operate.  There is alot of view adjustment, and alot of new people just end up looking off into space because they can't control what they are doing, that become like a digital coordination.  Past that, there is alot of fine tuning that goes on,  The processes are repeated and you say in your mind, " ok, self, to do this action, and to get this result, you have to run through these processes."  And you do them, and the more you do them the less you think about it and more quickly and precisely you can do all of this.  You can essentially get to a place Metcalf refers to as a flow-state.  Where you are 100% engaged and are making very complex actions and judgments which look to be as easy as breathing.  So in accordance with his description I think you can see where digital modeling becomes craft.  Also I wanted to give an example, Assassin's Creed 1 & 2.  Here's a video link
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/x06-onstage-assassins-creed/13511
but you can start to see where the designing of each individual brick and iron grating, each stone and stick starts to affect the game and impact how you move around.  They are doing a third one which means they will be building Rome during the Renaissance brick by brick.  INSANE!!!  But I feel that this is digital craft.  They even craft the movements and reactions of the people in certain instances.



What this means for architecture is that we can progress forward into the digital world as long as we maintain a standard of good work.  When doing something requires little or no effort that is when we have abandoned craft.