Inflection 2: Projection

Projection

JOURNAL OF THE MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

Vol 02 November 2015

EUR (D) EUR (A) CHF

18,80 19,60 28,80

PROJECTION

Features: Studio Gang Pérez-Gómez + Sioli dNA Architecture Fender Katsalidis Architects Stanislav Roudavski

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Inflection Journal Volume 02 - Projection November 2015

Inflection is published annually by the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne and AADR: Art Architecture Design Research.

Founding Editors: Ariani Anwar, William Cassell and Jonathan Russell Deputy Editors: Alexandra Bell, Christina Caré Calgaro and Katie Petros Academic Advisor: Dr. AnnMarie Brennan Academic Advisory Board: Dr. AnnMarie Brennan Prof. Alan Pert Prof. Gini Lee Acknowledgements: The editors would like to thank all those involved in the production of this journal for their generous assistance and support. Special thanks are due to AnnMarie Brennan whose continual support, guidance and encouragement since the journal’s inception has been invaluable.

For all enquiries please contact: editorial@inflectionjournal.com www.inflectionjournal.com facebook.com/Inflectionjournal © Copyright 2015 ISSN 2199-8094 ISBN 978-3-88778-463-8 AADR – Art, Architecture and Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice.

AADR Curatorial Editor: Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. Print run 2015 Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany.

Graphic design in collaboration with Büro North Interdisciplinary Design No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor – by application of electronic systems – processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder.

The opinions expressed in Inflection are those of the authors and are not endorsed by the University of Melbourne.

Cover Photograph: Ariani Anwar

Shifting Perspective, 2014 Kolumba Museum, Köln.

Inside Cover: Jo Harrison + Roberth Pinarete-Villanueva Reflection of Urban Transition, 2015

CONTRIBUTORS Ariani Anwar: Ariani Anwar is a founding editor of Inflection journal. She is currently completing her Master of Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, the University of Melbourne. Prior to architecture Ariani completed a Bachelor in Arts, specialising in Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is currently employed at John Wardle Architects.

Marco Carpiceci: Marco Carpiceci is an architect and Associate Professor of Architectural Drawing at Sapienza University of Rome. He has taken part in several architectural heritage surveys. He is a member of the Centro Ricerche Leonardiane in Brescia and the Ente Raccolta Vinciana del Castello Sforzesco in Milan.

Timmah Ball: Timmah Ball is a community infrastructure planner currently working at the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. She completed her Masters in Urban Planning at the Melbourne School of Design in 2011. She is interested in the cross section of public art, history and land use planning.

William Cassell: William Cassell graduated from the Masters of Architecture program in 2015, following a solid six and a half years of study that began with a Bachelor of Music Performance at the Victorian College of the Arts.

A designer, maker and improviser, William spends his days working as a graduate architect at Cox Architecture, while moonlighting as a saxophone player in several Melbourne bands.

Sophia Banou: Sophia Banou studied architecture at the NTUA (Greece, 2008) and the University of Edinburgh (2009). She practiced architecture between 2008 and 2011 and is currently pursuing a PhD by Design at the University of Edinburgh while teaching at Newcastle University (UK).

Her research explores the conventional material and temporal limits of architectural representation.

Fabio Colonnese: Fabio Colonnese is an architect and Ph.D. in Drawing and Survey of Architectural Heritage. He defended a thesis on Architecture and Labyrinths, from which he published a book. He taught Architectural drawing and Survey in Rome and Rieti and took part in monumental surveys in Italy and Turkey.

Alexandra Bell: Alexandra Bell has studied in both the Faculty of Arts and the Melbourne School of Design at Melbourne University. Previously, a creative writing and literature student, it was the realization that she wanted to cultivate experiences rather than just write about them which led her to undertake study in Landscape Architecture and take on a deputy editorship at Inflection journal for this current issue, Projection.

Karl Fender: Karl Fender is a founding Director of Fender Katsalidis. After gaining his Master of Architecture at Harvard University, he spent many years abroad, living and practising in London, Rome, Paris, Boston, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Karl has served as design director on major urban design projects such as Muang Thong Thani, a new city for 250,000 inhabitants in Bangkok, and the NewQuay Precinct for MAB Corporation in Melbourne’s Docklands precinct.

Adrian Bonaventura: Adrian Bonaventura is a recent graduate from the Melbourne School of Design. He strongly believes that architecture should strive to bring together today’s visions of possible futures that rise above the disillusionment of the present.

Jeanne Gang: American architect Jeanne Gang is Founder and Principal of the awardwinning design practice Studio Gang. A graduate of the University of Illinois, Jeanne received her Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

Paul Broches: Paul Broches is a senior partner at Mitchell/Giurgola where he has worked since completing his education in 1970 at the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Paul has led design teams for civic, cultural, educational and research buildings throughout the United States. He is a board member of the international human rights and social justice NGO, ARC PEACE; and, in 2013 was elected to the National Academy for his significant contributions to American architecture.

Francesca Giuliani-Hoffman: Francesca Hoffman is an Italian journalist. Born and raised in Rome among beautiful ruins and open piazzas, she moved to New York City in 2010 and embraced the grid and the skyscrapers. Francesca has a BA in Communications, a Masters in Government Studies and Public Communication, and she conducted research at NYU and CUNY. She writes for a variety of outlets and works with tech startups at the forefront of innovation in the field of news gathering.

Christina Caré Calgaro: Christina is a deputy editor of Inflection journal, graduate of architecture (University of Melbourne) and Arts Advanced (University of Sydney), where her thesis discussed the architectural drawings of the Italian Futurists. She is a freelance writer, serial traveller and has worked as a student architect and project manager in Melbourne’s CBD. Currently based in London, she is a masters student at the University of Greenwich.

Alexa Gower: After discovering that life as an art gallery manager was little more than glorified administration, Alexa returned to university to study architecture. She currently works at McBride Charles Ryan and through her project T.O.D. has explored the interrelations between art and architecture, the actual and the perceived.

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Alex Hamilton: Married 2 children; Dip-Art Canberra 1980-2; Sydney 1981-4, trumpet player, The Saints; 1984-1991 Melbourne, Canberra (touring exhibition The City and Beyond), 1992 visiting-artist Art School Prague; 1993 Artist-in-residence, Glasgow Art School; 994 Kunstlahaus Salzburg; London 1995-2009, show lots there; NARS studio NY 2016

Alberto Pérez-Gómez: Alberto Pérez-Gómez studied architecture and practiced in Mexico City. In 1983 he became Director of Carleton University’s School of Architecture (Ottawa, Canada). Since 1987 he has occupied the Bronfman Chair at McGill University, where he founded the History and Theory post-graduate programs. His books include Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983), Polyphilo (1992), Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (1997), and Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (2006).

Jo Harrison: Born in the UK, and initially working as an Architectural Technician, Jo went on to study Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art in London; relocating to Manchester, where she became a member of Rogue Artists Studios. Now resident in Melbourne, Jo works out of Blender Studios in the city.

Katie Petros: Katie Petros is a deputy editor of Inflection journal, graduating Master of Architecture student and Graduate Ambassador at the Melbourne School of Design. She has a Bachelor of Environments majoring in Architecture from the University of Melbourne, and has studied at The University of Stuttgart and Delhi's School of Planning & Architecture.

Matthew Hoffman: As Madeline Gins once defined him, Matthew is an architectural “coordinologist.” Trained in architecture at Penn State University, Matthew’s work as a Communications Director in a variety of architecture firms connects people to produce better design and generates public engagement around well crafted ideas. Matthew has collaborated with HWKN (Hollwich Kushner), C-LAB, Neil Denari, Mas Context, Polar Inertia, Bruce Mau Design.

He co-founded Blank Space with his wife Francesca in 2013.

Stanislav Roudavski: Stanislav Roudavski is an artist, architect and researcher currently working at the University of Melbourne. His interests include: philosophies of ecology, technology, design and architecture; emergence, self-organisation and generative processes in nature, society and technology; creative computing; digital fabrication; virtual and augmented environments; design fictions and practice-based research methodologies.

Francesca Hughes: Francesca Hughes is author editor of The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press), Drawings that Count (AA publications) and, most recently, author of The Architecture of Error (MIT Press). She teaches at the AA and is co-founder of the art/architecture practice, Hughes Meyer Studio whose work has been published by AA Files, AR, ANY, Art Forum, Routledge, Monacelli and Wiley and exhibited internationally.

Jonathan Russell: Jonathan Russell is a Master of Architecture student at the University of Melbourne, and an architectural student at RotheLowman. Before turning to architecture, Jonathan studied Urban Geography at Monash University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Sota Ichikawa: Sota Ichikawa is an architect, the founder of doubleNegatives Architecture, as well as a core member of city planning-analysing laboratory called hclab. He lectures at Tokyo University of the Arts (2014) and Tokyo University (2013~) as studio unit master. He collaborated with Seiko Mikami (1961~2015) on an interactive piece called Gravicells.

Anjeliki Sioli: Angeliki Sioli is currently a full time research professor at the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico. She holds a professional diploma in architecture from the University of Thessaly, a post-professional master's degree from the National Technical University of Athens and a Ph.D. in the History & Theory of Architecture from McGill University.

Michael McLoughlin: I’m studying architecture at Melbourne Uni and should have had my Bachelor already but I’ve been slack. I’m an avid reader, especially of critical theory, but must confess to owning more books that I haven’t read than those I have. I’m from the suburbs of Adelaide and have a deep desire to explore Australian’s complex relationship with suburbia. I’m also mildly obsessed with Australian history, music, film, and literature.

Robert Ventresca: Robert Ventresca is an architect who received a Master of Architecture from the University of Melbourne. He has interests in theories, design methodologies, sustainability and craft. Robert tutors at the University of Melbourne and is working at Grimshaw Architects.

Amelyn Ng: Amelyn is a Melbourne-based M.Arch graduate with a deep interest in civic agency and consumer behaviours. An avid writer and compulsive sketcher, she believes architecture is at once a physical practice, critical discourse and socio-economic catalyst. She hopes to further test its potentials through ongoing research and published work.

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CONTENTS

06 08 14 20

Editorial

Gestation, Process, Precision: A Conversation with Francesa Hughes

Transmit|Outward 2015 Inflection Exhibition

44

Stanislav Roudavski* Potential for Surprise

54

Alexa Gower Loose Control: Contemporary Implications for Digital Drawing

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Sota Ichikawa / doubleNegatives Architecture Projecting the World Through Networks

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Alberto PĂŠrez-GĂłmez + Angeliki Sioli Phenomenology and Drawing in Architectural Representation

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Robert Ventresca Experiments in Diagram: Catalysing New Discoveries + Challenging the Habitual

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Blank Space On Fiction, Process and the Architect

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Adrian Bonaventura Cryptonomy: The Rise of Digital Currency

Jeanne Gang Inside Studio Gang: On Making and Drawing

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Alex Hamilton Material, Texture, Surface: Thoughts on Drawing

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Sophia Banou* Deep Surface: On the Situation of Drawing

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Fabio Colonnese + Marco Carpiceci* Project Through Projections: Leonardo Da Vinci’s Design Process

94 98 104

Katie Petros Global Imaginations: Projection Versus Reality in Indian Megaprojects

Michael McLoughlin From Here to Now-Here: Reflections on Non-Linear Time

Ariani Anwar Superimposed: Projected Narratives, Memory and the City

110 116 118

Paul Broches FAIA Building a Lost Past: Louis Kahn's Four Freedoms Park

Alexandra Bell Stoa

Timmah Ball From Prison to Village: The Architectural Reframing of Melbourne's Dark Past

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Amelyn Ng Cities of Agency: Rethinking the Everyday

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Karl Fender Living in the City: High-Rise in Melbourne

* denotes articles that have been formally peer-reviewed

EDITORIAL Ariani Anwar, William Cassell and Jonathan Russell The process of creating our built environment is continuous, dynamic and unending. At every moment, buildings are emerging in the minds of designers, architects and planners – being planned and puzzled out, discussed, revised and argued over. They are being drafted, documented and detailed, their functions and forms are shifting and being renegotiated. They are being constructed: ideas on paper are, slowly and imperfectly, becoming a reality. All around us, buildings are taking shape – but this is only the beginning of their life. A small minority are being analysed, critiqued and written about – most are not. All are being occupied and adapted, forming imperfect relationships with their users, and changing in the process. Some are aging and weathering gracefully, others are decaying and falling into ruin. Some are being reused and revitalised, while others are torn down and demolished. Even buildings that are long gone live on in memories and photographs, and in the traces they leave behind. All of this – from conception to demolition and beyond – is happening around us at all times: our built environment exists in a dynamic state of becoming. If we wish to understand architecture today, we must engage with the dynamism and flux which defines it. It is in this spirit that we welcome you to Inflection Volume 02: Projection.

In this imagining, our built environment is thought of as a static entity, a moment in space and time which at best only hints at future trajectories. This year, in turning our attention from inflection to projection, we consider the contours of that trajectory, moving from static to dynamic, from point to process, and from being to becoming. Of course, none of these ideas are new to the arena of architectural thinking.

Most notably, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, published in 1980, is a work of process philosophy in which the dynamic and “smooth” is privileged over the static and “striated.” Similarly, Bernard Tschumi's theoretical and built work proceeds from an understanding of architecture as fundamentally dynamic. In the city more broadly, we can look to Guy Debord and the Situationist dérive for an assertion of the value of event over object. In the decades since they arose these ideas have become embedded in architectural theory, however in the practice of architecture and placemaking the static perspective remains dominant.

To better understand the meaning of projection, it is useful to borrow some terminology from the school of process philosophy. In contrast with classical traditions, process philosophy sees the world as fundamentally defined by dynamism and ubiquitous change – it would have us trade the object-centric worldview of Aristotle for that of Heraclitus, who imagined the world around him as “an ever-living fire.”1 This shift, from a static to a dynamic worldview, corresponds well with the trajectory of Inflection itself. In 2014, Volume 01 was built around the idea of an inflection point – a discrete moment from which change begins to emerge.

In these pages, our contributors provide a myriad of responses to the theme of projection. Throughout, we see themes of becoming and dynamic process emerge from vastly different but complementary perspectives. A number of contributors position projection as inherent to the act of design, in which ideas pass through stages of translation on the way to built form. Too often this process is imagined as a straight-line sequence in which the architect propels their design from one stage to the next – such an attitude undervalues the opportunities for creative adaptation which are latent in the design process. Francesca Hughes touches on the limitations of this straight-line process, questioning the abandonment of the creative possibilities of error and imprecision by architects. Along similar lines, Stanislav Roudavski argues for the value of unpredictability and surprise in digital design. Other contributors investigate their own design process: Robert Ventresca writes about the diagram as a tool for productive iteration, while Jeanne Gang speaks of the importance of research and drawing.

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In examining design processes and the role of the architect, several contributors sought to rebut the status quo of architectural practice and representation. Here, Sota Ichikawa of dNA Architects considers the power of representation systems, describing his firm's radical reinvention of architectural notation. Architectural publisher Blank Space asserts the value of fiction and the written word as a mode of architectural representation and questions society's narrow view of the architect's role. This critical approach to the architect’s role is expanded on in Adrian Bonaventura's Cryptonomy, a radically speculative piece of visual storytelling that challenges the traditional boundaries of architecture and the imaginative possibilities of a techno-future.

In the projection from idea to architecture, drawing is a particularly important and contested site. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Angeliki Sioli emphasise the importance of criticality when utilising digital tools of representation and design, while Alexa Gower questions our assumptions about the role of the human hand with her drawing machine T.O.D. Sophia Banou’s reflection on the relationship between drawing and space emphasises the connected spatiality of the drawing process. Fabio Colonnese and Marco Carpiceci continue this line of enquiry, analysing the architectural drawings and thought processes of Leonardo Da Vinci.

A place does not end once it is built, and a number of pieces tackle the complex trajectories of architecture and cities in their continued becoming. Katie Petros applies a critical lens to the trajectory of contemporary Indian urbanism, while Paul Broches writes about Four Freedoms Park in New York City, showing that even in work which appears singular and timeless, the path from idea to construction rarely runs straight. In the Australian context Michael McLoughlin shares his experience of the Outback and his thoughts on the apparent dichotomy between periphery and centre, and Timmah Ball questions our tendency to silence painful histories in the Australian city.

Vol 02 Projection

Amelyn Ng proposes micro-strategies for the humane adaptation of public space, while Ariani Anwar considers the role that events such as Melbourne’s White Night have in re-framing our collective understandings of the city. Finally, in looking to the future of living in Melbourne, Karl Fender of Fender Katsalidis spoke with Inflection about the history and future of high-rise living in Melbourne. Together, the work collected here forms a complex, intertwined set of perspectives, orbiting around the idea of projection. Like projection itself, the collected whole is nondeterministic, non-prescriptive, and its meaning is not yet settled.

As a publication, Inflection has also changed as it has grown.

From a germ of an idea in 2013, this journal has become a real, tangible entity. Today, Inflection is a platform for discourse between students, academics and practioners both locally and internationally, and we are proud to have enabled these conversations. Going forward, Inflection will continue to change and evolve. As founding editors, we are moving on from studenthood to professional practice. From 2016, each edition of the journal will feature a new editorial team chosen from the Melbourne School of Design's student body. For Inflection Volume 03, we are proud and excited to be passing the editorship to Courtney Foote, John Gatip and Jil Raleigh – you can find a preview of their vision for Inflection on page 140. In this spirit of progress and change, we welcome you to Inflection Volume 02, and invite you to join us in our continued process of projection.

References 01

Johnanna Seibt, “Process Philosophy” in The

Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford: Stanford University, 2013).

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GESTATION, PROCESS, PRECISION A CONVERSATION WITH FRANCESCA HUGHES Alexandra Bell, Ariani Anwar & Jonathan Russell If we consider the world around us through the lens of projection, we soon begin to encounter new, unfamiliar questions about architecture and the built environment.

When we bring dynamism and flux to the centre of our thinking, it compels us to consider more closely the underlying processes of architectural practice. Does the projection from idea to architectural form necessarily proceed in a straight line, or can it accommodate uncertainty, imprecision and error? What should we make of the polished 3D render, which hides architecture’s becoming under a glossy skin?

In a milieu which privileges the static, perfect and precise, London-based architect Francesca Hughes is asking these and other difficult questions. Following the release of her new book, The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision, Inflection spoke with Hughes at the Melbourne School of Design. In discussing the hidden-away processes of architecture, she highlights the imprecision and multiplicity which is integral to our discipline. Arguing that we have avoided these topics for too long, Hughes does not provide answers – instead seeking to inspire new conversations and new thinking in an important and undertheorised area.

Inflection: One of the characteristics of architecture is the use of representation as a tool to convey an idea. In your lecture you critiqued the prevalence of the 'slippery image' or the highly polished render in contemporary architecture. Can you discuss this a little more?

Francesca Hughes: It’s an extraordinarily rich topic.

Rendering software originates from the optics industry and hence is entirely focused on the optical performance of the surfaces of a building. These images, these hyperpolished renders, do not let us past the reflections of the surfaces they portray, they do not get to their materiality, or anything beyond optical performance. This excessive, strictly superficial resolution conceals the necessary irresolution that’s always going on behind the surface, the irresolution central to the building process – from the negotiations with site, and clients, and political interests, to the irresolution between different parties claiming authorship of the process – the essentially messy business of making architecture. For me it is telling that we choose to use the incredible precision of the computer not to unpack this irresolution or to find new ways to lay open and draw the indeterminacy at large in architectural production (because the best way to solve any problem is to draw it!) but instead to cover it up, and give it this really shiny surface, so shiny you actually can’t see most of it because of the glare bouncing off.

Opposite: Gergely Kovacs, Hughes Meyer Studio Orders of Chance, 2014 Ink on paper: 80.6 x 58.4 cm Private collection, UK While Sömmerring’s morphogenesis conceals any anomalies or marks of the arbitrary, Dissembling Chance investigates the formation of a forged randomness within the deterministic body of the computer; its fundamental incapacity to make a mistake.

So, in a sense it’s not surprising that the fetishisation of precision in architecture is most heightened at this surface: the cathexis of the surfaces of architectural representation and the representation of architectural surfaces. Because this is the site (and I do mean this in Freudian terms) of the absence of the building, whereby the existence of the drawing denotes the building not being there. And once the building is there, the drawing is gone, we don’t see it anymore, we see a new surface: the photograph of the building. So not surprisingly, the representational surface becomes the focus point of all of the architect’s anxieties about the transmission of form through matter.

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In your book you have written about Gordon Matta Clark as an artist who removes the distinction between designer and creator.

Using him as a case study, how can we learn from a more direct engagement with the messiness of building?

Do you think architects have a tendency to avoid error and improvisatory practices in their process?

Gordon Matta Clark’s work is almost more relevant for architects now, since the introduction of digital fabrication and the way in which it starts to close the gap between the represented and the materialised, than at any time before. This doesn’t mean we should all behave like Gordon Matta Clark, but it does mean that it’s very instructive to look again at his work. Looking at the films he made of his process in his Unbuilding projects we find he eclipses representation, he is the drawing, he is both the instruction and the operation and therefore as a consequence he is able to improvise. Obviously a production economy that uses improvisation is able to allow error into the centre of production and not just keep it at the margin, nor in a sense to just desperately try to keep it out. So error has a very different value within improvisatory practices.

Yes, in a way... and we also traditionally have gone to great lengths to cover up any trace of such practice. What I mean is that true process (not the stories of process architects tell) must be kept interiorised because it constitutes that which is not to be seen in the first place. It’s during the messy process of negotiating between form and matter that error runs rife.

This is precisely why historically the metaphor of gestation from biological reproduction has been so convenient for architects, because there’s a moment of conception (which is fine, we can deal with that, we do concept sketches), but the potentially precarious projection between that point of inception (the idea) and the destination (the perfect end product) is, in the metaphor of biological reproduction, a wholly internalised process. Nothing can get in there, no one’s going to go in and hijack the project and make it theirs and nothing can go wrong. In this sense this metaphor endows architecture with a wonderfully secure, sealed corridor between origin and end product.

Do you think that form of hiding could be endemic of the social constructs that suggest we shouldn't engage with the potential that we could learn from error in design?

Absolutely. But I think that is a different type of hiding. It’s extraordinary that our knowledge is built entirely on things that are successful and not on the vast array of failed projects.

But it’s a trick and the lessons of failure are potentially more important than the lessons from success. This is precisely why in The Architecture of Error I explore the failed aircraft, the failed needle and the failed radiator that just couldn’t be precise enough. Each can be understood as hardware fallout from the seminal crises which marked – indeed structured – Modernism.

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You spoke about the headlong rush into precision that happened during Modernism in architecture. What connection does this have with the stripping of ornamentation?

When we think of digital precision I am reminded of the proliferation of generative digital design processes in contemporary architecture, which use parameters to produce the final outcome from thousands or tens of thousands of options.

What do you think of this approach?

Are you familiar with Wittgenstein’s house? It’s stripped of all ornamentation and his famous column has no capital.

So, not only is the ornament stripped, but also there is this kind of void where the ornament once was, where ornament notionally began even... and of course ornamentation is itself traditionally a key strategy for concealing error in construction.

Ornament gone, we find Wittgenstein fastidiously measuring everything. For example, he goes on site after the plasterers have finished the 6 metre high ceiling, he measures it, it’s less than 1% out and he requires the whole thing to be torn down and done again. It is as if he was desperately trying to close the relationship between an absolute value and its materialisation, desperately trying to literally materialise the absolute value, to have zero margin for error. So in a sense, what we find in Haus Wittgenstein is that ornament is removed, but it is replaced with uniformly distributed exactitude. It is almost as if once the excess of ornament is removed, the building was coated with the new excess of exactitude, ornamented with invisible numbers as it were and a new margin of redundancy. But what is crucial with Wittgenstein is that this new ornament of surplus precision is ubiquitous: everywhere is equally precise.

This is of course the precision of the digital. It’s not about actually getting more precise where you need to be and kind of slackening off where you don’t, in the middle of the ceiling for example, but instead digital precision is equally precise everywhere. So one can start to think about Wittgenstein’s house as ornamented by integer, ornamented by redundant precision, but also one can start to think about it as being the first materialisation of the digital surface. His interest was not in the materiality of the wall, or what was behind the surface of the wall (in fact, the walls are often different thicknesses and some of them are made of different materials), his absolute obsessive interest was in getting that wall to coincide in space at the exact planar coordinates. The distribution of precision in this Viennese house is akin to that of a digital model.

I think that it risks being an extraordinary abdication of authorship by architects. There is also a constructed false modesty around it, but worry not, there is no danger of architects ever getting modest! It’s more a clever strategy: you can’t critique a parametrically optimised solution because who can out-calculate the algorithm that has generated it? 'This form must be right, this solution must be correct, because the algorithm said so.' And therefore it’s somehow immaculate. This is also partly delivered by a certain type of instantaneity. Le Corbusier well understood that, if properly harnessed, instantaneity can be a very powerful tool. He talks about pouring a concrete house in just three days, and the house emerges from its shuttering, with all the immaculacy of instant form. So, there is a tricky collaboration between this immaculacy and instantaneity on the one hand and the way we’ve engaged with parametricised production with all the abdication of authorship it entails. It is almost an engineered neutrality that is equally good for everyone, isn’t it? So it basically excludes everything that’s central to architecture: conflict, qualitative properties and their genuine complexity and differences. Everything difficult is just kept out. It is too good to be true and way too easy...

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... and it also leads towards that universalising tendency that was so often the reality with Modernism.

It’s interesting that that happens through the representation of the gestation process.

Yes, it’s a product of Modernism, a complete extrusion of the project of Modernism. Which is why when I go through these historiographical mantras that organise the way we relate to Modernism: ornament was removed, organic materials were rejected and so on. One could actually just carry on and say: construction was eclipsed, fabrication was automated and it’s the same projection, the same trajectory just carrying on. And of course it starts with the Enlightenment, this extraordinary projection of a teleology where you end up with a destinationperfect product at the end and there is no deviation. In the book I talk about Samuel Thomas Soemmerring’s intervention in the understanding of the foetus’ development whereby, prior to his work, the foetus as an entity did not exist, gestation was indeterminate in origin, polyvalent, with multiple outputs described as the “mola” that were different products of the womb. They weren’t considered failed products, they were just considered as different things the womb might produce and only one of them happened to be a perfect baby. There also wasn’t the idea of the duality, of the mother and the child as separate entities, it was more understood as an ambiguous state of potentiality – ambiguous in its origin, potentially multiple and therefore indeterminate in its output. And so Soemmerring decided to bin perspectival space and use architectural space (parallel projection), the space of buildings, to set up this kind of wholly different thinking about the projection of form in production. And to set up the duality which is prerequisite to the representation of the foetus as an autonomous entity, faithfully following its prescribed linear morphogenesis: we have the mother, who is reduced to context and thus conveniently erased and then we have the foetus and there’s just one product, so everything that deviates from that becomes erroneous and becomes a failure in some way.

By the representation of this morphogenesis, yes… but it’s a tricky thing, because what this drawn morphogenesis is doing is constructing a safe bridge across that difficult passage of form and matter transformation. It’s almost a different kind of concealing because it promises causal linearity: 'you’re going to get from A to Z, and Z is the destination-perfect product – and don’t worry, there is no risk of deviation, you just follow this line.' Prior to that, the model of gestation was Preformatism, the idea that the baby starts perfect, but tiny and the projection of its production is simply about getting bigger: a simply scalar transformation. This strategy also excluded the messy polyvalencey of mola etc. and this is what the job of any morphogenetic model is: to provide a singular road map of a given transformation that in its singularity is so completely censoring. I mean, bodies have produced babies in the same way through history. Women didn’t start to be pregnant in a different way in 1799 than they were in 1798, but the representation and therefore the understanding of gestation has changed enormously. So in 1944, Erwin Schrödinger’s “architect gene,” much like Sömmerring’s model, is still saying: ‘don’t worry we’ve got this line, where the architect gene secures its causal linearity, and there’s no deviation.’ Schrödinger was continuing the project of Sömmerring: anything that deviates from the line is dismissed as white noise, as error...

Opposite: Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring Icones Embryonum Humanorum, 1799 Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London

The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision

by Francesca Hughes is available now from MIT Press.

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... until cybernetics comes along and says hang on a minute, the messiness is what’s interesting and there’s enormous instruction that is possible from this messiness.

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TRANSMIT | OUTWARD 2015 INFLECTION EXHIBITION The Dulux Gallery, The Melbourne School of Design, September 2015.

Curatorial Team: Ariani Anwar, Danielle Mileo, Katie Petros, William Cassell, Jonathan Russell and Alexandra Bell Inflection aspires to enable students to become active participants in a wider discourse on design. As a platform for discussion and debate, Inflection has always been (and hopefully will continue to be) more than the creation of a printed publication – rather, it is a community, a network and a place to experiment with ideas. In this context, the curation of an annual exhibition exploring the current issue’s theme has provided a unique opportunity to spatialise ideas generated by the journal, and to act as a catalyst for student growth and exploration within the wider context of the university.

In 2015 the Inflection exhibition grappled with the theme of Projection as a process of becoming. An immersive, ambitious exhibition, the show combined individual artworks with threedimensional installations, soundscapes and events to explore the unique possibilities to blur the definition of an “exhibition” that an event held within an architecture school can afford: fragmenting the pre-existing categories of art, sculpture and architecture; student, academic and architect; artist, observer and participant. Conceptualised as three distinct curatorial categories defined as Object, Event and Process, the show sought to emphasise the importance of the exhibition as a performative event space that simultaneously interrogated, explored and provided a platform for discourse around the theme of projection, whilst reflecting upon the process of Inflection journal as a departure point for new ideas.

Object: Harnessing the potential 3-dimensional spatiality of journal content through the exhibition typology, Object encompassed the curation of crowd-sourced submissions and solicited works from students, professionals and creative practitioners. These individual objects provided a visual landscape of reflections on the theme, acting as a point of departure for wider discourse. A select number of images are exhibited on following pages, facilitating the continuation of the exhibition space beyond the event itself.

Event: Providing a specific platform for dialogue, Event denotes the curation of a space within which exhibiting artists, architects and guests ran events responding to the theme of projection and the content of the exhibition. As a transient embodiment of the journal itself, each event aimed to create a forum that fostered discourse and enabled exchange between professional practitioners, students and the general public beyond the individual encounter with the exhibition.

Process: As the creation of a journal can be likened to a spatial exercise in adjacencies, alignments and connections, the process behind the creation of Inflection has a strong connection with the exhibition theme. Conceptualised as a four-dimensional timeline, the inclusion of the Process behind the journal invited viewers to engage with the most intimate details of the development of Inflection Volumes 01 and 02. The installation revealed this process as a spatial experience that can be entered physically and explored, reflecting on process as both a series of projections and a point from which new ideas may be projected.

The exhibition team would like to thank Philippa Knack, Ross Berryman and Jas Johnston for their continued support.

Overleaf Left: Teresa Sanchis Dacrocas The Tower of Hope, 2015 Transmit | Outward Exhibition Entry Overleaf Right: Aaron Tjie The Orchestrator’s Tower. 2015 Transmit | Outward Exhibition Entry

Opposite: Jun Ming-Kong Cinemateque, 2015 Transmit | Outward Exhibition Entry

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John Wardle Architects

Aperture Study: Generating Desire Lines, The Melbourne School of Design, 2011 Transmit | Outward Exhibition Entry

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Tessa Lancashire Book of Amos, 2015 Transmit | Outward Exhibition Entry

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INSIDE STUDIO GANG ON MAKING AND DRAWING In conversation with William Cassell and Jonathan Russell

Chicago architect Jeanne Gang, principal and founder of Studio Gang, is a practitioner and thinker at the forefront of her field. Gang's body of work, from high-rise apartments to vast landscape interventions, is notable for its variety and inventiveness: rather than hewing to an in-house style, Studio Gang privileges research and inquiry as primary design drivers. These methods are exemplary in their responsiveness to complex, dynamic contexts, and produce buildings in which the quality of the finished outcome speaks to the rigour of its creation. If the architectural process is an act of projection, we can learn a great deal by studying the strategies and methods of architects like Jeanne Gang.

In conversation with Inflection, Gang discussed the role of drawing and research in contemporary architecture, touching on her designs for Chicago's Aqua Tower and Northerly Island.

Her perspective provides insight into the value of a rigourous, multi-disciplinary approach to architecture.

Opposite: Studio Gang

Model Photograph, Solar Carve, 2012

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Inside Studio Gang

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Inflection: One sense in which we're interpreting our theme of projection is that, when we draw as architects, it's often in plan, section or elevation, which are reductions of the real world. For your process, which seems so deeply rooted in observation – in standing in a place or experiencing a city – do you find that the necessary reduction of drawing and projection is a sidestep away from the end goal?

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Jeanne Gang: I think, for me, there's this huge importance to the plan and the section, because they're lenses to see the project through.

You can look through perspective drawings or renderings – which are also a reduction because they are of one moment, looking in one particular direction – but the plan is something that I'm afraid as architects we're not paying enough attention to any more. It is a kind of abstraction, it's a slice, but there's a total art to doing a good plan. One thing that happens in practice is that you start out with a really clear plan with a strong idea and concept and then, as you move toward reality, it can get muddied. It's also possible to lose it because you are not looking at it as a slice any more, you start looking at it just as a model. And so it's important to step back and just look at the projection of plans and sections as things in and of themselves. It's so true that you can perceive a good plan in three dimensions when you finally go into a building. I hope it's not a dying art, to do a good plan.

It's our language, and we need to keep speaking our language.

Above: Studio Gang

Process Diagram, Aqua Tower, 2010

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Inside Studio Gang

Have you deliberately looked outside the architectural canon to find a process of building that's more relevant to what buildings should aspire to be today?

I've looked outside architecture because I'm interested in things outside architecture and I feel like in our practice we can connect these dots somehow, between being in the world and making design. The processes of making – whether it's the building documents, the models, the drawings or the actual making and construction – are some of my favourite parts about architecture. Inspiration comes from all over the place and maybe it's that the architecture research is already embedded in your brain and you can bring those precedents to bear, but for the content it's about being in the world and the things that are going on in the world. You have to look outside architecture for that.

Above: Steve Hall / Hedrich Blessing Photographers Aqua Tower, 2010

There is a school of thought that says we should not be going beyond our own boundaries and that we should learn our own tenets and speak our own language. But I don't think that's even possible. The core things that we have to know are constantly being rewritten. Right now it's history – why are we only looking at Western architectural history? There's amazing stuff out there that I never got in my history class. We constantly have to update it, but it's something to do with knowing the past and making sure that we don't lose anything that was good in trying to look forward. And I do think that drawing is essential, it doesn't matter what the tool is, pencil or computer, drawing is essential to what we have to teach and to learn and to expand on.

Vol 02 Projection

Jeanne Gang: In Conversation

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Jeanne Gang: In Conversation

Northerly Island is very exciting: it's obviously a complex scheme in its relationship to Chicago, and also in its symbiosis between the man-made and the natural. As I was reading about it, I couldn't help thinking about William Cronon's book, Nature's Metropolis – that idea about the constructedness of the city and the constructedness of nature in its relationship to the city.

Can you expand a little on that hybrid nature of Northerly Island?

Well, it's interesting because originally, in Daniel Burnham's plan of 1909, he envisioned these islands that would help break waves and provide calm waters near the city centre.

In the 1930s they decided to build Northerly Island (which is actually a peninsula), so it was man-made, it was sand from the bottom of the lake. And the first thing they did was have a big expo fair – 1934, the Century of Progress show was there, so it was full of Ferris wheels and all kinds of contraptions. After that they turned it into an airport – it was kind of like every single generation was just mapping their desires onto this man-made piece of land. So now it's our turn! The airport's gone, and we won a competition to design it – together, of course, with landscape architects and ecologists and water hydrologists and a whole team of engineers. We conceived it as a much more rich, biodiverse island that would provide an interesting space for inner-city people, youth, to actually have an experience of nature.

But it actually has to be designed – everything about it was sectioned to encourage nature to come in and take it over. So, for example, we dug out a wetland and made topography. The section allows for fish spawning and the type of grasses that like to have wetland water, and then the higher lands are more like savannah landscapes, and all of these things work together to attract animals and make it a more interesting place than a flat green baseball field. So I think it's important to start intertwining these wild types of nature into the city, and not just think of city landscapes and recreational green monoculture lawns, which is mostly what we have right now in cities. The design of it used a hexagon as a scale unit to develop the territories of the different landscapes. There's some legibility to the hexagon geometry in the landforming, in an acknowledgement that it is designed. It's not just trying to mimic nature completely, it shows that we can still get that natural diversity, but have it be more visibly touched.

Left: Studio Gang

Photomontage, Northerly Island, 2014

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Research during the initial stages of a project plays a very important role in your practise. How do you make sure that the research you've done continues to direct the project?

So, the balance of research, of taking things in, with the projection outwards of hands-on design is very important?

Well, in a way you don't have to, because it's already inside the head of the studio, and the way that we share our research within our teams – the way that we maintain the research – makes it accessible to everybody working on the project. If a new person comes in, they can jump in and hit that research part. But it's almost important to put it away when you're starting to make – you have to step away. You have to go to the model shop and make something, or draw something. It's possible to do too much research, you've got to start making something somewhere, and then let that work speak back to you. What is it that you made?

I think it's also interesting the way that research accumulates within an organisation, especially with towers. They're particular because there are limited things you can do with structure and limited things you can do with the areas. It's such a particular building type, so the area where you can innovate is narrower. Maybe the tower doesn't get built, but the things you've started to discover can actually be applied to other towers, so you don't have to always start from scratch with the research. People joke about that, like, 'oh, these architects designed that in a competition over there, and now they're building it over there' – but there's something to that, especially for us in the tower category. Maybe there's an idea that's really good but didn't get built – you can take what you learned and try to apply it to another problem.

If it's a model or a drawing, how is it telling you something new? The method is definitely not to continually try to force the research on it – you can hinder your creativity if you do that.

Above: Studio Gang

Study Models, Solar Carve, 2012

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Jeanne Gang: In Conversation

Staying on the theme of towers – and Aqua in particular: it's a tall building in a city whose identity is defined by its tall buildings.

What was your attitude towards the existing skyline when you were thinking about Aqua?

There are a couple of things: one is, a lot of times in our practice we start with the material or the structure. In this case it's concrete, you can see it in the Chicago skyline – we wanted to exhibit the fluid qualities of concrete. The same way the John Hancock Center does with steel – it's made of steel, it's showing that it's steel. Or the Monadnock Building – it's masonry, it looks like masonry, it is masonry.

So Aqua is not decorated, the structural material is the aesthetic of it. So I think it fits in with that heritage of tall buildings there. And then I always thought that there was a little bit of a relationship with the Bertrand Goldberg building, the Marina Towers, because that's a residential building too – I always liked how people's personal things start to inform the building, like, people put little Christmas tree lights on the balconies, or somebody has astroturf on their balcony. So you see the life coming out on that, and I like that aspect of it – it's not cold, it's interesting. So with Aqua tower, we provided those outside terraces and sure enough people are starting to take them over with their own personal things, and that gives it more interest. People lock their bikes to the balcony railing and people have various things out there. It is pretty interesting – it's not as fully taken over yet as the Marina Towers are, but I think it would make me pretty happy if it were.

Left: Steve Hall / Hedrich Blessing Photographers Aqua Tower, 2010

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Our built environment exists in a perpetual state of becoming, caught in a process of creation that is continuous and unending. If we wish to understand architecture today, we must engage with the state of flux that defines it.

In 2015, Inflection Volume 02 considers the idea of projection, interrogating its meaning in architecture and the built environment. Bringing together the work of students, academics and practitioners from Australia and around the world, this issue addresses the trajectories of the architectural design process, the changing role of architects in society, and the continuing state of becoming that defines our cities.

Inflection is a student-run design journal based at the Melbourne School of Design, Melbourne University. Born from a desire to stimulate debate and generate ideas, it advocates the discursive voice of students, academics and practitioners. Founded in 2013, Inflection is a home for provocative writing – a place to share ideas and engage with contemporary discourse.

ISSN 2199-8094 ISBN 978-3-88778-463-8 AADR publishes innovative artistic, creative and historical research in art, architecture, design and related fields. www.aadr.info

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