2015 Tropicality Brief

Tropicality

Nomadic Visiting School

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Directors Brendon Carlin & Maria Paez Gonzalez Invited Tutor Andrew Houston

San Jose, Costa Rica August 01 - 15th 2015 http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/VISITING/costarica

Contents

I.

Summary

II.

Architecture of the Tropics: resistance, disjunction and power

III.

Methodology

IV.

The Team

V.

Bibliography

VI.

Addendum: Co-Conspirators

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I. Summary

Tropicality is a new visiting school programme which seeks to exfoliate the seeming to expose patterns and resistance in tropical dwellings through architectural stories about home, culture and place.

The programme will consider the self-builder, local artist and domestic architect as key sources of power, simultaneously generators and perpetuators of culture. Conceived from within the multi-scalar and often contradicting spheres of their political, cultural and climactic contexts, their works serve as manifestations of an ever changing identity and collective aspirations.

Students will work alongside tutors to formulate interview questions and set out to rouse and record the stories and experiences of those who live there. Based on observations, insights and documented stories, you will then compose your own story about architecture, domesticity and place, devising a diagram and drawing as a plan of action to then record and film sound and images of people, houses, streets, neighbourhoods and the city. Editing together of the collected images and sound into film will evolve through conversation with tutors.

During the course of the two week workshop, students will make a short film as a narrative composition of images (form, space, light, colour, materiality) and sound (voice, story, city, nature). This film intended to become a unique and perceptive form of architectural construct.

The purpose of this workshop as an experiment is to cultivate extraordinary design insights, hone your compositional abilities as a designer and to refresh an architectural sensitivity and sensibility to the interrelationships of material organisations, space, and human perception and reaction.

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Image of Costa Rican House

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II. Tropicality: resistance, disjunction and power

Half of a millennia has passed since colonisers introduced alien building types to the tropics, relegating place-conscious, climate-evolved vernacular inhabitations1 to largely unrecorded history. In the 19th century, problems of comfort and survival for white colonisers living in the tropics became the focus of efforts within institutions of the metropole to develop systematic, universal design and construction procedures aimed at delivering ‘hygienic’ tropical buildings2. The end of World War II heralded a period of decolonization during which tropical architecture became institutionalised as a professional field in London3. Research groups including the Building Research Station, and the Department of Tropical Architecture at the AA, which was founded in 1954 by Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry and Otto Koeningsberger, sought responses to a ‘crisis’4 of incongruity between dominant architectural production and its respective socio-cultural contexts.

In the half-century, since these programmes ended, the built fabric of sovereign tropical regions has undergone natural mutation propelled in part by a reconfiguration of political and cultural networks and a collective introspection. Spontaneous manifestations of the phenomena coined critical regionalism in the early 1980’s5 have emerged from within tropical societies and exhibit parallels, but also stand in colourful contrast to a thickening shroud of globalized homogeneity.

In this visiting school programme, we will consider the informal builder, local artist and architect key sources of power6 and resistance; simultaneously generators and perpetuators of culture. Conceived from within the multi-scalar and often dialectically opposed spheres of their political and climactic contexts, from the local to global, their material creations serve as fettered manifestations of struggle, mutable identity and collective aspirations7.

We will seek and expose moments of residual disjunction, resistance and culturally specific architectural features. We will use drawing, diagram, film and photography to exfoliate the skin of familiarity from modes of domestic being and to document the immediate climactic and socio-political context. Through dissection and reanimation of the constituent elements of selected domestic inhabitations, we will contemplate their role as political8 and cosmopoietic9 instruments within their society.

1 “The form of (Neolithic) buildings and settings,” writes Marco Frascari “arose from within logic of their immediate surroundings, and from the organising processes in peoples minds and bodies. Using the materials that were available, people instinctively constructed dwellings that proceeded information, forms, meanings and sensual inhabitability that the cultural sense of happiness required.” The Cultural role of Architecture(London:Routledge, 2012) 2 In the book Third World Modernism: Architecture: Development and Identity, Jiat-Hwee Chang writes that “For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prevalence of miasmic theories of disease transmission and other related environmentalist discourse meant that a lot of attention was channelled towards modifying the built environment in order to mitigate the supposedly pernicious effects of the torrid tropical climate on white men. As a result, systematic bodies of knowledge on building in the colonial tropics were developed from the early nineteenth century…” (Routledge, 2010).

3 Rachael Lee, in her lecture titled ‘Searching for the Social in the Tropical” at the University of Liverpool in October 2013.

4 The source of this ‘crisis’ is described by Jiat-Hwee Chang: “The colonial environmentalist discourse on climate was not simply a neutral scientific knowledge describing natural phenomena, it was entwined with the politics of colonial governance and the related constructions of race, culture, and civilization.” Rachael Lee states that “in contrast to the hygiene engineers who preceded them, (mid-century tropical architects in London) shared a commitment to creating buildings that attempted to understand and respond to the social needs of the users” 6 5 Kenneth Frampton, Towards a Critical Regionalism in Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983) 6 ”Power should not be simply conceptualized as something that resides with certain political entities and is typically displayed as a form of oppressive dominance in highly visible nationalist projects, as is common in the current scholarship on Third World modernism. Power should also be understood as something more pervasive, ubiquitous and productive, shaping knowledge and practices linked to the production of the larger built environment.” Ibid.

7 This idea and many related can be found in The Cultural role of Architecture: ‘Throughout history, architecture has played a key role in the expression and communication of the ideas, beliefs and values of a culture or society’ writes John Hendrix, Paul Emmons, and Jane Lomholt (London:Routledge, 2012) 8 political in this instance is intended to implicate the device as a mediator of the relationship between actors within the society. Sibel Bozdoğan has called buildings “visible politics.” Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).

9 In describing cosmopoeisis or ‘world making’ , Nelson Goodman writes: ‘world’ is not merely the physical universe, but also a sum of cultural artifacts, the system of organization and meanings created by a group of people at any one time. In this way, the formation structure and spaces in the architecture plays a significant role in creating and contributing to a cultural world. An architectural cosmopoiesis is the sum of the different ways that architects contribute to the world order in their architectural conceiving. Ways of World Making (Indianappolis:Hackettt, 1978)

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III. Methodology

The workshop will develop exercises for exposing, stripping and decontextualizing architectural mechanisms to expose the nature of their sources and articulation and their role as mediators of the inter-relationships between the users, program, physical environment, societal context and architecture.

Exercise 01: Interviews / Field Research Students will work alongside tutors to formulate interview questions and set out to rouse and record the stories and experiences of those who live there, allowing us to explore the character of architecture and the singularities of inhabitation conditions, daily rituals, novel uses of space and function.

Exercise 02: Story Boarding - Perceptual Diagram Based on observations, insights and documented stories, you will then compose your own story about architecture, domesticity and place, devising a diagram and drawing as a spatial story board, mapping the relevant areas that will become the starting point for the film.

Exercise 03: Film Students will make a short film as a narrative composition of images (form, space, light, colour, materiality) and sound (voice, story, city, nature). This film intended to become a unique and perceptive form of architectural construct.

Exercise 04: Post Story Boarding - Critical Mapping We will map onto our original story board our progress, aesthetic decisions and relevant modifications done through the process as means of understanding the correlation between story, method and technical prowess.

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IV. The Team

Brendon Carlin - Course Director Brendon is a Unit Master at the Architectural Association and partner and director at Urban Systems, responsible for management, research and design direction of the office.

Before founding Urban Systems Brendon practised in the United States, China, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

He collaborated on a diverse range of projects as a design architect including Raffles City Hangzhou with UN Studio in Amsterdam, first-prize winning competitions with Plasma Studio in London, urban proposals with Relational Urbanism in London and a range of projects in his native Colorado. Through research, mentoring and practice, Through research, mentoring and practice, Brendon continues a development of computational generative latticeworks which elicit networking, collision and isolation, exploring the potentials of architecture and the city to initiate progressive shifts within society.

Brendon currently pursues this and other areas of research as a Unit Master of Intermediate Unit 6 at the Architectural Association, which he has mentored since 2011. He has been an instructor for six years with several courses at progressive institutions worldwide including the post-graduate course ‘Territorialism’ with the Berlage Institute and the Architectural Associations ‘Design+Make’ masters program. He has taught in various workshops at Harvard’s GSD and the AA including AA visiting schools in Beijing, and MakeLab at Hooke Park.

Brendon received a masters degree in Architecture and Urbanism at the Architectural Association of London’s Design Research Laboratory, and an undergraduate of Environmental Design in Architecture at the University of Colorado Boulder, graduating first in class.

Maria Paez Gonzalez - Course Director Maria graduated with honours from the Architecture program of the Universidad de Los Andes, in Merida, Venezuela. She has been practicing architecture and design in Venezuela and the UK since 2006.

In 2007 she joined Plasma Studio and Ground Lab in London, becoming a key designer in award winning projects like Deep Ground, Longgang, China. Link City Competition in Kufstein, Austria amongst many others.

She joined Foster and Partners in 2009, working in Urban and Architectural projects and competitions; she is currently a leading member of the Apple Campus 2 Project, in Cupertino California. The 176 acre project, which will be the new headquarters for Apple Corporation which broke ground in 2014 and will achieve completion in 2016.

Maria has taught in various institutions independently and in collaboration with Relational Urbanism, as a lead tutor in workshops in ULA, Venezuela and with the Veritas University in Costa Rica in 2012 and the Architectural Association.

She is also a founder of the design studio Built Operations.

Andrew Houston - Tutor

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V. Bibliography

Alexander Tzonis, L. L. (2001). Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalisation. University of Michigan: Wiley.

Appadurai, Arjun. (2010). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Bachelard, Gaston. (1958). The Poetics of Space. Paris: PResses Universitaires de France.

Baweja, V. (2008). A Pre-history of Green Architecture: Otto Koenigsberger and Tropical Architecture, from Princely Mysore to Post-colonial London. Ann-Arbor: Pro-Quest.

Bergson, H. L. (2002). Henry Hergson: Key Writings. New York: Continuum.

Briganti, Chiara. Mezei, Kath. (2012). The Domestic Space Reader. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press Canizaro, V. B. (2012). Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Chang, J. H. (2014). A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonialism, Ecology and Technology. London: Routledge.

Charington, H. (2012). An Agency of Endless Play: Alvar. Sein채joki and Jyv채skyl채: Alvar Aalto Museum.

Curtis, W. J. (1986). Towards an Authentic Regionalism. Mimar, 19.

Eggener, K. L. (2002). Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism. Journal of Architectural Education, 228-37.

Foyle, A. M. (1954). Conference on tropical architecture 1953: a report on the proceedings of the conference held at University College, London, March, 1953. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Frampton, K. (1998). Towards a Critical Regionalism. In H. Foster, The Anit-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (pp. 17-34). New York : The New Press.

Frascari, M. (2012). Places for Thinking. In J. L. Paul Emmons, The Cultural Role of Architecture. London: Routledge.

Fry, J. D. (2013). Village Housing in the Tropics: With Special Reference to West . London: Routledge.

Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianappolis: Hackett.

Harris, J. (2011). Globalisation and Contemporary Art. Chinchester: Wiley Blackwell.

Hayden, Dolores. (1982). The Grand Domestic Revoluion. Cambridge, Massachussets, and London, England: MIT Press.

Heynen, Hikde. Baydar, Gulsum. (2005). Negociating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture.

Abigndon: Routledge.

Hernandez, Felipe. (2010) Bhabha for Architects. London: Routledge.

Lee, R. (October 2013). Searching for the Social in the Tropical . University of Liverpool.

Rice, Charles. (2007). The Emergence of the Interior. London: Routledge.

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VI. Co-conspirators

A consortium of photographers, filmmakers, philosophers, architects and designers that form an intrinsic part of our critical apparatus. Their pursuits, na誰veties and intricacies kindle our imagination

Superstudio

Eisenman

Anny Stephanou

Bernard Tschumi

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Jeff Wall

Richard Hamilton

Edward Hopper

Giorgio de Chirico

OMMX Document Title Chapter Opener Headline

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ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

San Jose, Costa Rica August 01 - 15th 2015 http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/VISITING/costarica