GSAPP Writing Sample

Translations

conceived of nurtured forsaken doubted mishandled enjoyed made drawn

by Anne Freeman

Disgust and Desire

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disgust - postmodernism - misuse

scultpure that repels and entices How can one “misuse” a material?

Guided by our shared obsession with unconventional methods of fabrication, Laura and I experimented with the many forms and finishes of spray foam.

We investigated the qualities and implications of this plastic material and experienced the kind of discovery that can only happen through physical exploration.

The voluptuous form echoes classic and iconic sculptures of the feminine physique, subversively rendered in cheap foam rather than precious marble.

1:1 Fabrication Fall 2022

Partner: Laura Blaszcak, M.Arch ‘23

Professor: Zach Mulitauaopele

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Determined to make an object that was repulsive to look at and touch -- disgusting yet alluring in its garishness -- we began by making our own stock material: scrap chunks of purple foam reconstituted with spray foam into thick slabs. We found that spray foam can take on a variety of finishes depending on curing conditions: at times it can be glossy, wet and bubbly; elsewhere it is matte and opaque. The slabs grew into a vertical stack supported by irregular and improbable columns made from foam themselves. The result is an artificial monstrosity that nearly resembles organic growth such as fungi and slime mold. The finishing touch is a tensile skin of nylon, an homage to the veiled nuns and adorned goddesses of Renaissance art. The object took on a second and final form when we sectioned it with a chainsaw and reassembled the cut pieces to reveal the inner substance.

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Inviolable Space: Playboy Architecture’s Colonization of the Domestic Interior

Paul Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 34.

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In the decades following the Second World War, American society bore witness to several movements that rejected traditional gender roles and embraced a liberation of gender expression and sexuality. This change in how Americans understood themselves had vast ramifications for how they inhabited public and private spaces. It is often taken for granted in architectural studies that during the 19th century domestic spaces were distinct from public spaces and that women influenced the former while men dominated the latter. Modern skyscrapers and places of business were populated by men, whereas the domestic space of housekeeping and childrearing was run by women. However, societal changes in the 1950s and beyond challenged these assumptions on several fronts: re-examination of history, advocacy for sexual liberation and popularization of technology embedded in architecture. One salient voice that illuminated a new path in the midst of the change was Playboy magazine.

The first issue of Playboy was published in Chicago in December 1953. The men’s lifestyle and entertainment magazine quickly rose to popularity across America and became an icon for modern masculinity.

In the decade that Playboy came on the scene, there were several shifts in how Americans understood modernity, gender and how both of these concepts play out in architecture. Playboy subverted the male- and femalecoded spatial narrative of the time by carefully crafting a rhetoric that placed man comfortably as the king of his domicile without undermining his masculinity. In his book Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics, author Paul Preciado examines the ways in which the Playboy image changed masculinity and domestic spaces. He writes, “The new male identity...was not defined by distinct psychological characteristics, but by a habitat: the bachelor pad, where the future playboy had to retreat in search of his lost freedom.”1 The “bachelor pad” became a viable habitat for single, modern men who embraced technology and shunned marriage.

Activities such as shopping and cooking that were considered feminine were supposedly reclaimed by men. Suddenly, architecture became inextricably Inviolable Space - excerpts

linked to modern masculinity. The magazine illustrated a way to be a man outside of marriage, where one’s masculinity had less to do with being the head of a family than it did with having the right environs and possessions.

Playboy framed this reclamation of domestic space as a fantasy by depicting in its publications the luxurious, indulgent home and lifestyle of this new kind of man.2 “Playboy’s early editorials can be read as a manifesto of ‘male liberation from domestic ideology.’ However, this ‘liberation’ did not consist of escaping domesticity, as feminism did, but paradoxically, of constructing a specifically ‘male’ domestic space.”3 Unlike the already male-dominated public realm, the bachelor pad was designed for a man’s private relaxation and enjoyment. But this domestic space was still different from other homes for men at the time in that everything about the bachelor pad was designed to function without the presence of a nuclear family.

Gender theorist Judith Butler interprets architecture as an incubator where gender is developed and expressed as a performance.4 Unlike theories that explain gender as innate or purely psychological, Butler and Preciado’s view is that gender is an expression enabled and tempered by habitat. It is a theory “according to which architecture is a biopolitical, surrogated womb where the process of becoming male or female is fully achieved.”5 Playboy writers clearly thought along the same lines. By designing a new domestic space, they created a new kind of man--the eponymous “playboy.” This kind of man was a young, single, career-minded, heterosexual consumer.

Nowhere was this new lifestyle more clearly expressed than in the kitchen that Playboy designed. In the essay “The New Dwelling: The Woman as Creator,” Bruno Taut provides a fine example of the pervasive association between women and the kitchen: “[New dwellings will provide] the woman with a way to improve her performance. She will adopt a new organization for her work and, with due consideration to the circumstances, arrange to perform individual chores--tending the children, cooking, serving meals, washing up, cleaning, laundry, shopping, etc.,--according to a plan.”6 These chores, time consuming and never ending, comprised a typical white middle class housewife’s schedule. Without such a woman to manage the kitchen, how could the playboy tend to an apartment by himself ?

The fantasy bachelor pad that Playboy invented featured a kitchen that was a sleek, highly stylized spectacle run by technology and not a housewife. Man’s colonization of the domestic space had penetrated the final frontier of the feminine domain: the kitchen. In alluring renderings Questions in Architectural History II - Spring 2021

See “Playboy Townhouse,” Playboy vol. 5, no. 9 (May 1962), 84 2

3

Preciado, Pornotopia, 32.

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (Theatre Journal 40, no. 4, 1988), 519.

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Preciado, Pornotopia, 33.

Bruno, Taut, “The New Dwelling: The Woman as Creator,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed.

Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, trans.

Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1924), 461.

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See “Playboy Bachelor Pad,” Playboy vol. 3, no. 10 (October 1956), 65.

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Preciado, Pornotopia, 94.

Hugh M. Hefner, “College Issue,” Playboy, vol. 3, no. 10 (October 1956), 12.

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published in their magazine, Playboy touted polished fiberglass screens that concealed a noiseless dishwasher, a remote controlled breakfast station and a broiler-roaster with clear dome lid--everything efficient and a spectacle.7 Sophisticated, innovative technologies could take over the tasks of cleaning and cooking, making “the woman disappear from the kitchen.”8 The magazine had designed an incubator where playboys belonged and women had no place; they visit, but cannot stay. The October 1956 issue of Playboy made explicit the argument that the magazine had been folding into their columns and images for nearly three years: “[T]he overwhelming percentage of homes is furnished by women. What of the bachelor and his need for a place to call his own?”9 The argument is positioned as if women had the upper hand in most domestic scenes. It is true that in most suburban homes domesticity was associated with femininity, but men still lorded over the home when they were not out at work. A seat was reserved for the head of the household at the dinner table; many suburban homes included a private study for men to pursue hobbies and activities separate from their families. Women kept the household running, but men still dominated private spaces as well as public. Rather than subverting this disparity between men and women, by creating a new kind of domestic space Playboy only invented yet another way for men to be in control.

The white American man’s hegemony over space did not, however, take over as much it could have. The bachelor pad was a fantasy that existed more in seductive renderings and advertisements than it ever did in real life. Not only was it an unrealistic lifestyle, but it was inaccessible for most men. It was an ideal for a particular kind of young, career-minded man to aspire to. The reality was that heterosexual marriage was still the norm and few men ever abandoned their suburban, conjugal lifestyle to be a playboy. The influence of the playboy lifestyle, however, is undeniable. It sparked something in the imagination of designers. If gender is nurtured by habitat, this fantasy was all Playboy needed to have a real impact on the built environment.

The influence that Playboy had on domestic American architecture during the Cold War was not entirely subliminal. From the outset, Playboy took an interest in contemporary architects and furthered their designs when other publications would not. While other US magazines like Ladies Home Journal or House Beautiful balked at the designs of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, believing them to be foreign to the American tradition, Playboy frequently wrote laudatory articles on Mies, Walter Gropius, Philip Inviolable Space - excerpts

Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Wallace K. Harrison. Playboy’s imagery, calibrated to spark its readers imagination, was filled with the “simple, functional and modern” designs of Eames, Saarinen, Nelson, Bertoia, and Knoll. Preciado summarizes, “During the Cold War, Playboy had become a platform for spreading domestic architecture and design as masculine consumer goods for the American popular culture.”10 By aligning with these architects that came to define Cold War era architecture, Playboy positioned itself as a defining influence of style and culture of that time.

Even before the aesthetic argument of Playboy’s architecture, the mere fact that men were encouraged to appropriate domestic space for themselves was a huge step towards modernization. Architectural historian Beatriz Colomina argues that the way we define modernity is not simply a stylistic or technological distinction: “The way we think about architecture is organized by the way we think about the relationship between inside and outside, private and public.”11 In this sense, modern architecture is not just about aesthetic or construction; rather, it is the shift in private/ public boundaries. Playboy magazine simultaneously altered the definition of “inside” space and created a new definition of masculinity. It is this overlap that makes Playboy such a significant factor in Cold War era architecture.

Tastemakers like Playboy magazine encouraged men to embrace a new modern lifestyle full of fantasy and technology, but women saw few concrete changes to their status in the workplace or in the home.

This continued disparity, unfortunately, was not limited to the United States. The aforementioned modern architects that Playboy lauded and other publications saw as too foreign spent a good deal of their careers designing buildings outside of North America and Europe.

Playboy emboldened men to colonize domestic space while maintaining control of the public sphere. For the most part, it was a fantasy; most men did not actually leave married life to be playboys, but neither did they relinquish what control they had in their public and private spaces. Preciado clarifies, “The playboy’s shift toward the home and his relative move from the exterior was not, however, a withdrawal from the public sphere.”12 It used to be that public spaces were run by men and private spaces were run by women (for men). The fantasy of “playboy architecture” as well as several liberation movements in the 1950s challenged this architectural and sexual separation.

However, unlike the efforts to liberate women and queer communities, Playboy did nothing to disrupt the dominance of masculinity in all sectors of society.

Questions in Architectural History II - Spring 2021

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Preciado, Pornotopia, 18.

Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 12.

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Preciado, Pornotopia, 34.

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In Their Own Ways

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identity - making - iteration

discovery of self through making “The MAKERGRAPH studio centers on thinking-by-making; on craft and digital craft; and on material practice. The studio adapts a thesislike sensibility into a committed sequence of highly structured, iterative, cumulative assignments.

In parallel and mutual influence with those assignments, you create a visual, material, and verbal archive of your own preoccupations and reflections from your life experiences within and beyond the design world. This requires radical authenticity and creative courage.”

– Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano ADV VI Spring 2023

Professors: Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano, LOT-EK

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When I look at my work from the MAKERGRAPH studio, I see tension between extremes. Natural alongside artificial, organic with manufactured, rough with smooth, ordered with chaotic. There are moments of efficiency and lightness, and other moments of redundancy and abundance sometimes held together in literal tension. All four of these objects began with bursts of intense and intuitive creativity, but when I step back to examine them, I see an amazing confluence of themes and interests that have been with me for years. I was genuinely surprised to notice that a grid -- and its opposite -- show up in every object. From the beginning, week by week, I tried to understand what I had made by writing about it. I traced the lineage of my work as it took on a life of its own.

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In Their Own Ways - excerpts

Stacked on top of each other, these pieces stand six feet and three inches tall, a good deal higher than my five foot seven. When I face my creation I am surprised to recognize myself in it. My obsessions, my sensibilities, my deepest creative impulses have all found their way into the object before me. The first piece, an assembly of shells made of stones and spray foam, reveals my long held fascination with form finding and unexpected shapes. The metal grid on top of it is at once precise and expressive, each delicate wire ending with tape, like little white flags shooting out in all directions. The wooden object is my most excessive. A bird’s nest of both raw and processed wood, it appears to grow out of the stone and form the backbone of the piece as a whole. Finally, the spray foam that has been a fascination of mine long before this studio reappears in another guise as a canopy that nestles among the branches of the wood object.

Masonry My experiments in thinking-by-making started with a prescription: each week I must use the assigned material to make an object that measures 18”x18”x18”. Over a collective three hours, I found a variety of stones in Morningside Park, some with jagged edges, others smooth and rounded. I decided to use expanding foam to join these distinct objects. The foam, as is its way, fills any crevice, thereby resolving the incompatibility of the stones’ contrasting and organic edges. At first I loved the irony of joining stone, an organic and nontoxic material, with one of the most artificial and surreal substances I could find.

I created a flexible sling in which I placed the stones and allowed gravity to determine the form of the stones as a composite object. The foam that I sprayed in between the stones holds the pieces together and captures the curvature exactly.

The shells I produced with this method are smooth on one side and uneven on the other. When lit from within, the space glows, as I discovered that spray foam is partially translucent. It takes on a honey yellow color in the light.

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In Their Own Ways

My eye always goes back to the edges among the shells’ heterogeneous parts: Are the edges of my found objects formed by nature, construction, use? The edges of the broken pavement chunks are defined by the aggregate--little stones bound together. This profile is repeated at a larger scale throughout the whole object. The found pieces are like aggregates bound together by a fluid substance that cures into a solid. The binder negotiates the voids in between the objects whether they are smooth or jagged. The edges are opportunities for the stones to be connected.

Are their different profiles an incompatibility? Does the foam erase or emphasize the distinct shapes? The edges are opportunities, but by the same token they are weak points, fault lines.

Metal At the start of our second week, just before I left my apartment to look for scrap metal, I remembered that I have a closet full of leftover model materials that I have accumulated over the past two years. In the closet I found 27 steel wires, packaged in 6 red plastic tubes. Wanting to use every part of the material that I had, I spent two hours segmenting the plastic packaging into 114 connecting nodes and puncturing them with a pin so that each node could hold two wires perpendicular to each other.

I ended up with a flexible mesh that is surprisingly strong and resilient. When I set out to make an object with metal, I expected it to be heavy and cold. I surprised myself by finding a form of metal that can be woven like fabric into a lightweight, spacious and playful object.

By producing a metal object that is light and delicate, I was surprised to see that I defied my own preconceptions of metal as always being thick and heavy. I learned even more from this making experience about the nuanced qualities of 22 gauge steel wire. Without the application of heat, the wires will always return to their linear form. Although, because of their huge ratio of length to diameter, they are pliable and flimsy. Almost like their plastic connections: strong and adherent to one form, but still flexible and light.

The wire itself is capable of a remarkable amount of tension. The plastic as well is strong enough to hold the wires together as they bend and flex.

As I was weaving, I noticed that there is some friction between the plastic nodes and the wire, but not enough to keep the nodes from sliding off if I bent the wire too far. To mitigate this problem, I hastily MAKERGRAPH ADV VI Studio - Spring 2023

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tore pieces off a roll of nearby masking tape and secured them on the ends of the wire. Once I completed the piece and began to play with it, the taped ends started to tangle and entwine with each other. At first this was a nuisance, but soon I understood that this friction creates the possibility of unlimited shapes. Instead of adding yet another system to structure the piece, it already has everything it needs to reinvent itself. It is a poised, tensile piece, always a product of the wire’s innate qualities, gravity and the distribution of its component parts. I like to think of the metal grid as a kind of computer for determining the position of its taped ends.

Wood I began the third week with a growing sense of confidence in my ability to make something out of nothing. I was learning to trust in my process. Like last week’s object, my wooden architecture originated as an irregular grid.

There are moments of material and structural efficiency as well as moments of density and redundancy. The tree branches, irregular and prickly, contrast with the planar smoothness and uniform barcoded ends of the wood scraps.

Like my metal object, this piece originates from the process of weaving an irregular grid. Also like my metal object, the material comes from the same stash of model supplies that I’ve been hoarding in my closet for two years.

The wooden sticks are from a model all M.Arch students built for the second technology sequence, which was a skeleton of columns and beams attached at the joints by pins. This is why, two years ago, I put blue tape on the ends of the wood –to keep it from splitting when I pushed the needle through.

Initially the object comprised only one tree branch with many basswood strips. That branch was found not in nature but in the garbage bin in the fabrication shop. It caught my eye because of the juxtaposition of the artificial, neon orange plastic of the bin liner and the organic roughness of the branch.

This contrast between artificial and organic continued to influence my object as I started to put the pieces together. The object grew rapidly as I added more manufactured wood, then more branches. It is somewhere between life and death, an artificial tree spliced together from many different kinds of wood.

When I was finished with making, I was surprised that elements from the initial iterations actually made their way into the object I see now. There are moments where the woven grid is neat, others where it’s disjointed and random. Even the hyperbolic double curvature that I 17

In Their Own Ways

discovered in my initial weaving experiments reemerged when I inserted the long vertical strips that hold the two grids together in tension. This sort of echo was not conscious on my part, or even something that I would have desired before I saw the result, but I was amazed how those initial abandoned ideas were still active in my creative process.

Plastic I thought I was done exploring spray foam, and yet that week I uncovered even more of its unique qualities. Using a combination of rigid and flexible plastic, I made a layered formwork in which I cast thin sheets of spray foam. When I first did this, I accidentally discovered that spray foam absorbs ink. Images and writing from plastic bags have transferred onto the spray foam, creating a collage of the messages and connotations embedded in our daily use of plastic.

This process revealed so much to me about the qualities of plastic and the many meanings of the word. In its undetermined form, plastic is impressionable and almost defined by its lack of qualities. Once I gave it qualities, by means of plastic bags and containers that had been formed by someone else, it took on a range of textures, colors, finishes and forms.

Writing What really is my role as the creator? I am only a part of the process that led to the existence of this object. I did not make the materials; I found them. I have no influence over the laws of physics that shaped these objects. Do I even have control over my own creative intuitions?

As I studied the products of my creativity with almost clinical scrutiny, I was able to discern a continuous thread running throughout each component.

What I was studying was the distinct natures of each material. But really, to look at what I had done with these materials was to understand my way of thinking about them. I observed and processed these qualities the best way I know how, through writing. And this is how my way of thinking, my way of making, reached its ultimate form as this manuscript. My obsessions and preoccupations, even my habits became four objects, which took on lives of their own. In turn, I reflected on and wrote about the objects, and my writing became an object itself–a book, which comes to life in its own way.

MAKERGRAPH ADV VI Studio - Spring 2023

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admired feared loved polished iterated upon mishandled worried about developed devolv cared for consumed valued subjected given cherished deserted experimented upon like ignored populated adjusted nurtured given a defined entrusted adopted carved out puzzled over conflated glued together wondered ab conducted eaten disseminated destroyed c dismembered covered up made in secret gentri strongly about created criticized defended pun differentiated shared online published disguis reflected lauded missed necessitated orphane modeled clicked on woven together ferried d imprisoned cropped carried out elected tam revered listened to simulated given shape lofte stuffed animated held close thought about vis released live painted trained performed purs lamented reckoned with delivered laminated c variegated willed researched refined projec

n revisited written about studied objectified ved absorbed processed invented reinvented agency remembered obsessed over redrawn ed made important recovered overestimated life of their own internalized spilled let down d over recorded cleaned up drawn out labored bout dragged along presented by associated colored starved paid for observed dictated ified rejoiced over saved confused proposed felt nished tried unknown translated smuggled in sed prescribed underbaked doubted repeated ed cried over planted sculpted discovered told dreamed up sanded held sacred regurgitated med recovered edited compiled misapplied ed deeply felt masked risked poeticized started sualized burnished purified scaled saturated sued found misled waylaid sweetened owned churned out embellished condensed cemented cted trimmed propogated shaded The End