Dichotomy 19: Ugly

19 UGLY

Editors Jennifer Richards Michael Sklenka Business Manager John Quaine Staff Mollie Decker Kamara Fant Thomas Provost Joseph RafďŹ n Molly Redigan Samuel Stevens

Faculty Advisors Tadd Heidgerken Noah Resnick PRICE $20.00 US University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 4001 W McNichols Rd Detroit, Michigan 48221 313.993.1523 Our digital archive can be found at: http://dichotomy.arch.udmercy.edu

Printing: Heath Press, Royal Oak, MI Copyright Š 2013 by Dichotomy | University of Detroit Mercy All rights reserved. No part of this issue may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from Dichotomy.

ISSN # 0276-5748

mission Dichotomy, a student published journal of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, strives to be the critical link to the discourse on design, architecture, urbanism, and community development. Like the institution, Dichotomy focuses on social justice and critical thought concerning intellectual, spiritual, ethical, and social development issues occurring in and outside of Detroit. The aim of Dichotomy is to disseminate these relevant investigations conducted by students, faculty, and professionals.

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001 002 003 004 005 006 007

Editors’ Note: Jennifer Richards + Michael Sklenka

008 010 012 014 016 018 020 Kaveh Alagheband: THE ELEPHANT MAN UNDER INTENSIVE CARE

022 024 026 028 030 032 034 François Blanciak: UGLY AND ULTRAORDINARY

Adam Anderson: METABOLIC TECTONIC

036 038 040 042 044 046 048

Steven Parissien: VULGARITY WITHOUT PRECEDENT

050 052 054 056 058 060 062 Samuel Langkop: CONTRAST

Maria Simon: UNDER THE OVERPASS

064 066 068 070 072 074 076 Manu Garza: FORM FOLLOWS UGLY

078 080 082 084 086 088 090 Stefano Corbo: IN THE REALM OF AESTHETICS

092 094 096 098 100 102 104 Jimenez Lai: ON TYPES OF SEDUCTIVE ROBUSTNESS

106 108 110 112 114 116 118 Libby Balter Blume: [DE]FORMING THE FIGURE

120 122 124 126 128 130 132 134 136 138 140 142 144 146 Víctor Ciborro + Natalia Ventura: I DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE ME VOMIT

Krysia Bussière: TEMPORAL DESIGN

148 150 152 154 156 158 160 Adamantios Tegkelidis: UGLY = NOT BEAUTIFUL (?)

Anna Klochowicz: HOUSE WITH A VIEW ON THE MINE SHAFT

162 164 166 168 170 172 174 Aaron Jones: FUNICULAR CASINO

176 178 180 182 184 186 188

Andrea Alberto Dutto: THE POLITICS OF UGLINESS

190 192 194 196 198 200 202 Marcin Kedzior: UGLY ORDERS

UDM|SOA NEWS

'Elephant', photo by Andy Richards, 2013

editors’ note

This issue of Dichotomy contains a unique collection of material from seventeen diverse voices concerning the concept of ugliness within environments of design. Compared to past issues, UGLY probes the taboo sides of aesthetics to give a fresh perspective on meanings of architecture, form, and culture.

Since the revival of the journal in 2007, each consecutive issue has matured and evolved to include increasingly relevant articles to be assimilated into a contemporary literary debate. With issue nineteen, our aim was to obtain a global perspective on the theme with a broader call for entry distribution through various forms of social media. After a tough selection process, the final publication contains works by authors of many different design backgrounds from eight different countries.

UGLY bears further relation to the full Dichotomy lineage with the recent creation of a website devoted to the digital distribution of every issue since the first publication in 1979. The site (dichotomy.arch.udmercy.edu) independently extends beyond the UDM Library’s digital archive with a user-friendly reading format, an option for seamlessly submitting articles for future issues, and an outlet for up-to-date Dichotomy news.

Due to the commitment of this year’s staff, Dichotomy has continued to explore new concepts and evolve as a grass-roots publication. The momentum associated with the past several issues and the enthusiasm of future staff ensures that issue twenty, Old, will also be a varied and exciting critique of architecture and design amidst the 50th Anniversary of the UDM SOA.

Your Editors,

Jennifer Richards and Michael Sklenka

008 010 012 014 016 020 022 THE ELEPHANT MAN UNDER INTENSIVE CARE: AESTHETICS, TECHNOLOGY, & ARCHITECTURE

Kaveh Alagheband Kaveh Alagheband graduated with a Master of Architecture from Azad University of Khorasgan in Esfahan, Iran. After 3 years of practical experience and having taught in several branches of Azad University, he left Iran to continue his education in architecture.

He also had a short cooperative with Iran Architecture Magazine before moving to the United States. His works have been published within various international conference proceedings on the issue of identity in architecture. He is now a PhD student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. As the co-author of the Persian publication, Multiple-Personality Architecture, his interests include subjectivation, temporality, and anti-spatialization theories.

Facing: John Merrick, graphite on paper, Paul Mellor, 2011.

Figure 1: Royal Ontario Museum, Sam Javanrough, 2012.

“The stuffy old gentleman of a museum has developed a horrendous steel and glass tumor. It has become the ‘Elephant Man’ of museums… [T]he mis-use of ‘technology’ has become the fatal disease of civilization.” 1 James Howard Kunstler

Innovative, Fresh, or Ugly?

There are numerous attempts in post-structuralist philosophy to deconstruct binary pairs in language-discourse, and, thus, to free thinking from such dualities. In aesthetics, this means moving beyond the dichotomy of beautiful and ugly. The Elephant Man, a 1980 drama film based on a true story, however, shows that people, regardless of linguistic attempts, almost instantly distinguish the negative feeling associated with the so-called ugly. This, in turn, points to a gap between the discourse and the reality. This gap might be concealed where not only the discourse and the feelings, but also the reality is socially constructed; even if they are subject to differential and unbalanced transformations.

Accordingly, one might ask: are beautiful and ugly real categories, or, are they (re)constructed, each time and in each attempt, by the very discourse that seemingly tries to de-construct them?

To demonstrate that the boundary of beautiful-ugly is not clear, and that it is subject to change, one might use Pia Ednie Brown’s account of Greg Lynn’s projects. She writes that Peter Eisenman once told Lynn that his Embryological Houses “were ‘really ugly and horrible.’ A year after making that remark, however, Lynn showed the Ark of the World … project and Eisenman found it ‘disgusting,’ asking him ‘why isn’t it like those beautiful Embryological Houses?’ ”2 The author continues referring to Sylvia Lavin who was quoted as calling the latter project “the ugliest thing that I ever saw,” while later in her article, “Freshness,” Lavin recasts that diagnosis in terms of “novelty.” 3 The above story also relates the shivering edge that defines the beautiful-ugly to the issue of technology which considerably influenced the design of those projects. Lynn himself refers to such a process in terms of “talking to machines” and “learning their tendencies and capacities.” 4

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Figure 2: Embryological House, Marvin Rand, Courtesy of Greg Lynn FORM.

Figure 3: Ark of the World, Greg Lynn, Courtesy of Greg Lynn FORM.

Because of the contemporary advancements in computerized technologies, we are now provided with more powerful tools. Thus, the introduction of novelties into the field of design may have been accelerated, and perhaps they are more of an issue today. But what relates novelty with ugliness is that they are both deviations from the normal with which a reactionary fear of the (at least previously) unknown is associated.

Yet the other, or even deeper, problem is that the normal is not any better defined.

In the following lines, we will go through the Elephant Man story to analyze how the social machine produces dichotomies such as normal-abnormal, beautiful-ugly, and insideoutside. This may be beneficial because it offers a case where art and science equally engage with the issue of ugliness, and they both fail to deliver a certain definition or a clear boundary in that regards. But technology, as a shivering edge and a hybrid that simultaneously accommodates both poles of such dichotomies, proves crucial in rejecting them.

In the context of current architecture-practice where offices have changed from studios to labs, probably to emphasize the scientific and technological aspects of architecture, this might provide a productive study.

The Elephant Man and the Ethics of Abnormality John Merrick, “the Elephant Man,” lived in the late 1800s in England and was considered the ugliest person in the world. In the course of

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events, however, the ugliest man alive became attractive and this was an interesting subject for writers and philosophers. One explanation offered here was that such a radical change happened because the society changed the emphasis from an outside look, which treated the Elephant Man as a material-body or as an object, to an inside look, which deals with his subjective qualities. This apparent change of view has deeper layers. Severyn T. Bruyn, for example, writes: “This transformation for the beholder is important. It concerns the relationship between what is ugly by convention and what is seen equally by convention to be beauty inside.” 5 Among other versions of the story, however, we will focus on the script that David Lynch edited for his movie because it offers a totally different analysis. Here, that apparently radical change is initially emphasized between the daytime experiences of Merrick, at the hospital, which includes compassion, kindness and a lady who calls him “Romeo,” as opposed to Merrick’s nighttime experience. This second, and seemingly different, side is associated with the scene of another lady who screams and cries when seeing him, or the night porter who “organizes a series of visits to Merrick’s room in which members of lowclass Victorian society pay for the privilege of being horrified by Merrick’s body.” 6 But the compassion becomes visible as part of the mistreatment, not an alternative to it, in other words the line between the two is blurred: Lynch establishes the identity of

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compassion and cruelty: they both treat the object of their concern by condescension …. These attitudes allow the subject to ensure its own [distantiated] status as the one giving compassion or administering cruelty … because compassion [as much as cruelty] always implies the idea of a safe distance. One feels compassion for Merrick or for starving children on the other side of the world only as long as they don’t come too close.

Lynch’s film has the virtue of bringing Merrick too close and demanding that we see ourselves in what first appears as his impossible distance.7

movie to be an ethical act.8 He concludes that:

The moment that the audience understands that the line between the two treatments is blurred another border crumbles as well: the line between the inside and outside the film. The observers suddenly understand that they themselves might be accomplices in the mistreatment of the abnormal or the ugly. Moreover, their very ability to invest themselves in this story testifies to their alienated relation to normality, to the stuffy old man suited in the conventional expensive wrap. If they simply inhabited normality, if normality provided seamless identity they would not have taken an interest in the story. Normality has a boundary that is no clearer than the line that defines the ugly and it is not possible to certainly determine an inside or outside in each case. Because this omits any sense of a distance from abnormality, Todd McGowan considers deliberate watching of this

Biology of Art and Evolutionary Aesthetics

What the film proffers is not a universal humanism in which all subjects share an essentially human core that they never lose and on the basis of which they can identify with each other.

This is what occurs in most monster movies, which aim to affirm the common humanity hidden beneath the monstrosity. According to the logic of the Elephant Man, what we have in common is our monstrosity, a kernel of desire that prevents us from ever adopting a position of neutrality and from ever being simply human.9

“There can be a biology of art, as there is a biology of digestion, and of motoring” 10 Alex Comfort As mentioned before, the other notable point about the Elephant Man is that, at least for a considerable part, he is within a hospital environment, under intensive care, and carefully attended by a doctor. This, in turn, provides a convergence for biology and art, or aesthetics and science. Here, the implied question of ugliness is presented under the light of biology and ends with death. The presence of death is more emphasized if we consider that one of the reasons people distantiate themselves from the Elephant Man is his intensified

vulnerability to death: he may die just by lying down, as it actually happens. People however, may need a safe distance from death.

We may further develop the relation between aesthetics and death on the grounds of evolutionary aesthetics. For this purpose, we can connect the aesthetic feeling to selfpreservation and the survival instinct and, thus, we are enabled to compare the beautiful and ugly pair to life and death, and the positive or negative feelings associated with them.

The idea lying behind evolutionary aesthetics is that “the pleasures that underlie aesthetic judgments have evolved because they have played some role in adapting humans to their environment, either by playing a role in finding healthy mates, thereby ensuring reproductive success, or by directly promoting survival; for example, by making safe habitats seem attractive and healthy food seem delicious.” 11 Evolutionary aesthetics has been a hot topic recently, to a point that it was suggested as the next step in the social sciences: Adam Chmielewski, for example, writes: “it is not metaphysics, epistemology or ethics, but aesthetics that is the first and foremost of all philosophical disciplines. This claim is argued for by references to findings of evolutionary aesthetics.” 12 Also in art, architecture, and design disciplines (and maybe because of an organic nature inherent in computerized software; scripting, generative codes and evolutionary solvers that are widely employed nowadays), evolutionary aesthetics seems

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intriguing and timely. Moreover, since its development, the most intriguing point about Darwin’s theory of natural selection was that it could explain the appearance of design in the biological functionality which, philosophically undercuts the argument from arbitrary, architectimposed designs. Such a philosophical view is in line with the idea of architecture “without an architect” or “without resorting to design,” which was the aim of a generation of architecture pioneers like Bernard Tschumi and others.14 However, we should attend that if understudied, evolutionary aesthetics might lend a backbone of authenticity to the old aesthetic dichotomy of ugly and beautiful, and it would in turn lead to inevitable political outcomes. In other words, it has to be remembered that beautiful-ugly pair cannot be confined to objects. On the contrary, the rules establishing the authenticity of beauty are considered as the most repressive means of control in the social field. Albert Camus, for example, has defined beauty as a quality which procures the answer “yes” before any question has been asked.15 Conversely, a person devoid of that aesthetic quality will hear “no” before even asking any question. In an analogy to beauty, ugliness never works as a term of aesthetic only, but also of moral-political disapproval.16 This political aspect, which again connects life-death to the dichotomy of aesthetics, needs more exploration.

Biopolitics and Technology Aside from the previous argument, one may

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find many other sources on the relation of aesthetics and politics; especially after Walter Benjamin. However, while politicization of aesthetics might not be new, the politicization of life might prove invaluable in the context of this study and the interrelations of aesthetics, death, and technology.

In this regards, Giorgio Agamben, one of the pioneers of biopolitics, introduces the term “bare life” which marks a total politicization of life, and establishes a ground for the relations of politics and death-life. Agamben claims that in the biopolitical context, the concept of “death” reflects the “greatest indeterminacy,” and a “vicious circle that is truly exemplary.” 17 To support this claim, he starts with the fact that because of the heart-transplant technology, heart failure is now insufficient to define death and, at least temporarily, brain death seems to be the criterion. However, problems persist:

Figure 4: Loving the Machinery Within the Consumation of Great Sacrifice, Jeffery Scott, 2010.

It is … surprising that the champions of brain death can candidly write that brain death “inevitably leads quite quickly to death” (Walton, Brain Death, p. 51) or … that “these patients [who had been diagnosed as brain dead and who were, therefore, already dead] died within a day (quoted in Lamb, Death, p. 56).” 18 Agamben then borrows the technical term “neomort.” Neomorts have the legal status of corpses, but they would maintain some of the Figure 5: The New American Family and the Perfect Purchase, Jeffery Scott, 2010.

characteristics of life for the sake of possible future transplants. For example, they would be warm or pulsating. In this regards, he introduces the case of Karen Quinlan, the American girl who went into deep coma and was kept alive for years by means of artificial respiration and nutrition. Because her life is maintained only by means of life-support technology, Agamben uses the term “anatomy in motion” which, he claims, wavers between life and death.19 But I would like to transform this into “mechanical anatomy” to more emphasize the role of machines in this state of Karen’s biological life - which is a zone of in-distinction between life and death. Here, machines are not simply extensions of the body, the way a microscope or an artificial hand might be. Rather, they are inseparable from the body, or death will be inevitable. These machines are maintaining Karen’s technological hybrid life by means of artificial respiration, pumping blood into the arteries, and regulating the blood temperature.

In reality, in 1976, and on the request of Karen’s parents, “a court finally allowed the doctors to stop the machines on the grounds that the girl was to be considered as already dead. At that point Karen, while remaining in coma, began to breathe naturally and ‘survived’ in a state of artificial nutrition until 1985, the year of her natural ‘death.’ ” 20 For Agamben, this marks a zone of indetermination in which the words “life” and “death” lose their meaning. But what truly defines the shivering edge on which death and life are situated is technology again. Agamben suggests that:

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[J]ust as heart failure no longer furnishes a valid criterion for death once life-support technology and transplantation are discovered, so brain death would, hypothetically speaking, cease to be death on the day on which the first brain transplant were performed. Death, in this way, becomes an epiphenomenon of transplant technology.21

Gilles Deleuze, Machines, and Mechanization “...everything is a machine” 22 Gilles Deleuze So far, through evolutionary aesthetics, we have established a relation between falling dichotomies such as life-death and beautifulugly while referring to the role of technology.

Technology, either within a Greg Lynn project that freely crawls in and out of the boundary of ugliness, or as a transplant that changes the definition of death, marks a zone or a hybrid entity in which both sides of an apparent dichotomy are simultaneously present.

Technology is beautiful and ugly, dead and alive.

However, if we want to use evolutionary aesthetics as the gate of importing technology, for all the charm that it has, we should be cautious of a reappearing dichotomy. If we legitimize beauty as a necessary means of survival, or as an ideal form to which evolution happens, we should then be ready to face the political outcomes

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of the authenticity of such predetermined, convergence point. We might add that even the new evolutionary ecology “rejected both holism and vitalistic progressivism, replacing them with a view of nature that stressed individualism, conflict, chaos, complexity, and non-teleological, stochastic change.” 23 This might at first be similar to Henry Bergson’s seminal critiques of mechanistic rationalism in Creative Evolution (original 1907), arguing that science can never grasp the real. For Bergson, science slices the dynamic flux of nature-reality into static snapshots and closed systems for the purpose of analysis. In turn, this creates an artificial and mechanistic picture

of nature: a manifold series of still images that, Bergson claims, can never give a true account of living reality.24 Bergson’s cynical view of technology, which in turn leads to his critique of cinema, however, finds its counterpart in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. Deleuze regards the problem not as being mechanical, but as not being “mechanical enough.” 25 Thus, Deleuze embraces technology, and regards everything as being machine: human, objects and animals equally. If Darwinian theory of evolution is a blow to the normal human (the issue of the Elephant Man), inviting mankind into the animal kingdom by demonstrating our ineradicable animal nature,26 Deleuze’s theory might be an ultimate deterritorialization of dichotomies by merging the subject and the object. Accordingly, and through technology, humans are related not only to the animal world, but also to the inanimate world of objects that they themselves turn into machines.

Architecture / Machine In our age, computer generated virtualities, both in our life and in our design procedure, Gilles Deleuze’s level of “enough mechanization” provides a solid ground on which the virtuality may equally refer to the virtual technologies and the virtuality of human memory. In this regards the metamorphosis between the human and the machine (architecture); and between the body and the built environment. This becomes comparable to the mechanical anatomy, and the aesthetics of the recent waves of architecture might be more easily analyzed in Figure 6: Year of the Ox, Daniel Lee, 1993.

Figure 7: Aerial Paris, Lebbeus Woods, 1989.

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the contemporary techno-existential condition.

Such architecture, marked by terms such as adaptive, responsive, interactive and the like, may be regarded as a metamorphosis between nature and technology, and the organic and the mechanical; which are no more different at the new level of mechanization. In that sense, the post-metamorphosis architecture might be a rediscovery of the idea of architecture/machine which is now closer than ever to being mechanized enough.

A mature idea of architecture/machine at least goes back to the Corbusien “machine à habiter.”

The later developments of architecture/machine, especially in brutalism, prove revolutionary.

Maybe it is exactly this machine-nature that brings about the visual properties and the alien and unfriendly structure that critics ascribe to brutalism along with its brazen disregard of the social, historic, and architectural striations (preconditions). At that point, the architecture/ machine feels confident enough to move, to connect or to disconnect which is what defines a machine. These machines develop further in Archigram’s Moving Cities or in parasitic machines of Lebbeus Woods. They refer not only to the design and fabrication process that is now totally reformed, but also to the everyday life experiences that are now similarly subject to machines. Far from judgments (aesthetical or else) a machine is defined by its functions which, thanks to the level of enough mechanization, now include the im-materials such as affects and social forces. The machine is now equally a technical and a social machine in

Figure 8: UCSD Geisel Library. Photo by Roman Newman.

this techno-existential condition. In the works of Woods, for example, the design explorations experiment the unit or the machine as well as the habitation itself, an experimental inhabitation.

New Generation “Merrick’s face was so deformed he could not express any emotion at all” 27 Bernard Pomerance Using the current technologies, the new generation of architects are able to create the architecture that is neither designed from the outside (the objective) nor from the inside (the subjective), but rather it is produced on an edge that the hybrid of technology and creativity provides. As Figure 5 shows, the new design, does not try to establish a ground for the normal. This can be an ethical act if it directs the architecture practice towards integrating the social field into the architecture/machine, not by interpretations, significations, or aiming at the implementation of the common language; but by transforming the aesthetics into a field

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Figure 8: Shahira Hammad, Asemic Forest Westbahnhof Train Station, Vienna, 2010

of forces and actions. Probably the question that we might ask, in a Deleuzian context, is about what the architecture does to the different layers of humanity and the environment, rather than how it looks in term of ugly or beautiful: We will never ask what [it] means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed….28

END NOTES 1

James Howard Kunstler. “Eyesore of the Month,” The James Howard Kunstler Blog, December, 2006 accessed February 1, 2013, http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200612.html.

2

Pia Ednie-Brown. “On a Fine Line: Greg Lynn and the Voice of Innovation,” Architectural Design 122 (2013): 44-45.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid, 48.

5

Severyn T. Bruyn. “Art and Aesthetics in Action,” last modified 2002, https://www2.bc.edu.

6

Todd McGowan. “The Impossible David Lynch,” New York: Columbia University Press, 2007

7

Ibid, 61-67.

8, 9

Ibid.

10

Alex Comfort. Darwin and the Naked Lady: Discursive Essays on Biology and Art, ed.

George Brazilier, New York: Routledge, 1962, 2.

11

Denis Dutton. Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009.

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12

Adam Chmielewski. “Evolutionary Aesthetics as a Meeting Point of Philosophy and Biology,” Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae 81, no 2 (2012): 67-73.

13

Roger Paden, Laurlyn K. Harmon and Charles R. Milling. “Ecology, Evolution, and Aesthetics: Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetics of Nature,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 2 (2012): 128.

14

Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge: MA, MIT Press, 1996, 198.

15

Albert Camus MacIntyre. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1982).

16

Adam Chmielewski, “Evolutionary aesthetics as a meeting point of philosophy and biology,” Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae 81, no 2 (2012): 71.

17

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 162.

18

Ibid.

19

Ibid, 164-186.

20

Ibid, 186.

21

Ibid, 163.

22

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 2.

23

Roger Paden, Laurlyn K. Harmon and Charles R. Milling. “Ecology, Evolution, and Aesthetics: Towards an Evolutionary Aesthetics of Nature,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 2 (2012): 128.

24

Graham Coulter-Smith. “Evolutionary Aesthetics: Rethinking the Role of Function in Art and Design,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Researh 8:1 (2010): 87.

25

Gilles Deleuze. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, ed. and trans. Tom Conley, New York: Continuum, 2006, 82. Emphasis added.

26

Adam Chmielewski. “Evolutionary Aesthetics as a Meeting Point of Philosophy and Biology,” Acta Societatis Botanicorum Poloniae 81, no 2 (2012): 67.

27

Bernard Pomerance. The Elephant Man. New York: Grove Press, 2007, v-vi.

28

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. One Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009, 4.

024 026 028 030 UGLY AND ULTRAORDINARY François Blanciak François Blanciak is a French architect and lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.

Prior to completing both his Masters and PhD at the University of Tokyo, he has worked for architectural firms in Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and New York, with architects including Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman. His work has been exhibited at various venues, including the Canadian Center for Architecture and the Venice Architecture Biennale. François has served as a guest critic at Rice University, and has lectured at Tunghai University, the University of Michigan, and Tsinghua University.

As a practicing architect holding a French registration, he has entered numerous competitions and has won several awards. He is the author of SITELESS: 1001 Building Forms (MIT Press, 2008).

Figure 1: François Blanciak Architect, competition entry for the Taipei Performing Arts Center, 2009.

The canons of architectural beauty have traditionally relied on the principle of interpretation of natural processes, such as emphasized by Quatremère de Quincy in the nineteenth century. In his Essay on the Nature, the End, and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts, Quatremère defended a view of creativity which, while taking its cue from nature, should emphasize the act of transformation through that of representation: “Why may not art represent subjects, or actions, or characters, just as they are found in reality, with their discrepancies, their irregularities, and with that mixture of accidents and circumstances which belong to the reality of things?” 1 he asked.

“Because art is not nature, and does not possess her means. . . Because in pretending to follow nature on the ground of realities the poet deserts that of fiction, and ceases to be a poet.” Through the process of generalization and idealization only should valid art—and that encompasses architecture in Quatremère’s mind—be produced: “In order to withdraw the objects and subjects that imitation has to do with, from the region of vulgar realities, and to elevate them into those of the ideal, the poet and the artist are alike under the obligation of recomposing them.” 2 Despite being so old, Quatremère’s dogmatic thought is far from being antiquated. It still embodies the commonly held view within the design field that architecture cannot be literally mimetic, and that the quality of the work of the architect should be assessed against his capacity to transform and interpret, rather than to merely replicate what already exists. Design, hence, has in this discipline been widely understood not only as an act of adjustment of a particular program to the variables of a given site, but also as a process of approximation of selected external images within the resulting scheme. This status quo is particularly conspicuous in what has called itself the digital avant-garde over the course of the last two decades, as its fascination for biological features seems to have only represented a pretext to emulate natural phenomena through machinic means. In short, architecture is still seen as something that necessarily needs to add, rather than simply equate.

Challenging these conceptions, and taking into account that, as Karl Rosenkranz suggested, “ugliness exists only because of beauty,” what will closely be examined here is the perception of a competition entry—a cairn-like accumulation of theaters intended to accommodate a Performance Art Center in Taipei—as an object of repulsion by an architectural audience. What is sought after is a reassessment of the formal and symbolic characteristics of that particular project in order to delve into the question of what conditions, defines, and codifies the notion of ugliness within the realm of architecture.

The form of the project, submitted in 2009, recalled the primitive root of what is now called Taiwan, and was originally meant to be a cultural reference to a building technique employed by a local aboriginal tribe called “Paiwan,” which uses piles of slab stones as its main construction method, with heaps of stones accumulated into walls, roofs and floors. Similarly, taking its cue from the very name of the competition project—a “center” (which in fact rests in the outskirts of Taipei) - the proposed concept consists in piling up a series of four slab stones.

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Figure 2: François Blanciak Architect, competition entry for the Taipei Performing Arts Center, 2009.

Three of these entities contain theaters, while the top pebble contains administrative offices. By concentrating the functions vertically, the project is meant to constitute a semantic connection to the notion of center itself, as the superimposition of all the venues makes them share the very same core, a unique feature in theater typology. A critical aspect, in plan, was thus the necessity to locate every theater stage between the four massive circulation cores of the complex, which form a square in plan. In addition, the parallel with the stones, not only meant to be a cultural allusion, is extended to the acoustic qualities that the oval pebble-like shape provides, particularly suitable as a receptacle for theaters, since it “naturally” reflects sound in multiple directions in its midst. But beyond its internal layout, the stability of the edifice was initially suggested by the ubiquitous recurrence of its overall form in vernacular land art, a similarity which did not convince its viewers, its primitive character being frowned upon by its main detractors.

“This is just a giant cairn,” “This project is not creative at all,” “This is not architecture,” were about the most recurrent, heated reactions (scatological comparisons aside) made by anonymous commenters on the myriad of architecture blogs and websites which spontaneously showcased the design, epitomizing the quasi-unanimous rejection of the project. So why is this ugly? Two possible leads can be put forward in the light of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which put a particular emphasis on the circumstantial nature of ugliness in artistic fields, including architecture. On the one hand, the capacity of the project to oppose itself to a traditional well-accepted vocabulary of architectural aesthetics, its capacity to embody autonomy, to veer from the expected, clearly distinguishes the project, with a structural parti at odds with the commonly desired correspondence between geometry and construction method. Precious to Adorno’s thought, the ugly embodies this

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capacity to oppose the mainstream by proposing a dismantlement of its archetypes, an attack on the purity of the forms of what claims to be higher art, in what he sees as a culture industry that essentially pushes for a “deaestheticization of art.” 3 As noticed by Peter Uwe Hohendahl: “In the context of modernist aesthetics the reversal between the beautiful and the ugly becomes necessary for a defense of the artwork against the impact of the culture industry and its commercialization

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UGLY AND ULTRAORDINARY

of the beautiful...It is precisely the violation of the traditional aesthetic code that separates the advanced artwork from the threat of the culture industry.” 4 Arguing for a practice that both provokes and results in autonomy, Adorno noted that “the impression of ugliness stems from the principle of violence and destruction,” 5 the ugly being held as what sets itself in opposition to the law of form, set by the authority of cultic objects. In its disregard for the canons of contemporary modernism, for the commercialized aspects of architectural beauty, this set of Taiwanese theaters adheres to the definition of autonomous artwork set forth by Adorno.6 The relation of the proposed scheme to the geological also should be paid attention to in this respect, as its modus operandi defies conventions in this field. A number of fairly recent publications have covered the current trend of fusion between architecture and landscape,7 which has invariably aimed at the topographical metaphor, fulfilling a modernist desire to confound architectural elements with each other (walls and roofs in this particular instance)—a trend which, somewhat paradoxically, is more likely than not to have stemmed from Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s antimodernist designs. As opposed to what has now become one of the most played out clichés of contemporary architecture: the blurred distinction between the vertical and the horizontal— basically that between floor and terrain—what this entry for the Taipei Performing Arts Center proposed is a clear dichotomy not only between what is underground and what is above ground, but between programmatic elements themselves through site-specific geological physiognomy.

On the other hand, the disturbing character of this project, in the eye of its critics, lies in its clear reference to the archaic. This aspect also points to Adorno’s reflexions on ugliness, as he links this notion to a temporal hierarchy: “What appears ugly is in the first place what is historically older, what art rejected on its path toward autonomy... The concept of the ugly may well have originated in the separation of art from its archaic phase: It marks the permanent return of the archaic...” 8 It might thus appear that, within an era that glorifies the use of increasingly complex production techniques through digital means, returning to geometries that not only pre-existed but that existed well before the advent of what we now call architecture might constitute a form of intolerable transgression to the progressive practitioner. By renewing a focus on imitation rather than (re-)composition, on figuration rather than abstraction, on the mimetic rather than on the schematic, and thus standing against the commonly held view that, in architecture, beauty lies in transformation, the project transgresses and raises the issue of the potential necessity of archaic ugliness in this field. In its deviation from the moral imperatives of the post-crisis world of architecture, the project seems to have become an effective tool to assess the cultural and time-specific circumstances that trigger the perception of ugliness. What seems to constitute a sacrilege is the very absence of design, and the statement that architecture and design are not necessarily interdependent. Misunderstanding architecture as the practice of switching scales, one is left to ask: If architecture does not modify

or transform, where does the architect’s work lie? How can we evaluate the beauty of its outcome?

The qualitative potential of the ordinary has already been debated in architectural theory, but most notably to dismiss the extra-ordinary. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour have advocated a flattening process of figurative imagery over three-dimensional poultry-like buildings.

What they called ugly was, in their thought, associated with the ordinary—within the model of the decorated shed—and the original tied to the heroic—within that of the Duck.9 The paradoxical choice of the latter to symbolize heroism was part of the provocative nature of their theory, so as to assimilate the modern with the archaic. The result was nevertheless an attempt to surpass functionalism in its capacity to be functional. What is a decorated shed if not a communication machine? Escaping this bipolar taxonomy, the entry for the Taipei Performing Arts Center proposes to merely sample the very material upon which architecture sits—the ultraordinary physical condition of its site—and to take it as a point of departure for a replicative process. Ultraordinariness, precisely because it shuns the cultural domain and refers to both the unnoticed and the universal, exceeds ordinariness (at least that evoked by Venturi et al., mainly governed by market forces) and flees extraordinariness, uninterested in contrast. The project thus becomes, in its hyper-material yet immaterialized state, a manifesto for an architettura povera that stands against the aesthetics of the machine, an attack on the urge of transformation in a world that no longer seems to need it.

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UGLY AND ULTRAORDINARY

END NOTES 1

Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, Essay on the Nature, the End, and the Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts (London: Smith, Elder and Co.,1837), 239.

2

Ibid, 358.

3

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16.

4

Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory”” in Cultural Critique, No. 60 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 171.

5

Adorno, op. cit., 46.

6

It is to be noted that he also advocated an approach of architecture that links site-specific building materials to buildings themselves through his critique of technique: “After the abolition of scarcity, the liberation of the forces of production could extend into other dimensions than exclusively that of the quantitative growth of production. There are intimations of this when functional buildings are adapted to the forms and contours of the landscape, as well as when building materials have originated from and been integrated into the surrounding landscape, as for instance with chateaux and castles. What is called a “cultural landscape” [Kulturlandschaft] is a beautiful model of this possibility.” Adorno, op. cit., pp. 46-47.

7

See for example: Stan Allen, Marc McQuade (Eds.), Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain (Baden: Lars Müller, 2011); Vincent Guallart, GeoLogics: Geography, Bits and Architecture (Barcelona: Actar, 2009); Aaron Betsky, Landscrapers: Building with the Land (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006).

8

Adorno, op. cit., 47.

9

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 93.

032 034 036 038 040 042 METABOLIC TECTONIC: TERRAFORMING WASTE INTO OUR PERPETUAL CITY ORGANISM

Adam E. Anderson Adam E. Anderson is a Landscape Architect, designer, and artist currently based on the East Coast. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from the Ohio State University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he was an Olmsted Scholar. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and his academic research has dealt with the entropic use of sediment waste for large scale terraforming and cultural re-deďŹ ning of the ideology of nature.

He has worked professionally in southern California and Boston on projects throughout the United States and abroad.

Adam is currently a Landscape Architect for Landworks Studio in Boston, and author of the blog Design Under Sky.

Predicated upon accommodation, humans have become one of the geologic forces affecting the earth. Unregulated growth required materials and energy and to produce those forces, requiring deep extraction within the earth to reach material made from millions of years of geologic pressures. Technology has allowed us to catalyze certain geologic processes at our will.

Many scientists believe we have ushered in a new epoch of the collective effect of human intervention on biological, physical, and chemical processes within the Earth system - they are calling it the Anthropocene. The Royal Society describes the name as “a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth.” It means that human activity has left a “stratigraphic signal” detectable thousands of years from now in ice cores and sedimentary rocks.

The Bingham Copper Mine in Utah is the biggest man-made depression in the world, it can be seen from space (CLUI, 2009). Operating for more than a century now, the mine represents one of the largest zones of human existence. Faced with the thought of what happens to the mine when profitable extraction ends, the operators looked to Robert Smithson to engage the mine. Rather than hiding the scars, Smithson proposed highlighting the violence of the creation of the negative hollow form. The realization is made into the revelatory through physical manifestation. Bingham is of course only one of a long list of anthropogenic zones of extraction. By 2250 most of the natural resources will be mined out of the Western United States, leaving 100,000 square miles of reclaimed landscapes [Alan Berger CUSP, 2009].

Cities are possibly the biggest human geologic intervention. New York City, as stated by Friends of the Pleistocene, is its own geologic force. Buildings constructed from local sandstones and schist from the triassic and jurassic period form skyscraper canyons of transformed rock, at times aligning celestially with the sun displaying the phenomena of time in the same way stone monuments have done for millennia. Before the Pangaea split, the tallest mountains in the world sat where the skyscrapers currently sit, mimicking their scale, constructed from their remains.

The dredging of the harbor and digging of tunnels continues to alter the shape of the coast.

Governors Island’s current form was created with the 4,787,000 cubic yards of fill excavated from the Lexington Avenue Subway tunnel in 1901 [Army Corps of Engineers, 2012]. Battery Park extended Manhattan southward into the harbor using debris from the 9/11 attacks. The major shipping routes in New York Harbor need constant dredging. The Army Corps of Engineers plans to extract roughly 2 million cubic yards of dredge material from the harbor each year. That material most often will be shipped out of state to landfill or abandoned mines to be disposed. The dredgers artificially repeat the same naturally occurring process that created the harbor, scraping the bottom sediment as the Wisconsin glacier did 12,000 years ago. The city is in constant flux due to its own geo-dynamics that will continuously transform it for thousands of years to come.

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This is not a traditional park experience. In a similar way that one might witness change in Central Park - flowers blooming, trees regaining leaves in spring, or something understood as a “natural” event - here it would be another kind of phenomena; a neo-nature. Toxicity within the site material is not buried or hidden, but emphasized by revealing this toxicity through bio-luminescent engineered hyperaccumulating plants that glow with it’s presence. The remediation field is a vast flat space where materials from the facility are first treated and sorted.

The mountain grows in the distance. Paths begin to disappear into deep canyon.

The machines of the areas of operation plow ahead, their lights distorted by summer haze and harbor twilight fog. Non-operational areas house the glowing plants and massive sculptures constructed from city waste material.

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METABOLIC TECTONIC

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METABOLIC TECTONIC

Deformations and Pressures - A drawing of the growth and accumulation of the mountain, and the factors that will cause its erosion and decay, such as the tides and rainfall.

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METABOLIC TECTONIC

It’s dawn, the sun is rising. Flying into New York City you see the massive organism breathing in the city. It is it’s heart, and the city’s waste its lifeblood. A continuous flow of barges carrying city waste synchronize their way through the harbor, unloading at the north and south ends of the mountain. Ferries carrying passengers temporarily dock at the extended platforms on the westside. Visitors and waste flow into the site simultaneously.

The mountain is much bigger than it was last year, and becoming greener. The light is still dark enough to see the glow from the bioluminescent field, and the lights from the city.

Metabolic Tectonic focuses on the “Anthropogenic” layer of waste. The effort and energy of extraction, production, and disposal of fossil fuels, geologic commodities, and construction is awesome in scale. The waste material created as a result is a bastard by-product where only the fringes of the built environment will offer it a home.

The now closed Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island New York is monumental, reaching over 150 feet in some areas and containing some of the most noxious chemicals known to man. It is a human geologic event, an archeology of excess caused by rapid city growth and abundance. The landfill upon becoming full, and closed, becomes a mountain. In the case of Fresh Kills, it was treated as a massive wound, covered with little acknowledgement to the toxic human-generated strata below.

Part of this study seeks to understand the fear associated with waste that results in its displacement to marginal landscapes; often to the detriment of low-income inhabitants. I believe that part of this fear stems from the predominant view of nature as an idyllic memory that has been destroyed through human intervention. Landscape paintings from the Romantic period depict pristine wildernesses and disregard the reality of human development which inevitably leaves behind the ugly waste. The images of Field Operation’s Master Plan propose a similar notion of nature rescued, with renderings of flowered covered meadows that critic John May refers to as “wholly fantastical Photoshop collages of upper-middle class recreational enjoyment.”

The critique of the Fresh Kills proposal stems from its contribution to the perpetuation of the fallacy of pristine nature, especially in urban conditions; and when, and only when we are able to think beyond these ubiquitous idyllic notions can innovation in how waste is treated in the urban system occur.

Metabolic Tectonic is a proposal of constructing this layer of the anthropocene in a way that challenges how we view waste - not by romanticising it, but by giving it authenticity and accepting the ugly by transforming it into a perpetual functional organism of the city.

The ‘Mountain’ is a designed intervention that breathes the city’s waste, and fuels its growth.

These materials come together, and through a process of accumulation, sorting, piling, bioremediation, and solidification through bacterial calcification, grow into mountain over time.

We can design our own neo-nature. This is first done by either dismissing, or accepting everything as nature - both the ugly, and the pristine. Metabolic Tectonic is a study of this dismissal.

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METABOLIC TECTONIC

END NOTES 1

Coolidge, Matthew. New York: Metropolis Books, [2009]. Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation [CLUI].

2

“CUSP Conference 2009, Alan Berger Presentation,” Accessed January 20, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd78QyUPWEA

3

“Dredged Material Management Plan for the Port of New York and New Jersey,” New York District Army Corps of Engineers, Accessed March 1, 2012, http://www.nan.usace.army.mil/project/newyork/factsh/pdf/dmmp.pdf

044 046 048 050 052 054 056 VULGARITY WITHOUT PRECEDENT? ‘UGLINESS’, CHANGING TASTES AND THE VICTORIAN INTERIOR

Steven Parissien Steven Parissien is Director of Compton Verney museum and gallery in Warwickshire, England, and Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and the University of Warwick.

Born in London and raised in Buckinghamshire, Steven obtained both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Oxford – a 1st Class BA (from University College, Oxford) in 1981 and a doctorate in eighteenth-century architectural history in 1989.

Steven has written extensively on architectural and cultural history.

His nine books to date include Adam Style (Phaidon, 1992; Apollo magazine’s Book of the Year for 1992 and The American Institute of Architects’ Book of the Year Choice for 1993), George IV: The Grand Entertainment (John Murray, 2001) and, most recently, Interiors: The Home Since 1700 (Laurence King, 2008).

Facing: Plate from Owen Jones’s “The Grammar of Ornament”, 1856.

The increasing pace of industrialization had a fundamental effect on the average Western home of the early nineteenth century.

Technology democratized taste, allowing the middle classes a real choice in how they planned, furnished and decorated their homes for the first time in history. What had been a luxury, affordable only by the very rich, in the 1730s was, by the 1830s (at least in Western Europe and the US), often eminently within the grasp of the ‘middling sort’, thanks to their growing purchasing power and the astonishing advances in mass-manufacturing techniques.

Figure 1: A mass-produced chintz fabric of c.1840.

Deciding how to decorate interiors became pleasurable, congenial, and even amusing for the first time, as homeowners now were liberated from the dictates of the rich – and encouraged by the first mass-market consumer guides (publications such as Rudolf Ackermann’s periodical Repository of the Arts, the ancestor of today’s glossy home interest magazines) – and by the freedoms conferred by mass-production.

By the 1830s, householders were shrugging off the patrician dictates of Palladianism, Rococo, and Neoclassicism that had shaped the domestic interiors of the previous century, and had abandoned the ‘cultural cringe’ that had characterized so many aspirational homes of previous generations. Instead, they simply bought what they liked, indulging in an orgy of tongue-in-cheek revivalism that embraced all periods and all styles.

William Hogarth’s celebrated print of a century earlier, The Man of Taste of 1731, had

46

VULGARITY WITHOUT PRECEDENT?

Figure 2: A French interior of c.1855 from “La GardeMeuble”.

caustically lampooned the status of the early eighteenth-century amateur architect and style guru Lord Burlington as the self-appointed arbiter of architectural and decorative fashion.

It was a satire which emphatically associated the definition of ‘taste’ with the aristocratic world of Burlington and his privileged set.

In the 1730s, innovations in architecture and interior design gradually filtered down to the lower orders, through the prism of great patrons such as Burlington and the stylish interiors they were able to create using their vast wealth. (Burlington himself was one of the richest landowners in the country in 1730.)

A century after the publication of Hogarth’s print, however, the world of decorative taste had been turned upside down. By 1830 it was largely the burgeoning middle classes who were, by the power of their wallets, helping to encourage, define, and propagate innovation in the design of domestic interiors. [Fig. 1] Newly-prosperous and increasingly confident middle-class householders were able to dispose and decorate their homes using methods and materials that, a century earlier, would have been available only to Lord Burlington and his friends. [Fig. 2] For example, by 1840 most middle-class households in Europe and North America could afford mass-produced woven and printed furnishing fabrics – particularly the durable, washable, and brightly-coloured chintzes that were so popular on both sides of the Atlantic (and generally manufactured in Britain from imported American cotton). Such affordable textiles in turn helped effect a sea-change in taste.

48

Comfort and informality were now established as the prime goals, even in the most public of middle-class rooms, in place of the rigid, correct formality which had so characterized polite society in eighteenth-century Europe.

However, to many modern commentators and critics – both then and since – the middle decades of the nineteenth century merely saw the newly-enriched and newly-confident middle classes cheerfully indulging in ‘vulgarity without precedent’, and creating a plethora of some of the most ugly and gaudy interiors ever witnessed. One recent historian, for example, astonishingly claimed that ‘From this point fashions filtered downwards, first to the bourgeoisie, degenerating in the process, and finally to the poorest stratum of society, where they were crudely imitated in cheap materials’.

At the crux of this argument is what has since been pejoratively labelled the ‘NineteenthCentury Debacle’ in interior design, a phrase which conjures a period in which, in thrall to new industrial techniques, dyes, and methods, homeowners happily threw good taste out of the window and instead substituted a conspicuous, gaudy, and frankly ugly display of badly-designed fixtures, finishes, and objects in order to display both their own purchasing power and the mighty possibilities of industry. Such a nakedly materialistic approach towards the innovations in interior design prevalent during the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, the argument goes, inevitably sowed the seeds for the Design Reform movement of the

VULGARITY WITHOUT PRECEDENT?

1850s and 60s, and, ultimately, for the Modern Movement of the early twentieth century

Figures 3 (above), 4 (below): The bane of the design reformers: lifelike, vibrant three-dimensionality in chintzes of c.1860.

The middle classes of the Victorian era were helped to decorate their homes both by vastly widened choice, and by a flood of advice and information. The large number of published guides on interior decoration available from the early 1800s onwards helped to liberate homeowners, enabling them to make their own decisions about how their homes were to be disposed and decorated. Decorative manuals put them (rather than, as before, established architects, writers, or scholars) in the driving seat of fashion and taste. This development in turn helped to quicken the turn-round of room redecoration, the pace of which accelerated from about a thirty-year lifespan in the late seventeenth century to an average of about seven years by the 1820s.

What was different about the manuals and periodicals published after 1800 was that most of them were aimed not at the trade but at average homeowners, thus shifting the balance from the manufacturer to the consumer.

Perhaps the most obvious, early example of this was the London periodical The Repository of the Arts. Issued between 1809 and 1828 by the Saxon-born entrepreneur and publisher Rudolf Ackermann, it proved hugely influential in the English-speaking world. Its colourful plates and up-to-date styles initially reflected the prevailing neoclassical tastes (called ‘Regency’ in Britain, ‘Empire’ in France, and ‘Federal’ in America). By the end of the 1830s it had

spawned an equivalent in France: Le GardeMeuble, which first appeared in 1839 and ran till 1935, almost a century later. [Fig. 3] Both Le Garde-Meuble Ackermann’s publication, however, were not necessarily illustrating contemporary interiors; rather they showed consumers the styles, forms, and products to which they might aspire – much in the way that magazines such as The World of Interiors do today.

More practical than these lavish periodicals were unpretentious, one-off publications such as J C Loudon’s enormously successful, doit-all manual, Encyclopaedia of Villa, Farm and Cottage Architecture, first published in 1833, and George Smith’s accessible Cabinet-Maker’s and Upholsterer’s Guide, published in 1826. Smith popularised many of cabinetmaker and interiors expert Thomas Hope’s rather esoteric stylistic innovations of the 1810s (when Hope became the first to use the term ‘Interior Decoration’) with down-to-earth prose, copious illustrations, and a sample paint chart (a very modern feature). As a result, Smith’s book proved a big success on both sides of the Atlantic.

By 1840 there was a bewildering variety of guides and manuals on the subject of interior decoration, making the subject into a popular occupation for the average house owner. Most guides now advocated the concept of an instantly recognisable, comprehensive ‘look’ – a concept, originally devised for the aristocratic great houses of the 1760s and 70s by Robert Adam, which was now within the reach of all households.

50

Meanwhile, it was Britain’s cheap, washable cottons that helped create the democratic interior of the early nineteenth century. Western cotton manufacture had been revolutionised by the introduction of mechanization: the patenting in Britain of the spinning mule in 1779 opened the door to the mass-manufacture of more delicate, finely-woven cottons, and by 1820, cotton chintzes (the word was adapted from the Urdu for ‘printed cloth’, chintz having originated in India) were particularly favoured for parlours and drawing rooms.

The introduction of gaudy new mineral dyes also allowed designers to produce even more striking colour combinations. At the same time, fabric and wallpaper patterns also became bolder, larger, and more colourful. (However, such lush displays of colour and decoration were rarely seen unless important guests were present: every important item of furniture was invariably provided with a protective loose cover of cotton, serge, or linen, to preserve the precious fabric underneath. Slip covers thus became a barometer of social status, since only the most prized visitors earned their removal.)

A reaction against such bold, empowering technology was perhaps inevitable. It first came in the 1850s, led by a group who were subsequently labelled the Design Reformers.

Their standpoint was symbolised in Holman Hunt’s brightly-coloured, morally-driven PreRaphaelite painting of 1853, The Awakening Conscience. Design guru John Ruskin – already a revered household name in Britain and America – identified the ‘fatal newness’ and

VULGARITY WITHOUT PRECEDENT?

Figure 5: The power of chemicals: William Perkins's aniline dye, mauve, as proposed for French interiors of c.1860.

‘terrible lustre’ of Hunt’s picture (which he very much admired), focusing on both the drawing room’s furnishings and the moral dilemma they epitomised. All was, he declared, ‘common, modern, vulgar’: Everything in the small parlour – the gaudy gilt mirror, the veneered and immaculately-polished piano, the brightly-coloured carpet, the overstyled ‘naturalistic’ curtains – was designed to indicate a reliance on surface and colour rather than depth and meaning, on immediate visual gratification rather than on a more subtle and gradual appreciation.

The resulting fictional interior, Ruskin concluded (and Hunt agreed), represented the triumph of mass-manufacture, of new over old, of the celebration of colour and texture for its own sake rather than as an expression of traditional, organic craftsmanship.

Ruskin admired decrepitude, not the gleaming newness of mass-manufacture. Crucially though, his stringently academic and historicist viewpoint was out of step with public enthusiasm for the world of colour which industrialization now brought. Where Ruskin, Hunt, and their followers saw ugliness, the middle-class householder saw the possibilities of the future and social empowerment.

In an age when the majority of interiors were lit by candles, oil lamps, or gaslight, the bold new colours that manufacturers were able to use for paint, wallpaper, and fabrics by 1850 lent cheer to principal rooms. Interiors became fully gendered for the first time: colours were now being perceived as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (or childlike), and were how used as indicators of function and social status. (J C Loudon, for example, suggested in 1833 that ‘the colouring of rooms should [be] an echo of their uses’.

Thus the typical library was to be a ‘severe’ and sober masculine space; the drawing room a feminine one (the term itself having originated from the ‘ladies’ withdrawing room’); and the dining room a ‘grave’, cross-gender arena.)

Other guides of the period recommended that bedrooms – defined as a light, clean, and cheerful feminine area – should be decorated in white, tinted with hues of blue, rose, straw, or lilac.

Ruskin’s stand was undermined still further when in 1856 the first of the wholly inorganic, chemical ‘aniline’ paint dyes appeared: Henry Perkins’ ‘mauve’, a fabric dye made from coal tar (the waste product of the gas industry) which was far more potent, vibrant, and colourfast than the washed-out purples of the preceding decades. Chemical dyes such as Perkins’ mauve turned mid-nineteenth century interiors into riots of bright, confident colour.

[Fig. 5] Simultaneously, paint preparation was taken out of the realm of the professional, as pre-tinted paints became available to individual consumers. By the 1870s paint manufacturers in America and Britain were selling re-

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sealable cans directly to consumers rather than, as before, to tradesmen. And, much to Ruskin’s distaste, furniture itself became more colourful. Gaily-coloured papier-mâché furniture won favour as seating for children – being light, easily painted, and easily inlaid.

Thanks to the advances of technology, the nineteenth-century interior also became far more comfortable. Furniture historian John Cornforth characterized this age’s primary goal as the ‘quest for comfort’; and certainly by 1850 springing, introduced on a wide scale from the 1820s, was commonplace, as was the fashion for deep-buttoning after the introduction of coiled springs for seat upholstery in the 1860s. Rooms were draped with fabric to soften the environment and create a sense of cosiness and comfort, muffling sounds and filtering light; cushions were added to sofas; tables were now covered with tablecloths; room corners were concealed; and in this manner the outside world was gently shut off.

While comfort and colour appeared to predominate in the average home by the 1850s, the Design Reformers were preparing their counter-attack. Design Reform declared itself the enemy of naturalistic floral imagery, and in favour of the honest use of materials and appropriate ornament. The first effective salvo from this quarter came with the publication of Owen Jones’s influential pattern-book, The Grammar of Ornament in 1856. The Grammar championed the use of ‘honest’, two-dimensional ornament. But Jones himself

VULGARITY WITHOUT PRECEDENT?

Figure 6: Comfort and convenience: a typical middleclass interior of c.1870.

– unlike his Design Reform successors – was no enemy of mass-production, and designed everything from mass-manufactured carpets to biscuit-tin lids. Moreover, Jones’s message was not a proto-Modernist one: he admired decoration (‘whenever any style of ornament commends universal admiration, it will always be found in accordance with the laws which regulate the distribution of form in nature’, he wrote), and sought to harness, not reject, history. To work ‘independently of the past’, he declared, ‘would be an act of supreme folly’.

Jones’s groundbreaking book inspired designer, poet, conservationist and socialist William Morris to react more forcefully against what he deemed to be the inappropriately heavyweight colours, the licentious superfluous ornament and the immorally illusionistic flower and vegetable designs of mid-Victorian manufacturers. In the view of Morris and his followers, the brightly-coloured, mass-produced exhibits showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been a hideous aberration; in reaction, they now sought to turn the clock back. Morris’s colours for his textiles and wallpapers were thus obtained from traditional, organic sources such as the madder plant (for red), weld, saffron or quercitron bark (for yellow), walnut roots or husks (for brown), and indigo – also known as woad – for blue [Fig. 8]. From 1875 Morris experimented with ancient vegetable dyes, while his wallpapers were all wood-blocked in the eighteenth-century manner and the number of colours used in their design was deliberately restricted. As Morris’s Times obituary noted in

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1896, he had sought ‘to express the beauty of colour, line and material’ based on the direct observation of nature, rather than exploiting the technological possibilities of mass-production.

However, even Morris did not always eschew modern technology. His popular fabric of 1891, ‘Daffodil’, used a bright yellow aniline dye, and while the company’s chintzes were still handblocked by Wardle & Co, Morris-designed woven textiles were made elsewhere on power looms.

William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement of the 1860s onwards represented a return to ‘a respect for the achievements of craftsmen’ – an ambition later hymned by design historians as a fusion of simplicity and functionalism. What these historians blithely ignored, however, was that Morris’s synthesis, as exemplified in the products of his own firm, Morris and Company [Fig. 7], generally proved far too expensive for the everyday home. Individual labour was far more costly than mass-production, and for all Morris’s high-flown socialist principles, few working men and women could actually manage to pay for the sort of furniture and textiles produced by his admirably ethical workshop.

Design Reform was also emphatically a masculine reaction. By the 1870s women were taking a leading part in determining the decoration and disposition of the home; yet, revealingly, Design Reformers invariably gendered luxury as ‘she’, created the stereotype of women who were preoccupied with surface rather than with substance. The hugely influential critic Charles Eastlake (author of

VULGARITY WITHOUT PRECEDENT?

the best-selling Hints on Household Taste of 1868, whose name and reputation were well-known in Britain and America) went even further than Morris, and squarely blamed women for the alleged tastelessness of contemporary interiors. Women, he declared, were responsible for the ‘assemblage of modern rubbish’ that disfigured so many middle-class homes, and for the technologically-fuelled obsession with novelty and fashion. ‘The ladies like it best when [a piece of furniture] comes like a new toy from the shop fresh with recent varnish and untarnished gilding’, he opined, and he accused women of being responsible for the desecration of the domestic interior via the unnecessary addition of such practical items as ‘flimsy and extravagant’ antimacassars’.

This victimization of women, coupled with the denunciation of the mid-Victorian era as one of unparalleled poor taste and ugliness, continued into the twentieth century. The Modernism of the first decades of the century actually turned the clock backwards for women: the style’s pursuit of open-plan interiors eradicated gendered spaces in the interior, while a hundred years of women’s advance as arbiters of interior taste and disposition was swept away in an instant. Female ‘amateur’ decoration was dead; long live male ‘professionalism’. Women seemed to have little place or voice in training the designers of the future – a goal which was, famously, central to the purpose of the Bauhaus which Walter Gropius set up in Dessau in 1919.

Although the Bauhaus in theory espoused the notion of gender equality (a quarter of the

Figures 7a, 7b: Plates from Owen Jones’s “The Grammar of Ornament”, 1856.

students who enrolled in 1919 were women), the school found it difficult to incorporate them fully into the workshop structure, and in 1920 Gropius himself took formal steps to confine women students (of whom, he believed, there were already too many) to weaving. By 1926 the Weaving Workshop was accorded inferior status, despite the considerable revenue that it brought to the strained Bauhaus coffers.

Modernism also drove a wedge between the work of interior decorators – a trade dominated by women before 1918, and already professionalized by the likes of that American doyenne of home design, Elsie de Wolfe – and that of so-called ‘serious’ designers and architects, who were invariably male and trained in architecture practices or schools. (The paucity of architectural commissions in the aftermath of the First World War encouraged many male architects to colonise the world of the domestic interior, in which there were far more opportunities for commissions, after 1918.) The inevitable result of this development was seen after 1945, when – again, at a time of dearth for more conventional architectural commissions – male architects successfully promoted the superiority of the organised ‘interior design’ profession, and saw off (for the time being, at least) the challenge from the feminine field of interior decoration.

The post-1918 desire to retreat from the starker and more vicious realities of technological advance was understandable, if disappointing to subsequent design historians. Interwar Britain

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and America preferred warm and friendly rather than stark and challenging, and there was a growing obsession both with historical revivals in general and with the mythologized ideals of the small English country house or Parisian hôtel in particular. Even the design ‘excesses’ of the 1840s and 50s were, for the first time, regarded with a modicum of respect and affection.

Today the ‘ugliness’ of the mid-Victorian interior is still an issue which raises temperatures and guarantees heated debate. Many historians (most of them, interestingly, male) still persevere with an anti-industrial argument which would not look out-of-place in a Design Reform tract of the 1860s. However, they fail to grasp that few consumers at the time shared their prejudices and intolerance – and indeed that very few homeowners could actually afford the exquisitely-made Arts and Crafts pieces to which they trace the origins of modern design. A more balanced view is presented by the eminent academic Professor Penny Sparke of Kingston University, who rightly suggests we use both the past and the future to create ‘a more human, more comfortable approach to decorating [our] private spaces’. The tenets of the designers and manufacturers of the midVictorian age – that we must exploit the benefits of mass-production and not be cowed by them, and that the interplay of craftsmanship and industry has provided us with the marvellous ability to make choices – are surely just as valid today as they were then. In 2013, as in 1863, we just need the confidence to do it our way.

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Figure 8: Morris and Company's 'bird' wallpaper design.

058 060 CONTRAST Samuel Langkop The year was 1980. The day had been occupied by sun-kissed beer cans and river rafting. A thin blue vinyl tent set beside the wide and shallow watercourse.

It was here, next to the Colorado, that Samuel Langkop was conceived. After his unanticipated fetal ontogenesis, Ann Elaine Wade and William Norbert Langkop sought the sound reasoning of a Lutheran minister. He wed them a few months later.

On April 1st, 1981, Missouri had yet another of its many noble sons. The farmhouse where Samuel spent his first years was built in the late 1930’s. Wind blew right through it. The living room was decorated with a wood burning stove, and the kitchen with lemon yellow countertops that had been added at some point in the 1960’s.

He moved with his parents so they could attend a bible college in Texas.

Samuel grew up around Dallas. He attended a state college for both undergraduate and graduate school with aspirations of becoming an architect. Frankly, he questions his decision to go to college on a daily basis.

CONTRAST

/ 'käntrast/ A child wants to understand.

Concepts are grasped more readily when polarized; cowboy to indian, good to evil, pretty to ugly.

Fast fast-forwarding, the Greys rush in.

The intellect dilates.

New shades find new company.

Its face is ill-defined, without proportion, in a sea of change.

As life’s waters muddy, new contrasts are needed.

The construction of a position gives rise to rebellion.

Or, is it the other way around? Who cares as long as the teeth are cut?

As long as a myth can be called from the boreal; something beautiful, self-assured and ashore.

/ in'tens ə ι fī s/ Wrecked by a tempest of it’s own creation, youth’s lie is scattered by heat.

The hot Grey rises, formlessly occupied by parts of oxygen.

Free radicals fire but don’t think to reuse; only loud microscope suicides, fervently begging for truth.

Equations for energy bind vessels at port, as potential elegance shakes material math convincingly made.

It isn’t dried oak or black coal, but the closed furnace of a great wanderer, spinning, stirring the oceans and forging a more rigid member. the white iron the simple field a new kind of home

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CONTRAST

/ ik'spi( ə )r ē ə n s/ Hot metal reflecting due arrears, disparate pixels resolve as a Redbird appears.

Pocks sizzle in skin.

Silence cools the façade. A mask takes shape, untoward with aplomb.

Inside, new beauty swears off states, resolute.

Disfiguration clears pathways to a personal truth: ‘To be, even to be ugly, is enough.’

ability to multi-task detail oriented basic computer skills must work well with others must be able to take direction excellent oral and written communication means of transportation to & from office

062 064 066 068 070 UNDER THE OVERPASS: AN EXPLORATION OF URBAN VOID

Maria Simon Maria Simon, Registered Architect, has an M.Arch from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her B.Arch from Pennsylvania State University.

Maria has practiced on a variety of international and domestic projects for Fentress Architects and ORG, The Organization for Permanent Modernity. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where she teaches fundamental design andvisual communications. Her research interests are in the body始s relationship to space from intimate to urban scales and the relationship of representation to the design and fabrication process.

Figure 1: Lunalilo Freeway, Photo by Maria Simon, 2013.

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UNDER THE OVERPASS

Figure 2: Conceptual Site Investigation

Honolulu, while best known for Waikiki beach and Mai Taiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, is also one of the most expensive cities in the world. The cost of real estate creates a challenge for many community service and non-proďŹ t organizations that require an urban location but are unable to afford it. Honolulu also has little available land as developers and large private land owners have captured every acre of buildable space between the ocean and the mountains. The intersection of strained resources and available space lies in the H-1 highway that runs through the heart of Honolulu.

The H-1 highway bifurcates the low elevation commercial-beach areas from the predominantly residential zone in the leeward foothills of Oahu. Where the H-1 intersects major cross streets it dips below or pulls off of the ground to create brief highway caverns and urban voids that in most cities are left behind, discarded spaces. The City of

Honolulu activates these voids by renting them to civic and community organizations that are unable to afford the market rate for rent.

Hawaii was granted statehood in the same year that the planning and preliminary construction began on an interstate system for Oahu.

Originally the interstate system was developed for the purpose of homeland security and the deployment of military resources. Oahuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interstates provide a link between the various military bases located on the island. Local legend about the highway abounds. One group believes that the highways were built to move nuclear war heads around the island, while another believes that the highways were developed in response to the large number of soldiers that had no direct route from one base to another during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Regardless of their initial intended use, the highway is being encroached upon by

Figure 3: Makiki Civic Investigation

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UNDER THE OVERPASS

Figure 4: Kaimuki Housing Investigation

Figure 5: Kahala Community Medicine Study

Figure 6: Conceptual Site Investigation

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UNDER THE OVERPASS

organizations looking for affordable real estate opportunities. For example, the Hawaii Potters’ Guild has actively occupied a highway on-ramp for 46 years; their space is often bustling with activity beneath the stream of cars merging onto the H-1 during the evening rush hour. Farther west, a local neighborhood post office occupies the space under an overpass in the heart of the city. These examples provide a small sample of the community and civic functions that have eagerly inhabited the overpasses reinvigorating the discarded urban voids.

Figure 7: Industrial Airport Investigation

From an architectural perspective, highway infrastructure conjures a kind of idealistic image of exposed structural vignettes separated by long expanses of smooth asphalt.

However, people often occupy the spaces in and around highway infrastructure while in a climate controlled vehicle with music playing to dampen the highway noise. We look out the window and are romanced by the soaring infrastructure and are impressed by the ease that masses of concrete possess as they easily and gracefully float through the air. We peer out the window with a sense of wonder and curiosity. Under the Overpass is a reflection of those interests as well as being a project that is based on investigating the role of the body juxtaposed to the scale of urban infrastructure through the occupation of discarded voids.

For the purposes of Dichotomy, this project explores urban void through the lens of “Ugly” in looking at the occupation of underpasses and how this occupation challenges their identity along the length of the H-1 highway.

Figure 8: Chinatown Cultural Investigation

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UNDER THE OVERPASS

These are the preliminary investigations that address how, in speciďŹ c urban conditions, the body could be un-massed from the masses in becoming a recognizable individual within an infrastructure scaled system. Various programs were chosen to help mediate the investigations between the scale of body and infrastructure. Within the urban core individual zones were identiďŹ ed based on contextual research of that sector of the city. The zones are industrial, cultural, civic, housing and community medicine. Each zone attempts to capture a particular type of program that serves a need of its sector.

These ideas have been spatially mapped through sketches, photographs and preliminary conceptual drawings in an attempt to discover the line between the occupation of available space and the violation of void space. The investigations resulted in some spatial suggestions of how space might be utilized in a variety of different highway/urban conditions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Voss, Oscar; Slater, C.C. Oahu Freeways.1997, 22 January 2013.

Schwarzer, Mitchell. Zoom Scape. Princeton Architectural Press: NY, 2004.

072 074 076 078 080 082 084 086 FORM FOLLOWS UGLY Manu Garza Manu Garza was born in Brownsville, Texas; received his Professional B Arch in 2002 at the University of Detroit Mercy in Detroit, MI. Work experience includes; Albert Kahn Associates in Detroit, MI, Morris Adjmi Architects(formerly Aldo Rossi studio di architettura) in NYC. He has exhibited work at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Gallery of Windsor and for Archilab in France. Guest critique at Pratt Institute, the New School, City College of New York, Cranbrook Academy of Art, University of Detroit, Lawrence Tech, and NYIT. Currently teaches two design studios as an Adjunct Associate Professor with the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in Long Island, NY. He co-founded and heads et al. collaborative of New York, an architectural design practice based in Brooklyn, NY. Its team represents a unique combination of talents, professional backgrounds, passions and insights. et al. approaches each project as an opportunity to collaborate with a client, an opportunity to define and appropriately respond to a specific goal–yours.

Facing: Sandy Makes Landfall Over Cuba, NOAA/NASA.

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FORM FOLLOWS UGLY

What Have We Learned?

Resilient Design

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Anti-Fragile Design

Quest for New-Engineered Tolerance

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FORM FOLLOWS UGLY

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FORM FOLLOWS UGLY

END NOTES

088 090 092 094 096 098 100 IN THE REALM OF AESTHETICS: THE UGLY AS ATMOSPHERE

Stefano Corbo Stefano Corbo is an Italian architect and assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Alghero, Italy (2011-2012). He received a Master in Advanced Architectural Design at ETSAM Madrid (Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura) in 2010, and is currently a PhD candidate at the same Institute, with a dissertation titled: “Archaeology of Infrastructures. A conceptual cartography”. Some of his texts have been published in international magazines, and he lectured as a guest at the ETSAM and University of Miami.

He worked as a designer at Mecanoo Architects (Delft, Netherlands), and in 2012 founded its own office: SCSTUDIO (www.scstudio.eu), a multidisciplinary network practicing architecture and design, preoccupied with intellectual, economical and cultural contemporary context.

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.” 1 Georges Bataille In 1957, French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille published “Literature and Evil” (La Littérature et le Mal), a series of essays dedicated to eight important authors: Emily Brontë, Baudelaire, Michelet, William Blake, Sade, Proust, Kafka, and Genet. For the first time, we find in this book a different approach to and meditation on the role of Literature. Every writer is analysed by Bataille according to a new lens, their work conceived as prodromal of a renovated vision and traditional dichotomy between Good and Evil totally re-interpreted: to experience the Evil and to deny the Good is iself the condition of freedom. Literature is the most conscious, and at the same time, the most acute, expression of this condition. Real and authentic literature is always “promethean” as it questions established rules and conventions: the writer is someone able to contravene the fundamental rules of society and recognize the condemnation as the most profound form of self-realization.

Bataille writes: “These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality.

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[…] Literature is communication.

Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.” 2 Is it possible to transfer this approach into the realm of architecture? Can we build a theoretical discourse around Architecture by following the millenary dichotomy between Beauty and Ugly?

In a way what Bataille meant for Literature is applicable and extendible to many other disciplinary territories, including architecture: it’s time to break the rigid and reductionist dualism between terms in order to build a wider and more complex cartography of terms, positions, and attitudes that better can explain what happens in the recent architectural episodes and in the theoretical elaborations. Beauty and Ugly are just two of the several interpretative elements surrounding our daily activities.

First we need to go back to the contemporary philosophical debate and find the reasons for this paradigm shift, and at the same time explain the rise of a new sensibility. In other words, the antithesis between Beauty and Ugly has been totally revisited by the architectural debate of the last two decades: the progressive de-materialization of the notion of form in the design strategies is directly connected with

IN THE REALM OF AESTHETICS

Figure 1: Puppy, Jeff Koons, 1992.

the new direction of contemporary aesthetics, which moves the focus of its speculations from semiotics and hermeneutics to AISTHETICS (from the Greek word aisthesis, perception).

From Aesthetics to Aisthetics Starting from the second half of the 20th century, philosophical aesthetics experienced a radical change, thanks to the rediscovery of the body, the rehabilitation of senses, and the new phenomenological studies developed by thinkers such as Heinrich Barth, Ludwig Klages, Husserl, and Schmitz. The nucleus of this shift consisted of a return of the discipline to its own origin: aesthetics as doctrine of sensible knowledge. Aesthetics as AISTHESIS, perception.

Italian philosopher Mario Perniola analysed the 20th century from the point of view of all the contributions in the field of aesthetics and argued that it was possible to detect four clear conceptual areas defined around the notions of life, form, knowledge, and action. Life and form represent a development of Kant’s philosophical apparatus and of his “Critique of Judgment”, while knowledge and action come from Hegel’s Aesthetics.

Besides the four traditional fields illustrated before, Perniola introduces a new field in order to describe what happens in the second half of the 20th century. It’s what he calls Aesthetics of

Feeling (Estetica del Sentire). This conceptual area doesn’t have its own origin from the two traditional blocks that characterized the philosophical thought until the 20th century: what Perniola describes is the scope of a philosophy that tries to re-direct the meaning and the purpose of aesthetics towards its original inception: Aesthetics of Feeling, aesthetics of affectivity and sensibility.

Instead of a reconciliation between the tools offered by Kant and Hegel’s thought, Aesthetics of Feeling propose to emphasize the opposition between them; Perniola focuses attention on the “feeling” as an autonomous philosophical tradition declined according to the notion of difference.

Among the protagonists of this new approach to aesthetics, Perniola quotes Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and many others: Jacques Lacan, for instance, who transferred these topics into the study of sexuality; Derrida, who, for the first time will introduce the category of “disgust”; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” represent the “summa” of all these contributions.

Beside these contributions, we can’t forget the French philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty, whose phenomenological approach influenced the work of many artists and architects over the years: the role of body becomes central in the construction of the spatial and temporal world in which we live:

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“My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension”.3 According to Merleau-Ponty, the human body is an expressive space, which contributes to the significance of personal actions. The body is also the origin of expressive movement, and is a medium for perception of the world.

Bodily experience gives perception a meaning beyond that established simply by thought.

So, once the character of AISTHETICS and its authentic nature is illustrated, we should wonder which becomes the role of Art and what are the connections between Art and Life in general.

According to the German philosopher Gernot Böhme, the real challenge of art is found in what he calls ATMOSPHERES, and the UGLY is just one of the possible atmospheres, such as beauty, the serene, the terrible, the threatening, etc. So, the production of atmospheres becomes the specific task of aesthetics, and the function of architecture is to create scenarios, dispositive for the development of human activities.

We might define the atmospheres neither as a quality of the subject, nor as a quality of the object. Atmospheres are something between subject and object, not something relational but the relationship itself; they are the co-presence of subject and object that we can experience. The atmospheres are the prius of our perceptual experience of the world, of our affective-sensitive experience, and in order to clearly define its own meaning,

IN THE REALM OF AESTHETICS

Figure 2: Taichung Metropolitan Opera House.

Böhme tells us with its emotional certain impression, a space with its that suggests a

that “the atmosphere is a space tone, is something that suggests a a mood”.4 The atmosphere is emotional tone, is something certain impression, a mood.

In the perspective of AESTHETICS as AISTHETICS, we may say that the effectiveness of this new approach lies in its characterization of a theory of sensible experience, not as a theory of artwork. Beauty loses its status as a privileged object of aesthetic reflection, to turn into just one of the possible atmospheres: music, cinema, and architecture produce feelings or atmospheres

because

they

build

sensitive

landscapes.

While describing the work of Jeff Koons, Böhme even states that “as producer of atmospheres and manipulator of feelings that rehabilitate advertising and kitsch, he manages to transform the audience in a ready-made through an atmospheric technique, a technique that influence our feelings”.5 [Fig. 1] So, the production of atmospheres is the specific task of the aesthetic work and its reception, the characteristic experience of art. At the end what Gernot Böhme builds is an aesthetic of appearance, preoccupied with the expression of things, the way things manifest themselves in their physicality and in relation to the senses.

Figure 3: The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson, 2003.

The atmospheric perception has nothing to do with solid and continuous objects, discrete shapes and movements, but includes multiple and chaotic situations whose phenomenology is to be distinguished from the physical stimulus. Perceiving atmospherically doesn’t mean to detect some sensitive data, but rather to be wrapped by things and situations.

The atmospheric perception is thus a holistic and emotional “being in the world”.

Regardless of its application scope, and scale of intervention, perception and feeling have become central issues not only in the philosophical debate, but also in architecture.

If view has always represented the privileged

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channel to experience an architectural object, in recent years criticism has been growing towards that ocular-centrism typical of Western culture, in order to underline also the importance of the haptic and the orosensory in architecture.

In a way what we experience in our daily life was already described by Paul Virilio in the 80’s: “Two procedures confront each other here: one is material, made up of physical elements precisely situated walls, thresholds and levels; the other is immaterial, its representations, images and messages possessing neither locale nor stability, since they exist only as vectors of a momentary and instantaneous expression, with all the misinterpretations and manipulation of meanings that this implies”.6 Contemporary cities become

IN THE REALM OF AESTHETICS

the ideal field of application of these theories: Rem Koolhaas’s Junk Space or Toyo Ito’s Transparent Film belong to the attempt of reading the urban spaces according to a different perspective: the distinction between Beauty and Ugly lose power and sense, and can easily be re-defined within the concept of atmosphere.

According to the Dutch Architect, “the built product of modernization is not modern but junkspace.

Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress. […] Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than all previous generations together, but somehow we do not register on the same scale. We do not leave pyramids. According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the 20th”.7 Toyo Ito, in one of his essays from the 80’s, describes for the first time the “atmosphere” that surrounds occidental cities: if the attention towards the climatic parameters still didn’t take part of Ito’s design tools, at the same time we have to acknowledge an atmospheric approach in many of his positions, mostly in relation to the contemporary condition.

So, according to the Japanese architect, to detect the atmospheric character of our cities means to define a peculiar protective film: “The transparent film originally had the mission of preserving the freshness, but now plays a much more important role, establishing a homogeneity that ensures

equality in the process of selection.

However, all these features: homogeneity, transparency, fluidity, etc. are those that Modern Architecture was seeking at the beginning of this century. For example, homogeneity is symbolically expressed in the concept of universal space and in Mies van der Rohe’s aesthetics of Less is more”.8 Considered as a consequence, even metaphorical, of a consumerist society, the film implies new challenges for architecture, whose role becomes making this film visible and relating it to the actions and needs of users. Architecture, for Ito, must become a phenomenological device: “Therefore, the architecture that we search for cannot be anything more than the materialization of the transparent film itself, to structure this membrane, which becomes a dispositive that produces phenomena.

It doesn’t exist as phenomenon, but its substance produces and ensures that events occur. Architecture should be a device that produces landscape, makes visible the flow of invisible things such as air, and that shows human performances (communication); a dispositive that produces programming.

Although we define it as a dispositive, it doesn’t look like the machine that the Modern Movement pursued at the beginning of this century. It is rather architecture as a system, which has no morphological expression itself and, being

extremely simple, can produce different meanings, like the “bar code.” 9 [Fig. 2]

Spheres-Atmospheres Surfaces, spheres, epidermises, and environments: these are the real fields of interest that move the architectural and artistic production. What we once defined as good, ugly, etc. is what we experience as a filter between our inner world and the exterior worlds: the world where we act and live. Many artists and architects tried to explore this dimension, focusing their attention also on the climatic parameters that influence our lives.

Olafur Eliasson’s work follows a similar strategy: rather than the old dichotomies between public and private, technical and organic, etc., what really grabs his attention are those perceptive and sensorial thresholds where the distinction between a inner world and an outer world is totally dissipated.

In 2003, Olafur Eliasson presented his installation “The Weather Project” at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Gallery in London. In this empty space, designed by Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron and imagined as a kind of Parisian “passage”, we find a semi-circular structure hanging from the ceiling and composed of hundreds of mono-frequency lights whose emitted light is reflected through a screen-mirror covering the whole of the Hall, filling the entire space with light and simulating solar radiations.

The wavelength generated by the neon leads the

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eye to detect only colours ranging from yellow to black, transforming the visual field into an extraordinary monochrome landscape. [Fig. 3] Nature, technology, colour, temperature: all these elements interact and help to produce an atmosphere in which to develop actions, feelings and human gestures. By reproducing an environment in which natural and artificial are completely inter-penetrated, Eliasson wants to re-think the relationship between spheres of individual action and macro-spheres; if the museum is in some ways a microcosm of society, the Danish artist wants to transfer those dynamics and contradictions of our lives inside this institution, incorporating heterogeneous points of view and a multitude of experiences.

In order to metaphorize this relationship, Eliasson adds to the structure of the museum another system as unstable as society: climate.

Meteorology is shaping and characterizing our lives, defining habits and behaviours: it takes a central position in the formation of a collective consciousness. Its constitutive elements – water, light, temperature, pressure – are those materials Eliasson has used to describe the atmospheric and evanescent aspects of nature, and its impact on our sensibility.

The control of the climatic aspects, the desire to comprehend those forces acting in nature, and advances in the field of technology make that meteorology, is going to assume a crucial importance for our time. Attempts to control or modify the weather have had a chequered history. The

IN THE REALM OF AESTHETICS

Figure 4: Interior Weather installation at CCA, Montreal, Philippe Rahm, 2006.

discovery by scientists in the 1940s that sprinkling pure silver iodine into clouds would demonstrably boost the resultant precipitation led the US government to employ the controversial practice of ‘cloud seeding’ in military campaigns, most notably during the Vietnam War. According to Peter Sloterdijk, the 20th century began on April 22, 1915, when a German regiment launched chlorine gas over the Ypres front towards French troops. Wind blew the gas towards the target, who were puzzled. At 6:20 PM, the French general, Mordacq, rode towards the gas to investigate. By 7:00 PM, a six kilometer breach had been opened for German troops to march through. The French were carved open without being attacked with direct shots. But more importantly, the German military had shown that environments could be harnessed to cause harm. Sloterdijk argues this first act of gas warfare initiated and exemplified a principle that characterized the 20th: the increasing explication of our environment.

Bruno Latour well explains the importance of meteorological conditions in our life and its correspondence with the world of Art. He links Eliasson’s work with the positions of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk: “The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has recently gone so far as to take anew approach to philosophy by stressing the importance of atmospheric conditions on our lives. In what amounts to a sort of expanded meteorology he argues that philosophers have been far too obsessed with objects and subjects, and not enough with air conditioning. Envelopes, spheres, skins, ambiences: these are the real ‘conditions of possibility’ that philosophy has vainly attempted to dig out of totally inaccessible infrastructures. […] What Sloterdijk does in philosophy, Olafur Eliasson does in his art. In both cases, the tired old divisions between wild and domesticated, private and public, technical and organic, are simply ignored, replaced by a set of experimentations on the conditions that nurture our collective lives.

Seen through this approach, climate control is not inspired by a mad ambition for total mastery of the elements, but by a reasonable wish to ascertain what sort of breathing space is most conducive to civilised life. The most important question is, how are we going to survive? In what sort of interior milieu should we be insulated? Since the sciences have expanded to such an extent that they have transformed the whole world into a laboratory, artists have perforce become white coats amongst other white coats: namely, all of us. We are all engaged in the same collective experiments. Both Sloterdijk and Eliasson are exploring new ways of escaping the narrow constraints of modernism”.10

New Boundaries and New Con!gurations How to materialize the atmospheres? How to turn them into architectural concrete episodes? For many years, Philippe Rahm worked on the relationship between climatic parameters and architectural form, trying to re-interpret the modernist parading according to “form follows function”. In fact, in his proposals, he introduces climate as a central topic: “The goal is to come up with an architecture free of formal and functional predeterminations, a de-programmed architecture that is open to variations of season and weather conditions, day/night transitions, and the appearance of novel functions and unexpected forms.

What we are working toward is a reversal of the traditional approach to design on order to achieve a new spatial organization in which function and form can emerge spontaneously in response to climate. We propose to work with the very matter of space, the density of air, and the intensity of light, and to offer architecture as a geography, an open-ended, shifting weather system embracing different climates and atmospheric

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Figure 5: The Blur Building, Diller + Scofidio.

qualities to be occupied and used according to our needs and desire, the time of the day, and the season.

We would like to replace functional and symbolic constraints with a freedom of use and interpretation opening onto unexplored dimensions in which architecture generates an emergence of times, spaces, and practices within the very matter of which it is made”.11 In one of his installations- experiments, “Interior Weather” (2006), Rahm tries to design an architecture that is capable of indicating possible uses of spaces which are only generated by the interaction of three climatic parameters: temperature (T), intensity = lux, and relative humidity = HR, so that T x lux x HR = form and function. [Fig. 4] Temperature, light intensity, and relative humidity are understood as the three elements of a specific equation that produce a determined condition: different combinations of the three parameters suggest different possible interior weather situations. The installation is made of two spaces, one a gallery designed for the measurement of the interior weather conditions, and the other used for the interpretation and manipulation of data. In this gallery, data are analysed according to many points of view (social, psychological, functional), and in a second moment translated into concrete situations, spatial practices, and new architectural forms. The installation is the occasion to test the

potential of climatic conditions to generate new functions and new architectural programmes.

Who also focuses attention on the notion of perception and the production of “architectural atmospheres” is the American office Diller + Scofidio, founded in 1979. In a way their work shares with Toyo Ito and Paul Virilio the pursuit of an aesthetics of disappearance, but at the same time goes beyond these positions. In fact, they don’t investigate simply the hegemony of view and the power of image in contemporary society, but they face the wider question of perception as a very intimate and personal interpretative category in the fruition of an architectural work.

Paradigmatic of this vision is the Blur Building, designed for the EXPO 2002 in Switzerland (YverdonLes Bains), expression of many of the investigations developed by Diller + Scofidio over the last decade. [Fig. 5] More than a building, we could define the Blur Building as a dispositive capable of stimulating psychological and sensorial perceptions in the visitor. What is virtual and digital introduce a new interpretive dimension: a holistic physical and emotional interaction that includes all five senses.

Based on a 1950 Buckminster Fuller project, the Blur Building is a floating construction on pillars (100 meters long, 65 meters wide, and 25 meters high) that can accommodate 400 people; this structure was completely immersed in an artificial fog produced by a piping system with 31,400 nozzles capable of reaching 24 kilometers. A weather station is incorporated into the building to monitor temperature, humidity, wind, or other weather parameters, and fog emissions change continuously in response to changing climatic conditions. To get into the Blur Building turns into a ritual: a gateway separates it from the shore and via ramps visitors enter a media cafe, a bar where only mineral water is served, a partially submerged sushi restaurant, and finally the exhibition areas.

If Blur means indefinite, immaterial, what Diller + Scofidio pursue in this building is to investigate the notions of perception and sensoriality. The perception of the cloud is vague, lacking a clear and defined geometry: its architecture is intangible, ethereal, floating.

In a word: sensorial, because it is linked more to the realm of feeling than to a definition of an object. Here, form, plans, structures are completely irrelevant. Diller + Scofidio reclaim the centrality of individual perception and freedom of movement, at the same time calling into question those same principles that have been regulating the discipline of architecture for centuries: dichotomies such as interior/exterior and close/far, no longer make sense.

If contemporary conditions require a hyper-definition of their aspects, vision can again become a theme of reflection. What is blurred, indefinite, or dematerialized is now configured as a response to the society of control and image. And architecture can be an instrument for denunciating certain mechanisms.

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IMAGES 1

“Collection Online Jeff Koons. Puppy. 1992.” Guggenheim.org. Guggenheim, n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2013. <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/ piece/?search=Puppy>.

2

“Toyo Ito: Taichung Metropolitan Opera.” Designboom Toyo Ito Taichung Metropolitan Opera Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2013.

3

“Olafur Eliasson.” Olafur Eliasson. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2013.

4

“Philippe Rahm, Architectes.” Philippe Rahm, Architectes. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2013.

5

“Diller Scofidio Renfro.” Diller Scofidio Renfro. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2013. <http://www.dillerscofidio.com/>.

END NOTES 1

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, 144.

2

Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. London: Calder and Boyars, 1973, 11-12.

3

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press, 1962, 173.

4

Böhme, Gernot. Atmosfere, estasi, messe in scena. L’estetica come teoria generale della percezione.

Milano: Marinotti, 2010, 83-84.

5

Ibid, 91.

6

Virilio, Paul. L’espace Critique: Essai. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1993, 539.

7

Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” October. 1.100 (2002): 24.

8

Ito, Toyo, Nadal José María Torres, and Iñaki Abalos. Escritos. Murcia: Colegio Oficial De Aparejadores Y Arquitectos Técnicos, 2000, 102.

9

Ibid, 109.

10

May, Susan, and Eliasson Olafur. Olafur Eliasson: The Weather Project. London: Tate, 2003, 29-41.

11

Rahm, Philippe. Philippe Rahm: La Forme Et La Fonction Suivent Le Climat = Form and Function Follow Climate. Montréal: Centre canadien d’architecture, 2006, 128-137.

102 104 106 108 110 112 114 ON TYPES OF SEDUCTIVE ROBUSTNESS Jimenez Lai Jimenez Lai is an Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago and Leader of Bureau Spectacular. He graduated with a Master of Architecture from University of Toronto. Previously, Jimenez Lai has lived and worked in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Before founding Bureau Spectacular, Lai worked for MOS, AVL, REX, and OMA/ Rem Koolhaas in Toronto, Rotterdam, and New York. In the past years, Lai has built numerous installations as well as being widely exhibited and published around the world. His ďŹ rst manifesto, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. Draft II of this book has been archived at the New Museum as a part of the show Younger Than Jesus. In 2012, Jimenez was named a winner to the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects.

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It is sim simply ply ug ugly ly in a grotesque grot grot rotesq esque esq ue way. way

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116 118 120 122 124 126 128 130 132 134 [DE]FORMING THE FIGURE: SPATIAL EMBODIMENT IN ARCHITECTURAL REPRESENTATION

Libby Balter Blume Libby Balter Blume is Professor and Director of Developmental Psychology at the University of Detroit Mercy and Co-director of the Masters of Community Development in the School of Architecture. She has a Ph.D. in Human Development from Texas Tech University, M.A. in Creative Arts Education from San Francisco State University, and B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California-Davis where she studied figure drawing with Wayne Thiebaud. Since 1987, she has taught courses in human development, environmental psychology, and visual communications and co-taught architectural analysis in Volterra, Italy.

Libby is founder and co-curator of the Women’s and Gender Studies Biennial Juried Art Exhibitions with faculty in the School of Architecture.

Facing: Reconstruction of the City, Léon Krier, 1990, Architecture & Urban Design: 1967-1992, Léon Krier © 1992.

Beauty and its opposite ugliness were described by the philosopher Edmund Burke who claimed that “…though ugliness be the opposite to beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion and fitness. For it is possible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, and with a perfect fitness to any uses.”1 From this perspective, the aesthetics of incorporating human bodies into architectural drawings to represent static scale and proportion is less important than the processual design practice of envisioning how people may embody spaces over time. Design through the iterative process of drawing, or disegno, “uses the considerable power of the image to raise and reflect on those questions that interrogate architecture’s canon and tradition.”2 This essay briefly examines the history of anthropomorphic architecture, a pictorial or narrative metaphor for the architectural body in the early Italian Renaissance, and extends a critical discussion of contemporary architectural representation to include consideration of spatial embodiment and human movement as a direct agent of design decisions.3

Anatomy as Measurement Based on pre-classical Egyptian and classical Greek canons, the Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio described the human figure as the principal source of proportion in his ancient treatise De Architectura: “Without symmetry and proportion… there can be no principles of design. The measurements for buildings are all to be derived from the members of the body.”4 Although Vitruvius measured the dimensions of

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the ancient Roman body, historically all stylistic periods have had systems of measurement and proportion for human representation. The Egyptians based their human figures on the length of middle finger (height=19 fingers); the ancient Greeks used the hand as a standard (2 hands=1 head); and following Vitruvius, the Renaissance masters used the head as a unit of measure, as do most artists today.5 Based on Vitruvius’ classic work, Leon Battista Alberti published De re aedificatoria6 in 1450, in which he outlined 68 dimensions of the human body related to average body proportions.

In the Four Books on Human Proportion7 published by Albrecht Dürer in Germany in 1528, the average man was 8 heads tall [Fig. 1].

Although there is little evidence that Dürer studied anatomy, Leonardo da Vinci spent years documenting human proportion and anatomy in his prolific sketchbooks including a sophisticated understanding of the body.8 As seen in Figure 2, “His [Leonardo’s] anatomical studies were contemporaneous with the execution of his famous Vitruvian man, suggesting a direct speculation upon architecture and a mathematical and geometrical interpretation of the body.”9 For example, Leonardo computed the perspective necessary to fully view the human figure when paintings were placed above eye level in the domes and vaulted ceilings of Renaissance churches and cathedrals.

Michelangelo Buonarroti10 based his knowledge of the human skeleton and musculature not only on the study of classical sculptures and live models but also on drawings of dissections from a convent hospital in Florence he made

[DE]FORMING THE FIGURE

Figure 1: Four Books of Human Proportion, Albrecht Dürer, British Museum, MSS 1.32. Philosophical Library © 1958.

Figure 2: Study of Proportions (Vitruvian Man), Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1490. Galleria dell’Accademia, Venice.

when he was only 16 years old.11 Furthermore, Michelangelo criticized Dürer’s writings on body proportion: “[He] treats only of the measure and kinds of bodies, to which a certain rule cannot be given, forming the figures as stiff as stakes; and what matters more, he says not one word concerning human acts and gestures.”12 Like other Renaissance architects, Michelangelo treated human activity as the basis of architecture, as demonstrated in a rare ergonomic drawing of a visitor at the reading room desks he designed for the Laurentian library,13 shown in Figure 3.

Michelangelo’s concern has been echoed by architectural educators today,14 who have suggested that the human figures drawn by most contemporary architects “have lost any ontological dimension; they are simply a form of communication oriented to the common man and to the technician, or a formal representation to other architects of the possible problems of scale and dimension.”15 In the 1920s the Bauhaus16 required a course titled “Man” in which measurement and proportion were formally taught [Fig. 4], along with drawing from live models, although “Dimensions of the Human Figure”17 illustrating body clearances in varied positions was not incorporated into the Architectural Graphic Standards until the 1940s.18 In the 1950s, Le Corbusier19 advocated using human body proportions to design the built environment, including “architecture and mechanics” with his ideal human figure called the “Modulor” [Figs. 5, 6]. In the 1960s, the reference book Measure of Man20 documented human factors as a guide for product design,

specifying a multitude of human dimensions and positions for calculation of architectural spaces and furnishings. Originally derived from physical anthropology research and U.S. Army anthropometric studies during WWII, such metrics have been criticized for the continued use of White males as the standard to which others, such as children, women, or diverse racial-ethnic men, are compared.21 Today, measurements in the revised Measure of Man and Woman22 reďŹ&#x201A;ect population data on body size, movement range, and strength with variability due to intra-individual differences (age), interindividual differences (ethnicity/race), and secular change (generational differences).23

Figure 3: Study of a Bench, Inv. 94-A, Michelangelo, 1524-1525. Fondazione Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

(Permission not granted for electronic publication)

Figure 4: Measurement and Proportion, Oskar Schlemmer: Man, Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus.

The MIT Press Š 1971.

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Embodiment as Architecture In contrast to today, Renaissance architects viewed buildings anthropomorphically rather than as nonhuman manifestations of scale and proportion, and throughout the period bodies were seen as the spiritual basis for the built environment incarnate. In De re aedificatoria, Alberti wrote that “Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body” as dictated by the rules of Nature or Creation.24 The embodiment of architectural forms was

often metaphorically depicted in plan drawings, such as Pietro Cattaneo’s floor plan where Christ’s body with outstretched arms configures the church’s nave and transept, and Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s visual interpretation of the fortified city as analogous to a towering youth [Fig. 7]. Renaissance architects also frequently theorized a natural correspondence between architecture and human figures in which the capital of a column was compared to a head,

Figure 5: The Modulor, Le Corbusier, 1948. Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, FLC-ADAGP © 1954.

Figure 6: Golden Rule of Human Scale, Le Corbusier, 1946. Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, FLC-ADAGP © 1954.

the column to the trunk of the body, and the base to the feet. Furthermore, Vitruvius’ description of the classical orders as gendered was reinscribed in the first known architecture book in English, John Schute’s The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture,25 illustrating Tuscan and Doric columns as male [Fig. 8], but Ionic and Corinthian column as female [Fig. 9].

“Just as the human body was a clearly defined organism, with head and limbs, so were buildings.”26 This architectural metaphor of gendered embodiment was extended to a narrative text27 by the fictional account of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, widely attributed to

Figure 7: Plan of the City, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, ca. 1480. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenzina, Florence.

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Figure 8: Tuscan Order, The First and Chieff Groundes of Architecture, John Shute, 1563. Google Books, Facsimile of the first edition, London.

[DE]FORMING THE FIGURE

Francesco Colonna or to Alberti himself. Also based on the metaphor of buildings as bodies, the Hypnerotomachia tells the romantic story of a hero named Poliphilo who sees his beloved embodied in the buildings he encounters in a dream. Detailed descriptions of the architecture and landscape [Fig. 10] comprise over half of the book, which was referred to at the time as a trattato, or architectural treatise.28 However, according to contemporary critical theorists “Of most importance… is the metaphor of the building as a body and the unbridled eroticism that metaphor introduces into the architectural experience.”29, 30

Figure 9: Corinthian Order, The First and Chieff Groundes of Architecture, John Shute, 1563. Google Books, Facsimile of the first edition, London.

Figure 10: Poliphilo/Female Beauty, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance, Liane Lefaivre, The MIT Press © 1997.

[De]forming the Figure: Spatial Embodiment The architect and embodiment theorist Pallasmaa claims that ever since humans have used bodies as a dimensional and proportional system of construction, we have interpreted buildings as analogous to our body and vice versa.31 However, in contrast to both anthropormorphic and metric uses of the body in architecture, peopling architectural drawings can become a strategy for employing the human body to motivate design decisions.

By applying the Deleuezian32 concept of folds, we can explore Burke’s dialectic of ugliness/ beauty independently of the canons of human proportion. The poststructuralist philosopher Deleuze did not define a body by its form but rather by a set of ever-changing relations among un-formed elements, such as speed or slowness, motion or rest.33 Deleuze referred to this process as spaces of de-formation.

In this sense, de-forming the object/figure/ body is “not unlike discovering the intricate weave and meshing of a whole fabric of cloth, constantly moving, folding and curling back on itself even as it stretches beyond and below the horizon of the social field.”34 De-formation recently has been described by poststructural philosophers as a topological process by which surfaces are transformed.35, 36 Topology is a mathematical concept commonly illustrated by the well-known example of a Moebius strip in which the object is not a static form but rather is constantly changing

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Figure 11: Section of the Pavilion, Brion Cemetery, Carlo Scarpa, 1969-1978. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, Electa Editrice, Milan © 1984.

Figure 12: Nudes, Carlo Scarpa, ca. 1930. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, Electa Editrice, Milan © 1984.

[DE]FORMING THE FIGURE

its surface. In terms of human figures, often referred to in psychological terms as social objects, these transformations may consist of actual movements, body positions, or other spatial operations, such as computer models of bodies navigating virtual spaces. From this perspective, “the topological object is a process, a space of figuration… As such it must deal in the register of the image, with the figure… Inasmuch as it deals with art, media, and urban space, it will foreground the imaginary.”37 To achieve an imagined social topology of architecture, this philosophical argument, then, suggests that as humans, we exist as spaces of de-formation and can be imagined as multiple topological subjectivities that form imagined social spaces: “We see social imaginaries in […] project networks in architecture, art and the culture industries. We encounter them in large-scale urban imaginaries, in city topologies. It is this that is the stake in Lefebrve’s (co-) production of urban space.”38 Architectural topologies that apply philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s analysis acknowledge that movement through space is a “bodycentric and multisensory performative activity.”39 In this regard, Lefebvre’s concept of “urban social space” has been examined by architectural researchers as perceived, conceived, and lived spaces—resulting in “representations of space and spaces of representation.”40 In a topological society, “we no longer live in or experience ‘movement’ or transformation as the transmission of fixed forms in space and time but rather movement – as the ordering of continuity – composes the

forms of social and cultural life themselves.”41 In this performative approach, also referred to as time-geographic, people repeatedly interact with their physical surroundings.42 The temporal-spatiality of the body in Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis claims that the human body is the site and place of social interaction. According to Lefebvre, although each body has its own rhythm, scale determines our location in space and time.43 The task of architects, then, is to envision the movement of bodies through space and time in order to formulate a design response to an architectural program that is itself in continual deformation through the experiences of human temporal subjectivities. Thus, by examining embodied experience in spatial representations, such as drawings or computer graphics, architects can envision Bourdieu’s habitus,44 the everyday rhythms of imagined bodies.

Recently, contemporary architects have theorized the embodied image in a philosophical tradition that critiques a “disembodied subject” in favor of an embodied vision. “Works of art originate in the body of the maker and they return back to the body through the experience of the beholder/listener/reader of the work, or the dweller of the house, through the mediation of the artistic image.”45 According to the phenomenologist MerleauPonty, “Our body is both an object among objects and that which sees and touches them.”46 Similarly, visual anthropologists also have theorized that “bodies themselves constitute a place, a locus, where the images

we receive leave behind an invisible trace,”47 for example in memories, dreams, or visions.

[Re]!guring Architectural Representation For over a decade, architectural educators have advocated for a more thoughtful use of figure drawing to show how projected buildings might be inhabited, including the representation of movement, gesture, experience, and action.48 By sketching, drawing, and modeling, designers can not only create architectural forms but also imagine the experiences of habitation—the movements and rhythms—that will eventually constitute the transaction between occupants and built environments. For example, 20th century Italian architect Carlo Scarpa49 frequently embedded delicate line drawings of human bodies in a multiplicity of overlaid positions in his sketches of elevations to understand the spaces of his architectural designs.50 These transformations—or deformations of figures—allowed him to envision the movements of future occupants simultaneously in space and over time, as in his section drawing for the Brion Pavilion [Fig. 11]. Architecture critics also have noted that his graceful figures are usually female, thus imbuing his architecture with a cultural image of feminine beauty, not a canon of scale or proportion51 but of activity, as seen in Figure 12. An etching titled Nude in an Interior [Fig. 13] made when Scarpa was a student at the Accademia in Venice, illustrates “… the architectonic feeling for fluid space—the staircase and windows…

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Figure 13: Nude in an Interior, Carlo Scarpa, ca.

1922-23 Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, Electa Editrice, Milan © 1984.

[DE]FORMING THE FIGURE

(Permission not granted for electronic publication)

Figure 14: The Manhattan Transcripts, Part 4: The Block, Bernard Tschumi, 1977-1981.Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press © 1994.

[and] the drawing of the naked figure contains an echo of forms later dissolved with exquisite irony into his architecture drawings.”52 With similar attention to human movement, contemporary architect Bernard Tschumi53 developed a narrative representational system in which sets of images consist of the photograph of an event, a line drawing of the physical setting, and a diagram to represent movement over time, as seen in

drawings for “The Manhattan Transcripts” and “Screenplays” [Figs. 14, 15]. These series of drawings can be read like detective novels, suggesting that architecture could be based on stories of imaginary people’s lives,54 not unlike the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. According to Tschumi, architectural drawing implies a transformational sequence in which successive design iterations become a theoretical space.

Tschumi asked several questions relevant to

(Permission not granted for electronic publication)

Figure 15: Screenplays: Domino Distortion, Bernard Tschumi, 1979. Architecture & Disjunction, The MIT Press (c) 1994.

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architectural representation: “Is topology a mental construction toward a theory of space?”

“Can a geometrical spatial concept be replaced by a concept based on one’s experience of space?” and “Does the experience of space determine the space of experience?” In so doing, he advocated for architecture that “produces dissociation in space and time, where an architectural element only functions by colliding with a programmatic element, with the movement of bodies…”55 By describing this process of disjunction, one that is incompatible with a static view of architecture, Tschumi has deconstructed human scale and proportion, essentially de-forming the figure.

A final exemplar of de-formation is the architect and urban planner Léon Krier,56 whose metaphor for the city literally de-forms the human body into an industrial Cyborg, using a conceptual drawing to allude to the de-humanization of urban spaces, as seen in “Reconstruction of the City” [Fig. 16] in which his solution re-embodies the city. As embodied design thinking, Krier’s interpretive sketches echo Lefebvre’s social imagination, as in his untitled drawing of a mysterious nude figure in the library [Fig. 17].

Also referred to as social semiotics, “Drawing not only expresses the social context but is part of a more complex dialectic in which drawings actively symbolize the social system, thus producing, as well as being produced by, the ideological framework of a society.”57 The drawings of these three architects illustrate several ways that contemporary designers can use figure drawing to think through a social imaginary and thus “may reclaim the

Figure 16: Reconstruction of the City, Léon Krier, 1990 Architecture & Urban Design: 1967-1992, Léon Krier © 1992.

Figure 17: Untitled, Léon Krier, 200. Architecture of Community, Island Press, Léon Krier & Dhiru Thadani © 2009.

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Figure 18: Figure Studies, Leonardo da Vinci, 15061508. Royal Collection Trust, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II © 2013.

[DE]FORMING THE FIGURE

ontological dimension of human figures in architectural representation.”58 To do so, however, would require a rejection of the ballooned or silhouetted figures commonly available in computer graphics software that promises anonymous “people textures”59 and a commitment to sketching or rendering embodied users engaged in activity, as seen in the action figures of Leonardo [Fig. 18]. In fact, in the early Renaissance figural studies were routine before the strict conventions of technical drawing were fixed by the advent of modern architectural education.60 Recently, contemporary architects have advocated for a re-examination of the canons of scale and proportion to “re-figure” the discipline— replacing idealized rules and conventions, such as Le Corbusier’s modulor, with a more vital and humanistic architecture that responds instead to real persons, and thus removes the arbitrariness of the design process.61 As a teacher of both visual communication and environmental psychology to architecture students, my goal is to integrate both courses in my daily pedagogy. In the studio, I teach anatomy and life drawing, often to promising architects who have no experience with drawing from live models. They are challenged to view figurative drawing not just as a means to communicate human scale but also to explore the social design implications of human habitation in a psychological environment.

In this manner, the graphic portrayal of gestures and locomotion—as well as emotions and social interactions—can become a powerful tool for recording the quotidian

rhythms of the bodies who inhabit everyday spaces of de-formation and for imagining how clients and potential users shape their environments in a transactional social topology.

AUTHOR’S NOTE Architect Mariarosaria di Palo assisted with Italian translation, correspondence, and image research in the preparation of this article.

END NOTES 1

Burke, Edmund. “Proportion is Not the Cause of Beauty in the Human Species.” On the Sublime and Beautiful: The Harvard Classics. Vol. 24, Part 2. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1904. E-book.

2

Schneider, Peter. “Disegno: On drawing Out the Archi-Texts.” Journal of Architectural Education 61 (2007): 20. Wiley Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

3

Anderson, Alex T. “On the Human Figure in Architectural Representation.” Journal of Architectural Education 55.4 (2002): 238–46. Wiley Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

4

Agrest, Diane. “Architecture from Without: Body, Logic, and Sex.” Ed. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden. Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, 2000, p. 360.

5

Kuchling, Heimo. Oskar Schlemmer: Man, Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus. Trans. J. Seligman.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.

6

Alberti, Leon Battista. De re aedificatoria, On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Trans. J. Rykwert, N. Leach, and R. Tavernor. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.

7

Dürer, Albrecht. “Four books of human proportion.” The Writings of Albrecht Dürer. Trans. W. M. Conway. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958.

8

Richter, Jean Paul. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci: Compiled and Edited from the Original Manuscripts. Vols. 1-2. 1883. New York: Dover, 1970.

9

Klassen, Helmut W. Michelangelo: Architecture and the Vision of Anatomy. MA thesis. McGill University, 1990, p. 13.

10

Barkan, Leonard. Michelangelo: A Life on Paper. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Paper.

11

Muscarelle Museum of Art. (2010). Anatomy as Architecture: Drawings by the Master. Williamsburg, VA: Author. Web. <http://web.wm.edu/muscarelle/exhibitions/2010/michelangelo.html>

12

Klassen, Helmut W. Michelangelo: Architecture and the Vision of Anatomy. MA thesis. McGill University, 1990, p. 83.

13

Brothers, Cammy. Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

14

Anderson, Alex T. “On the Human Figure in Architectural Representation.” Journal of Architectural

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Education 55.4 (2002): 238-46. Wiley Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

15

Frascari, Marco. “The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa.” Res: A Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 14 (1987): 124. JSTOR. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

16

Kuchling, Heimo. Oskar Schlemmer: Man, Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.

17

Freese, Ernest Irving. “Dimensions of the Human Figure.” Architectural Graphic Standards: For Architects, Engineers, Decorators, Builders, and Draftsmen. 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 1941.

18

Pai, Hyungmin. The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

19

Le Corbusier. The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, Second impression of the 2000 facsimile reprint of the first English edition, in 2 volumes, 1954 and 1958. Basel & Boston: Birkhäuser, 2004.

20

Dreyfuss, Henry. The Measure of Man: Human Factors in Design. 1st ed. New York: Whitney, 1959.

21

Hosey, Lance. “Hidden lines: Gender, Race, and the Body in Graphic Standards.” Journal of Architectural Education 55.2 (2001): 101-12. Wiley Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

22

Tilley, Alvin R. The Measure of Man and Woman: Human Factors in Design. New York: Wiley, 2002.

23

Wilcox, Stephen B. “Introduction.” The Measure of Man and Woman: Human Factors in Design. Rev. ed. New York: Wiley, 2002.

24

Alberti, Leon Battista, quoted in Oswald M. Ungers. “Ordo, Fondo et Mensure: The Criteria of Architecture.” Ed. Henry A. Millon & Vittorio M. Lampugnani. The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1994, p. 310.

25

Shute, John. The first and chief groundes of architecture used in all the auncient and famous monymentes with a farther & more ample discourse uppon the same than hitherto hath been set out by any other. [Original imprint] London, England: Thomas Marshe, 1563. E-book.

26

Ungers, Oswald M. “Ordo, Fondo et Mensure: The Criteria of Architecture.” Ed. Henry A. Millon & Vittorio M. Lampugnani. The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1994, p. 315.

27

Coates, Nigel. Narrative Architecture. New York: Wiley, 2011.

28

Lefaivre, Liane. Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

29

Ibid, 3.

30

Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. Polyphilo or the Dark Forest Revisited: An Erotic Epiphany of Architecture.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

31

Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 2012.

32

Stivale, Charles J. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen, 2005. E-book.

33

Ballantyne, A. Deleuze and Guattari for Architects. New York: Routledge, 2007. E-book.

34

Seigworth, Gregory J. “From Affection to Soul.” Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Ed. Charles J. Stivale.

Durham: Acumen, 2005, p. 168. E-book.

35

Lury, Celia, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova. “The Becoming Topological of Culture.” Theory, Culture, and Society 29 (2012): 3-35. Sage Journals Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

36

Lash, Scott. “Deforming the Figure: Topology and the Social Imaginary.” Theory, Culture, and Society 29 (2012): 261-67. Sage Journals Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

37

Ibid, 265.

38

Ibid, 278.

39

Borden, Iain. Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001, p. 228.

40

Stanek, Lukasz. Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 81. E-book.

41

Lury, Celia, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova. “The Becoming Topological of Culture.” Theory, Culture, and Society 29 (2012): 6. Sage Journals Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

42

Edensor, Tim. Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2010.

43

Lefebvre, Henri and Catherine Régulier. “The Rhythmanalytical Project.” 1985. Henri Lefebvre.

Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. Trans. S. Elden and G. Moore. New York: Continuum, 2004. E-book.

44

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

45

Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture. New York: Wiley, 2011, p. 42.

46

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, quoted in Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 2012, p. 23.

134

[DE]FORMING THE FIGURE

47

Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 38.

48

Anderson, Alex T. “On the Human Figure in Architectural Representation.” Journal of Architectural Education 55.4 (2002): 238-46. Wiley Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

49

Dal Co, Francesco and Giuseppe Mazzariol. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works. Milan: Electa Editrice, 1984.

50

Anderson, Alex T. “On the Human Figure in Architectural Representation.” Journal of Architectural Education 55.4 (2002): 238-46. Wiley Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

51

Frascari, Marco. “The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa.” Res: A Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 14 (1987): 132. JSTOR. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

52

Scarpa, Gigi. “Painting.” Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works. Ed. Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol. Milan: Electa Editrice, 1984, p. 150.

53

Tschumi, Bernard. The Manhattan Transcripts. London: Academy Editions, 1981.

54

Davies, Colin. Thinking about Architecture: An Introduction to Architectural Theory. London: Laurence King, 2011.

55

Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 57-59, 213.

56

Krier, Léon. Léon Krier: Architecture & Urban Design, 1967-1992. London: Academy Editions, 1992.

57

Riley, Howard. “Perceptual Modes, Semiotic Codes, Social Mores: A Contribution Towards a Social Semiotics Of Drawing.” Visual Communication 3 (2004): 300. Sage Journals Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

58

Anderson, Alex T. “On the Human Figure in Architectural Representation.” Journal of Architectural Education 55.4 (2002): 244. Wiley Online. Web. 12 Feb. 2013.

59

Walker, Rob. “Go Figure: To Sell the Future, Find the Right ‘People Textures’ for the Sketch.” The New York Times Magazine 4 Feb. 2011. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/magazine/>

60

Brothers, Cammy. Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

61

Vessella, Luigi. “Il Canone come Regola in Architettura: Da Vitruvio a Sebastiano Serlio.” Senzacornice: Rivista Online di Arte Contemporanea e Critica, Canone 2, (Feb-Apr 2012): n. pag. Web. <http://www.senzacornice.org/articolo_archivio.php?id_magazine=3&id=13>

136 138 Victor Ciborro & Natalia Ventura Víctor Manuel Cano Ciborro is an architect, graduating from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. He has worked at Gazapo-Lapayese Studio and has been a researcher at the Cultural Landscape Research Group. In 2009 he was in India studying the wide range of social housing and formation process of Indian

in Cameroon. He has also recently published in Engawa journal texts about Formless Natalia Matesanz Ventura studied at the Liceo Francés in Madrid. She is an architect, graduating from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura y Geodesia in Alcalá de Henares. She has worked for Carlos Arroyo, Jaramillo & Kreisler,

and multidisciplinary project in Madrid. Her ongoing research is focused on the city and the contemporary landscape as a manageable and emotional relation.

Currently, she works as a teaching assistant at the Architectural Projects Teaching

2

I DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE ME VOMIT

0_Prologue Ugly is not to give away the word ugly while talking about the ugliness.

Doubting about whether what you are reading is actually ugly.

1_ Solid The little Jean painted with “strange” colours.

His universe of browns, reds and purples, escaped from his insides as he searched for himself through the paper.

His palette was constellation of repugnancy.

Everyone looked at him.

Dirty looks. Inquiring faces.

Nobody understood how he could spend so much time searching for disgusting colours.

Solid forms. Painting as if with road paste.

Petroleum. Feces. Blood. Painting different.

You’ll fear yourself for not being like everyone else.

Pay attention to the autistic, the mad or the freak´s motion, notice.

You’ll deny your “insides” faced with the pleasant.

The uncomfortable entrails.

The uncomfortable strange.

That is painting.

Figure 1: Grand Maitre of the Outsider, Jean Dubuffet, 1947.

2_Heavy 2 Beauty is light. Clouds. Always pleasant.

You´ll never hate a cloud. The horizon is beauty.

The beauty comes off, it touches you and then walks away. Forever.

- Captain, where are we going?

-To the horizon.

-Impossible. We will never reach it.

The possible. What invades. That which slowly glides.

Mud. Mould, Dirty sand. Hell.

A worm followed by another snake.

That which weights. What falls.

Night. Thunder. Storm.

Stroke, Gravity impossing itself.

Unmaking flesh. Death falls.

Deny me the horizon.

Your five fingers over my eyes.

Sweating shadow, censuring hand.

Stop me like cold sweat before everything.

Don´t look. Beings fearing their own nature.

Saturn was right when devouring his sons.

Figure 2: “Saturn Devouring His Son”, Francisco Goya, 1923.

138

I DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE ME VOMIT

Figure 3: “Triptych, May-June,” Francis Bacon, 1973 © 2013. The Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved. ARS, New York / DACS, London.

3_The Revolt of the Inards 3 Francis sees everything distorted.

I will only paint what I see. The body’s spasms.

The less forced and coerced situations existing.

Moments. When the body desires to escape through one of its holes.

Emanations. Instints. Screams.

Bathrooms must no longer be white.

._Epilogue Darling, I don´t want you to see me vomit.

140 142 144 146 148 TEMPORAL DESIGN Krysia Bussière Krysia Bussière is in her fourth year of undergrad at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture. She lives in LaSalle, Ontario and plans to complete her M.Arch. in the coming year.

Figure 1: Manipulation of space

Utopian plans are typically conceived by positing order yet they are often restricted to a single moment in time. Thus, these “ideal” forms, initially perceived to be beautiful, become static. They are limited to a single moment in time and are not made to adapt. Alternative to this process is that which occurs in nature and in areas that are said by some to be organically developed (such as Venice, Italy; Ganvie, Benin; Ain Salah, Algeria; Miria, Niger; Oslo, Norway; farmland outside of Rouen, France and towns west of Siberia, Russia). Their development abandons traditional forms of beauty and creates what is initially difficult to understand or is perceived as ugly. Kevin Lynch described Utopias as seeming to “come from nowhere and to go nowhere… ‘Scientific’ planners… focus on how things change now and how one should maneuver to survive in the present context… if it is suitable to one particular time, place, or culture, it may soon be misapplied to some other one.” Unlike their utopian counterparts, evolving cities and forms maintain flux with a society that is in constant flux.

Of course, it would be naïve to suggest that natural systems do not contain any system or intent. An excerpt from Prairyerth describes the existence of a code in the natural process (Least Heat-Moon, 41): But the grasses before the wind bend and straighten and bend and keep their vital parts underground, and, come into season, they release their germ, spikelets and seeds to the wind, the invisible sea that in this place must carry the code, the directions from the unfaced god,... and so the grasses pull the energy from the wind, the offspring of sunlight.

A system that is in flux is forged through the application of a code of nature or experience, responding to and perhaps even supplying both the given conditions and the contemporary goals. The code exists as a means of primary conception (and secondary/tertiary reaction), much like systems found in nature. Of course, suggesting that this is a correct or fitting way to design implies a kind of utopia itself.

However, this approach presents an alternative to what is commonly perceived as ideal and beautiful.

In this study, the system or environment is created through a series of applied actions, rather than through one action from a singular vision that is not intended to be revisited.

The key to such a system would not solely be the design or analysis of the dimension of elements; rather, significance rests on the changes to these dimensions which occur over time.

This process critiques typical utopian design of an ideal system. Unlike in a utopian plan, a system that is in constant flux affects the society with whom it is inhabited but is also greatly manipulated by the environment that it exists within. Repeated recharging of the system allows for the form to continuously challenge or reinforce the needs of the inhabitants. In Isaiah 28: 24-

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TEMPORAL DESIGN

25, the prophet describes the destroying action of ploughing as a destructive, yet productive act: So, too, should the motion of a changing environment be one which promotes positive growth and forgets traditional conceptions which impede such growth. Therefore, manipulations which occur must not be a total destruction of previous conditions, otherwise there will not be any growth at all.

24 Do those who plough for sowing plough continually?

Do they continually open and harrow their ground?

25 When they have levelled its surface, do they not scatter dill, sow cummin, and plant wheat in rows and barley in its proper place, and spelt as the border?

Creation, then, does not produce a static, composed or pre-planned result like that of a utopian plan. While ideal forms propose an end through carefully selected means, this alternative form of design exists as neither a cause nor an effect. A form, for example, that bends and bows due to a code and given conditions also imposes changes to the code. In this way, such a system is metabolising and turning in upon itself.

It may exist as a structure or physical form that is conforming to newly imposed conditions and a code or set of directions. Alternatively, a code may imply a method for the gathering or separating of people based on the current conditions and ways which they have been manipulated. In the latter case, manipulation of the environment might not suggest changes to a structure but may influence the location, orientation or size of a structure to suit the needs of the society. Either direction describes the designer as one who conceives of the code but also as one who occupies the environment.

The course of action which an occupant might take is of particular interest; a user of the space may actively fight against impending changes or perhaps passively comply. In both cases, a system which is in constant flux would engage the occupant. A third option may be for the occupant to simply withdraw from the space entirely. This last scenario may be easy to overlook and might initially cause an observer to discount this option entirely, however, this does not take into account the nature of a system which is in flux. Because this proposed system is one that relies heavily on given and changing conditions, this withdrawal would indeed influence the course of the system, whether through a change in social density or through the absence of active opposition or reinforcement.

Figure 2: Compilation of city and rural maps

144 144

TEMPORAL DESIGN

Figure Fig ure 2: .

146

TEMPORAL DESIGN

Figure 3: Form dictated by wind speed and direction

Figure 4: Initial sketches of manipulation of form

Rapid sketch studies have begun to explore the implications of such actions. With a given rate of change, would occupants be more likely to abandon the space for another environment perhaps one that reinforces traditional values regarding space and activity - or would occupants allow the changing form to dictate space and future approaches to use of space? Whether one begins to regard space as temporary, suitable, challenging, static, comfortable, sacred or meaningless is best determined by exploring different frequencies and methods of growth.

The occupants’ reactions to these manipulations of space may indicate a nontraditional form of the ideal through an approach that is initially difficult to perceive. As stated earlier, the proposed system may not exist simply on a map or plan because of the intricacies of the interactions which must take place in order to create such a system. Different from typical perceptions of beauty and order, a system that is in flux might be understood to be a rhythm of elements which establish an ideal environment that is everchanging and consistently challenging.

Beauty in this system should be found where the system is harmonious with the conditions or people which it affects. Otherwise, the system could fail to meet the needs of its habitants and would likely be abandoned altogether. It would be important, then, to establish a “human

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TEMPORAL DESIGN

frequency”, perhaps, which should defy the traditionally static approach to creation of the ideal yet not move so quickly so as to entice occupants to view space as temporary and meaningless.

Either extreme case would likely produce a similar effect in that users of the space may begin to regard its design as inconsistent with human needs. Design of spaces with consideration of time brings to mind the Perdurance Theory, originating with David Kellogg Lewis. Lewis’ philosophy of perdurance was explained through Mark Johnston as when “something… persists by having different temporal parts, or stages, at different times, though no one part of it is wholly present at more than one time” (Oakes 205). This theory suggests that forms become an index of the past and an indication of the future. Design, then, must utilize what we know and perceive about time in order to truly achieve what is beautiful or suitable for the society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

10

“Aougrout, Algeria.” 28° 45’ 0” N, 0° 15’ 0” E. Google Earth. 2012.

November 2012.

11

“Venice, Italy.” 45.4333° N, 12.3167° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

12

“Siberia, Russia.” 60.0000° N, 105.0000° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

13

“Delhi, India.” 29.0167° N, 77.3833° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

Least Heat-Moon, William. PrairyErth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999. Print.

14

“Concoran.” 36.0981° N, 119.5594° W. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

5

“Oslo, Norway.” 59.9494° N, 10.7564° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

15

“Oxnard Pacific.” 34° N, 119° W. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

6

“Tegbi, Ghana.” 5° 51’ 0” N, 0° 59’ 0” E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

16

“Algeria.” 28° N, 3° W. Google Earth.

2012. November 2012.

7

“Ganvie, Benin.” 6.4667° N, 2.4167° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

17

“Detroit, USA.” 42.3314° N, 83.0458° W. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

8

“Miria, Niger.” 13.7167° N, 9.1500° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

18

“Radial Farms.” 33.8948° N, 111.5095° W. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

9

“Rouen, France.” 49.4433° N, 1.0958° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

19

“Rome, Italy.” 41.9000° N, 12.5000° E. Google Earth. 2012. November 2012.

1

Lynch, Kevin. Good City Form. MIT Press, 1981. Print.

2

Oakes, Gregory M. “Perdurance and Causal Realism.” Erkenntnis. 60.2 (2004): 205-227.

3

The New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition. New York. Harper Catholic Bibles. 2007.

4

150 152 154 156 UGLY = NOT BEAUTIFUL (?)

Adamantios Tegkelidis Adamantios Tegkelidis studied architecture in the University of Patras, Greece and the Technical University of Berlin. Currently, he is a master student in the University of Delft, the Netherlands and owner of the blog: (un)architecture.blog.com that focuses mostly on paper architecture and abstract approaches to contemporary issues.

He also worked as an assistant architect in Andreas Angelidakis office, Athens, actively participating in the Biennale of Venice, 2012 as design cooperator for the project “Troll Casino” presented in the Greek pavilion. The book “the future of architecture” and the magazine “Ampersand” have also featured parts of his work.

In 2011, “Dogtooth” was the second Greek movie to earn a nomination for best foreign language film award during the Oscar ceremony.

The specific category recognizes movies that cannot be compared to the mainstream, easilydigested, Hollywood category. After such an acknowledgment for the low budget film, Greek audiences rushed once again into movie theaters to give it another chance almost two years after its original release. But “Dogtooth” is not a film that is easily shallowed. The story revolves around a 5-member suburban family that confines itself inside a vast rural house in the outskirts of Athens. Socially isolated and autarkic, the teenaged children have been living in a microcosm created by their parents based on the alteration of the meaning and context of ordinary words: it is a cinematographic dystopia where “sea” is an armchair and “cunt” the PCkeyboard. For these three kids, our unlimited endless galaxy is contained in 5 acres of land protected by the surrounding fences of their villa.

The allegorical meaning of this short tale is constructed using two basic arguments as its basis. First and foremost the director George Lathimos stresses the grave significance of education (in a vague, generative sense) for the evolution of human kind, especially in mental terms. The information that we perceive during our lifetime is responsible for teaching us elementary behaviors, such as to avoid putting our finger into burning fire, while on the other hand dictating non-established definitions of ideas such as freedom, life and beauty.

Furthermore, Lathimos distinguishes the fact

152

that words and their subsequent meaning can randomly vary; instead of polarizing antithetical notions of words such as life/death or man/ woman, the movie-script generates an entirely new universe based on the existing word-sounds; hence the definition of ugliness is not a mirrored copy of beauty. The aforementioned statements will be our groundwork in order to formulate a cohesive approach to architectural ugliness.

While Umberto Eco strove to build-up the very essence of ugly by painstakingly examining all the related sources found during the history of humankind, this exact term took a very specific form in the architectural context triggered by the establishment and the gradual evolution of modernity and the new breed of architectural education that it encompassed. In Paris, the École Des Beaux Arts was the first well-known architectural institute, the incunabula for the “stararchitects” of that era and the driving force for triggering and evolving an architectural style that derived from the Romanesque ruins of the Italian continent, the roots of which are found in the Greek monuments of the classic period.

It was precisely in that golden epoch of the Parthenon that ideas concerning abstract meanings such as “beauty” were geometrically transcended into the building environment through mathematics while simultaneously being expressed through words such as “κάλλος” (Greek for beauty). Because of this systematic approach to these inclinations, the produced words gained an absolute and surpassing significants which was equivalently

UGLY = NOT BEAUTIFUL (?)

disseminated through the ages, especially among artists who chose either to comply with their rules or drift away from them. Nonetheless, at this point, we have to decipher the fact that classic in ancient Greece was mostly referred to as the organic forms of the statues as interpreted by the sculptors, the rules of which were ultimately applied in architectural forms, especially for religious-oriented buildings and temples. After all, it was these sculptors who also used to draw the temples and the monuments.

Bible of the young students; the Swiss architect was praised as a hero (Hackney 1990). Oddly enough, throughout the pages of the book, there is an ambiguous relation to the statements that were initially made long ago by Thomas Aquinas; he was the first to clearly relate the functional/ utilitarian aspect of an entity with the notion of beauty. Le Corbusier reintroduced Aquinas’ ideology that took a doctrine form largely due to the revolutionary jargon he used (Eco 2004).

The École des Beaux-Arts interpreted these norms or canons as massive, juxtaposed, sculptural ornamentation of symbolic items which formed the “skin” of the buildings while at the same time rendered and propounded the classical authoritarian beauty. Therefore, almost every architectural example that didn’t abide by this “evangelion” was considered sinful and ugly*. This was roughly the essence of the architectonic cultivation that was transmitted to the majority of architectural apprentices who probably considered the Parisian Institute as the great ambassador of what was considered architectural beauty. However, the formerly outlined stream was halted after the savage emergence of modernism which reformulated the de facto meaning of architectural beauty.

Le Corbusier’s former occupation as a watchmaker was obviously inadequate to justify his “belief ” in utilitarian forms. Nowadays, it is already widely known that during his early trips, as CharlesÉdouard Jeanneret, he intensively studied the classical Greek temple, the ancestor of its Roman counterpart. Observing the whitened ruins of the Parthenon, he crystallized a Hegelian** meaning of architecture as non-art free from the needless inoperative elements (Hollier 1992). Hence, instead of classic, his modus should probably be described as Doric***. His clearly-expressed repulsion for the École des Beaux-Arts (Corbusier 1946) and the warm reception of his ideas among the youngsters banished neoclassicism as an ugly and false representation of architecture, making space for the upcoming beauty of “less.” Somehow, history is repeating itself.

Gradually, modernism took over the reins, self-evolving into the new architectonic ritual.

Its principles were dictatorially preached inside the ever growing institutes of Europe while synchronously Le Corbusier’s manifesto “Towards a New Architecture” became the

By all means, the process of forcing neoclassicism into oblivion, raising the etiquette “ugly” over every related example was reinforced by three more documented events that took place concurrently with Le Corbusier’s manifesto. Initialy, we have to mention the bond established between him

and Adolf Loos especially through Loos’ text “Ornament und Verbrechen”**** also exalted through the pages of “L’ Esprit Nouveau” magazine. Loos not only regarded ornament as the impersonation of ugliness but, at an advanced level, he related it to criminal behavior both as architectonic visualization and as social display (Van Bergeijk 2003). Accordingly, even more related books came into light, such as Karl Rosenkrantz’s “aesthetic of ugliness” that delivered a sermon for the ugliness that engulfs deformation and distortion (Eco 2007). Still, the most important factor in this movement was the violent burst of World War II that forced the majority of the distinct modernistic architects to flee in search of a safer place anywhere else but the European continent. The international style that followed this migration thereupon settled a global architectural and social education system devoted to the beauty of the Modern while rejecting anything else as ugly. In that sense ugly was defined as an opposition to everything that is not modern.

The modern apparatus by that time had allies in almost every representative city of the world. The constant meetings of the CIAM members involved broad discussions which in turn, steadily, gave birth to a specific strategy based on the utopian socialistic world they wanted to create. Consequently, blinded by the idealistic urban visions printed on huge posters and named after grandiose titles that promised a more prosperous, equalitarian society, they conducted a thorough expropriation of entire neighborhoods both in urban and rural

154

areas constructed under former architectural principles. Victorian middle-income towns in England were literally erased in order to give space for the new vision (Hackney 1990). Despite the drastic, holistic changes, after an undefined period of time, it was fairly obvious that something was wrong.

The massive constructive resurgence of Le Corbusier’s concrete dominos didn’t produce the desired aesthetic effect, nor did it fulfill the high social expectations of modernist. This situation, under which something is not the way it should be, is laconically summed up in the term “ugliness of the uncanny” (Eco, 2007). The abysmal schism between the picture (illustration/ portrayal of the idea) and the building (actual edifice) turned out to be the major drawback of the vanguard, offering multiple headaches for every architect. The hygienic accurate drawings most of the times were interpreted as lousy details, unpredicted construction failures and an alteration of the overall atmosphere that the building was supposed to reflect. The modern vanguard miserably failed to meet its expectations and falling in its own trap, forged a new meaning for ugly.

Moreover, the radical introduction of industrially-oriented materials made in vast amounts through mass production were unable to last more than a formerly-specified time frame. Their episodic lifespan directly affected the whole structure which, from that point on, was in need of continuous renovation and “liftings” just to maintain its

UGLY = NOT BEAUTIFUL (?)

beauty and ensure its salubrious ethos. As opposed to the monumental and time resistant neoclassical palaces, modern houses began resembling a modern woman who acquired her own plastic surgeon that guaranteed her good looks till the late years of human decay.

We, students of a new era, strive to identify the canons of new promising architectural premises, devoting ourselves to the digital tools and the complex matrix of the electronic intelligence. The computational revolution shares many similarities with modernism.

From another perspective, modernisms success in small scale individual housing has been brutally contradicted to the interminable failures in urban scale and collective conditions.

The Arcadia of Villa Savoye confined to its local well-cut lawn surrounded by greenery and located outside the frenzy of downtown Paris, when multiplied by thousands, reveals the unburdened reality of Athens: a hefty concrete landscape of the multiplied corbusian domino structure. To rephrase Major Graus’s quote†”what is admirable on the small scale, is monstrous on the large.”

The world is changing. So is architecture, the art of building. Since the world is evolving its communication and manufacturing methods drastically and with increasing speed, architecture will never be the same. All building components must be designed to be active actors. Buildings and their constituting components no longer can be seen as passive objects. The new kind of building is based on the invasion of digital technologies into the building industry and into the design process.

(Oosterhuis 2012)

It has been almost a century since the pioneer manifestation of modernism resumed into the following lines: A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit. Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined end, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit; We must create the mass-production spirit; The spirit of constructing mass-production houses; The spirit of living in mass-production houses; The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses (Corbusier 1946)

In spite of the reciprocal resemblance in linguistic tone and color, I am afraid that the future of the new architectural movement is rather delineated. Probably we should not expect much; we will closely observe whether it is going to solve real architectonic problems and restore the already lost beauty or end up just like its ancestor, reproducing another aspect of ugliness and becoming the new convention. Meanwhile, contemporary architecture students should probably consider and investigate every possible route while being open to new ideas using the new informative means – otherwise we will be bounded by dogmatization and reduce ourselves to the ignorance of the teenagers of “Dogtooth.”

NOTES *

A characteristic example of that dogmatist attitude is beautifully described though the pages of the novel: “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.

**

Hegel used to describe architecture as the specific group of attributes found in an edifice and which cannot degrade it into a building.

***

German in the text: “Ornament and Crime” (English title).

****

A word deriving from the Greek “δωρικός” that describes the construction technique based on strict, exact lines found in several fairly big archaic temples as opposed to the Ionic; a more decorative style that we encounter on small-sized temples and relevant buildings.

†

A memorable quote from the movie the night of the generals (Anatole Litvak, 1967) originally scripted as: “what is admirable on the large scale (a win of a battle during the war and the massive annihilation of thousands of soldiers) is monstrous on the small (a murder)”.

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UGLY = NOT BEAUTIFUL (?)

BIBLIOGRAPHY 1

Corbusier, Le. “Towards a new architecture”. London: Architectural Press. 1946.

2

Eco, U. “On beauty”. London: Secker & Warburg. 2004.

3

Eco, U. “On ugliness”. London: Harvill Secker. 2007.

4

Hackney, R. “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly; cities in crisis”. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd. 1990.

5

Hollier, D. “Against Architecture; the writings of Goerges Bataille, 2nd edition”. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1992.

6

Oosterhuis, K. “Towards a new kind of architecture; Delft lecture series on architectural design”.

Delft: Delft University of Technology, 2012.

7

Van Bergeijk, H. “The travelling eye; Between Jeanneret and Le Corbusier”, Thesis, nr. 1, pp.

69-77. 2003.

158 160 162 164 166 HOUSE WITH A VIEW ON THE MINE SHAFT Anna Klochowicz EDITED BY AMY SWIFT

Anna was born in Radom, Poland. She is a fourth year student of Architecture and Urbanism at Warsaw University of Technology. In 2012 she participated in an exchange program with the University of Detroit Mercy. She enjoys painting, art history, and ďŹ lm. Her hobby is travelling to see extraordinary examples of architecture.

She enjoys the architecture of the Polish Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Republic for its singularity - being beautiful and ugly at the same time.

Figure 1: Characteristic post-industrial buildings of Silesia - "Krystyna" mine shaft in Bytom. Photography by fotomargines.pl

With the end of communism in 1989, Poland took a huge step forward. It was a change that ended a long period of the peoples’ mutiny, disappointment and praying. Many Poles welcomed this change with a sigh of relief, but this new period would prove similarly difficult as they worked to settle accounts with a hated past. This process of reconciliation has effected many aspects of life, including architecture.

During the early years of these new times the region of Silesia in southwest Poland was transformed from a region of heavy industry into a hulking expanse of inactive production halls. To some these abandoned landscapes are an eyesore that should be demolished but to others this area is one of great yet unexploited potential. Some have been purchased by Polish or foreign private investors, but many still remain vacant. This cultural struggle of transitions is felt most painfully by the people who lost their jobs at these industrial plants.

However, it is also clearly visible through the region’s architecture - in its peeling paint, broken windowglass, rusting steel construction, graffitied walls, and environmentally devastated surroundings. These unique landscapes appear picturesque and fascinating, but they are slowly disappearing as the owners are keen to pull down the abandoned production halls in the hope of selling the empty lots [Fig. 1].

Architect Przemo Łukasik has taken the uncommon approach of embracing this phenomenon when he decided to rescue one of the buildings from the coal mine White Eagle.1

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HOUSE WITH A VIEW ON THE MINE SHAFT

During a stroll to the dumping ground where he looked for materials for his models, he was enchanted by this bizarre structure of an old mine lamp house [Fig. 2]. He loved the way it levitated over the ground on 8 reinforced concrete columns, and it seemed to be the perfect place for him to live. This way of living is of course unorthodox; however, it shows love for Silesia. In his reclaiming of this industrial ruin, the architect is remaining honest to Silesiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mining past. In order to do that you just have to redeďŹ ne the idea of home2 which is an idealistic approach demanding a lot of courage and daring, but really worth it when you look for an extraordinary space that you can call your own.

Figure 2: The lamp house before adaptation.

Photography from medusagroup for reportage by Anna Dudzinska.

The structure of the lamp house is so grotesque such as the times it was build – the 1960s – a period of building gray blocks of flats cheaply and in masses, fast and carelessly. The spatial and organizational situation at the coal mine was a nonsense. The entrance to the mine shaft was located adjacent to the mining pit. Cloak-rooms for the miners were located on the top floor of the front building. This means that the miners had to go from the entrance, through the cloak rooms to the coal-pit elevator, which took them to the mining shaft. On their way they had to collect their head lamp. Because the structure was meant to connect these various levels of function, this strange single-level lamp-house was build. It was connected to mine shaft elevator and to cloakrooms with bridges. In the 1990s, when mine was closed down, one of the bridges was demolished and the owners wished to tear down or sell the useless buildings.

When the architect discovered the building, it looked like a picture of misery and despair but its structure was very good [Fig. 3]. The main point of the designer’s project was to not change anything or cover the traces of history. The second condition of the rebuilding was that it needed to be inexpensive. But on the other hand he had to adapt it to the new residential function which is governed by its own rules. That is why one of the most basic and important changes was to insulate and paint the exterior walls, as well as replace the existing windows with aluminum ones.3 All of the windows on the new elevation were located based on the placement of previous windows, but only four of them stayed the same size, some were halved and two were joined together to create a panoramic opening on the south elevation. They were all placed in such a way that framed views on the close and distant mine-shafts. The elevations were aesthetically updated from an industrialized and strictly functional condition to a condition more in line with his stylistic intents.

The main problem was that this building does not have its own stairs. It was solved when the architect decided to recycle technical steel construction of a staircase from another building site.

He also had a similar approach to the scaffolding which was attached to the exterior walls. After renovations the elevations were completed he created a balcony around the building from the structure that remained. Now he can go out from the house to the center of the coal mine without going down 40 steps. That is why he also put a terrace on the roof. Both, the balcony and the roof-terrace were designed in a simple, structural move, which was suitable for the project goals [Fig. 4].

Inside the house he also did not change much. For instance, the distribution of the partition matches that of the lamp house. Thus he created one big open space where the kitchen, dining room, living room take place and a few smaller closed spaces such as the childrens’ bedrooms, service spaces and one open partly – parents’ room. [Figs. 5, 6]. The only new partition walls belonging to the restroom and wardrobe were painted bright orange to show the contrast with the old structure. The big open

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Figure 3: Interior of the lamp house before adaptation.

Photography from medusagroup for reportage by Anna Dudzinska.

space was visually divided by two translucent walls â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one a translucent plexiglass and the other a colorful glass [Fig. 8]. He uncovered original materials by just blasting concrete ďŹ&#x201A;oors and ceilings to show their characteristic formwork. Changing all installations was necessary but the architect did not hide the new ones, they are guided on the surface of walls. There was a lack of interior doors, which is why he designed sliding doors made

from beaverboard. Furnishings of the interior are a mix of inexpensive building materials and a few luxury elements. The interiors give an overall impression of modesty and austerity, but at the same time are cosy and homey.

The architect said in an interview that he likes living in this place. He got used to it, but he agrees it is not the place for everyone. For instance, not everybody would enjoy the

Figure 4: Present elevation. Photography from medusagroup for reportage by Anna Dudzinska.

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HOUSE WITH A VIEW ON THE MINE SHAFT

view of a mine-shaft from their bathroom window. The surroundings here are somewhat surreal. The mine is now closed and has long ceased operation, so his only neighbors are the few miners left to secure the mines.

But despite the obvious disadvantages – the distance from downtown, higher heating bills, and the unconvenience of living 40 steps above the ground – he knew what he was getting into and welcomed the challenge.4

Figure 5 (top): Diagram showing designing decisions of the architect. Figure 6 (above): Diagram showing divison of the spaces in the loft.

Figure 7 (above): Sketch of Bolko Loft.

This project has not been clearly defined yet. For sure it is experimental and controversial – you can easily feel incoherence between associations this building brings up and its function. On the one hand it is in the center of a coal mine, but on the other it flows over it, and only touches it with its supports. In this way it has become an island on a sea of coal. The architect created a utopian tree house of his childish dreams, in that he created something special from nothing. This extreme approach is a manifesto that indicates a solution to Silesia’s disinvestment problems by promoting that every building carries a meaning.

Even a simple shed creates associations in the beholder’s mind. Polish People’s Republic industrial buildings, which are generally ugly and neglectful, boil with potential but they have to be looked at with more gracious gaze.

Nowadays Polish people are curious about life.

They are searching and discovering. It is typical for developing countries. For example, the trend of building cheap-semi-luxury residential villas in the 1990s in the suburbs was a way to escape from their grayscale surrounding, showing that

now they can afford anything. Fortunately they do not build eyesores anymore. Poles developed their imagination, good taste and experimental point of view as you can see in an example like the Bolko Loft.

Figure 8: Living space. Photography by Daniel Chrobak, Jan Lunatyk.

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BIBLIOGRAPY This piece was originally written for adjunct professor Amy Swift’s studio at the University of Detroit Mercy in 2012.

1

“O projektowaniu w biednych czasasch: Przemo Łukasik at TEDxPoznań.” YouTube. YouTube, 02 May 2012. Web. 22 Nov. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgdcimA1u1I>.

Przemo Łukasik with medusagroup designed many other adaptive reuse of post-industrial buildings such as: adaptation of former granary for lofts, adaptation of Krystyna mine shaft for a multifunctional center, Michał coal mine urban plan, adaptation of water tower for an art gallery.

2, 3

Sroczyński, Grzegorz. “Loft Z Widokiem Na Górników.” Wyborcza.pl. Gazeta Wyborcza Magazyn Świąteczny, 20 Apr. 2012. Web. 23 Nov. 2012. <http://wyborcza.pl/magazyn/1,126176,11579857,Loft_z_widokiem_na_gornikow.html>.

4

“Fotokast - Bolko Loft - Dom Z Kopalni.” YouTube. YouTube, 02 June 2011. Web. 23 Nov. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHZ0qMwH0YA>.

168 170 172 174 176 178 180 182 FUNICULAR CASINO Aaron Jones Aaron is a 5th generation Oklahoman, having since practiced architecture in both Texas and Michigan. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Oklahoma State University and Master of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Aaron was a summer Fellow within CEMAT - Centre d’Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis - based in North Africa and sponsored by the US Dept. of State. Professionally Aaron maintains his practice on Detroit’s Eastside and teaches various architectural coursework within Lawrence Technological University’s College of Architecture and Design. Recently Aaron has served as Architect in Residence for the Bronx River Art Center, exhibited work within NEW PROJECT’s and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and is now currently developing work for the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

FUNICULAR CASINO This work sought to evaluate Detroit through various bouts of scale and proximity. A ďŹ&#x201A;oating casino, loaded with stereotype and bound for very real places, documents an absurd dialogue between insider and outsider. This conversation issued itself across varied media and within unorthodox atmospheres, ultimately offering alternative values for a time and place. Open mic stand-up, an international chair show, and several comic book stores emerged as a contrarian network for architectural discourse, happily skirting the mainstream.

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184 186 188 190 THE POLITICS OF UGLINESS: DYSTOPIC, BANAL, KITSCH

Andrea Alberto Dutto Andrea graduated with a dual degree in Architecture between Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and Ecole Nationale Supériere d’Architecture de Marseille (France). He studied with Luigi Snozzi in Monte Carasso (Switzerland) and recently concluded an academic experience in ETH Zurich. He worked with DOGMA in Rotterdam for the International Competition of Taichung Gateway Park (Taiwan). After graduation he continuously collaborated with the Politecnico di Torino Faculty of Architecture in the field of urban and architectural design. His main research purpose concerns architecture in relation to managerial techniques. Therefore he recently started a research on the topic of the urban grid. He is a blog activist and co-founder of the collective Endoxa.

The concept of ugliness, as opposed to beauty, is commonly intended as a criterion for aesthetic judgment towards a physical object or a representation. However, it can be most generally characterized as an instinctual reaction to external influences which substantially determine an intellectual desire for or aversion to a given object. Defining “ugly” is, in itself, a philosophical task widely neglected by historians of philosophy. At stake in this paper are some strategies of denial, of voluntary estrangement from beauty, or truth, which is generally considered as a totality1. Therefore it becomes crucial to point out that ugly is a concept which is assigned a “negative” connotation in terms of comparative judgment. This does not exclude the issue of formalization but rather the denial of a previous autonomous creative will. Actually, to be considered ugly is an effect derived from an operative strategy of rejection rather than from a specific stylistic choice. This leads to emancipation from the judgment of taste and to the assignation of a specific value to the intellectual process engaged in establishing the meaning of an artistic production in terms of social and political relevance2.

This short introduction to the concept of ugly evokes a specific attitude undertaken by the avant-garde designers and architects at the end of the 60s. This group based their ideology in the rejection of devaluation and established their references in certain types of intellectual productions engaged with politics and activism. What they generally share is a subversive purpose against the institutional

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and productive structure operable in terms of “destruction of the object”3. According to Franco Raggi, this subversive expression is realized through the design of objects that “are only the tip of the iceberg. That has as a common fact a state of political and existential distress which is the most instinctive and immediate expression of the general crisis of values in which the consciousness of modern society is debated, all stretched out, through the religion of consumption and production, to self-destruction and cancellation”4. If the object can be described as ugly for its morphological quality, for example lame chairs, kneeling tables, studded beds, it appears of secondary importance in comparison with the destructive message that prevails. Even utopia is sheltered from the capitalist dynamics of recycling, through representational strategies that bestow on dystopia the hypothesis for a future urban scenario developed as a consequence of neo-liberal speculations5. Instead of totalizing modernist visions characterized by a progressive vision about urban growth, there are cynical and controversial proposals which polarize their own goal in a polemic message. Reality and its related structures are deemed to be inadequate and only able to base their regulations on pure quantitative data.

To avoid unnecessary generalizations, the continuation of this paper is structured on a case study of Alessandro Mendini and his writings between 1970 and 1981. The events that elevate this architect as a key figure in the transitional period between Radical Design

THE POLITICS OF UGLINESS

and Neomodernism6 will not be analyzed in their entirety but rather in reference to the specific case of theoretical written production.

In the modern period, in fact, the work of art fundamentally consists in its theoretical content. The technique of writing is something that particularly pertains to this research.

During the twentieth century the role of writing within artistic production was structural and intrinsic to the understanding of its language and conceptual contents. The avant-garde and other protagonists of this period have often considered writing as a complementary role to that of their own artworks. Writing is not seen as something that indulges the processes of artistic formalization but rather is considered as a “project” in itself. It acquires a certain degree of autonomy evident in the activity of Mendini7. This author represents one of the most significant protagonists of the twentieth century as a protester of modernism and its subsequent precursor of postmodernism.

He adopts the negation of several principles linked to the tradition of functionalism and triggers a strong opposition to the ideology of the Modern Movement. This protest takes the form of an oxymoron which consists of the reversal of meanings: anti-design becomes the opposite of design, while the seriousness of rationalist thought is contrasted by a playful, ironic approach inferred from the banality of everyday life. More precisely, it is of great interest to examine Mendini’s communicative tendency as the director of the editorial boards of the design magazines “Casabella” and “Modo” over a decade. A fundamental and

shared aspect of his writings consists in his adversity towards institutional structures of production, or rather, a preventive denial of any totalizing institutionalization of creativity.

If ugliness can be defined as an intellectual attitude, it might be related to Mendini as much as it has been considered a strategy, as a opposed to a quality, at the beginning of this essay.

The direction of “Casabella” was entrusted to Mendini between June 1970 (No. 349) and April 1976 (No. 412). These are years in which the radical project began to weaken while nevertheless continuing their criticism of the institutional and industrial structures.

Mendini’s writing fully expresses the excitement of the moment and is deliberately fragmented, alienated and bitterly hostile to the tyranny of the dominant structures. The complexity of the urban realm is transposed to a critical attitude that, following the model of Ernesto Nathan Rogers, determines the political role of the architect and establishes in memory, invention and consciousness as its hinges. An aspect that is frequently present within the writings of this period is that of a political militancy that deals with reality by way of a cynically disenchanted approach. Despite the collective dimension of the “group” is the preferred board of discussion; it is through the exploration of the individual that alienation is revealed. Beginning with the editorial entitled “Project and Death” (Casabella, 360, 1972) Mendini establishes a technique of communication based on the literary form of the diary. Following the method of anthropological analyses, which

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THE POLITICS OF UGLINESS

was celebrated by Superstudio, he points out that in the depths of a postmodern existential condition is a meeting point with the design practice. The death of the subject, theorized by radical design, is transposed to the body of the individual that becomes itself part of a “generalized drama.” The slogan “harsh true realities against optimistic fake reality” is part of this criticism of a design capable of producing only ephemeral totalizing visions and unable to base its foundation on the verification of reality.

Mendini introjects the negative; he does not refuse it. The same theme returns in another editorial entitled “The Future is Already Past: The Concept of Death” (Casabella, 397, 1975) in which the metaphor of a political will is in opposition to the commercialization of a man-machine set to reject death: “Talking about death is instead implicitly to admit life.”

The wide range of experiences that emerged from Arte Povera resulted in a strong influence on cutting-edge architectural research which anxiously sought an ideological motivation from other disciplines. The figure of the “Gorilla Gorilla Beringei” (Casabella, 367, 1972) created

by Mendini, who also designed the cover graphics, shows on its chest the inscription “Radical Design” and therefore triggers the celebration of counter-design. This intellectual tendency is essentially an act of rejection and destruction of the choices imposed by the world of production and the artworks in question are “non-objects.” The description of the ideological oppression imposed by the real is expressed by its opposite. “The poor

technique in revolt demands for the release of the existential experience and imagination of the individual against the tyranny of the competitive method, which requires massproduction and aseptic criteria.” The essential message of counter-design is “the destruction of culture as it is the place of the elite that holds within itself the right to creativity.” Directly connected to this critique of capitalist logic of accumulation is the “Concept of De-project” (Casabella, 410, 1976), or rather a “negative” attitude which he describes as “a project conceived in reverse: instead of increasing the amount of information it removes, reduces, simplifies, streamlines the jammed mechanism.”

What prevails in this organic ephemeral nature is an “artificial world of millions of buildings and projects” that Mendini defines as ‘”antinature.” The same concept of a new “negative” nature is again present in another editorial entitled “The World as a Tool” (Casabella, 400, 1975) in which the loss of the natural world is replaced by “a world of architecture.”

Between 1977 and 1981 Alessandro Mendini edited the journal “Modo.” This magazine marked the passage to postmodernity and the multidisciplinary problems that stood in contradiction to the fragmentation and multiplicity of a dialectic with reality.

The most distinctive qualities that define Mendini’s work are also the key concepts of the magazine: kitsch, banality and amorality.

Mendini writes, “we list a goal that seems absurd: that is, to get into a project as much as possible

of ugly taste,” that is, the least possible aesthetic quality. With these words Mendini introduces the “Amoral Project” (Mode 14, 1978) through which he re-structures a series of critiques of the Modern Movement ideology guilty inasmuch as it “educated the understanding of a house that did not belong to its thoughts intellectually.”

On the contrary, the designer must adopt the language of the “man of the masses,” or rather a “trivial fantasy.” The style achieved in designing the trivial house is the non-violent style of unhappy consciousness that is typical of the masses who know they can no longer pursue the proletarian mirage. In contrast with the idea of an aesthetic extended to the masses, Mendini suggests the use of an “anti- aesthetic” that is able to embody a political strategy or a subliminal possibility of class struggle.

Following the definition given by A. Moles, the Kitsch8 must be understood as a phenomenon that goes beyond the issue of aesthetics to be considered a “social fact that stands as a way of being.” As opposed to a consumer society “that creates to produce and produces to consume,” Kitsch is the negation of the authentic worth and establishes its preferential place of evolution within domesticity. The critique that Mendini directs against functionalism and more generally against the Modern Movement starts from considering the notion of Kitsch as their evident “continuation.” It implicitly provides an “end” or a purpose to the parable of the functionalist belief that beauty is the adaptation of an object to its function. As Modo writes in an editorial entitled “Utility of the Useless,” (Modo, 12, 1979) “it is possible, on the edge

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of speech, in a rational manner, to produce what is useless, unnecessary. Organized waste.”

According to Encyclopedia Feltrinelli-Fischer9 at stake “is [the creation of] a society that [is] more rational and humane even in its most peripheral aspects,” whether that aspect be an alarm clock or a TV. This consumer finally realizes that he had replaced the alarm clock and TV, while effectively being unaffected by the power feeding him ever new products for sale. This is how the political context has absorbed and changed direction to a utopian design. Kitsch is therefore assumed by Mendini as a contemporary condition that cannot be eliminated, but rather with which one must live.

As stated in “Kitsch Praise,” (7, 1978) Kitschman matches Kitsch houses and objects: the paradoxical exaltation of the conventions, the triumph of true failure, the reversal of good taste, and the willingness to fiction aesthetics corresponding to the fiction of everyday life.”

Ultimately, it is a political aspect that gives Kitsch an operative capacity; it is “a political fact directly linked to the strength of the middle class. It is the Trojan horse of the masses to reclaim art.”

THE POLITICS OF UGLINESS

IMAGES Casabella, no.367 (1972). Title: Gorilla Gorilla Beringei. Authors: Alessandro Mendini with Luciano Boschini.

END NOTES 1

According to Mark Cousins “an ugly representation, or an ugly object, is a negation not just of beauty, but of truth. The category of beauty plays an epistemological role; it represents the truth of an object Ugliness belongs to whatever negates the truth”. M. Cousins, “Ugly”, part I, in AA Files, no.28 (1993), p. 61.

2

Often the judgment of beauty or ugliness are not the result of aesthetic criteria but political and social criteria. For instance about K. Marx see U. Eco, Storia della bruttezza (Torino, 2007), p.12.

3

R. De Fusco, Made in Italy, Storia del design italiano (Bari, 2007), p.200.

4

Translation by the author, see F. Raggi, Radical Story, in Casabella, n.382 (1973).

5

See No-Stop City, 1970-71, in R. Gargiani, Archizoom Associati 1966-1974

6

G. D’Amato, Il design tra “radical” e “commerciale”, in Op.Cit., n.53 (1982).

7

See L. Parmesani, Scrittura come progetto, in A. Mendini, Scritti (Milano, 2004), pp.21-26.

8

A. Moles, Le kitsch : l’art du bonheur (Paris, 1971).

9

See Design, in Enciclopedia Feltrinelli-Fischer, Comunicazione di massa (Milano, 1978), p.94.

192 194 196 198 200

UGLY ORDERS

UGLY ORDERS Imagine a vast assortment of professionals meeting, trading secrets, bearing claws, checking clocks, negotiating, taking notes, scratching their heads, speaking foreign tongues, waving their tools of measurement in the air; territories are carved up, new bodies are constructed.

Suddenly out of the ground there rises a quarry, a French garden, an archive, a zoo, a city.

Multiple currencies and forms of order mingle. (Do they have ears for each other?) Each with its own cruelty and sentiment, atmosphere and bodily disposition, habits and dreams. Over time there are no more individuals or “types”, only populations—vibrating bodies on a vibrating ground.

Those that enter certain professions are no longer themselves, though they can still fondly remember their personal lives. Now they get wrapped-up in a role, pulledinto a collectivity and begin to order space, other people, animals, minerals, and even the weather, according to protocol—someone surveys the scene and breaks out: --We are Ordered to Order!

A FLATENNING OF RESOURCE EXTRACTORS

A LA A MEMORY OF GENETICISTS

department of posession

A PARANOIA OF GUARDS

A FORGOTTEN LOVE OF BREEDING DISPOSITION DOCUMENTARIANS

A MURMURING OF SPECTATORS

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A GROPING-IN-THE-DARK OF DEVELOPERS

DISINTEGRATING BODY OF ANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

A DESPERATION OF GRAFFITI REMOVERS

A TIME-TRAVEL OF GEOLOGISTS

A TEMPTATION OF NUTRITIONISTS

behaviour archives

A SENSATION THAT-THE-ROOM-IS EMPTIER-WITH-THEM-IN-IT-THAN-IFTHEY-ARE-NOT-IN-IT OF CUSTODIANS

A CIRCUS OF TRAINERS

A LONG DIMI PARADE OF S

A FANTASY OF WINDOW CLEANERS

painting p pa

A CULTURE OF CURATORS animal costumes ostumes

A MISCLASSIFICATION OF HYBRID COLLECTORS feeding regime archives

affection techniques workshops

AN UNDERWORLD OF PHARMACISTS

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stuffed animal storage

centre develo highly habita

INISHING STATISTICIANS

A PRIMORIDAL SOUP OF CLASSICAL MYTH SCHOLARS AN ACROBATICS OF FUNDRAISERS A SHITSHOW OF FECES INSPECTORS

A PRIDE OF NEUROLOGISTS e for the opment of y naturalistic ats

A SILENCE OF CAGE BUILDERS department of display

monument to neurology

A RABID PROLIFERATION OF VACCINATORS

AN AWKWARD STARE OF AMATEUR PAINTERS

elepha cemete

A CONFESSION A CONTINGENCY OF WEATHER FORECASTERS

centre for the augmentation of bodies

daily issue medicine and innoculation register

A RUDE ESSAY OF SKIN ANALYSTS

skin study

A DISSIMULATION OF ADVERTISERS S

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A SEARCH-PARTY OF WAYFI

A TRESSPASS OF PHOTOGRAPHERS

A VIOLENCE OF VETS

centre for the study of animal innerconsciouness

ant ery

N OF RECEPTIONISTS

A BETRAYAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCHERS department of transportation

A BLANKET OF ADMINISTRATORS

kitten iterations

A FEIGNED INNOCENCE OF TOY DESIGNERS

INDING DESIGNERS

unthinkable territory

A BUTTRESS OF FURNITURE-MAKERS

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Detroit Future City After a year and a half of involvement by our Detroit Collaborative Design Center, Detroit Future City was launched on January 9, 2013. The product of the Detroit Works Project Long Term Planning, Detroit Future City (DFC) is the framework for decisionmaking, which will guide all of us—residents, businesses, nonprofits, and government—into the next 50+ years. The Design Center directed the civic engagement for DFC, which blended civic expertise with discipline or technical expertise. Reaching people 163,000 times with 30,700 one-on-one interactions, the Design

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Center—along with Detroit-based Michigan Community Resources—designed a process that is unprecedented across the United States.

The Detroit Future City framework is also unprecedented in its comprehensiveness addressing six critical areas of investment moving Detroit into the future—Economic Growth, Land Use, City Systems, Neighborhoods, Land and Building Assets and Civic Engagement.

For the sake of brevity, I would like to discuss the framework in four guiding principles. First, Detroit Future City does not define a single

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future for the block, neighborhood, district or the entire city. It establishes criteria pointing to multiple futures, which can be adjusted and refined as we move forward and continue to understand what lies ahead. Second, DFC lays out a flexible framework for decisionmaking, which can adapt to change. Much of urban design and planning history has been defined by thinking about cities with growing populations. The past 20 years have shown us attempts to design the future of a city with a shrinking population. Neither approach is sufficient. Detroit Future City defines methods and processes that move us into the future, which can alter and transform with changing circumstances while at the same time, keep the integrity of its vision. Currently, DFC is focused on the issues surrounding the shrinking population of Detroit. But if this changes in the future to a growing statistic, Detroit Future City can adjust without having to start a brand new planning process. Third, DFC defines criteria, systems and infrastructure by thinking of variety not singularity. For example, instead of maintaining the current single system to clean our city’s storm water and human waste, DFC defines a variety of ways, which include natural processes like landscaped ponds and mechanical processes like water treatment facilities. Also, instead of centering on one or two employment districts in Detroit, DFC has defined a variety districts located throughout the City. One final underlying principle, Detroit Future City is built upon Detroit’s many assets. Though DFC does not rely on them alone, it does celebrate and align these assets to uniquely leverage them and prepare the city for a transformed future.

As I reflect back on our engagement process, which inspired and informed the final framework briefly outlined above, a few guiding underpinnings come to mind. The Design Center submits that leaders should influence communities to face their future versus influence communities to follow the leader’s vision. To make this happen, civic engagement was defined as the open and ongoing twoway dialogue between all stakeholders— essentially, people working together and talking together to move forward together. A successful civic engagement process lies in the many opportunities to engage a broad range of communities, to work across silos and boundaries, and to increase the capacity of all community sectors to more effectively engage and partner. We looked for ways for people and organizations to see beyond me and my to move toward we and our. As leaders in this particular type of process, it was our responsibility to synthesize this knowledge exchange versus dictating specific knowledge or ideas.

As we move during this first half of 2013 from planning to on-the-ground visible action, all of the DFC partners, including the Design Center, are currently defining our roles and responsibilities. If you are interested in learning more about Detroit Future City and its next steps, or if you would like to read part or all of the final report, feel free to visit the DFC website www.detroitfuturecity.com or call 313-259-4407.

Dan Pitera, FAIA, SEED, ACD 22 March 2013

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Facing: Infrastructure courtesy of HAA.

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SOA

Theme

The driving force behind anything new is a rejection of the old, but perhaps the past is infused with histories that never ran their course. Dichotomy 20 seeks to unearth the rejected material of past generations and honor it as an object embedded with forgotten value. Submissions should consider the natures of old and new through novel reflections on architecture, urbanism, or community development.

This issue of Dichotomy is in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, and the 20th Anniversary of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center.

Submit

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Submit your 300 word abstract with three images by December 1, 2013 at DICHOTOMY.ARCH.UDMERCY.EDU u

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Address

University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 4001 W. McNichols Rd. Detroit, MI 48221

DICHOTOMY 20 COMMEMORATING

50

YEARS

OF

THE

UDM

SOA