I. PASSAREN 3 Mia Tulen
The ugly building. To extend the ugliness, one must first analyse where the ugliness initially manifests. The building presents itself as starkly irregular in it’s presentation of form, execution and choice of colour but it is the ugliness that comes to light upon closer inspection that resonates as truly ugly. It is here we notice the failure to meet expectations, misalignment, non unity and the feeling that things were simply put together as an after thought. The elements that have been subtracted from and then disregarded, rendering the once finished elements of the building as once again, unfinished. My ugly extension captures these incomplete moments of ugliness and hero’s them as a monument to the unexpectedly ugly. It is from here that I have developed the five points of ugliness that emulate throughout the building. The ugly extension is situated within an existing courtyard created by the original building. By placing the new extension in close proximity to the existing, incidental, awkwardly too narrow corridors are created around the perimeter of the extension. These incidental corridors function, or fail to function in a way that allows the extension to be accessible but in a way that is uncomfortable, claustrophobic. In the winter months these spaces would fill with snow and would become very difficult to clear. The proximity to the existing building also blocks views from the windows of the existing building and limits the amount of light that is able to enter. “If the unity of difference is destroyed by becoming contradiction without returning to unification, a kind of rupture emerges that is adequately called disharmony. Incidental disharmony is ugly.” Asymmetry. The act of deliberately altering the window mullions to be slightly misaligned acts as an element of ugliness. “The absence of symmetry where symmetry where we would expect it hurts us.” The use of deliberate symmetrical mullions on half of the extension creates a contrast between the symmetrical and the asymmetrical. The effect here is that the ugliness of the asymmetry is emphasised by the presence of the expected, or the symmetrical. By showing 142
the desired outcome and then negating it with the unexpected, an unpleasant outcome is achieved. “What I polish recedes, what is dirty approaches. The more you clean something the dirtier it gets.” The layering of “ugly aspects” through varying degrees of subtle discernibility cultivates as you begin to carefully depict the building. The more you look, the more you uncover. The ugly and the incoherent begin to cover the building like a layer of grime that once you have uncovered cannot be unseen, overbearing the building into a mess of ugliness. The ugly junction. By over exaggerating the awkward junctions, you are unable to avoid them, to unsee them. The glorification of the awkward junction brings to light the existing awkwardness in the original building. Accentuating what one might have overlooked before. “Ugliness is condemned to the role of the mistake”. The awkward junction exists where two building elements have seemingly been forced together without thought. The resulting intersection is consequential of poor planning and craftsmanship. Ugliness as failed expectations: “Fundamentally unplanned, unexpected, not supposed to be.” Smaller elements that don’t quite match up work together to create a complete ugliness that are more successful here than one large gesture. The finer elements build up, infecting the building, creating a complete ugliness. It is the extension as a whole that fails to meet the expectations of what an extension should be.