MASKS 1 FAUX FAMILIES

MASKStheJournal Editors Clemens Finkelstein Anthony Morey Typeface used Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk © 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Clemens Finkelstein

3 Love’s Locus - The Bed and the Fiction of Family Francesca R. Forlini

15 The Necessary Deborah Garcia

21 Gross National Cool Greg Logan & Ali Karimi

25 Mesh of the Phantom Martin Kozlowski /and Clemens Finkelstein

37 A Fair, A Fare, Affair for Architecture Curating Architecture and other Oxymora

Daniela Leon

45 Graphic Architecture Ryan Tyler Martinez

55 Politics Performed Valerie von Kittlitz /and Yevhenia Haidamaka

69 On Architecture Anthony Morey

81 Image Index 83 Contributors

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1 Editorial

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Editorial //

“Now it is time to reveal oneself through the mask as the one that one is, without

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having to lift the mask.” — Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre

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Picking up on the theme of a hidden reality, this publication operates in a double meaning that sways between the bucolic realm of life and death, fantasy and reality.

Simultaneously the final publication for its founding editors and the initiation of an adapted concept for the meta-project of MASKS, FAUX FAMILIES announces a new beginning of relationships, new guises to be donned by new editors, the continuous reiteration and reinvention of content and concept; owing to the decision to renounce absolute ownership of a project that was conceived to take on a form of itself.

Autopoietic in its character and formless by nature, MASKS enunciates progression as a continous transformation. Absence and presence allow one behind the mask to recognize who one is.

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LOVE’S LOCUS the bed and the fiction of family // Francesca R. Forlini

Furniture: the agents of comfort and signs of well-being, interior equipment, upholder of status, symbolic configurations of the tight fabric of affections in the scheme of things, instrument of domestic comportment.1

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Prologue.

It all started with the coffer [cassone]; a wooden box, a right prism with six faces and an opening on the long side, a container large enough to accommodate any type of object. In the 14th and 15th century they were called bonnets or chests. The biggest boxes served as the basis for the bed, the smaller one formed a seat and so on. The cassone is the matrix of what we commonly call furniture. In Italian the word mobile (furniture) describes its inherent feature of mobility, and as such, the cassone was in fact a travel box that moved with the medieval court’s demands. Throughout the centuries it started to be decorated and—once the dwelling became fixed—began to be incorporated into walls, shifting its typology, to become what we now know as furniture.2

Bed Stories.

The great early medieval rooms did not respond to specific functions, many people shared the same space. In France, the void left between the bed (an isolated object) and the wall was called ruelle (small street) because the bed, surrounded by curtains, allowed intimacy that could not have been obtained otherwise. These conditions favored the development of the canopy bed type, considered an integral part of this process of monumentalizing furniture. The canopy bed embodied fundamental architectural qualities, it sheltered and protected from indiscreet eyes, assuming objecthood similar to that of a house [Fig. 1].

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Fig. 1 Especially the nuptial bed provides an interesting case: it could be “found in the bride’s room, it was very wide, raised above a double step made up of footrests and predellas. It had the monumental and solemn appearance of an altar; it was the real thalamus, altar on which was to fulfill the rites of the ancestry’s fecundity; and seemed to be matched to the throne, attributed to the authority of the head of the family.”3 This parallel between the throne and the bed (as mediated by the altar) is much more than a simple opposition. In fact, the times of courtly love were over; what was bound by marriage were nothing but rigid alliance bonds. Therefore, both pieces of furniture—the bed and the throne—represented the perpetuation of a ritual that consecrated the continuity of power.

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Fig. 2

Exactly like the complex decorative apparatus of the bed, “family” is the most fictitious construct of our society; it is considered as the basic measuring unit of a social group, the economic and political nucleus on which the cultural identity of a place has its foundations, the elementary human organization in which the most basic dynamics of power are demonstrated. Just as in the canopy bed, the intimacy associated with the family has been demonstrated clearly as an integral part of a representational device that concerned itself with social conventions no matter what century. Architecture, like the system of household objects, including furniture, has been consistently functional in perpetuating—in time and space—the structure and representation of family.

The Baroque period represented a culmination of the interior’s pretensions.

Here, the spectacle was privileged, the decorative forms were exasperated, and the fictional ritual pervaded every aspect of aristocratic life, turning it into a real ceremonial act. It extended from the court of France to all of Europe’s courts and aristocratic mansions. The bedroom turned into the chambre de parade (parade room), the public space of the interior moved from a simple ruelle to the sumptuousness of a central street where the court parade was performed daily. Each room corresponded to a specific theme, each space adjacent to the contiguous was consequent to the previous one as the decoration followed the logical thread of a narrative that appropriated allegorical subjects.

All the designed artifices aimed to convey sensational messages that directly informed the onlooker about the owner’s wealth and status.

In fact, the symbolism related to each single piece of furniture was conceived especially for its owner. The spectacle was, therefore, directly linked to communication and persuasion. The bed can thus be considered

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In the 16th century, the marriage bed became increasingly decorated and thus more apt to represent the family as a whole, rather than serving solely as a comfortable couch for the night. At a time when the interior spaces of the house began to differentiate themselves, the bed started to play a crucial role in the internal distribution by qualifying to claim its own room. This is an instrumental characteristic that illuminates the tight relationship between furniture and architecture, and how one—specifically the bed—influences and encompasses the other as the loci of familial intimacy, reproduction, and representation. From the 1500s onwards, the bed evolved from the canopy thalamus to the marital bed, finally placed in what we commonly call the “parent’s room.”

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as an integral part of the semantic system constituted by furniture at large.

More specific, it obtained during the 17th century what it was gradually encompassing: a symbol of social status.

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In France, different canopy sizes corresponded to particular ranks and specific allegories, and decorations directly related to their occupiers.

For instance, the longer the bed curtains were, the more prestigious the title of nobility. The most popular type of curtain bed was called lit à la duchesse [Fig. 2]: its curtains were suspended from the ceiling or were anchored overhanging the wall. The very structure of the bed implied its specific placement within the bedroom space, leaning against the wall from the bolster side. This way it was possible to understand the canopy’s “façade,” clearly visible to the court ceremonial. Remarkably, such sumptuousness did not receive but the emptiness of ceremonial gesture; no one slept in these pompous beds. The actual bedroom was smaller and even welcoming in contrast, often adjacent to a large representative room that was arranged, as every other, in an aristocratic enfilade. The rooms dedicated to withdrawl from the courtly rituals were much smaller and intimate, often wardrobe rooms or cabinets served this purpose.

With the rise of the 19th century bourgeoisie, architects reconsidered the so-called “art of building,” moving towards a much more pervasive aspect of daily life, i.e the science of “savoir-vivre” (“good living” or “knowledge of life”). It represented a clear pedagogical and moral project of the architect that had great repercussions on the design of domestic architecture. The urban middle class was described as the norm, establishing the dwelling program and its spatial organization. Through the art of distribution, the architect assigned to each inhabitant his own place in the same way the individual elements of furniture qualified the function of the rooms.4 Their interest was de facto founded on the definition of a framed lifestyle that would have mediated between intimacy and representation, the two sides of domestic living. A clear dividing line defined the layout of the house: the reception area was the realm of the “maître de la maison” (master of the house) and it generally faced the street side, whereas the private one was dominated by the more functional and intimate rooms that were the undisputed realm of the “maîtresse de la maison” (madam of the house.

Interestingly, the share of public reception was often tripartite: the center was occupied by the large living room (sometimes accompanied by a dining room) and the two sides hosted the two bedrooms of the husband and wife. Both bedrooms opened to the living room space so all three combined environments did have the function of representing the family wealth and status [Fig. 3, 4].

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Fig. 3

Fig. 4

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The climax of the “widespread production, dissemination and consumption of the aesthetic interior” can be situated in the year 1870, when historicism and eclecticism prevailed.5 This fashion–cultural and socioeconomic symptom of the modern condition–changed depending on the styles imposed by the market. The richness of choice led to the definition of the “style room:” “Rococo for the living room, the Moorish for the smoking and pool one, Renaissance for the study.”6 Thus, by the end of the 1800s, the quantity of bed types and styles increased dramatically before the simplifying revolution of the following century. The disposition of the piece of furniture, meaning its careful placement inside the room within the parameters of the distribution art, changed from the previous century. Moreover, the size of the room was regulated by that of the bed, as major treatise writers considered it as the main piece of furniture of a house so its shape and arrangement determined those of other furniture pieces. Remarkably, by the beginning of the 20th century, the largest and most important room (the one with the double bed) belonged only to the woman of the house while her husband found sleep in a separate room, often in a single bed. If he had thus the will to spend some intimate moments with his wife, he was forced to move into the room of his spouse. Therefore, differently from the previous dwelling layout, the wife’s bed coincided with the marital bed which had great consequences for women at large: the gradual consolidation of the marital bedroom as an evolution of the previous tripartite organization went hand in hand with the obvious loss of their fundamental spatial independence.

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Moreover, among the various layers of the middle class, the new idea of being chez-soi (at home) gradually began to emerge, a completely new, low-cut concept detached from the sheer representation of status. Its associates began to marry for love, the smaller dwelling spaces limited the number of servants, domestic work was redistributed, and the relationship of parents and their children changed. During the Third Republic, in the second half of the 19th century, the “parents’ room” became the norm for architects, reflecting the change in the model of “love.”

Honoré de Balzac, in his book Physiologie du Mariage (Physiology of Marriage, 1829), tellingly wrote “le lit est tout le mariage” (the bed is the entire marriage), showing that the harmony of the family group was linked to the peaceful sharing of a piece of furniture—which until then was used in a completely different way. He described that there were three ways to sleep with one’s own wife: two twin beds in the same room, in two separate rooms, in one room and in the same bed. Although, leading

However, it is possible to grasp the radical difference to the previous centuries: “from there, and from many other causes, such as economy, fear, and misunderstood jealousy, it came the cohabitation of the spouses; and this custom has created the periodicity and simultaneity of waking up and sleeping. (...) Here, then, the most capricious thing in the world, here the most eminently changing feeling, (...) here is love, finally.”7 At that point in time, romantic intimacy matched the couple’s feelings and the bed gradually lost its quality of sumptuousness as it had as monumental furniture, becoming instead the true locus of love.

Epilogue.

Just as the salon exists in the 19th century as“the theater where it is exchanged a crowd of nothings,”8 our love-play continues to take place in the contemporary theatre of the absurd. Indeed, in Paris a middle-class dwelling is the setting for a film by Jean-Luc Godard titled Une Femme est une Femme (1961) [Fig. 5]. The film represents perfectly the challenge that the nuclear family structure faced in the mid-20th century. In fact, the story is rather a tragi-comedic theatre play, where dissonances between the lyrics and the spoken parts, as well as the presence of paradoxical situations—which includes using in an absurd way domestic objects— create a masterpiece of synthesis.

In the movie, the vantage point of the spectator (from where the majority of scenes are filmed) coincides with the point of view of the entrance, looking toward the living room. This seems to be both the point of view of a visitor or that of a theater spectator. In the scenes, often frontal ones, it is not intuitive to understand the plan of the house. The bed seems in fact to be an integral part of the living room, therefore, based on the orientation of the room (keeping the table as a constant), it sometimes appears and sometimes seems to disappear from the living room. In short, the feeling is that the piece of furniture is not a fixed element, it is not stable, exactly like the couple.

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from the text, it seems that they could freely choose among the three types, it is evident that owning two rooms or sharing a bedroom were essentially choices dictated by the dimensions of the respective dwelling, the economic prowess of the couple.

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Fig. 5

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The most exemplary scene is perhaps the one in which Emile, husband of the film’s protagonist Angela, moves around the living room on his bike while the couple discusses having a child. While Angela insists on wanting to become a mother, Emile clearly avoids to deal with the topic by sidetracking the discussion.

The desire to create a family, to fulfill the duties of reproduction, manifests in that open place of instability. There, the old architectural layout of the typical French apartment disappears, as the nuclear family dissolves along with the rigid organization of the house. Romantic love also vanishes with the fleeting presence of the marital bed, and as the construction of the familial nucleus starts to be questioned, it aligns itself with the presence (or absence) of that particular piece of furniture that has historically embodied social hierarchies.

In Godard’s movie, a new level of theatricality takes place: the presence or lack of the bed conveys the sporadic presence of love as well as a profound schism between the couple, not a family yet. The play develops within the same space of the living room, so following the artificial theatrical space, the distribution loses its value. The bedroom is divested of its importance, no canopy fosters intimacy or encases the locus of the sex ritual. Instead, inside the movie’s interior the bed seems mobile as a prop, reminding us of the movable nature of the cassoni.

The young French couple’s instability is thus reflected in their domestic interior while their loving model seems to get closer to the contemporary one, characterized by the uncertainties of an almost nomadic lifestyle.

In such circumstances, intimacy seems a fleeting and almost impossible condition, passion is sought but never achieved, sex is wanted but impossible because the emotional contact is constantly avoided. Thus, in contemporary love the heavy fabric that allowed the couple to isolate from the world under the canopy finally falls, and as the curtain of a theater stage, it reveals how much fiction is hidden behind the concept of family as the marital bed represents its maximum expression.

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The appearance of the film’s bed greatly differs from that of the heavily decorated lit à la duchesse, but despite the simplification of forms or absence of a decorative style of contemporary beds, its symbolic value remains intact throughout the centuries. In fact, we can say that the simplification of forms does not necessarily convey a final liberation from the expressive power of the symbolic order. In this sense, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard claimed that today: “[t]he [furniture’s] function is no longer obscured by the moral theatricality of the old furniture; it is emancipated now from ritual, from ceremonial, from the entire ideology which used to make our surroundings into an opaque mirror of a reified human structure.”9 The new, ordinary furniture defines the objects as truly functional, devoid of their representational character, but despite that, no real emancipation can occur if it is not followed by a complete restructuring of both space and social hierarchies.

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Endnotes.

1 Georges Teyssot, “The Disease of the Domicile,” Assemblage No. 6 (June 1988): 72-97 (92).

2 See Renato De Fusco, Storia dell’Arredamento, Dal ‘400 al ‘900 (Milano: Francoangeli, 2004).

3 “All’interno del genere dei cassoni, mobile per eccellenza nell’Italia Rinascimentale, quelli nuziali costituiscono una tipologia a sé, appartenenti alla dote nuziale della sposa; venivano realizzati solitamente in coppia con gli stemmi dei due casati ed erano tanto più ricchi di intagli e dipinti quanto più il casato di provenienza della moglie era potente e politicamente influente, ponendosi come una vera e propria manifestazione dello status della famiglia.” — Mario Tinti, Il Mobilio Fiorentino (Milan: Bestetti and Tuminelli, 1928), 59-60.

4 See Monique Eleb, Architecture de la Vie Privée (Bruxelles: AAM, 1990), 37-61.

5 Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal, The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 562.

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6 De Fusco (2004), 178.

7 “De là et de bien d’autres causes encore, comme l’économie, la peur, la jalousie mal entendue, est venue la cohabitation des époux; et cette coutume a créé la périodicité et la simultanéité du lever et du coucher. (…) Et voilà donc la chose la plus capricieuse du monde, voilà donc le sentiment le plus éminemment mobile, (…) voilà l’amour, enfin.” — Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du Mariage (Paris: M. Levy), 198.

8 “[Le salon] c’est le trêatre où s’échangent une foule de riens.”— D. J. Rengade, Les Besoins de la Vie et les Elements du Bien-être (Lagny: F. Aureau Impr.), 173.

9 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (New York: Verso, 1996), 16.

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The Necessary

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// Deborah Garcia

It is with intense haste that I have re-written my originally intended submission for the second issue of MASKS. I had, what at the time I believed to be, a fun and witty piece dealing with the contemporary issue of multiple genealogies within the architectural discipline. A clever jab at the overwhelming pointcloud of stances we have recently called “genres” and ”tendencies”, the multiple clans of personalities that make up the hazy architectural ontological. A response during a time of too many manifestos seemed appropriate, perhaps even overdue.

The unstable climate of architectural definition has impacted its pedagogical approaches greatly within the last 15 years marked acutely by the events of September 11th, an event which I herebring up not only for its intense trauma within American commerce but within the American psyche. It is a date which marks the birth of an internal paranoia greater than that of any other American myth, surpassing the financial helplessness of the Great Depression and the political schizophrenia of the Cold War. September 11th marked the beginnings of a national body dysmorphia so deeply buried and so actively denied that it would not reveal itself until it was too late. The recent 2016 presidential elections have finally exposed the part of ourselves that we let rot.

I walked amongst the crowd during the January 21st Women’s March in Los Angeles post-Inaguration day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the newest President of the United States of America. I was swept with the current of make-shift signs and pink knitted beanies that made their way towards City Hall in a commotion of civil expression. I was particularly frightened by the high amount of infants I spotted hoisted upon shoulders, their over-sized baby-heads bobbing above the crowd as they drooled onwards with the rest of us. Despite my hyperactive attention towards these precariously situated toddlers, I was caught off guard by the rush of emotion I felt when I spotted just ahead of me a young frizzy haired teen wielding a sign that read ‘Don’t Grab My Pussy’.

When the march is over, when we get tired of holding up signs and fistpumping, we will all go home. Even then, for a while, we’ll keep checking our feeds maybe repost a fellow protesters photo or an inspirational quote about changing the world. For a while the high will last but then it will dull and then it will die. When we are alone when we are without the crowd without the mass without the public, when we are individuals

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Foreword (An Apology)

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and naked and at home— this is the most dangerous time and the most fruitful. If we can learn to revolt in solitude we will learn to do it together.

But our attention spans are so short. Our credit cards are made of highly flammable material and they burn holes through our pants and we yank them out quickly and frantically over and over and over so that they can continue to do their part in the world at large. Americans love to shop.

We love to consume and we like to do it when others are watching. If we can learn to be alone we might have chance.

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(Disclaimer: This statement has been funded through the Consumer Consciousness Board of California. We encourage you to rethink your personal patterns of consumption and to shop responsibly. Just remember, if you stop - someone will always consume anyway.)

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The Necessary Just outside of Bakersfield sits the largest factory and storage facility in California belonging to the second-largest Internet-based retailer in the world. There are 1233 employees currently working as full-time physical staff, not counting the robotic support in eighty-five percent of the facilities internal operating systems. The greatest and heftiest local workforce in the Golden State is made up of the most faithful and loyal workforce. A team of thinkers doers and makers. Of its research sectors the most competitive and coveted is its internal biomedical consumer analysis department, solely dedicated to the study of experimental customer services. Inside this department is located the office of Purchase Phlebotomy made up of the smallest and most focused team of all— five men and two women, all graduates of the top universities in the world and prominent figures within each of their respective fields.

The major part of their research is conducted in anonymity— no research papers are published, no conference presentations are performed— the experiments and their results are executed, recorded, and archived with the ultimate care dedication and secrecy.

The laboratory is relatively small, about the size of two airplane hangars and facing south there is a singular gaping door through which the vast desert outside can be glimpsed. The door is left open for the convenience of the attending research staff so that they may take a break at intervals to rest their weary eyes from the painful fluorescent interior of their workspace. Out of view to the left of the door sit two plastic

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tables and a surrounding assortment of broken and unbroken chairs upon which the staff have sat in order to pass a few hours of the night or morning when the air is not scorching and the heat of the day is at its lowest.

At the center of the workspace stands a small white cabin, a modest two bedroom West Virginia home with a porch and curtains in the windows.

Behind the wooden paneling and beneath the shingled roof are three bedrooms a single bathroom a dim living room and a tiny kitchen with an old pine table that can accommodate six with little room to spare. It is here where the most vital and difficult work is done.

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Today, at this very moment, we have just passed the six-day mark (06:03:33:02), and the current Mackson family is still alive. (The closest family to come this close had been the Jackson family in trial 022, but they had gone cannibal in the last six hours before they made it to the dawn of the fifth day). The inside of the laboratory is desperately humid.

The circulating attendants sweat endlessly through their uniforms, but they remain steady at their posts each with their eyes glued to a monitor displaying a live feed from the various cameras placed within the house.

If they make it past day six they will witness the moment that their years of research have been preparing them for. It is the kind of work that they do for the stability of the world. They do it gladly, of course, but it gets tedious sometimes. The failures outweigh the few results. But they are dedicated so they wait patiently, and today is day six and all things are possible if you persevere. Thirty minutes later all hell breaks loose.

It was Tina Mackson who turned first, there was no way of preparing for her sudden shift but their recent data had been showing major changes in her eating habits and body temperature. She had stopped eating feces altogether around day four. They had tried not to be too optimistic but it was hard not to be when results of this kind were so infrequent.

The rest of the family members had been avoiding her throughout days four and five and now, at hour four of the sixth day she had isolated herself under the bed of the smallest bedroom. She had drifted into an almost comatose level of body function, her organs stopped working one by one and sepsis was clearly the next step except it didn’t happen.

Instead her body began to change. The frontal horn began to recede, the prontum reduced, and her middle legs disappeared into the abdomen. Her wings fell off her antennae shrunk and the eye sockets began to expand. And she grew. She grew larger and larger, disgustingly huge

The entire staff was frozen at this point, a crash cart was ready in case of heart failure and a stretcher was pulled at the ready. But they could not cross into the house until they were absolutely sure that the change was complete. She needed to breathe, moan, gurgle— anything. They needed a sign that it was over.

But she was silent unmoving splayed across the floor half of her body hidden beneath the bed. Someone’s hand slipped and a pair of metal forceps hit the floor with a sudden clamor.

Tina Mackson awoke with a scream, the body sung electric leapt into motion jerked into existence jumping and jittering naked towards the door of the room in complete disorientation. She had never used legs before or muscles or human sized optical lobes. She screamed and screamed and as the staff sprung into action, running towards her with EKG machines and respirators and a sterile blanket every attendant failed to notice until it was much too late as Tina’s right foot came crashing down upon the brittle bodies of her brother and mother. She flailed wildly throughout the room a deep throat-grating wail erupting from her as her left foot crushed her father. Little bits of beetle settled underneath her toenails before anyone had a chance to save the rest of the Mackson family.

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until she was the size of a small dog. The floor of the cabin creaked beneath a new weight it did not recognize. Over the next hour the black exoskeleton was gone and instead pink flesh began to stretch. Bones were being cracked into place, a cardiovascular system was ripping its way through her newly formed limbs. Two more hours and she had hair, nails, and toes.

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Gross National Cool // Greg Logan & Ali Karimi

Following the economic crash and ensuing “lost decade” of the 1990s, the Japanese government turned its attention to the economics of cultural exports. Aimed at reasserting Japan’s international relevance as a global soft-superpower, the “Cool Japan” campaign was launched as a top-down branding strategy to sell Japanese culture to the world. This umbrella of exportable Japanese commodities, also known as Gross National Cool, covers everything from sushi and Kurosawa movies to anime and Hello Kitty. “Cool Japan” naturally also extends to design and the practice of architecture in the country and although the 2008 recession marked a decided downturn in the effort’s reach, the country’s architecture continues to exist as its own autonomous brand in the changing climate of global architectural. As the tenor of international architectural discourse shifts away from starchitecture to a renewed interest in history and critical practice, it becomes increasingly evident that nowhere has there been a starker decline in the practice of polemic, culturally relevant design than in Japan.

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But does the blame for this decline lie with contemporary Japanese architects themselves or the way they are presented? If we are to understand Japanese architecture through the eyes of the international architectural press, then there are apparently just two design trends that should merit our interest. The first is the proliferation of heterogeneous and “crazy” single family homes in the country - represented primarily by click-bait articles that appear on social media every few weeks.

The second trend is the continued fetishization of prestige projects by Japanese starchitects, works commissioned by established risk-averse institutions.

MoMA’s recent exhibit “A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond” falls somewhere in between. The constellation presents Japanese architects as a genealogy whose dominant familial trait appears to be a decided turn away from the critical and political bite of the preceding generation. Unlike the politician Kisho Kurokawa or the postmodern agitator Arata Isozaki, this new generation of Japanese architects could

If we look at Japan more broadly, we could argue that its architecture fits within or is perhaps is even ahead of a resurgent global conservatism; is it any surprise that in an Abe-run Japan, Japanese architecture should also enter into a new era of isolation? In this scenario, any discourse on architecture is relegated to a self-reflexive orientalism and nostalgia where the work is justified only by the novelty and homogeneity of Japanese culture. The argument becomes, for Japanese architecture, perpetuated tautologically—what is shared between Japanese architects is that which they share—undermining any critical stance toward defining a movement or a place within the international architectural discourse. Japanese architecture has bought into what it has been selling for so long, that it is : “cool.” The projects displayed at MoMA or other venues are grounded enough in a Japanese culture to be exotic, but not too particular or culturally specific to be exported elsewhere. And while there are Japanese architects doing radical, polemic work (e.g. the teahouses of Terunobu Fujimori or the adaptive reuse projects of Schemata Design), they do not fit comfortably under the label of “Cool Japan” or as part of a immaculate “constellation”.

To this end, it would seem that Japanese architecture is decidedly not unique. Like Hello Kitty, Japanese architecture is sold as a generic fetish. The neo-liberal market of developer driven construction assumes the predictable cycles of planned obsolescence (build, sell, tear down, repeat) as its business model. Japan is fortunate enough that it is able to spin this waste as part and parcel of a narrative predicated on exoticism and ephemerality. In the end, both parties – Japanese architecture and

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be understood as innocent; a characterization taken from the “New Innocence” lecture series at the Harvard Graduate School of Design featuring the same group of architects. Read charitably, this innocence could be the result of a body of work that is immaculately constructed and virginally white. Yet looking at it within the context of the discipline at large, the designation seems more like a subtle critique of a generation whose isolation and political stance toward a broader social agenda has become naïve and toothless (if non-existent at all). Although replete with unassailably beautiful models and drawings, the MoMA exhibit does very little to ask why the critical project of the Metabolists or the particularities of the postmodern generation could have dissipated by the end of the twentieth century. Only a single proposal by Toyo Ito for post-disaster housing questions the fundamental assumption that a movement need only be defined by a refined palette of forms and materials.

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the media that covers it – are complicit. Whether genealogies of white, or innocent families, the global architectural community gives Japanese architecture an a-critical carte blanche. The “Constellation” of Japanese architects they imagine are a faux family, a product of a myopia brought about by invitation-only architecture competitions and Instagram-oriented curation. Both Japanese architects and media use the country’s isolation and exotification to make the work more palatable to an international audience. They are bedfellows in an a-critical architectural landscape, which takes no meaningful stance toward the discipline.

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In this regard Japan is not an isolated producer of architectural work but rather a canary in the coal mine. Its brand of architecture is one strand among many, heralding a new era of architecture with the simplified pattern recognition of tenuous categorizations. Although the current generation seems out of place in a post-recession architectural climate, Japan is ahead of the curve when it comes to self-curation. In this new era of market-mediated criticality, it is only a matter of time before we see familial groupings the world over, all participants in a Gross [International] Cool.

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Mesh of the Phantom

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// Martin Kozlowski [art] and Clemens Finkelstein [text]

For you to adapt Not an ordinary thing It’s to reveal the mask of the phantom The past was just a test The façade on which desire is projected … into my body

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These first lines stand freely conceived as rhymes unfurling in Mask of the Phantom (1994), a track by the enigmatic US rap formation Lo Down.

Poetically rearranged lines filter through an informed mis-understanding, a mis-hearing, a mis-translation, or a simple creative act.

The sensuous drawings by Martin Kozlowski, the liminal zone where the inanimate becomes animate, are similarly unconscious at work as the words flowing through the movement of tongues. As neo-Baroque amas, the amassment, an affect-loaded pile of disorienting clutter that longs for fitting parts: a geometry that is meshed together in shallow layers so that their varying depths become imperceptible, forming projective surfaces.

The visible and invisible underlying structure of the mesh—phantoms bleeding through the surface, compelled outwards yet contained by an inward folding of matter—congeals as pleats collapsing into crevasses, a loss of meaning, a gesture that side-steps verbal communication, intersecting only in traversing the realm of the tongues that extrapolate memory and matter by twisting and turning.

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I make moves like chess, jump like checkers Point like a pencil I wrote this to split shit in half I rap this to rip this

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For you to adapt …ferocious It’s not an ordinary thing It’s to reveal the mask of the phantom The past was just a test I’ll be the master of death ...avoid the confrontation …hold the victim in place It’s no ordinary thing It’s the mask of the phantom The past is just a test I reveal the skill …sprezzatura The façade on which desire is projected.

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A Fair, A Fare, Affair for Architecture Curating Architecture and other Oxymora // Daniela Leon

Framed within the paradox of curating architecture, a fair calls attention to the multi-viewer, the architect and larger public, in parallel to the object of inquiry: architecture. The project presents itself as A Fair for Architecture.

Not a gallery, a collection of objects in space; not a museum, a historical record or past account; not a biennial, a speculative or projective future; but a fair as itself. A fair, in art, functions at the point of the present. It displays what is, not what was, or what could be. A Fair for Architecture does the same. The typology of the fair is used as a tool for self-reflective production and disciplinary thought as it communicates with both architecture and a larger public.

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The fair is a place for self-reflection in a hyper idealistic and false environment without the extremities of program, site, and specific cultural contexts, stripped away and shunned to ask “what’s left?”.

The fair A Fair, A Fare, Affair for Architecture is a set of seven exhibits.

Displayed here are two of them. A curatorial brief, consisting of a prompt image and a curatorial blueprint, sets the parameters for the exhibitor to work within and create architectural oxymora. Where architecture takes on the definition of an oxymoron—architecture that has two different and contradictory qualities at once—the oxymoron no longer assumes impossibility but becomes a tool for architecture. Each exhibit is interdependent to each other, relational to each other, and site specific.

As a break from objects in space populating the white cube gallery— an object’s eraser from its context and history in order to be viewed in another way—and preoccupied with reframing the architecture and the visitors perception of it.

The site of choice is the Grand Palais in Paris, France, which is both extremely specific and simultaneously undefined. An interior space so large it creates its own exterior-like-environment beneath its roof. The Grand Palais has its own amorphic history, having served as a military hospital, a truck depot, an industrial trade show, and a fashion runway in addition to hosting numerous art exhibitions. This is all to say the Grand Palais, even though it was constructed for the use of exhibition, has some kind of expanded bandwidth of possibility for the exhibition typology.

The Grand Palais is a convention center, a warehouse, a big box. The extraction of the building into each exhibit allows the fair to clearly mirror and speak to the project’s site.

Each of the fair’s exhibits is titled a different oxymoron: Original Copy, Noticeable Absence, Clearly Confused, Typically Weird, Dark Light, Act Naturally, and Enormously Small. What can be seen here are detailed accounts of Noticeable Absence and Act Naturally. Each drawing has its own story and multiple layers of reading—please read, re-read, forget, remember, and imagine each page in front of you. These oxymora set out to address architectural elements such as scale, perspective, proportion, and act as a lens to engage and view the exhibits on a multi-level reading.

Welcome to A Fair for Architecture. Please enter the fair without hesitance and keep your arms, legs, and feet out at all times.

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A Fair, A Fare, Affair for Architecture can be read in three ways. The first, A Fair, is a reflection of the present, functioning within this moment in time. The second, A Fare, calls upon the necessity for architecture to act within the marketplace and challenge the presupposition that architecture lies beyond art and exists (only) within the profession. The third, Affair, is a passionate love affair with architecture, filled with pleasure and joy.

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Act Naturally

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Noticeable Absence

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Epilogue

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A fair is a temporary “thing,” once you have immersed yourself it becomes necessary to leave. It is a fairy tale, a fiction that results—by conventional obligation—in the return to reality, a return to the work we—as architects— do. There exists an importance and vitality for the architect to engage in this environment. Once immersed though, you step out and close the book while the curtain falls. You distance yourself from it, turn around, and walk away.

“You walk toward the gates, reading the card in your hand again. Before you pass through the gates to the field beyond, you turn back to the ticket booth, but it is empty, a black grate pulled down over it. You tuck the card carefully in your pocket. The step through the gates that takes you from painted ground to bare grass, feels heavy. You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Rêves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.”

— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

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Graphic Architecture // Ryan Tyler Martinez

Young architects are defined by graphics. Superfluous they will tell us: We do not have enough opportunities to build, therefore we make images.

Maybe images make us. Drawings, renderings, photographs, and films are ways we construct images. Even more so now in the 21st century!

This is a very good thing.

Architects don’t make buildings. Instead, we construct drawings of buildings. We are construction document makers along with other subjects like historians, philosophers, scientists, business personalities, and artists. Yet so few of us get the opportunity to see our drawings translated into buildings. Instead, we invent and organize information about buildings. The knowledge that we accrue through conversations, seeing, and doing only influences our recursivity.

More is more! More autonomy, more marketability, more meaning, more freedom, more confusion, more more!1

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Just as the graphic designer exhausts combinations of the alphabet into words and symbols, the architect re-uses forms and ideas more and more and more. But graphic architecture helps restrict the more into a limited edition; a one of a kind. “Hear! Hear!” to the graphic! Celebrate the image, the most powerful thing any architect can make.

In graphic architecture then, it is quite impossible to consider the building as one thing. We should consider its graphic representation as a body of work that represents the difficult whole and its life (come full circle) after its existence as a photograph or an image. The existence of any building with a critical idea relies more on its process than the neighborhood it supports. Architecture’s ultimate aim is a building made up of limited editions: drawings, objects, writings, books, posters, films, stories. We must invest in the graphic! We must have a variety of work!

I found two posters that might be of interest.

Just as Hansel and Gretel left breadcrumbs to find their way home, graphic design helps organize information to aid in navigating through the complexity and intricacy of today’s drawings. Construction document sets are filled with so many pieces, it becomes challenging to organize information. If you are interested in the way connections between things allow communication and understanding of architectural work, the way one reads a construction document set by navigating between drawings to eventually grasp the whole, how this relates to linguistic works and how graphic design is structured, where things need to be decoded, read from left to right, top to bottom, right to left, then these images might be of interest to you.

1. Helvetica Poster 2. Interior Elevations: A-Typical House The Helvetica poster is doing something similar to the drawing of interior elevations. First, understand their formal similarities. They are both aligned to the left. Twenty-six letters on one and almost twenty-eight elevations on the other. The spacing between text and elevations are consistent.

One poster is minimal, the other is filled with multitudinous lines and figures. A more important fact about these images is their relationship to a construction document set. The interior elevations show seven interior rooms unfolded. The drawings represent information on other pages within a construction document set. Simultaneously, these elevations provide clues to other elevations, which help our understanding of the represented rooms’ interiority. The Helvetica poster is effectually very similar, while strongly positioning itself as graphic design. The alphabet is shown in an orderly grid. The letters A-C-E-H-I-L-T-V are red, forcing the viewer to navigate between them to spell out H-E-L-V-E-T-I-C-A. So, just like a construction document asks us to navigate through an organized set of information, graphic design asks architects to understand their work through operatively navigating their ideas—formally. Are we starting to connect the dots?

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Why? Why not?

OK, OK, that’s all fine and dandy, but what’s next?2

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Architect Mark Wigley connects the dots.

Those of you who feel that graphics are a lesser art, an art of seduction, and that architecture is a superior art that doesn’t seduce but quietly exudes its own virtue—be careful. Can you image architecture without graphic design? It’s almost impossible. Can you even imagine the world itself—Architecture—without some kind of image?3

Graphic Designer Michael Rock connects the dots.

Architecture is born and dies as graphic design. Think of the work you do in architecture school: how much of it is printed, written, illustrated, diagrammed, photoshopped, collaged, animated, and ultimately presented. All graphic. Think of the buildings you know: how many of them are from books, magazines, catalogs, websites, blogs, collages, photographs, and, ultimately, drawings. Again, all graphic. You design, and you know, things primarily through their graphic representation.4

Architect Michael Meredith connects the dots.

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Today we must claim a space for architectural discourse that is neither a metanarrative of a project nor the atomization of architecture into buildings but the idea of a collection, an oeuvre, a body of work. As a way to construct relationships between buildings, objects, drawings, and other innumerable fragments of architectural practice and to incorporate them into a difficult whole*, the body of work exceeds individual buildings and the contingencies of practice. It returns agency to the architect, without a prior project; it also shifts away from the contingent instantiations of buildings—that is, the images circulated by social media—and toward something more protracted, something that emerges and changes over time.5

Go and connect the dots! Invest in the graphic! More drawings, more films, more writing, more books, more images, more ideas, more, more, more. We are young architects and we should master our medium. We should embrace the stereotype.

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Send me a text when you’re done.

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I want to leave you with an assignment. Make seven posters representing orthographic views of a house with seven rooms with seven different finishes. Each of the seven posters should represent seven different subjects. Site plan, sections, plans, exterior elevations, interior elevations, reflective ceiling plans, and the last one based on something specific but different from the other subjects. You should use two typefaces, two colors, two ways to view it, two concepts, two-step transformations. You should focus on one idea, one number, one precedent, one person, one sentence.

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Endnotes.

1. Yale School of Art, “More,” More, n.p., n.d. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.

2. Ronny Eckels, “Absurd Realism,” 22 Dec. 2011 Print.

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3. Mark Wigley, “An Introduction,” in Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users, Michael Rock, 2x4, eds. (New York: Rizzoli, 2013), 17-18 (17).

4. Michael Rock, “2 × 4: Home,” Architecture in Print: New Approaches to Graphic Design (2016): n. pag. 2 × 4: Home. 29 Jan. 2016. Web. 01 Nov. 2016.

5. Michael Meredith, “Toward the Body of Work,” Log 35 (Fall 2015): 11-14 (13-14).

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Politics Performed

// Valerie von Kittlitz [text] and Yevhenia Haidamaka [illustration]

This essay gives context to a practice-led anthropological research study on digitally networked activism by Maren Wickwire and the author. Its results were first summarized in “Click to Remain. A short essay film on digital political activism, Brexit, and Love,” produced as part of the MA Visual and Media Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, in the summer of 2016. All names in the text changed by the author.

Politics Performed We’re afraid of love, not because of its beauty but because of its power.

—— Wade, participant of the kissing chain.

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Jellyfish washed up on the ocean. The waves’ crests translate into a fine ridge of spume on the wet beach, dotted by intermittent pulsations of dying medusae. Their translucent manubria cracked, lifeless in the sand.

We’ve picked up their original locomotion, running back and forth along the beach, grabbing the guck. Tossing it up, testing aerodynamics.

The sky is wide and generous and chasing its shade of gunmetal. This is some summer seashore on the coast of the North Sea, stretched out between Germany and Denmark. The Wall has come down in Berlin; the country lies torn open; we’re still children. The jellies rupture into finality under our throw, we throw them at each other. We laugh and scream over our own boldness, our fierce disgust and reckless fun. Shivers from spray, shivers of recognition. The sum of five Deutschmarks traded for a final test of courage, a bite into one quivering, gelatinous mesoglea…

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Twenty-seven years later, the world has gained momentum and accelerated its spin. It is early 2016, and collective memory is sensitized to breaking news: on Brussels, the US elections, repercussions of Syria, the Ukraine, Iraq. We’re all grown up and ready to pull our phones at any alert.

Right there, some resound with an email invitation: to an event circled around politics, love, and the media. An anti-Brexit demonstration in the heart of Berlin. The calendar writes June 19th. Avaaz, an online forum dedicated to political activism and digital petitions, had sent said email to millions of its European subscribers. “Let’s tell them that there is no place for hate. We’re directing our call to Johnson himself and attempt a world record with our kissing chain in London and all of Europe—so that the media do not report on a break-up, but on love and solidarity.”

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And so, some two-hundred people gather in front of the Brandenburg Gate. A young Avaaz team member shows up and begins to direct the scenario. Equipped with an iPad, he shouts out prompts: “Great that you are all here! We will begin our kissing chain in about three minutes! Please all stand in a large circle and hold hands!” I find a place within the ring of people. “At least the media are present, that’s the most important thing,” my neighbor says, pointing to a team of camera men. “Is it?,” I inquire, but our incipient conversation is cut off by the Avaaz activist’s countdown.

The kissing chain begins.

There is something endearing to the dissolution of the initial awkwardness unfolding within; each kiss is the expression of an individual character.

Some more heartfelt, some shy. I receive one onto the cheek from a stranger to my left and offer another to that on my right. As the circulation comes to an end, a round of applause breaks. The Avaaz official points his iPad to film the end of the circulating kiss and “pass it on”: as we understand, a similar crowd in Paris or London has witnessed our exchange and picks up the movement as we are done. The connection is instant. “Many thanks to you all!,” he now shouts out. “If you want to carry on demonstrating, there seems to be something going on along Oranienstrasse! I must jump to the internet cafe and upload our action!”

Five days later, millions of phones buzz into the morning. The European Union is entering a new phase; the web trembles with trepidation. How could this happen? After all, the kiss chain had broken the world record with a total of 785 participants across Europe, if we are to believe Avaaz.

1- Do you often take part in events like the kiss chain, and what did such a public demonstration mean to you?

2- What motivates you to use the media as a tool for political engagement?

3- The event centered on an idea of love—what is love to you?

Some ten people agree to participate in semi-structured interviews. As it turns out, many are neither native Berliners nor German altogether, so that the web serves to connect disparate locations in a study of seemingly isolate issues.

The object of study is ultimately mobile and multiply situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a comparative dimension that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions of phenomena that conventionally have appeared to be (or conceptually have been kept) “worlds apart”.1

With this, anthropologist George E. Marcus sums up a methodological and even epistemological stance. What follows is an interpretation of statements issued, an answer, too, to the final question: 4- In which way are these phenomena—political activism, the media, and love—not worlds apart, but connected?

1_ A numbing panic weighs over many of the participants. “The standard of debate prior to Brexit was one of the lowest I have ever experienced,” says Mike. In his late sixties, the native Londoner attended the Berlin kiss chain on a whim, during a visit. “The campaign fed on anger and fear,” he says, referring to either side of the political spectrum. Journalist John Lanchaster describes this as the “Brexit Blues”: The trouble with where we are now is that the configuration of the parties doesn’t match the issues which need to be resolved. To simplify,

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Beyond facetiousness or disappointment, clues to the impact of such activism are perhaps to be found in addressing those who participated in the event that day. A set of research questions arises.

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the Tories are a coalition of nationalists, who voted out, and business interests, who voted in; Labour is a coalition of urban liberals, who voted in, and the working class, who voted out.2

Lanchaster observes a growing disillusionment, in particular among youth, over an economic system apparently immune to political powers proclaiming to lessen the ailments of the widening social gaps it produces.

Mike points across the pond: “It’s similar to what’s happening with Trump”— diatribe and showmanship have pushed democracy off the stage. “We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts.

And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further,” as political commentator Andrew Sullivan describes the fertile grounds for “anger and fear” in NY Magazine.3

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Feelings spread over the debate, percolate through the web and exit the other end in the shape an invitation to a thirty-minute long kiss-chain demonstration. “Hate leads to more hate. Only love can be the answer,” says Mike, sipping tea cross-legged on his sofa, his long white hair a distant Skype halo. He is right. Reminded of the late sixties, one hopes for signs of comparable stamina, alas, this brief encounter was an affair reduced to a kiss. A performance uploaded. We too have left the stage, and gone home to search the computer for traces of ourselves.

2_ “I was proud to see myself in that video,” reports Wade, who has returned to his native Singapore, on spotting himself in clip of the event on Facebook. He shared it with friends and family, but cared little about that post’s repercussions. Perhaps because, as we learn from the organizers, he was one of the many tourists who joined the demonstration on a whim.

Perhaps because he is now drawn into the day-to-day of his immediate environment. Perhaps because, as Kate put it, “On Facebook, I am preaching to the wrong crowd. The people who see my political posts are mostly my friends and already agree with me.” Her kiss chain selfie is scrolled into the abyss of digital memory and replaced by another topical notice. The space for newborn standpoints is in flux. A matrix-like cascade of discussion flow, it is also a place of dissolution, a disappearance of voices into the immense archive of accumulated data.

The last space that I was aware of in the late nineties of a truly kind of public arena was really the virtual, the message boards of the internet. And in a way the privatization of electronic exchange through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and these other processors is the kind of virtual equivalent of what we’re seeing in our cities.4

In front of the Brandenburg Gate, I had chatted to a couple who had painted their faces in the flags of Britain and the EU respectively. It emerged that they were acquaintances of the organizers of the chain, and had agreed to show up in such make-up. The picture of the kissing couple covered newspapers as a simulacrum of unity. “Of course, we do it for the media, too—all else would be a false claim,” says Bea, who occasionally joins the local Avaaz team in the production of their events. “We don’t really talk politics at these events. It’s important that the emotional spectrum of the larger population is communicated through pictures. Real politics is tied up into other systems and mechanisms.” Such a statement is the guillotine to street-level activist hope, where the individual is but an extra in the images its organizers wish to produce. Symbolic politics run danger to distort sincere civic ambition within staged events, and transform it into pixels fed back into an algorithmic barometer for marketable trends.

3_ As a hashtag, love is endemic in the dissemination of current political issues. #lovenothate. #lovenotfear. “Our Love for Great Britain,” read one of the Avaaz signs. But of what nature is this type of love? The philosopher Srecko Horvat likens political demonstrations to short-lived infatuations: The first thing which happens in revolutions is very similar to what happens when you fall in love. You find yourself at a public square and you experience an intense moment which is very specific, because it happens only in that precise moment, maybe only once in a lifetime. (…) But the true test of a revolution is the day after, and not the day in

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To be informed, today, means to know where to seek the opinion one wishes to trust. But Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, to remember, are designed interfaces. Beyond some freedom to float within a sea of cognition, our perceptions in the realm of social media remain managed.

In a talk on the role of public and private space in democracy, young architect and writer Jack Self states that:

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“Hey, didn’t you want to ask me something about love?” David, the Avaaz organizer, tries to divert from our questions financial structures. “Yes, that too. So—how do you define love?”—Long silence. He reflects, then says.

“Phew… ask me something easier!” Some differentiation of the meaning of this hefty word within the context of public space, is of need.

Geographer Alan Latham argues that our sense of self is commensurate with our capacity to relate to our surroundings and the people encountered within. Drawing on the work of psychologist David Winnicott, Latham frames his theory around a primordial desire to control and destroy—a pattern rooted in our early dependency on help.

The human infant is (…) driven by a kind of primary aggression and destructiveness. The unfolding of its capacity to relate to an object involves a specific channeling and drawing of limits to this aggression by which the object is constantly destroyed in fantasy (…). If the object is unaffected by this act of destruction, the self is brought up by the very ‘thereness’ of the object.6

To pick up a lifeless sea creature and throw it at another child is not a mere act of brutality, it is the exploration of a range of emotions—fear, fun, flux—as the limits of other and self are tested and the results embodied.

Albeit infused with an audacity kin to children in particular, the underlying sense of such actions is that of affect and feedback, which, in its matured form, shapes adult communication as much. “In the act of re-encountering the object, the self obtains the capacity to form a dynamic relationship with others. (…) at the heart of the process of using an object is a shared discovery and creation of reality, a mutuality Winnicott terms ‘potential space.’” Latham’s outline is actually simple. Where do we meet? Where have we crossed the boundaries? Have we hurt each other? Should we apologize?

In light of this, the web appears to swallow all political activism into what Latham, again with Winnicott, refers to as “dead space,” marked by “a passivity in which ‘we do not live the complexities of society directly

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which the occupation is happening. The true test of a one-night stand is always the day after, or even the very moment after orgasm. The true value of love is to endure.5

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and physically, in where we walk, who we see, or what we touch.’”7 Perhaps the virtual repercussions of the kissing chain are truly only a mirror of the physical depth the event itself lacked—short-lived, vague, they seem to point to a fear over potential, paradoxical in light of the immense hope tied to the vote. Any incontrollable outcome may manifest itself as an antidote to freedom, in politics as much as in love.

4_ Bea explains how she enjoys the liberty of supporting Avaaz intermittently, at her leisure. “It is this network which does not break away, even if I need to focus on other things for months, or even a year. It’s a new form of trust.

It’s like with relationships. There is none of that fear that you may commit to something you can’t do justice to.”

Fear to commit to something one may not do justice to. This is a sentence that lingers. If justice refers to an administration of fairness in a case of guilt, the circulation of kisses could be interpreted as preventive regret, as a plea.

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But Bea’s explanation does not refer to ‘justice’ assigned to the complex relationship of Britain and the EU. It addresses civic engagement itself.

Above all, it reflects a sense of pressure from commitment, ubiquitous in the discourse on contemporary loving, where freedom is equivalent to individualistic control.

Lastly, and perhaps above all, it reflects a fear of inappropriateness. A contemporary break-up sentence to fresh infatuations on the brink of sincerity sounds like this: “I can’t give you what you want. It’s not about you, you’re great.” It could be argued a white lie that shies away from the challenge of putting into words what one truly disliked, which serves to avoid a debate unnecessary after the fact. A debate with oneself as much as the other. Above all, its logic infers that we must like the other less in order to stand their presence. “You’re great,” in this sentence, is the ultimate testimony to a fear of inadequacy.

And so, the conclusion would appear to be that dedication to public political engagement is limited by a sense of personal inadequacy. At first glance, this seems antithetical to an age insistent on the expression of individuality and uniqueness. At second, it isn’t. The philosopher Somogy Varga meticulously unravels connections between our “age of

In the performance model of authenticity, difference is not the “byproduct” of an autonomous life (…) but the primary source of authenticity and value.8 Incessant re-fashioning of difference as a definition of authenticity is in so far contradictory as that runs counter to its original sense of a consistent self. As Varga argues, “claims of individual authenticity that were addressed against hierarchical institutions and that questioned the legitimacy of their power, have lost their content and now function as institutionalized requirements that legitimate de-institutionalization and that promote the very kind of logic that it wanted to critique.”9 To give an example, the demand within structures of labor toward increased freedom finds an outlet in casual Fridays, as an institutionalized critique of duress.

Performed authenticity is at the heart of ever blurred lines between work and private life, where “situations such as a job interview or Internet dating become paradigmatic situations of authenticity and performing difference.”10 So, what impact does this pressure have on civic engagement? In its extreme form, performed political authenticity mutates into the duplicity of a Surkovian reality show, throwing its viewers into near-schizoaffective paralysis.

A milder version may be the organization of a kiss chain; the performance of blind love toward a political subject begging for real debunkers.

Authenticity, in this context, is affectionate cunning toward a double bind. As much as many of the “leave” voters hope for solicitude to their precariousness, the kissers cannot console over troubles beyond their control. All they can affect is their personal sense of short-lived adequacy.

If the organizers themselves state that “real politics are made elsewhere,” the performance becomes cynical.

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authenticity” and the paradoxical effects it produces within capitalistic practices. (Take, in the context of the Avaaz demonstration, the creation of pictures to procure funds which exceed necessities and produce profitable margins.) In referring to Boltanski and Chiapello’s idea that the ‘new spirit’ of capitalism endogenizes the very critique it is subjected to, transforming it in its favor, Varga presents authenticity as repeated selfinvention, forged into the energy of difference:

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The catch in this set-up between personal authenticity, media output and a longing for “love,” is collective exhaustion. “You know, I’ve stopped listening to the news a lot”, says Kate. “I feel overwhelmed by everything that is going on”. Our “striving to fulfill the institutional demand of authenticity— putting emotions and feelings to work in order to (...) permanently perform uniqueness—creates the social preconditions that lead to the exhaustion of the self”—an effect Varga regards intrinsic to the epidemic rise of depression.11 Here, however, matters come full circle, and viciously so: if the construction of self is considered work, any relationship in demand of commitment adds to the resulting exhaustion, especially if it faces further pressure to display authenticity. To regard difference or change, not as a product of the performance of authenticity, but as naturally kin to time itself, is to bet on a dwindling resource.

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Lack of time for dedication, combined with a fear of inadequacy and short-lived authenticity, add up to economized relationships: “(…) if it is the process of performing authenticity that creates the value of the self, this also means that the ‘product’ (the authentic self) by itself holds no intrinsic value and can consequently easily be devalued in order to secure further production. The result is somewhat ironic and connects effortlessly to the idea of the paradox: the emphasis of the sovereign and authentic self is intrinsically connected with its devaluation.”12 To a certain degree, this economic logic applies to EU relationships, too.

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Through aeons of time, jellyfish surrender to the currents. The sighting of larger swarms has long been suspected symptomatic for a system out of balance.13 And yet, we can grip its symptoms, and make use of this incongruity. Depression, in a more literal sense, is not only the pathological condition Varga refers to, but the lapse of agency—the fall into silence. All relationships thrive on communication, on fear, fun, and flux elucidated, only, “the new model of authenticity lacks the dimension of articulation: it does not create dialogue between the individual difference and the choice-transcendent standards. It loses its meaning, because authenticity (and difference) only remains meaningful as long as it connects the two levels of interpretations and widens the horizon of intelligibility.”14 The Avaaz family is a loose network of silent voices.

And yet, there is hope. Within depression, silence and stillness are not simply a dangerous curbing of enthusiasm, they also allow for necessary contemplation and depth. David takes a sheet of paper. He maps out the functioning of the Avaaz event in a drawing: Big Ben resounding, Avaaz reacting, millions of emails being sent out, phones buzzing, recipients subscribing to more alerts, sharing emails. Finally, fractions of subscribers show up in the streets to share—at least—that fleeting moment dedicated to the concept of physical presence, of mutuality within potential space.

“It felt warm and special. A loving atmosphere,” said Kate. David puts the pen down. “This is how it worked. That’s is how we did it. Alas, the love was not enough!”

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Endnotes.

1. George E. Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

2. J. Lanchester, “Brexit Blues,” London Review of Books [Online] vol. 38 no. 15 (2016), 3-6; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n15/john-lanchester/brexit-blues [accessed August 2016].

3. Andrew Sullivan, “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny,” New York Magazine/ Intelligence; http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html# [accessed November 2016].

4. “What is public space?”—debate held at the Building Centre, London WC1E 7BT on Tuesday, March 3, 2015, minute 45:30ff; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXM1Mz0Uok [accessed November 2016].

5. Creston Davis and Srecko Horvat, “Love and Revolution: An Interview with Srecko Horvat,” Roar Magazine / Essays (2015); https://roarmag.org/essays/srecko-horvat-love-revolution/ [accessed November 2016].

6. A. Latham, “Powers of engagement: on being engaged, being indifferent; and urban life,” Area 31 (1999): 161–168.; doi:10.1111/j.1475-4762.1999.tb00181.x.

7. Ibid.

8. Somogy Varga, “The Paradox of Authenticity,” Telos 156 (2011): 113-130.

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9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. “Jellyfish” + “Increase” / Google News.

14. Varga (2011).

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on Architecture // Anthony Morey

introduction to forthcoming publication endnotes of architecture

The last four-plus decades have seen formidable developments in the discipline of architectural history/theory and at large — Architecture. This prolific production of theory found its mode of public dissemination in mediums such as Oppositions, Log and Assemblage among countless others.

Theorist such as Diana Agrest, Stanford Anderson, Alan Colquhoun, Francesco Dal Co, Peter Eisenman, William Ellis, Kurt W. Forster, Kenneth Frampton, Mario Gandelsonas, Michael Hays, Giorgio Grassi, Fred Koetter, Rem Koolhaas, Léon Krier, Mary McLeod, Rafael Moneo, Joan Ockman, Martin Pawley, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Denise Scott Brown, Jorge Silvetti, Manfredo Tafuri, Bernard Tschumi and Anthony Vidler all participated in the production of a new disciplinary mode of communication, one that attempted to begin the cross breeding of Architecture with art, literary theory and attempt to connect with the general public.

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The origins of architecture’s disciplinary and representational bisections can simultaneously be traced be to the infusion of psychology and critical theory into Architecture’s reach. Through this reaching, architecture’s means of representational tendencies delineated into the text & image.

We suddenly have no inclination of how and in what sense to move forward, why?

We have paused and exploded into a plethora of unrelated directions.

Simultaneously, the scholars of architectural discourse, have found no foundation on which to attach their new words, endlessly attempting to pull from the graveyard of forged memories, manifestos scratching for a ray of light to peer upon their texts.

This culture of mass consumption, along with adaptation of a medium of mass consumption into the tools of architectural theory allowed the critic, historian or scholar to extensively curate, control and limit the exposure of the architectural images of the time. A newly minted disciplinary role, the solitary, stand-alone architectural historian / theorist assumed the role of creator of knowledge. This produced a tension in the discipline, one that

It is no coincidence that disciplinary texts such as Oppositions Reader, and Theory since 1968 became staples of the discipline. These texts allowed the currently appointed generation of architects, ones who now had doubled up on resources to immediately tackle ideas textually while simultaneously produce images that either supported or instigated such ideas. To tackle the explosion and influx of new means and methods of architectural production, the discipline split into the route of the image and the route of the text.

Manfredo Tafuri 1, the champion of the text and as such, affirming the autonomy of the discipline of architectural history-and-theory, severed from any immediate application or agenda, knowledge in waiting.

Tafuri believed that the historian scholar should not aim to produce or construct architecture, but instead, should aim to construct and produce architecture’s text. Thus, the conversation of theory versus practice erupted from the 1960’s and stood as a contradiction and pedagogical system up until today where the conversations of that separation and such a separations validity is up for debate. The urge was to pursue a level of textual purity and allow the architect without a pencil to discover architecture through the langue and parole of the discipline. Tafuri’s attempt to solidify the autonomous nature of history was at the time, what architecture needed.

The culture at the time, being bombarded with an unprecedented level of new mediums, tools, and means of exploration and disciplinary cross contamination and interest. Tafuri, seeing this newly increased level of dilution foresaw the need to divide and conquer these new fronts of exploration and collect and filter through these newly appropriated tools. This large influx called forward a means of architectural representation that could not wait for the erection of building, or utility of a plan to be recorded.

Instead, it was cemented in the most elevation and surface based means of representation that architecture holds, that of the text.

The text, while a powerful tool for recording, as a graphic, is the flattest and thinnest level of depth an object can have, it is a pure elevation that in itself holds no plan or section of its existence, it is a mask of endless interpretations and meaning, all of which the architecturally built object attempts to pull forward into the construction of reality, into the construction of the discipline.

Tafuri though, while declaring the autonomy of the discipline is never capable of escaping the connection to the semantic question of rules and orthographic structure of language itself.

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in one way or another bounced back and forth for the last forty plus years.

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This autonomy may be solely from architecture, but autonomy itself again is a contradiction, a system that Tafuri uses so precisely, as being autonomous from anything, implies the other’s existence and as such, can never fully be autonomous in the end. As such, the negation of one aspect of architectural exploration will always leave a certain level of debris within the action of negation, and thus any entire disengagement from the architectural process is a fool’s errand — a wicked one. Skip forward twenty years, and this doubling of tools has gone awry, what was once two centered on one, became two, centered on their one.

To explain, what was once seen as proliferation, and liberation of the discipline, slowly became a discipline of many disciplines, all unable to communicate and even further, adopting isolated and esoteric means of communication at that.

It is clear to see this separation become true if we study the modes, isms, and forms of architectural exploration that have occurred since then. Post Modernism, as an answer to the modernist movement, has found itself no longer the post of any movement, but instead, a pool of standing water.

Our scholarly texts have cannibalistically forced themselves into an ouroboros 3 of cross-referencing and tit for tat congratulatory declarations on discoveries and our images producing fantastic views of ideas only explored through the singular perspective needed for the render to export, collapsing reality to a series of facades — to a series of back-lot film sets casting their false shadows 3 of depth.

How then, can theory provide any depth to a discipline that seems fit and comfortable in the discovery of thinly veiled ideas and concepts?

How then can we ever foresee a criticality with the tools and means we entertain today? The environment of today’s architectural discipline is the explosive outcome of a proliferation of technique, theory, abstraction, translation and endless citations of varied text.

This contentious relationship between text and image in architectural is as definitive as that of the scholar and academic. One who sees the world and imposes their will, and another who sees such will and imposes their world.

Text, being the theoretical, narrative and historical cannons that erupted since the 1960 and image, the collages, and architectural manifestos written in the discipline’s visual means of communication — its conventions.

Manfredo Tafuri reinforces this concept by implying that there cannot be reunification of such a delineation of the discipline and its tools by stating:

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Autonomy for history, as Tafuri states, from the outset, is an impossible task. Tafuri in reality is asking for an origin for himself, an origin that he is both author and judge for.

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“There cannot be a true complementarity between architectural and historical critical discourses: they can converse with each other, but they cannot complete each other, because the two find themselves, inevitably, in competition.” 4 Text, defined as content rather than physical form, and, image defined as a representation of external form then leaves Architecture with either text with nothing to shape or images with nothing to say. These modes of architectural communication have fostered a space of inquiry and disconnect between the scholarly text and design image.

This differentiation is broken down into the usage of language, audience, and mediums, nothing more. It is not a question of criticality or relevance; it is not a question of meaning, it is a question of common meaning and interpretation. As Nietzsche states, “to be able to read off a text as text without interposing an interpretation is the last form of inner experience.” This implies, that reading becomes then no longer an act of interpretation but that all levels of possibilities are already fulfilled in the objects appearance and its singular interpretation. We have allowed our discipline to assign to either side, different sets of incomplete ciphers and tools for translation expecting and blindly desiring a complete, or rigorous meaning.

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The graphic of language, the text is interpretative and coded on different levels, one that is not as universal as one could and would dare to say art is. Art, for example, allows any dialect to appreciate it and interpret it because the code for interpretation is in the subject of art, within its discipline.

Architectural theory relies on a discipline, outside of its own, on linguistics which through time, usage and semiotic variances, finds its code outside of itself and thus finds itself with no control of the basis of interpretation that it requires finding the universality that it so implies and attempts to achieve. How then, when text, graphic, and language are in constant flux, can we understand the roles of these mediums in a discipline that may no longer need or even demand their isolation.

ENDNOTES looks to understand the potentiality of fragmenting these concepts by instigating a potential fusion between the discourse (text) and design (image). This fragmenting is not intentionally focused on resolving the conflict, nor does it desire to produce some new modus operandi for architectural discourse, what ENDNOTES attempts to provoke is a taking stock, a modern day tabula confecta.

The intention of fragmenting and chaotically assembling the results of this current disciplinary contradiction is to allow images again to convey meaning just as text is allowed to produce images. As a way to allow images to not solely end as formal conceptual investigations and again allow them to create space for polemical and critical investigations and simultaneously allow text to dictate form, influence the practice and untie

This publication, titled, ENDNOTES, consists of a collection of endnotes and is both the located at the end of a document as a vehicle of legitimization and simultaneously the notes at the end of a disciplinary investigation.

The publication is separated in a series of topics and themes, those that have become relevant through the series of inquiries into the discipline of Architecture. It is a collection of inquiries, questions, sources, comments and statements all meant to be studied further and examined through the modes of inquiry that the text itself, the images laid before you, attempt to frame. It is a set of ideas with no language as of yet to communicate them, but aware they must be investigated, and a set of communicative tools being used and misused as a means to discover what they are truly capable of communicating.

The text, the written portion, of ENDNOTES is the collection of images before you. The images before you, are a translation of the text into text, but a translation of the linguistic text, into the graphic text, the text one step removed from pure legibility as itself, and still teetering tension between image and text. Each graphical translation is a framed perspective to the semiotic object extracted from the larger whole and allowed to explore its lingering middle between language, image, and implicitly architectural convention. Conventions are architecture’s first language, its primary means of communication.

The discussion of drawing, its roles, and viability in the current discipline is of constant questioning and yet, in this void, in this divergence of the text and image, the drawing, in both act and production has only garnered more potency.

What was once part of the discipline at large was delegated to the image once the rupture of theory and design occurred. The drawing then became the image’s means and mode of theoretical production and simultaneously attempting self-criticality. Yes, it is fair to assume that architecture existed before its invention of convention, it is also fair to imply that architecture was communicated as a cultural identity, but architecture itself was only capable of coming into its own until it had a voice, a means of communication of its own — its conventions, while allowing any residue of institutional signs to be dismissed or broken.

ENDNOTES aims to begin to understand not the origin, or possibilities of architecture, or provide an ism, or formal stylistic manifesto on architecture, but it is instead interesting in understanding the nature of architecture, to begin to descriptively discuss an architecture of self-criticality.

Manfredo Tafuri’s introduction to The Historical Project, an essay located within, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, begins with a quote, a statement,

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their hand from behind their backs as a means to bring forward the autonomy of not the solitary text, and not of the formal image, but of the critical image — the image that speaks and the text that forms.

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whose usage teeters again, yet now it teeters between speech (parole) and text (langue). This quote stating as follows: “There comes a moment (though not always) in research when all the pieces begin to fall into place, as in a jigsaw puzzle. But unlike the jigsaw, where all the pieces are near at hand, and only one figure can be assembled (and thus the correctness of each move be determined immediately), in research only some of the pieces are available, and theoretically, more than one figure can be made from them. In fact, there is always the risk of using, more of less consciously, the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle as blocks in a construction game. For this reason, the fact that everything falls into place is an ambiguous sign: either one is completely right or completely wrong. When wrong, we mistake for object verification the selection and solicitation (more of less deliberate) of the evidence, which is forced to confirm the presuppositions (more of less explicit) of the research itself. The dog thinks that it is biting the bone and is instead biting its own tail.” 5

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The following words were isolated from Tafuri’s passage and chosen as the foundation for ENDNOTES, The Historical Project, research, jigsaw puzzle, pieces, assembled, theoretically, blocks, construction, and dog. The selection spans the entire passage, attempted to understand if through a fragmentation of the original, how and in what sense could various forms of alternative narratives be assembled. Each semiotic construct was kept in its original semiotic composition, fonts, italicization, size and scale to the whole. Each construct was then translated and drawn in architectural sensibility, through a diagrammatic analyzation through architectural conventions. What then would a section, a plan, an axonometric or even a three-dimensional diagram of the construct dog be, and if produced under the narrative implications of Tafuri’s quote, would such a construct produce a deeper meaning than that of a four-legged animal.

Each translation attempts to maintain a certain level of traceability from the pre-translation construct.

Each word was pushed towards architectural conventions and each architectural convection forced into the strict frameworks of orthographic rules. The orthographic rules of both systems were allowed to seamless and rather aggressively infiltrate and destabilize each other’s roles and rules of legibility. This constant flux and movement between the text and image bring forward a potent rupture in the scale, density and visual representation to the layers of meaning in language coming forward through architectural graphic representation. These layers were then isolated and solidified through a construction of the site model, the context for the translation to occur, a production of a variable perspective and scale for a translation to find a foundation. This context, consisting of only a portion of the original translation is layered and rich enough to bring forward a narrative encapsulated in the smallest of figures. The context attempts again, to maintain a certain level of traceability from the pre-translation

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construct. Representation is used intentionally, as they are not yet stable enough to imply signification, but are instead attempting to imply the emptiness of a figure whose history pulls it out of such a varied existence, into a static holding position and singular frontal perspectival reading — a letter. Each standalone figure is a construction of such a change of perspective, an assemblage of the words from Tafuri’s introduction combined with the section, and perspective shifts that occur in its translation.

Such as Francis Bacon’s perspective and portrait studies, where a strong tension is placed between figure, technique and representation of such, what is presented upon these contexts is a contextual image that applies to stitch, if not chaotically the figures, techniques, and modes of representation that architecture implores. What rests upon these sites, are a set, a collection of contextual objects, those whose formal characteristics are based upon the playful understanding of the system of difference that creates the rules for the figures which they represent. This back and forth allows for a change in the manner in which they are stabilized and their allocation to either text or image.

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The graphic overlay, is again, the framework, the architectural graphic that gave birth to the characteristics which are being brought forward into the dimensional reality before us, the realm where Architecture solidifies itself. This friction at every state allows for a constant fragmenting of any given solidity of reference and thus allows these two disciplinary ruptures to be forced into interaction if not, unknown interaction. Through this introductory statement, Tafuri can frame and at the same time, allow for freedom in interpretation to any given topic at hand. If any conclusion founded in the process of research is up for blind assumption that the viewer is only ‘biting its own tail’, how are we capable of viewing any conclusion with any conviction at all and if so, how are we to know when such a conclusion is approaching and when the tail is ours or when it is another’s.

What this does is that it facilitates the opening of new paths, and shining light onto shadows that had before been left behind in the endless desire of biting — its own tail. ENDNOTES attempts to allow Tafuri’s quote to be taken as a set of instructions, separate from its context, but allowed to become its own context, to allow it to itself become fragmented, rearranged and assembled within the discipline that it pertains to. The fragmentation is taken under the umbrella of architecture, colliding the image and the text, forcefully. Words, letters, and phrases are all translated non-directionally and endlessly between the text and architectural graphic while paying close attention to the structures of both with the aim off attempting the reawaken the discipline’s critical and communicative perspective on itself — to produce a plan for a critical architect.

The work that is presented is the work of thinking through the question of architecture today and understanding the architectural tools of tomorrow. If it could become possible to understand the text as a drawn plan,

The intention here is to limit the discussion and to focus on the distinction between images and text and the manner with they are produced primarily and in the manner in which their meanings are assigned in route to question their explicitly and stubbornly enforced negations of either’s role while allowing conceptual residue infused with byproducts of their respective fragmentations and meanings to pull through the process, attempting to address the problem of our current disciplinary activity that is currently framing our understanding of architecture.

ENDNOTES is a project on the possibility of a true conceptual architecture, one that is not focused on the semiotic construction or stability of the word Architecture or what does and does not pertain to it but instead is about beginning to potentially understand the conceptual beginnings of architecture and attempt to gauge architecture’s current status and modes of operation.

ENDNOTES looks to pull two seemingly distant disciplinary realms, the image and the text in hopes to see if it is possible, if not to only understand its limits and possible outcomes of the fusion between the discourse (text) and design (image) and develop potential sites for future critical and conceptual architectural investigations.

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then the reverse could also become true, and through such liberation of reconciliation and the possible mistaking of text for graphic and graphic for text, Architecture could begin to understand what is left, where the gaps of the fragments exits. Exposing this fissure between the two is where the truest architecture exists, in a place before declaring a voice, at the moment before it stares itself in the mirror and attempts to separate itself, forcefully and conventionally into either text or image. This allows the text to become both formations of knowledge and formation of form, between being a supplement to the design process, or optional in today’s climate and also being the means in which the medium of knowledge is transferred.

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Endnotes.

1. Manfredo Tafuri is an Italian architect, historian, theoretician, critic and academic, was arguably the world’s most important architectural historian of the second half of the 20th century. He is noted for his pointed critiques of the partisan “operative criticism” of previous architectural historians and critics like Bruno Zevi and Siegfried Giedion and for challenging the idea that the Renaissance was a “golden age” as it had been characterized in the work of earlier authorities like Heinrich Wölfflin and Rudolf Wittkower.

2. The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, often taken to symbolize introspection, the eternal return or cyclicality.

3. Shadows here directly refer the concept Allegory of the Cave by Plato, in which, we may find ourselves declaring such shadows of thinly discovered facades as implying simultaneous interior and depth only to be confronted with nothing but a surface casting shadows beyond their recognition.

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4. Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, trans. Daniel Sherer, foreword K. Michael Hays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

5. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Conolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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Image Index //

Love’s Locus — the bed and the fiction of family Francesca R. Forlini // 4 // Giovannino de’ Grassi, Coitus Liber Tacuina sanitatis (XIV century), Ububchasym Baldach, s. XIV-XV, Bibliotheca Casanatense Rome, Italy. // 5 // Daniel Marot, Design for a State Bedchamber, from Second Livre d’Appartement (Second Book on Interiors), 1702. // 8 (top) // Bourgeois Décor, The Athenaeum, Philadelphia, (1880). Source: Ursula Paravicini, Habitat au féminin, (Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 1990), 53. // 8 (bottom) // Typical bourgeois apartment of the 19th century. Development of the organization of the triad: bedrooms (ch.) and livingroom (S). Kitchen (c); Office (O); Dining room (s.m.). Grey areas coincide with the “representative” part of the home. Source: Ursula Paravicini, Habitat au féminin, (Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 1990), 50 — redrawn by Jacopo A. Colarossi. // 11 // Digital Collage of Une Femme est une Femme. Film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1961; Francesca R. Forlini, 2017.

The Necessary Deborah Garcia /// 15 // image courtesy and copyright Deborah Garcia 2017.

Mesh of the Phantom Martin Kozlowski and Clemens Finkelstein /// all images courtesy and copyright Martin Kozlowski 2017.

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A Fair, A Fare, Affair for Architecture Daniella Leon /// all images courtesy and copyright Daniella Leon 2017.

Graphic Architecture RyanTyler Martinez /// all images courtesy and copyright RyanTyler Martinez 2017.

Vicious Circulations of Woe in the West Valerie von Kittlitz /// all images courtesy and copyright Yevhenia Haidamaka 2017.

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Contributors of MASKS theJournal are responsible for contacting all copyright holders of the images and illustrations that appear in their pieces. The contributors and editors of MASKS theJournal were careful in reaching out to all copyright holders for permission, but it was not always possible to find all of them. Please get in touch with us, should you claim ownership of any illustration that has not been credited accordingly and we will correct the information.

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Contributors //

Francesca R. Forlini is a PhD candidate in Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London on the SNF Scholarship. She is a Fulbrighter and MDes graduate with distinction at Harvard GSD. She studied at the AA in London as MPhil Projective Cities student, at ENSA Paris Belleville and Sapienza University in Rome. She has been Teaching, Research Assistant and curator at the GSD, But also editor for the journal OBL/QUE, and guest critic at the SOS in Bologna. She published essays and poems in various journals, and worked on some GSD faculty publications. She is currently interested in modernist housing estates and the evolution of domestic interiors.

Clemens Finkelstein is a historian and theorist of art and architecture. He is a doctoral student in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, a graduate of the History and Philosophy of Design program at Harvard University, and has worked extensively as a writer, editor, consultant, researcher, and curator in Europe and North America.

Martin Kozlowski is an artist from Stockholm, Sweden.

Yevhenia Haidamaka is an illustrator from Kiev, Ukraine.

Valerie von Kittlitz is a recent graduate from the MA in Visual Anthropology at Freie Universtität, Berlin. Her research focuses on material and consumer culture, global capital, and hybrid movements at the confluence of political activism and its commercialization. She has published texts with the digital platform The Pigeonhole and the Journal for Visual and Media Anthropology at FU Berlin. The research film on which this essay builds has been shown at conferences across Europe.

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Anthony Morey is a Los Angeles-based designer, writer, theorist and curator. Currently he is the assistant director at a+d museum along with being a discussion moderator at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a columnist at Archinect and an instructor at USC in Los Angeles. His work and research is invested in the tensions between text, psychology and image and their relationship to architecture and art.

Anthony is a co-founder and chief curator of a one-night stand for art & architecture (ons-la), an ongoing curation experiment in cultural representation along with it’s journal, morning after.

He is also a co-founder and co-editor in chief, of masks the journal, a publication founded while at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Anthony obtained his undergraduate degree in architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) with distinction, and his masters in history and philosophy of architecture from the Harvard graduate school of design.

Deborah Garcia is a founder and editor of the student publication, Underscore, which presents discussions, installations, and activities that encourage the open exchange of ideas around architecture and politics. She has been published in Offramp and although her essay on Evil Twins was highly morose it was also slightly entertaining. She has also been a curator of exhibitions for the Architecture and Design Museum in LA and for One Night Stand LA. She is currently pursuing a Masters of Architecture at Princeton University.

Ali received his Master in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (M.Arch I ‘16). He was the curator of the Kuwait Pavilion titled “Between East and West: A Gulf” at the 2016 Venice Biennale with Hamed Bukhamseen. Ali has conducted research on governmentbuilt housing in the GCC with the Affordable Housing Institute in Boston as a Joint Center for Housing Studies Fellow; and in Havana with a grant from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Ali currently practices in Manama and teaches architecture design studio at the University of Bahrain. His writings have been published in various journals such as San Rocco, CLOG, and he was recently the editor of the third issue of the Harvard GSD student publication, Very Vary Veri (VVV).

Greg Logan has maintained an interest in Japan for over thirteen years. Before coming to Harvard, he received a Master’s Degree from Sophia University in Tokyo where he studied as a recipient of the Monbukagakusho fellowship.

Greg returns to Japan often and has worked for the offices of Maki and Associates and Tezuka Architects. Along with Tom Sherman, he is the co-editor of Tezuka Architects: The Yellow Book from Jovis Publishers. Greg is currently researching courtyards in Asia and Europe under the assistance of the Frederick Sheldon Travel Fellowship.

Daniela Leon received her Bachelor of Architectural Studies with honors, from University of Waterloo School of Architecture and Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Daniela is the founder of Five and Under, a gallery and event for early career architects.

Her work has been published in the Harvard Real Estate Review. Daniela has previously worked with UNStudio (Amsterdam), Alloy LLC (Brooklyn), Lateral Office (Toronto), and MALL (Boston).

Ryan Tyler Martinez is a Los Angeles-based designer. He is a faculty member at SCI-Arc, founder and principal of studio®™ and the co-founder and chief curator of A One-Night Stand for Art & Architecture. He holds a Master of Architecture from Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Prior to joining the faculty at SCI-Arc, Ryan was a Visiting Lecturer at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design and worked at Gehry Partners, LLP. His work has been exhibited in the United States, France, and Hong Kong with publications in Architectural Record, LOG, Architect Magazine and Routledge Publications.

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Ali Ismail Karimi is a Bahraini architect and educator interested in social housing, public space, and infrastructural re-imaginings of the GCC countries. He has worked in Brussels with OFFICE KGDVS, in New York with SO-IL, and in Santiago-Chile with Elemental. In addition to his time abroad he has also attained regional experience in public projects through his time in Bahrain with Gulf House Engineering.

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