Thresholds 46: Scatter!

Thresholds 46 Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture Edited by Anne Graziano and Eliyahu Keller

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Editors Anne Graziano, Eliyahu Keller Advisory Board Timothy Hyde, Chair Mark Jarzombek, Chair Dennis Adams Martin Bressani Arindam Dutta Diane Ghirardo Rodolphe el-Khoury Vikram Prakash Kazys Varnelis Gwendolyn Wright J. Meejin Yoon

Kathaleen Brearley Melissa Vaughn Patsy Baudoin — Alejandro Restrepo Montoya Ana Miljački Bobby Schweizer Can Bilsel Caroline Jones Constant Hak Dan Novy Edward Eigen Elliot Sturtevant Erik Ghenoiu Frederick Luis Aldama Hashim Sarkis Iheb Guermazi Jackson Davidow Jaffer Kolb Jeffrey Cody Jesse Feinman Jessica Varner John McMorrough Jordan Kauffman Jota Samper Lauren Jacobi Léa-Catherine Szacka

Lynn Spiegel Maria Gonzalez Pendas Mark Jarzombek Matthew Allen Max Sternberg Nick Monfort Nicolas Labarre Nisa Ari Perry Kulper Petra Kempf Rafi Segal Remy Wenmaekers Robert Cowherd Robert Thompson Robin Schuldenferi Roi Salguerdo Sabine von Fischer Sam Wetherell Sarah Rifky Sebastian Schimdt Sophie Hochhausel Timothy Hyde Walker Downey William O’Brien Jr. Yingchun Li Zachary Angels Zeynep Çelik Alexander

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Patrons Mark and Elaine Beck Robert F. Drum Gail Fenske Nancy Stieber Nader Tehrani Jorge Otero-Pailos Special Thanks Anne Deveau Irina Chernyakova

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Anne Graziano Eliyahu Keller Architecture Mo The fundamental issue of architecture is that does it affect the spirit or doesn’t it. If it doesn’t affect the spirit, it’s building. If it affects the spirit, it’s architecture. And architecture doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the final form of a complete building. A drawing to me is a completer piece of architecture, a building is a completer piece of architecture, a photograph of a drawing or a photograph of an architecture is a piece of architecture; each act is individually an act of architecture.1 John Hejduk, The Education of an Architect

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Speaking to poet David Shapiro, John Hejduk recollects an argument with fellow architect Peter Eisenman, addressing the nomadic character of his work and the criticism it has received. After looking at Hejduk’s House for a Musician and House for a Painter, Eisenman, according to Hejduk’s story, states that these structures “are not architecture, because you can’t get in them.” Confident that his designed creatures are unequivocally ‘architecture,’ the furious Hejduk points his finger at his interviewer—standing in for Eisenman in this reenactment—and declares with conviction: “YOU can’t get in them!” He then, more calmly, follows with an explanation: “In other words, he was not in the position to get into them, because he did not understand them. You can only get into something if you understand, or are willing to.”2 The question raised by this conversation regarding the definition of what is or is not architecture—as nonsensical as it may sound to a person not familiar with architecture’s disciplinary anxieties—is not new to architects or architectural scholars. This pseudo-existential inquiry into the definitive essence of the discipline is one that has eluded absolute answers, fostering endless propositions to come forth—the most

1 2

Education of an Architect: Voices from the Cooper Union. Directed by Kim Shkapich.

(The Cooper Union, New York, NY: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1993.) Film.

John Hejduk: Builder of Worlds. Directed by Michael Blackwood. (New York, NY: Michael Blackwood Productions, 1992.) Film.

Thresholds 46 Scatter!

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common approach being one of negation: perhaps we do not know what architecture is, but we can surely tell you what it’s not!

We, however, are not here to give or even attempt to find an answer to this question. Rather, and following Hejduk, we too acknowledge that architecture is by no means only ‘building.’ The two anecdotes shared by Hejduk stipulate not only that architecture exists in other, perhaps less traditional, forms, but also point to the fact that the answer to what is and isn’t architecture is a matter of perspective, point of entry, and approach.

It is not only, as Eisenman would have it, a matter of whether one can enter architecture or not, but rather of how one enters it: how one reconceptualizes what it means to approach a seemingly unintelligible thing and how, by entering differently, one broadens the category of what is or could be architecture.

oves 7

The starting point for Scatter! is simple: buildings, for the most part, are immobile; architecture isn’t. Like Hejduk’s nomadic architecture-on-wheels, architecture moves, it mutates, it gets around. It does so in loud forms and subversive whispers, it finds accidental alleys into places unknown to its creators, it is mediated through walls and drawings, thoughts and poems, space, and time. True, architecture’s traditional objects—namely buildings—are inert, yet architecture itself does not stand still. In the words of anthropologist Tim Ingold, “For things to interact they must be immersed in a kind of force-field set up by the currents of the media that surround them;” this “force-field” nurtures and disperses architecture into newfound motility and life. If it were not for such mobilizing agents and “cut out from these currents—that is, reduced to objects,” the still pieces of architecture “would be dead.”3 Whether through its imagery or discourses, architecture finds its way to places and people that exceed the physical limits of its sites; in fact, it expands on the very notion of what the site of its operation is. These become more than plots marked by building codes, regulations, and municipal lines—although, paraphrasing the Pre-Socratic Heraclitus,

3

Tim Inglod, “When ANT meets SPIDER: Social Theory for Arthropods” in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London; (New York: Routledge, 2011), Pg. 89-94.

Anne Graziano and Eliyahu Keller Architecture Moves is present.4 Rather, its sites expand beyond the here too architecture traditional realm of the built work, its fragments move and shape various aspects of human culture in its travels. Through inquiries, public displays, political co-option, or with the assistance of other disciplines, architecture shakes loose from its creator’s stabilizing will in surprising and curious ways. Here architecture forges new networks and establishes agency through a variety of mediums, no longer static as concrete, steel, or glass. Rather, and not unlike information, it becomes nimble, agile, and dynamic. Here, it manages to escape the exclusive clubs to which it is typically confined, dodging the figures and masters of its institutional dissemination who decide what is or isn’t architecture. Here, it is able to reach unfamiliar and unexpected spaces, exerting newfound power in subtle, and at times, surreptitious ways.

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Throughout history, these moves and movements have been a vital form of architecture, the most potent way by which it has entered, and was circulated and witnessed around the world. As texts and treatises, in rules and regulations, within dreams and stories, or on coins, bills, and stamps, architecture possessed power beyond the building. In such spaces, it could multiply and transform its material presence into a variety of other means, and create ripples that would sound its echoes beyond the limits of its physical sites. Still, and despite the exponential increase of its dispersal in a wired world, architecture and its discourse continue to be confined to its physicality as building while its rhetoric mostly resonates within its self-reproducing, restricted circles.

Scatter! serves as a call for action. It asks for a recognition of the many ways in which architecture moves, and for a heightened awareness to the moves that architecture makes. Like the observation made by the architectural theorist Albena Yaneva and philosopher Bruno Latour that “the problem with buildings is that they look desperately static,” Scatter! demands an appreciation for the commonly recognized yet rarely expressed fact that “a building is not a static object but a moving

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“…for here too, the Gods are present.” In Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, Book 5, Chapter I.

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project.”5 But this would be a limited premise. Expanding on Latour’s and Yaneva’s manifesto-like appeal, Scatter! urges for more than a retroactive inspection of static buildings or intricate representations of architectural works. In addition to these pleas, Scatter! charts, suggestively, the vast and almost limitless ocean in which architecture and its representatives could and should operate.

Scatter! is a command, equipped with exclamation. It demands to not only see architecture as moving, but to direct its movement, to use its moves, to move it with conviction. Still, to scatter implies that one must always be aware of chance. Like a hand grasping a pile of sand and directing it toward the wind, Scatter! intends to facilitate a more complex, layered, and inclusive notion of dissemination, while always leaving space for a storm to suddenly surge, and send the sands of architecture to places unknown.

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The essays, contributions, proposals, and creative projects in this volume all begin at this port of departure and travel through their own itineraries to sites both anticipated and unexpected. They point to the history of architecture’s appearance in places, documents, and spheres, some of which have been traditionally recognized, while others overlooked. Piercing through language, code, image, and sound, the discrete works assembled in this collection are now bound together and become associated with one another before being offered up to the wind. Such potent collectives both make their individual components more unique and powerful, while creating a web of relations through which a social and communal will gains an ability and power to pursue change.6 These become malleable associations between objects, ideas, institutions, and individuals; ones that although always at the edge of anarchy, as Alexis de Tocqueville suggests, have the potential to become a powerful means of agency and action, of political capacity, and a link between disparate and supposedly disconnected peers.7 5

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Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “Give me a Gun and I will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture” In: R. Geiser, editor(s). Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. (Basel: Birkhäuser); 2008. p. 80-89.

Georg Simmel. Conflict; The Web of Group-Affiliations. (Free Press Paperback. New York: Free Press), 1964.

Alexis de Tocqueville, “Of Political Associations in the United States,” in Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part 2, Chapter 4.

Anne Graziano and Eliyahu Keller Architecture Moves The tables have finally turned. Our hand has reached to the sand and gathered a collection that is as beautifully accidental as it is a result of our own intentions and contemplations. With the shared knowledge that architecture can indeed be entered in numerous ways and can indeed exist outside a fixed building, each piece within this collection presents and represents a distinct yet mutual point of entry; each work asks the reader to consider it as architecture, and in doing so expands the capacity of architecture: “each act is individually an act of architecture.” We now raise our palm towards the sky and ask you, the winds, to do with it what we cannot. Scatter!

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Ocean Chart (The Bellman’s Map). Illustration by Henry Holiday for Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark: an Agony in eight Fits, 1876.

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Reading

Moving

Kyle Dugdale Drawing Below the Line: The Bible as Architectural Text

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Hadas Steiner A Bird in the Hand

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Lai Jing Chu Retrofitting Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow into the Republic of China in 1936

n re tio ctu rs a ite nve 103 h c o Ar in c 102 ing stra eiss t a ul ud Feir rc o Ci t W kas x i R th Lu wi

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Duygu Demir Another Kind of Muralnomad: Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s Mosaic Wall from the Turkish Pavilion at the Brussels Expo 58

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Robert Gerard Pietrusko A Space for Signals Manfred Schroeder and the Circulation of Reverberant Architecture

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Juliana Kei On the Crossroads: Inter-Action Bus Tours 1973

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Seeing

Making

Gili Merin Odyssea Palestina. A Travelogue of Travelogues to the Holy Land in Modernity

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Maura Lucking “Seeing Clearly What is Good”: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image

e io tur at ec vers t i 7 ch on Ar n c 6-6 ng tra i iss 6 i t e ula ouds Feir rc Ci t W kas x i R th Lu wi

n

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Michael Piper and Zoé Renaud Mallopolis A Board Game About Megalopolitan Urbanization

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Scott Murray Architects and the Cultural Agency of Television. Frank Lloyd Wright on The Mike Wallace Interview, 1957

n re tio ctu ers a 5 e t 4 nv hi rc co 4-1 g A ra in ss 14 n i i t t ula ouds Feire rc Ci t W kas Rix th Lu wi

146-157

n re tio ctu ers a 1 e t v 7 hi rc con 0-1 g A ra in ss 17 n i i t t ula uds Feire rc o Ci t W kas Rix th Lu wi

Reading

Moving Larissa Belcic & Michelle Shofet intuiting on behalf of Dr. Sark Freak Party: Ecological architecture for intimate relations

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Frederic Schnee Straight into Your Mailbox– The GDR Buildup on Postage Stamps

190-207 Alejandro Valdivieso A Format for a new Formula: Arquitecturas Bis (1974-1985)

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e ion tur at ec vers 29 t i ch on -2 Ar n c 28 ng tra i iss 2 i t ula ouds Feire rc Ci t W kas Rix th Lu wi

Taylor Davey Medellín’s Miracle: Architecture in the News

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Marija Marić Real Estate Fiction. An Outline for a New Literary Genre

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Table of contents

n re tio ctu rs a ite nve 263 h c o Ar in c 262 ing stra eiss t a ul oud Feir rc Ci t W kas x i R th Lu wi

e ion tur at ec vers 19 t i ch on -3 Ar in c 318 ing stra eiss t a ul oud Feir rc Ci t W kas x i R th Lu wi

Seeing

Making

n re tio ctu ers a 9 e t 0 nv hi rc co 8-2 g A ra in ss 20 n i i t t ula ouds Feire rc Ci t W kas Rix th Lu wi

Aleksandra Kudryashova Concrete Dreams: Architecture and Space in late GDR Film

230-245

Luke Pearson Worlds That Are Given: How Architecture Speaks Through Videogames.

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n re tio ctu ers a 7 e t 7 nv hi rc co 6-2 g A ra in ss 27 n i i t t ula ouds Feire Koldo Lus rc Ci t W kas Dancing about Architecture Rix th Lu wi A Conversation with architect

and cartoonist Klaus

278-299

Elizabeth Keslacy Arcbazar and the Ethics of Crowdsourcing Architecture

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Doors, Tunnels, Archives, Architecture Eliyahu Keller in Conversation with Jeffrey Schnapp. Curated by Anne Graziano

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Joseph Kennedy Building Blocks, Building Books, Building Rooms

344-351

Sam Ghantous Images from Images from Images, etc.

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Thresholds

Editorial Policy Thresholds, the Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, is an annual, blind peer-reviewed publication produced by student editors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Opinions in Thresholds are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the Department of Architecture, or MIT.

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Publisher Published by the MIT Press on behalf of the Department of Architecture, MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

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The individual contributions are copyright their respective authors. Figures and images are copyright their respective creators, as individually noted. Every effort possible has been made to identify owners and gain permissions for images. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

ISSN: 1091-711X

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Lai Jing Chu Taylor Davey Duygu Demir Kyle Dugdale Lukas Feireiss Sam Ghantous Juliana Kei Joseph Kennedy Elizabeth Keslacy Klaus Aleks Kudryashova Luis Miguel –Koldo– Lus Arana Marija Marić Gili Merin Scott Murray Luke Caspar Pearson Robert Gerard Pietrusko Michael Piper Zoe Renaud Jeffrey Schnapp Frédéric Schnee Michelle Shofet Hadas A. Steiner Alejandro Valdivieso Rixt Woudstra

Published by the MIT Press on behalf of the Department of Architecture, MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Larissa Belcic