Issue013 by One:Twelve

O N E :T W E LV E

SPRING 2018 / ISSUE 013

O N E :T W E LV E Politics and Architecture Issue 013 / Volume 008 Spring 2018 One:Twelve is produced by a small group of Undergraduate and Graduate students at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University and is published annually. For inquiries, please contact us at: onetwelveksa@gmail.com 275 West Woodruff Avenue Columbus, OH 43210

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EDITORS Curtis Roth FACULTY ADVISOR

Ali Sandhu GRADUATE MANAGING EDITOR

Theo Morrow UNDERGRADUATE MANAGING EDITOR

James Amicone EDITOR

Bethany Roman TREASURER

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THE CALL

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Influenced by the innumerable complexities of the environment it inhabits, architecture is innately reactive, defensive, and political. While design is a product of its creator, designers are a product of society (sub)consciously projecting experience into the work they create. What does this cyclical process mean for us as designers? What does this mean for us as citizens? How does our work operate politically? In contrast to our last issue's theme of humor and whimsical sophistication, we are calling for more serious matters in the thirteenth issue of One:Twelve. This open call for submissions welcomes all disciplines to contribute a written or graphic piece to the journal. Any viewpoint/approach will be considered as long as it specifically addresses the prompt.

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CONTENTS

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Acts of Architecture ADEEBA ARASTU

Exit Review and Politics THIRD YEAR GRADUATE STUDENTS

Ohio's Congressional Districts DRAWING SEMINAR

Brutal Dystopia MARLY MCNEAL

U.S. Embassy in Mexico City FOURTH YEAR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Cryptic ERIN PESA

Supernormal CURTIS ROTH

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Who Owns the Moon? ALEX OETZEL

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"Walls" JARED YOUNGER

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Spatializing Ideology THEO MORROW

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The Contemporary Ruin MICHAEL RIZK

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Beyond the Surface ALI SANDHU AND CLARK SABULA 7

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Adeeba Arastu

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CLAIM

“The first act of architecture is to put a stone on the ground.” - Mario Botta

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PERIMETER

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They say Carthage was founded by a once-princess of the land of Tyre, who fled after the death of her husband at the hands of her brother. From the Middle East she fled to North Africa with a loyal band of followers with little in the way of resources. They wandered for many weeks before Dido met with a Berber king. She had little to bargain with, but needed to establish herself in this new land. They struck a bargain -- as much land as one ox hide would cover. In her ingenuity, Dido cut the ox hide into strips to encircle a huge area. This land became the city of Carthage and the beginning of a great empire. Architecture is the act of laying claim. Architecture is the inscription of power and identity on space. Geopolitical boundaries are drawn to designate identity, authority, control. They disregard the complexity of social and cultural overlaps, which exist not as perimeters, but overlapping fills.

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Geopolitical boundaries are drawn to designate identity, authority, control. They disregard the complexity of social and cultural overlaps, which exist not as perimeters, but overlapping fills. In 1948, Palestine was carved up by its colonizers to establish the state of Israel. Since 1948 more and more land has been claimed, cheated, or stolen by the state of Israel, regardless of the agreement on the location of the border. The Israeli wall draws a sharp line, a line which usurps the land it touches, cleaving apart towns, lands, families. The wall, like Trump’s wall, is a symbol. It is a reminder that there is an “us” and there is a “them.” “We” are defined by being on one side of this wall, just like “we” are defined by existing on one side of this border.

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FILL Borders are not inherently bad or evil (defining areas is productive to the organization of our society). But evil lies in the â&#x20AC;&#x153;violent disjunctionâ&#x20AC;? that happens when we try to wall ourselves off from other peoples who we think are not like us. In reality, everyone is shaped by a complex network of identities that have been shaped by space that goes back deeply into the past. Our true experience of the world happens in a series of overlaps. Our selves and our environments occur at the intersection between multiple conditions. Our physical environments are a product of layers of explicit inscription on the Earth that become latent with time. Every act of architecture, even as it fades to a distant memory, remains on the Earth. Every act of architecture frames, reinforces, or subverts our understandings of who we are and our relationship to others. Our experiences in space coagulate to become autonomous pieces of identities.

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These are transmutable. We are tied to homelands we have never seen. We are tied to worlds that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist. Relationships created in space transcend their physicality by becoming part of our blood: an intergenerational sense of self. We test our DNA to find that we are Korean or Zimbabwean or French and define ourselves by borders that have never contained us. But we are also painted by a history that predates us in the lands we inhabit. Those who live on US soil are automatically enrolled in a relationship with the imprint of slaveries and genocides, with peoples who were displaced from or forced to bleed on the ground that you now stand on. We are as much defined by borders we do not know, byproducts of culture whose origins we may not remember or recognize. When we design spaces for violence, the trauma we inflict upon people takes hundreds of years to be undone.

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ARCHITECTURE IS P O W E R FUL

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Claim fades. Perimeter fades. But fill will always remain.

We canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use livepaint on the world; the fills are not ours to command or control. But we can be critical of how we draw the lines, who draws them, and for whom they are drawn.

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A collection of essays from third year graduate students

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The following prompt was written by Todd Gannon and the Spring 2018 Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor, Caroline Levine. Levine is the David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities in the Department of English at Cornell University. "Politics, according to Andrew Heywood, has been understood as both an art and a science, as both an arena (i.e., a space) and a process (i.e., unfolding in time). It is, he claims, an “essentially contested” project. Much the same can be – and has been – said of architecture. What is your definition of politics? What are its implications for architecture? How do you plan to take up/engage that version of politics through architecture in your exit review?"

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Josh Tomey

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For me, politics is directly tied to its roots as a derivation of the Greek polis. As people begin to group, organization necessitates itself as the size and scale of the group increases. Politics is making the decisions that affect said group. The interactions amongst members of the group drive those decisions that are made and it’s because of this, that politics is inherently a spatial condition. American politics seek to identify, manipulate, and reinforce the splits in our geopolitical landscape. Discussions around the urban/suburban/rural divide, the coastal elites versus the country’s interior, the north versus the south, the west versus the east – each dichotomy reinforces and entrenches place-based politics. My interests in politics have often circled around the blueness of cities and the redness of the outer lands. Politics, as defined as the set of regulations that governs how people are to interact, must then by influenced by the spatial confines in which these groups meet. Do city dwellers lean left because of the urban density that forces interaction amongst different cultural groups and socioeconomic statuses? Or should we think that those people are simply more tolerant of those conditions and those that aren’t self-segregate to conditions more favorable to their views? Politics are so heavily tied to space, density, and organization that it is inherently architectural. If it can be determined that location heavily impacts political leanings then in fact architecture’s impact on politics is the arrangement and interactions of peoples fostered by the inhabited designs. Architects then must consider the micro and macro scales of what we do and how it will impact the politics of the country as whole. It needs to be determined if the density of an apartment building or row houses can foster political feelings different than that of single family homes. There needs to be a full understanding of the impact and the power embodied in these designs. It must be explored whether a single building has an impact or if it is the networks fostered, intentional or not, that mold political holdings. An interior arrangement of desks in an open space could foster tolerance and acceptance or annoyance and hate or both or neither. Politics as a process of making decisions that affects a group of people must be influenced by one’s previous experiences. The larger the political system, the more reliance on generalizations, stereotypes, and tokens; the more 23

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distance and difference between each group; the easier to isolate, segregate, and misunderstand. It’s easy to make racially restrictive housing covenants when you aren’t looking a black mother in the face. It’s easy to deny a refugee’s entry when you haven’t heard their story. It’s easy to say “Build the Wall” when you’ve never loved someone who’s crossed the border. The United States is a large country and it is inherently difficult to understand each culture and identity it withholds. But if the role of politics can be argued as making the best decisions for the largest amount of people, then architecture should become a tool for fostering interaction among disparate groups for the good of the democracy. Architecture should eliminate boundaries not increase them. Technology can now play a big role in the elimination of these spatial differences. The internet eliminates distance as a function of interaction, making the proximate as irrelevant as the far. Architecture must then be combined with technology in crafting a new American landscape, bringing with it an entire set of political implications. It is from this relationship between Architecture and technology that my exit review emerges. Technology is both a great connector and social isolator. I project a future in which architecture is fostering both this connection and isolation in the form of single, self-sustaining pods spread out across the country, giving everyone the “personal bubble” of space they crave and the social connections that they want. The pods become a fetish object and an extension of self and through them each person interacts with the world. This pod based living has grand impacts on the political sphere. Geography is no longer a limiting factor to ones interactions with different groups. It completely destroys place based unequal systems like public education and instead unifies distribution of information through digital channels. The consequences have the potential to increase interaction between groups that would otherwise steer clear of each other. It could eliminate discriminatory politics based on race, age, and gender because of self-projection behind a digital mask. The implications for politics of the pods could go poorly as well. Would digital interaction act as an acceptable substitute for the genuine interactions of today, or without witnessing the subtleties of human behavior that occur IRL would sensitivities to the 24

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human condition disappear? It could give rise to an all for one and none for all mentality, where persons no longer identify as a member of any group, let alone one community or polis. This scenario would also lead to the elimination of political alliances formed in our geographic conditions today. Coastal versus interior politics has nothing to do with views of the ocean or the Great Planes. Instead it is a result of accumulated culture tied to a geographical location. The pods make geography irrelevant and thus eliminate culture of place. This in turn could lead to the disintegration or watering down of all cultures until over time, cultural differences are eliminated entirely. If politics completely eliminates one of its dimensions- the politics of proximity, space, and place -what will it begin to look like? I wonder if the elimination of differences would lead to further cooperation or if as human beings we would simply seek out an alternative. This sounds dystopic and fantastical but I argue that it is what technology is leading us too. Phone zombies and ear bud warriors ignore their surrounding and stomp down the sidewalks of campus, completely immersed in their smart phone bubbles. The architecture of these pods is simply accommodating an already forming reality; catering to clients who block out everything near them, to let in everything else. Everything is political and architecture is no exception. Currently, where and how we live has a tremendous impact on our political views. The architecture of today should foster connections and interactions amongst a diverse arrange of groups as an understanding of politicsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; tie to space and place. As technology plays a larger and larger role in our lives, architecture will accommodate the shift in placelessness and the interruption of politics that comes with it. Whether we grow to miss the conflicts generated in geographic politics as locally based culture erodes is yet to be seen.

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Ali Sandhu

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In his book, “Network Aesthetics”, Patrick Jagoda defines “politics” in this way: “it is not a term reserved for negotiations, elections, campaigns, or ideologies. It can serve, more capaciously, to describe a field of sensibility in which certain ways of being or particular lives – for instance, women, unarmed black men, or precariously populations living outside of first-world networks – might be only distantly detectable or wholly unrecognizable.” Politics lie far beyond the confines of government and its power. When Jacque Ranciere says, “politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time,” he perhaps unknowingly ties the role of politics and the architect into a single definition. Architects have the ability to speak via their work and the possibilities of time and space. Architects can act as social and cultural agents who have a key role in the politics of contemporary society. Through this collection of definitions and my own interpretations, politics can act as one of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects insofar as it is so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity . It is never something you can see, but you are always feeling its effects. That is the power and subtly of the hyperobject. The five characteristics of hyperobjects that Morton has identified further my argument of this alignment: viscous, molten, nonlocal, phased, interobjective. Furthermore, politics can be defined as a force so massive and ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to read its entirety. Surface reading versus symptomatic reading remains a constant debate among literary critics. There are a fair number of players on both sides of the argument, but through my exit review, I will advocate for surface reading. I will take surface as Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus define it, “to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding, what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.” This is very easily translatable to the way we, as architects, read buildings as language. Instead of embedding meaning within formal qualities, 27

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meaning is pushed to the surface; it is plastered on the façade. The role of the architecture and its critic would then be as Susan Sontag says, “[to] show it is what it is, even that it is what it is rather than show what it means.” Reading the lines and not between them has political implications regardless of discipline. There are clear oppositions to this argument; the loftiest one most likely being Fredric Jameson who says, “if everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either.” He was explaining why the text can never means what it says. This form of reading has become nostalgic. There is no need to read between the lines; they are right in front of you. Ultimately, I want to parallel the way fake news is perceived to the way a building is perceived as facade. The building surface does not discriminate viewers and suggests an agenda in the same way as news media. In order to make this parallel, I will advocate in detail the productivity of surface reading of architecture. I will then flip my argument, stating that surface reading is not only useful for architecture, but also for news media. The extreme absurdity of that position should have an M. Night Shyamalan plot twist, dismantling my previous statements with one pointed declaration. The audience should then realize when I was promoting the surface reading of architecture, I was actually presenting an inverted argument to expose the effectiveness of deceit. My goal is to show that the current trajectory and outputs of news media culture, in its dismantled state, is not a path architecture should follow. My argument will therefore criticize news media culture and advocate deep reading of architecture

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Architizer.com

N OT E S 1. Jagoda, Patrick. Network Aesthetics. University of Chicago Press, 2016. 2. Ranciere, Jacques, and Gabriel Rockhill. The Politics of Aesthetics: the Distribution of the Sensible. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 3. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 4. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21 5. Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, (New York, 1966), pp 6. 6. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. (Ithaca, 1981), pp 61. 29

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Nadia Voynova

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Architecture conventionally made to serve as a reflection of public activity has so long been the primary physical apparatus for organizing space. How does it respond to the emerging new affordances of a public that begins to increasingly organize itself more outside of physical space but rather in the digital? Identifying new avenues of the politics of internet that begin to suggest different forms of operation of the public, one begins to suggest new spatial products that architecture could employ to create new ways of operation Essentially, the art of politics is the decision making that must turn conflict into coexistence . Historically, architecture has addressed that notion of coexistence through the means of a polis, a political space of a city state, which is a community that is organized in the form of a state; and the oikos, the management of a household, thereby resolving the conflict of public and private interests in the form of civitas and urbs. Today architecture is no longer a predominant frame for producing bodypolitic in the same way and therefore is being created elsewhere. The version of politics that is particularly curious is the shift in the disposition of architectural infrastructure on the body politic. Traditionally, the tools for creating the body politic have been the institutions, architecturally manifesting themselves in public squares, public parks, or similar placemaking public spaces. However, today the more dominant set of principles organizing the notion of a public are found beyond the built environment. As in the same way a larger frame for producing architecture would be the physical infrastructure, as in the Extrastatecraft example, architecture of free zones becomes a mechanism of larger infrastructural forces at hand, a means to switch power relations within the culture of capitalistic economic development. As with any tool, architecture becomes a physical manifestation that serves as an extension of the network distributed agency system. Similar relationship as between the physical infrastructure and architecture would be the imposition of the digital infrastructure on the physical environment, which, in my argument, has been completing, intervening and in some cases governing the way spatial conditions work. One of the most political examples of a similar relationship is the border between the Israel and 31

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the West Bank, introduced by Eyal Weizman in his book The Politics of Verticality , where the two dimensional mapped border line transforms itself into a six dimensional complex vertical relationship overtaking the subterranean and air space, along with electromagnetic fields. A new understanding of territory had to be developed in order to take control of the West Bank that a simple border line could not have accounted for by the limitations of its own affordances. In the similar way as one occupies places based on the availability of wifi or number of cellphone reception bars, the relationships between buildings start to be dictated not by context but rather by superimposed digital means. For example, they start to be dictated by most advantageous and economically beneficial digital data transfer rates as in the case of data farms. Therefore, logic behind the composition of a body politic begins to manifest as a result of the emerging overlap between the digital and physical infrastructure, which invites a new kind of political importance that architecture could potentially regain. Perhaps, to properly address the matter of shifting ontologies, to the architectural body of post-ontology, and to the body politic that no longer constructs itself according to the physical spaces architecture has provided it with, one may look beyond the current state of affairs and allow for an expanded approach as a matter of concern. What should architecture concern itself with? Perhaps, one concern manifests itself with not the design of buildings as objects, but rather the design of territories as field conditions, specifically related to the phenomenon of an active form. Active form, as opposed to object form, as Keller Easterling states “is a design not of the field in its entirety, but rather the means by which the field changes – not only the shape or contour of the game piece, but also a repertoire for how it plays. The object of design is not a single form but an apparatus for shaping many forms”. For example, highly popular urban formula of a freezone, is an active form that becomes a mechanism for switching power relations within the city. It acts like a signal of entry for global marketplaces and is a contagious “formula for making an extraterritorial space where state and non-state actors use each 32

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other as proxy, double and camouflage ”. It is a signal of active mutation of the city’s operational system, which in itself is a manifestation of the implicit political power. Perhaps, this may be an opportunity to launch a counter-narrative of the architectural story. The notion of active form is not only applicable to building’s distributed territories, but also to our collective body politic as a field condition. We are also active form. And the logic by which we as subjects move physically superimposed with the movement of our digital ontic exhaust becomes an active form . Therefore, the relationships which emerge along with the nature of the field in which the data travels could be designed as a spatial project as well. One of such examples is manifested in the work of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in a project called Flirt. Suddenly, as you pass a certain corner you enter the dwelling zone of a virtual cat which can randomly appear on your screen. And if you regularly walk the same streets the cat starts to follow you as you become her friend. On the other hand, if you enter a danger zone of a reindeer stampede, it may black out the pixels on your screen if you happen to be in the middle of it. Such examples of peculiar space interpretation allow us to think about physical bodies as active signals for new processes that start to coherently fuse the relationship of physical and digital space. Whereas in the previous example the physical space was interpreted as a given non changing factor, perhaps one may suggest an architecture that could in fact manifest as a response to the active form of pedestrian traffic superimposed with the space of a digital cat. Could that be the way for architecture to regain its shifted political ground? Perhaps, one may wait and find out. N OT E S 1. Aureli, Pier V. "Toward the Archipelago." Log. (2008): 91-120. Print. 2. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. , 2014. Print. 3. Weizman, Eyal. The Politics of Verticality: The Architecture of Israeli Occupation in the West Bank. Birkbeck (University of London,) 2008. Print. 4. Easterling, Keller. "We Will Be Making Active Form." Architectural Design. 82.5 (2012): 58-63. Print. 33

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Shauna Lindsey

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Politics is power. This dynamic creates a dichotomy between those with influence and those subjected to that influence. Because the Greek word for politics involves cities and the citizens who inhabit them and citizens need shelter, then politics is related to architecture. Architecture orders human activities. The arrangement of forms within architecture mediates everyday human relationships and activities. Forms in architecture are political and operate at the intersection of power. This intersection is the exchange that happens between those in control and the rest of the community. The built environment is a mediator through which the connection of these relationships can either remain stagnate or grow and foster. In this way, architecture can be used to reveal the power structures at play and disrupt them or perpetuate the hegemony. Form gives dimension to these encounters, organizes social spaces, and distributes resources. Power extends to many facets of the design process such as choosing the site, program, budget, and materials. Because of this, architecture depends on capital. One implication for architecture is that often, form follows finance. This reinforces the dichotomy of those with influence, architects and clients, and those subjected to that influence, the end user. These intentions may not always align creating disparities between the intended function and the actual function to the detriment of the end user. Architecture can also act politically through the way in which it makes functions, such as those of a business, visible or leaves them out of sight using methods such as orientation and controlled circulation. These techniques facilitate power dynamics of control by creating less transparency where one group has knowledge that is withheld from another group. Another implication of politics and architecture is that space itself is not neutral, it answers to specific strategies and connotations. Neutral space â&#x20AC;&#x153;is a delusionâ&#x20AC;Ś it hides the power that the customary arrangement of space exerts over our livesâ&#x20AC;?. Even space that claims to be multi-functional or have no one specific function can be reduced to or commodified by the aspects of that space that have to do with control. For example the Big Steps and Main Space in Knowlton deal with the idea of surveillance and personal space. When physical space is prioritized by clients and architects over social space 35

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and relations, the effect is a space that is empty and not suited to the users. This empty physical space can either repel people or cause boundaries to be drawn, separating the actions that occur in space and creating spatial and functional categories that can be divided and controlled. I plan to engage politics in my exit review by first asking the questions, who participates in design and how does design engage people. Alejandro Aravena and his firm Elemental may provide insights into these questions. His strategy of incremental housing has allowed families to start out with half of a house that the families can use, transform, and build on to create a more desirable unit based on their needs. Another contemporary firm El Equipo Mazzanti, tries to create architecture for social inclusion by using actions and relationships to develop patterns that influence form rather than thinking about authoritarian functional schemes that only suit the client. I will also examine how the two groups involved in the power relationship can be affected by the misreadings that occur when the form is not directly suited to the end user. One example of a misreading is when the form, intended for one purpose, is taken over by the end user and inhabited in a different way. In conclusion, “architecture is both configured by power and is a resource for power”. All architecture is political in its form and serves as a framework for organizing relationships between people, resources, and the environment. How these forms can be manipulated or restructured to suit the end user may require a redistribution of power.

N OT E S 1. Evans, Robin. Translations from Drawing to Building. MIT Press, 1997. 2. “Politics.” Merriam-Webster.com, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/politics. Accessed 20 Feb. 2018. 3. Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. Vol. 55, MIT Press, 2009. 4. Yaneva, Albena. Five Ways to Make Architecture Political: An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice. Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. 36

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Bethany Roman

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The term “luxury” has been widely discredited in the academic world of architecture in recent years, in part due to the possibility of crassness that it too often implies. Projects like Trump Tower, Burj Khalifa, and Burj al Arab are excessively excessive and don’t cater to the puritanical modernist view of good architecture, but the definitions of both architecture and luxury imply that architects who discount these projects are missing a large portion of the discipline. Luxury describes “something which conduces to enjoyment or comfort in addition to what are accounted the necessaries of life. Hence, in recent use, something which is desirable but not indispensable.” Architecture, too, is excessive whether one consults Vitruvius regarding its essential qualities of utilitas, firmitas, and venustas (commodity, firmness, and delight); or prefers to cite Philip Johnson’s definition of architecture as the art of how to waste space. In that excess of architecture, the wasted space becomes the space of luxury. Desirable but not indispensable implies inherent cost – that is, the politics of luxury exclude those who cannot afford it, because the excess is unnecessary. If politics is a series of “actions concerned with the acquisition or exercise of power, status, or authority” and luxury is that which is above the base needs of a person or building – an indulgence in something which is high quality or expensive – it would make sense that the terms are related. Architecture has historically reinforced the existing political structure of a time or place, but that doesn’t have to be the case if architects can provide excess, even in small amounts, at various price points to suit the needs of its clients. I would argue that the excess of architecture doesn’t necessarily lead to excessive costs, or that these increased costs can be mitigated by creative use of resources. Accessible luxury is that which doesn’t distinguish based on cost, because small luxuries can be made with careful design of any space. Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation was built as inexpensively as possible in postwar Europe, structured entirely of béton brut and with elevators only stopping on every third floor. Despite this, each resident has a two-story apartment with windows on each side of the building, and each apartment has sufficient living space. Community spaces on the roof and the shared 39

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“streets” within the building are not strictly necessary to a housing block, but give a feeling of community to its residents. While these aren’t necessarily our first thoughts when considering luxury in the traditional sense, its definition as conducive to enjoyment suggests that these resources – more natural light than strictly necessary and a community in a tower – provide a sense of luxury as just a little bit more than what is necessary, but as things which are nevertheless appreciated for their contribution to the comfort of living in the tower. Even though Mies van der Rohe and his followers perhaps incorrectly used the idea that “Less is More” to justify efforts of condensing a building and its components into simple forms which integrated design and mechanics, the phrase itself is still useful. Tiny houses – especially those on wheels – allow their owners a sense of allemansrätten, the Nordic “freedom to roam.” The idea here is that owning less, and often in a form where it can travel with you, provides far more in terms of experiences and adventures than a traditional home. Though many of the most cost-effective tiny houses are often built based on what resources are readily available at the time of construction, others are carefully designed to be as effective as possible when in use without being excessively expensive. Their excess, rather than in space, is in how they use their home to the fullest of its potential. The most overt version of luxury, which begs to be included in this discussion despite its potential crassness, is illustrated by Trump’s exuberantly prolific towers throughout the world. While architects may scoff at the idea of goldplated toilets, buildings made to look like solid gold, and hotels shaped like sails, Trump’s towers are not the only ones to make these moves. Maurizio Cattelan’s “America” is a fully-functional, solid gold toilet on display in the bathrooms of the Guggenheim Museum. OMA’s arts center for Fondazione Prada features a building clad entirely in gold leaf, a move even more excessive than simply appearing gold as Trump’s Vegas hotel does. Finally, the idea of a sail-shaped building is not unheard of in a harbor, especially when one considers that the Sydney Opera House is an iconic structure that is familiar around the world to more than just architects. In this potential familiarity with architecture lies the possibility to undermine 40

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its expected political reinforcements of power. Frank Lloyd Wright published plans and drawings in Ladies’ Home Journal to garner fame; in the process, he made prairie style architecture available to the American public, allowing it “to be opened up to the understandings of the profane and the vulgar, at the risk of destroying [architecture] itself as an art in the process.” Among the facets of luxury lies the implication that it is synonymous with lasciviousness. Sharing this lust for excess with the profanity of the public flips the political hierarchy, even momentarily, that architecture would historically reinforce. The term “luxury” has been widely discredited in the academic world of architecture in recent years, in part due to the possibility of crassness that it too often implies. Projects like Trump Tower, Burj Khalifa, and Burj al Arab are excessively excessive and don’t cater to the puritanical modernist view of good architecture, but the definitions of both architecture and luxury imply that architects who discount these projects are missing a large portion of the discipline. Luxury describes “something which conduces to enjoyment or comfort in addition to what are accounted the necessaries of life. Hence, in recent use, something which is desirable but not indispensable.” Architecture, too, is excessive whether one consults Vitruvius regarding its essential qualities of utilitas, firmitas, and venustas (commodity, firmness, and delight); or prefers to cite Philip Johnson’s definition of architecture as the art of how to waste space. In that excess of architecture, the wasted space becomes the space of luxury. Desirable but not indispensable implies inherent cost – that is, the politics of luxury exclude those who cannot afford it, because the excess is unnecessary. If politics is a series of “actions concerned with the acquisition or exercise of power, status, or authority” and luxury is that which is above the base needs of a person or building – an indulgence in something which is high quality or expensive – it would make sense that the terms are related. Architecture has historically reinforced the existing political structure of a time or place, but that doesn’t have to be the case if architects can provide excess, even in small amounts, at various price points to suit the needs of its clients. 41

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I would argue that the excess of architecture doesn’t necessarily lead to excessive costs, or that these increased costs can be mitigated by creative use of resources. Accessible luxury is that which doesn’t distinguish based on cost, because small luxuries can be made with careful design of any space. Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation was built as inexpensively as possible in postwar Europe, structured entirely of béton brut and with elevators only stopping on every third floor. Despite this, each resident has a two-story apartment with windows on each side of the building, and each apartment has sufficient living space. Community spaces on the roof and the shared “streets” within the building are not strictly necessary to a housing block, but give a feeling of community to its residents. While these aren’t necessarily our first thoughts when considering luxury in the traditional sense, its definition as conducive to enjoyment suggests that these resources – more natural light than strictly necessary and a community in a tower – provide a sense of luxury as just a little bit more than what is necessary, but as things which are nevertheless appreciated for their contribution to the comfort of living in the tower. Even though Mies van der Rohe and his followers perhaps incorrectly used the idea that “Less is More” to justify efforts of condensing a building and its components into simple forms which integrated design and mechanics, the phrase itself is still useful. Tiny houses – especially those on wheels – allow their owners a sense of allemansrätten, the Nordic “freedom to roam.” The idea here is that owning less, and often in a form where it can travel with you, provides far more in terms of experiences and adventures than a traditional home. Though many of the most cost-effective tiny houses are often built based on what resources are readily available at the time of construction, others are carefully designed to be as effective as possible when in use without being excessively expensive. Their excess, rather than in space, is in how they use their home to the fullest of its potential. The most overt version of luxury, which begs to be included in this discussion despite its potential crassness, is illustrated by Trump’s exuberantly prolific towers throughout the world. While architects may scoff at the idea of goldplated toilets, buildings made to look like solid gold, and hotels shaped like sails, Trump’s towers are not the only ones to make these moves. Maurizio 42

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Cattelan’s “America” is a fully-functional, solid gold toilet on display in the bathrooms of the Guggenheim Museum. OMA’s arts center for Fondazione Prada features a building clad entirely in gold leaf, a move even more excessive than simply appearing gold as Trump’s Vegas hotel does. Finally, the idea of a sail-shaped building is not unheard of in a harbor, especially when one considers that the Sydney Opera House is an iconic structure that is familiar around the world to more than just architects. In this potential familiarity with architecture lies the possibility to undermine its expected political reinforcements of power. Frank Lloyd Wright published plans and drawings in Ladies’ Home Journal to garner fame; in the process, he made prairie style architecture available to the American public, allowing it “to be opened up to the understandings of the profane and the vulgar, at the risk of destroying [architecture] itself as an art in the process.” Among the facets of luxury lies the implication that it is synonymous with lasciviousness. Sharing this lust for excess with the profanity of the public flips the political hierarchy, even momentarily, that architecture would historically reinforce. `

N OT E S 1. “luxury, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, January 2018. 2. “politics, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, January 2018. 3. Banham, Reyner, Mary Banham, and Peter Hall. "A Black Box." A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham. U of California, 2007. 292-99. Print. 43

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Drawing Seminar Jon Rieke and Emily Mohr

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+ Select an area of an Ohio Congressional District map. Define a narrative concept for your drawing. + The drawingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contents may or may not have any relation to the political context of the district map - use the district map to define context and consider treating the defining border between districts a threshold between narratives. + The drawing should be a single image that fills the page: elevation, section, plan oblique, axonometric, etc. + Incorporate as many scale figures, hatches, textures, color, plants and furnitures as possible. + The drawing should be a projective view: a true axonometric, front oblique elevation, a choisy-eque wormâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye axonometric, or use an invented projection.

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The drawing is a current representation of the congressional districts layered with an axonometric of the districts abstracted with call-outs about parts of Ohio from my own independent political view. Garret Schultz 46

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This drawing begins to analyze the supposed logic behind Ohio's congressional district lines. It highlights the relationships these arbitrary divisions have to state infrastructure, county lines, geographical features, and more. Katie Shipman 47

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Gerrymandering applied to a building creates various spaces within the iconic Leveque Tower that don't fit in with the expected section. Ultimately the separation divides the structure into segregated areas with their own agenda. Rachael Hill 48

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The congressional districts and elements it contains are scaled according to the gender wage gap in that district. This creates a graphic representation of what "The Gap" does to divide a state even beyond gerrymandering. Taylor Smith 49

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I decided to draw the Statehouse and use the boundary line between the Columbus district and the neighboring district to divide the drawing in half by color, specifically the colors of the democratic and republican party. The crack in the statehouse represents the chaos and division happening with our government right now Jeff Leopold 50

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The congressional district lines become physical, walled boundaries. Due to this constraining condition, growth within each district results in high densities. Thus, each district has reached maximum density and they vary via distinct color palettes. Faris Ahmed 51

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Marly McNeal

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A utopian society has never prevailed. It probably never will. A dystopia, though? The chances seem a bit more likely. Perhaps that is why utopian film is hardly a prominent genre. A perfect world is a concept far too unattainable; “utopia” itself derives from the Greek words meaning “no place.” Nobody can fully envision or relate to a society where nothing goes wrong because something always has to go wrong. Past attempts such as Broadacre City and Plan Voisin revealed the difficulties of constructing a utopia too distant from reality. That is where the dystopian genre comes into play, a genre that is becoming more popular than ever.

Dystopian films take a genre such as science fiction and politicizes it through the creation of a problematic person or group in power. The word “dystopia” is derived from Greek for “bad, hard” and “place, landscape.” In creating what is essentially a “bad place,” architecture begins to play a critical role – drawing upon past and present aesthetics and ideologies to construct fictional regimes and illustrate political values. Because architecture is crucial in the creation of a political-dystopian environment, it’s important to understand how filmmakers appropriate existing architectural styles. Brutalism, a notoriously unpopular style, becomes a favorite choice. The FBI headquarters, for instance, regularly receives 53

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negative reviews such as, â&#x20AC;&#x153;went by this building during a tour and my wallet caught on fire lol,â&#x20AC;? a dystopic experience in its own right. From The Matrix to Robocop, numerous films exploit the brutalist aesthetic to establish a more sinister quality. Dystopian architecture is important to understand not only aesthetically, but conceptually. For instance, while many find the FBI headquarters visually scary, what they perceive it to represent is more fearsome: surveillance, secrecy, and power. Such impressions of the FBI Headquarters exemplify the role architects play in translating social and political hierarchies into the built world, latent ideologies that dystopian films subsequently dramatize.

A similar power dynamic plays out in the dramatization of piano nobile and class stratification in the 1927 film Metropolis. With a piano nobile, the main floor has superior status above the street and service space below. This idea is amplified in Metropolis where vertical cityscapes represent power, the rich occupying high towers while the poor struggle with horrible live-work conditions underground. The role of the piano nobile might initially seem unrelated to the organization of a colossal skyscraper, yet a derivation is clearMetropolis ultimately dramatizes this social structure to make latent social organizations present. It is time for architects to start paying attention to architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s critical role in dystopian film. How do we leave dystopian architecture in movies and keep it out of the real world? Learning from the adaptations of architectural 54

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aesthetics is the first step. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, we must learn from the dramatization of latent problematic ideologies in dystopian architecture. Perhaps by amplifying these problems within our own work we can make projects to critique the existing ideologies we are forced to design. Gaining a better understanding of this may ultimately shift the culture around which we design.

N OT E S 1. Lepore, Jill. “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 19 June 2017. 2. Carmichael, Joe. “How Science Fiction Dystopias Became Blueprints for City Planners.” Inverse, 20 July 2016. 3. Wagner, Kate. “The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.” 99% Invisible, 99% Invisible, 2 Dec. 2016. 4. Image: Carmichael, Joe. “How Science Fiction Dystopias Became Blueprints for City Planners.” Inverse, 20 July 2016. 5. Reviews: Stodder, Sarah. “The Best Bad Reviews of the FBI Building.” Washingtonian, Washingtonian Media Inc., 11 Aug. 2016. 6. Popov, Mikhail . “Metropolis: the founder of a fantastic movie.” Мир фантастики, Igromedia Ltd, 24 Dec. 2016. 7. Fabio. “Retrofuturism, The Return of the Past that Dreamed of the Future.” Stampaprint Blog, Stampaprint, 27 July 2016. 55

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Gui Competition Finalists

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The following prompt was written by the Undergraduate Chair, Jane Murphy, for the fourth year Gui Competition studio: Note: this is a largely fictional scenarioâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;though a new embassy is being designed for Mexico City, the program and site we are using were compiled for the purposes of the studio. Overseas Building Operations (OBO) at the Department of State provided most of the program of spaces. In the late twentieth century, in response to the Iranian hostage crisis and bombings at African embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and other security threats, the U.S. embarked on a campaign to replace embassies that were deemed insecure. Seventy-one new facilities were completed, designed and built with the primary goal of safety in mind. By 2010, the impact on this campaign of new building was recognized by John Kerry and William Cohen as detrimental to the image of American diplomacy. They pointed out that â&#x20AC;&#x153;for decades, we hired world-class architects to design buildings that inspired people, conveyed our spirit of openness and represented the best of our country.â&#x20AC;? A return to a conscious effort to design and construct embassies that provide security, but pay careful attention to architectural quality and image was made official through the Embassy Design and Security Act and the Federal Building Design Excellence Program. At its core, an embassy is a diplomatic institution; fostering good will is central to its mission. This project asks that you consider the design of an embassy for our close neighbor, Mexico, recognizing that architecture itself, as Moynihan pointed out, is a political art, but also that embassies represent the entirety of a country for longer than an American political cycle.

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A City Within Inspired by the studies and critiques of Sitte and Rowe, this American diplomatic headquarters seeks to embody a project of void: a project that values openness, tolerance and diversity. Formally symbolic and functionally effective, this openness is achieved by organizing an interrelated sequence of voids in respect to the context of Mexicoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urban fabric. Culturally, I am interested in exploring a collage of American and Mexican cultures to reflect a productive relationship. The voids would be a product of this relationship; not simply the resultant of a subtraction or the symbolic removal of either country. The embassy would become a locus for the reconstruction of our relationship, and the milieu for the new to emerge. Alex Oetzel

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US Embassy

An embassy built today has an obligation to uphold our civil relations. With an American president who repeatedly provokes the Mexican people with talks of walls, honestly and transparency are vital. Because of this, sight lines and materiality are of extreme importance. Communal exterior spaces are generated through intersecting sight lines cutting into the site. The secondary program is wrapped around columns, which, in turn, house the primary programs. The skin is a comprised of Mexican and American textile patterning, acting as a wrapper which unifies the masses.

Zach Stewart

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Temporal Tower The United States and Mexico have a complex, oscillating relationship. I propose an embassy complex that expresses the temporality of our international relationship, and suggests the current state of our countriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; diplomatic affairs, while allowing for a more positive reinterpretation of the unpredictable future. The project consists of a tower, along the Paseo de la Reforma, composed of loosely arranged pieces, and a landscape of fragments that organizes the site at a scale that mirrors the surrounding context. In the tower are the secured functions of the embassy. Consular offices and public engagement are scattered across a landscape with native vegetation, and form informal courtyards for visitors. Jack Raymond

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The Sinking City

When a storm sweeps in to Mexico City, the rain does not just fall, it pours. The lake that had once existed due to flooding has since disappeared, and what remains is a vast sea of concrete. As a result, Mexico City is left to extract the potable water from beneath the ground, thus eliminating support for the land above. This embassy seeks to alleviate stress on the aquifer, asserting itself as a divided wall rather than a wall that divides. The facades are designed to resemble and perform as bald eagle feathers by protecting, collecting and shedding water to the ground below.

Aleah Westfall

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19°25'43.8"N 99°09'59.7"W 19°25'43.8"N 99°09'59.7"W is founded on the idea that to be an effective member of the international diplomatic community, one mustn’t be insular. Instead, one should acknowledge their location and the larger framework of living on Earth. This is achieved firstly by bringing focus to Mexico City’s ecological disposition through passive ventilation massing and bio-swales around the site. Experientially, this connection occurs through the contrast of framed urban views and the removal of visual context in circulation cores. Before entering any program with visual access to the city, embassy occupants are first confronted with the phenomena unique to the coordinates of the embassy; a simultaneous connection with the direct environment and ubiquitous ephemerality. Theo Morrow

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US Embassy This embassy, while initially appearing strong and aggressive, evokes a sense of insecurity and sensitivity at close proximity. The complexity of structure represents the bureaucratic reality of the political world while the ground condition and floor to enclosure relationship express an anxiety of being an icon. Almost immediately after entering, a force seems to pull the user vertically to the tower. This tension is furthered by the floors pushing towards the exterior with a desire to break through the serene, silent curtain wall. The resulting building holds a tension between desire and vulnerability. It is the debate, the election, and the social order. Rhoda Du

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Porous Diplomacy A United States embassy in Mexico City could either reinforce the antagonistic views of our current administration or, alternatively, reimagine diplomatic relations. I propose an embassy that chooses the latter; an embassy that, in its form and material, promotes an honest relationship between two countries. The form is derived from a solid box carved away to reveal four distinct areas. Where this carving takes place, channel glass curtain walls inwardly focus views, creating a strong, welcoming edge condition. In combining the opaque and transparent, the embassy appears honest and translucent, while maintaining a high level of security. Chris Burroughs

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Transitions

This project challenges the conventional embassy design by placing multiple buildings with distinct systems onto one site. This move separates program into white volumes, strung together by a gray organizational system. With the absence of traditional floor plates, the volumes rely on the expansion and contraction of the gray system to generate sectional difference. In coalescing these two systems, an open yet secure embassy is created, offering public relationship with more private functions of the embassy.

Caroline Proffit

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Generators of Space This embassy takes into consideration the current relationship between the United States and Mexico by investigating the border condition not as something that divides, but enables interaction. The expected function of the border is inverted into a wrapper that collects a series of objects. Like most borders, the wrapper is not tangible and instead is read where the limit-defining box cleaves the objects and leaves behind transparent glass, indicative of bordersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; increasing obsolescence. The pyramidal form allows for more secure and private spaces to exist within public areas. By mapping a typical office diagram to the pyramidal forms, each plane of offices can remain intact and introduces sectional relationships. Rachel Ghindea

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The Divergent Glow

Inherently, the program of an embassy causes division, resulting in a duality of spaces. Typical embassy design isolates the stark zones of private and public within one entity. This embassy is designed to facilitate interaction between these zones and thereby illuminate the dual requirements of the program. Privileging the private zones with views of the public zones allows officials a view of their constituents. Allowing public glimpses of private spaces yields a psychological effect of unexpected intimacy between typically isolated programs. All conventional notions of an embassy are performing in tension.

Tyler Krebs

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Erin Pesa

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THE PREHISTORIC Architecture has always mined history for inspiration, but there has been a recent trend in contemporary practice to move past our more familiar sources, and look to the prehistoric. Prehistoric architecture concerns itself with a much more informal, primitive way of space making. So why are contemporary architects choosing to return to the prehistoric today?

First Office, PS1 Dolmen.

It seems that the prehistoric serves as a source for architects who are looking to escape the “baggage” that comes with familiar historical work. Sources from more recent history, are more than just the building; they also carry with them social, cultural, and political agendas. By knowing the motivations for the work, the time it was built, how it was built, and so on, we become familiar with a building’s unique baggage. And when we use those buildings as sources in our own work, it’s almost impossible to detach the building from those ingrained ideas. So, the prehistoric acts as a way to escape that, and return to a source with more indeterminate origins. But this return to a source so far back in history also suggests a profoundly different role for the architect as an author. We usually think of an author as a creator—someone who makes something. But that’s not really the case in architecture. We actually author through reinterpreting, we’re always returning to a source. If anything we do can be traced to a source in some way, even an unintentional one, it appears that an architect is an author in the sense that we are an interpreter. We author by recontextualizing sources in a contemporary setting, consequently giving it meaning through our work. 79

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AUTHORSHIP: A SECOND LOOK So for our purposes, an author is defined as an interpreter. While this definition has been suggested by literary theorists in the past, the widespread accessibility of technology has necessitated a second look at it. Technology provides an instant collective. People have an equal voice, and can openly discuss, create, and share on digital platforms. In contrast, the methods we rely on in practice remain hierarchical. With the architect at the top, they take credit as author and owner. And though credit is attributed to a single author, it is almost never the work of a single person. Design teams, interns, builders, engineers, and computer programs have just as much of a role in helping realize the work as the architect. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not just the architect whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s authoring, everyone whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s involved along the way is too in some way. By still working in traditional methods of sole authorship, we are limiting ourselves to an outdated way of designing and thinking, consequently preserving arbitrary distinctions of hierarchy. We should instead recognize the potential in the networks that both our field and technology has afforded us, and move away from the architect as sole author and towards methods of authoring as a collective. There are a variety of alternative models of authorship that we can turn to that take advantage of current technology and a collective. The most promising, and generally misunderstood, technology that has the potential to impact how we author and own our work is blockchain. Its open method of tracking asset ownership makes it a promising technology as a foundation for new collective authorship models in our field. GRANULAR AUTHORSHIP But to understand the potentials of collective authorship, we first have to understand the implications of a collectively authored work, as opposed to a single author work. This could imply anything from two people into the millions, with recent projects expanding the role of the author to nonhumans as well. 80

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Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Rutgers University. GAN Art.

Art provides clear examples of collectively authored work which begin to suggest various implications regarding the extent of individual contribution and legibility. If we begin by looking at work with just two authors, we can see immediate differences in the legibility of each contributor in the final product. On one hand, a work such as Duchamp’s Fountain is a single object, but retains the idea that two people worked on it. The urinal clearly lives on after Duchamp adds his signature. On the other hand, the work of Artie Vierkant makes it less clear that two people had a role in the work. Vierkant’s Exploits exhibition takes a patented object, in this case a spice rack, and uses the patent’s properties as both a set of guidelines to follow and a set of norms to be deviated from. Here, the contributions of Vierkant and the patent holder are more integrated; it’s not immediately clear how the patent lives on in Vierkant’s work. As the number of contributors increases into the thousands or millions, the author still retains legibility, but at increasingly small scales and in decreasingly unique ways. Reddit hosted an experiment where people could place a single pixel on a digital canvas over the course of 72 hours. While we can still technically see an individual’s specific contribution, a distinction is necessary here because the contribution of each author has been reduced to a generic input; none of the contributors actually created the pixel they placed. So while people could claim they were authors because they played a role in creating the final work through their pixel placement; they’re not really acting as authors, but rather as agents carrying out a larger agenda. The unoriginality 81

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of a pixel as a contribution at a microscale, combined with the surprising cohesion at the macroscale doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make it immediately obvious that this is actually a collective work.

Reddit, r/place.

But perhaps the most interesting result comes when the collective is expanded to include nonhuman entities. Based on an algorithm, GAN uses deep learning to analyze thousands of historic paintings to learn not only art styles, but also what is considered art, versus, say, a diagram or photograph. GAN not only has the ability to create new works of art, but has the ability to subjectively judge what it creates before it decides itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done. It loops through iterations of a painting, searching for an aesthetically pleasing composition that is similar to past styles, but uniquely its own. Humans play a detached role in this process, again acting as agents, but this time with no distinguishable input at all; we have essentially provided the content and basis of training for a new algorithmic creator. Despite input from hundreds of thousands of human artists, identifiable authors are erased at even the smallest scaleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;their contributions have been seamlessly interpreted into an entirely new single work of art by an algorithmic author. And if we look back at the Dolmen project, this is essentially what First Office is doing. 82

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They’re using a database of information, or history as we call it, as a base to blend and interpret sources into something new. Specific authors become so muddied; it’s clear there are sources, but their specific contribution is not readily obvious. So this would imply some sort of authorial equivalence between human authors and nonhuman authors, like GAN, if we’re essentially able to replicate our unique ability to think, interpret, and create.Though we seem hesitant to extend nonhumans role any further than agency, we need to recognize their emerging role in the way we work. POLITICS While the collective work we just saw emphasizes the product, process becomes just as important as the product as more people get involved. Questions like what contributions are made, how they’re made, and who has the final say in editing start to arise. To deal with these questions, political-like processes of organization begin to emerge as a way to handle the expansion of authorship to a human and nonhuman multitude. If we start with a totalitarian process of collective creation, then The Sheep Market provides us with an example of how this model would work. The Sheep Market is a collection of 10,000 digitally-drawn sheep made by workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Each person was given a simple direction—to draw a left facing sheep. And what we get in the end is exactly what we see; thousands of variations of a left facing sheep. People’s individual drawings are left to stand as-is in the end, but the unique identity of each single drawing gives way to the entire set as a whole. This totalitarian method also appears in traditional methods of animation. A primary artist creates key frames, which a number of individuals then go through and fill in to create one continuous motion. Again, the identity of each individual is lost to the whole, though this time it is intentionally erased for the sake of continuity. While we like to think people in these examples have authorship, the reality of a totalitarian process is that most people are acting as agents. They’re fulfilling the orders of some higher authorial power. And if we think about, this is actually how architecture works. The architect comes up with an idea, and 83

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through drawings and specifications, relies on other people to interpret them and actually build it. Next, if we move to a slightly freer model of limited democracy, we see the emergence of voting and a majority. Twitch Plays Pokemon is a large-scale, real-time game where people enter a command into a chatbox about what move the character should make next. With thousands of conflicting input commands, the game takes the majority opinion from the chatbox and uses that as the next move in the game. It is a democracy in the sense that it takes the action of the majority, but limited in the sense that people are limited to the parameters of a constitution, or in this case a framework of rules; they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make changes to the pre-existing structure. And this too has relevance in architecture. A limited democracy in architecture would be like something implied by Yona Friedmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Spatial City. As a means of liberating architecture and people, Friedman removes architecture from its existing context and provides a new structure above the city. People are in control of their environment, able to freely build within the structure to meet their needs. We see this again in Cedric Priceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fun Palace. The architect provides the framework for the building, but the program and use are up to users, capable of shifting with social and cultural changes. As a built example, Alejandro Aravena uses a framework for an affordable housing model. He provides the start to a house by building half of a house, and leaves the other half as just a frame for the occupant to build over time. Each house comes with connections for utilities, and a manual that shows possible ways for people to build out the other half of their home using standard building materials. Finally, autonomy provides us with the seemingly most free model, where entities are independent and free to make their own decisions. Terra0 is an autonomous forest in Germany that runs on blockchain. It receives satellite data of itself, which it regularly analyzes to know what percent of itself it is able to sell for logging rights without compromising its future. People can then buy those logging rights with money, which the forest in turn reinvests to buy more land or hire humans to plant trees for it. Humans here, are agents, subject to the needs and requests of thinking nature. And in my opinion, there 84

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are no examples of an autonomous architecture; we don’t have buildings with resources at their disposal to run themselves. BLOCKCHAIN The role of author versus agent remains in constant tension in everything we have seen so far, with each process and work having a unique relationship between its participants. But a recent technology presents itself as a potential tool for sorting out the ambiguity of authorship and agency in creation. Blockchain is a tool to track the origins and movement of a product in realtime, and this information is instantly distributed to anyone, anywhere.

Steven Bradley.

To understand what this looks like, we can look at how it’s being used in the food industry. Let’s consider a tomato. We can use blockchain to track its entire history. We could track everywhere it was shipped before it got to the grocery store, where it was packaged, the farm it was grown on, the chemicals that were applied to it, and the variation of seed it grew from. And we could do this for any tomato; we could see what farm they came from, where they went, and their entire histories as well. And as they grew and moved, their ledgers would be instantly updated and visible to anyone. Anyone could view the record of any single product’s life at any time, and could verify the exact origins, future uses, and components for anything. 85

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Now, we are probably most familiar with blockchain as the basis of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but blockchain is proving to be far more versatile. For example, in art, the blockchain application dada.nyc is a platform for digital artists to release and track the distribution of their artwork. An artist offers a certain number of licenses of their work for people to purchase, and can track how many authentic copies get distributed and where. One step further, Maecenas uses blockchain to extend trackable ownership of art to a collective. Most fine art is unattainable for the average person, so Maecenas acts as a way for people to collectively own a work of art. You could own a piece of a Picasso like you would a share of a company. Already changing many industries, blockchain provides us an opportunity to rethink architecture’s current model of authorship and ownership. We can begin to see new models emerge including one where essentially everything becomes a commodity and there is excessive ownership tracking; or alternatively one where nothing is owned, but rather everything is shared in an open network; or finally a model that takes into consideration the potentials of nonhuman involvement. MODEL 1: COMMODIFICATION Like we just saw, one of the key functions of blockchain is its ability to publicly track authorship of an asset; and with authorship comes the implicit impression of ownership. In a model focused on tracking ownership, it’s hard to say certain things can be owned, but others can’t be. So instead, this suggests a model of excessive ownership, where essentially everything is owned and becomes a commodity up for claim. There are many variations of blockchain-based games right now that illustrate its purpose of ownership tracking. But Cryptokitties has unique features that suggest deeper meanings of ownership in a blockchain model. Cryptokitties is a place where people own, trade, and breed 100% unique, digital cats. A cryptokitty has no inherent value; it’s value is determined by whether or not people perceive a cryptokitty’s specific cattributes to be rare. Cryptokitties implies deeper meanings of ownership based on its value model and the ability to breed your cat. It suggests two larger ideas; one, that ownership 86

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can be tracked through future iterations and generations, and two, that rarity translates to economic value, or at least the perception of it. We can apply these ideas to suggest a new process of architecture in which everything is owned, and our ideas are tracked in their future reuses and misuses. This exists now very basically, where firms technically own the drawings and details they create for a specific project. But if we expand that to include other authorable content, we can begin to lay claim to unique formal moves, design processes, diagrams, graphic styles, and so on. People reusing OMA diagrams would suddenly have to pay OMA to use it, or a firm’s unique graphic style would no longer be up to freely copy at will. Architect’s that have developed a signature style of sorts, would be able to lay claim to that gesture every time someone reuses it. For example, Neil Denari’s often used fillets would require us to recognize their source when we make that same gesture in our own work.

DADA.nyc

Though our value as architects comes not from our ability to reuse, but rather to misuse things that are not ours in a unique way. This new model of ownership complicates our methods of design, and our inherent value, if everything becomes ownable and identifiable in such a way that even misuse represents a distant owner. For example, you could say Greg Lynn uses a unique column form for the Slavin House. But at the end of the day, they are essentially a misuse of pilotis. So OMA could easily have a percent ownership claim based on Lynn’s misuse of their pilotis at Villa d’all Ava, and Le Corbusier could claim a misuse of his original pilotis at, say, Villa Savoye. There are many other sources of origin that could be drawn for just the pilotis, 87

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let alone the whole project. This could lead to hundreds of sources claiming ownership of increasingly small portions of a project. So we could begin to imagine that architects could make their living by coming up with one identifiable thing, from which they receive perpetual compensation for through future appropriations and reuses. We could theoretically author hundreds of thousands of buildings without ever actually being involved, even after our lifetime. And with the subjective application of value to everything, we would quickly establish a marketplace of architectural components. MODEL 2: OPEN SOURCE Now obviously this gets complicated, depending to what level you look for appropriated parts or how far back in history you look for sources. So rather than say everything is excessively owned, we could also draw inspiration from blockchainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s open network and say rather that nothing is owned and people work collectively in an open source model. But working in an open collective model of architecture is not necessarily a new idea, many people have tried this before. Walter Gropius successfully used this process with TAC starting in the 1950s, and many firms today operate organizationally with multiple principals. Technology in our field, too, has updated to reflect the importance of open collaborative design. BIM is a pretty well-established mode of working in our field that tries to foster a collaborative process. And while it works well for logistically sharing project information, it rarely qualifies as a process for an open method of design. BIM still applies levels of ownership to peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contributions and methods of working. Some people are limited to only viewing models, while other people are allowed to make varying degrees of contributions. While this is good for protecting your specific work, this limits BIM to a method of information sharing. Contemporary architects are starting to take initiative to share their work and methods in order to promote innovation through a collective. In architecture, Tomas Saraceno launched the open source platform, Aerocene, which provides people with a base pattern for a floating kit. He provides an outline 88

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of materials, tools, and instructions for people to assemble the explorer on their own. People are also encouraged to adapt the basic kit to meet their situation, and share their version with the community. Similarily, the Danish art collective, N55, provides complete construction manuals for a wider range of products. Their manuals include instructions for a walking house, a bike, and hygiene system, just to name a few. While these examples are focused on openly sharing information to promote innovation, they are still limited by lacking an active collective in process; people are not working simultaneously like we saw with the Reddit art for example, they are just taking information from one person and hacking it to fit their need. But if we were to imagine a truly open source architecture where people are actively working together, sharing information, and designing, this poses a curious condition we havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seen yet. In every example so far, we have been able to identify at least one author, and from that explicit ownership. And with ownership usually falls liability. But in a model where there are no authors, and there are no owners, who does liability fall on?

cryptokitties.co

Suprisingly, open source work actually shifts the liability to the user; it is ultimately up to the user to decide whether an open source product is legal to use. So this raises the age-old question of intellectual property rights and copyright in architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;can architecture be copyrighted? This is something that has been tried to be clarified, but has ultimately had little success. Ana Miljacki and Sarah Hirschman investigate this notoriously gray area in their 89

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exhibition, Un/Fair Use. They identify architecture based on common themes and ideas, which are generally considered uncopyrightable, and display them alongside architecture involved in legal disputes, emphasizing the ambiguity of this in our field. In an open source model, the user would have to decide in each case whether a design is valid to be used. Does it contain sufficient originality, implying that it could copyrighted, or is it based on ideas that have been used so many times that no one person can lay claim to them. But the lack of an owner and liability can also be intentionally abused by people purposefully looking to escape authorship and circumvent laws. There are several open source sites that provide 3D-printing files for guns or gun attachments. Here, the creators have a political agenda, and they’re using the platform to get around laws and widely distribute their message. They’re intentionally trying to get rid of authorship as a way to get around the legal problems that typically come with it. While we saw earlier open source attempts through information sharing, there have been recent attempts of open source architecture in terms of process. Architecture for Humanity was an open design initiative in the early 2000s that focused on architectural solutions for humanitarian crises. It provided a platform where designers of any kind could share ideas, drawings, and collaborate on community-focused projects. People didn’t necessarily need to have a specific background or skillset, anyone could help in the design process. And the firm provided access to many of their projects for free so people who needed them, could use them. So while open source certainly has its flaws, it does make architecture more accessible to people and communities that would otherwise not be able to access it. Architecture has historically been categorized as an expert’s art, out of reach of the general population. But open source implies the end of architecture as an expert’s art. The “big idea” we’ve been valued for in the past is no longer reserved as a specialized skill; almost anyone can come up with an idea now. What’s valued now are specific skills. People who can draw details, write specifications, and know building methods would now be the most valuable. And rather than actually build architecture, architects could instead use their specific skills to develop manuals or resources of other collective ideas for 90

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people to create their own architecture. MODEL 3: NONHUMAN INCLUSION While each of the two previous models certainly have their pros and cons, perhaps the most promising model comes when we look at how they operate when nonhumans are included. The previous two models still suggest a primarily human-focused process of design. But as we saw earlier, some of the most recent innovative and influential work is the result of nonhuman inclusion. While we recognize nonhuman entities as contributors and becoming increasingly essential to current advanced processes, are we able to consider them authors or owners? As has been suggested by the work investigated earlier, the answer is yes. Though the call for the advancement of nonhuman representation is not a new initiative. Bruno Latour advocates for nonhuman equivalency in his actor network theory. He suggests that the role of objects, ideas, and processes are just as important as the role of humans in a network. This echoes Graham Harmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ideas in OOO, which assert that the focus should be neither the human individual, which was the focus of the first model, nor the human collective, the focus of the second; but rather the focus should be the nonhuman object, which is the crux of this third model. Latour later furthers his actor network theory idea in The Parliament of Things, attributing a political quality to the human-nonhuman relationship. The Parliament of Things is essentially a democracy extended to objects, where both humans and nonhumans would be given a voice and represented equally. Coincidentally, several countries have literally done just that; they have extended legal standing to nonhumans to give them a voice in government. Similar to how the definition of a legal person includes corporations in the US, legal standing has been extended to include nature in countries such as New Zealand, Ecuador, and India. Giving nature legal rights means we can see nature as a legal person; it has rights that can be reinforced, it can enter contracts, and it can hold property. 91

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Tomas Saraceno, Aerocene.

So if we go back and consider the implications of the GAN art and autonomous forest we saw earlier, we can see the emergence a future model of nonhuman architecture processes. The GAN art algorithm suggests that not only can a computer create art that humans hold at an equal level to human created art; but it can also have subjectivity. The GAN art creator doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just make something and immediately call it art. It can continuously think and analyze what it creates until it reaches a level of work its satisfied with. Next, the autonomous forest gives us a model for how a nonhuman could operate and run on its own. With a supply of resources from humans, the forest is able to analyze its needs and decide the best use of those resources to keep itself alive. In a more common example, autonomous cars would operate this way. People pay money for the car to pick them up, the car drives itself on an optimized route, it goes home to charge itself, and lets someone know when it needs repairs. So, then, that begs the question, could a building own itself? And the answer again is yes. The concept of a building owning itself has been alluded to before in the most basic sense; squatter communities surprisingly provide a pretty clear example of this. Squatter communities emerge, typically in political protest, as independent, autonomous communities within the city. People united by a common interest turn abandoned buildings into thriving communities. These communities take on their own identity, often complete with their own housing cooperatives, newspapers, and art forms. Not only do they 92

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become a way of living for the actual occupants, but they become hubs in the community that foster open thinking and discussion. Regarding the building itself, it is brought to life and maintained by the occupants themselves. No one technically owns the building, not the state or a landlord, but rather ownership is implied as distributed among the collective occupants. In many cases, people are even given ownership rights after decades of occupying it as if it were theirs. So if we take this one step further to give the building itself autonomy, we can begin to see how nonhumans could impact architecture in our cities. We could start with a version of the autonomous forest, but with a building. Humans give the building money through, say, rent, and we suddenly have a nonhuman with real resources at its disposal. Similar to the GAN creator, the building would be constantly analyzing itself to decide the best way to invest its resources. It could add additions when it needs more space, make repairs when something fails, or update its façade when it starts to feel out of style. And the building would do things like this with humans as agents; it would hire a human to come add additions, make repairs, or whatever else it needs. Here, though, like the forest, economics and capital are still the regulating factors at play. By default of being a project created by humans, it also relies on human models of economics to sustain itself; it’s not truly free. And what’s more, we can only think of the tree in the sense that it wants something; we can’t get away from our innate tendency to attribute human psychology to nonhuman things. But if we move past an economics driven model, we can begin to consider buildings with non-economic missions. A building, for example, could seek to provide shelter for as many people as possible. It could be constantly adding additions, moving people in and out, or subdividing space to maximize occupants. Or an aesthetically driven building could be constantly in search of an ever more beautiful façade. Much like the GAN artist constantly loops through iterations of art, a building would be constantly looping through facades until it reaches a façade its happy with, if it ever does. While architecture would be pushed to a status it has never been before, humans in this world are reduced to agents. To push the limits of our field, 93

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humans and nonhumans need to work, own, and create interdependently, recognizing the strengths of each. New-Territories is a studio that is taking steps towards an interdependent, human-nonhuman design process. Officially headed by a digital avatar, it’s clear from the start that humans are not in charge anymore. Their work involves humans from many disciplines, and relies on robotics and software to bring their work to life. But instead of being a procedural maker that knows what it will make in advance, like a 3D printer would, the makers here act in real-time, reacting to changing surroundings and occupants; they’re self-generating, responsive, and unpredictable. But despite this, the firm is still limited in its process. There is a detachment between humans and nonhumans; humans don’t include nonhumans until after they’ve scripted code, and after that nonhumans take over. To truly make progress and advance our field, we need to include humans and nonhumans in all steps of design. Reimaging is a firm that identifies with this philosophy in practice. It actively engages humans, nonhumans, and objects in the design process. Their nonhuman colleague, Stewart, relies on a multitude; he doesn’t act procedurally to just fabricate according to specified parameters. Instead, Stewart requires live interaction, watching what other people are doing, prompting inputs by other participants, giving outputs for people to act on, and constantly analyzing its surroundings. Fabrication performs in sync with its site and as a collective.

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Reimaging recognizes the strengths of humans, the strengths of nonhumans, and uses them together to push the boundaries of what we would otherwise be able to create. Their project, the Found Object Catenary, took objects from around LA, digitized them, and together with Stewart, built freestanding catenary structures. Stewart continuously approximated a new catenary curve as each object was added and suggested which objects to use and modes of connection. In this project, the objects themselves even play a role in process. Each object has its own properties that initiates a new set of conditions to work within. Their truly collaborative process of design, actively including all types of creators, is just a very preliminary exploration of what this can offer our field. Nonhumans are essential to the design process, doing things we simply cannot do. They can continuously react to their surroundings, offering information that humans wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be able to have without them. They should be recognized as an independent, free-thinking entity in their own right; capable of authorship, ownership, and decision making. And we need to recognize our own limitations as human designers; once we do that, we can make significant design advancements by including other nonhumans to fill those voids.

Reimaging, Found Object Catenary.

But this is all to say that if we refuse to recognize the ability of nonhumans to author and own real assets, ignoring their emergence in the processes of our work, we could be in serious trouble. As nonhumans further develop their ability to think and create as independent entities, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the potential for 95

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that to go unchecked. Rather than have a process of active collective working between humans and nonhumans, we could fall subject to a system of analysis and consumption. We currently only track ownership of something for a certain period of time; blockchain would track everything for the rest of time. It would be impossible to escape the record of ownership, with every new idea, product, shape, and style becoming owned. We wouldn’t have gray areas around what’s ownable anymore; anything and everything would be ownable. And we would be further subject to a system of continuous analysis. Our society would be constantly calculating its value, its best use of resources, its needs, and its wants. But in this world of architecture, where do we fit in? As we’ve seen in other fields, our role as architects will inevitably change once nonhumans move into the realm of recognized authorship and ownership. This doesn’t have to mean the end of the architect, though it is the end of the architect as we know it now—as the architect. But a new door has opened up for processes where humans and nonhumans can create, design, and own together, and we can push the field beyond its current limits. And there are technologies at our disposal now to help us sort out the questions of authorship, ownership, and collaborative methods. How we choose to situate ourselves amongst our new emerging coauthors though, is up to us.

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New-Territories, Shadow ROOM/[the virgin case]

N OT E S 1. Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press, 2011. 2. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1991. 3. Gannon, Todd, et al. “The Object Turn: A Conversation.” Log, no. 33, 2015, pp. 73–94. 4. Curtis Roth served as the faculty advisor for this exit review turned essay 97

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Curtis Roth

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Sometimes I think the word “super” as a prefix is a little funny, like supercilious for instance. Some people think United States embassies are too supercilious; they try to blow them up, still others feel they’re not super enough, more precisely, that the supererogatory demand for security has superseded something called excellence. Or rather, the somewhat vague position that diplomatic superintendents who work in excellent buildings generally have superior lives. I like to secretly believe in this kind of architectural optimism, but I get selfconscious when asked to justify it to others. Anyway, the thought occurred to me that what’s really super about today’s embassies is how average they are; in fact they’re not just normal buildings but supernormal buildings, altogether too normal for comfort. But for normal to become supernormal it has to take the architectural proposition of averageness quite seriously, more seriously than your average architect at least. Like for instance: the average penetration distance of a 7.62 x 39mm round into a concrete panel, or the average blast radius of an averagesize van packed with trinitrotoluene, or the average distance an average human can jump from an average sized tree over an average sized fence. In fact, I think supernormal has something to do with taking averages (in this case the average chance of dying) to a maniacal extent. I saw this version of supernormal most distinctly in the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operation’s EPIC (Embassy Perimeter Improvement Concepts) manual for the planning of new embassy walls. The more or less average spaces between the street and the embassy are indexed with the statistically determined proportions of a century of violence. But this made me think that maybe normal has more than one connotation, a mathematical norm corresponding to a kind of insane statistical obsession with risk (like for instance: the average amount of bollards necessary to stop an average-sized vehicle) concealed within an entirely alternative definition of normal, like benches, planters and the relaxed folks you put in the front of an architectural rendering to take up space and add a bit of normality to the scene. In fact, for me, supernormal corresponds not only to the maniacal statisticalization of risk indexed by the embassy wall, but how 100

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the implementation of embassy walls also necessitates the construction of another form of normal inside the embassy, as in, something that might be called normal-life. I wanted to design an embassy which was the perfect representation of the chronology of supernormal as a defensive and representational agenda. So I researched bullets and blast radii and developed a catalog of walls based on the history of attacks on US diplomatic facilities over the last century. Each wall would afford an average person a roughly average chance of survival, the OBO calls this ‘reasonable risk’, explosive experts call it 50% lethality. At the same time I drew the average life of a diplomat over the course of an average 24 hours, it seemed a bit like anyone’s life to be honest so I furnished this alternative normality via 3d-warehouse college kids who make digital models of their bedrooms and offices when they’re bored. I thought it was all pretty average stuff and I hope you like it.

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Alex Oetzel

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The Outer Space Treaty was drafted during the Cold War Era when the top competitors for lunar success were the Soviet Union and United States. This treaty agreed that no single country could own the Earth’s lonely moon, but did not specify any grounds of ownership for equally lonely individuals. Since then some hundreds of acres of desolate space rock have been sold off and deeded to a variety of individuals – unrecognized by the UN until recently. It’s a pyramid scheme of some astronomical dimensions, but noteworthy because it poses some questions: Why would you want to own the moon? How charismatic was the individual who sold you a piece of the moon? How do you claim ownership of a piece of property you’ve never seen, touched, surveyed? Do you plan to spend summer or winter holidays there?

Perhaps, the moon is the world’s largest pet rock. We can note that there are at least two types of ownership in this scenario: psychological and legal. The case of the moon illustrates both through an international treaty, deeds of ownership (albeit initially falsified), and a sense of control or self-identification as a result of buying into the moon’s “guaranteed” future development. Back on Earth, we face equally politically sticky ownership situations. There are extremes such as international waters and parts of the atmosphere that begin to illustrate the three-dimensional stretches of space that avoid a single states’ or individuals’ oversight. These spots follow statutes like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which declares that the sea must be used for the benefit for all states and peoples of the international 105

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community (a follow up called the Moon Treaty attempts to copy this although it’s considered a failure as no state with self-launched flight has agreed on its ratification). There may be some suspicious power dynamic at play in this abstinence – who stands to lose the most if the moon is not open for cultivation? Who gains? Most curious, perhaps, are the spots even closer to us. Who owns the space above a building? Who owns the ground beneath? How far up or down? I am reminded of the 1916 Zoning Resolution in New York City and the development of the Equitable Building – can we revoke ownership of air space to assure the allocation of a public good (eg. sunlight) to the public? Or oppositely, can we sell the land rights above our trains at Grand Central Terminal with the caveat that x amount of foundation is only allowed below, a structural determinant of the ultimate building height? This is clearly a concept of political consequence. Whether you are surveying the pocked land of a space rock, pirating on the open seas, or digging into the water line near your home and flooding the neighborhood, you can be sure to be tip-toeing on a fine line (imagined or lawful) of what is yours and what is mine. There is much to be learned exploring these aforementioned suspicious moments where the ownership becomes both yours, mine, and ours. Considering all of these questions, I feel the most relevant is: why do we feel the need to own anything at all?

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Grand Central Station, 1954

N OT E S 1. Boyle, Rebecca. “FYI: Can I Buy The Moon?” Popular Science, 2 Sept. 2013. 2. Image: “Grand Central Terminal in Pictures, 1900s-1910s.”Rare Historical Photos, 3 Oct. 2017 107

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Jared Younger

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We generally understand Rome as the area enclosed by the third-century Aurelian Walls. Once built as a defense structure to deter and stop intruders, the wall aimed for a very consistent construction of segments and towers, but what we find is far more that what we understand as a simple tool of division. One-eighth of the wall incorporated existing structures such as colosseums, houses, theaters, and aqueducts. The towers had staircases that led to a rampart walk that gave the Romans high ground in battle. It was purely functional as a divisive element of warfare. But the wall is no longer needed. Though forced to face the outside for 1700 years, they now defend nothing. Instead, they welcome all inside. A tool of warfare turned tourism. A look at historical maps from Alberti to Tempesta show us that the wall is a datum by which to locate greater monuments. I argue that the wall is a monument in itself. However, the wall has a contemporary problem. It is 12 miles long and imagined as uninteresting. It is a monumental forefather of Rome, but neglected. The wall must be reborn. It will be compiled to display its spatial and architectural richness. Not unlike Piranesiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fantastical etchings of Rome, the wall will be re-imagined from its pieces to form a new image. Rome is now outside of the walls.

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Theo Morrow

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*this article is intentionally free of drawings so as to force mental visualization*

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A seemingly infinite amount of components work in conjunction to form the spaces we inhabit. While it is easy to simplify this complexity and accept the world as a flattened idea, the realization of individual elements within a space can make for an entirely new reading of something previously thought to be familiar. Regardless of whether or not these disparate elements make it fully into our conscious mind, they remain as factors which shape how we visualize and subsequently experience the world. What is interesting, however, is the elements which cannot be physically seen but still factor into this process. An idea, for instance, has no material presence outside of artifacts which describe it. When an idea is too abstract or complex to be described through physical or digital means, diagrams seem to be the only way out - potentially resulting in reductive, even dangerous binaries. One such description that has proven extremely problematic in the United States is the right/ left binary. This polarization has become more pronounced following the 2016 presidential election and is the source for much dispute with little resolve. Even for those who place themselves at the center, the problem is still present; a linear organization is simply not fit to illustrate the complexity of political ideology. Beliefs are nuanced and complex, coming from influences such as upbringing, social groups, religion, media, selfidentification, and education. While an individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beliefs have the ability to transcend singular classification, they still find themselves subject to an inadequate system of compartmentalization and semi-relative association. We can all see that political ideologies are not flat in their intricate reality, but speaking about them as such forces us to visualize them as two-dimensional. If one is forced to place themselves at a singular point on a line, they are then surrounded by others who have done the same. A sort of two dimensional echo chamber, the voices around them seem to be very clear but from the distance one hears only muffled noise. Along with this noise is the attached baggage from its position on the line. While distant voices may in fact be in more agreement than either point realizes, common ground does not seem to be an option. This is contemporary discourse, a tumultuous attempt at exchanging beliefs 114

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I propose that individuals begin to separate their political ideologies from the limitations of linear classification. Much in the way that, dare I say progressive, gender discourse has moved away from describing itself as a binary and more towards a spectrum, political ideology can incorporate increased nuance. Similarly to how one can mentally picture the space of a building, individuals can imagine ideology as a space. A sort of three dimensional network wherein one does not occupy a singular point but a moving vector of their own. A vector which travels through ideological space, intersecting with others they might not have previously allowed themselves to hear. This model may offer the ability to find common ground, at the least, allowing people to better understand the voices which surround them. Lines have the property of being infinitely extendable and increased binary polarization is only pushing the right and left further into infinity. It is time to stop feeding into this reduction and begin acknowledging the complexity of the political network that is seen by no one but occupied by all.

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Michael Rizk

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when I say â&#x20AC;&#x153;RUINSâ&#x20AC;?

do you think...

historic? abandoned? haunted? overgrown? apocolyptic?

or do you think... war-torn?

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Ruins have long been idolized objects. As landmarks set within picturesque landscapes, they appeal strongly to the romantic pondering times. People have traveled far and wide - from Belize to Greece, Italy to Cambodia - to marvel at these ancient wonders, and it was ruins that inspired architects such as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn as they embarked on their grand tour. But in our contemporary world, they are being violently removed from their utopian context, finding themselves deep within a hellish dystopia. Aleppo, Homs, and Damascus are home to the most contemporary ruins and no one is traveling to marvel at them. Caught in the crossfires of a fierce civil war and terrorist activity, buildings in Syria are being leveled relentlessly. Neither historic nor fictional, these ruins are symbolic of a country’s political strife. War is usually understood in terms of human loss. We determine the significance of a violent event based on the casualty count. But since people are the targets and they reside in the built environment, the buildings cannot go unscathed. In times of armed conflict, people and buildings lose their identities. So what role do our residential, religious, civic, and cultural buildings play in the game of war? Throughout history, buildings have been targeted by warring factions in an effort to destroy infrastructure, reduce morale, and eradicate culture. “Warchitecture”, first used to describe the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990’s, is defined as war carried out through the destruction of architecture. This theory forces us to reconsider the built environment as mere “collateral damage.” Warchitecture is intentional, not accidental. Historian Andrew Herscher has studied the effects of violence on architecture and argues that destruction can be both violent and semiotic. Herscher believes that, “violence transforms the meaning and identity of architecture in the very process of destroying it.” Sometimes regular fabric acquires value only after being destroyed. In 2015, ISIS destroyed the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra. This historic site was detonated because it was deemed “idolatrous” by the terror group, but in reality it was representative of a cultural heritage they were seeking to obliterate. Palmyra went from being an artifact of history to an artifact of violence overnight.

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The scars in Syria run deep, so what happens when the war is over? Do we rebuild the country to its former condition to instill a sense of normalcy, or build anew from a blank slate to erase the memories of tragedy? Architect Lebbeus Woods claims that we need to find a middle ground that respects the city’s war-torn state. Woods sees potential in the forms of besieged buildings and argues that “a new order can be built on top of the old, leading to revitalization.” The contemporary ruins of Syria do not find themselves in the traditional space of romantic idolization but instead they have been endowed with a harsh new meaning. There is no doubt that Syria can be rebuilt from the ashes, but it needs to embrace its painful past as it pushes toward a brighter future. When the switch is finally made from razing buildings to raising buildings, only then can we heal.

N OT E S 1. Andrew Herscher, “Warchitectural Theory,” Journal of Architectural Education, (2008). 2. Eyal Weizman and Andrew Herscher, “Conversation: Architecture, Violence, Evidence,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism, (2011). 3. Sarah Almukhtar, “The strategy behind the islamic state’s destruction of ancient sites,” The New York Times, (2016). 4. Lebbeus Woods, "War and architecture", Princeton Architectural Press, (1993). 120

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Article: Ali Sandhu Project: Clark Sabula and Ali Sandhu

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Chapter One: Tribune Tower The Tribune Tower Competition was the largest international architecture competition in history. The editors of the Tribune were veterans of World War I and they had a very clear vision for the Tribune’s future upon their return: they would create the world’s most beautiful building for the world’s greatest newspaper. It was their job to put Chicago on the map and the only way was to build a skyscraper for their newspaper. The gothic towers they had seen in France during the war acted as precedents because of their beauty and power. The towers were associated with religious contexts and the sublimity of those towers was what the Tribune wanted to convey. They wanted to construct a cathedral for journalism. With the goals set into place, Colonel McCormick attended the AIA Chicago banquet on the evening of June 9th, 1922. He made an announcement to the architecture community of Chicago that the competition was afoot and the next day it was officially announced in the paper. The competition was a celebration of the 75th birthday of the Tribune and called for three things: 1. To adorn with a monument of enduring beauty this city, in which The Tribune has prospered so amazingly 2. To create a structure which will be an inspiration and a model for generations of newspaper publishers 3. To provide a new and beautiful home worthy of the world’s greatest newspaper Each competitor was required to submit drawings showing the west and south elevations and perspective from the southwest of the new building. No plans or sections were required. During the competitions six months life, the newspaper ran several articles about the potential style for a new building. There were advertisements of the cathedrals of Amiens and Rouen and many more. Meanwhile, in Germany, 124

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this is just a couple years prior to the building of the Bauhaus in Dessau. The crisis of style was at an all-time high in the mid-twenties. The closing of this competition emphasized that crisis with 263 entries from very different style camps throughout the world. On December 23, 1922, Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells’ entry, number 69 a Gothic Skyscraper, wins the competition. Construction starts almost immediately. While the shell is being constructed, the inner workings of the building need to be fleshed out to accommodate for the required program. Most of the building is dedicated to the Tribune except floors 13-23 which would be rentable office space. The advertisements published by the newspaper advertise the building with such headlines that are hard to overlook: “Tribune Tower has been built for discriminating tenants” “Tribune Tower is to have the very best of everything” “A fine Interior will match this beautiful Exterior” “Buy Prestige with Rent Checks” These advertisements are always juxtaposed with similar or altered perspective drawings of the original competition entry drawing done by Raymond Hood. Soon enough, the Tribune was running their production of news and printing of newspapers out of their new location at 435 North Michigan Avenue.

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December 4, 1924 126

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Chapter 2: Surface Reading The article titled, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, serves as the introduction for Volume 108 of the journal, Representations. Representations is a UC Berkeley based publication whose mission is: “[to] bring together work that ignores traditional disciplinary boundaries, revealing the connections among widely diverse fields of research.” This specific volume of the journal was dedicated to surface reading. The editors define surface reading as, “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in a geometric sense, has length and breadth but no thickness and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through.” Surface reading is opposed by symptomatic reading. Best and Marcus define symptomatic reading as, “not just any idea of interpretation but a specific type that took meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter.” Their definition implies that both texts and their readers have an unconscious veiled by the surface. The way these two types of readings are defined with vocabulary such as surface, depth, thickness, seethrough, and veiled are easily related to architectural qualities. Best and Marcus outlined a taxonomy of surface reading typologies in their article. In an act of abstraction, I have adopted their categories to outline how I think surface reading operates within architecture. This adoption turns the focus to the surface or skin of buildings, resulting in a surface reading of surfaces. The categories as extrapolated are surface as appliqué, surface as intricate structure, surface as critical description, surface as literal meaning, and surface as erasure. Venturi and Scott Brown coin the term both/and for architecture in their 1966 book, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” They state: “If the source of the both-and phenomenon is contradiction, its basis is hierarchy, which yields several levels of meanings among elements with varying values. It can include elements that are both good and awkward, big and little, closed and open, continuous and articulated...” And for the sake of my argument, 128

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surface and symptomatic: â&#x20AC;&#x153;an architecture which includes varying levels of meaning breeds ambiguity and tension.â&#x20AC;? Architecture should offer hybrid situations of surface and symptomatics because buildings can sell themselves on the surface or exterior, but also need to offer an opportunity for a deeper critical analysis. The image they create and the message they send are not enough. Architecture can contribute to the idea that surface sells. Judging a book by its cover is inevitable. Surface is where the seduction lies. Prada Aoyama by Herzog and de Mueron falls under the category of surface as intricate structure. It is more than just structure embedded into the surface cage of the building. The building takes on multiple forms as it is circumnavigated; it morphs from a saddle roof building to a crystalline structure. The differing geometries of the exterior cladding allow for various framing of the products inside. This has a cinematographic effect as one walks along the building taking window shopping to an extreme. This effect also plays a larger role when people enter the building and can be seen from the outside with constantly oscillating frames. You get a view into the portal from the plaza and are immediately invited to enter. The people shopping (or more likely just looking) become a part of the spectacle as soon as they enter the building. The building is alluring through its objectivity which is then perceived as a Prada product itself. This patterning of the crystalline object coupled with its milky texture becomes a direct reference to the Prada Safianoresa Textured Leather. The quality of the surface and the Prada brand become the selling points for the building in the same way it does for the products it encases. This building acts as a vehicle for deeper, critical reading to take place and exemplifies the both-and structure; the surface always invites us to look closer rather than take away the quick meaning. Architecture can oscillate between surface and symptomatic reading. Designs need to dig at the strategies put forth through advertising and marketing campaigns. 129

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Architecture now, more than ever, needs to be more attuned to the distracted audience. As headlines are “sold” through web traffic, Instagram posts are gratified through likes, relationships are sparked by swiping right, commercials are validated through sales, how is architecture participating? If the surface as façade can be a form of deceit when defined as, “an outward appearance that is maintained to conceal a less pleasant or creditable reality” rather than of the face of a building, then depth needs to be achieved beyond the surface. Architecture needs to address the current trends as it relates to a changing audience.

While a both-and architecture has been called for previously, I would like to revive the term for our contemporary discipline with a different application. There needs to be a clear tension between surface and symptomatic reading for architecture to cater to a society that just refuses to slow down. 132

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Chapter 3: Tribune Tower Reimagined The skin, as it was conceived, was apathetic to the resulting interior. The section became stacks of program organized in a typical hierarchical structure. We reimagined beyond the surface of this iconic structure. What lies on the interior needs to offer a deeper critique of its own surface but also of today's news media culture. Contemporary news, as architectural program, does not require the same organization; instead, it can become a "No-Stop City" via section. The mat condition in section allows for fluidity and adaptable news program. While the surface offered seduction, the new interior critiques that surface along with its vision imagined in 1922.

N OT E S 1. Article Images: chicagotribune.newspapers.com, Model Images: Clark Sabula 2. Kinsley, Philip. The Chicago Tribune, Its First Hundred Years. Chicago Tribune, 1945. 3. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. 4. Karl, Joseph I. Tribune Tower World’s Leader, Real Estate News, Chicago. Vol. 29. Oct, 1924. Print. pp. 8-9. 133

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