1 c o n t e n ts
Workbook— 12/13 5
Undergraduate Program
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ARC404/LYN RiCE—Fall 2011
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CHANG —Ruth, Senior Thesis Spring 2012
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Chen—Ling Jun, Senior Thesis Spring 2012
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Lam—Diana H., Senior Thesis Spring 2012
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McNamara—Tess, Senior Thesis Spring 2012
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Tiwari—Ariana, Senior Thesis Spring 2012
25 Masters Program
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Chum—Jia Xin, Spring 2012
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Mineikyte—Dominyka, Fall 2011
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Franz—Kai, Spring 2012
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Murphey—John, Fall 2011
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Ghilic Micu—Razvan, Spring 2012
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Storrie—Matthew, Fall 2011
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Heid —Adrian, Spring 2012
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Stulc—Alexan, Fall 2011
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Hirano —Toshiki, Spring 2012
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Suarez-Alperi—Lucas, Fall 2011
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Springstubb—Phoebe, Spring 2012
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Xynogala—Lydia, Fall 2011
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Stewart-Halevy—Sam, Spring 2012
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Final Comments Fall 2011
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Yeung —Man-Hei (Tulip), Spring 2012
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Final Comments SPRING 12
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Doctoral Program
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Kallipoliti—Lydia
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Research Seminars
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LÓpez-pÉrez—Daniel
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Avilés—Luis
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Olaiya—Yetunde
130
Britz—Marc
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Ramirez—Enrique
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Buckley—Craig
154
Steenson—Molly Wright
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Fabricius—Daniela
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Su—Michael Wen-Sen
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Fontenot—Anthony
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Sunwoo —Irene
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Grau—Urtzi
160
Tenhoor—Meredith
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Handwerker—Margo
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Verbakel—Els
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Hsieh—Lisa L.
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West—Diana Kurkovsky
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Imperiale—Alicia
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The undergraduate program in architecture offers an opportunity for in-depth study of the discipline of architecture within the context of a liberal arts education. The program of study emphasizes the complex relationship between architectural form, culture and society considered through an in-depth exploration of architectural design, history and theory of architecture, building technology, urbanism, and landscape architecture. Particular attention is paid to the social and political aspects of architecture’s urban setting, and its impact on the natural environment. Princeton’s undergraduate program is known for its rigorous interdisciplinary approach. The course of study includes a sequence of design studios and complementary courses in the history and theory of architecture, drawing and representation, computation, environmental and building technology. The broad academic program prepares students for graduate study in architecture and related disciplines such as landscape architecture, urban planning, civil engineering, art history, and the visual arts. In addition, the B.S.E. program in architecture and engineering is offered through the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The School also directs the university-wide Program in Urban Studies which offers additional opportunities for interdisciplinary study. Each student completes a senior thesis, a rite of passage for all Princeton students. The thesis gives seniors the opportunity to pursue original research and scholarship on topics of their own choice under the guidance of faculty advisers. The senior thesis is a detailed project, presenting a well-argued piece of research on a precise architectural theme, and may include architectural drawings, models, video, photographs, and computer-generated images. The thesis is a yearlong project that begins in the fall semester. Faculty thesis advisers are assigned at the beginning of the fall term of the senior year, and students work closely with the adviser in the formulation of the topic, research methods, organization of the thesis material, and presentation of the work.
underg r a d uat e
Undergraduate Program in Architecture
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Liz Diller, Thesis Director David Allin (Fall 2011) and Ryan Neiheiser (Spring 2012) , Thesis Coordinators Each semester, the thesis students are challenged to make an architectural response to a general thematic question. The theme is explored in workshops, stated as a written proposition and elaborated as a design proposal during the students’ final semester. Thesis topics are one word themes, agreed upon by the faculty, that serve as a hinge point between architecture and questions of politics, culture, technology or society. The thematic organization of the final semester’s independent design research creates a shared point of departure for students, faculty and visiting critics.
Useless
‘Smart/Dumb’
Fall 2011—Invited Critics, Final Jury
Spring 2012—Invited Critics, Final Jury
Sylvia Lavin David Ruy Keller Easterling Mark Wasiuta John Harwood
Brian Boigon Adam Budak Nicholas de Monchaux Anton Garcia-Abril Jeffrey Inaba Natalie Jeremijenko
“But if these projecting masses be carved beneath into rounded courses, which are useless, and if the headings of the intervals be arched and trefoiled, which is useless, that is Architecture.” —John Ruskin “I would therefore suggest that there has never been any reason to doubt the necessity of architecture, for the necessity of architecture is its non-necessity. It is useless, but radically so.” —Bernard Tschumi “The ideal building has three elements; it is sturdy, useful, and beautiful.” —Vitruvius
Mitchell Joachim Laura Kurgan Sylvia Lavin Reinhold Martin Kevin Slavin Alejandro Zaera-Polo
This semester the thesis group was asked to think hard about architecture’s relationship to technology. For while the theme is so vast and technologies are already so much a part of the lives of architects – from design, communication and analytical tools, to materials research, fabrication processes, and systems engineering and monitoring – the topic remains under-theorized. The conversation barely goes beyond parametrics. The theme smart/dumb, at first glance, suggests an axis in which “smart” (sensing and responsive systems) and “dumb” (inert buildings) are posed at opposite ends of an intelligence spectrum. But these terms are easy to invert. Electronic systems are not nearly as sophisticated as the intricate cultural, economic and political concerns that constitute the “technology” of architecture. Rather than pitting “smart” and “dumb” against one another, the provocation is intended to test the generative potential of technologies and/with/as architecture. Leaving behind technophylic and technophobic rhetoric of the past, this prompt assumes that smart and dumb coexist, and that technologies can be simultaneously cast as both liberating and controlling, but in what proportion, and on what terms?
M . A rch FA L L 11— S P r i n g 12
M.Arch Thesis Projects
27 M . A rch Fall 11— S P r i n g 12
fall—2011
spring—2012
Kovacs, Andrew All that work for pleasure
Sanders, Samantha Cyclical Obsolescence
Suarez-Alperi, Lucas | p. 52 TBD: Time Based Density
Chang, Haemi Smart Pre-cycle Dumb Derelict
Mineikyte, Dominyka | p. 28 CIT—Collective Information Topography
Storrie, Matthew | p. 40 From the Waist Up: Studies in Completion
Xynogala, Lydia | p. 58 Dark Ecology
Chum, Jia Xin | p. 66 Suits!
Heid, Adrian | p. 84 The Future of the Post Office: LIVSTOR
Hirano, Toshiki | p. 90 Times Square Re-imagined
Springstubb, Phoebe | p. 96 Dumb Luck
Stewart-Halevy, Sam | p. 102 Loose Ends
FINAL COMMENTS FALL 11 p. 64
Murphey, John | p. 34 Capsized Domesticity
Stulc, Alexan | p. 46 The Data Uncanny
Clarke, Matthew Overexposed: The American Domestic
Franz, Kai | p. 72 Low-Res Architecture: A New Methodology for A New Resolution in Architecture—Low Res Process—HD Results
Ghilic Micu, Razvan | p. 78 SMART | DUMB Field Conditions 2030 | Tall Urban Density
Huelsmeier, Viviane Amplified Architecture
Li, Ang Once More, With Feeling: Smart Copy, Dumb Copy
Tierney, Patrick Scaleless Design
Yeung, Man-Hei (Tulip) | p. 108 Smart Wrinkles
FINAL COMMENTS SPRING 12 p. 114
Shell, Scott Smart/Dumb: Intimate Haptic Interfaces for Architecture
35 M . A rch FA L L 11
Murphey—John
Murphey—John
Capsized Domesticity The project proposed to extract techniques and formal strategies from the field of Naval Architecture in order to devise new modes of domestic space.
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M . A rch FA L L 11
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FINAL COMMENTS FALL 11 USELESS
Sylvia Lavin: The challenge to be useless, putting uselessness on the table, led some students to make stronger claims than I would associate with Princeton for the utility of architecture.
John Harwood: All of the students produced work that had to be argued about. All of them got us talking to each other, struggling to find a vocabulary, and struggling with a kind of lack of precision in our vocabulary.
Thesis is a negotiation between issues that exist in the world and issues that exist in the discipline. Elizabeth diller
Keller Easterling: Uselessness has these very interesting lateral effects— lateral political effects, and aesthetic effects—that are much more powerful often than the direct effects, and that’s part of our art, part of our aesthetic...
Its just so hard to be useless... it’s just nearly impossible. Trying to be useful is almost more useless. Keller Easterling
Sylvia Lavin: At the end of one of these days, part of what always stays with me is the extreme variation from one project to another, and that in fact the single word reveals a kind of fracturing of the discipline rather than its collusion and location in a shared vocabulary. So its almost the legislation of a shared vocabulary that reveals its lack, and produces opportunities.
Elizabeth Diller: Thesis is an extremely private thing. The students get to do this project without a big framework, but that freedom also means they have to work hard to fortify their position. It’s a really good test of independent thought.
THESIS—Comments
Mark Wasiuta: The theme ‘useless’ has a sort of strange utility. Each time I come back you seem to be searching for a term that is somehow even more challenging, and yet you don’t seem to have reached the limit yet. ‘Useless’ seems to be at the limit of utility for the thesis, and yet the students have returned with ever more strong, ever more exploratory projects, both in terms of the school and the discipline.
71 M. Arch S P r i n g 12
Chum—Jia Xin
81 M. Arch S P r i n g 12
Micu—Razvan Ghilic
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Heid—Adrian
103 M. Arch S P r i n g 12
Stewart-Halevy—Sam Smart/Dumb would seem to imply deceptive intelligence— what formerly appears as Dumb is only later revealed as Smart. This is only “playing dumb” or Crazy Like a Fox. 2 9
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Smart/Dumb is not the same as “Dumb (secretly) Smart.” Smart/Dumb collapses the terms, inviting an ambiguous reading—the Smart/Dumb maker always tows the line. In this respect, Smart/Dumb is a sensibility. It is not a formal property that can be pointed to across time periods.
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These kinds of myths are familiar within architecture as well. Here Smart/Dumb seems to be something that is constructed after the fact—charismatic narratives of crumpled aluminum and piled up stones recounted in lecture halls and client meetings.
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The Smart/Dumb sensibility often plays a role in creativity myths: Columbus cracks an egg to make it stand, Alexander slices through the Gordian knot with his sword, and Ariadne unravels the labyrinth at Knossos with her thread. In these examples, the creative protagonists resolve seeming intractable problems with simple gestures—their dumbness allows them to step outside the known boundaries of the problem, producing solutions that seem like mistakes at first.
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But what if we were to take these stories seriously—how would one adopt a Smart/Dumb sensibility as a working method— where would you start? If you’re going to start from scratch, you mine as well start with spaghetti- the most uninhibited of foods. Possessing neither firmness nor utility, Spaghetti throws a wrench in the system. Here the spaghetti is transplanted from the plate to the bed—ready to be fabricated by an automated fork. The familiar act of twirling pasta is made strange by the outsized production of the mill. What will result from this scrambling of media and tools?
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An enigmatic mess—the contours of a network, apparently disorganized but smarter than it seems. Recall that spaghetti begins in a different state, straight rods packed within a box. We could identify an order of noodles, each with their own proportions, each form engineered for a particular sauce. These strands bear no marks on their surfaces—though we could distinguish a relational scale between them, spaghetti in itself suggests radical shifts in size. One imagines entire worlds within the heap of pastavast currents of wind, knotted infrastructure, tangled wires, and the labyrinthine intersections of molecular structures.
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It is here that architecture usually stops—giving in to quick associations and freezing scale. Instead, I tried to put the pasta back in the box- to draw it, to scan it, to test its limits, and to arrive at some understanding of its behavior always believing, in a dumb, or perhaps naïve way, that somewhere in that pile of starch lay an architectural discovery.
Stewart-Halevy—Sam
Loose Ends
117 Ph.d. P ROGR A M
The Ph.D. Program The interdisciplinary nature of the program stresses the relationship of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and building technologies to their cultural, social and political milieux. Supported by strong affiliations with other departments in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, the program has developed a comprehensive approach to the study of the field. Students interact with their peers to sustain individual projects in a context of collective research. The fields of study are normally, but not exclusively, selected within the history and theory of one of four primary areas: architecture, urbanism, landscape, and engineering/building technology. During the first year of residence, a two-semester pro-seminar introduces students to historical research and methodological approaches, and guides the development of individual research proposals. A guest seminar series, supported by the School of Architecture and administered by the students in residence, forms a venue for ongoing discussions. PROGRAM COMMITTEE—
Supporting Faculty—
Recent Visiting Faculty—
Beatriz Colomina, History and Theory Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, Ph.D. Program
Eduardo Cadava, Department of English, Media Technologies, Literary Theory, 19thCentury American Literature, Comparative Literature, Theories of Translation
Jean-Louis Cohen Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012 Professor, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Lucia Allais, History and Theory M. Christine Boyer, Urbanism Axel Kilian, Computational Design Spyridon Papapetros, History and Theory Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Dean of the School of Architecture
Esther da Costa Meyer, Department of Art and Archaeology, 19th—and 20th-Century Architectural History Hal Foster, Department of Art and Archaeology, 19th—and 20th-Century Art History, Cultural Theory Michael W. Jennings, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, Late 18th-Century and early 20th-Century European Culture Thomas Y. Levin, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, Aesthetics, 20th-Century European History and Art History, Cultural Theory John A. Pinto, Department of Art and Archaeology, Renaissance and Baroque, Landscape Studies Anson Rabinbach, Department of History, 20th-Century European History, Intellectual History, History of Technology
Sylvia Lavin Fall 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2011 Chair of the Ph.D. in Architecture Program and Professor of Archi tectural History and Theory, UCLA John Rajchman Fall 2006 Adjunct Professor, Director of Modern Art M.A. Program, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University Elizabeth Grosz Spring 2006 Professor, Women’s Studies Program, Duke University Mirko Zardini Fall 2007 Director, Canadian Centre for Architecture
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S. Can Bilsel (University of San Diego) Architecture in the Museum: Displacement, Reconstruction and Reproduction of the Monuments of Antiquity in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum (2003) AnnMarie Brennan (University of Melbourne) Olivetti: A Working Model of Utopia (2011) Sarah Deyong (Texas A&M University) Archigram and the City of Tomorrow (2008)
Joaquim Moreno (Columbia University) From a Little Magazine to the City: Arquitecturas Bis (1974–85) (2010) Ernestina Osorio (University of California, Los Angeles) Intersections of Architecture, Photography, and Personhood: Case Studies in Mexican Modernity (2006) Emmanuel Petit (Yale University) Irony In Metaphysics’s Gravity. Iconoclasms and Imagination in the Architecture of the Seventies (2006)
Inês Fernandes (Lisbon) Building Brasilia: Modern Architecture and National Identity in Brazil (1930–1960) (2003)
Stephen Phillips (California Polytechnic State University) Elastic Architecture: Frederick Kiesler’s Mobile Space Enclosures (2008)
Gina Greene (University of Pennsylvania) Children in Glass Houses: Toward a Hygienic, Eugenic Architecture for Children During the Third Republic in France (1870–1940) (2012)
Lutz Robbers (IKKM Weimar) Modern Architecture in the Age of Cinema: Mies van der Rohe and the Moving Image (2011)
Romy Hecht (Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile) The Attack on Greenery: Critical Perceptions of the Man-Made Landscape, 1955–1969 (2009) Branden Hookway (Cornell University) Computational Environments of the 20th Century (2011) Karin Jaschke (University of Brighton) Mythical Journeys: Ethnography, Archaeology, and the Attraction of Tribal Cultures in the Work of Aldo van Eyck and Herman Haan (2012) Roy Kozlovsky (Northeastern University) Representation of Children in Postwar Architecture (2008) Joy Knoblauch (University of Michigan) Going Soft: Borrowing from the Human Sciences to Create a New Institutional Environment (1963–1974) (2012) Louis Martin (l’Université du Québec à Montréal) The Search for Theory in Architecture: Anglo-American Debates (1957–1976) (2002) Joanna Merwood (Parsons School of Design) The Mechanization of Cladding: The Chicago Skyscraper and the Constructions of Architectural Modernity (2003)
Ingeborg Rocker (Harvard University) Evolving Structures: The Architecture of the Digital Medium (2010) Rafael Segal (Harvard University) A unitary approach to architecture—Alfred Neumann and the ‘Humanization of Space’ (2011) David Smiley (Barnard College) Pedestrian modern: modern architecture and the American Metropolis, 1935–1955 (2007) David Snyder (Shenkar College of Engineering and Design) The Jewish question and the modern metropolis : urban renewal in Prague and Warsaw, 1885–1950 (2007) Sara Stevens (Rice University) Developing Expertise: The Architecture of Real Estate, 1908–1965 (2012) Shundana Yusaf (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) Wireless Sites: Architecture in the Space of British Radio (1927–1945) (2011) Tamar Zinguer (The Cooper Union School of Architecture) Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys, 1836–1952 (2006)
Research now in progress includes: research seminars—
122 Playboy & Architecture: 1953–1979 —Fall 2008 124 Modernist dilemmas: Chandigarh and Brasilia at 50 —
Spring 2010 126 RADICAL PEDAGOGY©— Fall 2010 dissertation ABSTRACTS—
146 Kallipoliti—Lydia Mission Galactic Household: The Resurgence of Cosmological Imagination in the Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s 148 LÓpez-pÉrez—Daniel Skyscraperology: The “Double-Exposure” of Tall Buildings in History and Contemporary Building Practice (1975–1984) 150 Olaiya—Yetunde Expert, Artifact, Fact: The Technopolitics of Architectural Production in French Black Africa, 1945–75
128 Avilés—Luis Postwar Rhetoric.Technology, History, Ornament (1947–1966)
152 Ramirez—Enrique Airs of Modernity 1881–1914
130 Britz—Marc Durand in Deutschland: Formal Economy, Financial Argumentation, and the Scarcity of Means in German Architecture from 1799 to 1848
154 Steenson—Molly Wright Artificial Intelligence, Architectural Intelligence: The Computer and Computation in Architecture, 1960–80
132 Buckley—Craig Images Beyond Images: Architectural Montage in the 1950s and 1960s
156 Su—Michael Wen-Sen The Architecture of Synergy: R. Buckminster Fuller’s Theorization of a ‘Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science,’ (1915 to 1938)
134 Fabricius—Daniela Calculation and Risk: The Rational Turn in West German Architecture 1965–1985 136 Fontenot—Anthony Non-Design and the Non-Planned City 138 Grau—Urtzi Replica! 140 Handwerker—Margo Public Displays of Effection: Ecological Art and Utility, 1969–1984 142 Hsieh—Lisa L. The Readable, Playable, and Edible Architecture of ArchiteXt, 1970–1995 144 Imperiale—Alicia Crescita e Forma: The Tissue of Structure
158 Sunwoo —Irene Alvin Boyarsky’s Well-Laid Table: Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy 160 TenHoor—Meredith Food, Media and Spatial Politics from Les Halles to Rungis 162 Verbakel—Els Cities Across Nations. Postwar Competitions for the Transnational Urban Project in Europe 164 West—Diana Kurkovsky Planning Utopia, Designing Socialism: Science, Theory and Systemic Thought in Soviet Planning and Architecture
Ph.d. P ROGR A M
Recently Completed DisSertations include—
131 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
britz—Marc
Britz—Marc
Durand in Deutschland: Formal Economy, Financial Argumentation, and the Scarcity of Means in German Architecture from 1799 to 1848 As architectural educator, prominent French theorist JeanNicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) had a considerable influence on the German architectural production throughout the first half of the 19th century. Attracted by the French architect’s modern teaching method, a generation of young German architects became guest students in his course on architecture at the École Polytechnique in Paris and interns in Durand’s private atelier. In contrast to the rather unstructured education in their homelands, Durand provided the Germans with a codified system of architectural composition and a radically concise conception of the architectural object. For Durand, architecture was referential only to the history of its own solutions and thus divisible into genres of autonomous artifacts in the service of common public welfare. Durand propagated the idea that the prime objective of every architectural design lay in the achievement of the most fitting and the most economic disposition of a conventionally defined architectural repertoire within the ideal constraints of a building’s given genre. German students like Gottlob Georg Barth (1777–1848), Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray (1775–1845), Johann Friedrich Christian Hess (1785–1845), Leo von Klenze (1784–1845), Peter Cremer (1785–1863), and Adolph Anton von Vagedes (1777–1842) continued to practice along the lines of Durand’s teachings throughout their subsequent careers in the many capitals of the various German states. As court architects or state-employed architectural inspectors, they were forced to adjust and fine-tune Durand’s abstract universal theory of architectural disposition to the quite often hostile contingencies of their commissions. Guided by the will to stick to Durand’s generally classicizing architectural idiom and faced with the primary task of erecting public and private buildings under the pressure of material and financial scarcity, these site-specific adjustments took on many forms. Given these circumstances, Durand had involuntarily set the agenda for the Germans to follow with an ingenious conflation of architectural form, budget, and beauty: “All of the architect’s talent comes down to the solution of two problems: (1) in the case of private buildings, how to make the building as fit for its purpose as possible for a given sum; (2) in the case of public buildings, where fitness must be assumed, how to build at the least possible expense. It will thus be seen that in architecture there is no incompatibility, and no mere compatibility, between beauty and economy: for economy is one of the principle causes of beauty.”1 Durand’s discovery that architectural form could be supported by a financial
argument resonated in the many ways in which the German architects tried to match their own sense of beauty to their patrons’ budgets. From the formulation and implementation of administrative guidelines for urban and rural planning to the reorganization of architectural education, including the erection of institutional buildings, and the renewal of architectural theory, Durand’s followers were forced to set his lucid theory of architectural fitness and economy to work in the muddled complexity of a nation struggling to emerge from provinciality. This dissertation will examine Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s architectural theory in correspondence to the architectural production of his former German students by analyzing the multiple compositional tactics and building techniques in which the German architects followed Durand’s economical dictum throughout their careers. The dissertation’s main focus will be on the notion of financial argumentation as a potentially subversive strategy to realize architectural objects according to specific formal preferences. Apart from highlighting Durand’s influence on Germany’s early modern architecture, the dissertation will thus describe the more practical problems related to the implementation of architectural projects against the financial and material scarcity in early 19th century Germany. Following the trajectory of the German disciples’ professional development and drawing from the different texts, buildings, projects, and biographies involved, the ultimate objective of the dissertation is to examine the theoretical conflation of architectural form and financial argumentation in Durand’s theory within the material constraints of a number of concrete examples ranging from Coudray’s failed theatre project in Weimar to Klenze’s successful museum in Munich.
1 Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand; Précis of the Lectures on Architecture; The Getty Research Institute Publications Program, Texts and Documents; Los Angeles; 2000; p. 86.
Above: Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray, Design Study, Paris, 1801; left: Leo Klenze, Design Study, Paris, ca. 1804
133
The jarring collisions, scalar mutations, and disorienting, hybrid spaces appearing in the architectural culture of the 1960s and early 1970s testify to an extraordinary deployment of montage techniques. Typically montage in architecture has been regarded as a question of graphics, or as a means for illustrating the potential relationship between an existing environment and a projected building. This dissertation argues that montage played a more performative than illustrative role: the use of montage to construct an image out of disparate and composite elements enacted graphically the manner in which architects appropriated and assembled new techniques and materials from outside the domain of architecture into their built projects. Such montage images were a special tool, circulating in small magazines and their professional counterparts, in alternative exhibitions and in official competitions. Spurred by the availability of emerging offsetlithographic technology—a moment when the page was just beginning to face the challenge of the screen but had not yet been absorbed by it—the visual gravity and tactility of each montaged component jumped into relief, registering the thickness of the clipping, the variable effects of scaling, the contrasting densities of newsprint and photographic gloss, the mobility of transfer lettering, and the effects and patterns of lithographic color. If much contemporary media theory has assumed montage to be a basic principle of digital environments, the dissertation argues for a reconsideration of the importance of tactility and materiality in the creation of montage images during these years. The construction of such montage images differs radically from those of today’s media, where the specificities of weight, texture, transparency, color, or adhesiveness, are mapped onto a uniform optical matrix whose tactile manipulation has been absorbed by a general interface. The dissertation further proposes a relationship between the uses of montage in the 1960s and discourses regarding the appropriation of new technologies for architecture during these years. In 1962 architectural historian Reyner Banham described a particular attitude, an interest in the “ingenious mating of off-the-peg components, specials, and off-cuts from other technologies,” to describe an architectural practice of appropriation. Montage tallied well with such an ethos; implying a confident enactment, able to distinguish and manipulate these appropriated technologies at will. From automobile gaskets to lightweight PVC, from retractable masts to synthetic paneling, materials not yet available to architects were captured in imaginary and practical ways, in the hopes of transforming the relation between the building industry, architectural culture, and
a greater public. Devices of montage not only allowed different visions of technological appropriation to be enacted, they aggressively reintroduced and recodified human presence. This conjoining registered volatility and excess; by the late sixties, however, the fantasy of manipulating technology grew increasingly uncertain and self-critical, both of its own projected power, and of the nature of the power passing through it. Like the material it examines, the dissertation links material from distinct places and times in the form of several case studies. In each, changing ideas about the composite image engage the actual production of images in a manner closely related to redefinitions of architecture during the post-war period in Western Europe. The first case examines the importance of debates in London to post-war architectural culture, examining the particular manner in which the montage practices developed by pre-war avant-gardes, such as Dada and Surrealism, were interpolated there. Through the writings of Reyner Banham, the collaborations of Alison and Peter Smithson with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, and publications such as ARK and Uppercase, such avant-garde practices were redefined in a “permissive” and paradoxical manner through a spatialized conception of collage. If collage was seen as a source of anti-aesthetic energy to be retrieved from movements of the early twentieth century, it also provided an image of an emerging, changeable, and informal order, whose principles could be transferred to a range of scales, connecting architecture to urban design and to advertising. The next chapter, shifting to the European continent, examines the work of Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, and Gunther Feuerstein in Vienna. Shifting away from an overt concern with making seams evident, Hollein and Pichler explored the effect of their erasure in a series of influential photomontages in the early 1960s. In the pages of the magazine Bau their collaboration evolved into a more expanded fusion of architectural history with media and information theory, which combined to produce Hollein’s notorious 1968 montage manifesto “Alles ist Architektur.” Chapter three, examines the work of the Paris-based group Utopie, in which the semiotic decomposition of contemporary rhetoric of advertisements, the critique of urban planning, and the fascination with demountable architecture come together in a theory of démontage. Facing a crisis in architectural education and practice in the context of May 1968, Utopie’s concept of démontage provided a vision of architecture as a structure susceptible to transformation through ideological dismantling while simultaneously feeding a fascination with the radical potentials latent in the appropriation of
buckley—Craig
Images Beyond Images: Architectural Montage in the 1950s and 1960s
Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
buckley—Craig
demountable technologies. The final chapter examines a subsequent turn towards a more explicitly cinematic engagement with montage, combining the development of narrative scenarios and storyboards with the production of films and video-environments by Florentine architectural groups Superstudio and 9999. Building upon research that has drawn critical attention to the interplay between architecture and forms of mass media in the twentieth century, recovering this overlooked history of architectural montage promises a greater comprehension of the techniques and the concepts through which the seams of representation could be rendered constructive or be erased during specific moments in time. The construction of montage rendered architectural relationships graphically evident, just as relationships within the graphic fragment were made architectural. Understanding the various contexts in which such concepts and practices were deployed can provide a measure of critical distance in our own time, when the combinations of media appear ever more seamless.
(top) Alison Smithson, Collage Scrapbook cover made from pieces of Eduardo Paolozzi screenprint wallpaper, c. 1952, Alison and Peter Smithson Archive, Harvard; office of Ronald Jenkins, Ove Arup and Partners, London. Renovation by Alison and Peter Smithson and Eduardo Paolozzi, 1952. (above left) Double-page spread from Architektur, 1963. Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler. (left) Double-page spread from Utopie: Sociologie de l’urbain 1, 1967. Hubert Tonka and René Lourau. (above) Montage from Fundamental Acts: Education, Superstudio, 1972–3.
135 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Fabricius—Daniela
FABRICIUS—Daniela
Calculation and Risk: The Rational Turn in West German Architecture 1965–1985 In this study, calculation, and the related concepts of risk and rationalization, will provide the central mode of understanding a series of practices in West German architecture between the 1960s and the 1980s. As it will be defined here, calculation is distinct from the more rarified topic of mathematics in architecture, with the potential to address not only questions of aesthetics, form, and design but also those of economy. Mathematics has traditionally held a privileged, even mystical status in architecture; calculation, by contrast, is usually associated with the drudgeries of labor. Yet calculation has an expressive quality and proper aesthetic beyond that of mere numbercrunching. Nor is it free of mystification, as the seemingly objective nature of calculation, its claims of exhaustive evidence, proof, and mastery (hence the shared etymology of accounting and accountability), make it particularly vulnerable to misplaced faith. Calculation is a form of prediction used to manage uncertainty and risk. In the 1980s, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens argued that modern industrial society was no longer instrumentally rational as it produced a series of new risks. These risks are not eliminated, but managed and integrated, forming a “risk society.” Several aspects in West Germany in the 1970s correspond to this theory, and indeed set the historical stage for Beck’s formulation. As West German architects turned increasingly away from functionalism and its perceived risks one paradoxical response was the return of a “radical rationalism.” Even with the influence of the Frankfurt School`s critique of instrumental reason, rationalism not only lingered, but intensified. Politically progressive architects like those at Ulm and the TU Berlin looked to systems theory and sociology for alternatives in architecture and planning; however, these were also used to rationalize government bureaucracies, industry, and national security. This universal use of calculation is one of the reasons why it is difficult to identify an architectural project in West Germany that used calculation in a manner consistent with an avant-garde.
Case studies will focus on practices in West Germany that prioritize and thematize calculation visibly. Architecturally, this can be seen in an interest in abstract languages, numbers and formulas, quantifiable information, statistics, parametrics, and typology. As architectural information was quantified, calculation took place both at the scale of the building and of the city. Early examples will center around the Ulm School for Design, which was instrumental in introducing calculation into German architectural practices in the 1960s and 70s. Other case studies include the optimization of form in the experimental engineering of Frei Otto, and the of geometric and typological systems in the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers. The development of Frankfurt am Main into a city of skyscrapers in the 1970s will illustrate the use of calculation and risk at the level of the postmodern city that became a financial capital. In the two decades that will be studied here calculation increasingly loses its basis in the real and approaches simulation in the form of predicted and projected futures. No longer applied teleologically, numbers are abstracted from their material referent. The examples here share a tendency towards the numerical on the one hand but also the production of a symbolic economy. With the absence of function, or more specifically Zweck, an architecture of calculation accumulates other meanings. Questions emerge around form, language, symbol, and utopia. But even these architectural examples cannot escape the “real” effects of calculation that occur on a social and economic level.
Frei Otto/IL, “Multimedia” test of simultaneous measurements of the Olympics stadium model using cameras and gauges, c. 1968.
137 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Fontenot—Anthony The dissertation seeks to understand the larger cultural context which gave rise to what is referred to as non-design, a term designated (by the author) to denote a particular aesthetic that is characterized by a suspicion of, and/or rejection of, “conscious” design, while embracing various phenomenon that emerge without “intention” or “deliberate human design.” The study traces the phenomenon of non-design in British and American design culture of the postwar period. The author argues that following the Austrian-British economist Friedrich von Hayek’s theories of “spontaneous order” of the 1940s, non-design first emerged in design discourse and practice in the early 1950s in England, particularly in the work of certain members of the Independent Group, and by the mid-1960s it gained currency in the US in the architectural and urban theories of Charles Moore, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, as well as in Reyner Banham’s writing on American urbanism. Urban debates on the American city in the postwar period ranged from extreme positions of calling for order/control through urban design, on the one hand, to allowing the city to develop on its own via disorder/sprawl, on the other. This research traces the rise of a polemic which began in the 1960s and reached full maturity in the early 1970s: design versus non-design.1 Unlike modern urban planners who believed that design should be employed as a means of controlling the “exploding metropolis,” Banham, Moore, Venturi and Scott Brown, argued for non-design strategies in support of the “spontaneous” conditions of the contemporary city. This new generation of designers and critics argued for a conception of design that embraced the full context of the built environment, including unplanned conditions that were often disregarded by modern architects. The affirmation of these “common” environments, along with the rise of a “non-judgmental” attitude towards unplanned cities, the sprawl of suburbs, commercial strips and roadside environments, characterized a new sensibility in design culture. This study investigates the various ways in which non-design manifested itself in British and American architectural discourse as a critical tool used to critique modern design and planning strategies for ordering the city. In seminal texts of the period by Moore (“You have to pay for the Public Life,” 1965, and “Plug It in Ramses, And See If It Lights Up, Because. We Aren’t Going to Keep It Unless It Works,” 1967), Banham (“Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom,” 1969, and Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971) and Venturi and Scott Brown (Learning from Las Vegas, 1972), conspicuously missing is support for any form of contemporary design by a “trained” designer. In fact, both “design” and the “designer” are placed in a highly
ambivalent and destabilized position. What are supported by the protagonists are the qualities of non-design, which are constituted by the unplanned metropolis, common buildings and roadside environments, i.e. conditions that are the result of laissez-faire economic and urban developments. For example, Moore is enamored by environments such as the Madonna Inn designed by non-architects, Banham celebrates the Watt’s Towers, dingbats and non-plan commercial developments, and Venturi and Scott Brown, while declaring their support for the Las Vegas strip and suburbia, claim that “learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.” References are seldom, if ever, in support of any design by an architect or planner, whether it is the design of an object, building or a city. Yet, while non-design is a fundamental aspect of their critique, it is rarely made explicit. The “Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom” of 1969, authored by Banham, Cedric Price, Paul Barker (editor of New Society), and Peter Hall (city planner), is one example of a “project” that is less a design proposal than a proposition to discredit and withdraw design as an agent in the shaping of the built environment. But perhaps more importantly it is a manifesto that argues that the absence of design, i.e. the “spontaneous” development of the unplanned city, is a far more desirable condition than anything designed by a “trained” designer. What might one learn from reflecting on the fact that Banham, one of the most prolific design critics, along with Moore, a highly influential dean at Yale University School of Architecture, and Venturi and Scott Brown, designers who have been described as some of the most important architects and critics of the 1960s, would all, in one way or the other, resist design and affirm instead strategies of non-design? 2 Surely this attempt to negate design must have significance for the history and theory of architecture. Non-design is as much a discursive strategy as it is a call for a new relationship with the urban environment; it is a mode of thinking intended to threaten the established discourse of design and destabilize the desire for “control.” This new “vision” of design relied upon an indispensable relationship with the postwar American laissez–faire city. Unlike other “movements” of the 20th century based on promoting new forms of design as a means of molding and improving new lifestyles, which “tended to remove its references from the familiar surroundings of everyday life,”3 non-design is less a formal design strategy than an operation in undoing a process of exclusion thought to be ingrained in the practice of design. For one trained in modern design, if to let go of design itself would be the
unthinkable, the provocateurs of the late 1960s proposed just that, an “inclusive” practice based on the irreconcilable qualities of the city. If the concept of non-design ignited the imaginations of young architects and critics as a powerful force thought to elude manipulative powers of top-down design, it simultaneously prevented any possibility of critiquing the “spontaneous” conditions of the metropolis. If all aspects of the contemporary city were to be appreciated for their own specific qualities, on their own terms, as Banham demonstrated in Los Angeles, then nothing, save the desire to mold and shape the world through design, could be criticized. 1 Diana Agrest uses the term non-design in a paper titled “Design versus NonDesign” presented at the First International Congress of Semiotic Studies, Milan, July 1974; published in Oppositions 6, Fall 1976. I am less interested in a semiotic reading of the urban environment than in the use of the terms to distinguish between the “designed” and “non-designed” aspects of the built environment. Reflecting on Agrest’s use of the term non-design, Kenneth Frampton wrote: “For the pure manifestation of non or rather unconscious design (the author’s use of the term is consciously Freudian) must surely imply the suspension of all conscious design, while conscious design in its turn must imply ideological repression.”
2 A distinction is made between the design work of the various protagonists and their writings on contemporary urbanism. I maintain that in their writings on the contemporary city, the aspects of the built environment that are accepted is that which seems to be beyond the “control” of architects, planners and trained designers. While the Case Study houses, for example, are acknowledged by Banham in Los Angeles, they are mostly the products of an earlier era. 3 Robert A. M. Stern, New Directions in American Architecture, New York: G. Braziller, 1969, p. 7.
Fontenot—Anthony
Non-Design and the Non-Planned City
139 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Grau—Urtzi
grau—Urtzi
Replica! This dissertation explores the renewal of the city of Barcelona during the 1970s and 80s in order to identify strategies of reconstruction that operated within its urban discourses and practices. In opposition to the accounts of uniqueness and singularity associated with the Barcelona Model, the public spaces, historic fabric and iconic buildings of the city will be analyzed and defined as replicas, both literal reproductions of (pre)existing works of architecture and, in a sense denoted in the Spanish language, as responses to previous statements. Most importantly, this approach can further clarify the passage from neo-avantgarde reenactments to postmodern pastiche, revealing the shifting relations with the historical past that underline this transition. Its is to reveal the role replicas play in Barcelona Urban Renewal of the 1970s and 80s and as such contribute to our understanding of copying and historical reconstruction as it was practiced and experienced in modern architectural history of Spain and beyond.
Barcelona’s self-replication, encompassing both built icons and historical fabric, truly embodies the uniqueness of the model; but more importantly Barcelona’s replicas of 1970s and 80s also have the capacity of adumbrating a contemporaneous shift of attitude towards history. To clarify a gap in the transition from neo-avant-garde to postmodern historicism, the third chapter analyzes the three replicas of the German Pavilion built in 1929 by Mies van der Rohe for the International Exposition of Barcelona. In 1986, Rem Koolhaas, Josep Quetglas and Ignasi de Solà-Morales rebuilt the pavilion and its history in parallel sites: at the Triennale di Milano, at a lecture that became the book Fear of Glass, and at the original site in Barcelona. All three projects respond to history by replacing as well as creating and erasing historical references and, in their synchrony, unveiling the state of the question of architectural copies. With this they illustrate three main reevaluations of modern architecture in the peak of Barcelona’s urban renewal.
As a mode of introduction, the first chapter defines the scope of the dissertation by examining three branches of Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ intellectual production: a) his studies on the historiography of modern architecture; b) his interventions on and reconstructions of works of art and architecture; c) his writings on contemporary urban conditions. The intersection of these tragically incomplete projects, which have the city of Barcelona in its background, outlines temporal, spatial and conceptual spheres of the dissertation, establishing a framework to evaluate the use of replicas in the Barcelona Model.
The pavilion of the Spanish Republic for the International Exposition of Paris of 1937, initially designed by the Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert, became the topic of Spanish pavilion of Venice Biennale in 1976 that housed the exhibition ‘España. Vanguardia artistica y realidad Social 1936-1976’. In 1937 the building operated as a political display in the war against fascism and the fourth chapter will explore how in 1976 the same building came to terms with the cultural heritage of the dictatorial regime. This chapter also describes how a replica, build in 1992, coinciding with the Olympic Games, made such a program obsolete. Historical reconstructions fulfill the ideological function of rendering specific versions of the past and these two buildings, located at both ends of Barcelona’s urban transformation of 1970s and 80s, symptomatically unveil the evolution of the past that replicas meant to present.
Barcelona’s the urban strategy has been reiterated for the last century and a half. Yet, the so-called Barcelona Model is commonly branded as the particular iteration of this model after the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 which surpassed the urban realm, renovating the social, cultural and institutional status of the city. The second chapter of the dissertation chronicles the prehistory of this iteration as an implied rather than explicit doctrine to the Spanish Village, a historical theme village raised in the occasion of the 1929 International Exposition of Barcelona. The importance of this village lies in the fact that it worked as the testing ground for the strategies of replication at play in the renewal of the 1970s and 80s. Hypothesis of the experiment was: the urban environment can be used as mass communication device through the absorption of technological media. As Barcelona’s Old City’s future blueprint, the Spanish Village describes a conjectural city in which facts speak for themselves before any outside theoretical framework is imposed on them. It is these “facts” that shape the second chapter before the dissertation unfolds to more theoretical realms.
During the 1970s and 80s, the renovation of Barcelona’s Old City [Ciutat Vella] and its adaptation to a tourism economy solidified the Barcelona Model as an explicit doctrine, which further negotiated the transition from replication of individual buildings to its urban phase. From his office in the Barcelona City Council, the architect Oriol Bohigas guided the collective enterprise bridging architecture, academia, politics and the public realm. The fifth and last chapter examines how his urban polices preserved existing conditions and established the new Barcelona’s Old City’s identity, and used replicas to do so—i.e. It analyzes the series of punctual interventions in Barcelona’s public space commonly known as the little squares that regenerated its urban tissue in its own image.
Photo: UHF 2009
143 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
hsieh—Lisa L. This dissertation investigates the Japanese New Wave group ArchiteXt’s readable, playable, and edible architecture, which significantly redefines architecture as action rather than the backdrop for action, and reorients architecture toward everyday activities in the practices of reading, writing, illustrating, mapping, jesting, playing, cooking, eating, and so forth. Founded in 1970 around a magazine of the same name, ArchiteXt paradoxically formed an alliance without a common philosophy, encompassing diverse theories and activities—so much so that, beyond building, they charted encephalograms, designed toys, and cooked pastas. The pluralistic functioning of ArchiteXt aligns with New Wave’s tendency toward dispersion. Prior to New Wave, there existed a pyramidal hierarchy of orders—master and apprentice, senior and junior, etc.—which controlled the Japanese architectural world at large, with Metabolism at the top in the 1960s. This pyramid is simultaneously open and closed: open, because one could move up the rungs of the ladder with efforts or advancing age, and down if losing a superior’s favor; and closed, because the pyramid is all there is—should a person defy the system, he/she would find him/herself outside with no place to go. However, the structure started crumbling in the 1970s, and in place, a tremendous array of individual value systems (collectively known as New Wave) rose above Metabolism. My dissertation argues that New Wave indeed reflects the disjointed practice of everyday life; its logic can only be found in the local, in the details, rather than at the level of generality. Therefore, my investigation centers on three small-scale “intermedia” productions by ArchiteXt, specifically a magazine, a toy, and a cuisine. In accordance, my dissertation comprises three chapters: the readable, the playable, and the edible. Each chapter pairs architecture with certain pertinent activities: writing, reading, and illustrating (the readable), playing and jesting (the playable), and eating and cooking (the edible). The Readable: ArchiteXt, 1970–1972 This chapter investigates architecture as communication— reading, writing, illustrating, etc.—via ArchiteXt’s selfpublication, ArchiteXt. Consisting of loose leaves of parchment, the magazine opens from a 21cm square into an extended 21 x 105cm long accordion fold. Each issue includes five strips, one per architect/editor. Each has a specific theme, ranging from “self” and “the earth” to “my home.” Eventually, the magazine ran a total of five issues between the summer of 1970 and the winter of 1972 as ArchiteXt 0, 00, 1, 2, and Extra.
Embracing pluralism, ArchiteXt defies a single comprehensive reading. Each strip, square, or even image, is a locus; each bears a signifier without a fixed signification—reflecting Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, which reads Japan into a fictive system of “empty signs.” In a sense, the magazine comprises an empire of empty (architectural) signs in itself. Through a peculiar reading of ArchiteXt, my work aims to shed light on a distinctive architectural semiotics embedded in the Japanese postwar harenchi (literally: shameless) culture anchored in fantasies and sex thrills. The Playable: Toy Architecture, 1971–1984 This chapter explores architecture as playing and jesting. From their toys (Aida Block, Aida Box, etc.) to houses (Blue Box, Green Box, Toy Block House, House Like a Die, etc.), ArchiteXt’s designs are charged with a spirit of play. This tendency toward playfulness indeed stemmed from the displacement of functionalism in the 1960s, which threatened to render the modernist equation “form follows function” obsolete. In search of a new dictum, ArchiteXt proposed “form follows fiction”—that is, the fiction of play (based upon Johan Huizinga’s Homo Lumens, which characterizes play as fictive: a free activity situated in the unreality of play). Reflecting the aphorism, ArchiteXt’s building works manifest play, or fiction, in three forms: to mimic play (in form), to enact play (in action), and to transform play (in space). Drawing upon certain theories of play and humor, my research aims to make explicit a group of connected ideas, including play, laughter, folly, wit, and the comic, at play in ArchiteXt’s building designs. The Edible: Architecture and Macaroni, 1995 Centering around the exhibition “Architecture and Macaroni” in Tokyo, 1995, this chapter investigates architecture as cooking and eating. The Japanese exhibition correlates sociality with space by inviting the visitors to eat architecture together. From the space in which the movable feast transpired to the exhibits that consisted of twenty pasta dishes, “Architecture and Macaroni” participates fully in the logic of Michel de Certeau’s mobile spatial concept: “space is a practiced place.” In the world of food, architecture gets ever more fictive. Form melts, lumps, bulges, blisters, hardens, flakes, and so forth. Renouncing coherent geometries, the edible enters an indefinite, topological disreality. At last, shifting sites from the pedestals to the tables, Architecture and Macaroni culminates in pure sensual pleasure prioritizing gustatory delights over visual experiences.
hsieh—Lisa L.
The Readable, Playable, and Edible Architecture of ArchiteXt, 1970–1995
147 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Kallipoliti—Lydia This dissertation traces a renascent cosmological imagination in the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. It documents how the exploration of outer space fueled a radical ecological architectural debate that addressed the reinvention of the household and domestic economy, as both a scientific and an ontological project. I am arguing that in the anticipation of a cosmic view and the search for our coordinates in the universe, there was a disciplinary inflation of previous perceptions of habitation, amplifying the household to an interplanetary organism that can capture the immensity of the cosmos and the obscure density of living systems. Reflecting the spectacle of a now finite “spaceship-earth” in 1967, previous concepts of nature’s preservation as separated from the urban milieu, gave rise to a novel naturalism of “artificial ecology,” where the functions and operations of nature were copied as precise analogues in man-made systems, explicitly in spaceships and houses. At this time, the space program played a fundamental role in the reformation of the building industry, effectively adopting, rationalizing and simulating nature’s operations in the cautious cycling of provisions. The potential for convergence of all waste materials into useful ones became eminently important, as a means of survival within the enclosed space of the spacecraft. However, NASA’s experiments were not only emoting unearthly fictions; they were a catalyst for re-thinking transformed social and technical relationships as architectural problems, particularly in the domestic sphere. The space program, as a paradigm of reinventing habitation in extreme physiological conditions and instrumentalizing human agency in terms of input and output invoked an ecological sense of inhabiting the world, as seen in houses equipped with digesters, hydroponic systems, composting devices, solar components and wind generators. In essence, the projection of humanity in outer space was less about conquering of a new geographical and technological frontier and more about the projection of primordial habitation principles on earth, as well as the conception of a new type of a recirculatory house, a cybernetic laboratory, that can reproduce the ecosystem in its totality in smaller closed space-vehicles. Recycling habitation experiments in the backyards of amateur engineers coupled the naiveté of survivalist fortitude with NASA’s latest discoveries on the recycling systems of spaceships, nurturing a cultural fascination with systems that promised to grow tomatoes exclusively from household effluent. NASA’s experiments with self-sufficiency were appropriated by a countercultural generation of environmentally concerned architects in the
United States and England that popularized “autonomy” from the grid of supplies as a tool for social and political reform. The protagonists of this dissertation are architects, like Graham Caine, David Sellers and William Katavolos among others, who perceived themselves as “semiscientists.” Deeply immersed into biology, cybernetics and the life sciences, these architects experimented with the function of domestic space as a performative device, though not as a representational metaphor as Le Corbusier’s “machine for living,” but in a literal manner through growth of living substances and scrutinizing experimentation with human physiology. Edward Burton’s patents for Grumman’s Corporation’s “Integrated Household Unit”, Grahame Caine’s “Eco-House”, Cosmorama’s “Trick Recyclist”, all promised to reinvent habitation anew as a synecdoche of the earth, showcasing an unprecedented belief in the possibility of systematizing the oikos into an autonomous and regenerative circuit, capable of harnessing its waste and providing its own energy. Methodologically, I use as a primary resource the factsheets—in the form of instruction manuals—that certain architects left behind as a documentation of their “semiscientific” experiments. Throughout the pages of these manuals architecture was staged in a comprehensive set of numerical steps that would spring an end built product. Fact-sheets and manuals, as educational resources and a collective written landscape of gathered and organized information on building, have marked a significant shift from determining final blueprints to open procedural design expressions and construction methods. My main argument is that the emergent practice of ecological design, as inspired by the cosmological impulse of the day, was paired with a specific building language, structured as an open source computation code. Accordingly, the information policy of the manuals, manifest in the promotion of combinatorial skills, ‘dos and don’ts’ and an evolutionary built-up process that could derail from an original plan or intention, not only influenced profoundly design decisions, but also stirred design creativity. Writing open source design codes was by no means a neutral agent of recording a building process that was already predetermined and consequently executed; the manuals became themselves architecture, in fact the most radical architecture of the 1960s. Bringing this discussion to face contemporary debates, systematization, as an abstract model of design thinking, was being developed not only long before the actual physical artifact that we now call the computer, but also long before the authorship of these manuals, in an attempt to bring together the principles that govern living systems and
machines since the inception of cybernetics as a discipline. In light of this lineage of building experimentation, it is worthwhile to observe that two major peripheral areas of the architectural discipline—computation and sustainability— that are considered almost in all cases as disjunctive or irrelevant fields stem from equivalent epistemological aspirations and converged in a time where cosmological imagination was at play in the core of the discipline.
kallipoliti—Lydia
Mission Galactic Household: The Resurgence of Cosmological Imagination in the Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s
149 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
LÓPEZ-PÉREZ—Daniel
LÓpez-PÉrez—Daniel
Skyscraperology: The “Double-Exposure” of Tall Buildings in History and Contemporary Building Practice (1975–1984) In the 1970s, a number of European and American architectural journals were devoted entirely to the skyscraper. Across their pages, its image appeared in a state of “double-exposure,” where contemporary tall buildings were published alongside a variety of historical texts on the subject, with little apparent connection between the two... To reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable split between the building projects and the historiographic accounts presented in these publications, this dissertation explores “skyscraperology:” a composite discourse based on a term originally coined by Charles Jencks. Throughout four chapters, architectural journals and related exhibitions are examined to establish how a series of significant typological transformations to the skyscraper—spanning formal or tectonic structuralism, crystalline formations, historicism, and urban redevelopment strategies—did, in fact, develop analogous to the theoretical discourse. If journals were the symptom and platform for this parallax between architectural production and theory, exhibitions functioned as the site where both sides could intersect. The dissertation begins by exploring how the debates of the Chicago School on the origins of the skyscraper at the turnof-the-century, influenced the development of an organicist view of “structuralism” throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Promoted by the research of Myron Goldsmith, Mies’s apprentice, longtime collaborator, and colleague at the Illinois Institute of Technology, “structuralism” synthesized the Miesian separation between the interior structure and exterior curtain wall into a single differentiated system along the building’s perimeter. Bringing together architects and historians, the 1976 exhibition “100 Years of Architecture in Chicago” reanimated the longstanding questions of structure, order and expression that had dominated the debates surrounding the Chicago School for over a century. The second chapter examines how, in the second half of the decade, the building volume moved away from extruded and corrugated column forms and toward crystalline icebergs. All signs of load-bearing structure were replaced by an abstract and scaleless pattern of mullions designed to bring order to the surface of these crystals. A complete separation between the skyscraper’s interior and exterior was created by opting for the opacity of the mirror, over the transparency of glass. Led by Kevin Roche, a student of Mies at IIT and a longtime collaborator of Eero Saarinen, “crystallinism” was realized in a number of projects, including Saarinen’s Bell Laboratories project in Holmdel, New Jersey. The 1979 exhibition “Transformations in Modern Architecture,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, featured Roche’s United Nations Plaza Complex
in New York, underscoring the desperate need to come to terms with the formal autonomy and socio-political implications of these fractured crystals. The third chapter addresses how, near the end of the 1970s, the historicist discourse that stemmed from the postwar era gave form to built projects of an unprecedented scale. The cryptic, postmodern “historicism” of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building in New York was exemplar of both this typology and the debates that surrounded it: Was it the product of an antiquarian conception of the past based on preservation and an idealization of historical forms? Or did it offer a critical perspective of the past through its eclectic rearrangement of historical elements? The AT&T Building stood as both a “living” monument to and tombstone for the “historicism” in the Strada Novissima exhibition at the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980. The dissertation concludes by investigating an urgent need in the early 1980s, to come to terms with the skyscraper’s indomitable scale within the context of the city. Having become the corner stone of urban renewal projects across many American cities, the skyscraper’s scale and its lack of relationship to its urban context had reached a tipping point. In search for an alternative, John Portman’s designs featuring large atriums, based on his concept of “exploded space,” sought to transfuse urban life deep into the building’s interior in a seamless manner. As an architect and developer, Portman’s strategy of the city-as-a-skyscraper aimed to derive a formula based on a typological inversion where the building volume is turned into an endless interior atrium based on the principles of “capitalism,” dissolving its status to that of a node within a much larger network. His Marriott Marquis Project in Times Square stands in marked contrast to Rem Koolhaas’ inverse concept of the skyscraper-as-city, evinced in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s “Sphinx Hotel.” Whereas the “Sphinx Hotel” ascribed to a historiographic model based on extreme adjacency and difference, wherein multiple visions of urban life could coexist, Portman’s Marriott Marquis searched for a condition of seamless continuity as a way to find reconciliation between the skyscraper and the city.
(counterclockwise from top left) STRUCTURE : Myron Goldsmith, “Monadnock Building, Burnham and Root, Chicago; Promontory Apartment Building, Mies; 86-Story Building”; “Struttura, Scala e Architettura”, Casabella n.418, 1976. IMAGE : ‘Uses and Abuses of History’,
The Architectural Review, August, 1984. iNTERIOR : “Greenhouses and Other Public Spaces”, Transformations in Modern Architecture, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1979. ENVIRONMENT: Cover, “Grattacielo: Casa dello Spechio”, Casabella n.457/458, April–May, 1980.
151
The sort of entanglement outlined here between technical expertise and politics has been understood through the concept of techno-politics. Notably, techno-political readings have revealed how specific technological practices in colonial science, medicine, both shaped the exercise of political power and masked the other forms of agency present therein. Yet architecture, despite its earlier-noted centrality to modernization efforts, has only entered such readings so far in its simplest form as shelter from the elements. The goal of this dissertation is two-fold. On one hand, it introduces a broader analysis of architectural design to the discourse of techno-politics, which recognizes architecture’s inherent image-making role. Where architectural history itself struggles to articulate the complexity of postwar architectural production outside the West—either portraying it as a one-way traffic from imperial metropolis to colonial peripheries or privileging only the human actors—the dissertation, on the other hand, draws useful insights from techno-political research. As such, the techno-politics of postwar architectural production in French
Black Africa becomes not just a way to track the political implications of technical expertise generated in the colonial development apparatus at this time, but also, to uncover the broader spectrum of agencies involved in this process.
d’Études et Aménagements Urbaine) in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. Where each of the dissertation’s parts offers a different narrative of techno-politics, read in conjunction, they reveal a larger transition from the ambitious projects of the immediate postwar period to the more sustainable bilateral development that continued after the independence of France’s African territories. By weaving together these micro and meta-narratives, the dissertation in turn seeks to bring specificity to discussions on postwar architectural production outside the West whilst proposing more accurate strategies for global development initiatives.
Olaiya—Yetunde
Expert, Artifact, Fact: The Technopolitics of Architectural Production in French Black Africa, 1945–75 After World War II, territories in French Black Africa—once considered the outer limits of la plus grande France—found themselves in an unfamiliar position: both in recognition of their wartime utility in resistance efforts and by pure serendipity, they became the centerpiece in an ambitious scheme to modernize the French overseas territories. The legacy of this scheme are the many civic buildings, housing settlements, and urban plans initiated in this period to improve living standards for France’s African subjects; but these were only one part of the story. The rest is that such colonial intervention had been made even more conspicuous by the rudimentary development that preceded it in these particular territories. Furthermore, tackling the climatic and sanitary concerns blamed for this rudimentary development in the tropics now presented the ultimate showcase for French ingenuity after the losses of the war. More than any other time and place, the cultivation of technical expertise became the crucial first step in the postwar modernization of French Black Africa. Between 1945 and 1975, French authorities therefore launched research ensembles to systematically document local conditions, advisory committees to standardize building solutions, and technical consultancies to convey this wealth of knowledge to the many architects and planners working in the tropics for the first time. My dissertation examines how the technical expertise cultivated within this elaborate apparatus of colonial development facilitated postwar architectural production in French Black Africa and thereby, enacted the colonial administration’s broader political objectives.
Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Olaiya—Yetunde
d’Urbanisme et d’Habitat) and its successive outgrowths, MFU (Mission Française d’Urbanisme) and BEAU (Bureau
The main question posed by the dissertation is therefore this: how was the particular assemblage forged, from technical expertise, politics, and several other factors, that facilitated postwar architectural production in French Black Africa? In this respect, the dissertation follows a precedent set by research into the construction of scientific facts and technological artifacts within science and technology studies. Initially, the standard methodology in this field was to identify a situation of complexity, to track its resolution, and in so doing, to determine the broader implications of that resolution. More recently, however, new methodologies have emerged that re-imagine this linear trajectory as a heterogeneous web of interactions. Rather than conventional human actors, scholars like Bruno Latour and Michel Callon instead track the agency of “actants,” which may be human or non-human on one hand and act as individual actors or networks on the other. To make the same methodological shift in this dissertation would be to address both the human (colonial administrators, architects, subject populations) and non-human (policies, materials, instruments) actants involved in postwar architectural production in French Black Africa while continually situating these individual actors within the broader apparatus of colonial development. My hypothesis is that such symmetrical analysis will help answer the dissertation’s research question. The dissertation engages this hypothesis from two angles. Chronologically, it charts the evolution of technical expertise within the colonial development apparatus over the three most active decades of operation; and thematically, it examines these successive periods through the respective entry-points of expert, artifact, and fact. Part one (1945– 55) focuses on the French architect Jean-Henri Calsat, who emerged as an “expert” of tropical architecture through his advisory role in both CSTB (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment) and BCEOM (Bureau Central d’Équipement du Bâtiment), and design role on the 1950 master plan for Douala, Cameroun. Part two (1955–65) follows the implementation of a technological “artifact,” the mass-produced aluminum roof-umbrella, by French design ensemble ATEA-SETAP as part of their 1960 master plan for Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, commissioned by SCET (Société Central d’Équipement du Territoire). Part three (1965–75) traces the construction of the scientific “fact” constituted by the urban research of SMUH (Secrétariat des Missions
(clockwise from top right) Progressive phases of construction underneath mass-produced aluminum roof-umbrella shown in the ATEA-SETAP brochure, Habitat en Zone Tropicale Humide (1962). Massing model for Abidjan’s business district by ATEASETAP included in Mission 1959 (Abidjan: Ivorian Ministry of Public Works, 1959). Systematic documentation of sun paths published in
BCEOM ’s Essaie sur l’Habitation
Tropicale (1951). Inauguration of the HouphouëtBoigny Bridge in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, on 15 March 1958. Council president of French Republic, Gaston Monnerville (center, cutting ribbon) and Ivorian president, Felix Houphouët-Boigny (far right, behind girl). Coverage of postwar architectural production in Côte d’Ivoire from special issue of Urbanisme (1969).
153 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Ramirez—Enrique
ramirez—Enrique
Airs of Modernity 1881–1914 The burgeoning aeronautical culture in France between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War became the setting for a new conceptualization of air. The shifts from aerostatic to aerodynamic flight—from lighter-than-air flight via balloons to heavier-than-air flight with airplanes— resulted in a profound rethinking of air as a material and dynamic substance. This rethinking of air during this period signaled a different understanding of the modernization process. Architecture became the very medium that made this understanding possible. Different modes of representation will be analyzed for their role in using architecture to communicate new ideas about the physicality and materiality of air. L’Empire de l’air (1881), by the French ornithologist and artist Louis Pierre Mouillard (1834–1897) features drawings of large birds of prey to introduce the idea of air as a supporting and dynamic substrate. The conception of air as a “column” of geometricized space from two legal treatises by the French jurist Paul Fauchille (1858–1926) considers the relationships between building envelopes on a new understanding of aerial sovereignty vis-à-vis the built environment. Photographs of smoked air flowing over solid objects by Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) show how an architectural apparatus—a sealed, wood-framed wind tunnel with a glazed wall—can be used to turn moving air from something that was “optically empty” to a discernible, tangible phenomenon. Finally, the idea of a wind tunnel as an architectural object reaches its fullest expression in Gustave Eiffel’s (1832–1923) aeronautical experiments. His wind tunnels at Champ-deMars (1909) and Auteuil (1914) are analyzed as architectural machines for the recording of pressurized streamlines on solid objects. In short, Eiffel’s wind tunnels will be understood as architecture for drawing air. This dissertation will conclude with an examination of architectural drawings by Adolphe Augustin Rey (1864– 1934). Though Rey’s name is not associated with advances in French aeronautics, his winning entry for a worker housing competition sponsored by the Fondation Rothschild (1904) nevertheless stands for an important proposition underlying this dissertation. Rey’s plans and elevations for the Rothschild housing scheme (1904), with their depiction of flowing air at different scales, suggest a new kind of relation between architecture and its surrounding air. The implicit equation of Rey’s drawings with Marey’s and Eiffel’s wind tunnel visualizations1 invites an evaluation of how that most fundamental of aspects of 20th century urbanism—the design of the urban block—can be viewed in light of advances in aeronautics at the turn of the century.
Here, architectural drawing techniques become a way to understand air as a material condition coextensive with architecture. The five media organizing this dissertation will highlight an additional significance of air outside the more familiar histories of mechanized systems and hygiene. It will also build upon previous work concerning the relationship of aviation, streamlining and aerodynamics to architecture in order to reclaim the importance of air to these discourses. In response to this and similar scholarship, it should be pointed out that it is not so much the aircraft per se, but the air moving around the aircraft that becomes important. If “Rapidity of motion against the resistance of the air produced flight,” 2 this dissertation proposes that the theorizing of this resistance, the conceiving of air as something that sustains, moves, shapes, could not make sense without architecture. This dissertation will also stand for an important proposition regarding the relationship between aviation and architecture culture in the early 20th century. In order to properly understand the relationship between the two, it is important to go back to the origins of this relationship in 19th century France. 1 Marie-Jeanne Dumont, Le logement social à Paris: les habitations à bon marché (Liège: Editions Madraga, 1991), p. 47.
2 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 98.
(above) Gustave EIffel (holding a model of an airplane by Victor Tatin, 1914; (top right) Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) at the controls of his aerodynamical laboratory at Auteuil, 1914; (right) Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), photographs of smoked air taken inside 57-channel wind tunnel (1901), from Marey, ‘The movements of the air studied by chronophotography.” Scientific American 86 (1902): 75–76.
155
With the advent of the information age, architects in the 1960s and 70s found themselves contending with greater complexity in design problems. In response to these changes, the architectural profession began to approach computers and the information sciences as a way to approach problem solving and representation, as they grappled with the impact it would have on the profession. They turned cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI ), on one hand, but also conceptual models derived from cognitive sciences, Gestalt psychology and linguistics, on the other. The computational shift promoted design process over formal object, moved the architect out of the central role in the design process, and generated architectural solutions beyond the capabilities of machine or architect alone. This dissertation will address the computational shift in architecture, one that privileged the design process over the final representation, altered the centrality of the role of the architect and generated architectural solutions beyond the capabilities of machine or architect alone. In particular, it will examine Christopher Alexander (b. 1936), Nicholas Negroponte (b. 1943) and Cedric Price (1934–2003) and the influence of, and their collaborations with, key figures in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Throughout, this dissertation will develop the notion of generative systems in architecture; that is, systems that incorporate models of intelligence, interact with and respond to both designer and end user, and adapt and evolve over time. The period from 1960 to 1980 is significant because it marks the introduction of computing paradigms to architecture and ends with the early mainstreaming of computers in architectural practice. Alexander, Negroponte and Price were similar in that they responded to a common impetus by using computing and concepts of machine intelligence in their work. All challenged the traditional role of the architect, with Negroponte and Price going so far as to explicitly call themselves “anti-architect” and with Alexander railing against the “genius” role of the architect. Although they did not collaborate with one another, they based their notions of generative machines on work by many of the same figures in technology, including W. Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, Steven Coons, Marvin Minsky, Douglas Engelbart and J.C.R. Licklider. However, the manner in which Alexander, Negroponte and Price approached technology differed. Alexander sought to use computers for data processing and problem solving in the early 1960s, only to shift the computer to the periphery in his 1977 book A Pattern Language. Negroponte, on the other hand, only reinforced the importance of the computer in the concept of what he
called an “architecture machine,” one that would develop a symbiotic, conversational relationship with the user and use ever more sophisticated interfaces for input or output, and that would become so sophisticated, it would ultimately develop a notion of agency. Unlike Negroponte and Alexander, Price did not start with the computer as his central interest but instead turned to technology to provide unexpected interactions that supported his interest in “indeterminacy” and intelligence. While Alexander, Negroponte, and Price were key figures in the development of intelligent systems for architecture, they were by no means the only architects who were active in this regard. Throughout the 1960s, a number of conferences and publications addressed the implications of computing and architecture, including Architecture and the Computer at the Boston Architectural Center in 1964, Computer Graphics in Architecture and Design at the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1968, and the Design Quarterly double issue, “Design and the Computer” in 1966. Such confluences brought together representatives from architecture, urban planning, engineering and computer science. The events and publications took place within mainstream of architectural education and knowledge and included such participants as Walter Gropius, Charles Moore, and Louis Kahn, in addition to up and coming architects and technologists working at the nexus of computing and architecture. In this dissertation, I will engage sources from both architectural history and the history of technology to trace the development of the generative, intelligent systems at the center of Alexander, Negroponte and Price’s work. My research will examine closely the technological sources that influenced the key figures of the dissertation, the computational capabilities in use at the key sites in the dissertation (especially MIT), and the reciprocal collaborations and influences between the architects and the technologists. By synthesizing both architectural and technological material, the dissertation will probe how Alexander, Negroponte and Price challenged traditional architectural design and form-making processes, creating systems that generated architectural solutions in a unique human-computer “symbiosis,” to use J.C.R. Licklider’s term. Ultimately, the dissertation will seek to draw a clear picture of generative systems, the way they changed architectural method, knowledge and practice in the period of study, and the implications for contemporary architecture, computing and interactivity.
STEENSoN—Molly Wright
Artificial Intelligence, Architectural Intelligence: The Computer and Computation in Architecture, 1960–80
Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Steenson—Molly Wright
157
This dissertation investigates Fuller’s largely unexplored experiences, inspirations, and theorizations during his formative years from 1915 to 1938—a period demarcated at the start by his final expulsion from Harvard University and immediate engagement by Armour & Company, at the median by his conceptualization of an “Universal Architecture” and completion of the manuscript titled 4D, and at the end by his meeting with Albert Einstein and the subsequent publication of his first “synergetically”-founded theoretical treatise titled Nine Chains to the Moon. The impetus for this investigation derives from Fuller’s still-singular traversal of disciplinary divides for both metaphoric and literal inspiration in the course of conceiving an architecture nominally commensurate with the totality of human achievement, i.e. his efforts to inscribe into architecture such wide-ranging disciplines as mathematics, physics, painting, sculpture, music, psychology, business administration, construction management, and industrial production. Specifically, this work details Fuller’s asyet unexamined professional experiences with Armour & Company, his service in the US Navy, and tenure as president and chief engineer of the Stockade Building Company; explains Fuller’s unique repurposing of Einstein’s theories of Relativity and Hubble’s discovery of the “exploding universe,” and explores his largely unexplored attempts to combine Ouspensky’s speculations on the Tertium Organum with, among other incongruities, Babson’s market and marketing analysis. This dissertation thus accounts for Fuller’s interpretation and application to architecture of such contrasting notions as the effective “weight of light” with the optimization of architectural performance, the “scientific application of time-space principles and harmonies into modern building construction” and geometries of the “uni-dimensional” sphere, and the “globular, radiating form” underlying various polyhedrons that Fuller promoted as alternatives to architecture’s “fallacious plane and cubical geometry.” For instance, Fuller incorporated virtually every article in the April, 1928 Scientific American into his manuscript for 4D such that the novelties of the proclaimed “modern home” as related by this issue, e.g. “photo-radio transmission,” “neon light,” “sleeping cars,” and “ear and eye music”, later found their way into his Dymaxion House of 1929.
More generally, this dissertation delineates Fuller’s reading of diverse sources and attempts to insert himself into the prevailing architectural discourse led him to formulate the two contrasting agendas: the public and theoretical versus the private and practical. Publicly, Fuller sought to combine his own experiences and inspirations with developments in science, art, and industry to realize tangible benefits for all humanity. He therefore designated the quantity production of quality housing, or industrialization of housing, as the most urgent crisis to result from the prevailing economic recession. Privately, Fuller attempted to participate in the construction boom. That is, he presented himself as an expert on the building industry, and advocated its wholesale adoption of new materials, manufacturing techniques, and construction methods after the fashion of Henry Ford’s development of the automobile assembly line. It is this very attempt to pursue both agendas that led Fuller to, most famously, re-theorize architecture as, initially, “Universal Architecture,” and then more ambitiously as “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science.”
SU—Michael Wen-Sen
The Architecture of Synergy: R. Buckminster Fuller’s Theorization of a “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” (1915 to 1938)
Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
SU—Michael Wen-Sen
159
As chairman of the Architectural Association (AA ) in London in the early 1970s, the Canadian-born architectural educator Alvin Boyarsky (1928–1990) implemented what he believed to be the ideal model for a school of architecture: that of a “well-laid table” at which students could sample from a constantly updated international menu of divergent theoretical positions. In the wake of the institutional upheavals of the late 1960s, from the dissolution of the Beaux-Arts system in France following the events of May 1968 to student protests for curriculum reform at American schools of architecture, the convivial promise of Boyarsky’s pluralist, participatory, and anti-curriculum model offered a radical departure from the professional training of modernist programs, as well as from the specialized trajectories of newly reformed curricula. Under Boyarsky’s direction, throughout the 1970s the AA’s institutional platform operated as a nexus for the experiments of an international network of architects, historians and theorists—including Peter Cook, Robin Evans, Zaha Hadid, Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier, Daniel Libeskind, Robin Middleton and Bernard Tschumi, among many others—yielding a significant output of teaching methodologies, in addition to books, magazines, videos, exhibitions and conferences, which catalyzed a series of discourses and practices throughout the decade. Though widely recognized for his chairmanship at the AA , which lasted between 1971 and 1990, Boyarsky and his achievements at the AA have been neglected by existing scholarship. Tracing the development of his pedagogical theories through the 1960s and 1970s, this dissertation investigates Boyarsky’s experiment at the AA within the broader spectrum of his field of production. Operating on a Chicago-London axis (with requisite stopovers in New York) during this period, the peripatetic Boyarsky was situated at a transcontinental crossroads of a series of architectural debates and practices, and in this way his work and his encounters with an ever-increasing network of contacts will provide a multifaceted perspective on this moment of critical shifts in the discipline: critiques of modernism and its myths, the theoretical proposals of the architectural avant-garde, a developing discourse on postmodernism, and the radical questioning of extant systems of architectural education. Through an examination of Boyarsky’s oeuvre— which in addition to pedagogy includes media experiments, urban analyses, criticism, and collecting—the dissertation aims to complicate both his contribution to architectural education and the broader significance of educational reform during the 1960s and 1970s, a moment when, I argue, pedagogy became a primary agent in avant-garde architectural production.
SUNWOO—Irene
Alvin Boyarsky’s Well-Laid Table: Experiments in Architectural Pedagogy
Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
SUNWOO—Irene
163 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
Verbakel—Els From the Treaty of Rome (1957) to the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), the European city transformed significantly under the influence of geo-political changes, economic expansion and socio-cultural shifts. In this period, architects, urbanists and policy makers conceived and implemented a series of competitions for transnational urban projects at strategic locations in Europe—such as Strasbourg, Geneva and Luxembourg—which profoundly influenced the reality and imagination of a borderless European urbanism. The competitions produced a distinct discourse on the relationship between architecture and territory in a globalizing world and formed a distinct set of ideas within postwar urban practices and theories looking at the future of the European city. This early discourse on transnationalism from the architectural point of view served as an important vehicle for the postwar project of European integration. The formation of transnational urban projects at discrete moments in time challenged existing modes of nationbased place-making. At these moments, spatially overlapping identities reached a point of conflict between regional coherences, national territories and transnational aspirations. They produced a distinct set of urbanisms and architectures that represented hopes, desires and utopias but also conflicting territorial realities. This dissertation will study the discourse produced by a series of competitions for transnational districts in European cities in the context of the global city in the postwar period. The study will use materials from case studies of competitions for the European Zone in Strasbourg, France, the European District in Luxembourg city, the International District in Geneva, Switzerland and others. Each competition will be treated as a distinct genealogy in which the architects and urbanists involved, as well as formats employed will be explored. The dissertation will structure the debates and practices produced by these competitions chronologically in order to ‘distill’ three significant moments in the formation of a transnational urban model. A first set of competitions occurs during the end of the fifties and first half of the sixties, including the 1957 competition for the Place des Nations in Geneva, the 1958 competition for the Capital of Europe, and the 1964 competition for the European Parliament in Strasbourg. In the search for a European peace after the Second World War, architectural visions emerged that promised to provide a no-man’s land of international cooperation. Large architectural interventions proposed singular, monumental buildings and structures promoting a vision of political solidarity transcending nations and re-connecting regions. As cities kept growing, the
city-region thus formed a renewed concern as the ‘rival’ of existing political boundaries. From the end of the sixties to the beginning of the seventies, the autonomy of the earlier transnational projects was replaced by a new functionalism of urban ensembles that aimed at serving developmental practices of economic expansion. New urban districts were added as satellites to existing cities such as Paris and London. The four functions of the city: dwelling, working, leisure and traffic, proposed by CIAM ’s Charter of Athens in 1933 to de-densify the industrial city were subdivided in zones and redistributed over the city-region. As a reaction, the architectural debate put forward the multifunctional urban zone, inspired by national infrastructure initiatives of economic expansion, as a planning device for the transnational district. During mid-eighties and nineties, influential international agreements encouraged a new-fangled search for transnational urban visions, this time not as a promise but as a witness of European integration. Postmodernist architectural discourse had widened the gap between architecture and urbanism, reinforced by the disappointment with large brutalist projects of earlier decades. Competitions such as the transnational district for Strasbourg-Kehl in 1991 and the second competition for the Place des Nations in Geneva in 1995 renewed the architectural aspiration for reinforcing the identity of a European or even global urbanity. In the context of unstructured and dispersed cross-border urbanization, transnational architectural and urban visions promised to generate anchors for further borderless European urbanization. The dissertation will examine the discourse produced by these competitions and their contribution to larger debates in architecture and urbanism of the postwar era. The study will have a closer look at the way transnational urban projects related to the evolution of postwar urban theory in the general context of architectural and urban discourse such as the debates on brutalism, megastructures and metabolism but also pattern thinking and concerns with future city growth such as the megalopolis and the citta diffusa. Moreover, the competition as a distinct point of convergence between a wide range of agencies from policy makers to architects, will provide additional insights in the production of architectural discourse.
Verbakel—Els
Cities Across Nations. Postwar Competitions for the Transnational Urban Project in Europe
165 Ph.d. a b s t r ac t s
west—Diana Kurkovsky Utopian thought has had a pivotal role in shaping twentieth century planning theories by imagining a better social order and spaces required for bringing it to life. Yet what makes an architectural vision utopian? My dissertation explores the meaning of utopia in architecture through the prism of Soviet city planning—arguably the most famous case study of utopianism and its failures. By analyzing the social programs and design methods that shaped different aspects of the Soviet spatial imagination, it argues that beyond its radical social agendas, Soviet utopianism lay in the country’s attempt to develop a scientific, comprehensively designed, large-scale integrated system for living. Understanding the reasons for the emergence and failures of such systemic notions in architectural thinking not only sheds light upon the Soviet project, but also helps in reevaluating the role of utopianism in contemporary theory. In numerous ways, the Soviet Union has come to embody the evils of large-scale planning, which become discursively linked to the modernist project in general. Since the Bolshevik Revolution, the Socialist government sought to establish a system of central planning in order to coordinate demand and production on national scale through comprehensive statistical analysis. Architecture and design were subordinated to this project, demanding universal, optimized solutions that could be implemented on massive scale. At the same time, there existed great contention regarding what form the Socialist Utopia would take; famously, the 1920s debates between urbaninsts and disurbanists illustrate the lack of the clear singular vision one often associates with the Soviet project. The same was true of the post-Stalinist microregions—comprehensively designed towns made of prefabricated concrete buildings that have come to define the face of Socialism. My dissertation seeks to trace the evolution of the so-called Socialist planning utopia, illustrating that it never presented a fixed vision, but was instead a continual renegotiation of the ideal vis-à-vis the changing real conditions. It also examines urban planning in light of scientific discourses, which permeated Soviet discussions of architecture, paying particular attention to the intersection of cybernetic theory and comprehensive design agendas. From the Soviet point of view, capitalist cities were prone to social and spatial disorder leading to entropy. In an effort to build a non-capitalist city, Soviet planners pursued means of urban containment, spatial homogenization, and environmental control. Drawing on the writings of Marx and Engels that advocated the dissolution of distinction between town and country, Soviet authorities aimed to create an economically and socially homogenous
city altogether different from the socially stratified and unpredictable capitalist megalopolis. At the same time, the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism offered little practical guidance for building the physical environment appropriate to the new world order. The contention among various architectural groups during the early-Soviet era equally failed to develop a singular vision and plan. With the rise of Stalinist terror, Soviets became increasingly aware of their dismal living conditions, and with multiple families crowded inside communal apartments, their every action surveyed, recorded and often denounced to the authorities by the other inhabitants. Khrushchev’s promise of internationalism and freedom led to the rejection of the communal aspect of socialist housing. Launching a massive building campaign, the Soviet leader promised that every family would have its own apartment by 1980. Concurrently, disillusionment with the inability of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine to produce a viable urban planning program led to a new fascination with emerging cybernetic theory. Cybernetics was a science of control and communication in animal and machine behavior, its principal goal was to combat entropy and disorganization within complex systems. To Soviet planners, cybernetics offered new strategies of design and governance through continual checks on the system via informational “feed back” loops. In numerous ways, Khrushchevian reforms offered a more sophisticated system of social control than the communal apartments. The massive housing construction campaign resulted in the creation of millions of residential districts called microregions (mikrorayony), which were embedded in a carefully planned network of districts, towns and cities. They were to be powered through a seemingly endless, utopian source of energy—the network of nuclear reactors erected near the urban centers. Architects and planners were encouraged to design microregions comprehensively, considering all aspects of exterior and interior design, down to doorknobs, furniture, and color schemas. A kind of Gesamtbauwerk, microregions were self-contained units of total planning and design, which allowed for increased, but less transparent central control, turning utopian visions into a dystopian disciplinary mechanism. Was Soviet planning, thus, a failed utopia? By tracing the evolution of Soviet utopian visions from the early days of the Bolshevik government through the dissolution of Socialist utopia in 1989, my dissertation argues that it need not be construed in such a way. While both the utopian aspect and the inevitable failure of the Soviet planning program are often assumed, scholars have failed to register the
complex and continually evolving theoretical framework that formed the Soviet spatial imagination. Changing scientific, social and political theories pushed against all attempts to establish a singular, monolithic dogma. Evolving technologies challenged the efforts of developing a singular, universal building system appropriate for Socialism. The need for governable space resulted in spatial regimentation, discordant with the collective principles of communism. These were not, however, mere unfortunate effects of utopia as it clashed with the real, experienced world. Rather, I seek to demonstrate that utopian visions are in and of themselves multiplicitous, subject to critiques, modifications, and conflicting impulses, and thus continue to remain a relevant category for contemporary architectural thought.
(top) The region of Lazdinai (near Vilnius, Lithuania,) built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was considered a great success of the Soviet comprehensive planning program. (above) A shopping center in the town of Zelenograd built in the 1960s outside of Moscow as the Soviet center for electronics and computer research.
WEST—Diana Kurkovsky
Planning Utopia, Designing Socialism: Science, Theory and Systemic Thought in Soviet Planning and Architecture
Princeton University School of Architecture Princeton, NJ 08544-5264 Main Office 609-258-3741 Programs Office 609-258-3641 Fax 609-258-4740 E-Mail soa @ princeton.edu Internet soa.princeton.edu Design: Omnivore Thesis review photographs: Mimi Cabell, Daniel Claro, Stephanie Velazquez Printed October 2012