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THE EMPIRICAL FRAME: PETER TESTA FACULTY PROFILE Amit Wolf
Peter Testa is Principal-in-Charge of Design at TESTA|WEISER and founding director of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). His work is exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including recent shows in Los Angeles, New York London, Tokyo, and Beijing. He is the author of two books and more than 30 research papers on architecture, design, computation and robotics. His work is regularly published in international art, architecture, design, engineering, and scientific journals as well as major newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Times of London. Testa was Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, and has also taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Harvard University GSD, and the University of California. Since 2004 he has been a member of the Design Faculty at SCI-Arc, teaching XLAB advanced design studios and seminars. Testa holds an S.M. Arch.S. from MIT. He is the recipient of the MIT Innovation Award, three Graham Foundation Awards, and the Design Arts Award of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper
In their form and pedagogy, Peter Testa’s ESTm studios at SCIArc’s Robot House are empirical operations. An invitation to sit in on one of Testa’s reviews is a rare treat, inasmuch as it engages all the senses, which are given a first hand feel of each experiment’s empiric results. Of more interest than the physicality of these results, however, is their capacity to liberate the discussion from any tedious-mindedness in favor of a posteriori percepts that can cut through and make clear whatever is in the air that week, from objecthood to bio-printing to avant-garde art, all with the precision reserved for a six-axis robotic arm. To give a sense of this achievement, in one instance, a group of students sidestepped recent lengthy close readings of art-architecture relations to unearth surprising links between Conceptual art and Futurism, two currents that formally and ideologically could not be more distinct. Used as a precedent, the students began with Sol Lewitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes of 1974. Lewitt’s serial experiment, with its depiction of the varied forms with which to elude and deny the completion of a cube frame, was recreated as a choreography of robotized prisms. Further, when digitally filmed and spliced, the performance yielded unexpected in-between objects—circular sweeps that underlie Lewitt’s original index and that are akin to Umberto Boccioni’s and Giacomo Balla’s respective dynamisms, constructions capturing motion typical of 1914-1915 Italian Futurism. Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and trained in the offices of Álvaro Siza in Porto between 1984 and 1986, Testa belongs to that small group of architects who managed to avoid Postmodern American architecture and the protracting 1980s, stretching well into the mid-90s, while also trading academia and discursive practice for the computational advances unique at the time to MIT. Indeed, returning to MIT as an associate professor via Bernard Tschumi’s Columbia (two institutions in which architecture has never been deadlocked in the academic erudition of language and text, and in which technological experimentation was nearly indifferent to the selfimposed checks and boundaries of critical, ‘autonomous’ discourse), Testa understands computational innovation in all its forms as the sole remaining agent for the development of vigorous, novel architectures. Testa first came into his own in a series of prototype composite towers developed in 2000 with Devyn Weiser, coprinciple of the Los Angeles based architecture firm Testa|Weiser. The determining agent in these vertical structures, as in the firm’s later work, is computational vitalism that serves to re-imagine form in relation to structural and material computations and to create within such relays microcosms in which, as Testa affirmed, “materials are no longer fixed substances and morphogenesis supersedes form.” While not dissimilar to the ambitions of other digital proponents to come out of Tschumi’s tenure at Columbia (Greg Lynn and Hani Rashid, to name but a few), Testa has benefited from MIT’s disciplinary open-endedness and therefore from an empirical approach to both advanced materials and software that distinguishes him from his peers. The reiterative scripting templates developed with his MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG) would challenge a receding pallet of rotational and scalar formal operations as well as then parallel computational experiments in emergent form. These included the templates AgencyGP, GENR8, and Weaver™, all pivotal to Testa|Weiser’s later work. For an office building prototype for Herman Miller, by his account, Testa would produce nothing but “populations of design”—vital ontologies of design permutations that were made possible by software agents, themselves refitted to the standard software 4
package to effect the envelopes’ myriad curves. As a result, the scheme is far removed from the typical imagery of architectural computation circa 2000, evoking more than anything else Mies van der Rohe’s Glasarchitekture of 1920-22: the ephemeras of the Friedrichstrasse competition entry and the Glass Skyscraper, still unburdened by the curtain wall. Notably, the latter 1922 scheme was a more or less programmatic demonstration of experiments in curved glass prisms, which were conducted by Mies to empirically determine the concave/convex curvature of the glass. That Testa’s is an empirical exploration, a discovery as much as an architectural project, is clear from Testa|Weiser’s two tower schemes: The Carbon Tower, prototyped by 3D Systems Inc. in 2004; and The Strand Tower and Precursors commissioned by MOCA in 2006 and designed with Emily White. Owing much of their complex bundle-like configurations to the EDG Weaver™ script template, these vertical structures renounce the basic coreenvelop logic common to American speculative buildings. The former enfolds a spiraling ramp and three elevator pods, forming a spiraling exoskeleton; the latter relinquishes the core-envelop dyad altogether to develop a technique combining robotic and human labors within a single structure. Regardless of such strong, compelling objectives, Testa seems to have experienced real difficulty in these two schemes, but also real advances, within the more routine aspects of the modern tower frame, bringing it to term with other pressing questions of contemporary machine production, namely robotics and the materiality of composites. The tower frame, underwritten with compressive/tensile moments and code provisions, can be briefly summarized here to illustrate this difficulty. Before William L.B. Jenney’s Fair Store, built in Chicago between 1890 and 1891, the great problem of the rentable multistory building was the proviso of a fireproofed steel frame that can absorb variedly directed load intensities. Jenney’s steel frame overcame this difficulty through an assembly of concrete
W.B. Jenney, Fair Store
and tile slabs. These slabs were laid over (concrete) and inbetween (hollowed tiles) beam and girder as to resist local stress, complementing the wind girts and providing fire insulation. Jenney and the intimate corollary of Modern architecture’s assemblage logic to the Chicago frame have been widely discussed by the likes of Sigfried Giedion and Colin Rowe; Kenneth Frampton disclosed the influence of the Chicago School on Adolf Loos, remarking on the Viennese architect’s Chicago period and its part in the conception of Le Corbusier’s Domino frame. Less discussed, perhaps, are the dynamics implicit to the erection of steel frames: the lifting, rigging, and detailing as well