UNLIKELY THINGS in a likely world
[ Nathan Skrepcinski ]
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THESIS STATEMENT [3] STORY TELLING Precedents [5] LITERARY TECHNIQUE Magic Realism [24] THESIS PROPOSAL Sathorn Unique Tower [36] BIBLIOGRAPHY [51]
[ Requested Advisor: Elena Manferdini ]
“Over the past few decades, architecture as an idea has limited its definition of itself. Architectural styles and forms are often the seductive packaging and repackaging of the same proven, marketable concepts. What is needed desperately today are approaches to architecture that can free its potential to transform our ways of thinking and acting.” — Lebbeus Woods
[2]
THESIS STATEMENT
To design anything, it is necessary to first imagine an audience, a site, a purpose, or even a world. It has to be made up. This speculative practice invites the use of fiction in architecture to widen the cultural discourse and explorations in architectural design. Architecture is spatial storytelling. It has a unique capacity to uncover as well as tell stories. As a language it can negotiate the threshold between matter-of-fact reality and mysterious spatial happenings. This acknowledgement of the increasingly uncanny correspondence of the real and the imaginary is thereby relevant to our increasingly confusing and accelerated world. Arguably, fiction is necessary for the creation of any (intentional) future reality. This thesis investigates the potential of fantastic architectural representations, aimed not to create buildings, but to progress the discussion and mediation of architecture beyond its disciplinary boundaries. Using as a technique the literary genre and aesthetic style of magical realism, this thesis employs a narrative model that weaves together a bevy of oppositions: fact/fiction, objective/subjective, technological/ natural, rational and magical, to offer alternatives to the autonomous presumptions of architecture and to create a field of unpredictable potentials. This is a reminder of how constrained and conservative architecture can be.
[3]
To approach architecture as if it were a work of literature requires one to understand its narrative powers. This first section looks at a series of “architectural narratives� and examines the ways in which they either produce, or are a product of, a narrative.
[4]
STORY TELLING PRECEDENTS
NON-STANDARD CHARACTER Telling a story through a character
ARCHITECTONIC METAPHOR
Transforming a character into an architectonic metaphor
ARCHITECTURAL MANIFESTATION
Architecture that takes on the character of a story
ARCHITECTURE AS LANGUAGE Architecture that tells its own story
[5]
NON-STANDARD CHARACTER LUKE CHANDRESINGHE Institute of ideas
Top perspective A2
“The poetry and the seduction of a really powerful idea in a drawing, collage or model can be enough to take you there without physically having to build it.”
[6]
Expiration day
Detail of two tower elevation
The Institute of Ideas consists of two hundred storage towers and expiration vessels which dominate the site of the Lea Valley in East London. It houses all registered patents or ‘ideas’ in the UK for 20-year periods, continually expelling expired ideas and receiving newly registered patents. On the expiry date of the patent, it is released and transferred to the expiration vessel where it can be blown across the terrain. The surrounding landscape is a junk yard, market and forum for discussion of old ideas where intellectual scavengers steal, recycle, sell and buy expired inventions. The project can be read and understood through the story of a non-standard character (the patent) as it travels through the facility.
Containers rising up to the 20th level where they will be opened and the papers exposed
1.500 part plan
[7]
ARCHITECTONIC METAPHOR THOMAS HILLIER The emperor’s castle
Act III - Eternal Punishment
[8]
Chapter 1
Act I - The First Meeting
The Emperor’s castle originates from a mythical and ancient tale hidden within a woodblock landscape scene created by Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaker, Ando Hiroshige. This tale charts the story of two star-crossed lovers, the weaving Princess and the Cowherd who have been separated by the Princess’s father, the Emperor.
Act II - Duties Neglected
Act IV - The Last Meeting
[9]
THOMAS HILLIER The emperor’s castle
The Princess’s knitted canopy
[10]
Chapter 2
The Emperor’s origami lungs
The Cowheard’s mechanical cow-cutters
The flexible roof system
These characters have been transformed into architectonic metaphors creating an Urban Theatre within the grounds of the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo. The Princess, a flexible, diaphanous knitted membrane, envelopes the spaces below and is fabricated using the surrounding Igusa rush to knit itself ever larger in aim to reach the grass parkland perimeter representing the Cowherd. Linked within this skin is a series of enormous folded plate lung structures. These origami lungs of the Emperor expand and contract creating the sensation of life. The lungs, deployed around the site act as physical barriers that manipulate the knitted skin as it extends towards the outer parkland, these manipulations are controlled and articulated by the Emperor’s army using a series of complex pulley systems which pull back the lungs and the surrounding skin.
[11]
THOMAS HILLIER The emperor’s castle
The Emperor’s Castle - Set within the urban fabric of Tokyo
[12]
Chapter 3 This piece of narrative architecture was the vehicle to examine current day cultural and social issues in Japan such as unconditional piety, relentless work ethic, and conservative attitudes towards love.
The cowherd & his mechanical cow-cutters
The aim of the Emperor’s Castle was to provoke thought but never patronize or attempt to solve all the world’s problems.
The origami lungs connected via a series of walkways
The Emperor’s lungs expand and contract, blooming like flowers
[13]
ARCHITECTURAL MANIFESTATION C.J. LIM / STUDIO 8 Sins
Gluttony
[14]
Kiss + Tell a.k.a. the Jerry Springer Museum
Public telephone booths are turned into confession booths. Confessions get broadcast on a piece of landscape. The architecture then is not made by four walls and a roof, but by bodies; it is alive and always changing.
Inspired by David Fincher’s film “Seven”, the Seven Cardinal Sins - pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth are represented by seven innocuous-seeming projects that begin to question the traditional canon of building typologies. It suggests the possibility that sin may not be the intent or outcome, but a spatial relative. Or at the very least be formed and facilitated by an infrastructure of vice. Part manifesto, part design and part narrative, the projects reflect the ambiguous and ill-defined nature of their unseen protagonist, playing with our prejudices and preconceptions. They combine the sublime with the ridiculous, the biblical with cyberspace, the immutability of age-old sin with modern-day communications technology.
[15]
ARCHITECTURAL MANIFESTATION C.J. LIM / STUDIO 8 Virtually Venice
The woven beach (Lido) with pavilions and promenade
[16]
Par Xien Gou Hai
Empty vessels broadcasting the 6 o’clock news
Virtually Venice is comprised of seven projects: Par Xien Gou Hai, The Lido, Giardini, San Marco, Fortuna PozzoPozza, San Michele and The Four Seasons that celebrate the connections between Venice and China. It began with the legendary story of Marco Polo’s meeting with the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan. In these portrayals of how Khan might have imagined Venice after their conversations, the city took on aspects of the East and reconfigured itself in new architectural forms. With the two protagonists metaphorically representing East and West, this research investigates the differences and similarities in cultures and identities.
Telephone poles for viewing the city
Section of sound garden
[17]
ARCHITECTURE AS LANGUAGE NAJA & deOSTOS The hanging cemetery of Baghdad
[18]
Although architects typically design for clients, the Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad is not for or about the people of Baghdad, located over 4,100 km away from London, because about them we know almost nothing. But it is about a city represented and portrayed daily through international TV and newspapers; a place almost fictional in the attention it generates but equally one so far removed from our immediate physical reality. Through the TV, the imaginary clashes between a predatory West and a stereotyped East are reduced here to spaces, architectural inventions and structural uncertainty. Consequently the project, or story, reveals itself through the duality of both TV cameras and spectators, searching for an understanding of the colossal suspended apparatus.
[19]
ARCHITECTURE AS LANGUAGE NAJA & deOSTOS The pregnant island
View of the pregnant island from the dam reservoir
[20]
Top view The project merges existing ingredients within spatial narrative – a space that changes with time and is a multidimensional experiment depicting cultural and social ambiguities within the context of native communities.
The design of the Pregnant Island was based on two facts that sound fictional: 1,600 hilltops that were transformed into islands by the flooding of the Tucurui Dam and a water level that can vary 18m between wet and dry seasons. The project also compares Amazonian tribes’ perception of nature with the idealized mainstream Occidental vision. What if both universes, magical and scientific, could merge? This meeting of two parallel worlds mirrors the dam’s own condition – a colossal piece of engineering placed among Amazonian rituals. The literary works of Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and Alejo Carpentier were inspirational in how their abnormal narratives generated compelling pictures of complex situations.
Island formations
[21]
[22]
Rather than directly transforming a work of literature into something architectural, this thesis will use a specific literary technique to enrich architecture’s potential as a story-telling language.
[23]
LITERARY TECHNIQUE: Magic Realism : an aesthetic style and genre of fiction in which magical elements are blended with a realistic atmosphere to access a deeper understanding of reality
[24]
“Real” and “fantastic” are allowed to be accepted in same stream of thought. Highly detailed, realistic setting invaded by something too strange to believe. More lyrical and evocative than strictly critical, more powerful than precise. Presents the “mysterious and fantastic quality of reality.“
CHARACTERISTICS: Fantastical Elements - fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the ‘reliable’ tone of objective realistic report. Plenitude - a lack of emptiness, a departure from structure or rules, and an “extraordinary” plenitude of disorienting detail. Hybridity – multiple planes of reality taking place in “inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous. Metafiction - explores the impact fiction has on reality, reality on fiction and the reader’s role in between. Authorial Reticence - deliberately withholding of information and explanations about the disconcerting fictitious world. Sense of Mystery - disregarding natural assumptions in order to reach a state of heightened awareness
[25]
MAGIC REALISM GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ Colombian novelist
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
[26]
Gabriel García Márquez is the most iconic magical realist novelist, and One Hundred Years of Solitude is probably the genre’s most seminal text. Magic events punctuate the narratives of his books - things that defy scientific reality are depicted as matter-of-fact happenings. Magical and factual events are equally perceived by the characters as components of the everyday.
“A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. "Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.”
[27]
MAGIC REALISM IVAN ALBRIGHT American magic realist painter and artist
Self Portrait in Georgia (1967)
[28]
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1943)
In contrast with its use in literature, magical realist art does not often include overtly fantastic or magical content, but rather looks at the mundane, the every day, through a hyper-realistic and often mysterious lens. [29]
MAGIC REALISM FRANZ RADZIWILL German magic realist painter
The Strike (1931)
[30]
“Enigmas of quietude in the midst of general becoming.” Franz Radziwill was most famous for his hyper-realistic painting style that often contained airplanes or meteors flying over otherwise normal landscapes.
Houses (back-views) in Dresden (1931)
The Death of Test Pilot Karl Buchstätter (1928)
Dubbed by Franz Roh to be “magical realist”, the objects in Radziwill’s paintings take on new significance after the “fantastic dreamscape”. “It seems to us that this fantastic dreamscape has completely vanished and that our real world re-emerges before our eyes-bathed in the clarity of a new day. We recognize this world... We look at it with new eyes.” The painting, Houses (backviews) in Dresden, gives us a unique perspective of the lines and angles of the building, while maintaining the realistic design of the area.
[31]
TECHNIQUES EDUARDO PENA Colombian-born concept artist
Futuristic vision of Kowloon district 26 in Hong Kong
[32]
Creating worlds where fantasy and fact meet. What could be a normal scene in a deteriorating and overpopulated section of Hong Kong becomes something more due to a plenitude of fantastical details and an added sense of mystery that allows the unreal and the real to exist simultaneously.
[33]
TECHNIQUES DANIEL DOCIU Romanian-born concept artist
Fallen Tower
[34]
Dwellings
Chaos Temple
[35]
THESIS PROPOSAL: The real & the fantastic coexist in an abandoned skyscraper
[36]
The skyscraper’s conception and (partial) construction is real; its abandonment, deterioration, and unplanned occupancy is fantastic. Over time, that becomes accepted as reality, and myth and superstition becomes a new fantasy. This thesis will work in that realm of myth, superstition, and imagination.
[37]
PROPOSAL SATHORN UNIQUE TOWER Abandoned skyscraper in Bangkok
[38]
The Sathorn Unique Tower is among the major construction projects started when Thailand’s economy was booming in the 1990s. Developers envisaged a city of gleaming office and residential skyscrapers that were testament to the nation’s rapid development. Then Thailand sank into a swamp of reckless investments and unpaid debts that became known as the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The country’s economy contracted 10% in 1998 and many of the building projects, including this one, came to a crashing halt. The Sathorn now stands abandoned. Work was 80% achieved when the construction stopped. It has just the proper mix of glitzy (balustrades) and gritty (plants growing on the 30th floor). Locals believe the tower is haunted...
[39]
PROPOSAL SITE: Bangkok, Thailand. Between Sathon Tai and Charoen Krung roads
Central Business District
Sath o
aro en
Kr u ng
Pra ya R Cha o
Ch
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ork E Net w
[40]
Site
rban
at U Si R
iver
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Sathorn Unique Tower is located less than 200 meters from BTS Taksin station. It is also located at the edge of where the old commercial town of Charernkrung meets the new international business zone of SilomSathorn roads. The abandoned tower sits on a horse-shoe bend which is considered one of the best places to view Bangkok’s grand cityscape and the charm of the Chao Praya River.
[41]
[42]
Imagine walking along the street below and looking up. You see a flicker of light or hear a faint sound and imagine something inside—a hidden city, alive with events and activity. Approached as an artist, a series of detailed scenes will describe these imagined spaces and events. While fantastic in nature, they will each speak to a specific architectural quality thereby transcending the singular image.
[43]
Scene 5
Scene 4 Scene 3
Scene 2
Scene 1
[44]
PROPOSAL SCENE 1 PROGRAM: BATH-HOUSE Fantastic Element: Forest of pipes Architectural Quality: Constricted space / air thickness
SCENE 2 PROGRAM: CIRCULATION / ELEVATOR SHAFT Fantastic Element: Network of cables and pulleys Architectural Quality: Verticality
SCENE 3 PROGRAM: THEATER Fantastic Element: Made of gold, silver, and bronze Architectural Quality: Tactile materially
SCENE 4 PROGRAM: HANGING RESIDENCES Fantastic Element: Hammocks and suspended walkways Architectural Quality: Material Lightness
SCENE 5 PROGRAM: ROOF GARDEN Fantastic Element: Floating in the sunlight Architectural Quality: Light [45]
PROPOSAL The lovely ruins of Sathorn Unique
[46]
View of State Tower from its decaying sister
[47]
PROPOSAL Imagine an invisible city and fantastic events hidden from view...
Interior, Sathorn Unique
[48]
squint/opera, Flooded London (2008)
[49]
[50]
BIBLIOGRAPHY & SELECTED REFERENCES
Naja & deOstos. Ambiguous Spaces, Pamphlet Architecture 29, 2008, Princeton Architectural Press. Beyond Architecture: Imaginative Buildings and Fictional Cities. Edited by Robert Klanten and Lukas Feireiss, 2009, Gestalten. Bernard Tschumi. Architecture and Disjunction, 1994, Cambridge, The MIT Press. C.J. Lim. Being English, lecture, 2007, Sci-arc. MADE UP: Design’s Fictions curated by Tim Durfee with Haelim Paek, the Art Center College of Design, 2011. Gabriel García Márquez. Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), 1967, Editorial Sudamericanos. Magic Realism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism Ivan Albright. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Albright Franz Radziwill. http://www.michaelarnoldart.com/Franz%20Radziwill%20Artist.htm Silabin’s photostream. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alienworld/
[51]
[ Sci-Arc, Thesis Prep, Spring 2011 ]