ANDREW HOLDER WILLARD A. OBERDICK FELLOW IN ARCHITECTURE
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48 characters Consider, as a special case of form and repetition, a litter of piglets suckling at the teats of a plump sow. Both at the level of the entire piglet-sow agglomeration, and at the level of the individual pig body, geometric analysis is not readily equipped to describe this situation.
Andrew Holder is a designer, critic, and occasional author. He is the co-Principal of the LADG, where his design interests include re-purposing common or outmoded drawing techniques, inventing architectural characters, and inducing states of play in an audience. Andrew has held teaching appointments at UCLA, SCI-Arc, and Otis College of Art and design, and is a frequent guest critic at institutions across the country. Prior to his career in architecture, Andrew’s professional lives include work in real estate finance and tax credit syndication with National Equity Fund, and a stint as director of business development for a technology start-up using statistical analysis of language for novel information storage and retrieval systems.
Consider, as a special case of form and repetition, a litter of piglets suckling at the teats of a plump sow. Both at the level of the entire piglet-sow agglomeration, and at the level of the individual pig body, geometric analysis is not readily equipped to describe this situation. The disposition of one pig against another does not appear to be regulated by clear systems of repetition and adjacency. While the pressing of one pig tummy against another can be partially described as the pressing of one topological surface against another, but this same system cannot be used to rationalize the fit of mouth to teat. Each fit between adjacent bodies is unique not only as a variation on a single type, but also as a variation in kind. The pig bodies themselves resist decomposition as assemblages of skin and structure; they are too fat—nearly all fat, in fact. The excess of this obesity—the sheer quantity of material in any one body—make it impossible to assign any particular region to the task of fit and adjacency. A patch of one piglet’s distended stomach fits against the neighboring piglet, but not all of that stomach participates in the plane of fit between bodies, and not the same region of the stomach participates each time it presses. Nor can we definitively assign the stomach the role of “fitting part” or “the thing that does the work of joining one pig to another.” Snout, hoof, tongue: each of these may or may not participate in the fit of adjacent bodies.