A Collection of Shapes

The following shapes were produced over a three day period in a hospital. They are presented in chronological order.

“I’ve always been really interested in color and shape and art, so I wanted to make clothing that had really simple wearable shapes with bold, bright prints.”

Ellen Van Dusen, The Washingtonian

“ RULES FOR WORKING WITH SHAPES: 1. Pick a good shape.

2. Don’t worry about what shape you pick, shapes can be combined with other shapes to make new shapes. You are not stuck with anything. Your new best friends are aggregation, rotation, and transformation.

3. Read Bob Somol’s article about shapes.

4. Forget Bob Somol’s article about shapes 5. Choose some studio heroes and enemies…

6. Do not simply extrude the shape. You will be tempted to extrude the shape and call it a building. Resist.

7. Question if you chose the “right” shape. Consider changing the shape, take two days to experiment with a new shape, confirm rule #2.

8. Get an outside opinion on your shape. Make sure it is a respected critic in the field and local to your place of work. John McMorrough will do nicely. He will comment on both the humorous, ironic way you are describing said shape and critique your part-to-whole relationships…

9. Work 10. Invite mysterious critics from “out of town” to validate your project.

It helps if they are coming from new York or LA as it will sound better when you introduce them. They should be young (but not too young) and dressed very hip. Try to curate an East Coast- West Coast disagreement.

Clap at the end of the day. “ Ashely Bigham, A Studio Syllabus, POOL Vol. 2

Shape 26, pen, scanned

“I played my part, kept you in the dark / Now let me show you the shape of my heart” Backstreet Boys

Drawing feels like work most of the time. So now I try to

consciously indulge in the reassuring pleasure of making marks on paper.

Spending a few days focusing solely on parallel lines was a welcome, anxiety-soothing reprieve. The aesthetic qualities of the shapes had no motive, and was a product of instinct. I think playful geometries are more fun to draw. Shapes are nice because they are weird little things which aren’t trying to mean anything. When I reached the end of a line while drawing, I chose what to do next as a snap judgement. The a-b-a-b sequence of drawings was the easiest path forward, I could just doodle instead of worrying. The only real limits were the 8.5” x 11” paper I was given and my single pen. While drawing, I conceptualized the large compositions as weird buildings and the small ones as wooden or ceramic objects.

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us�

Winston Churchill, Best Architecture Quotes Pinterest Board

“The embrace of shape and other familiar pomo-inspired

visual strategies evinces a prevailing but largely unacknowledged pessimism among a new generation of practitioners and students.

Shape’s prominence speaks to a similar skepticism about architecture’s ability to communicate complex concepts through visual constructs.

But shape is also symptomatic of an architectural culture that, in being too accommodating of its past, cannot forget long enough to move forward...Today’s celebration of ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s architectural pop by a computationally adept generation with limitless visual and theoretical resources at its disposal is a profoundly ironic gesture. But in the neopomo formula, irony is no longer an effective critical response to positivism, expressionism, or navel-gazing existentialism; it’s simply par for the course. Shape is complacent. Ultimately it celebrates cultural inertia. The problem with shape is that its carefully tailored brand of humor, nostalgia, anyone-can-do-it formalism, and historical-theoretical indifference is more a defense mechanism (nothing waged, nothing to critique) than it is an authentic impulse to contend with out disciplinary past and the difficult project of projecting a future.”

Hans Tursack, The Problem With Shape, Log 41

“I’m staying in shape, working out.”

Pete Sampras

“ I was playing this video game. You were like dating ghosts or

something. And I was really into it. Played it like 24/7. Until this one afternoon. And suddenly, like, something broke. It was just like… pixels.

The characters on screen... I felt like I knew them. They weren’t people anymore, they were just shapes. And their lines were just things someone had written. They never existed, they never had feelings. They never would exist, either. And it felt so sad. Like I’d just lost these real people.

And this whole thing we had, it was just me, alone. And that realization dumped out of the screen and into real life. Went outside and the tree out front, I looked at it every day, it was like a friend outside that window.

Now it was just a thing… just a thing that was there. Growing and eating and just being there. Like all the stuff about the tree was just in my head.

And there was some guy walking by, and he was just shapes. Just like this moving bulk of... stuff. And I cried, because nothing was there for me anymore. It was all just stuff, stuff in the universe. Just… dead. “ Night in The Woods

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way - things I had no words for.”

Georgia O’Keeffe

Architects author drawings, not buildings. Thus, the way

architecture is represented is critical to locating and leveraging the agency of architects. Traditional orthographic drawings, which aim to describe a future building through scaled measurement and projection have been rejected by many as exclusionary and elitist, or irrelevant within a signalized, digital method of production. The strange ontological status of the ‘shape’ may breathe new life into discarded drawing practices, presenting new possibilities. Shapes evade easy categorization, flickering between plans, sections, icons, diagrams, and elevations. At their most refined, shapes manifest as a hybrid combination of these readings. Representational norms are confused, questioned, and rearticulated. Defining what a shape even is proves to be similarly troublesome. Are shapes always closed? How thick can a line become until it is reclassified as a shape? Are shapes only two dimensional? Are lines and curves the limits of shape-making? Shapes transcend scale, describing a whole down to its smallest parts. The discrete quality shapes imply allow for strategic slippages between readings of part and whole, disputing the dominance of one over the other. Within this playful haze of contradictions and multiplicities, a new architectural knowledge can emerge.

“The object of art is to give life a shape” William Shakespeare, Famous Shakespeare Quotes Pinterest Board

Architecture is all consuming. Everything becomes a project,

everything becomes content, everything becomes design. Yet, for all the iteration and composition, the drawing and modelmaking, nothing seems to change. The feverish pace is only posturing as progress, when in reality it serves to maintain an ouroboric status-quo. Aesthetic projects, philosophical inquiries, trends in the art world, and technological advances are eyed eagerly by the discipline: devoured, digested, and disposed of. Institutions are perpetually reorienting their creativite capital towards constantly shifting ‘disciplinary concerns.’ None of these concerns are shared by the general public, or anyone outside of the academy who isn’t commissioning an avant-garde second home. All that is internally recognized is the innovation, refinement, sophistication of these meaningless projects: the value of the content produced is only a side effect. The result is an increasingly fractured field where each practitioner must passionately argue that their work on chairs, fabric textures, screenshots, gradients, folds, paper, shapes, networks, dolmens, mock-ups, surfaces, and rocks has any significance at all. In a culture oversaturated with information, we must aim to create knowledge that matters. Rather than producing work for its own sake, we must ask ourselves what is worth learning, and what is worth making. Sometimes, shapes can just be shapes.