drawdels...

in case you are interested in exploring the medium... (of which, i know many are...)

    

go here...

on architectural autonomy

it is only in that instant when the laws are silent that great actions erupt.

- marquis de sade

this + that

… the artists, the architect, first senses the effect that s/he intends to realize and sees the rooms s/he wants to create in her/his mind’s eye. S/he senses the effect that s/he wishes to exert upon the spectator … These effects are produced by both the material and the form of the space.

– Adolf Loos, “The Principle of Cladding” (1898)

For Adolf Loos, the always-already of architecture was the idea of space; the characteristics that determined the form, experience, and understanding of the building. In short, the experiential condition of architecture came first; everything else was secondary to produce that. In his 1898 “The Principle of Cladding,” he defines it in this way:

The architect’s general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. S/he decides for this reason to spread out one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent this frame is the architect’s second task.

The character and qualities of the space are the primary preoccupations of the architect. The question that remains, however, is centered on how to design anew within the parameters of an existing precedent that has, inherent to it, its own spatial and experiential sensibilities.  How to take an existing interior and transform it into (an)other one.

[These are exterior views... but, the strategy is the same...]

exquisite (architectural) corpses...

here are some examples of the exquisite corpse operation performed in architecture:

arch 451: exquisite corpse and collage city 1 (robert arlt, sdsu)

aa: diploma 11 - group site sampling collage (Madiha Ijaz Ahmad)

the exquisite corpse dungeon (antherwhyck house games)

rome...

for those working on some part of rome...

there are these...

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/EART/maps/nolli.html

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nuova_Topografia_di_Roma_di_Giovanni_Battista_Nolli_(1748)

this one can let you search particular buildings:
http://nolli.uoregon.edu/gazetteer.asp

collaging belief in the age of dibelief

Perspective and color… are shareholders in the cowardly and smug philosophy that belongs to the bourgeoisie. [Collage], on the other hand, points to the absolutely self-evident that is within reach of our hands.

— Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada

[C]ollage, often a method of paying attention to the left-overs of the world, of preserving their integrity and equipping them with dignity, of compounding matter of factness and cerebrality, as a convention and a breach of convention, necessarily operates unexpectedly. … It is suggested that a collage approach, an approach in which objects are conscripted or seduced from out of their context, is –at present day– the only way of dealing with the ultimate problems of, either or both, utopia and tradition…

— Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City [142-44]

For the contemporary artist Cyprien Gaillard, collage has the ability to denaturalize conventions and meanings inherent both in architecture and painting. His series “Belief in the Age of Disbelief” directly places modern housing structures within 17th century Dutch landscape etchings. Through these insertions, according to Monica Ramírez-Montagut, he simultaneously presents “the beauty and horrors of these megastructures … [while] maintaining the evident dichotomy and an essential separation between architecture and nature.”

The issues inherent within collage are centered on the relationship and mutual dependence that the images –disparate and foreign to each other– generate as a result of their newly constructed association while, of course, maintaining some character of their own original meaning. Synthetic cubism relied on these as well as on the re-semanticized nature of the elements to give meaning to their compositions.

Piranesi:
https://www.wikiart.org/en/giovanni-battista-piranesi/

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection

umbrella, sewing machine, operating table

For “Insertions Into Ideological Circuits,” you are to take as generative the very representations of the given canonical building. Through cutting, collage, scale increase/decrease, weaving, cross-pasting, etc., develop out of the existing plans of the given building a new set of plans. The plans, from this, should be the generator of the building’s new sectional and spatial conditions. Apply the same technique used to develop the plans to generate the elevations (albeit mediated by the findings in the sections), perspectives, etc. For these and other generative drawings, feel free to use the vast representational arsenal of the architect –not only from the given project but from his entire oeuvre; think of the possibilities of creating a project based on the surrealist technique of the “exquisite corpse.”  Additionally, keep in mind the relationship that the building has to the ground and its landscape.

This new building form, in turn, will be inserted –through the same techniques– into an equally charged historical site through the next representational assignment. Lautremont’s famous statement regarding the “fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table,” in other words, will be central for our understanding.