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.

Architectural Alchemy: Dibujos sin Papel

If, according to Robin Evans, “architectural drawings are projections, which means that organized arrays of imaginary straight lines pass through the drawing to corresponding parts of the thing represented by the drawing,” the “drawings without paper” therefore should maintain a projected relationship with the thing represented but through the thing itself. And, in accordance with the investigations of the studio, these new “drawings” should be considered generative and open and not, as is many times thought of models, as finalized materializations of the design.

[for more: click here]

obstruction 2: flip flop house

… to locate the promising marginal text, to disclose the undecidable moment, to pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier, to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed.

— Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, “Translators Preface for Of Grammatology” [lxxvii]

What is never present is always possible. What is one thing is not the other. Yes. No. Opposites attract. Likes repel each other. All of these: in complete balance. The present problem is intended to articulate the dialectical condition of things. To understand them as one rather than another. And to question: what happens if we understand them as “another” (an/other) rather than as “one”?

In language, as the semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure would state, there are only “differences without positive terms.” Each word is defined, in other words, by those which are not it. Because of this, language is a system of interconnected elements that necessitate, through comparison, the presence of all others for its meaning. As a signifying system, architecture, it can be argued, works the same way. One can further argue that during the process of design, one decision overrules another: one system, one form, one structure, etc.

What happens, then, when we question those decisions?

For the “Flip Flop House,” you are to take a list of 10 descriptive statements or adjectives of the original precedent and “invert them.” From this, you will use 5. They should be the most diverse in nature and most closely tied to what you think are the initial “design decisions” of the original precedent or the most important. So, for example, “above ground” becomes “underground”; “transparent” becomes “opaque”; “pilotis” become “load bearing walls,” “horizontal windows” become “punched out windows,” the “horizontality of the project” becomes the “verticality of the project,” etc.

Using these 5 terms as rules, design a variant of the given precedent. Keep in mind to maintain the same programmatic spaces and sizes of the original. The intention is to have the designed structure be an opposite or inversion of the original. 

some earlier examples of student drawings

not the best cell phone camera quality... but they should indicate some possibilities
[click for more drawings here]

triangle house

despite the form... the building really operates within the parameters of a long/thin space...

[imagine it unfolded... in other words]


























levenbetts

japanese thin buildings

the perfect human...

obstruction 0

le corbusier at moma

[click on image to go to their site]

l'architecture d'aujourd'hui

pierre chenal's vision of le corbusier's early houses

the houses... (as seen by/found by the students)

beginnings...

Based on Lars von Trier and Jurgen Leth’s movie The 5 Obstructions (2003) and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947), this studio explores the multiple ways one can rethink architecture and its representation. At their core, both of these works investigate the ways of repeating pre-existing stories or cannons through new systems or representational strategies. In the movie, von Trier asks Leth to redo his 1967 movie, The Perfect Human, to respond to new and current filmic and personal concerns. In Queneau’s work, we simply find the reiteration of the same story using different styles.