"City is not a fork!"

quote by EOM

by Sepa Sama

It is 7:00 pm sharp, Sci-arc gallery, once again another installation, another hard talk, once again tiered faces in demanding profession, on my left some fashion experts are seating, and they ask me; who is this guy? I reply; he is Eric Own Moss, the director EOM: Is this a big piece of fashion or small piece of architecture?

Somehow the question is so direct, as If there is no chance for multidisciplinary work.

Elena Manferdini explains the elaborate methods to build this piece or pieces, she points at something that fascinated me, she explains how the Die-cut was a very ancient method and how the laser-cut was a contemporary technology, and in order for her to achieve this piece in budget, she needed to use both techniques; as the Die-cut resembles the stamp, once they arrange the cutting edges, they could repeat the same cuts, but in the case of laser cut there is a longer machinery preparations and more costs…

I immediately think to myself; what set of skills should I have to be able to invent as an architect? And what is really an invention in architecture? When I think about the Mosques I have encountered with, the invention is never in the piece, the piece is always the simplest element as bricks, the invention is always in the tectonics or assembly or the hidden logics that the definition of the piece will no longer come close to its existence, as the whole dominates the space.

EOM: OK you are talking about techniques, but what I see is that; this thing is hanging of some wires…

Moss insists on the fact that; this is decoration due to the feature that, this is hanging from wires and the shape of the gallery as the box and the hanging wires that hold the pieces decide the whole, everything is just an additive decorative piece.

Manferdini: you always have hierarchy of structural elements, you can not immediately reach the goal with one set of materials, plus the budget was very limited and I needed to use plastic, I could have used steel and the wires were not needed, and this is the new aesthetics!

I think that the genius of the work is limited to the piece alone, which there are 4 types of them, but what Moss is not buying is the easy tectonics of it, that is simply hanging from bunch of wires, that decide the overall shape, I think to myself in the case of Muqarnas, the overall shape is the exact difference of the box and the dome, and for the Muqarnas to be Muqarnas, there is no negotiation of the boundaries, all the complexity happens within the defined area, and different systems merge together without the observer being able to distinguish the logics discretely.

Me being her student and having designed a stadium, there is an issue of promise in her work, a promise of architecture, but the thing is not secured as architecture as Moss insists, this is what I did in her studio around 2 years ago:

With this work I always imagined; if this was going to be built, we will be in a Ducati condition, meaning that we had series of serious trusses and the more fluid skin frozen in a plastic state will hang from the structure;

After a rigid conversation Moss somehow concludes that; this is a big piece of fashion, the argument goes around the same topic and they both seem to resist each other, unfortunately the fashion experts left without showing any interest in the discussion.

Sepa: Can we compare this to Muqarnas? In a simple analogy, in a Mosque; we have a box and a dome and the transition in between; that gives birth to a sophisticated geometry as Muqarnas, and in this piece we have complexity and somehow geometric complexity finds its scale and place in architecture?

Elena Manferdini, rejects to answer, I had asked her before personally that would she find any connection to Islamic architecture in her work? And she had told me NONE, which I accept, but this question was meant to be in her favor, somehow I feel the Parthenon as an architectural geopolitical barrier again….

Moss starts to answer, he seems to be in the favor of the question, but I am not sure if he answered my question,

He talked about Islam and the form of the Mosque that was constant, and he seemed to make a very strong connection between the form and the culture and how it was missing in the installation and then he talked about how fashion and architecture can not be allies, because of the permanent characteristics of architecture…

Somehow the freedom of discourse of architecture from the culture was the topic that Moss made me think; as if in our profession, the limitation of culture is temporally released and we have created the architecture of its own culture, its own aesthetics, its own audience, its own publication, its own budget!

Sepa: What is the Eisenman-Lynn Transition? If the transition has happened! In another words; how the knowledge and skills of architect has changed?

Moss pauses, and then he laughs, he remembers me from the last lecture, I feel that my question has some content to it, it is really my question; as what is going to be my knowledge, as my friends posses sophisticated CNC skills and I don’t….

EOM: Greg and Peter are both my friends, At least Greg invented something! I know that Peter can seat in a bar in Berlin with a pencil and he does not need anything else….

That seemed interesting to me, I like to see an architect as a person that thinks, rather than a person that invents like a Ducati builder, because I tend to understand the huge promise of architecture as product or architecture as Ducati, and the freedom of forms and tectonics and performance and many other promises, but conceptually we are limiting ourselves to set of techniques and what happened to the simple architecture and simple methods and strong concepts? like in case of the Berlin Memorial, There is no need for the sophisticated technology to address the monument, I am not against techniques or invention or new methods, but I think what I understand is the inherent strength of architecture is outside of the techniques and it can conceptualize itself through set of techniques, but the bigger idea must be there, other wise we become Ducati architects, which I am not interested in.

On the other hand side these Ducati like industries are so called vertical industries and they have a very different mode of liabilities and divisions of responsibilities that make the invention easier for them in a more totalitarian way, and the invention is limited to the brand itself.

I don’t know what Lynn has invented and Moss does not make any specifications, a modular piece? But one thing was clear; that Eisenman could be traced with his definite specific unique ahuhhh decisions and Lynn seemed to argue to consume series of machine logics and computer logics and design skill logics, which brings me to the discussion of Hume and Architectural geopolitical generational wars.

Few weeks earlier a Dynasty had invited Manuel Delanda to lecture at Sci-arc, it was very similar to last year’s, but according to my memory; he discussed some new character, which was Hume and he discussed him in a very long time, and he talked about the skill, he talked about how the knowledge is unique only to the person that knows how, he brought the example of someone who knows how to ride a bicycle, that knowledge is unique to him, as Moss was directly looking at Delanda, the Dynasty was directly looking at Moss and that was the time I felt, I don’t belong here and I left, I hope my assumption was incorrect but I smelled generational wars. To be or not to be: …

But later, that event kept me thinking and somehow, I realized or I made assumptions based on; to be or not to be, the cycle of generations, to be does not necessarily means continuation, If you continue some entity older than you or in a different geopolitical region with more history, that means, you are always inferior, to be a new or to stand up, you must invent, or discontinue, to discontinue, you need to construct a barrier, a geopolitical barrier, or the HumeSkilloKnowledgeotechnological barrier, but you make it if the result is not a promise or how long the promise can be continued?

Manferdini: the methodologies of different disciplines have become the same and therefore; designers can have a wide range of works.

EOM: …city is not a fork!

We all laughed, he is the master surgeon that dissected the independency of skill and knowledge, as Manferdini was going for inherent knowledge of the technique in her work which can not be incorrect, but there is a generational tension and difference.

EOM: I appreciate all the work, and thank you all for coming.

Now is my turn to make an object, I will pick a plain coin, on one side, I carve; to be or not to be is not my dilemma by Rumi and I carve it with a Zen like degree of attentiveness,

On the other side I laser-cut; to be or not to be: that is the question by Shakespeare with a machine like degree of precision,

I project the coin toward the lost clouds, and its rotations define the third routine, similar to the Muqarnas that no longer remembers the box or the dome.

Bibliography

Hamlet by Shakespeare, p.146

Rumi, whispers of the beloved translated by Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin, p.48

Tracing Eisenman, edited by Cynthia Davidson, p.290

David Hume, A treatise of human nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary Norton

Pen images, www.fountainpenemporium.com

Ducati image, www.ducati.com

White, www.iranian.com

The rest is based on the student’s notes, questions and thoughts during the series of

Sci-arc installations, reviews and lectures in the spring of 2008. www.sciarc.edu

“Punch- hole building”, the new vertical courtyard?

by Guillermina Chiu

In an endeavor to challenge the building typology that is simply analyzed in floor plan within the discourse of architecture, this essay attempts to show how the “courtyard typology” has gradually morphed into a vertical scenario, keeping the underlying principle that different forms can belong to the same type, but be constructed dissimilar, reinforcing conventional architectural features in denser urban scales.

Throughout the discourse of architecture the word typology has had different connotation and meaning according to location, density and quality.

Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, professor of archaeology at the Bibliothèque Nationale (1818) gives a precise definition of “type” in his historical Dictionnaire d'Architecture: “The idea of an element which should itself serve as a model”.

Rafael Moneo considers typology as the inherent, structural and formal order that allows architectural objects to be grouped together, distinguished and repeated. Similar to him, Leon Krier thinks of it as a precise analytical tool for architecture and urban form, which also provides a rational basis for design. On the other hand Aldo Rossi sees it as a repetitive technique of production (closer

to Boulee and Ledoux ideas on the value of the place).

Abbe Laugier believed that the natural basis of design was to be found in the primitive hut; while Le Corbusier believed that the model of architectural design should be founded in the production process itself.

For Giulio Carlo Argan’s, typology is a historically-derived “formal” consensus, found by “comparing and superimposing”. It is an architectural “average” that should be distinguished from an archetype (an ideal form from which one is not allowed to deviate) A type has made possible the rehabilitation of historical meaning in a way flexible enough to allow for those meanings to change when circumstances dictated.

Typology is not just a classifying or statistical process, historical, social and economical factors generate or eradicate them over time, but in the end, the discourse always returns to the problem of form. Today the idea of the third typology raises the question of a city as an operation type, based as well on reason and classification as the guiding principles.

A courtyard is a type of building; like I mentioned a type only analyzed in floor plan. It is an enclosed space that is open to the sky. The earliest courtyards were built in 3000 B.C. in Iran and China. Historically, they have been used for cooking, sleeping, trading, working, playing, gardening, and even keeping animals. Different formal and spatial qualities make them the ideal image of the suburban landscape: A courtyard is a freestanding construction with a permanent landscaped park that offers opportunity for social interaction.

The problem of the courtyard has been dealt by many architects. Perhaps the most famous approach is Peter Eisenman’s figure-ground argument. The relationship of the ground is divided in external and internal. For Eisenman, Bramante lacked of figure ground relationship. For instance, If we take a Nolli map of Rome, Eisenman would address the problem by arguing that the public open space (white) is to be considered as the presence, and the private in black is to be considered as the absence or the partial figure, because it is in the “not present present” (the partial figure or the absence) that affective conditions are created. Perhaps Jaffrey Kipnis would address the same problem as the absence being the site and the presence as being the ground; but ultimately the courtyard diagram is one that has both political and cultural context.

If we take the problem of the courtyard, and analyze it as if it was a section instead of a floor plan; we could argue that the diagram has what Kipnis would call a “new authenticity”, for the diagram to work; it needs a degree of literalness and idiocy. The literalness is given by the obvious analogy between architecture and iconography; the idiocy is given by translating the floor plan diagram into a sectional one.

The “punch- hole building” vertical courtyard possesses the ideal image of the urban landscape; the perfect public isolated landscaped view. A vertical courtyard configuration that offers the opportunity of social hierarchy without mixed interaction. Perhaps population density is the most important factor for the “new vertical courtyards” to be born. Whether or not a symbolic context exists before the creation of this type? Is not to be discussed...

Architecture "is" vs Architecture "becomes"

by Guillermina Chiu

These are my ideas , a response to a set of cultural , social and economical circumstances driving architecture in the construction of my mind.
Architecture is part of society , a nexus of human activity driven by personal politics ; often times, a social experiment which leads the subjects to a set of deliberate choices, choices we as architects make , how far are we willing to make people go ?
I’m interested in what architecture can “become”, not in what architecture “is”; although it seems that architecture “becomes” because “it is”, the “is of architecture” refers to permanent, timeless and unchangeable concepts, opposed to “becoming”. I find the idea of Architecture very different from the experience of Architecture, and I wonder what lies behind the paradox of all t he thinkers in Architecture and their work (i.e. Nouvel, Rotondi, Eisenman, Lyyn).

If Architecture is a morphing creature indeed, it can only “be” if it “becomes” it can only survive if it changes. Eric Owen Moss says in “Who says what Architecture is?” that for Sciarc, there is no surprise; it has no permanent friends or enemies in poetry, time or space.
In “To have or to be” (pp.21) Eric Fromm states the philosophical concepts of “being”. For the “scholastic realists” makes sense only in the idealistic conception that a thought is the ultimate truth , therefore and idea is more real than an experience. Can Architecture jeopardize experience ?

I would like Architecture to “become” a subject in which no one but Architecture would be the spectacle, a place in which space is the subject to be discussed, it could be anywhere: desert, sea, wasteland, wilderness, city, suburbia, virtual land…in the realm of imagination. “A drawing limits as much as it opens possibilities” (Edward Robbins)
from “Fame and the Changing role of a drawing” by Jon Goodbun and Katherin Jaschke (pp 51).