Pattersons Associates [blog] have proposed a lighting scheme for the Auckland Harbour Bridge as part of tidying up around the place for the Rugby World Cup. I like it because it looks like space invaders shooting at each other across the harbour. War with the North Shore was inevitable, I suppose. The proposal was the joint winner, with oh.no.sumo‘s Cupcake Pavilion, of the open division of the AAA Cavalier Bremworth Awards held last week. (I should mention that the winner of the student division, Yosop Ryoo, is a student of mine, so I’m quite pleased about that – I’ll post some more pictures of his work some time). Herald writeup here.
Month: November 2009
Roadside Picnic
When you look at it, it looks like any other piece of land. The sun shines on it like on any other part of the earth. And it’s as though nothing had particularly changed in it. Like everything was the way it was thirty years ago. My father, rest his soul, could look at it and not notice anything out of place at all. Except maybe he’d ask why the plant’s smokestack was still. Was there a strike or something? yellow ore piled up in cone-shaped mounds, blast furnaces gleaming in the sun, rails, rails, and more rails, a locomotive with flatcars on the rails. In other words, an industry town. Only there were no people. Neither living nor dead. You could see the garage, too: a long gray intestine, its doors wide open. The trucks were parked on the paved lot next to it. He was right about the trucks–his brains were functioning. God forbid you should stick your head between two trucks. You have to sidle around them. There’s a crack in the asphalt, if it hasn’t been overgrown with bramble yet. Forty yards. Where was he counting from? Oh, probably from the last pylon. He’s right, it wouldn’t be further than that from there. Those egghead scientists were making progress. They’ve got the road hung all the way to the dump, and cleverly hung at that! There’s that ditch where Slimy ended up, just two yards from their road. Knuckles had told Slimy: stay as far away from the ditches as you can, jerk, or there won’t be anything to bury. When I looked down into the water, there was nothing. This is the way it is with the Zone: if you come back with swag–it’s a miracle; if you come back alive–it’s a success; if the patrol bullets miss you–it’s a stroke of luck. And as for anything else –that’s fate.”
[ From Roadside Picnic (1971), by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic was the short story on which Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) was based. ]
The Traction of Drawing
I was at the The Traction of Drawing, the 2009 Interstices Under Construction Symposium last weekend. It’s good to see the Under Construction event becoming established – this time there was a sizable international contingent. Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul and Ross Jenner did a great job of organising it (and simultaneously editing issue 10 of Interstices, based on last year’s symposium On Adam’s House in the Pacific ).
New Zealand schools of architecture, and the Auckland University school in particular, has had a long fascination with architectural drawing. In the mid-nineties there was some amazingly skilled work: (I was personally conscious of the shadows of Peter Wood, Russell Lowe, Simon Twose and Andrew Barrie), some acute theorising of representation and post-coloniality, and some excellent teaching (in Sarah Treadwell’s drawing lectures in my first year at architecture school I understood very little, but remembered an enormous amount). The Traction of Drawing was, in this respect, a return visit to familiar terrain.
Sadly, there was little new at the event. In light of this symposium, I think that by the turn of the century, theorising about drawing had become consolidated: the arguments sketched, positions established. Catherine Ingraham’s Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (1998), Robin Evans’ The Projective Cast (1995), and Stan Allen’s Architecture: Practice, Technique, Representation (2000, just released in a second edition, 2009) are the texts I find most compelling from this period. Ingraham indicates the philosophy of linearity implicit in much of architectural drawing, while Evans, with his characteristic lucidity, explores the mechanics of projective drawing and Allen insists that drawing not be artificially divorced from the context of architectural practice.
The Traction of Drawing felt dated, particularly with regard to computer drawing, which, unfathomably, some people seemed to think was somehow more problematic than any other mode of drawing. We were treated to the antique spectacle of some people standing up for ‘the digital’, others for the humanising value of hand-drawing, and others charitably proposing some kind of ‘hybrid’. Hybridity is an essentialist concept that assumes the existence of the discrete identites it merges, when in fact the extent to which drawing, modelling, simulating, rendering, geometry etc are actually differentiable as practices in the first place is precisely what is in question. Few people seemed interested in examining actual differences between computer- and hand-drawing; and there was a dearth of reference to current literature. Some bad critical habits were on display: unjustified reliance on puns and etymologies; and the tendency to build towering theoretical edifices on carefully selected edge-cases (a glaring fault of my own paper).
Drawing is ill-defined. So what? What is the desirability of establishing this kind of definition anyway? What is gained from maintaining a clearly demarcated thing called ‘drawing’? Albert Refiti’s paper, ‘Against Drawing’ described the construction of a Samoan fale as a kind of drawing in space that was not resolved as the projection of a plane, but as the aerial trajectory of a suspended curve. To call this a hybrid of drawing and modelling is to impose a categorical distinction that makes no sense in the cultural-technical context. Andrew Barrie commented at one point that the tendency to consider drawing in terms of a single authorial figure was an historians way of seeing things – and it is possible that the desire to maintain categorical distinctions like ‘drawing’ is a similar historians bias. Why defend drawing? Drawing doesn’t need to be defended from anything.
The keynote speaker, Marco Frascari, was of little interest, unfortunately (I didn’t attend his wrap-up comments on Sunday). Some of Professor Frascari’s writings (‘The Tell-the-tale Detail‘ and Monsters of Architecture especially) are excellent. Here, however, behind enjoyable although dubiously-useful latinate neologisms such as ‘facture’ and ‘sapience’, his argument was unimpressive. He began with the idea that architects are neurologists because they act on the nervous system. But then there was a blurring of emotion and sense, and the discussion collapsed back onto the assertion that certain drawings provoke emotion and others don’t (from his examples, I had the uncomfortable feeling that he meant blurry bits were emotional and straight-line drawings weren’t). The materiality of drawings, Frascari argued (the weight of their lines, the texture of their surfaces) are to be savoured for their emotional stimulation. But it isn’t recalcitrant Cartesianism to observe that architectural drawings operate in other ways than the direct pleasuring of the embodied viewer; commonly (although not necessarily) notating or foreshadowing an act of construction in a higher-dimension space. (In fact, it occurs to me that projective drawing is not really Cartesian at all – it certainly isn’t Euclidean). To neglect these other operations of architectural drawing in favour of the pleasure of the singular drawn artefact is falling back on a comfortable auratic elitism.
The session I found most interesting was the final one (possibly because I had already given my presentation, so I could relax!). Andrew’s discussion of Japanese folded-paper drawings accessed a practice unfussed about maintaining distinctions between drawing and modelling. Mike Davis’s demonstration of how drawing operates in a host of ways in his own current practice was refreshing because it classified drawing by forms and degrees of abstraction rather than media. Christine McCarthy, noting the origination of section drawings in renaissance anatomical practice and ideas about architecture as a body, catalogued current medical diagnostic techniques which have supplanted cutting (MRI, CAT, PET), raising the possibility of new parallel architectural drawings. I almost laughed out loud when, in response to yet another lengthy question about whether computers are stealing the souls of our drawings, Christine simply replied that in a few years nobody would care, so it wasn’t a big deal. This session at least felt like it was taking place in the present.
Interstices has always had high academic standards, but it needs to continually update itself. In my view, The Traction of Drawing was too hidebound to assist with this.
Mandelbulb
The Mandelbrot and Julia sets are two-dimensional fractals that most of us have wasted some time zooming in and out of. The Mandelbulb is a three-dimensionalisation of the Mandelbrot set. Not sure if it’s actually mathematically a pure fractal, but it’s freaky awesome inside! More 3D fractals here and a low-tech fractal by sevensixfive here.
A Meeting at Sea
It is an ugly or perhaps homely sailboat, broad and blundering along. The other is the magnificent red steel hull of a much larger vessel, loaded up with containers. On the sailboat, a man is moving frantically, heaving on stays and turning the wheel. The other is an implacable wall moving steadily. The sailboat begins to turn, but the arc is too shallow. It is drawn roughly across the surface of the other, a blunt pencil stabbed against a table. Unperturbed the other passes by, leaving the stunned and splintered sailboat in its considerable wake.
Infinitely Diffused Interior
From the outside, Byzantine churches are homely brick piles. The exterior surfaces of the architecture diminish in importance: the patterning of brick and stone supplant pseudo-classical elements, although these sometimes remain in a vestigial form.
Daphni, near Athens, c1100
It has been noted that while for the Greeks, architecture had primarily been a plastic art of exterior form, allied to sculpture, for the Romans it was the interior that was defined plastically. Although this distinction is already clear in Nero’s Domus Aurea, it reaches its peak in the Hadrianic interiors of the Pantheon and the Villa Adriana. Apollodorus has been criticised for not really resolving the collision of the circular drum of the Pantheon with the rectangular portico – certainly from the outside, the meeting is unlovely, and modest attention is paid to the exterior surface of the drum. But this is because the Pantheon is primarily (I should probably stop short of saying exclusively) an interior.
Byzantine space is an extension of this tendency. The exterior ceases to be a site of attention, but as the exterior becomes more and more prosaic, the interior becomes deeper, richer, and more ornate. The interior surfaces become particularly lavish. The plastically-defined volumes of Roman interiors become vivid spatial envelopes enclosed by a precious gold skin.
The bodies of the saints, angels, and courtiers who populate these envelopes hover over a gold mosaic ground. Their space is not defined by aedicules or contextual clues. They live over luminous gold depths, emphasising their detachment from things of this world. Candlelit, these surfaces are animate: glinting and shimmering amongst regions of deep shadow. The circular haloes around their heads were sometimes slightly dished, inducing an atmospheric disturbance in this divine ether as the light reflects off the curved surface, and making the head emerge from the plane of the wall.
The mosaic circles of the floor of S. Vitale in Ravenna, c547, are carefully given drop shadows, producing the effect that the floor is actually a series of layered geometries. The floor, like the walls visually dissolves and shimmers.
In S. Vitale the space is layered so that interior views ever yield a complete picture. We always look through into new depths. From almost any point on the plan, it is possible to see through two, three, or more layers. Although the chapel is circular, a spatial form typically associated with unity and visual completeness, it packs huge depths into its plan. There is a sense that the space is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. Later churches amplified this effect of the infinitely-extended interior: St Sophia in Kiev, c1040, is an extreme example: the central and transverse axes and dome devolve into a field of piers and cupola.
From the perspective of an architectural culture apparently convinced that exterior form is the primary rhetorical dimension of architecture, Byzantine churches appear unimpressive. But the spatiality of the interior and the calibration of diffusive effects are remarkable.
Untitled Tower for Daniel 221106
The Traction of Drawing
Just a note to say I’m presenting at the upcoming Interstices Under Construction symposium at the University of Auckland. The symposium runs from Fri 13 – Sun 15 November. The topic is drawing. I think now is a good time to re-visit some of the questions about drawing that were asked when it first became evident that digital drawing was going to become the norm in architectural practice, hopefully without some of the silly polarisation of the earlier round of questioning. The keynotes are from Marco Frascari (whose Monsters of Architecture was an important book for me), and Laurence Simmons.
My paper is going to look at two drawings, one by Enric Miralles, and one by Preston Scott Cohen, and explore the idea of the drawing as a crowded field or a collective formation. Or something. I’m blogging about it rather than actually writing it right now…
Hydriotaphia: The Failed Case
Etruscan urn-burial from Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (1976)
Hydriotaphia (1658), Sir Thomas Browne’s meditation on the discovery of a group of Bronze Age burial urns in an English field, elaborates a theory of the body, and it is this elaboration that distinguishes it from Browne’s other writings. It is the most systematic of his texts; where Religio Medici (1643) is a confessional document following a loosely segmented train of thought, and Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) proceeds according to no discernable plan, Hydriotaphia anchors itself to specific material artefacts, which it places in context and interrogates. It is not, however, simply the documentation of a discovery. Although Browne’s analytical and descriptive technique raises some of the concerns which have become central to modern archaeological practice, his text is not a report, but an inquiry in which, I argue, the nature of the body is pivotal.
Browne’s immediate concern is for the body as raw material, mere matter. He notes that “the body completed proves a combustible lump,” and discusses the body as fuel in the frank manner of a doctor: “How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes, may seem strange to any who considers not its constitution, and how slender a mass will remain upon an open and urging fire of the carnal composition.” Human remains are of the earth, and burning returns them to their elemental state: “That devouring agent [fire] leaves almost always a morsel for the earth, whereof all things are but a colony; and which, if time permits, the mother element will have in their primitive mass again.” In Chapter II, while discussing the way various materials decay, ashes, teeth and bones are simply enumerated alongside ivory, leaves, wood, metal, coal, eggshells, brass. The body, as it appears in Hydriotaphia is primarily a ‘lump’ of raw material.
Frontispiece engraving from Hydriotaphia (1658)
Browne focusses on decay as a temporal index. In a similar manner, Ruskin later develops the theme of decay in his Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), arguing strongly against the repair of historical structures on the grounds that it is precisely their state of decay that constitutes their historicity: if worn materials are replaced with new ones, then the structure has lost its authenticity, and remains only as a parody of the original. Ruskin considers the perception of age to be a crucial dimension of architectural experience; he is concerned with the scarring and eventual vanishing of the object. In Ruskin’s account, the architectural body ages by analogy with the human body: it bears increasingly evident marks of its age, and eventually collapses. It is important to note that Ruskin is concerned primarily with the maintenance of authenticity. His prohibition against intervention on historical buildings and his acceptance of decay are grounded in his requirement that building be authentic; that the truth of the building remain. In Browne’s account of the body, the truth has departed with the soul and passed into the spiritual domain. His inquiry is into what remains. Where Ruskin’s project is to elevate the spiritual on the back of the material, Browne muses on the value of the remainder.
The recurrent figure of Hydriotaphia is that of the body enclosed or encased. Browne addresses the various framings and encasings the human body is subjected to, or shown to depend on. This is also an architectural theory (as theories of the relationship between the physical body and the world necessarily are). The initial example, and the one which establishes the type of all others is of course the burial urn, which is repeatedly opposed by Browne to the mausoleum or monumental tomb. The central passage regarding this enclosure is concerned with the general and extreme cases of enclosure: “Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle [the character of death] must conclude and shut up all.” This statement (epitaph, perhaps) follows closely upon Browne’s conclusion that “To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs” and his idea that the modern condition is that of a latecomer, and modern minds are naturally disposed to an awareness of the rapidity of time’s passage and its impending conclusion. According to Browne, all bodies exhibit closure, and this closure is a geometric figure. A body’s closure is its property of exclusion: its ability to be distinct and separate from other things; that is, as Browne says, the body is a state of ‘limit’.
Browne here is evidently evoking Vitruvius with the image of the body framed by circle and square (that Browne’s erudition extended to Vitruvius’ Deci Libri is shown by his citing of it in The Garden of Cyrus, 1658). The Vitruvian figure of the body, centrally pinned and stretched on a graphic rack, illustrates the body receiving passively or achieving strenuously geometrical closure, and is familiar to the point of being an architectural trope. But where for Vitruvius, this figure was a demonstration of the body’s innate proportionality as a basis for architecture, Browne sees this figure for what it is: a marking of limit, the body’s enclosure. Architecture is a case which encloses with lines.
Browne also draws an explicit association between this figure of embodiment and the use of the quartered circle (the ‘right-lined circle’ – either a circle enclosed by a square, or a circle squared) as a symbol of death. Metaphorically, the figure of death is a case, because it brings finality and limit. It would perhaps not be out of place to suggest that Browne considers architecture to be a deathly case. It would certainly seem to be in keeping with Browne’s explicit pronouncements against architecture.
As he writes of ‘circles and right lines’, Browne appears too, to be evoking writing: words themselves being constructions of lines and circles, particularly in their monumental, inscribed format as they are used to provide epitaphs, accounts of deeds, and records of names. This form of funerary writing, too, could be considered as offering closure. Oblivion is the enemy of memory. Memory is a kind of afterlife (albeit one that Browne remains somewhat dubious about), and is best served by the leaving of records. It is “cold consolation to students of perpetuity” to persist in physical remains, but to be nameless and without record of deeds. In this way, the physical body could be said to depend on writing for its proper closure; and therefore writing be seen to be function similarly to physical construction. Indeed, it is the writing of the grave: inscription, epitaph, with which Browne is specifically concerned.
For Browne, all bodies depend on some kind of a case to ensure their limits and finality. This case operates against, while remaining subject to, the natural forces which tend to dissipate the body.
Diffusive Architectures 