➔ The Marriage of Reason and Squalor: drawings by Pier Vittorio Aureli — “Pieces of architecture-in-waiting that, despite rejecting a precise programme, are waiting sheet after sheet, to turn into something better defined, which is not necessarily architecture.”
Architecture
Corner Solutions of Mies Van Der Rohe’s towers
➔ Corner Solutions of Mies Van Der Rohe’s towers — Details from a 1972 issue of Architectural Review, via SOCKS Studio.
Saint Sophia in Istanbul : an architectural survey.
➔ Saint Sophia in Istanbul : an architectural survey. — Beautiful drawing set by Robert L. van Nice (1965-1986). Personal favourites are pl. 1 ‘General plan at ground level’ and pl.29 ‘Plan of dome at cornice’.
Saint Sophia in Istanbul : an architectural survey.
➔ Saint Sophia in Istanbul : an architectural survey. — Beautiful drawing set by Robert L. van Nice (1965-1986). Personal favourites are pl. 1 ‘General plan at ground level’ and pl.29 ‘Plan of dome at cornice’.
On first principles
From a profile of Friedrich Kiesler in Architectural Forum (1947)
“If Kiesler wants to hold two pieces of wood together, he pretends he’s never heard of nails or screws. He tests the tensile strengths of various metal alloys, experiments with different methods and shapes, and after six months comes up with a very expensive device that holds two pieces of wood together almost as well as a screw”
Reality reduced to a model
REALITY REDUCED TO A MODEL
Reading through Geoff Manaugh’s interview with Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, I came across this:
“If you lay, side by side, quotations from USC’s discourse on parametric urbanism now and USC’s discourse on cybernetic urbanism thirty years ago, for better or for worse, you can read them as a complete narrative. It’s impossible to distinguish which is which. Both are born out of a fundamental faith in technology and a fundamental notion that, if you feed enough variables into a problem-solving system — now we call it parametric, then we would have called it cybernetic — that an appropriate and robust solution will emerge. I’m not, myself, so sure that’s the case; in fact, I’m pretty certain that it’s not.”
Models are translations of reality, and all translations are partial, reducing some dimensions in order to allow a degree of fidelity in other dimensions. Something is abstracted away in order to concentrate something else: a white paper model might leave out any suggestion of materials to highlight volume; and acoustic properties may be excluded from an electronic model that simulates solar gain. Breaking a situation down into variables and parameters so it can be modelled is no stranger than any other kind of modelling. Problems arise when reality is reduced to the model.
I agree with de Monchaux that appropriate and robust solutions don’t emerge automatically given enough parameters; and appreciate his reminder that, despite a varnish of novelty, parametric approaches are not new.
(Again, I’d plug Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) on this topic).
Aureli, Stop City
Stop City, by Dogma (2008). English text here. Dogma is the firm of which Pier Vittorio Aureli is a member.
Arieff advocating for temporary architecture
Alison Arieff at the NYT advocating for temporary architecture. In my view, all building needs to be recognised as temporary.
Kennicott on MVRDV pseudo-controversy
Phillip Kennicott, art and architecture critic for the Washington Post, doing his job on the MVRDV pseudo-controversy:
The controversy seems part of a larger cultural effort to make the events of September 11, 2001 somehow sacred, to use the meaning of the terrorist attack for larger, more overbearing cultural control. So now it is being deployed against contemporary architecture, not because there is anything inherently offensive in this design (which may or may not be an intentional reference to 9/11), but because the emotions generated by the attack have been co-opted by one part of the political and cultural spectrum.
MVRDV in the echo-chamber
MVRDV IN THE ECHO-CHAMBER
MVRDV are in trouble for cashing in on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. From Tracy Connor’s report for the NY Daily News:
A mockup shows two soaring skyscrapers connected in the middle by a “pixelated cloud” that evoked the clouds of debris that erupted from the iconic World Trade Center towers after terrorists flew planes into them.
John M. Glionna goes further in the L.A. Times:
Even at first glance, the design renderings for the soon-to-be-built pair of apartment towers here pack a wallop: They evoke New York’s World Trade Center towers in mid-explosion in the terrifying moments after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The reason it evokes it so strongly at first glance is, of course, because the article is headed up with a pair of carefully selected images designed to make the link. Do the reporters or bloggers involved actually accuse MVRDV of deliberately evoking the terrorist attacks to make money? No, of course not. They just reports the controversy. And in the case of Tracy Connor, drum up a little more by poking the images under the nose of random people predisposed to be offended, in this case a retired New York firefighter.
This patently ridiculous claim originates with gossip website Gawker, for whom generating outrage is just another way to get clicks. Currently, they are also headlining “‘Elvis Monkey’ has a Michael Jackson Nose”.
The echo–chamber takes over, with nobody adding or asking anything new, or weighing the insinuations or claims. But then, this is the game MVRDV were playing. As Wouter Vanstiphout points out, it’s a “logical outcome of the global trade in empty images”, a trade in which MVRDV are complicit.
UPDATE: 24hrs later, the same story, with precisely zero new content, continues to echo.
Joseph Gandy’s Rural Essentialism
We’re used to seeing crisp white surfaces as a marker of urbane essentialism—c.f. O.M. Ungers’ Haus 3, or Loos’s Müller House—so it’s a little disorienting to remember that what we talk about as ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ has had quite different connotations in the past. For J.M Gandy (see this profile by Christopher Woodward) in 1805, for example, it was a matter of rustic humility. In his book Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural Buildings; including Entrance Gates and Lodges (London: John Harding) we find these stark white boxes: windows punched, untrimmed and horizontally oriented; surfaces unornamented; and with minimal overhangs. The images are somewhat surprising, given the sensitivity to materials, light, massing, and detail in his more famous images for John Soane.
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate V.)
Joseph Gandy, Cottage, 1805 (Plate XVII.)
Paolo Portoghesi, Islamic Cultural Centre (1974)
Paolo Portoghesi, Islamic Cultural Centre, Rome (1974). Portoghesi is interesting – his best details approach Scarpa, and the intensity of his relationship to Borromini is clear; but some of his work is clunky and kitschy. The mosque of his Islamic Cultural Centre is amazing – sinuous and dense. But then he’s also responsible for this. Ignore that and look at these:
Suppressing the Ground
Plan of the theatre at Olympia, drawn by Wilhelm Dörpfeld
Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853-1940) was trained as an architect, at the Bauakademie in Berlin and gained archaeological experience working on the excavations at Olympia. He was headhunted by Heinrich Schliemann, and went on to found the German School in Athens, which now takes his name, and become the Director of the Athens branch of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Dörpfeld was a very capable draftsman and the drawings in his book Das Griechische Theater (1896) are typical of his work: precise, complete and detailed.
In Dörpfeld’s plan of the theatre certainty and interest are shown through exactitude and solidity of line, while presumption and conjecture are marked with dotted lines which skip across the surface of the page. Dörpfeld pays considerable attention to the paving pattern of the theatre floor; to the blockwork and cavities above “N”, and in the vicinity of “E”. He indicates subtle distinctions in materiality in these areas and notes alignments and misalignments. But what about the large areas of the drawing that escape attention altogether? The spaces between blocks, walls and drains are entirely empty, apart from the texture of the page on which they are printed. What takes place in these spaces? What purpose do they serve?
The theatre in Dörpfeld’s drawing stands out as a clear figure. Each block sits distinctly against a white ground. The sharp lines of the original ink drawing, and of the published engraving, lend themselves to describing sharp-edged objects. In this clear construction of figure and ground, the empty spaces of the page represent the condition of the ground. In opposition to the plenitude of significance which is sought in the objects disclosed by archaeology, the ground is represented as a place from which no significance is to be extracted. The ground is that which escapes attention. Representing the archaeological site as a place of painstaking clarity is only possible by subsuming all the various problems of ground in archaeological practice under the blanket representation of emptiness.
Dörpfeld’s plan suppresses the archaeologist’s problematic encounter with the ground. However, there are even moments in his precise drawing where the ground emerges as a difficulty. In the areas marked “V” and “F”, a flurry of little lines marks out the ground’s rumpled surface. They seem to gather together to mark out edges. If we consult the key, we might conclude that they are intended to signify marble (“MARMOR”), but there is a distinct difference between this and other instances of marble in the drawing: compared to the stones marked above “L”, the surface at “V” is rough. These scratchy lines do not seem to signify the veins of marble. They are ambiguous moments in which the archaeologist has been unable to suppress the ground completely. Again, in areas to the far left and right of the drawing, the rendering of solid stone fades away indistinctly into the empty ground (above “W” and near “B”). At these moments, the archaeologist’s ability to define an edge, to clearly mark the contour between something that is present and something that is not, fails. The problem of resolving an architectural figure from an archaeological ground merges with the problem of resolving an architectural figure from a drawn ground.
It is noteworthy that such failures are permissible at the periphery of the drawings – at a distance from the centre which is marked by the dotted circles and the centre line of the theatre – but not near the centre itself. Uncertainty occurs at the periphery.
The ability to form a strong figure is paramount for Dörpfeld. If the image was grey and murky, he would be unable to resolve architecture as independent and autonomous. Dörpfeld constructs a clear architectural figure, but in doing so, he also posits the ground as a vacancy, as that which escapes attention because it cannot be delineated.
In the publications of Layard and Schliemann, the site is morcellated and scattered through the text as a myriad small engravings: objects, architectural details, profiles, landscape scenes, ethnographic details, comparisons, speculative renderings, tracings, inscriptions, maps. Together this collection of details and fragments comprise an archive that is sorted according to the order of the archaeologist’s experience. The architectural plan is only one more artefact in this archive. Dörpfeld and Theodore Fyfe (architect for Sir Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos), conversely, privilege the plan over the site, over the ground. The plan is the central document, the system of ordering to which all the other details are referred, the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion which functions to define the modern archaeological site. As such, plan substitutes for the ground in its function as a repository of archaeological knowledge.
More recently, archaeological criticism has queried the presumption of the archaeologist’s observational distance and noted the political dimension of the archaeological gaze. Julian Thomas writes:
The means by which we characteristically represent place, the distribution map, the air photo, the satellite image and the Geographical Information System, are all distinctively specular. They all imply a considerable distance between subject and object, and they all present a picture of past landscapes which the inhabitant would hardly recognise. All attempt to lay the world bare, like Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table”, or like the corpse under the pathologist’s knife.
The distantiation of archaeological subject from object is produced by the representational techniques considered above, which chart a process of modernisation from the end of the nineteenth century. Archaeological drawing shifts to exclude the registers of the private and the uncertain. It remains possible, though, to see these registers re-surfacing in the most strictly controlled of drawings. Catherine Ingraham describes architecture as a practice of delineation associated with the ‘tactics of ideality’. These tactics can be clearly seen at work in the constitution of the archaeological site as a representation that can be shared publicly. The ground is problematic under these terms for two reasons: the ground is a necessary pre-condition of the line; yet it resists delineation. The ground is thus a representational problem for architecture, archaeology, and the complex interactions between the two fields. Ground cannot simply be “represented”, because it is a necessary condition of representation itself.
Density and Delineation
Subterranean Excavations at Kouyunjik (1853)
“Subterranean Excavations at Kouyunjik” is a drawing from Austen Henry Layard’s Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853). It is a grey image, closely hatched, depicting a vaulted underground space that divides into two vaults in the midground, and shades off into darkness in the distance. It is presented as a vignette without a distinct frame. The deep space contains artefacts and workers: in the foreground, one man gestures towards the most distinctly delineated element in the picture, a relief panel on the wall, which appears to have taken two other men by surprise. Baskets and tools sit at the feet of this foreground group. Deeper in the image the two vaults frame a pair of figures and a standing vase. The two figures face in opposite directions, one facing the viewer, mirroring the gesture of the man in the foreground. At the top of the picture, the subterranean space opens to the sky. It is not entirely clear if the vaults are caverns or chambers. The largest opening at the front is sufficiently irregular as to appear natural, while the central column between the two more regular vaults appears to be made of bricks.
To resolve the architecture of this space, one must carefully examine the engraver’s marks. Viewed closely, the image is an obsessive hail of tiny scratches. The engraver varies the materiality and tone of the image by adjusting the pattern and direction of this rendered continuum. At the very top of the image, against the fine, evenly ruled lines of the sky, a sharp edge – marked with a line – suggests that the face below it is constructed. The cracks and seams in this face are formed by the dark edges of each hatched patch. Before it, to the right and left is a sharp but irregular line of heavily cross-hatched shadow. On the right, though, this cavernous line and the smoother face are made continuous: the engraver has blended the hatching in order to dissolve the edge. Further down the page, the same thing happens on the left. Similarly it is unclear whether the large bank of irregular rubble directly behind the foreground group of figures is intended to be continuous or discontinuous with the smoother face above. A cut stone block appears to be embedded in the wall above the heads of the figures, as does something else that forms a dark edge, and other details that might be artificial fragments; but they are rendered in such a way that we are welcome to read them as mere clumps or irregularities in the earth. At its base, the central pier appears to be made of consistent if irregular blockwork; further up it appears to change into a more compact small-stone construction, shading off into surfaces of indistinguishable materiality.
Of this scene, Layard writes:
After the departure of Mr. Ross, the accumulation of earth above the ruins had become so considerable, frequently exceeding thirty feet, that the workmen, to avoid the labor of clearing it away, began to tunnel along the walls, sinking shafts at intervals to admit light and air. The hardness of the soil, mixed with pottery, bricks and remains of buildings raised at various times over the buried ruins of the Assyrian palace, rendered this process easy and safe with ordinary care and precaution. The subterraneous passages were narrow, and were propped up when necessary either by leaving columns of earth, as in mines, or by wooden beams. These long galleries, dimly lighted, lined with the remains of ancient art, broken urns projecting from the crumbling sides, and the wild Arab and hardy Nestorian wandering through their intricacies, or working in their dark recesses, were singularly picturesque.
Layard’s description shows that even the figure we think we have been able to discern in the image is illusory. The vaulted architecture of the image is not the ancient structure of the Assyrian palace referred to by Layard, but the architecture of the excavation itself. Architecture is present in the image not as the object, but as the result of the investigation. The only object that is clearly antique is the relief panel at the lower right. The earth is described as a thick conglomerate, a solid compaction of soil, pottery, brick and other architectural remains. Ancient artifacts – fragments of pottery and architecture – are not contained within the space, but fused with the matter that defines the space.
The spatiality of the image – comprehending image as a figure – relies on a reading of density, not delineation. In the same way, the spatiality of the archaeological site also relies on a reading of density. There is no clear figure discernable against a consistent and neutral ground. Both the image and the archaeological ground present a figure-ground problem that cannot be resolved with a mere increase in detail. The epistemic condition of the drawing, the forms of knowledge it allows, mirrors the epistemic condition of the archaeological excavation.
Hiroshi Nakao, Dark Box Bird Cage
This weekend house consists of a large living room capable of accommodating two automobiles; small bedrooms in which the bed completely fills the floor; a study that doubles as a studio; two enclosed gardens; bathroom; and external garage. The layout plan involved disposing the component elements on a basic 3×3 meter grid. Since all surfaces are painted black, the interior is a somewhat dark box. However, daylight entering from the large and small enclosed gardens creates a varying mixture of light and dark areas.
Gained by a ladder, a small loft is provided above the living room, which is used for book storage and a reading place. A base of pebbles is placed at the bottom of the ladder, whose sounds when people are going up and down it make this little collection of pebbles something of an interior sound effect system. None of the walls are pierced by sizable openings, with lines of sight running to the exterior only in the vertical direction. Which is not to say, however, that this is a sealed space. It would be much more accurate to describe it as an open space. A ‘dark box’ it may appear, but with its innumerable holes, it is much more of a ‘bird cage’.
Weekend House: Dark Box and Bird Cage (1993), Hiroshi Nakao, Masahiko Inoue, and Hiroko Serizawa. Text and images from Japan Architect 9, Spring 1993, pp. 228-29.
Diffusive Architectures 
