INS AND OUTS

Legitimising Architectures: the ins and outs of socio-cultural values.
As you may have noticed, in the last 100 years, Architecture has been in a crisis of representation. And a crisis of the object. And of legitimisation. And autonomy.  And the current crisis of criticality, which basically just amalgamates all the other crises together. Oh, and that minor crisis of the real. Clearly something is awry: isn’t architecture about buildings? How can buildings be in crisis? Except in the event of ground shakes, surely they are the most stable and concrete facts of our lives? So why all these crises? 

I suppose this is where my research began.  Analysing the advent of ‘crisis’ in contemporary architectural texts, diagrams and projects, I’ve discovered a suspicious overuse of the terms ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ This obsession with clearly defining the ‘space of architecture’ is a tool the discipline uses – much like a drawing pencil, in fact – to assert its own value, and to distance the discipline – or the inside – from the public – that dangerous, unstable, uneducated outside.

Continues after break.

Surely knowing what architecture is is a positive thing? Yes; but the broader implications of this mode of definition – the affect of the inside/outside dichotomy – need to be examined. Certainly, Architects today have increasingly socio-cultural agendas, and produce projects engaged with sustainability, social housing, and disaster relief (which has been high profile of late). Yet, Architecture as a discipline faces a fundamental problem in terms of the ongoing efficacy of these social engagements: that problem is how architecture is legitimised. The problem with dichotomies is that one term always dominates: the inside dominates the outside. But, Architecture can only rigorously and effectively engage in these incredibly important issues if it is legitimised both by and for the public – instead of by the self-defined exclusive inside. 

Exploring architecture’s insides and outsides is not the literal analysis of the facades of buildings, nor some strange dissection of architecture’s kidneys (presuming the discipline has a mechanism for flushing out the bad) Instead, it is an exploration of how architecture is valued, the ideologies it perpetuates, and the resulting legitimisation of architecture into the future.
But we can’t be so naive as to assume we can ‘erase’ the dichotomy altogether! I believe that transcending the definition is more productive. The second part of my research proposes that, in fact, legitimisation transcend rather than depends upon the inside/outside of architecture. Through my research I theorise this neither-inside nor outside- space – in both physical and psychological sense – as a site of architectural culture.

My thesis culminates in realising this theorised space in the design of an Architecture Forum. I use  three key concepts: Smuggling objects, Transgressive activities and the in-between space. Here, I suggest, is a site for critical engagement between inside and outside, a place where architecture might begin to be legitimised by its public once more.

CONVOLUTES

Kenneth Goldsmith over at Harriet Blog is (re?-)writing Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project: But for New York. He is halfway through, and his convolutes thus far follow:

Convolutes

Abstraction
Advertising, Signage
Alcohol, Bar, Drugs, Prohibition
Amnesia, Rootlessness
Ancient, Primitive, SciFi
Apocalypse
Architecture
Art
Body, Hygiene, Pleasure, AIDS
Bohemia
Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge
Building as City
Captial of the 20th Century
Celebrity
Chronicle, Mundane
City as Sentence
Class, Social Unrest, Politics
Classicism
Coney Island
Cosmic, Celestial
Crowds, Congestion, Traffic, Density, Speed
Danger, Seedy, Crime
Death, Decay, Obsolesence, Downfall
Depeletion
Depopulated
Description
Détournement
Documentary
Dream, Sleep, Night Unreal City
Empire
Empire State Building, Chrysler, WTC
Eternal Return
Fame, Ambition, Excitement, Restlessness
Fashion
Flaneur, Idleness, Boredom, Perambulation
Food
Garbage, Dirt, Trash, Waste
Gentrification
Global, World City
Graffiti
Grid, Map. Cartography
Harlem
Image
Interior
Invisible, Unreal, Ghost
Labor, Work
Language, Speech
Light, Lighting, Color, Air
Literature
Logic, Reason
Loneliness, Singularity
Luxury
Manners, Customs, Mundane, Routine
Mapplethorpe
Media
Memory, Nostalgia
Money, Stk Exch, Economics, Wealth, Market
Movement, Mobility
Museum, Spa
Myth
Names, Ethnicity
Nature
Neighborhood, Strucuture
Old New York
Palimpsest
Paris, Europe, Old World
Photography, Reproduction
Politics, Leftism
Poverty, Squalor, Abuse
Power, Narcissism
Prison, Punishment
Progress (Theory of)
Psychogeography
Psychology
Purity
Real Estate
Reinvention, Invention
Religion
Robert Moses
Scale, Magnitude, Proportion
Sex, Romance
Shopping, Mall, Consumerism
Signage, Semiotic, Symbolic
Simulacra
Skyline (Panorama)
Smell
Social
Soho
Sound, Noise
Spectacle
Speed, Nervousness, Iron, Fire
Statue of Liberty
Steam, Plumbing
Streets, Street Names, Names
Suburbs
Surreal
Technology
TimesSq, Bway, Gamb, Prost, Night, Prohibition
Underground
Unrealized NY
Unrest, Radical
Violence
Voyeur, Window, Mirror
Water, Plumbing
Weather, Air Conditioning, Atmosphere
World’s Fair 1939
World’s Fair 1964
Writing
2011-04-30

PLAZA DEL TORICO

An old favourite of mine has caught my eye again; the Plaza del Torico by B720. The project uses large 'cobbles' with a pattern of embedded luminescent strips to create a delicate atmosphere while avoiding an excessively dominant illumination. The light, understood as a fluid element, spreads throughout the square but with variations: around the Torico fountain (encircled by luminous lines), the Fondero and Somero cisterns, and the Arca Secreta (where the density of the lines is reduced by half, to stress the archaeological value of these points).
The square is organised longitudinally by lines that accentuate the perspective, constructed with linear lighting systems in the porticos and facades, two conduits for installations on the exterior of the porticos, to eliminate the cables that until now have been attached to the facades.
The lighting project is completed by the installation of lights concealed within the Torico fountain (which can change colour on special occasions). Thus, the existing lighting, essentially vertical, gives way to a more horizontal arrangement.
And then there is the underside...

ON THESES and REMS


On June 17, 1979, Eija-Riita Eklaf, a Swedish woman, married the Berlin Wall at Grosse-Ziethener Strasse, taking Wall Winther Berliner-Mauer as her name. The final piece of heroic modernist architecture, the Berlin Wall was constructed just as the movement’s Utopian political ambitions had begun to wane. By then, with the eastward spread of modernism during the Khrushchev years, the ideological distinctiveness of modernity had come to an end, making East-West, modern-antimodern harder to distinguish. Still, the architects of the Berlin Wall hoped it would change society.

FOOTPRINT


Also, the incredibly thesis-pertinent inaugural issue of footprint journal:

This inaugural issue of Footprint aims at understanding today’s architecture culture as a negotiation between two antithetical definitions of architecture’s identity. The belief in the disciplinary singularity of architectural objects, irreducible to the conditions of their production, is confronted - in discourse and design - with the perception of architecture as an interdisciplinary mediation between multiple political, economic, social, technological and cultural factors. With the concept of trans-disciplinarity, the negotiation between these two positions is investigated here as an engine of the ‘tradition of the present’ of contemporary architecture - the discourses and designs which emerged in the 1960s and defined orientation points for today’s architectural thought and practice.


The contributions to this issue of Footprint include Wouter Davidts’ analysis of architectural design and discourse as a condition for art; Michael Hays’ examination of narrative as a form of understanding the object of architecture within the forces which it reflects and opposes; Patrick Healy’s reconstruction of Max Raphael’s project of an empirical theory of art and architecture; Mark Jarzombek’s questioning of architecture as a philosophical project; Ákos Moravánszky’s mapping of the multiple interchanges between theory, design, history and education of architecture; Jean-Louis Violeau’s account of the collaborations between architects and sociologists on architectural research in France since the late 1960s.


Issue's editors: Tahl Kaminer and Lukasz Stanek

DOMESTIC QUAKES



Having noted Julijonas Urbonas' 2010 Euthanasia Coaster over at Archiact, I was compelled to find some more of his work. Another piece, sharing the same whimsy-come-controversial nature as his Euthanasia Coaster, caught my eye. His Domestic Earthquake Generator transforms a guest's door tap into an intense object trembling - akin to a one-object earthquake.

I am not sure if they have earthquakes in Lithuania; but this 'quake' is certainly a tame version of the global destruction we have seen of late. The domestication of the quake allows us to reclaim space, ground, and stability as intimate aspects of our lives, rather than as the uncertain fears they have become. Beautiful.

BUILDING ROOMS, BUILDING QUALITIES

Allegra Lockstadt's Building rooms, Building qualities  was generated while she was trying to re-acclimatise and re-adjust to American life. Her hope was that by 'building' rooms with patience and solitude, she would be able to 'glean' these traits back off her drawings.

Meanwhile, over a C-Lab, I've been getting very excited (in a thesis-related manner, as is common place these days). Here is an extract from this conversation between Inaba and Jencks.

CJ:          
The problems here are multiple, because we have the ambition on one level to shape the earth. And yet we do not have either the capacity intellectually, economically, or in terms of power, nor do the politicians. We have an earth-shaping rhetoric, but a Boy Scout ideology. And since we control only two percent of building, we get involved in this false consciousness. We have to go along with the great middle-class lie that we can do something about global warming. That’s the biggest, most unbelievable lie of our time, and everybody takes part in it, especially every architect. They have to, because it’s too unthinkable to say, look, we don’t make any difference, we can’t make a difference, and it’s an institutionalized lie to say that we can make a difference. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do all the things that we’re doing to promote an ecological or green architecture, but we should realize that these are gestures of symbolism and art, because we are artists in the end, and if we want to shape the global environment on an ecological level, we have to use our levers of power. And that means: get involved in politics. But, like the rest of the middle class we get involved in this lie that if everybody stays home and uses low-energy light bulbs we can all solve it together.
JI: 
So do you think that architects are destined to be forever Eagle Scouts? Like men dressed up as little boys acting out a role, but never getting our hands dirty?

CJ:
I would say that you have to be an Eagle Scout with irony. I’m asking for a critical irony, because the Boy Scout ideology is the worst form of self-brain washing. My feeling is that architecture culture is bigger than that, and it can stand up and fight off the lie. And we will do that because we all feel it deep down and we want it said.

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