Re-theorizing the Glove, or, What’s Learned in Las Vegas Should Stay in Las Vegas

Severn Clay-Youman

“Architecture is like the design of mittens, not gloves. Gloves are too tightly shaped to the fingers of a single hand; mittens give you wiggle room for the future.”

Robert A.M. Stern

The glove, a functionalist stalwart from the beginnings of modernism, has been much maligned by the post-modernists. In the course of research for a studio project I began to look at gloves, and discovered something quite startling – they don’t fit the old modernist cliché anymore. I found myself looking at specialized motocross gloves by Troy Lee Designs (specifically, the “Pro Apex” model, available in black or white leather). Granted, these $80 gloves are not your typical fleece-lined “leather” one-size-fits-all winter glove, and RAMS would probably not be caught dead in a pair; but what could these gloves possibly tell us about the direction of contemporary architecture?

When is a glove like a building?

The first thing you notice when looking at these gloves is that the old form/function dichotomy is gone. There is a slippery relationship between performance and form:

Some of the ornament – namely the carbon-fiber knuckles, openly advertises performance. Anybody who has spent much time in the 21^st century will recognize this – carbon fiber has appeared in everything from laptop computers to car bodies and kayak paddles. The strength-to-weight ratio is phenomenal, but so is the price-to-weight ratio. Carbon fiber is the new gold leaf – it indicates that no cost has been spared on performance. Comparable gloves have plastic knuckles, and some competing manufacturers grouse that brittle carbon fiber shatters on impact, driving high-tech shards into your knuckles and palms, but who cares? The carbon fiber knuckles are interesting, though, because they are simultaneously functional and decorative.

There is the openly decorational – the Troy Lee Designs logo on the wrist. The manufacturer puts these badges on for the television cameras – the orientation becomes clear when you put your hands in “motorcycle” position and look in the mirror. Motorcycle branding, like the signage of Venturi’s Las Vegas strip, must be instantly recognizable at high speed. This is less interesting from an architectural standpoint– after all, consumers buying these incredibly expensive gloves should be able to recognize a TLD glove from the design, right?

There is ornament that is purely functional – look at the leather piping surrounding the velcro tabs at the wrists. Though it is not accentuated, it serves to make the transition between the softer grasping surface and the velcro surface. It prevents a frequently-used surface from falling apart. Like a chair rail or base board, it solves an architectural problem.

Statement of Purpose; The Case for an Architectural Theory of Computation

Drew Seskunas

As the dust settles on the digital party of the early millennium, the core revolutionaries have reevaluated their initial goals as woefully insufficient. Camps have split as computational and digital techniques are distinguished through critical and formal characteristics, respectively. Despite these factions, the concepts evolving from computation are currently the loudest ticks beating at the heart of architectural discourse, out of which a new vanguard has emerged. And while definitions of computation differ, there is a consensus that computational/digital techniques are the present and future of meaningful architecture. It seems ironic then, that with such a massive critical engagement of contemporary discourse, the architecture which it has birthed is increasingly culturally irrelevant. This debate calls for a meta-critique of the apparent relationship between computation, architecture, and biology; or more precisely the exploration of an architectural theory of computation.

Notwithstanding the unavoidable conflicts regarding a theory of computation, the solidarity which is present among computational and digital architects is significant. The movement emerged as an outgrowth from, not reaction to, elite architectural discourse. This can be seen in an almost uniform allegiance to the work of Peter Eisenman (his firm was practically a breeding ground for today’s digital vanguard). It was at Eisenman’s provocation of architecture as language, “with the proviso that architecture must explore more challenging, less familiar meanings”, from which today’s efforts were launched. While digital culture has flourished, the apparent line between built and virtual environments has dissolved, as has architecture’s relevance to society. This paradox is not new to our profession; in Jeffry Kipnis’ words:

…the unabated presence of architecture and our profound familiarity with it combine subtly to erase our perception of the significant difference between the building profession and the expert practice of architecture as cultural research and discourse.

Once digital culture has been fully absorbed at a grand societal scale, how can the inherently tangible field of architecture engage its intangible future?