Remember when it was trendy to have a fire dancing on your television screen? Well, now you can have a fireplace that looks like a television screen. Brilliant!

Algorithm and design are occasionally strange bedfellows.

The discussion of design as a discipline and endeavor unto itself is an important one. And, as has always been the case, beautiful and surprising results often emerge when this discipline partners with available technology. This summer, I read an interview with Jeff Kipnis in the AA’s DRL Ten where he vehemently states that architecture is not science or research, it is design. I think this is a critical distinction that needs to be discussed, insofar as the role of technology and advanced computational techniques are involved. The architect, in my opinion, should not relinquish his design to a script or algorithm. Mastery of the sundry tools available to today’s practitioner should allow a fluid an coherent design across all of these media, and the intervening hand of the architect should be felt, if not readily apparent, in the output. In schools such as the AA, Pratt, SCI-Arc and others, this idea is finding a place. Exploration of the architects role in design in this changed technological arena is vital.

Members of the TARP staff sat down last December with William Braham, the current chair of the Penn architecture department:

Brian Osborn: When you gave your talk at Pratt, you used the two words “ecology” and “emergence” in the same statement. Looking at the trajectory of the University of Pennsylvania itself, knowing how strong the tradition of ecological design is here, and looking at how, more recently, Penn may now be considered a leader in digital design and emergent research, I wonder in what spirit do you use those two words together–is it in reference to Penn’s history?

William Braham: I realized that the books I’ve been reading for years as an environmentalist and architect are often the same books that the early digital generation, were reading. Now, that reading list is almost universal among contemporary architects – Manuel DeLanda teaches at every architecture school on the East Coast it seems, but those books are the same as those that environmentalists, or ecologically-minded designers have been looking at for a while. However, very different conclusions are often drawn. What I think is important is the potential convergence of those conclusions, and also the way in which there’s something both approaches can learn from each other.

I would say that what has been really successful and interesting here at Penn over the last couple of decades is the intensification of what I would call artistic practices, meaning “research” that is not so functionally constrained, even though it is ultimately brought to bear on functional design, on real-world, practical kinds of issues. The techniques we use in studio are often opening things up in an entirely different way than you would expect if you were just setting out to solve problems.

That approach, however, is unusual to find in a studio or a practice that sets itself to solve ecological problems. I don’t see any reason why the two can’t coexist – the proposition would be that if artistic practices are useful in making architecture practices better, then they should be useful in making ecological practices better. I see them as potentially very similar.

As so often happens with new ideas, emergence was being used as the equivalent of “good.”. It describes a particular condition which was escaping scientific interest for a long period of time and wasn’t being discussed explicitly in many design fields. But as we make it explicit – asking in what ways are things already self-organizing, auto-catalytic, “emergent”–what do we learn from that? Its a hugely interesting subject, but as any self-respecting designer will argue, that doesn’t remove either the importance of authorship or of ethical decisions, or even possibly top-down interventions.

Severn Clay: In your discussion of the organic office layout, you describe these organic layouts within a very clean “SOM” glass box – were they just two different groups of designers?

WB: Absolutely. Particularly in those early days, they were really two different kinds of forces. In the talk I showed that whole family of diagrams about the different rates of change in parts of buildings. This is something that people have been observing for a couple of decades. This is just rational/pragmatic – it is even in the tax code – it is difficult and expensive to change the outsides of buildings, so we make them more general, and don’t redesign them very often, and we make the interior fittings more flexible and allow them to change more rapidly. It is an extremely rational consequence of people assessing the needs and costs of change within that particular climate. The ecologist Howard T. Odum, whose brother Eugene Odum wrote many of the basic textbooks on ecology, was interested in the self-organization of energy flows from the very beginning, back in the fifties and sixties, finding ways to map and diagram and understand energy within ecosystems. He’s the one I was drawing directly on when I was talking about the hierarchies or cascades that emerge from the transformations of energies. Odum has written some much more accessible, shorter books, including one just republished called “Power, Environment and Society”, in which he argues that every self-respecting self-organizing system is ultimately trying to maximize the flow of useful power through it. He means power quite explicitly, in terms of work that can be accomplished, which can be realized in many different forms, including institutional power. So this theory of energy flows can be used to describe all the formations we see in the world—everything maximizes its flows of power. Given enough latitude an open, self-organizing system forms into hierarchies of increasingly valuable high-powered forms of power. Odum applies the same analysis to an ecosystem as to an institutional hierarchy, meaning it takes a large body of photo-synthesizing plants to support a very small population of carnivores, and equally, for example, it takes a large body of workers to support the corner office. So one sees these hierarchies emerging everywhere, and also breaking down and forming new hierarchies at the same time. It was hugely interesting to see how rigorously Odum pursued that in one self-organizing system after another. And its why I’m now less sanguine about the notion that emergence is itself somehow in any way a virtue. More specifically, it is the milieu of our work.

SC: Is it possible to make a link between the people doing the interiors and the systems theory world, or are they just ideas that were in the air at the time?

WB: These were definitely ideas that were in the air. If you look in Progressive Architecture in the late sixties, they were very clear that systems theory or cybernetics was the coming thing. There’s a whole special issue to explain what it is, because how in the world would architects know? They explain all the nascent research, which looks like very early 3D digital modeling, similar to [Christopher Alexander's] Pattern Language, that might enter into architectural design. Of course once you go to the next scale up – traffic organization, organizations of businesses and resources, then it becomes much more comprehensible, and there are professionals who specialize in it. Everybody was aware of it at a certain level, but were puzzling about how it might actually come to bear on practice. They barely mentioned the office landscaping, and it is still true that the fitting out of office interiors often doesn’t register as architecture.

Some of my previous work was on color, and one of the things I learned is that there are some things (like color) which are simply excluded from the architectural discourse. You can talk really intelligently and deeply about color with architects and they’ll nod patiently, but view it as a different category from architecture.

Nathan King: Severn and I took a studio at Pratt with David Ruy and Karel Klein this last semester, and his provocation for the studio was to somehow use color. We started by looking at flowers – it was incredibly difficult – I don’t think anybody knew how to deal with it. It all just sort of flattened out by the end – it became an appliqué on a building, or some sort of sign or signifier that nobody was really sure of the meaning.

WB: The other way that could go is that the theoretical rules on the perception of color could provide a ruleset that then becomes a geometry, so you can say – “color leads me to this geometry, now I can forget about color”. It’s hard to get color right, and hard to clearly provide it a place in the architectural discourse as it has been constituted. I’ve written several other things on color in addition to ”Modern Color/Modern Architecture”, and I think color get’s rolled up in the masculine-feminine divide that is imposed on architecture in the late nineteenth century.

This is also about the time you start to find women in design practices. If you go into a large practice, the architects are still mostly men and the interior designers are mostly women, with notable exceptions. Some of this runs to the characterizations of architecture – durable, eternal, authentic, powerful – and that it has to do with form and with the aspects of the form buildings that are not themselves changeable and will endure. Venetian blinds are a little bit architectural, but a curtain is not architecture. It becomes very interesting for architects when they start talking about adaptive buildings, because almost all the aspects of buildings that already accommodate change aren’t seen as architectural. The furniture – that’s not architecture – but other changeable stuff, like all the ways windows and window treatments in many buildings adapt, moment by moment, day by day, season by season, that doesn’t count as architecture unless we make it out of aluminum and attach robotic controls to it. I’m being a bit cynical about that, but color points at that particular problem problem of disciplinary definition.

A lot of this follows from the great male renunciation of color. The uniform most men wear, even though it has shifted to an informal mode – dark suit or clothing, white shirt – was more or less was invented in the early nineteenth century. Think about eighteenth-century men in spectacular colors with lace and make-up and so on. Through the revolutionary period of a couple of decades they moved group by group to the dark suit. That process gets worked out through the century. Depending on who’s history you read, it finally gets consolidated with the trial of Oscar Wilde, who like was both flamboyant and gay, though he was married and had kids. At that moment colorfulness gets powerfully bound up not just with women but with femininity in men; and the really hard-nosed definition of masculinity emerges. A certain amount of this, by the way, comes from Mark Wigley’s remarkable book “White Walls, Designer Dresses,” though I suspect he’ll never write about color again either because he discovered that it slips out of the architectural discourse.

BO: The relationship between color and femininity – there’s also a parallel with ecology and nature. Up until Ian McHarg, the initial pushes in that direction were people like Rachel Carson.

WB: It’s paradoxical for landscape architecture as a discipline that most of the famous or the highly visible landscape architects are men, who were often trained originally as architects. If you look at the population in our Landscape department, it is largely women who enter the field. Go back to the seventeenth century and Claude Perrault would say the good architect is the one who is the most sensitive to the subtle differences in fashion and taste and judgment – that’s part of what gets excluded from the discourse as it is made more rational and more functional. It doesn’t seem accidental that a lot of the neo-avant-garde are trying to make sense of things which fall in the excluded category of ornament and decoration. Ali Rahim, for example, had a whole symposium this past Fallon “Aura.” Qualities, aesthetic phenomena, the whole business of subtle, refined, aesthetic experiences being captured within buildings continues to challenge the strong emphasis on form and the functional properties of form. So I think its fascinating that the younger generation of the serious, thoughtful designers are taking up questions of ornament, affect,and the sublime, and now color.

SC: I think we all found it very hard in David’s studio – you don’t realize you’re working within a group received aesthetic until you try to get out of it. The softly lit model on a white background – you realize you’re sort of unequipped with the aesthetic tools to deal with color.

WB: Well, the precise parallel of the male renunciation of color was the polychromy dispute about whether ancient buildings were colorful, and that goes on for about fifty years. I don’t mean to oversimplify the story, there have been constant attempts to resist or overturn whiteness or formalism. Certainly some of the elements that got lumped together as post-modernism were an attempt to bring color back into the discourse. Le Corbusier, for example, was an incredible colorist. The first time I went to the Werkbundsiedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, it had just been resotred.I had no idea that his buildings were colorful at all. Of course the color palette is from Purist paintings, so a certain turquoise, a rusty color were used, a very beautiful color palette altogether, but Le Corbusier also looked carefully at how it worked architecturally. Frank Lloyd Wright was also very attentive to color- really that whole first generation of Modernists. Mies collaborated with Lilly Reich, and although he would pick colorful stones, she would provide the other elements of color the fabrics, the carpets, and so on, If all you have is the skeleton, you’ve missed half the building.

SC: Well, like the uproar about whether the Guggenheim should be repainted the originally specified pale yellow or the final off-white that people have grown used to.

WB: The person who’s done the most work on that is the head of the Historic Preservation department here at Penn, [Frank Matero].He has examined the layers of paint from the building and has also researched the history of color in Wright’s buildings, pulling out the original paint chips that Wright would have been referring to in those days. In the correspondence he used a very precise color specification system, toning down the color as he realized that it couldn’t be realized in an an exterior paint. At almost the same moment with Fallingwater –same concrete, a lot of the same details–he intended the concrete at Fallingwater to be gold-leafed. Finally the client said “I’m a Jewish merchant in a Midwestern city in the Depression, I can’t build a gold building in the woods!” But I’ve always imagined that Wright wanted the Guggenheim to be gold – he loved gold, used it in a lot of his interiors. He may have gotten it from Japanese paintings, and their particular material quality – he simply hated white, which is why its such a shame that the Guggenheim ended up so white.

NK: My father-in-law is actually an interior designer who graduated from Pratt in the 1960’s, and his portfolio, his early work is all of these landscape offices that I had no idea how to critique. Until your talk, I don’t think I would have even thought of them as landscapes, but I realize that he was part of the systems movement. Why was there a distinction between office and interior design? Now it seems like interior designers are sort of bristling at that.

WB: Well, for that generation it’s coming from this business consulting, systems-theory body of knowledge. You would have to look at the bigger history of interior design as a separate discipline. Elsie De Wolfe – the famous actress of the late nineteenth-century in New York, more or less declares herself to be the first interior designer, and she is the one who brought neo-classical purity and clarity back to interiors, after the darkness and decadence of the Victorian period. She takes a house and transforms it with these lighter colored, pastel walls I wrote another article comparing Emily Post, the author of ” Etiquette”, with the catalogue of the International Style exhibition. Emily Post’s father, the well known architect Bruce Price, designed the amazing hotel in Quebec City, the Château Frontenac, so she grew up in a design household. Later, when she was divorced, she wrote the Etiquette to make a living, but she’d already been doing interiors as business before her divorce, and wrote another book called the Personality of a House, the most sensible book you’ll pick up on domestic design, published at the same moment that the International Style show was mounted at MOMA. My article was a reading between two books that exhibit an astonishing agreement about taste. It is somewhere in first decades of the twentieth century that the profession of interior design really begins to come into being.

NK: The profession doesn’t seem to have a problem with color, the way that we do.

WB: Oh no, in fact they’re the ones who actually learn about it. I taught a course here called “Light and Color”, an elective, where we would investigate them together and actually read color theory. It was how I ended up writing ”Modern Color/Modern Architecture” – I began wondering why architects are so bad at color , and why we don’t teach it in architecture schools?

SC: Its interesting you would mention “Light and Color”, because it does seem like something that architects working in the field seem to want to assign to other professions – I worked in an architectural lighting firm for a couple years before coming to Pratt, and architects would always come to us and say “we want to do something colorful, what can you do?”

WB: Yes, it has to do with all these other interesting distinctions that come up in architecture, but I do also think that architecture through the modern period, from the mid-nineteenth century until now, has spun off one specialty after another. Architects are just plain too busy to do everything! There’s too much to do in practice, and you look at how hard we work in schools to teach and learn the family of things we already provide, and you realize that there isn’t room to jam in much more! So it makes sense to allow for specialization from. Look at the movie industry. They don’t have a crisis of identity about the specializations in quite the same way that we do, although maybe directors do – they think that they should be controlling everything. On the one hand I think we should hold on the broad image of the master architect, but on the other, architects succeed by collaborating with and organizing specialists, by being a kind of specialist themselves.

I do think much of the appeal of systems theory (or emergence) for architecture is to provide a way of better understanding our limited scope of activity, of leveraging design work to its best effect. When architects complain that they are only consulted after the real decisions have been made by clients or other specialists, it may help to realize just how much every player in the built environment is always, already constrained by the self-organizing flows of money, power, energy, and other resources. I am not a strict ecological determinist, meaning I believe that we constantly change our futures through design, but we must operate within the systems at the moment we find ourselves.

From an interview conducted on November 11, 2007, by Nathan King and Severn Clay-Youman.

TARP: We’d like to start by asking about your thoughts on the relationship between academic architecture and professional practice. Specifically regarding how the academic setting feeds FOA’s professional practice.

AZP: The act of teaching is very much about rationalizing and verbally articulating the operations you follow when you perform as an architect. This skill becomes quite handy once you have to explain or put a project into any kind of context because you have been trained to explain what your processes are and the reasons why you are doing things, and you are better able to be accountable for your decisions. However, there exists a gap, a very important gap, for an academic architect in relating their work to certain methods of production, or certain demands existing in the market. Even so, that capacity to explain becomes very useful to mobilize the potentials within all these more professional, let’s say, more “real” knowledge that our practice is now engaged with.

TARP: Does this professional/academic relationship work in the other direction, i.e., is the academic environment ever an opportunity to test the ideas you develop in your professional practice?

AZP: Yes and no, because I think that the hypotheses that you address when you are approaching academic exercises are different from the problems that you face when you are doing a real project. You can test some ideas but the tests that you conduct in reality originate in a different field of operations. So professional practice is not about demonstrating a certain point, it’s about being able to bring together a number of market forces and present technologies encountered outside of academia and threading a certain rationale through them that will hopefully become a device for producing something new. I think the main transfer between the academic and professional practice is not so much in being able to test the same hypothesis in one field or another, but to address the academic demand to explain and articulate given problems.

I think academically oriented practices have an advantage. Architects who do not have the same academic training, who have built their entire career in the practice domain, often what you see is that they react very quickly to satisfy certain demands that come from the outside and are structuring the material in a way that doesn’t try to produce any further effect.

TARP: It sounds almost like the project begins as a sort of tension between client and theory.

AZP: Yes, but the client is just one part of the equation. We often talk about clients because they are more immediately associated with this other (non-academic) side of the process. Often it is the market as a whole, because clients can act as agents of the market, and have to be sensitive to certain demands. Obviously the clients decide for themselves what they are going to do; neither the architect nor the client are simply looking for a project that will put a certain number of square feet on the market. Both are also pursuing something that will produce some political effect. So in that sense, I’m not sure if there is intentionally some sort of dichotomy between a theoretical approach and some realistic situation. Theory is much more interested in the way you articulate the inputs, be they political, commercial, or technical into a problem and find consistencies across these inputs. Being theoretical means having the distance to turn immediate concrete problems into more abstract generic problems or questions. Otherwise you are simply driven by giving answers to immediate questions. I don’t want to describe our practice as having one theoretical side and one practical side.

TARP: That’s too simple?

AZP: When we teach, we propose a certain problem: that of an artist’s house in the mountains, or on the coastline; a project that had no real-world constraints, so students do not have to expect or explore these very powerful forces. At the same time, people may say the opposite about our professional work; that we tend to prefer projects that are subject to very specific technical, commercial, or political constraints. So I suppose theory is never something that develops completely parallel to reality.

TARP: We see a lot of studio projects that use FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal as a precedent. Doesn’t this produce a paradox, as Yokohama evolved out of all of these real-world constraints, which don’t really exist in the academic setting?

AZP: Yokohama is probably one of our earliest projects and probably at that time we did not have enough knowledge about reality, that is the realities of practice, and we were, to some degree, relying on theoretical research. This research was motivated by a certain formulation that led to us the following problem: that of exploring envelopes and the movement of people as a condition to generate public architecture. There was also an associated problem concerning the continuity between the landscape and the design of the built structure. Yokohama was a rare channel in which we could test the larger theoretical interests we had at the time, and continue to have.

The difference between Yokohama and what we are experiencing now by becoming more deeply engaged in practice and real projects, is our need to identify in the same way certain non-research based tendencies that may become the origin of some sort new architectural embodiment. In our development in Umraniye, Turkey, for example, the retail becomes a new form of public space that is built upon private land, as opposed to the traditional forms of public-ness which were built with public funds on public land. This condition is becoming increasingly important and should be the subject of deeper theorization.

TARP: Looking at the projects you showed during your lecture here at Pratt, and we’re thinking specifically about the retail development in Turkey, it seems like FOA is very willing to engage politics. One often hears of the choice of politics in architecture as being either to build or not to build, but it seems like FOA is looking for a third approach, perhaps changing things by building?

AZP: First of all, I think that when you are working as an architect and building in the city or building the urban network, unless you are building a small house for an artist in the country side, you are inevitably involved in politics whether you like it or not. In Istanbul, we were able to make the project work because we had a client who was willing to try a new form of retail. We may have had a different client and we would have had to do exactly what we were told, but then there was a certain openness in that commission that enabled us to explore the potential of generating a retail complex that was less of a suburban shopping mall and more of a piece of urban fabric or landscape.

When I spoke of about the envelope in the lecture, I did not talk about other firm’s projects. But look at what is happening now in China, where the country is building for the Olympics, and here you see in the specific case of envelopes that there is a very clear tendency towards a certain form of representation inscribed in these envelopes. Look at the stadium, look at the swimming pool, with these buildings what you see are envelopes of enormous scale with surface pattern that is on the one hand homogeneous, and at the same time random, or differentiated (it’s not really random). The intention is to produce a surface that differentiates or collages different elements or becomes totally transparent. You might compare these new envelopes with the political representations of public buildings during Modernism. Take, for example, the political representation of a public building of Le Corbusier, where the effect was more towards transparency: the building appears as a transparent machine that explains how people work inside. Nor are these buildings in Beijing the political representations of the envelopes of the post-modern or even the Deconstructivist period of individual differences. What you see happening now in China is this wrapping of materials that communicates sufficiently the building on a normal scale, while the kind of representation is no longer that of, let’s say, a collectivist state, in which everyone is the same. Rather there is a kind of maniac, large-scale collective project where people are represented by a surface that is differentiated. I think this is like an image of frozen swarms, where people are still part of a collective, while being represented on the buildings on a maniac scale. It’s the representation of some very large collective empire, or rather a successful embodiment of the message that the collective is no longer made out of evenness or equality but, on the contrary, out of differentiation. At this moment all the political implications of envelopes are very interesting to me, and are certain to become re-conceptualized or re-theorized in our projects.

I talk about the housing in Carabanchel as also having as having a very large, blank envelope, but also one that differentiates that kind of swarm effect as opposed to the collage effect of post-modern housing. This kind of envelope builds new forms of information, and new forms of monumentality, builds perhaps new forms of integration with the collective. So the reason I am so interested in the envelope as a political location is because it deals with and cuts across many different issues. Some are issues of representation, and some are very technical issues, and some deal with the development of the surface and what the building communicates and exchanges with the outside.

TARP: How do you think students can bring this political material into their studio?

AZP: Students should be experimenting with all of these political materials. What you need to do is to simply get out and try to determine for yourself what the important issues are. However, in order to engage the truly political problems of architecture, you need to identify where there are real opportunities for architecture to affect politics. So whether you are voting for Republicans or Democrats doesn’t really interest me very much because I don’t believe that architecture can be discussed effectively in those terms. But you can discuss architecture as a certain tendency to represent collective ideas, such as examining the effects of architecture in terms of reducing carbon emissions including the energy performance of a building and so on. Or you can question how to articulate the interests of the private/practical with public/performance which is basically what we’ve been trying to do with our retail projects. Inevitably you are going to encounter something that is going to force you to make political decisions. I’m not saying everything you examine should be political, but I think these problems you can bring into the discipline and practice of architecture that lie beyond the internal, disciplinary discourse, which becomes sterile when it doesn’t look beyond itself.

Our thanks to Alejandro Zaera Polo for his time and insight.

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.

The glove even has something like architectural poché – the form and experience of the inside is very different from its outside. Functional decoration tends to happen where the glove designer must negotiate these two conditions, either for hand entry, finger exit, or ventilation. There is no reason to pretend that the inside and outside are continuous (though in the topological sense they are) – even reversible gloves celebrate the difference between the inside and the outside. Within this poché are layers of foam or batting with either sculptural or insulative qualities.

Finally, there are pieces to the glove that are purely, frankly, functional. The cut, arrangement and material of the pieces of the glove must match their application: kayak gloves might require pads of material that can grip a wet paddle, a cycling glove might have its seams placed so that pressure between the thumb and forefinger will not irritate the wearer. The design of gloves has become incredibly specific, and the range of materials that can be deployed both in the lining and the outer glove is almost endless. One motorcycle glove manufacturer opines on the difference between deerskin and elkskin: one provides softness and flexibility, the other gives the maximum abrasion resistance. Whether the designer chooses to highlight certain functions (say flexibility, or ventilation) is part of the delicate calculation that goes into making a commodity objet.

A glove’s program (if you will) is both incredibly specific and terribly banal. The user must be able to manipulate small objects like keys and pens one moment and accessing the glove’s more exotic functionality the next. A glove that is so specific in its function that it prevents a certain amount of flexibility becomes an impediment and quickly gets stuffed in one’s pockets. Despite the wide range of performative applications, there is very little figural experimentation in the glove (hockey equipment notwithstanding). A glove must be warm, dry and (possibly) match one’s outerwear. Robert Stern’s mitten may be cozy, but the number of exotic mitten species suggests a basic dissatisfaction with the typology (mitten-over-fingerless-glove, “lobster-claw” two-fingered glove, etc). There’s a reason they’re often clipped to school-children’s jackets.

Complexity and Contradiction

I read Robert Venturi’s Learning From Las Vegas (LFLV) first, and only recently returned to read Complexity and Contradiction (CNC). LFLV is certainly the more seminal and more influential manifesto of the two, but I feel that CNC is the more nuanced and useful discussion for architects. While the book foreshadows Venturi’s later fascination with advertising and building-as-sign – besides the famous “Main Street’s almost all right”, he references Peter Blake’s photographs of roadside signage from God’s Own Junkyard[1], the analysis is about the complexity and compromise that go into even the most orthodox of Modernist icons.

Looking at the second half of the book, however, I would argue that what Venturi and Rausch were up to was really bloody-minded modernism – a critique of reductive modernism within the language of modernism. Venturi and Rauschs’ built examples of complexity and contradiction read a bit like vaudeville jokes told at a dinner party – the entire story of the building is telegraphed a bit too vigorously, as if Venturi’s eagerness for the building to be “read” overwhelms his discoveries in the first half. More than anything, the second chapter seems to pose the question of whether one can approach a project with the intention of creating complexity, or if the world will impose its own regardless.

Where Venturi goes wrong, too, is his insistence on historical precedents. Venturi knows too much – he seems unable to draw a window or a roof line without knowing the exact historical references implicit in those choices.

What I find most interesting in CNC is its pragmatism. Venturi is writing from the perspectives of both a practicing architect and a scholar. This dual lens allows him to see beyond the headlines of the historical canon and speculate about the secret lives of buildings, the reality that no building project is ever as simple as it sets out to be. He is a master storyteller of the architectural project, drawing us into the moments where the architect had to abandon orthodoxy and confront real architectural problems.

Architects from the beginning of architectural history have been trying to separate their profession from fashion. This is surely a pragmatic move – it entrenches the practicing old guard against the novelty of talented newcomers and emerging but untested technologies. It ensures that buildings are judged against a carefully-curated architectural canon rather than ever faster-flowing streams of popular culture. When it comes to ornament in architecture, there have been three strategies for warding off the taint of fashion: first, the couching of ornamentation in historical canon. Second, the removal of ornamentation entirely from architecture, placing it into the hands of “lesser” arts like interior design. Finally, the re-evaluation of decoration in terms of semiotics to allow it to be folded back into Modernism.

I would like to discuss ornament without resorting to semiotics. Semiology has been used to enfold ornament in the functionalist trope of modernism: everything becomes decorative (because all buildings can be “read”) and then everything becomes functional, because everything serves the reading of the building. Literature seems to have survived signs and signifiers, and I believe architecture can too. Multiple readings can exist simultaneously without invalidating one another – furthermore, buildings designed purely for one reading seldom hold up to other readings. To design a building with the most distorted, reductive reading of LFLV, one ends up with something very simple, and rather banal. The problem of ornamentation has been poisoned by the duck/decorated shed dichotomy for too long. It was never that simple, and nor should it be.

There are two types of ornament that I would like to focus on, because I think they have largely been ignored in LFLV and its intellectual progeny. In the spirit of coining new words, these are the deco-functional, or functional decoration, and the perfor-namental, or ornament that is also performative.

Venturi’s discussion of the deco-functional in CNC is split in two directions, one stemming from his love of the Classical and Baroque ornamentation and the other from his growing fascination with machine-made commodity “honky-tonk elements”. In his discussion of historical precedents, he points to ornamentation that is used to make structurally separate elements seem plastic and continuous - the rocaille of the Rococo chair leg[2] covers up the structural and manufacturing requirement of having a separate chair-leg, and ornamentation that allows joints between distinct structural elements to appear harmonious, like the Doric column[3]. He also lauds double-functioning ornamentation, where features are able to perform two separate functions within a building: “drip mouldings which become sills, windows which become niches, cornice ornaments which accommodate windows, quoin strips which are also pilasters, and architraves which make arches[4]”.

The discussion of “honky-tonk elements” brings up an entirely different problem, and one that I suspect many architects trying to design minimal residences have had to come to terms with. Machine-made objects, despite their fetishization by the early Modernists, are also designed to be installed by unskilled labor. Given that requirement, they include a certain amount of tolerance for poor plaster work or just general screw-ups. At least one manufacturer of trim-less recessed downlights also makes a “goof ring”, or an accessory that can be applied later when the carpenters have cut the holes slightly too large. Bridging the gap between unskilled labor and industrial design is usually some sort of ornamental flange, rim, or flourish, and therein lies the crux – to get truly minimal machine-made fixtures, the architect often must resort to carefully crafted custom designs or expensive specialty products that must be installed by skilled labor. This has led to expensive lighting coves, custom recesses and otherwise unnecessary translucent sculptural improvisations on the ceiling – its often cheaper to pay the unskilled carpenters to solve the problem with sheet rock or to conjure up a fancy lampshade than it is to design and pay for the manufacturer and testing of a custom fixture. Venturi solves this by witty insertions of banal fixtures, like the prominent bare light bulb in a porcelain socket in the Vanna Venturi House[5], or his use of large “industrial” RLM shades in the Philadelphia restaurant[6], but these fall under the polished rubric of the “insertion” – more conceptual judo than integrated design.

I would speculate that the contemporary fascination with continuous surfaces and smooth, radiused corners is to some extent a symptom of eschewing the architectural problem of transitions. Windows become all-glass curtain walls, corners become curves, roofs extensions of the landscape. Without being able to resort to deco-functional devices to make an entryway or fenestration, we are forced into acrobatics at the level of form and figure. This does not mean jambs and lintels out of Architectural Graphic Standards, but rather activating the building at the scale of ornament to create a penetration in an otherwise continuous surface.

The second category, the perfor-namental, is less discussed in CNC, though Venturi’s discussion of dual-use ornament is somewhat relevant. This category has a considerable amount of contemporary research behind it, and so in some ways is the more interesting of the two because of the wealth of contemporary precedents. Historic precedents might include flying buttresses on Gothic cathedrals or some of Nervi’s concrete waffle slabs, to name only two. Contemporary firms such as Reiser and Umemoto have written extensively about this at the level of form-finding and material articulation, but stopped short of talking about ornamentation. Much of Toyo Ito’s work contains elements of this category – to some extent the Sendai Mediatheque but especially his Tod’s department store in Tokyo, with the network of columns that echo bare tree branches. To classify this formal expression as ornamental immediately begs the preamble “merely ornamental” – as if that immediately precludes any performance beyond the semiological. It is usually preferable to demure with “merely functional”, while talking on the other hand of swan wings and soap films.

Examples of perfor-namental architecture in the last decade or so have largely been laundered through the instrumentalization of the Diagram and through engineering. By inoculating the ornamentation against conscious, willful design (in the case of the diagram), or by finding them in the drawings of engineers we can safely classify them as merely functional, though a Hollywood set designer not burdened by our taboos might be confused by the self-delusion.

What separates the perfor-namental from merely expressive formalism or Modernist expressed-structure? Admittedly, the distinction is unclear. The category could cover more than just structural expression – after all, contemporary buildings are advertised as performing in all sorts of extraordinary ways, from sun-shading to rainwater collection to solar. When the element in question could not be easily replaced with a less extraordinary by similarly functional one or hidden – say, replacing the columns of the Sendai Mediatheque with a Maison Domino column grid, or covering one of Nervi’s coffered ceilings with sheet rock – without changing the building, I would submit that the decorative qualities of the element are at least as important as the functional ones.

Venturi’s discussion of “Both-And” in architecture is valuable here. That something as solid and rational as a building could be so slippery seems counter-intuitive. Writes Venturi, “Most of the examples [of Both-And in architecture] will be difficult to “read”, but abstruse architecture is valid when it reflects the complexities and contradictions of content and meaning. Simultaneous perception of a multiplicity of levels involves struggles and hesitations for the observer, and makes his perceptions more vivid.[7]” It is important, though, to disabuse ourselves of ornament as something that is merely applied, and that is not fundamental to the design.

Digital techniques have lead to a growing wealth of research in formal expression. Without admitting the existence of ornament, this research ends up as either competition entries, follies or weird sculptural walls – where architectural problems of fenestration and connection are either avoided, or solved within the same minimalist/Modernist vocabulary of the past century . By focusing some of this research at ornamentation that solves architectural problems, we may begin to wrest some direction from the suburban housing market that keeps stamping out Neo-Georgian, Shaker and Craftsman patterns to feed the hunger for newer and larger houses.

The important lesson from CNC is that gray areas exist, and should be encouraged rather than smoothed over.. Architecture has enough pedagogical structures and rigorous processes that it should be safe with ambiguity and contradiction. It is these gray areas which allow multiple readings of a building, and perhaps prolong its importance through more than one ideological paradigm shift.

I do believe that the best buildings bear traces of their design and construction, not just their original concept, but ornament should be our ally in this, not something that is used to hide our flaws. An architecture profession that wants to stay relevant to society should look to other design disciplines before it looks to philosophy – introspection and self-delusion may make for interesting competition entries, but it will never make very good buildings.

Bibliography

Venturi, Robert. “Complexity and contradiction in architecture. With an introduction by Vincent Scully”. New York, Museum of Modern Art 1966.

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?

Theorist Karl Chu describes the development from Eisenman as two distinct approaches to architecture: the Morpho-Dynamic and the Morpho-Genetic. These approaches have emerged as markedly different interpretations of technology information, but nonetheless engage its cultural and formal concepts at the highest level. Through these approaches we have been able to explore architecture’s relationship to any organic process, societal impulse or dynamic force imaginable, yet we have still been completely unable to extend these relationships to anything more than representational. Architects can develop form based on evolutionary algorithms, structural soft kill options and flow patterns, but the end result has yet to create anything which nature hasn’t already perfected. Only Karl Chu has been able to conceive of architecture, computation, and anthropology as having a relationship beyond interpretation or mimicry. But his precepts require architecture to remain in the abstract; as space would become written into code and therefore non-existent.

At the heart of the argument is Chu’s critical engagement of the Church-Turing Thesis, his point of divergence from the digital avant-garde. To many of these architects, the establishment of a computational meta-critique only serves to muddy the waters which the digital revolution has already stirred up. The field has justifiably exhausted its tolerance for the slick imagery of digital design programs. Substance and build-ability have taken precedence over novelty. And while it is equally as valid to harvest what valuable affects have been garnered from digital experimentation and begin to convert them into real architecture, it is important that we finish the journey of computational exploration which the digital revolution was first sparked on, lest we fall prey to Kipnis’ architectural conundrum regarding the significance of cultural discourse. Even though Chu’s critique of the Church-Turing Thesis may brand him a computational theorist among his fellow digitals architects, it aligns him with many theorists in neighboring fields; namely Stephen Wolfram and his concept of computational equivalence, and the quantum theorist David Deutsch as an advocate of multiple realities. But although these theories point towards the unification of biology, mathematics and physics; where exactly architecture fits in seems to be as yet undecided.

Chu would argue that as computation, nature, and the laws that define both become more in sync, anthropology’s grip on architecture will be loosened and it too will be guided by this bio-computational synthesis. In Chu’s words:

Architects take note: this is the beginning of the demise, if not the displacement, of the reign of anthropology, which has always subsumed architecture…..The potential emancipation of architecture from anthropology is already affording us to think for the first time of a new kind of xenoarchitecture with its own autonomy and will to being.

The flaw in his argument is that he continues to refer to this new reality as “architecture”. Computation is inherently representational; its goal is the compression and decompression between reality and virtual reality. So how can a space be architectural when it is essentially space-less? The best analogy would be from the Wachowski brothers in the oft-referenced movie The Matrix. When the main character realizes he is delimited by a digital simulation of reality, he sees his setting as a series of 1’s and 0’s image-mapped onto the surrounding architecture. The inanity of this description of virtual reality alone should pre-empt any further reference to virtual “architecture”. It is not, as Morpheus from The Matrix might say, that we must “believe”. We must instead find better ways of description and perhaps pull the debate back to the present tense where we have yet to be enslaved by an army of rogue artificially intelligent robots.

To achieve the goal of reconstituting architecture to society, none of these references can be overlooked no matter their anchorage too far in the past or future. A critical analysis of not only computational theory, but society’s relationship to it, is a must. This would entail an investigation of Algortihmic thought from Leibnez back to the Syllogy of Aristotle as a starting point. Furthermore an in-depth exploration of computational design techniques and architectural theory, as well as an investigation of computation’s implications on mathematics, physics, and philosophy specifically what impact Cellular Automata, Computational Equivalence, Quantum Computing and Multiple Dimensionality can have on architectural thought? As no such unchallenged theories have developed in any of these fields, this task may seem doomed to fail, yet it is of paramount importance at this critical juncture to define what role computational architecture can have in the pantheon of the field beyond a phase where architects mimicked flocking organization or emergent properties in slime molds. To not act at this decisive point in history to keep this discourse moving would be equivalent to abandoning a symphony after its first movement; the groundwork has been laid, clarity and a triumphant conclusion await us in the final stages.

GAUD++

Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design Reception

Robert and Hazel Siegel Gallery

6:30 pm, March 31 2008

Higgins Center Hall

61 St. James Place, Brooklyn, NY

Slovenian artist creates obsessively perforated eggs [via Make]

Maybe they could try this out in Las Vegas first? Link [via io9]

…really big.