October 2008 Archives
Presentation idea
This whole project could turn into the website of the corporation that offers the cryonic suspension, that is, the cryonic institute itself. It would have a range of categories that could include 1) the history of cryonism, 2) the history of the building (maybe as a legacy of Philip Johnson?), 3) the cryonic process, 4) a film showing the formal development of the architecture, 5) a 3d walkthrough of the building, 6) am area where you can sign up to be frozen, 7) an interview with the director of the institute, 8) ‘photos’ of different rooms, 9) menus for the restaurant in which you have the last supper, 10) technical comments about the security of the building, how it’s guarded from earthquakes, etc. And so on, and so on. The final presentation would then be a click-through of the website, with printed plates to support the argument. Does this tie in with the unit agenda, or is it stretching things too far? I’ve heard of surprisingly few projects that have been presented in this way, which may turn it into an iconic presentation form (the obvious precedent examples being not only Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle films, but also Christian Waldvogel’s 2004 Globus Cassus project, which used to be housed on the web but now seems to have been taken down).
Notes from the jury
Some thoughts and ideas from yesterday’s jury that I will try to incorporate into the project over the course of the next couple of weeks or so.
These are obviously notes – as in ‘recollections’ – rather than quotes, and are thus not making their subjects justice; the jurors were much more eloquent in their comments than I’m showing them to be below.
BRETT: The status of the written word should/could be part of the argument, possibly even showing up in the plates themselves. The way the re-brief is presented now is quite traditional – you give an explanation for what we see on the wall. Remember Benjamin: image + caption = modern. [He says, for instance, that “the camera will become smaller and smaller; more and more prepared to grasp fleeting, secret images whose shock will bring the mechanism of association in the viewer to a complete halt. At this point captions must begin to function, captions which understand the photography which turns all the relations of life into literature, and without which all photographic construction must remain bound in coincidences” (Walter Benjamin, “Short History”, p. 215). Captions thus perform a crucial narrative function as they give structure and meaning to the otherwise fugitive nature of photographs. “They anchor the image.” (Nancy Martha West, “Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia”, p. 170).)] Be extreme!
The explosion of the Glass House (compound) pst-1949 is ignored, which is interesting. [Idea: the compression of time, birth and death, nothing in between, a building born and dying…]
[Another idea: maybe map the Johnson quotes on a separate plate, showing where they are taken from and how I edit them to fit with my narrative?]
PEDRO: You’re taking an object – the house – and a material – glass – which were epitomes of the modern, and then you’re saying that it’s all about a building that houses death. You’re taking the optimism of glass, the great promise of transparency, and subverting that sign. So how do you re-signify glass? [Idea: death is contemporary in that we can now (or, rather, soon, maybe) choose death, choose to change state from being alive to being suspended in a death-like, frozen state, awaiting our resurrection, rather than actually being dead; ‘death is the new life.’ Or: Dying is the new Living?]
BRETT: There’s a complete artificiality in the construction of your drawings that should be part of your argument. The re-reading of the Glass House as this haunted house… You’ve turned the 45x45 restriction into the repetition of a double square – why? [Idea: Johnson himself obviously talks about Mies’s Barcelona coffee table as the base unit of the house – this table, designed in 1927, has got a 1016x1016mm (40x40 inches) glass top. Could this be the reason for using the square? Can the square be turned into a map of the building/compound somehow? That is, grid pages according to the structure of the compound in order to map the site?] This full-bleed framing of yours is a 90s invention – that’s when the printers could finally achieve that effect. It was perhaps most famously used in Rem’s “S, M, L, XL”. If these are Johnson images, maybe we should focus on their corners? Johnson talks endlessly about the design of the corners as the true point of architecture, something he borrows from Mies.
PEDRO: You take an object and blur it into a different narrative. This could be an interesting starting point for telling new stories from new objects [once again: the coffee table?]. And who’s to say Johnson told the truth? Don’t take it so seriously.
BRETT: The most extreme argument would be to state that for Johnson, Mies didn\t exist. Why isn’t your Death character Mies? You’ve already appropriated history to suit your needs and you’re already making things up to have us look at a building that we all think we know in a new way – appropriate more!
Some other loose ideas and thoughts that I had during the day:
- Is there a more architectural analysis to be made from the same starting point as the plates and the re-brief? Can the site be mapped against a historic site, showing interesting correlations between, say, the Glass House and the Parthenon?
- A building in which nothing changes over time is like a building in which time is compressed, in which time stands still. The compound changes but the house does not. The same way, if I’m going with the idea of a cryonic institute as my iconic programme, maybe some parts of that building should be ‘alive’ whereas others should be ‘dead’? Some areas of this building need to be absolutely protected, completely shut off and sheltered from the world. They need to be ‘proof’ – earthquake-proof, flooding-proof, war-proof… The bodies need a Fort Knox structure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole building needs to be a Fort Knox.
- Someone, probably Pedro, talked about Ferdinand de Saussure and his idea that all signs are arbitrary. So a sign gets its meaning only in relation to or in contrast with other signs in a system of signs. The phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their network of relationships – understanding the structure/system is imperative. Reading up on Saussure, I learn that the signifier is the sound and the signified is the thought. “A sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern.” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 66). I’m not yet sure where this very fundamental and basic semiological understanding takes me or whether or not it will inform this project, but this seems to be the right place to make a note so as not to forget it.
- Brett mentioned something, though I can’t remember the context now, about planes collapsing into each other, about an Eisenman book on methods (“Diagram Diaries” or “Blurred Zones” or “Inside Out”?). Maybe look into this, especially since I’m already for some reason drawn to the formal exploration that is Casa Guardiola – could such a formal game be the way forward, or is that just dated? Hm. This ties in with the idea of life residing in the cracks of the dead, flowers shooting through the pavement; an excursion into cracking as a tool, or rather the fissure as a tool: that which is cracked from the very beginning. Needs a lot more thought, but maybe this could be a starting point.
- Yet another mnemonic fragment from the day: “The iconic image says everything or nothing.” This rings true somehow. The iconic image says everything or nothing – everything about nothing, nothing about everything?
The images float into each other, reflections - of the buildings themselves, but also of memories - dissolve and linger in a palimpsestic fog of angles and shadows and textures and colours and lines. It's an extruded moment of suspense, somewhere between fear (of knowing one is about to die) and content (viewing the collection, the diary which "is probably complete," as the architect put it in 1993, a final time). I'd like to think that this is what we see in Johnson's eyes, behind those trademark glasses.
I've modelled the Glass House and am setting up renders to get something to work from for the two interior collages. Time to put some touches to the white book, re-brief, and manifesto before tomorrow. Time, of course and as always, is already running out.
Oh, and I keep looking at Vittorio Storaro's magnificent images. The way he works with dissolves much the way a (collage) artist works with layers is really inspiring. Wish I'd brought his books with me from Stockholm - they're well worth having a look at if you haven't already.
Also a few loose thoughts for how to frame this whole exercise:
Architecture is a matter of life and death.
Buildings are born. Buildings die. And sometimes, you die in the buildings you give birth to.
Sometimes, buildings are even born because you want to die in them.
In 1947, Philip Johnson designed a house in which to die.
Or rather: in 1945, he started to dream up the first in a collection of buildings in which to die, the most important, crown jewel building of the collection, the Glass House.
From late 1945 to November 1947, he went through at least 27, but possibly as many as 79, 'schemes and variations' for this building, the one in which he put the bed where, 58 years later, he drew his last breath.
Johnson devoted at least two full years to the architectural design of his temple. And then he kept it in its final state until the time had come. Nothing changed. (Save for a statue that went missing in Brancusi's studio in Paris). The Mies furniture remained in their meticulously planned positions; the floors were kept in their waxed, purple hue; the paintings stayed in their places. Time stood still. Waiting.
You build a house in which to die, and, in doing so, you build a house in which to wait. A house in which to live until you die. A house that will inevitably outlive yourself. A house of life and death and time and reflections and glass.
Oh, and I'm planning on calling this New Canaan Ghosts & Flowers. What do you think? Too obvious a Sonic Youth reference?
Okay, I'll slide in the text and then try and catch some sleep before the pin-up.
I have a vague feeling this weekend will be one of Photoshop tutorials and tinkering... Together with a bit of modelling for the deathbed scene, and some planning of the other plates. Might find the time to re-write the re-brief again, but I'm not sure about that.
I've emailed Schott, the makers of the 0.03mm thin, flexible glass that would be interesting to use for the portfolio, and have now got a contact there.
And yes, I do know that the images below are in the wrong order. But if you're following this blog so closely that you noticed that, you should probably consider spending your time more wisely. Go for a walk, maybe?
FAST-FORWARD: ICONIC PROGRAMMATICS
Prolonging the lives of plants recalls the psychology of the phantom limb that accompanies the lives of those who have lost it. Is the eternity of nature a phantom process for you?5
The sculptor Marc Quinn‘s peculiar and spectacular installation Garden (2000) is a beautifully strange floral art work. When I interviewed him a few years back, Quinn told the story of how he collected a thousand flowers in full bloom from around the world and sank them all in “twenty-five tons of liquid silicone,” maintained at “a constant temperature of -80˚ Celsius.” His garden is frozen, but not frosty. The plants look as if they’re fresh and alive and thriving, though in reality, they’re dead. If we were to allow any air to contaminate the monter in which they sit, they would instantly go black, wither, fall to pieces. The flowers are dead, but will last forever.
“Of course,” Quinn said, “the flowers, when they freeze, become pure image. They become an image of a perfect flower, because in reality their matter is dead and they are suspended in a state of transformation between pure image and pure matter.”
Flowers trapped behind glass, reflected in mirrors, making up a garden of infinite beauty and immortality. A beauty that doesn’t decay. In an interview with Germano Celant, Quinn spoke of “a kind of romanticism in trying to stop time.” Which is different from what the supporters of cryonics are interested in. They would rather suspend the body in time, postpone the inevitability of death, freeze life so as to be able to resurrect it at a later point in time, when science has the answer to the riddle of eternal life.
Philip Johnson built himself a house in which to die. With great care he created a space that was at once both full and empty, both contained interior and open exterior, a shining case for his larval soul to leave behind. But today a house in which to die wouldn’t necessarily only be an end station.
Instead, it might be a building that is an end and a beginning. A place in which to die and be born again. An action and a re-action. A library of frozen bodies. A laboratory of the unknown; half serious science, half Frankenstein’s monster. A building that expresses the last hopes of our generation and those to come.
What spaces would such a building contain? How would the process of dying and being resurrected in a controlled fashion fold out in space and time? The mind wanders into an interesting range of programmatic spaces that would be truly iconic – the very spaces we remember from an entire cultural history of life and death:
• a space in which to sign the papers and pay the bill
• a space in which to be physically examined
• a space in which to have a last shower or bath
• a space in which to dress for death
• a space in which to have the last supper
• a space in which to say farewell
• a space in which to read and store human minds
• a space in which to die
• a space in which the bodies are frozen
• a space in which the bodies are stored
• a space in which electricity is safeguarded from power cuts
• a space in which friends and relatives can pay visits
• a space in which to be resurrected
• a space in which to have the first breakfast
• a space in which to have the first shower
• a space in which to greet each other again
• a space in which to do rehab training
• a space in which to learn about the history one has missed
• a space in which to read up on gossip and pop magazines
I propose a project that begins with the notion of building a house in which to die, but then immediately accepts the contemporary idea of death being a process rather than a final state – and a potentially reversible process at that. A cryonic clinic, a building of life and death, or rather death followed by life, would be programmatically iconic. The next question is: what would it look like?
WILTED LEAVES ON THE TREE OF LIFE
While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.2
The idea would be to die young, as late as possible.
To die quietly and gracefully, embraced by the trees and the pond, the rustling leaves, as the day dies with me.
To die the way Lord Byron dies in Joseph-Denis Odevaere’s painting, framed by a classical landscape.
To die like Marcel Proust, safe in the knowledge that the diary has been written, that the work has been done.
“Nothing burns in the glass house,” wrote Paul Scheerbart for the frieze of Bruno Taut’s glass pavillion in Cologne in 1914. “There’s no need to have a hearth.” The Glass House will have a simple bar for a kitchen. Standing behind it, one will be able to see The Night by Giacometti as one prepares the final supper.
Einstein wrote that death is not an end, that our bodies “are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.” As I move from the desk I will put at the northern end of the west wall and lie down on the bed to view the never-ending drama of the world outside, I might see the leaves wilt away with me.
Shining, immaterial, translucent impressions. I will be suspended in space, floating in time. A perfect building for a perfect moment. “The harmful insect is not nice,” wrote Scheerbart, “it will never enter the Glass House.” There will be a kind of harmony: nature running its course yet being held in place by hard, transparent sheets of glass. Nature and reason. A synthesis.
2 Leonardo da Vinci
REVERSE-ENGINEERING AN ICON
I was like the silkworm, making the house in which I was to die.1
In 1946, Philip Johnson designed a house in which to die.
He called this tomb for himself The Glass House, a prismatic box at new canaan, connecticut, which according to the designer himself (in an article in Architectural Review, 1950) incorporated “the latest development in ‘skin and bones’ architecture.”
Yes, he did stay there (especially during weekends, and at the end of his life) for more than half a century, and it may thus be argued that what he designed was a house in which to live rather than one in which to die. But judging from both the precedents listed in the article quoted above, and from the long-lost brief that Johnson wrote to himself and that is reprinted below, Johnson is stretching his architectural imagination, drawing on as many philosophical sources as he can, in order to create a space in which to lie down and close his eyes for the final time. A building made of glass and sunshine and nature and drops of rain. A carefully cut crystal. A place in which to stop breathing. The final space.
The silkworm’s eggs take about ten days to hatch. Hatchlings eat day and night, and are covered with little black hairs. After they have molted four times, their bodies turn slightly yellow and their skin becomes tighter. The larvae enclose themselves in a cocoon of raw silk. These were Johnson’s notes for making his cocoon:
Notes on The Glass House
Philip Johnson, New Canaan, 1946
The property I have bought in New Canaan will be the ‘diary of an eccentric architect.’ I have already sited The Glass House in the five-acre section. I picked the hill within the first five minutes. There was no hesitation, just as there was no hesitation when the pharaoh Khufu’s architect sited first the Great Pyramid of Giza and then, next to it, the mastabas: flat-roofed, rectangular buildings with outward sloping sides that marked the burial site of many eminent Egyptians of Egypt’s ancient period.
I have a site and I have a name. The house will be made of glass. This is one of Mies’s ideas – he recently showed me the sketches for Edith Farnsworth’s house and convinced me it would be easy to build a house entirely of large sheets of glass.
A site, a name, a material. Not a bad start for someone who tries to brush away the cobwebs of infinite possibilities and establish some way out. So what next?
We cannot not know history. I will use three ‘aspects’ for that awful moment in which I have to face the blank paper on the desk; three aspects that determine the direction of my thoughts; that make the shapes of the building. These aspects are the Footprint, the Aspect of the Cave, and the Work of Sculpture.
The house will be a sculptural cave (or a cave-like sculpture) to walk through. A space with turns, twists, surprise views, framed landscapes, reflections, refractions – all the wonders of the exterior projected onto the interior during the day, and at night, the interior lighting up the exterior. A silent lantern.
The Footprint: the richness of processionals. The Cave: the silent emptiness within; Lao-tse’s cup. The Sculpture: I will always be a descendant of the intellectual revolutionaries of the Baroque, and the house will have a cubic, ‘absolute’ form; a pure mathematical shape; a cube, a sphere.
A plain box can hardly be an exciting cave; visit your local auto factory building. Nor does size alone count; once more visit your local auto factory. The modulation of interior space must have complexity. The Glass House will not be your local auto factory. It will be a complex space, positioned in line with the writings of Choisy so that one approaches the buildling on the oblique, its surfaces will become deeper and deeper with each step: almost dangerously sitting on steep cliffside like a Schinkel building.
The glass will be given a certain solidity by the multiple dancing reflections playing within it. Why a house of glass? Because a house of glass contains two worlds in one: the outside looking in, the inside looking out. What is interior, what is exterior? On that last page of the diary, as I enter my mastaba, it will go through one final transformation. I will be inside of the house but then gone, away from this universe. In that moment, the walls will turn inside out. The interior will be outside of the house, the world.
1 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Exemplary Stories, translated by C. A. Jones (London, Penguin Classics, 1972), p. 178
