Post-jury notes and thoughts

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?