November 2008 Archives

[Monday 17 November]

The first sketches for a taxonomy of corners (very rough; these were done in hotel rooms and airports during the Marrakech trip). I'm struggling with finding the right definitions: don't really think "1D," "2D," "3D," etc are correct. But over and above that, the experiment is giving me some interesting corner configurations that I haven't seen before.

[Images to follow]

[Sunday 16 November]

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, father of the periodic table, in his study.

I'm still in the hotel in Marrakech, and for some reason, Robin Evans is on my mind today. I haven't even got his famous book on projective geometries (yet), and still I can't stop thinking about how great it would have been had Evans been around to do some serious thinking on the iconic in architecture, and explain a thing or two to us. Guess only the good die young.

It's funny how at this stage in a project, you (I, one) always get the feeling that what is being done is either fantastically great or ridiculously stupid. So whilst working on my taxonomy of corners - more of which to follow shortly - I've been trying to sum up where I am at the moment, just to see if the argument holds up. Some scattered notes that are admittedly not brief enough (yet):

ICONICITY

In their introduction to the seminal collection of essays, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, John Bold and Katherine Heron present us with a scribble from the desk of the late architecture critic, Robin Evans:

PROPOSITION: That a work of architecture is more than the sum of its representations. Is this to glorify the architectural object, putting it in a position unattainable by photographs, drawings and writings? No, because pictures and words are always less than what they refer to. Referential art is, by its very nature, reduced from its referents. Thus to say that a building is more than its pictures is not to say that it is more art-like than its pictures. It does suggest that it is more difficult to make a building art-like than a picture because the perceptions of the building are more in themselves but less manageable, less capable of full orchestration.

Here's my reading of Evans: architecture is more than the sum of its representations. A building is not just the image of architeture. Architecture is something more than mere iconicity. The architectural experience, the essence of architecture, is walking through the icon, passing through the image, taking in its essence but not necessarily being served the whole of the structure in a single oneliner snapshot. It is an image made of many images, a whole composed of fragments that exist in three dimensions, each of which shows a new side of itself as we move through the building. To really appreciate architecture, we cannot cling to the image, the icon. We need to keep moving, need to keep changing our perspective. We need a series of icons - and not just visual ones, but haptic icons: iconic smells, sounds, geometries, proportions - that together give us a sense of a much deeper structure than that presented through the single, visual icon.

Keep moving. Keep unfolding the icon. Keep finding new fragments, new facets, new corners.

Here's the 20th century Catholic mystic and thinker, Thomas Merton:

I am aware of the need for constant self-revision and growth, leaving behind the renunciations of yesterday and yet in continuity with all my yesterdays. For to cling to the past is to lose one's continuity with the past, since this means clinging to what is no longer there. My ideas are always changing, always moving around one center, and I am always seeing that center, and I am always seeing that center from somewhere else. Hence, I will always be accused of inconsistency. But I will no longer be there to hear the accusation.

To me, this sounds like the beginning of a manifesto - the manifesto of the corner. Keep moving to a new corner, keep viewing the (same) centre from a new angle, keep repositioning, keep growing - produce new corners, new figures, in continuity with yesterday's corners and figures. Beyond a static, consistent (rational, legible, modernist), global iconicity, there is an animated, ever-changing, fluid, inconsistent (or rather illegible), distributed, local iconicity.

So that's the basic thinking on tomorrow's iconicity. No more corkscrew buildings, but a lot of corkscrew corners, if you like.

To cut a beautiful diamond, you don't focus on the centre. You focus on the corners, the demarcations, the figure in between the mass of carbon and the space surrounding the crystal lattice. The result may or may not show signs of global iconicity, but that is merely the result of the intersection of planes, the corners created.

Question: if the new iconic building is an unfolding-in-motion of the iconic in architecture, then what about the iconic on an urban scale? Is there a time element to this as well? The corner is the figure, the focal point, the content. You move towards the corner and away from the corner - orienting your way through the spaces through the points where they meet. These points, by definition the newest, latest parts of the building, those moments that show where it was manipulated and formed into its current configuration, stand out against the background; figure and ground. In the same way, new buildings are the corners, the orienting focal points, of the city, today's figures set off against the background architecture of yesterday. As new corners are added to the iconic building of tomorrow, allowing us to catch new glimpses of its essence, so new corners-buildings will be added to tomorrow's iconic city, giving us new mirrors to hold up to its centre, its soul.

In this way, then, as perhaps in others, the architecture becomes something else, something more, than either an empty, image-based, simple iconicity, or a self-referential, indexical series of twists and turns. A non-representational figure of corners, reflecting both the building's interior core and the city's exterior essence. Interior/exterior corners, open corners, double mirrors. Communication that doesn't speak yet still isn't silent - a series of relationships left for you (the subject/user/visitor/critic/patient) to evaluate and make sense of. 

PROGRAM

The most iconic of programs in that it is the most fundamental, the most basic, the one infused with most hope of them all. A program of life and death, carried out in a building made from the notion that space can be born and die. A cryonic centre, an archive of human bodies, like Borges's library extending infinitely as generation after generation dies and is put in a suspended state, waiting for technology to catch up. 

An architecture in which to die.

An architecture in which to be resurrected.

An architecture in which to sign over the rights to one's life and death to someone else. Most likely a complete stranger.

An architecture in which to have one's last supper.

An architecture in which to have one's first breakfast.

An architecture in which to do rehab training - mental and physical - after having been clinically dead.

An architecture in which to read up on all the gossip magazines and history books and newspapers from the years that one missed out on. An architecture in which to catch up on tv soap operas. An architecture in which to learn how to use new machines that one has never seen before. Etc, etc.

An architecture in which to store a lot of brains, bodies, belongings, and so on.

An architecture in which friends and relatives can come and visit their frozen loved ones.

And so on. 

POETICS

The program, I venture to say, is rather poetic in its own right. So how can we find our way to a poetic structure in which to house this program? The notion of the birth and death of space, as in the beginning and end of spaces, seems like the most obvious starting point.

Where is space born, where does space go to die?

In the corner.

If we focus on the corner, then, we focus on birth and death, dismissing the suspension (or wait, or life) in between the two. A building based on and derived from and starting with corners (as opposed to one that just happens to have corners, as a result of surfaces and slabs and other geometries; an afterthought) is a building that speaks of the birth and death of space, the birth and death of the architecture in which we live.

Finding a language for this, finding a way of beginning and ending with the corner and create a series of effects along the way, is the poetic side of this project. This doesn't quite equal a thesis (yet), but it's clearly approaching one.

CONSISTENT ICONICITY

While pushing the boundary of iconicity in a theoretical sense is one thing, allowing these ideas to filter through to and have an implication for the entire project in all of its parts, from the creation of iconic images (tautology, anyone?) through to envisioning an iconic program, is quite another. And it is to this latter ambition that we shall aspire.

This is why the drawings should be iconic, as should the models, the presentation format, the portfolio, the texts, the White Book, the ideas, the program, the analyses - everything. Note to self: This is something that you quickly need to put a massive amount of work into. So far, this is not an iconic project. It needs to become just that very, very soon.

THE CORNER

The study of precedent corners, once finished, will yield a catalogue of existing thoughts on and approaches to the corner. But the aim is not to produce old 'life' corners, the once that simply pop up where surfaces intersect. The aim is to create new corners, birth and death corners, corners that control space, that begin and end space, that generate the surfaces in between, and that modulate the very volumes they demarcate. Corners that reflect conditions, corners that create effects and affects. Figural corners. Iconic corners. Or post-iconic corners, if that's where we end up.

TAXONOMY

The story of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table, is fascinating - a favourite in the history of science. John Gribbin tells it better than anyone else. By searching for patterns within the 92 naturally occurring elements, the Russian chemistry professor was able to derive his table by arranging the elements by mass. He also predicted the existence and properties of some new elements in the empty cells of his table, and later chemists were able to deduce much of the internal structure of atoms from the patterns of Mendeleev's periodic table. So simply by diagramming the structure of and relationships between that which could be observed, that which couldn't could be dreamt up and mapped out. Drawing a map yielded a map of that which wasn't even known to exist yet.

Could the same be done with that most fundamental of architectural features, the corner?

Could a taxonomic table be created that would map out existing corners, and lead us to the creation of a few new ones?

This is the aim of the taxonomy that I'm currently working on. Trying to establish some rules, and then see what shapes I find if I follow those rules. 

Apart from thinking hard about and drawing up the taxonomy properly, I also need to start thinking about what the different corners that I find actually do, how they could be used, which effects they produce. This will be the next step.

So, in line with our earlier FOA discussions: a phylogenetic tree of corners?

Not really.

Phylogenesis is the scientific means of charting a genealogy or line of decent of a living organism, and constitutes a system where evolution and taxonomy come together. FOAs idea was that a “population” of architectural forms could be gathered that was sufficiently large to apply the organisational regime of phylogenesis. They classified their formal output as though it were a living population, even a “genetic pool,” in order to identify the fields of consistency that could be superimposed upon their labour. 

This is great, a beautiful index - but it's not what I'm trying to achieve. They seem to produce their chart (if memory serves me correctly; I haven't got the book at the time of writing this, so need to go back to the source really) after the fact. I want the table - or rather the empty spaces within the table, those moments where I can't think of an obvious answer - to become the starting point, the generative device, for the making of some new corners to fill them with. We'll see if I get there.

FORMAL STRATEGY

On page six of The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, Robin Evans asks the excellent question "Where is the centre of a centralized church?".

This project should ask "What is the space that is created between corners a, b, c, and d?" First the corner, then the space. And then, if it works out, the reversal: which corners will be born if I change the space in this or that way?

I haven't come far enough with this to really be able to say what my formal strategy is - and this needs to happen very, very soon.

One way of creating a corner is to make a section, to strategically slice through a form, thus creating a meeting point between the resulting contour lines. An example would be OMA's Science Centre in Hamburg (the distribution of porosity/voids of which also points toward a focus on the corner).

The corners are floating in space, then frozen, or suspended. There is a tension between the beginning and the end of space, between the corners, and that tension is the space itself, the volume.

This all makes me think of the non-silent silence of Michael Kenna's beautiful photographs of frozen structures - as well as the inevitable reference to the algorithmic nature and microscopic beauty of snowflakes.

SITE (WHERE IN THE WORLD)

Haven't really started to think about the site yet, but a few quick notes:

- The place with the oldest population in the world?

- The part of London where most people die?

- A place chosen (somehow) from this cryonics map?

SITE (SCALE/FORMAL)

We have a building based on locally distributed iconicities, an archive of human bodies based on the corner as a formal generator. This archive would be constantly growing as the idea gets publicised, with more and more people signing up to be cryopreserved. So the building will grow and grow with each successive generation - possibly (depending on how long it takes for the technology to arrive) for a very long time. It may grow for ten years or ten thousand. What kind of site can house such a building?

A site, perhaps, that keeps changing? One that can grow with the project, like a grid, but without being a grid, as the grid is indexical and this is by its very nature an iconic project. A site that allows for the building (or buildings) to move through the world (or, rather, through the air), touch down somewhere for structural support and programmatic/pragmatic functionality, and then move on again? A site that is to the architecture like the stair is to the Slinky.

The Slinky.

A wild idea: what about extending the corner analogy, but add a shift in scale. What would be a corner for the (corner) building, a corner of the city, a corner on an urban scale? Now think of this corner, this figure-on-ground (or figure-through-ground) condition, as something three-dimensional: a Gordon Matta-Clark-like cut through the city fabric, creating a corner in which the new corners can stand. Hm, maybe.

PRESENTATION

I'll sketch out my ideas for the portfolio for Friday's session. It will be based on corners, of course, held together at its corners, holding corners within its corners, corners within which the portfolio pages are held together in turn.

The centre piece could be the website (or the dvd of the website), if we go with my previously posted idea for an iconic presentation. Time to figure out whether this is a good or a bad idea.

Time, also, to email the contact I got early on during the term for a person at Schott, who make very thin sheets of glass that could be interesting to use as canvases for my plates. (Following on from the Glass House studies.) 

TECHNIQUES

Grasshopper was fun and seems like a good alternative for iteratively testing different corner configurations. I'll keep you posted.

[Sunday 16 November]

A quick break from issues of iconicity: I put on my environmentalist beard for a few days and went to Marrakech in order to accept a Holcim Award gold medal in the Next Generation category for Africa/Middle East. The project was the anti-desertification sand-to-sandstone scheme, Dune, that I did under the tutelage of Jonas Lundberg and Steve Hardy last year. Thanks to everyone in in Dip 16, to Holcim for having the guts to give the award to such a speculative project, and to all the lovely people I met at the event in Morocco.

[Tuesday 11 November]

Presented the two 3d models + the renders of the third (which I couldn't get together soon enough to print), together with a new manifesto. Both the presentation and the manifesto are posted below.

PRESENTATION

Cornering the iconic

My now updated re-brief considers Philip Johnson's first and last day in the Glass House, focusing on the birth of the building and the death of its architect, completely negating the state of suspension in between the two moments. It is a radical re-thinking of the iconic building's programme: rather than viewing it as a modernist masterpiece of transparent living, I read the house as one in which to die, a final resting place: a tomb, a monument, a temple.

Philip Johnson was obsessed with the corner. "My main concern," he writes about the Lake Pavilion, one of the many exploded pieces that make up the Glass House compound, "was to create a corner column that would keep the module without the Renaissance problem of 'disappearing' columns in the interior corners of the arcades." There are many similar quotes on how to come to terms with and best use the corner.

The three aspects that Johnson use to discipline his designs are all about the corner: the Procession, usually diagonal and/or changing in direction, presents the corner and the depth it gives to the building. The Cave is about the boundary function of the corner, the way it holds space, its generation of 'insideness'. The Sculpture, finally: Johnson describes his own Sculpture Gallery as a "play of simple angular volumes". The angle lives within the corner. Without the corner, no angles – be they 90 degrees or any of the 359 others. If we take the corner to mean the common point or vertex of several meeting curves, or the vertex of a sinuous curve (as in the peak of that curve), then most forms would be impossible without the corner.

Now, what happens when you create a house of glass, a structure that holds large walls of glass together, what Johnson calls "a steel cage with a glass skin"? During the day, the walls disappear; during night, they become mirrors reflecting the interior. As the light conditions change, so does the level of opacity, from transparency, via differing degrees of translucency, to reflectivity. What doesn't change is the point where these planes meet, the intersections of the black, solid steel structure: the corners. To the reading of the Glass House as a temple we can thus add another one: the Glass House is a temple of corners.

You shouldn't take my word for it, of course, but go back to the original source. In this case, the source that Johnson used is not, as many believe, Mies van der Rohe, who was also obsessed with the corner but in fact had nothing to do with the conceptual foundations of the Glass House, but only with its empirical execution. The real source is the eminent French architectural historian Jean-Marie du Motier, who in 1831 wrote the treatise, "The Corner: On the Birth and Death of Space". Philip Johnson's diary shows that it was this text that made him set out to create a "building of corners, a building without walls." This is all part of the re-brief.

For what is a corner? It is the beginning and end of a space, its demarcation, its boundary, that which gives birth and direction to the space, and the point where the space finally dies. The corner encloses space, gives rise to the possibility of an inside and an outside. The floors, walls, and roofs in between the corners are the manifestation of time within the building, the time it takes for the line to travel the distance from corner A to corner B, the animated suspension between beginning and end, life and death. The corner is both permanence and persistency: it is the possibility of a common point of departure, and the possibility of a new point of departure; a splitting, a potential point of becoming.

To focus on the corner at the expense of those parts of a building that stretch between the corners is to compress time. And to turn the corners into the iconic moments of a building – that is, the moments where the structure's form and function converges with its meaning – is to move focus away from a global image and towards a local reading. I'm interested in this shift from an over-simplified, shallow, singular, global iconicity towards a complex, deep, distributed, local iconicity.

The way I tried to do it with these three 'post-indexical' models, in line with my futures-ist manifesto, "Toward a New Iconicity: Logical Sensations and Sensational Logics," which I will read to you now.

I have a hard time getting away from the iconic programme...

- - -

THE FUTURES-IST MANIFESTO

Toward Local Iconicities: Logical Sensations and Sensational Logics

We have been up all night, my friends and I, accompanied by the low humming of the cryonic chambers, the internal glow of electrically controlled brains and hearts, drawing the very first lines of an architectural undertaking that will never cease to exist.

Architecture is a matter of life and death. It gives birth to and kills space, as it sets the stage for human births and deaths. In our age of eternal suspension, the architecture that houses our institutions of life and death and resurrection must itself be eternal: the building must go on. Arguably the most important and ambitious project ever embarked upon in the history of humanity, these chambers and laboratories - and the people investing their belief in them - need an iconic architecture, one that stands as a symbol of our contemporary hope not for the old futurist notion of bringing the future into the now, but rather the new futures-ist notion of bringing the now into the future.

A futures-ist architecture that re-negotiates the elements of life and death in architecture the way cryonic technologies have re-negotiated life and death in human beings. An architecture that inserts new possibilities through the radical rethinking of what was once uncritically thought to be a given truth rather than a condition. A building of hope, of suspense, of waiting for the light to be switched on at the end of the tunnel.

Today's global iconicity won't do - the ultimate building, both temple and place of birth, needs more than a singular image; the corkscrew, fish, bird, or phallos aren't strong-enough symbols of hopeful endings and new beginnings. But the opposite reaction, a completely self-referential structure wrapped up in semiotics and spatial grammar, obviously doesn't tell the story of any other births and deaths than its own. While the index lessens the importance of spectacular imagery, it somehow seems too rigid a biography, too much like an unfolding of the twists and turns that made up the structure's life. Rather than focusing on the descriptive, we need an open system ordered by logic without being understandable, neither an icon nor an image but something in between: an articulation of the figural. Spaces that are present without being presented, spaces beyond the legible. We don't need another map without a territory, we need new mapless territories filled with beginnings and ends and endless possibilities. And paradoxically, by compressing time through focusing on spatial birth and death, we learn about the in-between: spatial modulation, life.

What is birth and death in architecture? Where is space born, where does it go to die? In the corner. As a navigational tool unfolding the space to come, as a sign of spatial potentiality, as an icon of expectation, and as a formal beginning and end with an internal logic, the meeting point between surfaces is charged with meaning, an image of suspension between one state and the next.

The corners of a building are its local points of iconicities. The re- or deformation of these points of spatial birth or death governs the geometry of the whole. As a formal vehicle, the corner is an ideal point to create logical sensations, those investigations that are unique to architecture - an unfolding of three-dimensional spatialities over time. Just as cryonics do to life and death what only cryonics can do, its architecture should do what only architecture can - create the neverending drama of spaces being born, dying, and being born anew.

These logical sensations might in turn drive a sensational logic, in which the spatial lifecycle goes from corner to building and back again. The corner has been cornered, and by releasing it, by freeing it from its dull life as a static demarcation of space and turning it back into the birth-and-death machine of space, we will create new logically sensational and sensationally logical spaces, forever adding new spaces to and shedding the old in the neverending creation of the truly futures-istic architecture of the era of suspense.

- - -

Architects have tried to go beyond the global iconicity before, notably Peter Eisenman with the indexical readings that produced his Houses. However, both in view of the fact that Eisenman today talks about post-indexicality - this is where I derived the term for those models - and following from Jeff Kipnis's suggestion, at least my reading of it, that an architecture may be possible that is neither representation nor invention but a discovery that belongs only to architecture, with "its own sovereign portal to affect," I based these forms on a global, three-dimensional mass of eight smaller, positive corner cubes surrounding a larger, interstitial negative corner space, on which I could then project and from which I could subtract corners, so as to create spaces both by an act of hollowing out and by one of adding demarcations. The previous creates negative void space, the latter positive mass - even where there is none.

The three models are based on studies of three precedent corners that make up a palette of architectural sensations: the Cut-Out Corner of Carlo Scarpa, as seen in the Gypsoteca Canoviana in Possagno, the Extruded Skeletal Corner of Peter Eisenman, and the Boolean Corner of Zaha Hadid. Through a series of formal iterations using Rhino's explicit history plug-in, Grasshopper, scalar and rotational complexity was built up using these basic notions, each model (hopefully!) suggesting an architectural figure that holds local moments of iconicity in its corners, rather than being presented as a global icon.

Eisenman says that he's "looking for ways of conceptualizing space that will place the subject in a displaced relationship because they will have no iconographic reference to traditional forms of organization". In a digital world, those traditional forms are that problematic anymore. The possibility is rather to shift focus from the global to the local, from the simple massing exercise or surface modulation to the intricate corners of the building. This local iconicity is where we may be able to find tomorrow's true icons: a new kind of architectural figure that is neither traditionally (globally) iconic nor indexical. A kind of post-indexical architecture that renegotiates the affective experience of the architecture beyond semantics and linguistics and readings that are really only about backtracking a process, paraphrasing what has already been said and done. An investigation of that truly architectural moment: space unfolding over time.

[Tuesday 10 November]

Some process screenshots from the making of the post-indexical sketch models. This was my first attempt at using Grasshopper – David Rutten's ‘visual scripting’ tool, which is great for people like me who haven’t yet come around to learn how to script properly, but are fascinated with the results one can achieve through such techniques.

[Tuesday 10 November]

Some new White Book pages for the pin-up:

[Monday 10 November]

2:54am and just about to start working on some White Book pages that I'm hoping to get ready for the pin-up. I need to change the music - Springsteen's Seeger Sessions album is doing my head in. Need something abstract. Four Tet. Photek. Whatever. I'm so not going to get this done on time. Reminds me of the title of a magazine that I once found and should have bought - Remember: don't sleep. Argh. This is a really good idea. Etc, etc.

[Monday 10 November]

More theory? I just went through an excerpt from Daniel W. Smith's excellent introduction to Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Quite a lot of interesting things architecture-wise, so without further ado, here is my super-condensed version (whereas the discussion on Kant is interesting, I don't think it applies to my project, so I've simply cut it out):

The first trajectory concerns the concepts used: not "What does it mean" but "How does it function".

Deleuze frequently returns to the three simplest aspects of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the contour that separates the two—which taken together form a “highly precise system” that serves to isolate the Figure in Bacon’s paintings...

But a first level of complexity immediately intervenes: the fields of color tend to curl around the contour and envelop the Figure, but at the same time the Figure itself tends to strain toward the fields, passing through washbasins, umbrellas, and mirrors, subjected to the forces that contort it, that deform or contract it in a kind of “derisory athleticism,” revealing the intensive “body without organs” beneath the extensive organic body (chapter 3)

A second level of complexity appears in the works in which Bacon paints coupled Figures that nonetheless resonate together in a single “matter of fact” (chapter 9). A third level of complexity emerges in the triptychs, where this “matter of fact” includes not only the distances that separate the distinct panels but also the forced movement or rhythms that constitute the true Figure of the triptychs: the steady or “attendant” rhythm; an active, rising, or diastolic rhythm; and a passive, descending, or systolic rhythm (chapter 10). Deleuze not only identifies these three fundamental rhythms found in Bacon’s triptychs, he also shows that even the simple paintings already function like triptychs, with their complex movements and combinatorial variability. A final level of complexity arises with regard to Bacon’s handling of color (chapter 16), and his construction of a properly “haptic” space, since it is primarily through the use of color (relations of tonality) that he brings about all these effects in his works (isolation, deformation, coupling, rhythm...).

...there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a “sensation” directly: either by moving toward abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural. An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye; by contrast, an abstract expressionism, like that of Pollock, went beyond representation, not by painting abstract forms, but by dissolving all forms in a fluid and chaotic texture of manual lines and colors (chapter 14). Bacon in effect followed a “middle path” between these two extremes, the path of the Figure, which finds its precursor in Cézanne. Whereas “figuration” refers to a form that is related to an object it is supposed to represent, the “Figure” is the form that is connected to a sensation, and that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the nervous system. In Bacon’s paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure: it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation. This is Bacon’s solution to the problem he shares with Cézanne: How to extract the Figure from its figurative, narrative, and illustrational links? How to “paint the sensation” or “record the fact”?

This brings us to the second trajectory, which concerns the nature of the “logic of sensation” that constitutes the object of Deleuze’s analyses in this book.

Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational. This linkage between sensation and rhythm can perhaps best be illustrated by means of a somewhat lengthy detour through Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s theory of perception, which forms a kind of complementary text to The Logic of Sensation.

“Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level. This is a ‘logic of the senses,’ as Cézanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes.” In painting, it was Cézanne and Klee who best exemplified this complex relation between chaos and rhythm. Cézanne said that the painter must look beyond a landscape to its chaos: he spoke of the need to always paint at close range, to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities. This is what Cézanne called the world before humanity, “dawn of ourselves,” “iridescent chaos,” “virginity of the world”—a complete collapse of visual coordinates in a universal variation or interaction. Afterward, in the act of painting, the earth can emerge, with its “stubborn geometry,” its “geological foundations” as “the measure of the world”—but with the perpetual risk that the earth in turn may once again disappear in a second catastrophe, in order for colors to arise, for the earth to rise to the sun. Similarly, Paul Klee, in a famous text in Modern Art, wrote of how rhythm emerges from chaos, and how the “grey point” jumps over itself and organizes a rhythm, “the grey point having the double function of being both chaos and at the same time a rhythm insofar as it dynamically jumps over itself.” Translated into Kantian terms, both Cézanne and Klee mark the movement by which one goes from the synthesis of perception (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) to aesthetic comprehension (rhythm) to the catastrophe (chaos), and back again: the painter passes through a catastrophe (the diagram) and in the process produces a form of a completely different nature (the Figure).

Klee’s famous formula echoes through Deleuze’s writings like a kind of leitmotif: not to render the visible, but to render visible. Sensations are given, but it is force that constitutes the condition of sensation. The artistic question then becomes: How to render sensible forces that are not themselves sensible? How to render the nonvisible visible in painting, or the nonsonorous sonorous in music?

...the third line of concepts in Deleuze’s book, which concerns the way in which painters, and Bacon in particular, produce this “logic of sensation.”

...in Bacon’s work, its summit is found in the sensation of color.

...through a kind of deduction of concepts. The first is the concept of the cliché. Clichés, Deleuze writes elsewhere, are anonymous and floating images “which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each of us and constitute our internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which we think and feel, are thought and felt, being ourselves one cliché among others in the world that surrounds us.” If Deleuze’s philosophy is a genetic philosophy, the cliché is precisely what prevents the genesis of an image, just as opinion and convention prevent the genesis of thought. In this sense, one of the fundamental questions of Deleuze’s philosophy is, What are the conditions for the production of the new (an image, a thought...)? Hence the essential role of the catastrophe: the condition for the genesis of the image (or the sensation) is at one and the same time the condition for the destruction of the cliché.

How then does the painter pass through the catastrophe and destroy the cliché? This is the role of what Deleuze calls the diagram or graph (chapter 12), a term he derives from the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce.

Although Deleuze admits his indebtedness to Peirce, he rejects the iconic status that Peirce assigned to the diagram, since it tends to conceive the diagram simply as a “copy” or graphic representation of intelligible relations or coordinates. Deleuze, rather, prefers to assign to the diagram a much more strongly creative or genetic role: “the diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.” As Deleuze explains in chapter 13, the diagram acts as an analogical modulator, a conjunction of matter and function.

Painters, Deleuze argues, have their own type of diagrammatism. What he terms a painterly diagram (an operative set of nonrepresentational and nonsignifying lines and colors) is the means by which painters, in their own way, pass through the experience of catastrophe.

The painter’s diagram undoes the optical organization of the synthesis of perception (clichés), but also functions as the “genetic” element of the pictorial order to come. Every painter, Deleuze suggests, will pass through this process in a different manner. “The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe,” he writes, “but it is also a germ of order or rhythm.” Using Wittgensteinian language, Deleuze says that the diagram constitutes a “possibility of fact,” out of which the Fact itself will emerge.

If the summit of Bacon’s own logic of sensation is found in the “coloring sensation,” it is because it is primarily (though not exclusively) through the use of color that Bacon effects his diagrammatic procedures. In this regard, Deleuze identifies two fundamental uses of color in the history of painting. The first, more traditionally, emphasizes relations of value between colors, that is, the contrast of shadow and light (chiaroscuro).

In chapter 15, however, Deleuze will define Bacon’s novelty in a twofold manner that breaks with these earlier conceptions of color and space. On the one hand, in his use of color, Bacon follows Cézanne and Van Gogh in replacing relations of value with relations of tonality, that is, with pure relations between the colors of the spectrum.

Chapter 16 analyzes how the three formal elements of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the contour, the structure—are all constructed by means of color: the internal variations of intensity in the structure, the “broken tones” of the Figures, the colored line of the contour. Thus, each element of Bacon’s paintings converges in color, and it is modulation (the relation between colors) that explains the unity of the whole, the distribution of each element, and the way each of them acts upon the others. This is why Deleuze says that it is the “coloring sensation” that stands at the summit of Bacon’s logic of sensation.

[Monday 10 November]

I'm thinking of basing my manifesto on Marnietti's 1909 Futurist Manifesto, but calling it futures-ism rather than futurism. Smart or silly? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here's the original text:

The Futurist Manifesto

F. T. Marinetti, 1909

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.

Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.

`Come, my friends!' I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.'

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel - a guillotine knife - which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. `Smell,' I exclaimed, `smell is good enough for wild beasts!'

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!

We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.

Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.

`Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!'

As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself - vlan! - head over heels in a ditch.

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!

As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care they raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.

We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins.

Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid fishermen and angry naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all the living men on earth.

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.

8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.

Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?

To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?

Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.

For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!

Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!

The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.

But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.

They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.

The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath.

Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? it is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what our beautiful false intelligence affirms: `We are only the sum and the prolongation of our ancestors,' it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up your head!

Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars! 

[Sunday 9 November]

So here I am, trying to model local iconicities and find my way away from global iconicity, and what do I end up with? A formal experiment that somehow looks pretty... iconic, anyone? I'll get it printed anyway – something for the pin-up, and yet another starting point.

[Sunday 9 November]

Donato Bramante, Santa Maria della Pace (Rome)

Snapshot halfway through the corner typologies study...

Francesco Borromini

Typology:

The Eliminated Corner

Example:

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Rome)

Description:

One of the most theatrical practitioners of the Baroque style, Borromini is said to have eliminated the corner in architecture. The undulating movements and sculptural effects of the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Borromini's first major independent commission) are characteristic of Baroque architecture, of which the church is of course an iconic masterpiece - but the architect allows them to flow so freely across this difficult corner site that the corner drowns in the concave/convex rhythms of the façade, visually liquidising the heavy stone in a dramatic display of bold architectural intricacy.

Donato Bramante

Typology:

The Iconoclash Corner

Example:

Santa Maria della Pace (Rome)

Description:

"At the courtyard of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome, Bramante superposed the existing proportions of two orders - the Tuscan and the Ionic - changing both their iconic condition and their conventionally coded relationships. (...) The corner at Santa Maria della Pace suggests that the volume of the courtyard produces a vectoral force which is outisde of any geometric order, compressing the corner into its resultant material being."

(Peter Eisenman, Digital Scrambler, from Written into the void, p. ?)

Frank Lloyd Wright

Typology:

The Mitred Transparent Corner and The Overlapping Corner

Example:

Zimmerman House  |  Ross House

Description:

Mitered corners are fitted togther from parts cut at angles. Two pieces cut at 45 degree angles will fit together to form a 90 degree corner. The windows of the Zimmerman house by Frank Lloyd Wright have mitered glass corners that allow unobstructed views of the gardens.

"Wright attacked the traditional room at its point of greatest strength - at the corner. He dissolved the corner between the dining and living rooms at the Ross house by permitting one room to penetrate into the other. If the living room walls are extended to their point of contact, the corner is at the dining room table. A similar extension of the dining room walls makes a corner located well within the living room. " H. Allen Brooks, "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Destruction of the Box"

Mies van der Rohe

Typology:

The Negative Corner

Example:

IIT Wishnik Hall (Chemistry Building)  |  Seagram Building

Description:

Philip Johnson writes about the Glass House that "Many details of the house are adapted from Mies' work, especially the corner treatment and the relation of the column to the window frames. This use of standard steel sections to make a strong and at the same time decorative finish to the façade design is typidal of Mies' Chicago work." It is also typical of the great German's treatment of the corner in his most iconic buildings: the IIT compound, the Seagram Building, the Barcelona Pavillion, and the Farnsworth House - all of which feature, in one way or another, the Negative Corner - the point where his 'refined simplicity' becomes less simple. The zipper in the black boot.

Richard Neutra

Typology:

The Extended Displaced Corner

Example:

The Singleton Residence

Description:

Some elements, such as major outdoor rooms enclosed by rows of movable vertical fins that offer flexible protection against the environment, seem to run through the buildings of Richard Neutra, including his famous Kauffmann House. Another element is the Extended Corner - a roof plate balancing on a structural element that is not quite exoskeletal, but rather seems to pierce through the building from the inside out. Floating vertical planes support their horisontal counterparts, while seemingly sliding away from or into each other.

Le Corbusier

Typology:

What to call this?

Example: Chapel at Ronchamp

Description:

TBC

Philip Johnson

Typology:

The Niche Corner

Example:

Cash Register Building, Denver

Description:

A take on Mies van der Rohe's Negative Corner, The Niche Corner...

Carlo Scarpa

Typology:

The Cut-Out Corner

Example:

Gypsoteca Canoviana (Possagno)

Description:

"Corner cutouts is a device frequently used in much of Scarpa's work. One might say he intensifies corners by giving them a direction or, it might be said he challenges the reading of the object-like quality of the volume, by giving it direction and thereby uniting it with its surroundings. I think they mean the same thing. I spoke of reversing Classical treatment before. This seems to be another example of this reversal. Rather than making corners, junctures, or connections positive, by embellishing them with a positive solid (as a capital, cornice, pedestal, etc., exemplifies) he creates a negative space which accomplishes the

same objective." (Ellen C. Soroka , "Carlo Scarpa – Connections in Design: A Generic Attitude",  dissertation, 1973.) Eric Owen Moss seems to have borrowed an idea or two from this in the design of The Box (1990).

Frank Gehry

Typology:

The Folded Sinuous Corner

Example:

Guggenheim Bilbao  |  IAC

Description:

TBC.

Peter Eisenman

Typology:

The Extruded Skeletal Corner

Example:

House III  |  House IV  |  Wexner Center

Description:

The column is extruded at different depths, creating alternative readings from that of a structural skeleton reminiscent of Sol Lewitt's sculptures, through to that of a regular slab, or wall. The corner as exploration of the syntactic combination of elements (beam, column, frame). The structural frame corner, but a bulimic frame: at times indulgent, at times ascetic. Where House III has one corner breaking out of the original grid, House IV starts with all four corners breaking out of the grid, only to end up a redefinition of the grid. In a kind of three-dimensional tic-tac-toe, space-defining frames slide into and out of each other, producing spaces (real or imagined) at their intersections. At times these corners are made redundant through the over-packing of space: columns stop before reaching the floor, and so on.

Steven Holl

Typology:

The Sliced Porosity Corner

As seen in:

Sliced Porosity Block  |  NYU Philosophy Department  |  Porosity Bench  |  Riddled Cupboard

Description:

The Sliced Porosity Corner works differently in different projects, but essentially builds on two themes: to slice off the corner at an angle, and to add porosity around the slice. This can be seen in the Sliced Porosity Block, the geometry of which results from minimum daylight exposures to the surrounding urban fabric prescribed by code. In the NYU Philosophy Department, the stairs are folded vertically through the building, producing many corners that are pierced with porosity in the form of cutouts. Both the Porosity Bench and the Riddled Cupboard are porously sliced pieces of furniture that can be seen through and plays with light to cast beautifullt patterned shadows.

Zaha Hadid

The Boolean Corner/The Extruded Corner

As seen in: Ideal House, Cologne  |  Cincinatti Arts Center  |  Darat King Abdullah II Amman

Description:

This is different from Carlo Scarpa's treatment in that whereas Scarpa cuts out part of the corner, Hadid allows this cut-out to completely deform - at times to the point of eradication - its supporting wall or column. The cut taken to a new level of formal logic. The booleaned-out space is so large as to almost, but not quite, make the reading of the corner impossible: we sense that it was once there, at some point during the process of drawing the building. Hadid creates interior or exterior space from cutting out the corner, sometimes replacing it with a new space, sometimes not, and sometimes extruding the walls to shoot out beyond the original building envelope.

[Sunday 9 November]

Quick sketch of the pages I'm hoping to have for Tuesday. I manically create these plans and never manage to stick to them, so we'll see how far I'll get with this one. However, I know from experience that if I don't spend those ten minutes drawing up a plan, I'll never get a single page done, so I suppose it may not be a complete waste of time after all.

[image to follow]

[Saturday 8 November]

On the left: Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Valazquez. On the right, Francis Bacon's Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

Late-night note (I once went to a talk that Jonathan Safran-Foer gave about his novels, and he said that what separates the writer from the non-writer is that former goes through the trouble of actually writing down all of those brilliant ideas that always seem to enter one's mind as one lies waiting to fall asleep, or something to that effect, which struck a chord; ever since, I've made sure to always have pen and paper waiting next to my bed) on architecture and the discussion of Deleuze's reading of Bacon: in his translator's introduction to  "Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation," Daniel W. Smith writes that "Deleuze frequently returns to the three simplest aspects of Bacon’s paintings—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the contour that separates the two—which taken together form a 'highly precise system' that serves to isolate the Figure in Bacon’s paintings". Now, if what we're looking for is the local iconicities within 'the unfolding of spaces over time,' and if we're looking for a way of expressing that through focusing on the corner, then really it may be that we shouldn't be so concerned with the figure, but rather with the contour that separates one space from the next. Is this just a contrived way of saying 'surface,' or is there something more to this distinction? The figure in Bacon is the human body, the figure in architecture is the space, the void, the contained. Deleuze views Bacon's body as one 'without organs' that is deformed or contracted by the forces that contort it. The body wants out of its skin. When we open a corner, the space flows through that corner; a space without organs? Hm, or maybe I should just go back to modelling - not to mention get a bit of sleep - instead?

[Friday 7 November]

I've decided to separate the chapters of the White Book by giving each its own font. This is either a really good idea or "a really good idea". We'll see.

Thinking of Didot for the next part of the book, that on finding a formal language. "Evocative of the Age of Enlightenment" - isn't that just what we need?

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Didot: 

"Didot is a name given to a group of typefaces named after the famous French printing and type producing family. The classification is known as modern, or Didone. The typeface we know today was based on a collection of related types developed in the period 1784-1811. Firmin Didot (1764–1836) cut the letters, and cast them as type. His brother Pierre Didot (1760–1853 ) used the types in printing. His edition of La Henriade by Voltaire in 1818 is considered his masterwork. The typeface takes inspiration from John Baskerville's experimentation with increasing stroke contrast and a more condensed armature. The Didot family's development of a high contrast typeface with an increased stress is contemporary to similar faces developed by Giambattista Bodoni in Italy. Didot is described as neoclassical, and is evocative of the Age of Enlightenment.

A version of Didot was commissioned and used by broadcast network CBS for many years alongside its famous "eye" logo.

Several revivals of the Didot faces have been made, most of them for hot metal typesetting. Like Bodoni, early digital versions suffered from a syndrome called "dazzle"–the hairline strokes in smaller point sizes nearly disappearing in printing. Among the more successful contemporary adaptations are the ones drawn by Adrian Frutiger for the Linotype foundry, and by Jonathan Hoefler for H&FJ. Both designs anticipate the degradation of hairline in smaller point sizes by employing heavier weighted strokes in the smaller point sizes."

[Friday 7 November]

Woke up this morning with the Dip9 bug. If how I feel is anything to go by, it probably looks something like this, and it's teaching me a thing or two about the body-with-organs, as opposed to Deleuze's body-without-organs. Thanks, Rebecca.

[Thursday 6 November]

Oh, hang on, haven't we seen this one somewhere else?

I've started to work on a typology of corners, following Tuesday's tutorial. Scarpa's are, of course, nice (as shown in this essay, quoted below):

"...the solidity and neutrality of the double height cubic viewing room is broken at the corners with corner windows of two kinds; at one end he intensifies the corner with cubic windows that are external to the building--they sit on top of the wall and ceiling generating direction to the outside, while the two at the other end are rectangularly three dimensional and are recessed; the effect of

them being recessed challenges the edge definition of the solid allowing the outside to enter in.

Similarly, in the Gypsoteca in Possagno, Scarpa reinforces this inside/outside relationship with corner windows in the double height gallery--however, where Frank Lloyd Wright would probably uniformly treat all corners the same way--Scarpa reverses two of the windows literally making note ofthe outside coming in. The end glass wall is another example of this inside/outside reading: the glass visually asks one to go beyond the edge definition and read the outside as an extension of the inside.

Corner cutouts is a device frequently used in much of Scarpa's work. One might say he intensifies corners by giving them a direction or, it might be said he challenges the reading of the object-like quality of the volume, by giving it direction and thereby uniting it with its surroundings. I think they mean the  same thing. I spoke of reversing Classical treatment before. This seems to be another example of this reversal. Rather than making corners, junctures, or connections positive, by embellishing them with a positive solid (as a capital, cornice, pedestal, etc., exemplifies) he creates a negative space which accomplishes the same objective. It intensifies the juncture. This can be seen at the right end corner of the viaduct where it is embellished with a change in material shaped into a cube with one quarter of it cut out. The same change of material can be seen in that which it meets.

The disintegration of an edge definition is accomplished in three ways: the extension of inside to outside, the bringing of outside to inside, and the more complicated act of having both occur at once. Scarpa used three dimensional windows to accomplish the first two. In the double height gallery space on the west side of the addition, Scarpa used two different kinds of windows to not only dissolve the corners at roof level, but intensified these corners by giving them direction. (Fig. #53) On the east side of this cube-like space, he put cubic glass windows which sit on top and outside of the roof and wall which effectively generates a diagonal direction to the outside from the inside (Fig. #52) (as these cubic windows protrude outside the roof and wall edge). On the west edge of this cubic room, Scarpa used rectangularly three dimensional windows which invert, cutting the dimension of the walls in half, and literally bringing the outside in."

[Thursday 6 November]

There's just no escaping Peter Eisenman if you want to talk about iconicity in architecture. There's pretty much no escaping Peter Eisenman no matter what you want to talk about in architecture, of course, but especially so with things iconic. Just lost myself (again) in Diagram Diaries and M Emory Games. Some quotes:

From "Diagram Diaries" (New York, Universe Publications, 1999)

"While diagrams of painting, sculpture, and architecture were often seen as similar in their content, my use of the diagram proposed that there was some critical difference between them. This difference was found in the unique relationship in architecture between its instrumentality and its iconicity, between architecture's function and its meaning, and ultimately between its sign and its signified." (pp. 49-50)

"Previously, specific forms in architecture were always linked to a function (a column must always have a shape and a material dimension) and, therefore, to a meaning. My innitial idea in the use of the diagram was that the substrate of form, here referred to as an aspect of architecture's interiority, could be detached from such programmatic concerns. This is what Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss have called the need to preserve the singularity of objects by cutting them off from their previous modes of legitimation. For architecture, this would mean a process that would displace form from its assumed necessary relationships to function, meaning, and aesthetics without at the same time necessarily denying the precense of these conditions." (pp. 50-51)

"...[Eisenman's idea of the formal] articulated both a quality of what at the time was called generic form, such as linearity - as opposed to a specific line - and the idea of a process of form suggested by a relationship of form in space, such as rotation and shear, which again had nothing to do with the actual physical character of the form but with something implied in the relationship between forms." (p. 52)

"...In any built work, while there were columns and beams - precences in the space - they were not holding anything up. These 'structural' elements asked whether it was necessary to have a functioning structure in order to be necessarily iconic (i.e., to symoblize function). Was the actual material column to be considered merely a functional element or was it also a sign? Was the unstructural or 'cardboard' column, since it was not a functioning structure, also a sign?" (pp. 57-58)

"A self-referential sign was defined in the House II diagrams as the difference between an iconic sign and an indexical sign. Traditionally, the diagram had been used as an iconic sign - one which referred outward to some metaphoric existence. Now, the diagram was seen instead as a series of indexical signs: a system of differences that had little metaphoric or iconic content, but rather could be seen as a notational system understood as different from other formal systems. These indexical signs were thought to exist in some sort of suspension from their iconic condition yet as a potential condition of interiority. It was not that these indexical signs did not also have an iconic value, but this value could coexist with their indexical quality." (p. 64)

"...Walter Benjamin's thesis that architecture is viewed by an essentially distracted observer." (p. 65)

"The need to detach the icon from the instrument in order to read architecture not merely as a language but as a singular manifestation of an interiority of difference became an important part..." (pp. 67-68)

From "M Emory Games" (in "M Emory Games: Emory Center for the Arts" (New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 1995), p.58-59

"Our work imposes a conceptual memory on the volumetric massing of an object, and in doing so attempts to subvert icons of presence, the building mass itself, with a striated network of what could be described as lines of memory. Little of the iconicity of these lines of memory comes from the traditional forms of iconicity in architecture, such as function, structure, aesthetics, or a relationship to the history of architecture itself. Rather, the iconicity of these lines comes from a writing that is indexical as opposed to iconic. An index is something that refers to its own condition. In this sense its iconic role is more one of resemblance than it is one of representation. The facade of a building, while traditionally thought to be a representation, also has the possibility to be indexical. The plan, on the other hand, while clearly indexical also has iconic characteristics. Writing attempts to suggest that both the plan and the facade can be used as indices. In order to have a writing in this context one must first make a distinction between a resemblance and a representation. A representation always refers to something external, while a resemblance also refers to internal characteristics. Representations rely on a traditional notion of memory that is linguistic and historical. A resemblance can also be understood as a simulacrum that is not based on a visual relationship. In a sense the simulacrum is a representation without resemblance or the sign of a sign. Such a condition of sign becomes an index. Thus the lines of memory act as a simulacrum rather than a representation."

[Wednesday 5 November]

Slightly exhausted from thinking about all this, I give Matthias a call. Here are my scattered notes from our phone conversation:

Sameness/difference. Need contrast. Chaos is just chaos.

How go beyond this simple state of affairs?

Work on both the detail and the global system so that when the detail changes, the whole thing changes, and vice versa. Not just a simple parametric relationship, but a super-fluid system...

How mix systems? How, if you have a regular grid and you move one dot it changes, but if you change all dots, nothing stands out? Figure vs gestalt...

Breaking out of the grid? An aggregate of grids? How treat the grid?

If you have a packed system and then you have a void, all of a sudden you have something that you see but at the same time don't see... Work with contrasts?

- - -

I hung up, thinking: was that a collection of good ideas or "good ideas". Hm. And then a question was formed in my mind:

Can the shape of the corner control the trajectory of the grid?

- - -

It's good to talk. Thanks, Matthias. 

[Wednesday 5 November]

I wish this was my model, but it's Eva Hesse's Metronomic Irregularity I (1966). There is an interesting project that begins with this rather lovely work of art here. I just thought it could illustrate the scribbles below, on information transfer through a grid.

Without further ado, then: Toward an essay. 

Possible titles:

- Logical sensations and sensational logics

- Notes on the post-indexical model

- Beyond the global: the local

The way we use the grid is projective, topological, and, to some extent, algorithmic. We draw lines running in opposite directions. Where they intersect, we chose to manipulate or not manipulate the lines, two at a time, pushing them up or down in accordance with a particular, fact-based logic or system. Applying algorithmic actions produce forms within this topography: raise four points at equal distances from each other by that same distance, and you get a cube.

The grid is inherently indexical in that it can be used as a referential guide, a trackback machine, a navigation tool. The information is carried along one line until it meets that of an intersecting line. In this network of lines the crossing-as-nodal-point no longer remains locally iconic, but becomes a cross reference in a larger, global system: a snapshot of an intersection, a value taken at a certain point within the whole.

A global manipulation of this grid, in which all the intersections adjust to an overriding form, is the predominant mode of creating "iconic" architectural statements: at its most simple, you raise the four points in the example above further than anyone has ever done and create the tallest building in the world. Viewed as a global artefact, this really would be an iconic structure in that there is a correlation between its form and its

If, however, we can no longer read the grid, if we lose our bearings, then in this moment of spatial vertigo we can charge the intersection, the cross, the corner with new meaning. In the (modernist) grid, the cross is always a meeting point, a moment where the lines converge, or come together. In this new grid-beyond-the-grid, the cross may be the starting point. It may be either beginning, suspension, or end. Birth, life, or death. We lose the serial repetitiveness of the grid and re-adjust our focal point to become that of the corner, the intersection, the cross. We zoom out on the grid and have indexicality, we zoom in on the individual node and get iconicity.

In this territory without a map, we read the intersections as local icons, the way we read the brushstrokes in a Bacon painting, or a beautiful tree in a landscape we know nothing about. The icon sits within a system without refering to it; we are concerned with the qualities of the individual intersection rather than the collection of intersections. Local before global.

The cross still carries information - indeed, it may carry more information than before, as we can track both its position in 3d space (as opposed to traditional, modernist, 2d space), it's route there, and its route thereafter. These routes between intersecting grid points are really the basis of projective geometries - they are the lines we loft to get forms, shapes, spaces.

The global form is a gigantic corner, demarcating a much larger space, possibly a worldwide network of buildings, a grid. On this scale, however, zoomed in at this level, we recognise only the building, we see only the node. As the building grows, the network grows with it. The grid grows deeper.

A corner needn't be just the point where two or three or more lines meet. It can be a corner made from surfaces, from volumes, from suggested lines.

Strange and probably unrelated sentence from nowhere: "Christianity stole the cross. We're stealing it back."

[Tuesday 4 November]

Notes from Tuesday tutorial 081104 (first sketch model)

Only corners. A drawing that's all corners. A model that's all corners. A building that's all corners.

How define a corner?

Dan Graham? (Mirrors, reflections, transparent/translucent/reflective/opaque + corners...)

The dislocated corner...

Grid? Beyond grid? How set the corner free from the grid?

Look at corners of Scarpa, Mies, PJ... Go through precedent corners.

Stereotomic corner?

Focus on the beginning and the end, without the suspension in between?

Negate, re-evaluate the grid.

Just a crossing doesn't need a grid. Introduce fault lines as grid lines, and you destroy the grid. Rotate along those fault lines, or use them as starting point/datum for other actions? (Rotating/scaling/stretching, bending, curving, spinning, spiraling, mirroring...)

Inverted, boolean corners...

Precedent corner study for TS? [Check Alex's old mate from Shin's unit...]

For Friday: corner model + manifesto.

Take out Rem/Eisenman video.

Take out Kipnis video.

Local iconicity as opposed to global, overall iconicity? The return of the fragment from PJs Glass House! A set of local icons rather than one single, overarching - though one does take precedence (because of its uniqueness, its materiality, its iconic programme...).

Distributed, and thus affective (since it demands an interaction between user/visitor and building) iconicity.

Look up Robert Somol ("shape, not form", Green Dots) and Bruce Mau.

Look at corners at other scales: the corner of the block, of the building, of the city, of the world, of the frame...

The 3d "crack" (change the word into something else) as non-topological anti-surface.

Cutting corners. Moving the corner in order to transform the space, amplify or silence, speed up or slow down the spatial experience...

The Glass House is a house of corners, the glorification of spatial demarcation - the demarcation of the demarcation itself. What's left when the walls disappear? The corners. (Draw it this way?)

Now: find formal language, devices, techniques. Pick out words from manifesto and make dictionary: figrue, compression, local vs distributed iconicity.

The folded corner > 2d to 3d = 2.5d?

Radical rethinking of the corner.

Check reading lists throughout history, especially the DRL shelf, to understand where the discourse has been focused.

Seriality: Yokohama (series of spaces) vs Embryonic House (iterations). A question of process/time?

Three white book texts: re-brief, quoted manifesto, new manifesto. (Wiki entry! A meta narrative. Make up people that Johnson quotes. The person who 'is' the corner.)

Plus a section on programmatic intent?

Each part of the white book has its own form?

A house without a middle, without content. An architecture that's all corner and no content. Corny?

Eva Hesse. Plus the mirrors in nature by Robert Smithson.

Look at wood joinery for corner studies?

The frame builds the image - Warhol.

Do read Rosalind Krauss on formlessness.

Whitebook sections: Research, material, plates, manifesto... New paper! Print on A3, double-sided tape.

[Tuesday 4 November]

This first conceptual sketch model (apologies for the quality of these late-night-at-home images) tries to convey the following three ideas:

IDEA_01

[corners/casa guardiola]

Architecture is a matter of life and death.

Space is born. Space dies. Space is born again.

Where is space born? Where does space die?

In the corner.

This is a lesson from Philip Johnson, who learnt it from Mies.

The intersection of lines, the seam between surfaces, the opening and closing of volumes. The points of no return, the point where you leave one space and enter the next.

Whether sharp or oblique or blurred, the corner defines the beginning and the end - the life and death of space.

By manipulating the corner - opening and closing it in different ways - space can come alive, or die, or be suspended in a tension in between the two.

Invisible, or suggested, corners demarcate transparent Chinese boxes, spaces within spaces. The corners of the rug in the Glass House demarcate a space that Johnson calls "a raft". By rotating the corners in plan, we can create successions of spaces (processions). By tilting the planes, we can reach alternative effects, animating the spaces by slowing them down or speeding them up, or having them shoot through each other.

What is it like to be in three transparent spaces at the same time?

The key is to stick with the corner, a collection of centres. If the corners turn into a grid, we lose the iconicity - or do we? Writes Peter Eisenman:

"In architecture when one draws the crossing of two lines, it produces a cross which is an obvious icon of point, centre, focus, etc. The repetition of this crossing produces a grid, which is no longer concerned with centre and focus but rather with surface, texture, etc. The grid is no longer primarily iconic but rather is also an index. As an index the grid is used in many conditions of mapping as well as in making certain reference tables where the horizontal columns are used for one kind of information and the vertical columns are used as a cross reference for other information. But in architecture when the grid becomes the plan of a city or a real building, its abstract co-ordinates become literal intersections for the simple extrusion of three-dimensional space. When this happens the secondary or relational aspects of the grid as an index becomes transformed into a primary, direct one-to-one relationship between abstraction and reality, space and three-dimensional volume, form and function. So most grid-drawn lines in architecture become iconic because of the priority of extruded three-dimensional space."

(Peter Eisenman, "Indicencies: In the Drawing Lines of Tadao Ando," in Tadao Ando: Complete Works. London: Phaidon, 1995, p.497. First appeared in: in Tadao Ando Details. Tokyo, Japan: A.D.A. Edita Tokyo, 1991.)

Can we draw convex corners, concave corners? Can we draw the crossing of two lines and produce a cross without allowing it to become a grid?

IDEA_02

[eusapia/isomorphic]

Architecture is a matter of life and death.

Italo Calvino knew this when he described Eusapia:

"...to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground. All corpses, dried in such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down there, to continue their former activities.

...

From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. (...) So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.

They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead."

(Italo Calvino, "The Invisible Cities")

A symmetrical isomorphic mirroring of that which is above and that which is below a datum level is not necessarily the most interesting formal take on this idea (though it could pose interesting design problems and possibilities). But through radial mirroring, through flipping, through tilting and then mirroring, through axial symmetries, a wide range of manipulations can be carried out that might open up for truly interesting geometries.

A side effect might be the restriction of viewpoints, the splintering and hiding of the iconic form, the transformation from a passive to an active user. An review of Eisenman:

"However challenged or troubled by the work, visitors are never overwhelmed nor reduced to anxious impotence. Nothing affects them without their active, willed participation. By avoiding an iconic design, Eisenman has ensured that the whole cannot be apprehended from any single vantage point. There is no center, no resting spot for the eye or the body, no therapeutic catharsis."

And the man himself, in discussion with Charles Jencks:

"I think that the real problem with architecture today is the question of the optical. If there's one thing that the iconic building relies on it's "opticality" - you have to see it, you've got to get it quick, it's an instant imagery. And I think that opticality is the problem with the buildings in this book, that they rely too much on a first impression, an image, a form, a shape. I think iconic buildings destroy, because of their need for opticality, the possibility of multiply coded enigmatic meanings. For me, iconic buildings cause the individual to become a spectator toward seeing a spectacle, becoming passive. And I think there's nothing worse that a person or an audience that is passive.

And then Rem, on what seems to be the same topic:

"Nevertheless, we try to build structures with unstable identities - that is, buildings with depth. Take the CCTV complex, for example. Now that it's almost complete, the way it functions becomes clear. It looks different from every angle, no matter where you stand. Foreground and background are constantly shifting. We didn't create a single identity, but 400 identities. That was what we wanted: To create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit."

IDEA_03

[cutting corners/fissures]

Architecture is a matter of life and death.

This shows clearly in the crack, the natural formation of a corner.

One thing coming to an end so that another can begin.

The multiplicitous division: an entity breaking up into several entities.

The crack is where something splits, where one line turns into (at least) two. This division is the symbol of something decaying, but also of something new coming alive: the cell splitting, the light shining through the cracks. One becoming two. Something dying, something being born.

The light shines through the cracks in the wall. The grass grows through the cracks in the pavement.

The fissure is different from the crack in that it doesn't compromise the structure of the material. The fissure, in our formal discussion, is a planned crack, a controlled crack.

The most common cracks and fissures are surface phenomena, but what happens if we allow the material to be cracked in three dimensions? We get light shining through along the crack, we get openings that we can use for formal/geometrical manipulations, or to carry air into or out of the building. We get new potentials for circulatory paths, a system for manipulating the ground tectonics.

The crack, even in its controlled fissure state, being a spontaneous corner, is iconic: it does what it is, there is a resemblance between form and meaning, between words and world, between sign and reality.

The crack could also change the gestalt reading of the geometry it is applied to, by mediating between iconic forms and the surrounding ground context, dissipating the hard edge between figure and ground. The crack lifts and lowers the ground, allows it to become a rolling canvas that could carry many different effects (wrinkling, folding, pleating, shifting, slipping, etc), and articulates the contrast between the icon and the urban fabric background.

[Sunday 2 November]

Anyone remember Life Before Google? (Actually, I remember life before Netscape - in my early days, I used something called Webcrawler; google it, kids.) As one of the current HTS classes has it, nostalgia, or Swiss illness, used to be viewed as a medical condition, and as far as I'm concerned, there is very little to be nostalgic about when it comes to life BG. But one thing has changed for the worse: we've stopped thinking. Or rather, we - as in 'most people of today' - have changed the way we think about thinking.

Thinking used to be an act of actively testing ideas (an operation during which, according to Hannah Arendt, "the mind learns how to deal with things that are absent and prepares itself to ‘go further,’ toward the understanding of things that are always absent, that cannot be remembered because they were never present to sense experience"), an event that incorporated building an imaginary experiment in an imaginary laboratory using imaginary matter, the fragments of knowledge left in the mind once one stepped out of the library. In life post-Google, however, thinking is something else: the finding of information, the bouncing between sites of interest, the collection of links, the constant expansion of one's insatiable curiosity.

Being without the Internet equals remembering how life used to be. It's pretty boring. But it does make you think.

Today, then, has been a day of thinking, based on the research I did in front of the computer after the tutorial on Friday. Below are the links, and some quick notes, to show how my mind is wandering at the moment.

"Iconicity, i.e. form miming meaning and/or form miming form...":

http://es-dev.uzh.ch/en/conferences/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1196956778&archive=&start_from=&ucat=3&

Iconicity as a media typification (how is this part of my argument?):

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:EW8OmqmL48sJ:www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol9is3/spitzberg.pdf+%2Bsurette+%2Biconicity&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk

'Iconicity' refers to resemblance between form and meaning, between words and world, or between sign and reality:

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15989267

"An icon is an image that is, in and of itself, recognizable...":

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23106647

Eisenman's (old) way of reading iconicity: "Our work imposes a conceptual memory on the volumetric massing of an object, and in doing so attempts to subvert icons of presence, the building mass itself, with a striated network of what could be described as lines of memory": 

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/eisenman/texts.html

Eisenman again: ""In architecture when one draws the crossing of two lines, it produces a cross which is an obvious icon of point, centre, focus, etc. The repetition of this crossing produces a grid, which is no longer concerned with centre and focus but rather with surface, texture, etc. The grid is no longer primarily iconic but rather is also an index."

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/eisenman/texts.html

An iconic architecture, then, is one beyond the index, beyond the grid. To draw the crossing of two lines, producing a cross that is never allowed to become a grid...

iConic architecture:

http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/reference/CRC-formulas/node26.html

http://www.coastalbend.edu/acdem/math/campbel7/stars/conics.htm

"Any critique of part-to-whole relationships implicates the icon, whose monumental size or distinct form produces the semblance of a legible or rhetorically decidable order.  The icon functions within a part-to-whole relationship by metonymically representing the whole, returning it to the Albertian notion of house as city":

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/675

Eisenman's 'post-indexical' studio at Yale - "In this project, the figure of the work is not simply the residue of the diagram, one which can be read as coming from or leading to a certain outcome, but the reinterpretation of the diagram in order to make it illegible, thereby avoiding indexicality":

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/805

...and it goes on - "My previous work attempted to give a priority to reading as opposed to the visual image—or icon—by proposing the idea of the index. This assumed a certain capacity on the part of the subject for close reading while at the same time attempting to lessen the importance of spectacular imagery. The process, which included the trace, codes, and other reading strategies, could be understood as part of the affective experience of the architecture. However, the mediated context that is now so totalizing of experience makes it necessary to rethink these ideas of close reading and writing. This studio proposes to this aim a strategy which can be called the post-indexical":

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/285

"By avoiding an iconic design, Eisenman has ensured that the whole cannot be apprehended from any single vantage point. There is no center, no resting spot for the eye or the body, no therapeutic catharsis. The tight weave of the project never loosens its grip on visitors, or allows them to yield attention to apperception":

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_5_44/ai_n26731917/pg_2

Eisenman vs Jencks:

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-7877.html

Piranesi's Campo Marzio (iconic city plan...):

http://www.quondam.com/20/1980.htm

According to the American pragmatist philosopher C S Peirce there were three categories of signs: icons, symbols, and indices. The icon had a visual likeness to an object:

http://designdissent1.blogspot.com/2008/05/eisenmans-six-point-plan-pt-2.html

Interesting text on iconicity in music:

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:xdVPRj6JJpYJ:www.lomuto.it/documenti/iconicity_in_music.pdf+what+is+architectural+iconicity%3F&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=15&gl=uk

Koolhaas: " we try to build structures with unstable identities -- that is, buildings with depth. Take the CCTV complex, for example. Now that it's almost complete, the way it functions becomes clear. It looks different from every angle, no matter where you stand. Foreground and background are constantly shifting. We didn't create a single identity, but 400 identities. That was what we wanted: To create ambiguity and complexity, so as to escape the constraints of the explicit":

http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=241349

Zaha's studio at Yale ("...this project conceals the icon, carefully choreographing specific space-time moments at which the icon is revealed. Each iconic image exists in its own space-time, independent from other iconic noise or competition):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/872

...and again ("...a high level of Gestalt-intensity (iconicity)"):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/327

...and again ("Reaffirming the image of the icon, these scenarios consistently reference the same iconic profile but are composed of component parts which, although autonomous, read as an integrated whole"):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/873

...and again ("This project concerns the revelation and change in gestalt readings of underlying iconic volumes through a secondary "drapery" which produces effects that change the reading of the icons"):

http://www.architecture.yale.edu/drupal/index.php?q=node/874

Finally, let me shock you with a quote from an actual book, Peter Eisenman's Written into the Void, (p. 74?):

"Text in architecture could be considered more like what could be ccalled an indexical as opposed to an iconic condition. The difference between the two is crucial for architecture. For while iconic relationships always refer outward from any form, architectural form poses a unique problem for such an outward looking in that any iconic condition in architecture lies within and thus contains its own instrumentality. A column is both a structural element and an iconic sign of its function."

[Friday 31 October]

Mark Wigley and Peter Eisenman debate on the role of the Corner, "an archetype which, inexplicably, is not yet under scrutiny in contemporary discourse of smooth architectures." More interesting for the fact that they do it than for what they actually say.

Eisenman "denies the existence of the corner in contemporary discourse". Wigley "proposes that the corner is 'not only physical but experiential,'" and that “the corner is an event.”

[Thursday 30 October]

It appears that I'm not the only one with a penchant for cryonics. Photographer Murray Ballard's Cyronics series "explores the practice of preserving dead people or animals by freezing them at extremely low temperatures, in the hope that science will be able to revive them in the future. The photographer traveled to a cryonics lab in Phoenix, Arizona, documenting the facility, the technology used, the scientists working there, met with some prospective patients in the UK, etc. All along, questioning whether he was dedicating his time to a world of 'farciful fantasies' or of 'genuine and innovative scientific experimentation.'" (Via We Make Money Not Art.)

If I'm going with this program, it may be a good idea to get in touch with Mr Ballard. On his website, he quotes Charles Platt's The Impossible Dream:

"The dream of escaping mortality has tantalized humanity for thousands of years. It occurs in all primitive cultures and modern world religions... Clearly, there is a natural human yearning to transcend the limits imposed on us by our physical form."

And then this:

"Cryonics is defined as the practice of preserving a dead person or animal, by freezing them at extremely low temperatures, in the hope that science and technology will be able to revive them, and return them to full health in the future.

It is impossible to predict when science will progress to this point. Consequently, a person might remain in this frozen state for many decades or centuries - or never 'wake up'. Indeed, cryonics is founded on science; but there is no consensus among scientists that the concept can ever actually work. The fundamental argument used by cryonicists, is that at some stage in the future, science and technology will inevitably evolve to the point when cryonics is physically possible. Cryonicists say that the only real question is: when?"

And then a lot of nice images. Some of my favourites:

A few more 'found' images (not by Ballard) that may serve as inspiration for thinking about that "most iconic of programs"...

...but I've missed to make quite a few blog entries lately, so here begins a backtracking session, from the really early stuff several weeks ago through to the latest developments. I've saved up some notes in a separate document that I will try and post in one go now, as I couldn't really find the time (or the energy that day the other week when I was down and out with the Dip9 bug) to get around to it before. I will put the corresponding date at the beginning of each entry (who knows, maybe in the future Movable Type will sort out there act so as to make it possible to change the dates post the fact), and in those cases where I haven't got any images yet, I'll just enter the line [images to follow] and add them later.

First, on popular demand (okay, on Monia's and Natasha's demand), that infamous letter from Sylvia Lavin to Alejandro Zaera-Polo from the second installment of the theory seminars:

[24 October?]

LOVE LETTER

Sylvia Lavin has shown an interest in psychoanalysis in the past. Maybe it's not too far a stretch, then, to read her text as if it is filled with underlying double meanings.

In a way her critique is a kind of love letter to Alejandro Zaera-Polo, albeit the kind of letter a much older and more experienced woman might write to a younger man.

"I like you," she seems to be saying, "I just don't like the way you over-simplify your arguments, and I find your aesthetics quite boring."

She acknowledges that being a critic is not quite the same as being a client, but hastens to add that "most architects would like their clients to love them" thereby implying that most would also want to be loved by the critics. Alejandro and Foreign Office need new modes of seductive speech, she says,  a new book of rules for how to seduce clients - and critics like herself.

If we take Lavin's statement about the critic not being a client but being equally important for the architect to seduce as a client, then the next sentence becomes interesting: "The first rule for how to successfully hook a client (- or a critic -) might be to take him/her out for a drink."

What does Lavin want her drink with Alejandro to be like? Well, before getting her clothes off, she wants to talk about serious issues: what this new mode of seductive speech, of seduction itself, might be. It mustn't be complicated and filled with jargon, she says, it must be a speech that can be understood by the people and by journalists. And it mustn't be based on data and analysis - this can be misunderstood or falsified. So what should the speech be like? Like an image. Not a word image that stands for or signifies something else - a metaphor - but an actual image that "has no logic or verifiability, or truth, or even of use", that "has no particular theme and stands for nothing". She brings up Boullée and Andy Warhol and their interest in shadows, a monochrome murkiness that at least makes me think about where she wants to go with Alejandro after that drink.

WORDS

psychoanalysis

love letter

boring

critic ≠ client

seductive speech

new book of rules

drink

jargon

no data/analysis

image

no logic

shadows

QUESTIONS

For the  Zaera-Polo group:

1) You say that "something wasn't quite working in (y)our carefully crafted discourse," but it seems like you're jumping to conclusions when you automatically believe this is because it was too hard for the public to understand. Maybe it was just boring. Don't you think it's a problem to hold the position that one should give the people what it wants rather than what it didn't know it wanted? Isn't this a problem of how you convey your ideas rather than the ideas themselves?

2) You basically say (p. 80) that you need to use an icon, an image, and then build that image in order to justify formal experimentation. This raises several issues: i) you may end up having to build the actual image rather than experiment with it, ii) there's a lot of scope for people mistaking your "hidden" intention for the real thing, iii) you don't explain why this projective strategy is better than any other one. In particular, you talk about "local iconographies" as a naturalisation of materials and geometries, basically an over-simplification of context, in a way that makes one think of the latter-day films of Woody Allen. "Ah, a film in Spain. Then we should have... let's see... bullfights! And, er... Gaudî! And maybe some... flamenco!" We would say this can be a lot of fun on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but doesn't necessarily produce great art.

3) How do you find the time to "rid the project of any symbolic and representational content" when you're busy deploying "pure metaphorical dressing... to qualify... a(n) unintelligible... assembly"?

4) Why do you assume that an "architectural output would make the plan threatening to the public"? (p. 84)

5) Why is it better for an architect to seduce the entire public rather than a single client? (p. 87) If you believe that the public would feel threatened by architecture, then why do you trust on them to allow you to do fantastic things, rather than a single patron?