Current thoughts summarised

[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.