Pin-up

[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...

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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.