Iconoclashtic: First TS Document for mr Weinstock
[25 November]
Today we saw Mike Weinstock for the first time, to set off the Technical Studies. I had prepared the following text for him, though I knew chances were minimal we would actually get down to discuss the project in this kind of detail. Nevertheless gave me a chance to sit down and think through the project again, incorporating new thoughts on scale and program:
Projections of Suspension
So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. (...) The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.i
Between Tomb and Womb
A house is a machine for staying alive in.ii
In his essay, Twenty-First Century Bodies,iii that most radical of life expansion enthusiasts, Ray Kurzweil, talks about how supporters of the 1980s cryonics movement, inspired by Eric Drexler’s book Engines of Creation, believed in having “their heads (with or without bodies) frozen in the hope that a future time would possess the molecule-scale technology to overcome their mortal diseases, as well as undo the effects of freezing and defrosting.” With tongue firmly in cheek, Kurzweil adds: “Whether a future generation would be motivated to revive all these frozen brains was another matter.” However, this points toward an interesting question for the future: if you were to be frozen, who would you like to care for your body?
The world leader in cryopreservation of human bodies, Alcor, points out on its website that “no large animal has ever been cryopreserved and revived,” and that “such an achievement is still likely decades in the future”. However, from the first ‘suspension’ of Dr James H Bedford in 1967, as of October 2008, the company has already frozen 84 patients, and lists 872 people as members. The technology to reverse cryonics is still theoretical, but as medical technologies make major advances, more and more people are interested in pushing the deadline, so to speak, forward.
Projections of Suspension is not a science fiction project. It is a playful experiment based on a science that is already in use, despite the fact that no one knows whether it will ever work.iv It takes the concept of cryopreservation at face value, linking the idea of using very cold temperatures to stop the dying process when ordinary medicine can no longer sustain life (with the intention of ‘suspending’ - saving - a patient’s life until a cure for their illness can be found) with the notion that the families of suspended patients would want to stay in control of the frozen body.
Rather than creating the next generation of institutional cryonics centres, the scheme envisions a near future in which the family home becomes both the family tomb and the family womb: an architecture that houses and bases its programmatic and formal properties from the body (or bodies) suspended within it. The iconic image of a twenty-first century body is that of a suspended body, its architectural counterpart being an iconic building suspended around this body, the bodily figure traced in space and time, modulated through formal concepts of spatial birth and death, producing a new kind of iconic architecture. The cryonic chamber is the centre point of the house, and the reflections of the body within it are the iconic moments that create the architectural figure of the interior volume.
Echoes of Bodies (Formal Manifesto)
Home is where the heart is on display.v
A domestic architecture that is both tomb and womb will by necessity be programmatically based on extreme functions: a space in which to have one’s last supper, a space in which to die, a space in which to be suspended, a space in which to be revived, a space in which to catch up on all the gossip magazines one has missed during the years in suspension, and so on. The building turns into a carefully instrumented collage of overlapping iconic spaces, an architectural iconoclash in which a space created for a singular event (“the last supper”) is used before and after that event (“the dining room”). Placing the suspension units in the living room redefines this programmatic typology.
On a formal level, the spaces will be sculpted so as to reflect both the body in suspension, and notions of the birth and death of space. Where is space born? Where does it go to die? In the corner, to the corner. The zoomorphic body has no corner, or we can say it is all corners. Any point on it is a corner, any silhouette of it is a folded corner. Nevertheless, some parts of the body are more corner-like than others, and the projection of a body’s shadow reveals these edges, these hidden corners. Paradoxically, the transformation of the outline, the iconic (frozen) figure, of one’s body from three to two dimensions makes us see its demarcations. In Projections of Suspension, the outlines of these frozen body fragments come alive to create new corners, giving birth to and killing spaces, while providing the formal information necessary to create the surfaces that in turn yield the architectural figure (analogous to the painterly figure in Deleuze’s reading of the paintings of Francis Bacon) in between the corners.
Thus a suspended limb generates a never-before-seen spatiality. The silhouette of a shoulder meeting a neck, a point of anatomical transition, is not just impressed into, but becomes the beginning and end of the building that encloses it. The building holds the body, the body makes the building. The first corner is birth, the second corner is death, the plane stretching between the two is suspension. Life.
Perceptually, the more or less straight lines between the corners are thus perceived as the least animated parts of the building, yet conceptually they are metaphors of the time passing between birth and death, of life, thus juxtaposing common ideas of the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic, nature and culture. Whether or not we actually comprehend the corner curves as anatomical echoes of bodies we could once touch but that are now in a state of suspension, we can marvel at the intricate spaces created from these curves - a new architectural figure. Since the body can achieve positions that create almost any curve as a shadow, or projection, it is enough to set the play in motion with an actual outline: all following curves will be modulations of the first, just as the body can be modulated to produce these curves. One alternative still to be considered is to use this figure as an extension of or an addition to an existing structure, thereby further highlighting the contrast between ‘static life architecture’ and ‘dynamic birth-and-death’ architecture.
Iconoclashtic Figurations
...space retreating to the corner of arm and knee...vi
Moving through the building, would we recognise on a conscious or an unconscious level these suggested reflections of the bodies of our suspended loved ones? Hopefully not. That would constitute evidence of a process, and such evidence equals indexicality, which we are not interested in. There may be suggestion, but never statement. The curves are the raw material of the architecture, not representative signs or indices.
The iconoclashtic program is carried through in the building’s formal articulation: rather than simply imprinting body curves onto a pre-defined volume, the curves are projected so as to stay true to their origin from a particular vantage point, while deforming to achieve specific spatial effects in three dimensions. The image of the corner curve (the icon) is preserved yet allowed to be stretched, scaled, rotated, folded, cut, and so on, creating unique architectural figures that unfold in space and over time. One icon, or image, simultaneously becomes (part of) another. Projecting without regards to metrics, that is, at different scales, further blurs the clarity of the antecedents, creating a ‘structured illegibility’. We perceive an underlying logic, but can neither tell how it works nor read the curves. The architecture becomes pure figure, neither ground nor figure, like a beautiful language that we do not speak.
What are the ‘specific spatial effects’ mentioned above? They are configurations that create a set of architectural gradients: from enclosed to open (porosity), from small to large (scalar), from simple to complex (intricacy), from primary to secondary (hierarchy), and so on. At the same time, they function as the connecting tissues between the building’s spaces, either giving free passage to or obstructing the flow of space through the structure.
Outlining the Structure (Technical Studies)
I can think of a range of interesting aspects for technical studies, but I think the first one below is the most interesting. The others constitute a starting point for further discussions.
The TS would be based on a study of how the corner is controlling my spaces. This could be modelled in Rhino/Grasshopper. The study would go from an initial analysis of ‘found’ body curves, via a catalogue of spatial effects created through corner modulations, through to programmatic and circulation diagrams, which together with a brief excursion into environmental studies and site analysis would yield the final proposal. This could then perhaps be further investigated through focusing on that one element which we have so far glanced over: the stretches in between the corners.
TS: Glass House Redux
This year begun with a study of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Partly to tie the project back to those beginnings, but mainly in order to further investigate the fascinating properties of glass structures, I’d like to focus the TS on the problem of how to make my more-often-than-not doubly curved glass sections structural. The question to ask would be: how can we make a glass house for the 21st century? How can we make a seemingly vulnerable building (that is still safe) for a seemingly vulnerable program?
Whereas the corners work as generators of space, the stretches in between are where the main part of the structural action (as well as many of the perceptual effects) take place.
Could, for instance, the technique from the Glass house in Leerdam, in which (primarily) vertical sheets of glass were laminated together, be an alternative? Could we have a system with glass fixings working together with curved glass beams? What about glue, acrylics, and different kinds of corrugation strategies?
The ultimate aim of a structure made from glass needn’t always be transparency and lightness. It might be a highly reflective effect, it may be opaque to the point of complete illegibility, it may be made to let coloured light through, or only be opaque (or see-through) from one particular angle. Why - and how - glass in 2009?
Potential Precedents
Casa da Musica (2004: Corrugation - waves of glass...)
Glass house, Leerdam (lamination)
R.O.A.M, Leerdam (structural glass walls)
Glass Bridge for Floriade (2002: glass beams, resin lamination)
Holten (1993: OMA, bundle of glass bars...) + Korea (glue lamination)
Glass-walled house (2001: finite element method computer imagery...)
Aquarium, Arnheim (2001: acrylic - polyacrylic/polycarbonate...)
Dutch Pavilion/EXPO 1998 (undulating glass skin, glass beam + curved glass roof)
Morphosis exhibition design, Centre Pompidou, 2006(?)
Corrugated glass roof for galliera (Rotterdam, 1995: corrugation)
Wallonia Forestry Centre (Philippe Samyn: glass fixings)
Parliament of Flanders (Hexagonal node point)
Apple store stairs (unique structure which also enjoys a ridiculous number of patents)
NOTES:
i Jeremy W. Hayward, “” (, , ), p.
ii Cf. “A house is a machine for living in” [Fr., “Une maison est un machine-a-habiter”], Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (, ,), p.
iii Ray Kurzweil, Twenty-First Century Bodies, in David M. Kaplan (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Technology (Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 381
iv “Cryonics is an experiment,” Dr Ralph Merkle (the inventor of public key cryptography) once famously observed. “So far the control group isn’t doing very well.”
v Cf. “Home is where the heart is,” attributed to Pliny the Elder [Caius Plinius Secundus].
vi Cf. T.S. Eliot, Animula (1928):
“Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree...”
Today we saw Mike Weinstock for the first time, to set off the Technical Studies. I had prepared the following text for him, though I knew chances were minimal we would actually get down to discuss the project in this kind of detail. Nevertheless gave me a chance to sit down and think through the project again, incorporating new thoughts on scale and program:
Projections of Suspension
So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. (...) The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.i
Between Tomb and Womb
A house is a machine for staying alive in.ii
In his essay, Twenty-First Century Bodies,iii that most radical of life expansion enthusiasts, Ray Kurzweil, talks about how supporters of the 1980s cryonics movement, inspired by Eric Drexler’s book Engines of Creation, believed in having “their heads (with or without bodies) frozen in the hope that a future time would possess the molecule-scale technology to overcome their mortal diseases, as well as undo the effects of freezing and defrosting.” With tongue firmly in cheek, Kurzweil adds: “Whether a future generation would be motivated to revive all these frozen brains was another matter.” However, this points toward an interesting question for the future: if you were to be frozen, who would you like to care for your body?
The world leader in cryopreservation of human bodies, Alcor, points out on its website that “no large animal has ever been cryopreserved and revived,” and that “such an achievement is still likely decades in the future”. However, from the first ‘suspension’ of Dr James H Bedford in 1967, as of October 2008, the company has already frozen 84 patients, and lists 872 people as members. The technology to reverse cryonics is still theoretical, but as medical technologies make major advances, more and more people are interested in pushing the deadline, so to speak, forward.
Projections of Suspension is not a science fiction project. It is a playful experiment based on a science that is already in use, despite the fact that no one knows whether it will ever work.iv It takes the concept of cryopreservation at face value, linking the idea of using very cold temperatures to stop the dying process when ordinary medicine can no longer sustain life (with the intention of ‘suspending’ - saving - a patient’s life until a cure for their illness can be found) with the notion that the families of suspended patients would want to stay in control of the frozen body.
Rather than creating the next generation of institutional cryonics centres, the scheme envisions a near future in which the family home becomes both the family tomb and the family womb: an architecture that houses and bases its programmatic and formal properties from the body (or bodies) suspended within it. The iconic image of a twenty-first century body is that of a suspended body, its architectural counterpart being an iconic building suspended around this body, the bodily figure traced in space and time, modulated through formal concepts of spatial birth and death, producing a new kind of iconic architecture. The cryonic chamber is the centre point of the house, and the reflections of the body within it are the iconic moments that create the architectural figure of the interior volume.
Echoes of Bodies (Formal Manifesto)
Home is where the heart is on display.v
A domestic architecture that is both tomb and womb will by necessity be programmatically based on extreme functions: a space in which to have one’s last supper, a space in which to die, a space in which to be suspended, a space in which to be revived, a space in which to catch up on all the gossip magazines one has missed during the years in suspension, and so on. The building turns into a carefully instrumented collage of overlapping iconic spaces, an architectural iconoclash in which a space created for a singular event (“the last supper”) is used before and after that event (“the dining room”). Placing the suspension units in the living room redefines this programmatic typology.
On a formal level, the spaces will be sculpted so as to reflect both the body in suspension, and notions of the birth and death of space. Where is space born? Where does it go to die? In the corner, to the corner. The zoomorphic body has no corner, or we can say it is all corners. Any point on it is a corner, any silhouette of it is a folded corner. Nevertheless, some parts of the body are more corner-like than others, and the projection of a body’s shadow reveals these edges, these hidden corners. Paradoxically, the transformation of the outline, the iconic (frozen) figure, of one’s body from three to two dimensions makes us see its demarcations. In Projections of Suspension, the outlines of these frozen body fragments come alive to create new corners, giving birth to and killing spaces, while providing the formal information necessary to create the surfaces that in turn yield the architectural figure (analogous to the painterly figure in Deleuze’s reading of the paintings of Francis Bacon) in between the corners.
Thus a suspended limb generates a never-before-seen spatiality. The silhouette of a shoulder meeting a neck, a point of anatomical transition, is not just impressed into, but becomes the beginning and end of the building that encloses it. The building holds the body, the body makes the building. The first corner is birth, the second corner is death, the plane stretching between the two is suspension. Life.
Perceptually, the more or less straight lines between the corners are thus perceived as the least animated parts of the building, yet conceptually they are metaphors of the time passing between birth and death, of life, thus juxtaposing common ideas of the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic, nature and culture. Whether or not we actually comprehend the corner curves as anatomical echoes of bodies we could once touch but that are now in a state of suspension, we can marvel at the intricate spaces created from these curves - a new architectural figure. Since the body can achieve positions that create almost any curve as a shadow, or projection, it is enough to set the play in motion with an actual outline: all following curves will be modulations of the first, just as the body can be modulated to produce these curves. One alternative still to be considered is to use this figure as an extension of or an addition to an existing structure, thereby further highlighting the contrast between ‘static life architecture’ and ‘dynamic birth-and-death’ architecture.
Iconoclashtic Figurations
...space retreating to the corner of arm and knee...vi
Moving through the building, would we recognise on a conscious or an unconscious level these suggested reflections of the bodies of our suspended loved ones? Hopefully not. That would constitute evidence of a process, and such evidence equals indexicality, which we are not interested in. There may be suggestion, but never statement. The curves are the raw material of the architecture, not representative signs or indices.
The iconoclashtic program is carried through in the building’s formal articulation: rather than simply imprinting body curves onto a pre-defined volume, the curves are projected so as to stay true to their origin from a particular vantage point, while deforming to achieve specific spatial effects in three dimensions. The image of the corner curve (the icon) is preserved yet allowed to be stretched, scaled, rotated, folded, cut, and so on, creating unique architectural figures that unfold in space and over time. One icon, or image, simultaneously becomes (part of) another. Projecting without regards to metrics, that is, at different scales, further blurs the clarity of the antecedents, creating a ‘structured illegibility’. We perceive an underlying logic, but can neither tell how it works nor read the curves. The architecture becomes pure figure, neither ground nor figure, like a beautiful language that we do not speak.
What are the ‘specific spatial effects’ mentioned above? They are configurations that create a set of architectural gradients: from enclosed to open (porosity), from small to large (scalar), from simple to complex (intricacy), from primary to secondary (hierarchy), and so on. At the same time, they function as the connecting tissues between the building’s spaces, either giving free passage to or obstructing the flow of space through the structure.
Outlining the Structure (Technical Studies)
I can think of a range of interesting aspects for technical studies, but I think the first one below is the most interesting. The others constitute a starting point for further discussions.
The TS would be based on a study of how the corner is controlling my spaces. This could be modelled in Rhino/Grasshopper. The study would go from an initial analysis of ‘found’ body curves, via a catalogue of spatial effects created through corner modulations, through to programmatic and circulation diagrams, which together with a brief excursion into environmental studies and site analysis would yield the final proposal. This could then perhaps be further investigated through focusing on that one element which we have so far glanced over: the stretches in between the corners.
TS: Glass House Redux
This year begun with a study of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Partly to tie the project back to those beginnings, but mainly in order to further investigate the fascinating properties of glass structures, I’d like to focus the TS on the problem of how to make my more-often-than-not doubly curved glass sections structural. The question to ask would be: how can we make a glass house for the 21st century? How can we make a seemingly vulnerable building (that is still safe) for a seemingly vulnerable program?
Whereas the corners work as generators of space, the stretches in between are where the main part of the structural action (as well as many of the perceptual effects) take place.
Could, for instance, the technique from the Glass house in Leerdam, in which (primarily) vertical sheets of glass were laminated together, be an alternative? Could we have a system with glass fixings working together with curved glass beams? What about glue, acrylics, and different kinds of corrugation strategies?
The ultimate aim of a structure made from glass needn’t always be transparency and lightness. It might be a highly reflective effect, it may be opaque to the point of complete illegibility, it may be made to let coloured light through, or only be opaque (or see-through) from one particular angle. Why - and how - glass in 2009?
Potential Precedents
Casa da Musica (2004: Corrugation - waves of glass...)
Glass house, Leerdam (lamination)
R.O.A.M, Leerdam (structural glass walls)
Glass Bridge for Floriade (2002: glass beams, resin lamination)
Holten (1993: OMA, bundle of glass bars...) + Korea (glue lamination)
Glass-walled house (2001: finite element method computer imagery...)
Aquarium, Arnheim (2001: acrylic - polyacrylic/polycarbonate...)
Dutch Pavilion/EXPO 1998 (undulating glass skin, glass beam + curved glass roof)
Morphosis exhibition design, Centre Pompidou, 2006(?)
Corrugated glass roof for galliera (Rotterdam, 1995: corrugation)
Wallonia Forestry Centre (Philippe Samyn: glass fixings)
Parliament of Flanders (Hexagonal node point)
Apple store stairs (unique structure which also enjoys a ridiculous number of patents)
NOTES:
i Jeremy W. Hayward, “” (, , ), p.
ii Cf. “A house is a machine for living in” [Fr., “Une maison est un machine-a-habiter”], Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (, ,), p.
iii Ray Kurzweil, Twenty-First Century Bodies, in David M. Kaplan (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Technology (Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 381
iv “Cryonics is an experiment,” Dr Ralph Merkle (the inventor of public key cryptography) once famously observed. “So far the control group isn’t doing very well.”
v Cf. “Home is where the heart is,” attributed to Pliny the Elder [Caius Plinius Secundus].
vi Cf. T.S. Eliot, Animula (1928):
“Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree...”
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