Process and the goals

Jeff Kipnis said during a recent Columbia review, "Process justifies everything these days, and architecture is being pulled away from its goals." I was so glad he said that - it really captures the current state of architectural practices. At the same time I was surprised that it was him who said so, knowing his long "association" with Peter Eisenman.

Eisenman is all about theoretical/formal operations. For him, architecture is linguistic, it can be reduced to grammar - an independent, self-reflective system instead of being connected to the outside. Design starts with basic elements, a square or a grid as a letter or a word in language, then repeat, rotate, shift, superimpose, intersect... The result is traces of processes, a form generated by the manipulation of geometry. Abstract formal transformations dictate everything; the modernist ethics of functionality and social agenda have been marginalized. Architecture herein becomes an autonomous project.

Guardiola House, Peter Eisenman, 1988

As a protégé of Eisenman's, Scott Cohen pushed his mentor's 2D formal processes into perspectives. The end geometry is a projection of a projection of a projection... a highly distorted shape.

Patterns for Head Start Facilities, Preston Scott Cohen, 1994

As those guys were drawing intensely by hand, computer made its entrance into architecture. All of a sudden, reiteration is no longer just a theoretical jargon. Huge amount of data can be processed and visualized rapidly. You don't even need to design - the computer finds the form for you. As in Aranda/Lasch's "Rules of Six" mural, an algorithm sets the rules of formation. The modules grow, combine, assemble, and proliferate across scales. This self-assembly process is clearly the digital extension of Eisenman's autonomous project. The form "finds itself from bottom up..." Sorry, I found this claim rather disturbing. Will the "imposing" architect really "disappear" with the introduction of the computer? Does the emphasis on the "bottom-up" process make the designer a noble fella who despises authorship? C'mon! Who made the rules? Who set the parameters? Who wrote the scripts? There's still the "Hand of God" behind it! The so-called "unauthored" project is actually highly authored. But nobody dares to say "This is what I want" any more... Suddenly, a curve generated by a computer random algorithm becomes more justifiable than a curve drawn by Ellsworth Kelly...

Rules of Six, Aranda/Lasch, 2008

If we say form-finding is a design process, there's another process called construction. A process obsolete as that, is again, fantasized by the computer and catches more attention than the result. Next week, New York Construction will organize a bunch of AIA registered architects and LEED APs to speak about something they are all proud of - the new Yankee Stadium! What? That thing is ugly as hell! You have to pay almost 200 bucks to get in? Oh well, the stadium is a pioneer of the BIM (Building Information Modeling) process. "The industry's next great hope!" Fancy that!

Turner Construction considers the $1.5 billion Yankee Stadium job as its biggest “first generation” BIM projects.

Tschumi said, there are too many "WOWs" in architecture now and very few care about WHAT. HOW has been wowing people and overshadowed WHAT. To me, a more important question is WHY. That sounds like a more legit process. WHY as a process is important because it's a way to get to the results. It's a way of thinking. Whereas HOW only indicates steps of a procedure. Parametric design method is innocent. The problem is how you set the parameters... Currently it's mostly just about how to make forms. Once we can successfully plug in the functional, social, and economical aspects and introduce reasons, it will make more sense. Seems I am getting somewhere... Let me think more about it.

Contextual Tschumi

Bernard Tschumi had a lecture at Columbia tonight. I have to say the Acropolis project looks terrible... So I'll just record the things that intrigued me.

He brought this up on the screen:When Enrique Walker asked him if this new trilogy replaces the old formula of Architecture = Space x Event x Movement, he said no - it just adds more complexity to the original. He said that his generation was trying to "anti-contextualize" themselves ("contexturalism" with the Stern connotation, I guess) and find their roots in the early avant-gardes of the 1920s. Looking back, you can see concepts there, contents (or program) there, but context was missing. When you solved some part of the equation, you can introduce more variables to it. Context is this new variable now.

The examples he gave were the Zénith Concert Halls in Rouen and Limoges, France. The two buildings have identical contents but are on very different sites. In the materialization of the concept, the contexts gave the almost identical forms distinctive materialities. I am not sure this is precisely what "context" means, but it's pretty funny.


He made an interesting remark on tabula rasa: "there's no tabula rasa; it's just some imagination in your mind." You may see nothing there and say, let's start from scratch. But there is always something. Starting from nothing is actually starting with an act - the act of erasure. You may cut all the existing trees. "And that will haunt you for a while."

Inevitably, Eisenstein was mentioned many times in the lecture. Now "technology allows," he even played a clip from Alexander Nevsky, including the piece he analyzed in the Manhattan Transcript. He also showed Choisy's analysis of Acropolis he found in Eisenstein's article "Montage and Architecture." Fantastic stuff. I wish he had got more inspirations from those than he claims he did.

Huaxi monsters

Didn't plan to write about this project. I simply didn't know what to say when I first saw the images - completely speechless... A few days ago I read a series of articles on the China Youth Daily. I think it's worth to spread the messages and write down some thoughts.

This is a "city creation experiment" orchestrated by MAD. The 11 participants include Atelier Manferdini (USA), BIG (Denmark), Dieguez Fridman (Argentina), EMERGENT/Tom Wiscombe (USA), HouLiang Architecture (China), JDS (Denmark/Belgium), MAD (China), Mass Studies (Korea), Rojkind Arquitectos (Mexico), Serie (UK/India), Sou Fujimoto Architects (Japan). Each of them got a piece from the master planner and designed a building for this wacky new "city center" in the middle of beautiful terraced fields outside Guiyang, the biggest city in Guizhou Province, China. An amazing group of talents, but sadly, the result is just a bunch of monsters dancing in the middle of nowhere...


I don't want to get into the whole "foreign-architects-experimenting-in-China" phenomenon. I don't think it's essentially a bad thing for a country where the title "architect" only exists for 30 years. But in this particular case, there are three points I want to make:

Floating Architecture

Rome was not built overnight. Nor can a CBD be planted everywhere. By definition, you need a lot of "business" going on in a CBD, which means a high density of population and activities, immense economic basis, and infrastructure support. These don't come out of thin air. Huaxi is a rural area 17 kilometers away from Guiyang - the capital city of Guizhou Province, which is one of the less developed provinces in the southwest part of China and famous for its natural landscape. Intense development here sounds very unpractical. As Luo Songhua, deputy head of Huaxi District said, "CBD is a big concept. Huaxi can't afford it." Who will put their headquarters over here?

In fact, everything is really just up in the air. The project was launched by a private developer (Homnicen Group) and the city knows nothing about it. The developer hasn't even got the land yet. When asked about the feasibility of a CBD in Huaxi, MAD's response was "This is not our business - not within our scope of work. We just take the survey maps from the developer and design within the assigned boundaries." So the architects' vision is just framed by the site boundary and never goes beyond that? Nobody wants to take on broader social responsibilities and go through a feasibility study? They are doing their little things with the windows shut instead of committed actively to reality. Whatever manifestoes they are trying to make are merely hollow big talks, floating with no solid grounds.

Billboard Architecture

Homnicen Group is said to be the biggest local developer. When the journalist tried to verify with them if this is just theoretical proposal, the response was "Think about this. If this is just an experiment, who pays the fee for MAD and all those foreigners?" Maybe it's not entirely hypothetical. Maybe the developer just wanted to put on a show and promote the deal? This certainly has been a successful business model. Architects are cheaper than movie stars anyways! Even politicians know the advertising value of fancy designs. See how much Bilbao made out of Frank! Architects seems to be enjoying the situation as well. Fuck the ethics of architecture. I'll paint your billboard, as long as I get paid!

Back to our own business. How about architects advertising themselves? How can you catch the eyes and get instant fame? Do something weird! Something people never saw before! All of a sudden, new things are created just for the sake of being new. Architecture is all about catchy imagery. Who cares if it can ever get built? Who cares what it does to society? It can always go to China or Dubai! (Sorry, not sure now.)

Hard Drive Architecture

We used to call those unbuilt experimental projects "paper architecture" because they just stay on paper. Now we should call them "hard drive architecture" because they only exist as a bunch of binary codes. For paper architecture, you still need to drawing every single line and color every single patch. That allows time for consideration and there were thinking involved. With new technologies, everything happens so fast and you don't even need to think. The computer does it for you!

MAD insists the goal for this experiment is not construction. "Concepts getting developed into drawings, this is already a way of realization." I do believe in the value of experimental designs. Back in the good old 60s, Archigram's fantastic collages contained so many thought-provoking elements. There are so many dimensions to it. In the discourse of architecture, they are of equal significance compared to built works, if not more. But now look at this bunch in Huaxi. Where is the social agenda? What does a computer rendering of alien invasion provoke? They are criticizing the "soullessness" of Manhattan and Chicago (is it true?) but are these monsters full of life? Maybe the biggest value of this whole thing is that it's so bad that it makes people reflect... OK, it makes me write. That's worth something.

References:
Dezeen post (EN)
China Youth Daily article on Sina (CH)

The curious case of believing

Sometimes we would believe something so firmly even it's just some fabricated rumor or pure imagination. It occurs to me that believing is not always the result of objective reasoning or verification. Quite on the contrary, I think it's most of the time subjective - we believe only what fits into the grids of our own thoughts. The most powerful proof is actually the resonance in mind.

Human beings are curious creatures. We want to know. Unfortunately, uncertainty is inevitable given the fact that information always comes as bits and pieces. Nobody can get the entire big picture all at once. When we try to understand the whole situation, we have to fill in the missing parts. We would keep wondering and wondering, trying to escape from the uneasy state of bewilderment, until finally, we come up with something - bang! - that explains everything. This little something provides us with convenient answers. It might be delusive, but at least it makes sense for us now. Why not just believe it for the moment before anyone can offer a better explanation? It may sound contradictory, but we believe because we don't know.

Human beings are also emotional creatures. We love and hate. When it comes to rumors, we tend to embrace the positive ones about someone we love, and the negative ones about those who we hate. When a rumor comes the other way around, we will question every single detail and finally find a way to dismiss it. ("No no no, he couldn't have done that. He's a good guy!) Our judgment or prejudice acts as a very powerful determinant when we decide whether to believe or not. Another pair of common emotions is desire and fear. Think about this: Why did so many people believe that the iPhone Nano is coming out soon? And why did the rumor about Steve Job's death spread out so quickly? As hearsay spreads in a community, it becomes even more interesting because it's no longer personal. A widespread rumor reflects an underlying collective stance or state of sentiment. All the recent worries ignited by lay-off rumors revealed one thing - we are all scared.

Droog New York

To join the chic design cluster in SoHo, droog opened its first store in the US. The stuff in there, classic or new, is fantastic. But I was wondering... can they really put on prize tags like that in this environment?

"Sorry, no photography!" - Run, fat boy, run!

For more info: droog website

Beauty and the brain

Researchers at San Carlos Clinical hospital in Madrid recently tested 10 men and 10 women , showing them paintings and photos of urban scenes and landscapes, asking them to rate each scene as either "beautiful" or "not beautiful." (To avoid confounding by romantic regions of the brain, close-up images of people were not included.) When the participants were making the decisions, the scientists looked at images of the magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in their brains. The findings are preliminary and only based on a small sample, but interesting nonetheless: men tend to process beauty on the right side of their brains while women tend to use their whole brain.

I don't think that means women appreciate beauty more than men. But it shows us different tendencies. Men's considerations appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms, in other words, x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Women do the same, but they also use regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under. "The answer seems to be that when women consider a visual object they link it to language while men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object," said Camilo J. Cela-Conde, one of the research scientists. Have you ever had the feeling that men are incapable of describing the reason why they think something is beautiful? But take a look at the 800-900 ms image - men are trying to find reasons afterwards. Yes, I admit, men are visual animals that are good at post-rationalization. :)

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Simple vs. pure, optimism, and others

Went to Rem's lecture at Columbia last night. It was packed. My first impression - such a star!! Ironically, he showed an image of himself talking to a huge crowd in the Neue Nationalgallerie in Berlin during the Content show, and went on attacking the notion of "starchitects." With an image of Guggenheim Bilbao, he said, "Gehry has become the emblem of Architecture Now." Indeed, if you ask Joe Sixpack which architect he knows, the answer would probably be Frank (either FLW or FOG).

I don't know when it started, but at least Rem was already attacking "starchitects" back in the days of Junkspace. "Laughable emptiness infuses the respectful distance or tentative embrace that starchitects maintain in the presence of the past, authentic or not." There are identifiable examples mentioned in the text: "...quarries reopened to excavate the 'same' stone, indiscreet donor names chiseled prominently in the meekest of typefaces; the courtyard covered by a masterful, structural 'filigree' - emphatically uncompetitive - so that continuity may be established with the 'rest' of Junkspace (abandoned galleries, display slums, Jurassic concepts…)." This is explicit: "Railway stations unfold like iron butterflies, airports glisten like cyclopic dewdrops, bridges span often negligible banks like grotesquely enlarged versions of the harp. To each rivulet its own Calatrava."

I think it's not necessarily the concept of stars that's bad, but it's what they do, or how they can catch our eyes. We don't need more Britney or Paris, but Angelina is not too bad...

Is there a way out? Rem offered two lines of thoughts. One is to be not simple but pure. "It's time to reconsider purity," Rem said. To illustrate what he meant, he showed the Dubai Renaissance project. I found it interesting to think about the difference between being simple and pure. Simple is direct and straightforward. But it implies being not sophisticated or complicated - there are no intellectual challenges. Pure indicates soleness, but this singularity can be organized by extremely complex internal relations. Purity knows exactly what it's doing, although it may be complicated. Purity excludes any interruptions from foreign elements.


The second way - we knew it already - is the extreme engagement in program and urban conditions. He presented Taipei as an example (see my blog entry). I so wished he had more, but that was it. I hope he will think more on this and we'll see some sort of "guide to starchitects behavior"... Did Rem write anything important after Junkspace?

Maybe it's time. He said, when everything goes down in this crisis, the chances for more planning, more thinking, and more feeling go up. It is actually a positive moment for architecture. This surprised me quite a bit given the fact that he claimed multiple times to be a pessimist, especially during his AA years. He was troubled by the dominant optimism of Archigram. When everybody was playing with fancy collages, he went to study the Berlin Wall... But now he seems to think positively. When asked about his "minimal" architectural intervention in the Hermitage project, He said, "Why can't we enjoy things just for their own sake? Architects tend to opt for radical changes..." Does he really become more optimistic and want to re-evaluate the legacy of Archigram?

Finally, one little quote on China: "If you don't understand the ideological ambition of that nation, you are not worth operating in China."

TVCC2 - Architecture must burn?

In Yukio Mishima's novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji), the disturbed acolyte Mizoguchi burnt down the Golden Pavilion at the end. What he destroyed was far more than a physical structure. For Mizoguchi, it's a symbol of beauty, and desire. It embodies all the love, shame, disappointment, and anger in his life.

In the last couple of years several well-known buildings caught on fire, partially or completely damaged. Buildings always mean more to architects, just like parents understand better the value of life... Let's take a moment of silence and mourn the loss of tremendous physical and emotional devotions, the loss of beauty, and the loss of all the wonders they had created.

TVCC, Feb 9, 2009

Berlin Philharmonic, May 20, 2008

TU Delft Architecture Faculty (Bouwkunde), May 13, 2008

Linked Hybrid, May 1, 2008

Villa NM, Feb 6, 2008

TVCC on fire!

Oh boy! Around 9pm Beijing time (8am Eastern time) today, TVCC caught on fire. Preliminary investigation says it's the firework on the last day of celebrations for the Chinese New Year... The fire went on for almost 4 hours. 54 fire trucks came to the site. 30+ people were rescued, and at least 7 people (6 fire fighters + 1 CCTV staff) were hospitalized. (Added 2/10: One firefighter died...) Estimated loss billions of dollars, not counting the endless hours of work on the design...

The entire morning there were floods of messages from different portals: emails, text messages, msn, google talk, skype, facebook chat... I was amazed how fast things travel in the architectural world.

Blink graphics

Emerystudio designed this cool wayfinding system for the carpark of Eureka Tower in Melbourne. The monumental words can be seen perfectly at certain key points. Otherwise they become ambiguous graphic fragments. The manipulation of perspetival distortion successfully addresses the notions of 2D (signage) vs. 3D (space), and staticity vs. mobility. When driving, you have to make decisions in a blink anyways, right?