Tribeca Telecommunications Switching Station

Constructs.
Architecture is inevitably an act of construction. Even such “paper” architects as Boulle or Lebbeus Woods engage in acts of construction or perhaps they might instead be said to engage more in acts of construing. Yet such a distinction does not only apply to those who theorize and do not build. For even the most practical and physically oriented architectural practice requires both an act of construing and an act of constructing. Implicit in the construing – constructing relationship is a production or becoming of a body. This body is not a whole but a population of pieces arranged in such a way to create capacities to affect other bodies or be affected by other bodies. Due to the fact that the joint or relationship between the pieces is what determines the becoming of the construct in the world, the joint is of great interest in any construing – construction process. Yet the body that emerges from the event of the joint constitutes the lived reality of our world and the embodied nature of things and ourselves in that world. In the end the problem of architecture is to address this lived reality including the way human beings and their bodies are embodied by this reality.

At the intersection of Hudson and Canal, the Holland Tunnel comes up on the Manhattan side. Just blocks away, the West Side Highway barrels down the side of the island, distributing cars all across Manhattan. On Canal between these two transportation networks at the top of Tribeca, is a small triangular block. On this site, a small building containing telecommunications switching equipment sits. It isn’t a billboard of some large corporations brand designed to be an image of that corporation’s power and influence, though it might become that. It isn’t a grand experiment designed to challenge the way we live. In fact it is mainly designed for the lives of the equipment that dwell there, humans only regurlarly occupy the top floor of offices and the roof garden. The building is more object than subject, more a construction than a creation, a construing of material rather than thought.

Both construe and construct come from the same Latin origin,¹ the word construo which in Latin means to pile up together or to arrange in a group.² From this definition one can see that a construct is an arrangement of pieces set in relation to each other in a joining to resist a force or forces. In the end, it is the joint between the pieces not the pieces themselves that constitute the construct, for it is in the act of joining that the assemblage gains its ability to resist the deteriorating forces of the world. Yet the pieces themselves have only certain kinds of capacities to join with each other. These capacities are immanent in the pieces themselves.

The process of construing – constructing is one of determining the capacities of pieces to join with each other and the actualization of the joint. Marco Frascari describes this double relationship as the “techne of logos” and the “logos of techne” or the craft of logic and the logic of craft.³ The craft of logic is the act of producing thought while the logic of craft is the act of actualizing that thought into a physical embodied construct, the joint. Both are acts of construction.

1. Jess Stein, ed., The Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1988), pg. 288.
2. John C. Traupman, The New College Latin & English Dictionary, (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), pg. 115.
3. Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail”, Via 7, MIT Press, pg. 23