Architecture

• The Manhattan Archive and Library

  The idea of building a new library in these days of the internet seems almost quaint. Something of a throwback to times when information wasn’t as accessible, yet overwhelming. Certainly the very idea of what is a library and what it can offer society has changed. When speaking of this change of idea, most young architect’s would try to challenge our preconceptions of what a Library is or offer us some theory of information diffusion cast in a formal strategy that expresses to the world, through Architecture the grand and revolutionary changes in the world of information today. Yet does every new building, let alone every library need to be a statement on society, or an expression of the world of information as a whole? Certainly such definitions of the problem are valid and important to the discussion of Architecture, but this is to the detriment of other problems.

  07.17.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture, Projects | read on

• 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.

  07.06.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture, Projects | read on

• Pollock + Krasner Study Center

  Space is a natural thing to talk about when it comes to the art of Jackson Pollock. His drip paintings were flattened pieces of explosive space, both challenging the then dominate nature of the canvas as frame and the figurative nature of art. So when proposing a new building on the site of Jackson Pollock’s and Lee Krasner’s home in the Springs, Long Island, New York to house the administrative offices, research library, community events and academic programs of the Pollock + Krasner Study Center, one can not but help to think of space and the process of defining that space as an integral part of the design.

  06.22.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture, Projects | read on

• An Ethics of Complexity for Architecture

  How does one make decisions and judgments within the practice of architecture?  There are no answers to this question, only problems.  How one formulates the problem, that is constructs the problem of architecture, effects the nature of the possible solutions, the performance of the designed and constructed buildings.  Problems are as much a construction of architectural practice as the actual built building is.  As Kojin Karatani describes in his book Architecture as Metaphor, there is a tendency in western philosophy to architecturalize itself.  He goes on to say that this “will to architecture” is not limited to philosophy but is latent in much of western thought, from science to the humanities.¹ The will to architecture is the act of to constructing thought.  It is an act of making.  For any conception of architecture must include an idea of making or construction.

  06.22.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture | read on

• Fields and Intensities

  System fields, intense fields and virtual fields are three interlocked concepts of the field. In his essay From Object to Field, Stan Allen primarily discusses the concept of a system field. I am using this term to describe a large group of objects that relate to each other in a systematic way and might produce emergent behaviors. An example of such a field is an ant colony as discussed by Steven Johnson in his book Emergence. In fact, a field is really just a set of relationships between objects. It can be hierarchal, unlike what Steve Allen implies, but does tend to be more of an intertwined mesh of objects, homogeneous or heterogeneous. Still a set of relationships between objects is hardly a clear way to describe a field. To be a field those relationships must be specified in a more exact manner. In fact, those relationships can not be a static “pattern” but are behavioral. The key to understanding a field is that each object inputs its behaviors, or its capacities and potentials to affect and be affected, into relation with other capacities and potentials. In a systems field the capacities are extensive properties of the objects. Examples of extensive properties are length, mass and energy.

  04.27.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture | read on

• The Machinic Phylum and Non-Organic Life Engines

  Life, organic or otherwise, comes from the intensive processes of a space Manuel DeLanda refers to as the machinic phylum in his essay Non-Organic Life. His use of this term comes from the philosophy of Gilles Delueze, including Delueze’s collaborations with Felix Guattari. Delueze and Guattari tend to not use any one term when referring to their concepts, instead, like the concepts they are talking about, they fluidly interchange several different words depending on the circumstances. In the case of the machinic phylum, Delueze and Guattari also use terms such as the Body without Organs (BwO), Plane of Immanence and Plane of Consistency. DeLanda in turn, also uses the term Intensive Spatium in his book Intensive Science, Virtual Philosophy. Each of these words is like a different gateway to the same concept, thus by virtue of each term we can gain a better understanding of the concept.

  04.27.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture | read on

• Brownsville Public Housing Development

  In their book, refabricating ARCHITECTURE, Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake discuss the implications of the prefabrication of modular components to architecture. They argue that through the realigning of the construction industry from an atomized state to a tiered organization similar to that of the aerospace and automobile industries architects will be able to design higher quality and greater scope buildings faster and cheaper. To build modular pieces of buildings one must move away from a purely systems approach and to a more integrated idea of building. A new spatial alignment of these systems is crucial.

  03.22.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture, Projects | read on

• Fulton Street Visitor and Transit Center

  A study in the ideas of qualitative performance as envisioned in William MacDonald of KOL/MAC Architects. The study was sited at the corner of Fulton St. and Broadway in New York City. This is the location of the for the Fulton Transit Center by Nicholas Grimshaw. The goal of the project from the MTA’s standpoint was to reconfigure the confusing labyrinth of subway stations going through lower Manhattan.

  03.20.08 | no comments | Filed Under: Architecture, Projects | read on