shared on 9 March 2010 | 12:11 pm via: Staalvilla

date: Saturday 27th of march 2010

and that is: About 14 artists and bands will perform in 7 living rooms of the mainly squatted houses. The festival is brought to you by a group of music-loving volonteers with no profit purpose. The artists, as well, will perform for free. During the performances, you'll be invited to support the artists by a volontary bribe. Thuis in Bajesdorp also aims at gathering all of us in the cosiest atmospere possible. Food and drinks will be served like at home at a democratic price. Do expect an unexpected performance Quartier Mustache at House 18.

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shared on 9 March 2010 | 11:39 am via: Delicious/edwingardner

Mapping Architectural Controversies (MAC) is an interactive website dedicated to students and researchers working on controversies surrounding design projects, buildings, master plans, and urban and development issues. Documenting and visualising recent controversies in architecture, it also aims to address a broader audience interested in the design of cities, spatial networks and built environments as well as planners, representatives of city government, NGOs and citizens. As it is a part of the EU-funded project MACOSPOL, Mapping Architectural Controversies draws on a variety of documental sources and visual methods to explore the multifarious connections of architecture and society.

shared on 8 March 2010 | 10:52 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: crashinglybeautiful: http://tumblr.com/xk6776gpc

shared on 8 March 2010 | 10:52 pm via: Howard Roark

crashinglybeautiful:

invisiblestories:

daimonion137:

Pfeilerhalle by Albert Speer

shared on 7 March 2010 | 11:39 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

webshop for building plans

shared on 7 March 2010 | 11:33 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: FFFFOUND! | Tanya Johnston | Illustration & Design http://tumblr.com/xk675xetb

shared on 7 March 2010 | 11:33 pm via: Howard Roark

FFFFOUND! | Tanya Johnston | Illustration & Design

shared on 7 March 2010 | 2:04 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: good read: Books in the age of the IPad http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/

shared on 7 March 2010 | 1:46 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 7 March 2010 | 1:26 am via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: Nested snub dodecahedron and family (via flight404) http://tumblr.com/xk674prh0

shared on 7 March 2010 | 1:26 am via: Howard Roark

Nested snub dodecahedron and family (via flight404)

shared on 6 March 2010 | 5:53 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a… - but does it float http://tumblr.com/xk674akdl

shared on 6 March 2010 | 5:53 pm via: Howard Roark

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a… - but does it float

shared on 4 March 2010 | 7:43 pm via: Howard Roark

crashinglybeautiful:

kateoplis:

17th century Ottoman tent from the Dresden State Art Collections

shared on 4 March 2010 | 7:43 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: crashinglybeautiful: http://tumblr.com/xk671zjq6

shared on 4 March 2010 | 7:34 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: nevver: http://tumblr.com/xk671zb0t

shared on 4 March 2010 | 7:34 pm via: Howard Roark

nevver:

Kim Høltermand | Daily Icon

shared on 27 February 2010 | 11:30 am via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: Townshift Competition proposal / Paisajes Emergentes | ArchDaily http://tumblr.com/xk66v6f77

shared on 27 February 2010 | 11:30 am via: Howard Roark

Townshift Competition proposal / Paisajes Emergentes | ArchDaily

shared on 26 February 2010 | 8:36 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: FFFFOUND! | grain edit · Mikey Burton http://tumblr.com/xk66ubyl9

shared on 26 February 2010 | 8:36 pm via: Howard Roark

FFFFOUND! | grain edit · Mikey Burton

shared on 26 February 2010 | 5:38 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: François Delfosse - BOOOOOOOM! - CREATE * INSPIRE * COMMUNITY * ART * DESIGN * MUSIC * FILM * PHOTO *... http://tumblr.com/xk66u6mep

shared on 26 February 2010 | 5:38 pm via: Howard Roark

François Delfosse - BOOOOOOOM! - CREATE * INSPIRE * COMMUNITY * ART * DESIGN * MUSIC * FILM * PHOTO * PROJECTS

shared on 26 February 2010 | 5:32 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: Anatoly Zenkov - BOOOOOOOM! - CREATE * INSPIRE * COMMUNITY * ART * DESIGN * MUSIC * FILM * PHOTO *... http://tumblr.com/xk66u6fyb

shared on 26 February 2010 | 5:32 pm via: Howard Roark

Anatoly Zenkov - BOOOOOOOM! - CREATE * INSPIRE * COMMUNITY * ART * DESIGN * MUSIC * FILM * PHOTO * PROJECTS

shared on 26 February 2010 | 3:14 pm via: Staalvilla

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shared on 26 February 2010 | 2:14 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

Like the story of a fictional movie, but Japanese space agency plan so serious: In 2030 they will capture solar energy in space and sends it to Earth via laser or microwave.

shared on 26 February 2010 | 10:59 am via: Staalvilla

Staalvillains,

probably interesting to some of you:

Next monday, March 01, 8pm, Erik Swyngedouw (interview) and Justus Uitermark a.o. will discuss neoliberal city development and it's alternatives at the CREA theather in Amsterdam.
Entrance fee 5€.

best,
Björn

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shared on 24 February 2010 | 2:04 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Waar is de Woede? boosheid en alternatieven tegen de 'banksters' 1 maart - @VPROTegenlicht http://bit.ly/a7Jsst

shared on 23 February 2010 | 7:47 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: squatting meant to architecture what punk meant music, anyone could live anywhere independent of the architecture. -Bart Goldhoorn

shared on 23 February 2010 | 5:49 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Video: jarredbishop: http://tumblr.com/xk66qfykx

shared on 23 February 2010 | 5:49 pm via: Howard Roark

jarredbishop:

Robert Hodgin (aka Flight404) shares some of his recent work for an exhibition at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Gray Scott Reaction Diffusion combines with webcam differencing to create a mesmerizing realtime installation currently on display at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Mesmerizing indeed.

shared on 23 February 2010 | 10:49 am via: Howard Roark

Brainstorm on Vimeo (via Near Future Laboratory)

shared on 23 February 2010 | 10:49 am via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Video: Brainstorm on Vimeo (via Near Future Laboratory) http://tumblr.com/xk66q5yzr

shared on 22 February 2010 | 6:55 pm via: Issuu by edwingardner

In 5 chapters five different ideas/meanings of architecture are displayed. Architecturs as Guidance, Hapiness, Structure, Mood Engineering and Power Play. The metaphorical power through the language of architecture. Through other lenses we see what notions of Architecture are broadcasted into the world.

shared on 22 February 2010 | 6:27 pm via: Issuu by edwingardner

In 5 chapters five different ideas/meanings of architecture are displayed. Architecturs as Guidance, Hapiness, Structure, Mood Engineering and Power Play. The metaphorical power through the language of architecture. Through other lenses we see what notions of Architecture are broadcasted into the ...

shared on 22 February 2010 | 1:06 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 22 February 2010 | 9:37 am via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: (via medicines) | r-echos http://tumblr.com/xk66ovk0m

shared on 22 February 2010 | 9:37 am via: Howard Roark

(via medicines) | r-echos

shared on 22 February 2010 | 9:35 am via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: (via medicines) | r-echos http://tumblr.com/xk66ovhoi

shared on 19 February 2010 | 6:40 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: @volume_mag sorry for @yarbus post, accounts mixed up, 5 twitter accounts is apparently too much to handle :s

shared on 18 February 2010 | 11:49 pm via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: nieuwe post op @yarbus - Tovernaars en Betovering door Christiaan Fruneaux: http://bit.ly/9x55sU

shared on 18 February 2010 | 6:39 pm via: Yarbus

De pen is machtiger dan het zwaard, maar een beeld zegt meer dan duizend woorden. Als je geduld hebt tenminste. Want meer dan duizend woorden maakt een lang verhaal. Dat wil zeggen; een verhaal dat langer is dan een ogenblik, om nog maar te zwijgen van een oogopslag. En wie heeft nog de tijd… Beelden zijn [...]

shared on 18 February 2010 | 2:36 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 18 February 2010 | 12:42 am via: Twitter / edwingardner

edwingardner: Photo: Drawing in Good Faith « Diffusive Architectures http://tumblr.com/xk66jgooo

shared on 18 February 2010 | 12:42 am via: Howard Roark

Drawing in Good Faith « Diffusive Architectures

shared on 17 February 2010 | 9:53 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner

edwingardner posted a photo:

The competition to design a new EU flag trigger me. Although this one ironically turns out too look like a string of barbed wire ... (at first I imagined the symbolism of a chain) but I guess this flag could be put on the strongholds of fort Europe.

shared on 17 February 2010 | 9:12 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 17 February 2010 | 5:35 pm via: Howard Roark

which remembers me, … something i did in Istanbul

edwingardner

shared on 17 February 2010 | 5:31 pm via: Howard Roark

!stanbul

via www.alitaptik.com

shared on 17 February 2010 | 3:00 pm via: Howard Roark

Ivan Sutherland : Sketchpad Demo (1/2) (via bigkif)

shared on 16 February 2010 | 8:30 pm via: Staalvilla

Hi all,

Photographer Sergio Gridelle and director Nienke Rooijakkers are going to document the transformation of the Staalvilla domain for a year. Bee keeping, moonshine bar, Schommelpaviljoen, etc etc: we are one of five domain vagues in the city that they will be follwing for a year. Terrains where people create their own environment. See below for a short pitch, and check the mediamatic site for more (bewegende) information.

http://www.mediamatic.net/page/101314/en

Project over braakliggend bouwterrein en hoe stadsbewoners dat eigenzinnig naar hun hand zetten
Fotograaf Sergio Gridelli en regisseur Nienke Rooijakkers volgen een jaar lang vijf braakliggende veldjes in de stad Amsterdam waar omwonenden zonder officiële toestemming zelf op hebben ingegrepen; met een reeks exposities in de openbare ruimte én een verhalenwebsite doen zij het hele jaar verslag en proberen zo de discussie aan te zwengelen rondom (groene) ruimte in de stad.

Gridelli en Rooijakkers kiezen vijf lege veldjes, verspreid over de stad Amsterdam, waar omwonenden zelf een tijdelijke tuin, speelplek, 'ruige' natuur, recreatieplek of nog iets anders van hebben gemaakt. Gridelli volgt de plekken met zijn camera, Rooijakkers verzamelt de verhalen van omwonenden en belanghebbenden die rondom de plek leven. Via openbare exposities, beginnend met een twee weken durende expo in MUPI's ('Mobilier Urbain à Publicité Illuminé', oftewel straatmeubilair in de vorm van verlichte reclamezuil) door de hele stad. Daarna volgen peperbussen, stadsdeelkantoren, de entree van een woningbouwvereniging, de wachtkamer van een architectenbureau... plekken die bij het onderwerp aansluiten en/of de openbare ruimte als geheel bespelen. Grafisch vormgever Daniëlle de Boo zal de affiches ontwerpen, tevens ontwerpt zij het concept voor de openbare exposities.

Tegelijk met de eerst expo gaat een website online waar de veldjes nader in beeld worden gebracht en de verhalen van de gebruikers, omwonenden en belanghebbenden beuisterd kunnen worden. Rooijakkers monteert interviews tot puntige audiofragmenten. Beeld en geluid geven samen een beeld van wat leeft rondom de plek, wat de zorgen zijn en waarvan gedroomd wordt. De website biedt de bezoeker ook de mogelijkheid om zelf een verhaal achter te laten.

Voor het project willen de makers samenwerken met zgn. 'stadspartners': instellingen die zich verbonden voelen met het thema. Zij 'hosten' het project: ze ondersteunen bij de research, bieden expositieplekken en geven naamsbekendheid aan het project. Er zijn reeds gesprekken gaande met De Tolhuistuin, Woningbouwvereniging Ymere, De Noorderparkkamer en Koers Nieuw West.

‘Vergeten veldjes’ ambieert meer te zijn dan een kunstproject alleen. Het project wil de ogen openen van bewoners, bezoekers én stadsplanners voor stukjes stad van onverwachte schoonheid en inventiviteit. Tegelijk willen de makers aanzetten tot creativiteit en op een laagdrempelige manier bouwen aan een gemeenschap die zich verantwoordelijk voelt voor de ontwikkeling van de stedelijke leefomgeving.

Wij houden van wonderlijke initiatieven - die gewoonweg opduiken in het dagelijks leven en ook zomaar weer verdwenen kunnen zijn. Wij willen ze (een beetje) bewaren. Bovendien - wij denken dat dit soort initiatieven iets zinnigs te vertellen hebben - met dit platform willen we luis in de pels zijn van allen die denken en beslissen over de inrichting van de 'leefbare stad'.

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shared on 16 February 2010 | 2:08 pm via: Howard Roark

tollll:

re.

hellodrama.

shared on 16 February 2010 | 11:16 am via: Howard Roark

desMena » Commercial-Residential Complex in Mashhad by BRT and DC[4s]

shared on 15 February 2010 | 3:14 pm via: Issuu by edwingardner

the independent paper blog aggregator

shared on 15 February 2010 | 12:40 pm via: Staalvilla

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shared on 15 February 2010 | 11:20 am via: Howard Roark

Particle collection on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

shared on 14 February 2010 | 8:26 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 12 February 2010 | 3:23 pm via: Staalvilla

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shared on 12 February 2010 | 12:14 pm via: Issuu by edwingardner

Essay by Reyner Banham published posthumously in New Statesman & Society 12 October 1990. Banham died 1988.

shared on 11 February 2010 | 8:07 pm via: Staalvilla

Sent from my iPhone

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shared on 11 February 2010 | 2:23 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

Written for Interactions Magazine by Hugh Dubberly.

Models are ideas about the world—how it might be organized and how it might work. Models describe relationships: parts that make up wholes; structures that bind them; and how parts behave in relation to one another.

shared on 11 February 2010 | 2:21 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 11 February 2010 | 11:22 am via: Staalvilla

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shared on 10 February 2010 | 5:06 pm via: Staalvilla

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shared on 9 February 2010 | 3:25 pm via: Staalvilla

Staalvillains,

I've been in contact with the people from the Gängeviertel in Hamburg. They invited us over for the weekend from 12-14 March upcoming, providing shelter for all of us, offering us a 'guided tour' through the squatted Gängeviertel and other 'Brennpunkte' throughout Hamburg, if we want to.
They also invited us to give a short introduction (e.g. presentation, film) on what's going on at the Tolhuistuin, the Staalvilla and the Shell Terrein at the moment. If we confirm on that, they would block a part of the evening whether on 12 or 13 March, inviting people over for attending, discussing and probably partying afterwards.
Sounds like fun to me, even if a presentation on the 'Amsterdam Situation' obviously needs some fine tuning on forehand.
What I need to know of you, ladies and gentlemen, is whether you are planning to come and if you are willing to collaborate on a storyboard for a presentation at the Gängeviertel?
I was also busy tracking down the last tickets for the St. Pauli match on March 14 13.30. There are some left, the only thing being us situated in the block of the enemies supporters (mmmh). Good thing about it is that they cost max 20€/piece.

So let me know asap, then i can catch up with them and figure out the details.
Best, Björn    
 

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shared on 9 February 2010 | 10:30 am via: Staalvilla

Hey Guys,

Jasper and Benito are on their way to make us hot!
I mean: the waterslang.
They already did 56 meters, so in only a few hours there will be water! Yes!

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shared on 8 February 2010 | 4:19 pm via: Yarbus

Iedereen koopt wel eens iets om zich beter te voelen, om een gaatje in z’n ziel te vullen. Of veel grootster; in de hoop dat een aankoop het leven zal veranderen, dat de aankoop gaat verschil zal maken waardoor je wel succesvol of zelfverzekerd wordt. Deze ervaring is volgens mij aan het devalueren, mensen hebben [...]

shared on 8 February 2010 | 9:03 am via: Staalvilla

From: francis francis <francis.mb@gmail.com>
Date: 7 februari 2010 18:15:47 GMT+01:00
To: joost@partizanpublik.nl
Subject: Partizan Publik parkeert Moonshine Bus op de Tolhuistuin

Joost, Jasper, Pieter-Paul, Touria en Francis hebben met vereende krachten de Moonshine Bus een zeer lastige bijzondere verrichting laten uitvoeren.
Na een paar rondes langs de pont en een mislukte poging om de bus achter uit in te steken, reed Joost terug naar de Mosveld rotonde, alwaar zij opgewacht werden door de politie die hen vroeg; of waar zij wel niet mee bezig waren?
Met een grijns en een knipoog reden Jasper en Joost en Leon( van Whilling Wheels) langs de dubbelgeparkeerde auto's op de Van der Pek.
Hier werden zij met luid gejuich ontvangen door Touria en Francis.
Op naar de Tolhuistuin voor poging twee.
Na veel heen en weer gemanoeuvreer,  heeft de bus voor de Staalvilla een straatje weten te keren.
Palen en nietjes en plantenbakken werden door de noeste strijders naar betere oorden verwezen.
Joost op de trekker, Francis achter het stuur, Jasper het brein, Touria het hart en Pieter-Paul de longen en interne organen (koffie en Gas op die Lollie!)
Kortom......feest!
de Bus staat.
En kijk dan hoe strak hij langs de stoep staat!

Francis

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shared on 6 February 2010 | 5:50 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 5 February 2010 | 6:33 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 5 February 2010 | 5:41 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

Allen Steele once wrote a book "Rude Astronauts". Well, today we have a short and sweet page called "Surprised Astronauts" - maybe somebody will write a book around it, too.

Surprised by what? We can only guess... Nanobot swarms, aliens with indigestion, invincible totalitarian spies, or inept blondes in spacesuits, you fill the blanks.

shared on 5 February 2010 | 3:13 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

Through historic and detailed documentation deriving from a singular urban episode, the New York City Subway, All City Writers wants to investigate the evolution and the consequences of a countercultural phenomenon, which in the last decades has provoked a change in the rules of aesthetics and communication in modern day society.

shared on 5 February 2010 | 3:08 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner

shared on 4 February 2010 | 10:13 pm via: Staalvilla

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shared on 4 February 2010 | 6:06 pm via: Staalvilla

Formaat: 35 mm

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shared on 3 February 2010 | 3:23 pm via: Staalvilla

Naar aanleiding van de discussie over een Staalvilla Cooperatie, en hoe wij als creatieven bewuster met de economische als wel de ideologische dimensies van onze rol in de stadsontwikkeling kunnen omgaan heb ik even wat Research gedaan.

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shared on 2 February 2010 | 1:03 pm via: Staalvilla

Download now or preview on posterous

2009-10_magazin_unter-geiern.pdf (7350 KB)

ha Staalvillains,

we did some pseudo journalistic research concerning our first collective 'bedrijfsuitje' to Hamburg. just some very selective cut'n paste information to update you on what's going on at our neighbours. with some of the information your german 'middelbare school' experience will be revitalised. the bottom line of this post is to inventarise who of you wants to conquer a seat in the Chrysler heading to Hamburg for a weekend end of February, beginning of March. depending on how many people are coming i can provide accomodation for a night or two. just have a look around, and if a trip to Hamburg sounds like fun to you, let us know and we'll figure out a convenient date.

best, Björn
   
subjective map of Hamburg:

View Larger Map

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shared on 1 February 2010 | 3:14 pm via: Staalvilla

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shared on 31 January 2010 | 5:32 pm via: Uploads from edwingardner

edwingardner posted a photo:

Exploiting a loop-hole in legistlation, because trailers don't fall under real estate taxation laws, one could make a trailer flat (stacaravan-flat NL). Which would legally be classified as "trailer storage" but is actually a "vertical trailer park"

shared on 31 January 2010 | 10:43 am via: Staalvilla

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shared on 29 January 2010 | 5:48 pm via: Staalvilla

reminder, vanavond om 1900uur in villa abspoel. Presentatie werk ahmed ogut, Kunstenaar project come in going out. Werkt in uitlopen kunstdisciplines: video fotgrafie, installaties en performances.
bovendien zijn er lekkere hapjes en is een wijntje komen drinken ook niet gek!
Zie je graag verschijnen,

Touria

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shared on 29 January 2010 | 5:33 pm via: Staalvilla

wist iedereen eigenlijk al dat mijn space ship naar de tolhuistuin komt? het is een beest van een machine, zilverkleurig als de maan, met een wat geschonden aangezicht. maakt het hier meteen weer wat vrolijker. er is nog wel wat werk aan, maar het gaat een geniale semi mobiele (de motor is eruit) bar worden. met een mini dansvloertje, om te eten, voor kleine feestjes, voor minioptredentje of filmavondjes. voor programma's of koffie.

iedereen die het leuk vind om er mee aan te knutselen (goed voor lichaam en geest) kan meedoen. met touria en japser ga ik volgende week naar het bredero college om te kijken of ze er een project voor hun timmerscholieren van willen maken, dat zou helemaal fantastisch zijn. vandaag kregen we een zonnepaneel voor op het dak gedoneert dus dat is ook tegek.

iedereen die verder nog goeie ideeen heeft vind ik ook leuk om te horen.

doei!

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shared on 26 January 2010 | 11:30 am via: Action! Creating knowledge through practice

On guiding, leadership, influence and motivation.

Late last year we launched the latest issue of VOLUME, simply titled The Guide. As the blurb states, it ‘presents a diverse collection of guides and attempts to guide […] the guide is understood as not simply a service or selling point, but as an exploratory tool, a generator for a proactive engagement with the city.’

Despite this pluralist approach to what a guide might be, the question remains as to what is actually guiding us as architects or designers. So, in an effort to expand the debate beyond the deadline for the printer, and beyond our office, we thought we would crack open this question once more by simply asking what guides you? What are your conceptual reference points? Who are your intellectual leaders? Are you driven by your tools, your working media? Larger ethical concerns such as sustainability? Or are you limited by the demands of the market? What do you feed your architectural black box?

Of the issue, Michael Kubo’s contribution Publishing Practices – which presents the findings of a survey of architects on their most influential books - is the most explicitly directed to revealing the reference points of architects today. The peaks in Michael’s graph are startlingly clear, Vers Une Architecture (1923), Complexity and Contradiction (1967), Delirious New York (1978) and by far the largest spike, SMLXL (1995). Since Koolhaas’ massive tome, Zumthor, Moneo, Evans and Moussavi each stick their heads up above the crowd, but a singularly defining work is nowhere to be seen. Could this doorstop be the final bookend on the canonical architecture text?

This question of defining books bubbled up on Twitter in a big way recently, spurred by the list-making fervour of the end of the decade. Captured by the hashtag #endofarchitecturetexts, the death of the canonical architecture book seemed to be accepted by the crowd (@loudpaper, @willprince, @javierest, @serial_consign, @ enriqueramirez and of course @microkubo) without dispute. While potential candidates were suggested, based on surveys of his students @kazys penned the 160 character tombstone: “there is no defining text for the 00s, that’s the defining text.”

Or – as Edwin argues in the previous post, Architecture left to it’s own devices – has theory simply lost its relevance to practice? By no longer being interested in the ‘dirtiness, the messiness and opportunism of practice’, are critics and practitioners simply ‘living on different planets’? In which case are we looking in the wrong places? Are the most instructive texts for the practitioner coming out of neurology, such as Jeff Hawkin’s On Intelligence, as Edwin proposes?

Perhaps it is too close to call, with the significance of particular text only becoming clear in retrospect. Or is it a broader symptom of contemporary practice’s marriage to the market, with our ‘leaders’ too busy building to consider publications? Importantly, Kubo’s survey and the Twitter discussion sought to determine which books are most influential, generating a compelling distillation of references, but leaving the larger question of ‘what guides you?’ wide open.

Have we simply turned to the internet? Will BLDG BLOG, Archinect, Mammoth, Pruned, City of Sound or Fantastic Journal emerge as having best captured the thinking (and attention) of architects today? But as Michael notes (without naming names) why do blogs aim to turn into books? Does this medium retain the exclusive rights to legitimacy and legacy? Can you only enter the canon when you are literally ‘in print’?

Of course, we want to believe Kazys, that there just isn’t a defining source of the past 15 years, that architects have their own interests beyond the canon and don’t merely follow unquestionably the latest manifesto/monograph of the day. We may no longer be the most irritating dinner party guests, leaving behind the constant quoting of Le Corbusier and Koolhaas while trying desperately to think up our own witty twist on ‘less is more’.

It would also be easy to dismiss the idea of the canon as something to be preferably jettisoned; the end of the insular discussions and autonomy of architecture, a first step toward re-joining society. But as Michael states, ‘the fact of having and naming an identifiable canon – of being able to label works as canonical – is central to the idea of architecture as a distinct discipline.’ He goes even further to state ‘the canon is the discipline’, which leads to the inverse question, without the canon, do we still have a discipline? Do we lose it all when we no longer have the same reference points – the ‘shared currency’ – to talk about? Will our established and broadly understood ‘body of knowledge’ dissolve into promiscuous pluralism – with sources coming from everywhere (and nowhere) leading – most shockingly – to the end of styles? In this case, the sensationally abbreviated Twitter hashtag #endofarchitecture may actually live up to its claim.

Who or what is steering this thing called architecture anyway?

shared on 25 January 2010 | 10:50 pm via: Action! Creating knowledge through practice

or How theory stopped guiding architectural practice

(as published in Volume #22 The Guide but with some aditional links)

Michael Kubo’s Publishing Practices project shows a beautiful overview of where the architectural discipline looks for guidance. The presented collection of canonical publications function as guidebooks for the discipline, books that instruct how to practice, aid our understanding of reality, and show us the way towards a makeable future. But alas, now that ‘history has ended’ and all the grand narratives that offered us a set of principles to live by and utopia’s to hope for have muted, the books we are left with to guide us are those that help us get a grip on reality – to not get crushed by its forces, but to surf its waves (S,M,L,XL). Instead of manuals for the future or anchors in the past, all that is left are coping mechanisms for the now.

There was a time when practice was guided by a sense of legitimacy, as opposed to pragmatism, and acted in accordance to a moral truth instead of mining contradictions of reality. Legitimization in architecture was acted out through rituals in which the sacred rules of an ancient craft were transmitted from master to apprentice. The professional truth was determined by the guilds and later by elaborate catalogues containing precedents and style-rules that function as the holy scripture of architecture. Then came the manifesto; architecture went from being legitimized by the traditions of the craft, to being legitimized by novel ideologies.

In the late twentieth century, these ideological premises shifted from a 5-point manifesto to the import of -isms such as deconstructivism, structuralism, and rationalism. These -isms evolved from the domains of post-modern philosophy into ideals that legitimized architectural practice and form. Paper architects brought theory and practice together in the arena of art galleries and lecture halls, but this convergence ended when the market regained momentum and building commenced once again. Consequently, theory remained in academia while practice followed the money. Now we’re left with an academic discourse that produces ideologically (anti-capitalist) charged theory for a practice operating in hyper-capitalist conditions. While practice is driven by market opportunism, all theory can suggest is for practice to negate the market. This is not to say we shouldn’t be involved in criticizing capitalist society – though criticism is a branch of theory, some have mistaken critique for instruction – but buildings themselves cannot be instruments of criticism. Besides, not all theory should be critique because critique is predisposed; it operates from a moral high ground. The problem is that this creates vast blind spots before the theorizing even begins.

Here we arrive at the problem concerning the relationship between theory and practice, which I’d like to introduce with an anecdote. In March 2006, I was involved in the organization of a conference entitled Projective Landscape, which aimed to deal with the landscape of ideas that was bubbling in architectural discourse around the term projective. Thus we invited theorists from all over the world, and several practitioners. We had hoped for more, but most practicing architects seem to be hesitant to join these highly intellectual circuses. At the closing forum, Willem-Jan Neutelings (architect) asked of the theorists, ‘When I get to my office again Monday morning, what can I take from today’s conference and put into practice?’ The room remained silent; the theorists had no answers for Neutelings. With this simple question, Neutelings laid bare the troubled relation between the theory and practice of architecture. Theorists and practitioners seem to live on different planets, because even when the architecture theorist is asked directly by the architect, ‘What should I do?’ the theorist can provide the architect with little guidance. Apparently those who think about architecture cannot guide those who make it. When the theory and practice exponents of a discipline doesn’t make sense to each other, there is a problem. It begs the question: are these actually exponents of one and the same discipline? Is there even a common ground where they can meet?

TOWARDS A THEORY OF PRACTICE
From Legitimating to Understanding Practice

If the conclusion is that thinking cannot guide doing anymore, that theory doesn’t guide practice, what does? Human intelligence is based on two operations; abstracting knowledge from the world, generally known as learning, and projecting knowledge we have already obtained back on the world (this argument is elaborated by Jeff Hawkins in On Intelligence as the foundation of intelligence). Thus, ‘theorizing and practicing’ is synonymous with ‘constructing knowledge and applying knowledge’. Most bodies of knowledge are organized along these lines. Theorists are housed in academic institutions where the accumulation of knowledge is cherished and where it is disseminated among the students of the trade. Practitioners reside in the office, where one executes the trade. While knowledge may accumulate in the office, it often remains intangible and ephemeral because it travels in heads, not in books. In the office it’s all about applying knowledge. Where academia judges knowledge on originality, rigor, argumentation and referencing, practice is only interested in knowledge’s effects. Where the aim of knowledge in theory is truth, or let’s say ‘deeper understanding’, the aim of knowledge in the pragmatic world of practice is ‘usefulness’; it is only true and applicable if it works. Truth in pragmatism is not a moral construct where the virtuous ways to act exist isolated from reality in a metaphysical universe, the pragmatist truth is deeply intertwined with reality, its only touchstone. The abstract can only be true if it proves effective in dealing with reality.

Contemporary architecture theory doesn’t seem sincerely interested in the dirtiness, the messiness and opportunism of practice, or in what it is that architects actually ‘do’ (as investigated in Reyner Banham’s ‘Black Box’ essay, see below). Theory has the responsibility to make explicit what is implicit, to surface what is la tent. Theory should hold up a mirror to practice, making practitioners see more clearly what it is they actually do. Insight into one’s own private processes of design and activities of architectural conception is a prerequisite to progressing practice itself. Banham argued for the need to bring anthropological and sociological investigation into architectural culture.

The branch of theory that I would like to promote in architecture is the theory that seeks to understand phenomena, theories that are judged by their explanatory power. I’m interested in theory that pursues what is known in philosophy of science as verisimilitude, as popularized by Karl Popper. The informative and predictive power of theory is what counts, and this is how competing theories should be judged. To be clear, by no means do I want to suggest that we should convert architectural design to a science, or a science based discipline. Design is not a science, and it never will be, as there will always contradictory and ambiguous operations involved in its process.

Besides renewing the relationship between theory and practice for the reason of making theory relevant again for practice (and vice versa), there is also a necessity to taking this path. Before the ideological legitimations of practice that came with modernism, theory had a much more intimate relation with practice. The theories associated with the craft of architecture were deeply involved with production. They provided precedents, typology and proportion systems, but also explanations of how to carve stones and how to make wooden joints. I am not promoting a conservative argument for a return to some sort of rendering of a premodernist architectural craft, but rather a contemporary craft that has less to do with the ‘art of building’ and much more with the ‘design of building’. It has little to do with mastering the stylebook and the drafting table, but all the more with mastering the diagram and the computer (something which becomes quite evident when watching this). While the tools are not the same, and the ideas of the profession have shifted, architects are still extremely intimate with their tools, their processes, their thoughts, and how they turn them into reality.

There are so many very specific processes in architectural practice, and the hands-on experience in the studio is of the utmost importance. Especially now, when legitimation through grand narratives has evap orated, there is room to reconstitute confidence in practice by drafting a theory which is instrumental in obtaining a deeper understanding of practice, one that can provide architects with insight in their actions. When architects start building a deeper understanding of what it is that they’re doing, they can progress the architectural process, and with it architectural thinking. It could provide a solid ground from which architecture would engage and collaborate with other fields and disciplines more confidently, without becoming pseudo-professionals of those disciplines.

Ultimately, understanding informs doing. (Schön talks about our ‘repertoire’ that informs how we see and act in situations.) Architecture needs a theory of what it is that architects actually do, a theory that provides the architect with more insight into their practice and that creates a common ground on which practice and theory can interact productively.

A PRELIMINARY GUIDE TO WHAT ARCHITECTS ACTUALLY ‘DO’

Step 1: A Black Box: the Secret Profession of Architecture (1990) – Reyner Banham

In his last essay, Reyner Banham argues for an investigation into the ‘black box’ that produces architecture, stating we can’t find definitive answers about what architecture actually is by only studying its products. Banham argues that sociological and anthropological research into the black box’s content is needed to understand how architecture could be a discipline in its own right, different from the humanities and the sciences, and that we must articulate how the architectural mode is different from other modes of design or manufacturing.

Step 2: The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (1983) – Donald Schön

In The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön, a design researcher trained as philosopher, observed practicing architects and succeeds in describing ‘how designers think’ in a way that designers can actually recognize. Schön’s work is interesting because of the kind of categories he introduces, which are at once open and adaptable, and yet defined enough to have explanatory power for the entire design discipline. His theory, ‘reflection-in-action’ describes how professionals ’see’ and ‘do’ in certain situations similarly, not the same, as in situations in their ‘repertoire’. Consequently the ’situation’ and ‘talk back’ is re-framed accordingly; this process is then iterated. The differences in repertoire largely influence the differences in design process and output. Schön positions his theory in opposition to practice being, guided by a theory of technological rationality.

Step 3: On Intelligence (2004) – Jeff Hawkins

Jeff Hawkins, a computer architect turned neurologist, is interested in making truly intelligent machines, but believes one can only do so when we understand how the brain produces intelligence. He states that in the cognitive sciences, intelligence is judged by the wrong parameter: behavior. To Hawkins, behavior is simply a manifestation of what intelligence really is, and puts forward a theory that intelligence is determined by prediction. According to him, the brain makes continuous predictions about the world it sees through its senses. It makes these predictions by analogy to the past, what is already stored in our memory. Hawkins’ theory shows many parallels with Schön’s ‘reflection-in-action’, which give Schön’s observations of practice additional grounding. Hawkins’ theory also opens up other avenues for theoretical research of practice.

! - These are mostly ‘my’ first steps (which you’ve probably seen before when you follow this blog). Books that I’ve experienced as very useful in discovering what architects actually ‘do’. I’m curious what you would add to this list, which books, movies, lectures, posts, … have been useful in providing you insight in what you ‘do’ as architect.

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Edwin Gardner thinks through how social networking via, for example, Facebook is changing how we construct our identities. Who is your Google you? He argues that virtual social spaces are revealing glimpses of new spatial experiences.

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Edwin Gardner thinks through how social networking via, for example, Facebook is changing how we construct our identities. Who is your Google you? He argues that virtual social spaces are revealing glimpses of new spatial experiences

shared on 23 January 2010 | 12:28 am via: Issuu by edwingardner

The God complex could acquire new meaning for an upcoming generation of architects and plan ners. Some of them played a 'God game' growing up called Sim City. It's God's point of view minus the attitude. As teenagers they learn ed to operate within the dynamic forces of their own home-grown cities. While these boys and girls have exchanged the sandbox for the construction site, Sim City has changed its scope from city planning to social engineering.

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The God complex could acquire new meaning for an upcoming generation of architects and plan ners. Some of them played a 'God game' growing up called Sim City. It's God's point of view minus the attitude. As teenagers they learn ...

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or How theory stopped guiding architectural practice

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or How theory stopped guiding architectural practice

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“the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” *

When I read this quote I think “Ah, this describes what designers do! This is a description of design thinking, This is an important facet of a designerly way of looking at the world, this is a tenet of architectural intelligence” The only thing that is defined from the outset of an architectural project is a site, a program, a budget and a client - this is the case from which the architect has to abstract the arguments for his/her actions. One can draw parallels from this description to how Donald Schön explains how the practitioner deals with a situation; the architect has to construct an argument, the design of architectural form, which takes advantage of a set of perceived and carefully selected features found in the situation, things that are there from the outset.

* - The quote above doesn’t come from a design researcher, it Aristotle’s who describes the art of rhetoric 350 BC. According to Aristotle the rhetoric faculty consists of sharp observation of a situation and perceiving what can be useful in constructing an argument, and the invention of the argument itself, in what way to deliver it, communicate it. To this date his Ars Rhetorica is the authoritive work on rhetoric. Rhetorica consists of ethos, phatos and logos.

(1) the speaker’s power of evincing a personal character which will make his speech credible (ethos );
(2) his power of stirring the emotions of his hearers (pathos );
(3) his power of proving a truth, or an apparent truth, by means of persuasive arguments (logos )

! - Note that the goal of rhetoric is persuasion, not truth, when the audience is convinced the rhetoric has reached is goal. Rhetoric itself is morally neutral and can be wielded by good as well as evil.

Since architecture cannot be ‘true’ or ‘false’ but more or less persuasive, rhetorical reasoning is akin to reasoning in architecture.
There are two basic kinds of argument one can make in Rhetoric, I would like to illustrate with an architectural example. One is the ‘Enthymeme’ which is the rhetorical version of deduction. The other the argument by `Example’ which is the rhetorical version of induction. The example has two varieties “one consisting on the mention of actual facts, the other in the invention of facts by the speaker” All examples consist of drawing analogies between real or invented situations and the situation in the point one wants to make. “all you require is the power of thinking out your analogy, a power developed by intellectual training”

The Hokusai Wave / The Example

An architectural illustration of the example, the rhetorical induction, would be Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s tale of the Hokusai Wave, which occurred to him when working on the Yokohama International Port Terminal.

Katsushika Hokusai, The Great wave at Kanagawa (from a series of thirty-six views of Mount Fuji)

Yokohama International Port Terminal designed by Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s office FOA

“It started, actually, ten years ago in one of those episodes that radically change one’s perception of reality. Faced with a full press conference in the Yokohama City Hall, circa February 1995, we had to explain what it was we were trying to do in our newly awarded Yokohama Competition project. Faithful to our doctrine, fine tuned through years of academic practice, we proceeded to explain the circulation diagrams, the geometric transformations, and the con- struction technologies that were involved in the project, hoping that the audience would have enough patience to wait for the emergence of the project. Halfway through the presentation, we started to notice the blank expression of the public in the room – a clear indicator that the message was not coming across (this was to become a very common experience during our evolutionldots). After a few minutes of cold sweat, an image that was carefully edited from the project’s discourse but still floating somewhere in the back of our minds came suddenly to our rescue. It was the Hokusai Wave, a drawing from a local painter that we had been toying with while we indulged in geometric manipulations and construction hypotheses during the design phase of the competition entry. In a sudden – and risky – burst of inspiration, we terminated the factual process narrative to conclude that what really inspired us was the image of Hokusai’s Wave (see Figure ref{hokusai} ed.). The room exploded in an exclamation of sincere relief: `Aaaahhhldots!’ and we left the room, still sweating and grateful for that moment of lucidity, and with the clear realization that something wasn’t quite working in our carefully crafted discourse.”
- Zaera-Polo, Volume #3, 2005

When Zaera-Polo explains that the design ‘is like’ the Hokusai Wave he strikes a chord with his audience. The example allows his audience to suddenly read the design in a for them familiar context. Zeara-Polo discovers something that Aristotle already wrote about: “It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences — makes them, as the poets tell us, `charm the crowd’s ears more finely.’ Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.” Beside the persuasive use of the Hokusai Wave, the example was not completely invented, as they ‘had been toying with it while they indulged in geometric manipulations and construction hypotheses during the design phase’ so it was also part of the design process itself (well for the sake of the argument let’s take Zaera-Polo’s word for it).

After the discovery of the `Hokusai Wave principle’ as useful in more ways than just `toying’ with it in the design process, Zaera-Polo explains that they more consciously started to work with this phenomena, which he later calls ‘form with a double agenda’:

“Paradoxically, this strategy, originally devised to respond to commercial demands, became the foundation of a series of commissions for local authorities, most of them in Spain. Short-circuiting our conventional arsenal of diagrams and constructive solutions with locally resonant iconographies became a very effective technique to territorialize our constructed foreignness and connect with local agents. Local iconographies became a perfect excuse to naturalize materials and geometries that would have been otherwise vulnerable to budget cuts or political uncertainty. Moreover, iconography helped us accelerate the identification of traits from our usually hypertrophied site and program analysis in order to provide a formal argument for the projects. Iconographies did not precede the material investigation but rather emerged as viable figures from our immersion in each project’s analysis. We would collect general material about local customs and iconographies and keep that information on the table while we did site analysis and programmatic diagrams. We knew that a project was structured when a formal correlation started resonating between them.”
- Zaera-Polo, Volume #3, 2005

I would read ‘Short-circuiting our conventional arsenal of diagrams and constructive solutions with locally resonant iconographies became a very effective technique to territorialize our constructed foreignness and connect with local agents’ as an academic way of saying ‘ We discovered that integrating local images is a successful rhetorical move in persuading the local public’.

Seattle Central Library / The Enthymeme

The Enthymeme is as Aristotle calls it, a rhetorical syllogism. A syllogism is a kind of logical argument in which one proposition (the conclusion) is inferred from two others (the premises), the syllogism lies at the core of deductive reasoning. The rhetorical syllogism known as: “The enthymeme must consist of few propositions, fewer often than those which make up the normal syllogism. For if any of these propositions is a familiar fact, there is no need even to mention it; the hearer adds it himself.”(Aristotle) Deductive reasoning in rhetoric is a performative form of reasoning, aimed at effect, and tailored to an audience. An architect will explain his project differently in a pitch to a client than he will to his peers on a conference. Depending on the audience one can leave out steps and propositions in the line of argument, since the concern is if the point gets made with a specific audience. The facts that are at the architects’ disposal are the site, the briefing and an assessment of the complete situation (politically, economically, etc) in which his design endeavour has to take place. To these external facts he adds propositions of his own and constructs arguments, why his design should be one way or the other. The propositions used to make an enthymeme, have a special character, for they are not necessarily true, but they are generally true, commonplace or accepted truths for a specific audience. These kinds of propositions are ‘Maxims’. “It is a statement; not a particular fact, (…) but of a general kind; nor is it about any and every subject.”

As an example:

There is no man in all things prosperous,

and

There is no man among us all is free,

are maxims; but the latter, taken with what follows it, is an Enthymeme

For all are slaves of money or of chance

(Aristotle)

An architectural illustration of the enthymeme is beautifully given by Joshua Prince-Ramus in a lecture in 2006 at TED. Joshua Prince-Ramus worked as the U.S partner of O.M.A on the Seattle Central Library (and now has his own firm, REX). What follows is an edited transcription from the lecture where he lays down the argument for the design of the Seattle Central Library (SCL).

Joshua Prince-Ramus:

“I’m gonna build up the SCL before your eyes in five or six diagrams, and I truly mean this is the design process that you’ll see.”

source: (OMA,1999)

“Books have to share attention with other media of potent performance and attraction”

“This diagram was our position piece about the book, and our position was: ‘books are technology’, that is something people forget. It’s a form of technology that will have to share it’s dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media.”

source: (OMA,1999)

“The Library has been transformed from a space to read into a social center with multiple responsibilities”

“The second premise, and this was something that was very difficult of convincing the librarians of at first, that libraries since the inception of the Carnegie library tradition in America, have a second responsibility and that is for social roles. Something about which the librarians at first said: `this isn’t our mandate, our mandate is media and particularly the book’.”

From this transcription we can take the first maxim that: Books are a form of technology that will have to share it’s dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media.

The second maxim is that: Libraries have the responsibility to take on social roles.

“Flexibility in recent libraries - San Francisco, Denver, Phoenix - has been conceived as the creation of floors on which almost any library activity can happen. Programs are not separated, rooms or individual spaces not given unique character. In practice, it means that the bookshelves define generous reading areas at the opening, then expand inexorably to encroach on public space. Ultimately, in this form of flexibility, the Library strangles its own attractions.”

source: (OMA,1999)

“A more plausible strategy divides the building into spatial compartments dedicated to and equipped for specific duties. Flexibility can exist within each section, but not at the expense of any of the other compartments… Change is possible by deliberately redefining use, rededicating compartments to new programs. (Cf. the LA Library, where the main reading room was successfully transformed into a children’ s library.)”

source: (OMA,1999)

The diagrams demonstrating the ‘high-modernist flexibitlity’ vs. ‘compartmentalised flexibility’ argument (a refutative enthymeme supported by examples)

“The upper diagram is what we’ve seen in whole host of contemporary libraries that used high-modernist flexibility, so any activity could happen anywhere. The high modernist would say: ‘we don’t know the future of the library, we don’t know the future of the book, so we’ll use this approach,’ and what we saw were building that were very generic, and worse not only did the reading room look like the copy room, look like the magazine area. It meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf any other activity happening in it, and what was getting engulfed by the expansion of the book, were these social responsibilities.”

“So we propose what is at the lower diagram, a `very dumb’ approach, simply compartmentalise. Put those things what evolution we could predict -and I don’t mean that we’ll say what will actually happen in the future, but we have some certainty of the spectrum of what would happen in the future- put those in boxes designed specifically for it, and put the things we can’t predict on their roof tops. So that was the core idea.”

What happens here is that two lines of argument are contrasted to make one stand out as the right proposition or solution. This is what Aristotle calls a refutative enthymeme which is formed by the conjunction of two incompatible propositions. What is done here is that the proposed solution, `compartmentalized flexibility’ stands out as in favor of protecting ‘the responsibilities for social roles for the library’ in contrast with the high-modernist proposition.

But the librarians weren’t convinced yet in the first place, that these `social roles’ were part of their mandate.

Joshua Prince-Ramus continues:

source: (OMA,1999)
The first step (left) the redigestion of the program showing that a third of the program is for books (the blue area). The second step (right): “combining like with like, we have identified five platforms”

“Now we had to convince the library, that social roles were equally important to media in order to get them to accept this. What you’re seeing here is actually their program on the left, that is as it was given to us in all its clarity and glory (see left in figure ed.). Our first operation was to re-digest it and show it to them and say: ‘we haven’t touched it, but only one third of your own program is dedicated to media and books, two-thirds of it is already dedicated -that is the white band below- that what you said isn’t important, is already dedicated to social functions (see second bar from the left in figure ref{bars} ed.). Once we had presented that back to them they agreed that this core concept could work. We got the right to go back to first principles, the third diagram, that re-combined everything. (see thrid bar from the left in figure ed.) Then we started making new decisions, what you see is the design of the library (see on far right in figure ed.), specifically in the terms of square-footage, on the right of that diagram, you’ll see a series of five platforms, combed collective programs, and on the right the more indeterminate spaces, things like reading rooms, who’s evolution in 20, 30, 40 years we can’t predict. So that literally was the design of the building. We came back a week later and presented them this.”

source: (OMA,1999)
One of the proposal models of SCL

source: (OMA,1999)
Schematic section indicating programmatic entities as a ‘figure-ground reversal’

This is the general argument for the overall scheme. Prince-Ramus continues to explain more about why other manipulations in the form, the facade, floorplans, etc. have been done, but I won’t dwell on that further. The architectural illustration of the enthymeme in this case is more that sufficient.

Both in Zaera-Polo and Prince-Ramus’ case they are involved in a public presentation, they have to explain to an audience or they are negotiating with their clients. While in their respective stories the arguments are clear, we have to be careful in seeing these stories as direct representations of the design process. What we can say is that they both are consciously working towards making the rhetorical argument for their design proposals as strong as possible and as Zaera-Polo explains well in his piece, the consciousness of these rhetoric effects start to have their repercussions on the design process itself, so working towards a rhetorically strong design that performs well in front of different audiences. Prince-Ramus talks about “A hyper-rational process. It’s a process that takes rationality to almost an absurd level, it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with what people sort of would call a rational conclusion to something. It concludes in something that you see here (shows a photograph of SCL ed.), that you wouldn’t normally expect as the result of rationality.” While the argument as Prince-Ramus unfolds it is clear, one can be very critical about the conclusion.

The conclusion could still result in a building other than the one they proposed. That the combed program diagram literally translates into the boxes with program on their rooftops seems obvious, but this is very much dependent on the chosen modes of representation that are used with building up the argument.

If one had represented the program as a bubble diagram or a pie-chart would the building than be a huge bubble composition or a giant pie? And even if we stick with the combed bar diagram, why would one read it as section, and not as a plan, since the bar surface represents square footage floor surface, not volume or wall-surface. While rhetorically this works quite well, it is by no means a logical consequence of the premises Prince-Ramus states.

The crux in this situation is that there are images involved to represent ideas, propositions and objective data. This is where the magic happens as Prince-Ramus cleverly demonstrates. Because while a certain image maybe perfectly able to convey a point, the choice of a certain image also `secretly’ or implicitly determines the direction of the `argument’ towards a certain design scheme. The choice for a certain image to represent a certain idea or data isn’t based on a rational argument in the first place, how images are used is influenced by conventions, habits, cultural notions, but not by strict rules. Just like picking a certain way to represent something, that same representation is open to interpretation and manipulation, independently from the intentions of certain representation (if you could even speak of representations ‘having intentions of themselves’). These manipulations practically always remain below the radar and are unconsciously accepted as logical by the audience, this is why the use of manipulation and the use of images can be so powerful when used consciously and intelligently.

This arena, that of reasoning with images, is where a specific architectural mode of reasoning comes into play. C.S.Pierce refers to this way of reasoning as diagrammatic reasoning. I’ll make a more elaborate post on this later, but to give a super short cut explanation; Pierce’s defines the diagram as an ‘image’ (he talks of an icon) on top of a system of representation. For example the written English language. Letters and words are images, these images can only be understood if you have internalized the system of representation of English, in other words the English syntax, grammar, etc. Having internalized a system of representation allows us to read words, maps, make calculations. For architects have internalized the systems of representation of reading plan, section, elevation, construction drawings. I can’t read Chinese, because I never internalized (i.e. learned) its system, but I can see the image, and read a character as the plan of a building. So while images and systems of representation belong to each other, these relations can be manipulated by the mind. This is a move often done by architects, they choose to read one image with the system of representation of another. This is also exactly what happens when the program bar diagram is manipulated and read as the section of Seattle Central Library building, it is an instance of finding something new through diagrammatic reasoning.

More on Pierce’s Diagrammatic Reasoning next time!

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The organisational conflicts of Studio Olafur Eliasson.

A new book, The Fall of the Studio: Artists at Work, examines through a collection of essays the changing role of the artists’ studio as sacred space of creative genesis. Edited by Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice, psychedelic-ly designed by Metahaven, and published by the new imprint of Valiz called ‘antennae’, which seeks to “pinpoint certain phenomena or new lines of thought in art, photography, architecture or design.”

A highlight here is the contribution focussed on the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson by Philip Ursprung, whose controversial and critical position is boldly announced by the title ‘Narcissistic Studio’.

Eliasson is probably my favourite contemporary artist, measured both by his prolific and wide-ranging exhibited output, the particular subjects of his exploration (optics, geometry, perception), but mainly because of the mythical qualities of the studio that produced them.

I had heard from friends in Berlin that he hired lots of architects, that they were generously given space and time to conduct their own research and experimentation, and that the studio itself functioned more like a community than a place of work; with a chef cooking lunches, and regular internal seminars to stimulate ideas. As an architect exhausted by the monotony and stress of office life, this sounded like somewhere I could even enjoy. More than this, being an artists’ studio, it appeared to offer a greater connection to the world of making, as the various artefacts are literally constructed by the studio, and not simply described in drawings to be handed off to builders.

And Ursprung’s essay largely confirms this. We are told that in addition to artists and architects, Studio Olafur Eliasson includes blacksmiths, carpenters, furniture builders, geometricians, electrical engineers, graphic designers, model makers and historians; making it a genuinely cross-disciplinary workshop and laboratory for ideas. Although Ursprung likens the studio to a medium-sized architect’s office, managerially it is importantly different, as “Eliasson does not act as his collaborators’ superior, but rather as a kind of ‘client’ who approaches them with ideas for projects and asks how they might be realized.” This offers them “more freedom to carry out their own investigations and experiments than they would have, by contrast, in an architect’s studio.”

This image is further reinforced by the self-published and freely downloadable publication Take Your Time, a booklet of 100 images of the studio and all its diverse creative production. We see people welding small geodesic spheres, screen-grabs of complex geometric structures, serious machinery for all sorts of material manipulation, staff enjoying informal debates (and of course lunch), process images and full-scale prototypes of various sculptures in development, and people seated at computers, like that of a more traditional design office. In the background, we frequently see the master, watching, contemplating, instructing and directing. Eliasson is presented not as a controlling authoritative figure, assigning tasks to his employ, but as an equal participant in the collective cultural endeavour he has brought into being.

But it would seem that all is not rosy in this creative utopia.

As a subtle prelude to the analytical section of the essay, Ursprung hints at an intrinsic conflict within Eliasson’s studio, by stating that he “has been employing between fifteen to fifty collaborators.” OK, hold on a minute, you don’t employ collaborators. You work with collaborators on equal terms. You employ staff. This is a critical distinction in the hierarchical structure of the office with direct implications on issues of authorship and financial incentive. Collaborators share in both the risk and reward of any undertaking, both financially and in terms of associated reputation, good or bad. Staff, in contrast, trade this possibility of reward for security and insulation from personal criticism. If an Eliasson show bombs, he is the one who has to face the music, not those who made the work.

It is at these contradictions in the so-called ‘collaborative’, ‘community’ and ‘cross-disciplinary’ structure that Ursprung levels his aim. To quote him at length:

“The artist intends to overcome the separation of practices that is typical of today’s economy and, by consequence, of today’s realm of art, art history, design and architecture. But the studio is not an organic research community, in truth. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of teamwork and its participatory and collaborative structures, and despite the fact that some publications merely bear the imprint of Studio Olafur Eliasson, it remains clear that Eliasson is the sole author. The collaborators are paid employees whose job it is to produce surplus value. […] Eliasson successfully exploits the key rule of any bureaucratic power structure, whether it be the Roman Empire or today’s globalised economy: Divide et impera, divide and rule. As long as every practice is limited to its spatiality and absorbed in its self reflection, it can be easily controlled and manipulated.”

(Aside: It is important here to note Ursprung’s intimate relationship with the Eliasson enterprise. As author of the Taschen-published Studio Olafur Eliasson: An Encyclopedia, the most comprehensive and monumental tome dedicated to the work of the artist, Ursprung is far from being a detached observer. And that’s perhaps what makes his critique all the more interesting. Is he biting the hand that feeds? Or has he finally seen through the rouse?)

This ‘manipulation’ occurs not only on the level of the staff, but also in the mechanisms for controlling the studio’s perception from the outside. One example of this is the ‘Life in Space 3’ symposium, featuring guests and studio members invited into the space to investigate “the relation between models and reality” in a day long programme.

Speakers included Mark Wigley, Daniel Birnbaum, Felicity Scott, Einar Thorsteinn, Bart Lootsma among others, speaking on topics as diverse as the ‘moral perception of the colour orange’ and ‘fivefold symmetry’. The published guestlist included superstars of art, architecture and theory: Beatriz Colomina, Thomas Demand, Juan Herreros, Sanford Kwinter, Detlef Mertins, Ilka and Andreas Ruby, and Lars Müller. Videos and a publication with transcriptions of all the presentations are available on the artists’ website, creating a fantastic archive of ideas and discussion.

However, it is also fairly easy to be sceptical of this endeavour as nothing more than an ego-fest of attention on Eliasson himself. In the introductory video he states his aim to focus on the studio as subject of discussion: “what we are trying to achieve is not talking about something which is not here” (read: ‘lets just talk about me’.) Indeed, the seminar and the views produced in it, are conceived as an artistic artefact itself, a “co-productive act of the artists’ studio.” By including these international figures in this production, and encouraging them to discuss the work of the office in the space it is created, they are deprived of their analytical distance, and inevitably lean toward praise. In addition, as the seminar, publication and videos are a product of the Eliasson studio, it allows the studio to selectively edit the message, and rigorously control how it is presented.

While Eliasson projects himself as a democratic enabler, he may conversely be closer to an autocratic dictator. This gaping void between these two Eliassons is sharply articulated by Ursprung:

“Diametrically opposed to the image of Eliasson as a quasi-romantic artist, with deep roots in the Scandinavian welfare state and the ideology of community and participation, stands the image of Eliasson as the smart research manager and artistic entrepreneur embedded in the networks of globalised economy, who is eager to expand his influence. The studio, I would argue, is the vital tool with which Eliasson successfully balances those divergent images and succeeds in pleasing almost everyone.”

Where I hope to expand on Ursprung’s argument, is to suggest that this rigorous control of the perception of the man and the studio is a key characteristic of Eliasson’s artistic production and research themes. Eliasson’s entire practice is about perception. He is foremost interested in how the eye and the brain interpret information – like light, colour, shape, texture and scale – and more specifically, the gaps between what is real and what is perceived.

A trademark piece in this regard is the ‘Afterimage’ series. An afterimage is a universal optical phenomena produced by focusing upon a projection of a particular colour for a number of seconds, allowing the viewer’s eye to adjust, at which point the projection is switched off, leaving the complimentary colour imprinted on the retina of the viewer. You see the opposite colour, something which is not really there, and nor has it ever existed.

This phenomenological sleight-of-hand is a useful metaphor for the dual realities of the projected image that is Eliasson and his studio. What exists is a “research manager and entrepreneur”, yet what we see is the “quasi-romantic artist”. The studio itself, conceived as a creative artefact of the Eliasson brand, could easily form part of his ‘Afterimage’ series. We have been tricked into seeing something which is not really there. The question is, how long can he keep up the illusion? When will our eyes adjust, and see this studio for what it really is?

This isn’t about whether ‘collaborative is good’ or ‘hierarchical is bad’, but the slippery notion of honesty. Is it a problem that the Eliasson studio and its organisational structure purports to be something it is not? There is clearly no problem with the work; in fact, the incredibly prolific output of the studio may only be possible under this strict managerial regime. Could the studio be better if they acknowledged this autocratic reality? Probably not. But what if they engaged in genuine collaboration, with the associated shared responsibility and reward? Possibly, although it could also be argued that the art world requires and demands a singular author/brand to attach to these projects and exhibitions. Despite the massive teams of staff and assistants that actually create the works of any contemporary artist of Eliasson’s stature, the concept of a factory or production house is thought to perhaps tarnish the impression that each work is a personal creation direct from the masters’ hand. We as the collective audience of consumers regard this as simpler and more palatable than dealing with the complex notions of distributed authorship or the grubby engagement with the market economy.

While it’s easier to believe the illusion, as Eliasson himself admits, “it’s quite liberating to understand reality as a construction.”

All images of the studio from the Take Your Time pdf.

shared on 26 October 2009 | 11:56 am via: Action! Creating knowledge through practice

IDEO /Tim Brown, Bruce Nussbaum and Stanford d.school call it Design Thinking. Michael Speaks, Michael Shamiyeh, Bruce Mau talk about Design Intelligence, Nigel Cross writes about Designerly ways of knowing (one of the best books i’ve read so far on design thinking). All these ideas deal with design as process rather than object. They all articulate and confirm the idea that there is a ’specific way of thinking that is unique to design’ and ‘that this way of thinking is applicable on any problem’ It is a way of seeing, understanding and making the world, and the ‘design way’ is a universal way, there is no problem that can not be solved, … or so it seems (this is one of the claims of Bruce Mau’s Massive change exhibit and book anyway).

Although one has to acknowledge a certain naivety behind this idea, it is non the less very appealing, especially for a designer, or well … an architect like myself. Thinking about design as a universal problem solving method radically enlarges the arena for design and provides the design discipline with a sense of authority. It provides a credibility to the discipline that is instrumental in getting designer involved in projects at a point where the fundamental decisions are made, instead of calling designers in to only deal with the cosmetics of a project. One has to read the efforts of IDEO and Bruce Nussbaum in this light, as advocating for a design discipline that is more involved at the moments and places where it matters and where it can make a significant impact. Beside propagating design thinking to businesses, selling the design way of thinking as universally applicable, provides design with a legitimization for engaging with fields that are normally well beyond their reach, beyond the confines of the design discipline. This is something also propagated in the Volume’s opening issue (#1) under the term ‘Architectural Intelligence’ and there is also some of this attitude present in the “Office for Unsolicited Architecture” issue (#14). I think these ideas bear fruit, but suffer from overestimation, but that’s what usally happens when one advocates something, it quickly turns into a one dimensional argument.

I would like to point out a few problems I have with the current discourse around design thinking:

Design as problem-solving
The underlying paradigm of what “design” actually is in the “Design Thinking” school, is that it is synonymous with problem-solving. This is a limited view of design, and a problematic one. First of all what does it mean to solve a problem? In design there is not one possible answer to a certain question, there are a lot, see the architectural competition as example. Also one can always question whether any problem is permanently solvable, especially when its problems have a socio-economical dimension, these are known as wicked problems. (see Rittel, Webber - “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”) The term problem solving sounds too absolutist. How many solutions from 50 years ago are regarded as the root of today’s problems? The more design becomes technical and a from engineering in which the criteria are technical as well, where the margins of error are so small that solutions can be measured in absolute dimensions, in this sense there is a relation between problem and solution that becomes traceable. Design has a huge cultural component, often the problem is artificial, or invented by the designer themselves and is connected more to a cultural zeitgeist than anything else. In what way can we talk about the brief for a project in terms of a problem? A problem is something undesired that needs to be resolved, but the brief is defined as a wish-list not a problem definition. The brief inspires a projection of the future, and over the course of a design process there surely is problem-solving going on, but it’s mainly a problem-solving cycle that deals with ones own invented or perceived problems, which is legitimate, but one has to acknowledge that problems are not absolute. Design is a discipline but not a scientific one!

Design as innovation
Another paradigm underlying “design” in design thinking is the one of progress, that design is instrumental in improving our lives, society and the whole world basically. The term “innovation” embodies the believe that the new is better, that technology will improve our lives, its propelled by the assumptions that science, rationality and efficiency will move the world to a better place. It’s a very technocratic conception of design, one that fits perfectly in our capitalist society. Innovation and problem-solving are two branches that grow from the same tree.

Design thinking doesn’t tell us much about thinking.
The “thinking” in design thinking, doesn’t really deal with explaining the thinking in design, it only scratches the surface of what design thinking is really about. Design thinking as propagated by IDEO and Nussbaum is mostly deals with methodology, process, ‘how-to,’ it doesn’t deal with how design thinking actually works. Usually cases are brought forward of how a typical design approach has been successful in tackling a problem, but from this we don’t learn how thoughts unfold in the design process, how thinking unfolds. Thus design thinking currently deals with describing behavior, symptoms, the consequence of thoughts but not what design thinking consists of itself. It is much like how the Turning Test for testing if a machine is intelligent or not doesn’t tell us anything about what intelligence itself actually is, it only shows that a machine can behave as a human does! But this tells us nothing about the nature of intelligence itself (John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room‘ thought experiment effectively exposes this flaw of the Turing Test)

Especially this last part intrigues me, i’m interested in how designer have their own rationality, how a design can have its own rationality. Just like a mathematician can say this equation is false, an architects can say, this detail doesn’t make sense in the overall concept of the building. Apparently design choices can be more or less right or wrong, within the network of choices made during the design process, while at the same time all most of the choices are more or less arbitrary! intriguing isn’t it!? What is this kind of logic that is operative in design? What is this intelligence that seems irrational but gives enough foundation for making a choice? What mode of reasoning is at work here?

I researched these questions in my graduation work, which consisted of a comparative literature research of three perspective on “reasoning in architecture“, although the findings are relevant to all design disciplines> The three perspectives come from three authors, from three different fields:

Donald A. Schön (1930-1997) a design researcher, but trained as philosopher who succeeded in describing ‘how designers think’ in a way that designers actually recognize themselves. Shön’s work is interesting because of the categories he introduces. These are fundamental descriptions of how a designer engages in the design activity. His categories are open but still defined enough for designers to recognise the fundamental process they are involved in. It describes an iterative process, but does not specify tasks, design phases or steps from beginning to end. It’s not a method for how-to think, it’s provides insight in how thinking works in design. Schön theory is presented in his book The Reflective Practitioner (1983)

Jeff Hawkins (1957) is a computer architect turned neurologist. He is interested in making truly intelligent machines, but believes one can only do so when we understand how the brain produces intelligence. He states that in the cognitive sciences intelligence is judged by the wrong parameter: behaviour. According to Hawkins this is only a manifestation of what intelligence really is, behaviour is but the surface. Hawkins puts forward a theory that intelligence is determined by prediction. According to him the brain makes continuous predictions about the world it ’sees’ through its senses. It makes this predictions by analogy to the past, to what is already stored in our memory. Hawkins theory in presented in his book On Intelligence (2004) You can watch a lecture by Hawkins on TED and here if you want to get in a bit deeper.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was a philosopher, logician and mathematician. Peirce was interested in where new ideas came from, how the mind was able to put forward fruitful ideas, and in that way it was instrumental in the development of knowledge. Peirce believed that deductive and inductive reasoning were not adequate in describing how this worked, thus Peirce developed a third mode of reasoning, abduction, with which he tried to clarify processes of invention and discovery. Another theory of Peirce is also of importance more specifically for the work of architects, that of diagrammatic reasoning. He developed the concept of diagrammatic reasoning in the context of explaining creativity in mathematics, but it also gives us a deeper insight in how architects reason through making drawings and models. Because like mathematics also architectural design is mediated activity. Peirce’s theories were developed over his entire career, publishing many papers and articles. For this research the explanation of Peirce’s theories is based on the readings of Michael H. G. Hoffmann and Sami Paavola.

Besides these main protagonists, Aristotle’s Rhetoric plays a significant role in describing the nature of reasoning in architectural design.

What all these authors have in common is that they deal with developing a framework for the fundamental elements and processes of creative thought, by naming them, formalizing and theorizing these they open up a possibility of discourse on these ideas. I’ll elaborate the theories these men have put forward later, for now I’ll leave you with a quote:

“. . . in speaking of logic, we do not need to be concerned with processes of inference at all. While it is true that a great deal of what is generally understood to be logic is concerned with deduction, logic in the widest sense, refers to something far more general. It is concerned with the form of abstract structures, and is involved the moment we make pictures of reality and then seek to manipulate these pictures so that we may look further into the reality itself. It is the business of logic to invent purely artificial structures of elements and relations.” (Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, 1964)

shared on 30 September 2009 | 12:29 am via: Action! Creating knowledge through practice

In 2006 the Stylos conference ‘The Projective Landscape‘ took place at the the Faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft of which I was the initiator and one of the organisers. What was it about? What were we after? Let me quote the preface we wrote in our pre-publication (a special edition of Pantheon):

“An architectural practice that does not blindly follow social ideologies and political intentions, that doesn’t retreat into autonomous formalism, architectonic grammatical codes or philosophical deconstructions of our reality. This much can be said of on the fresh contemporary architecture of a new generation. A way of practicing architecture that remains close to her disciplinary knowledge, and doesn’t look for her legitimations among philosophers, sociologists and other experts from beyond the architectural discipline. This new generation embraces the troublesome reality as a source of potential and vantage points. Always pragmatic, sometimes even opportunistic, but also often with their own ‘hidden’ and flexible agenda to bring qualities to a project that are not suggested in the brief and sometimes even testify of real (societal) engagement.

In the last five years a variety of architecture theoreticians and critics have tried to formulate and theorize this attitude in the practice of architecture. ‘Projective’ is one of many terms that tries to describe this kind of practice.”

- Pantheon// 5 July, 2006 published by Stylos (translated from Dutch)

When I read this it still sounds appealing and hopeful in the sense that the architecture discipline could navigate on their own bearings instead of following bearings that are imported from other disciplines. While my attitude now has evolved slightly (the conference happened almost 5 years ago) I still think that this descriptions, whether we call it projective, or post-critical, or whatever other buzzwords which has been uttered the last decade or so, is a signifier of the search for an answers to questions that have been troubling architecture since modernism. What should architecture be about? What should it do? What is its mandate? These questions raise other (more academic) questions like What are the boundaries of the architectural discipline? What is architectural knowledge anyway? Clearly in this discourse there is a great interest in what the ‘core’ or ‘autonomy’ of architecture is, and that the general feeling is that this got focus is lost by introducing all these other legitimization’s that come from ‘outside’ architecture. While I think this is true and important, it’s also dangerous, and the focus on autonomy of the discipline is a prerequisite for further isolation for a discipline that already suffers from (severe) autistic tendencies. The ‘projective’ attitude also seems to answer to this consideration through its pragmatism and inserting an ‘own’ agenda by manipulation of the brief.

The problem of discussing the ‘projective’ attitude is that it doesn’t look like something, it’s not a style. There is no specific formal language associated with it. Which makes it complicated to talk about ‘projective architecture’ since it’s not so clear cut what is or is not ‘projective.’ Another problem is the role of theory and criticism in the ‘projective’ attitude, a.k.a legitimation. Since modernism ‘theory’ (aka manifesto, ideology, philosophy, …) behind the object was what guided the ideological intentions of a building. The building was critique to the status quo itself, ranging from proposing various utopias to negations of the secret control mechanisms of capitalism (still have no clue how a building is supposed to do this), but pragmatism serves no moral appeals, it is about ‘what works’ not about ‘how it should work’. Perhaps the problem was that we were trying to understand this new way of practicing architecture through the effort of searching answers to the wrong questions, namely those of ’style’ and ‘legitimization.’

All these interesting considerations aside, my main conclusion after this conference had little to do with the matters that were discussed (what projective was, and how it could be a fitting theoretical framework for describing contemporary practice). Instead the more general issues that were troubling the discipline stood out to me. First and foremost there seemed to be a Babylonian confusion all over architecture.

Willem-Jan Neutelings at the Projective Landscape conference

The architecture theorists and architects didn’t understand each other. During the conference this disconnect between academia and practice was epitomized in Willem-Jan Neutelings‘ remark: “When I get to my office again Monday morning , what can I take from today’s conference and put into practice?” (the room remained silent, the theorists had no answers) Indeed what theory will help you do practice? And should this be the role of theory in the first place? My general believe by now is not that theory is there to guide practice, or to provide it with legitimations, but to try understand it. That’s one of the reasons this blog subtitle is ‘creating knowledge through practice’. Practice is a vast resource for knowledge, and much that is done in practice is not well understood by academia at all, since academia usually focuses on the building object not on the builder and the process. The gap between between practice and theory could be narrowed by making an effort to theorize what architects do, to try to learn from what happens in their offices, in their meetings, in dialogues with peers, in negotiations with clients and collaborating with consultants. Every office has their own ‘theory’ of what to do (which is often implicit and not well articulated) and what their buildings should be, they don’t need theorists for that.

Next to the confusion between practice and academia there is the confusion amongst architecture theorists themselves. Where before we had the classical tradition and the modern tradition, now we have a general post-modern confusion and no consensus at all about what is true. There are so many isms, or architectural sub-cultures and offices in which all boasts a private theory/concept that support their own style or ‘individual’ handwriting that each has developed their own slang, their own raison d’être, consequently it has become harder and harder to find a common ground for sharing disciplinary knowledge (Have you heard of Parametricism yet? ) Also here the lack of a lingua franca in architecture is striking, while I think deep down all these more or less superficial differences, which get more attention in the competition for attention, hide architecture’s commonalities.

The search for what architects share and have in come, is something I started researching for my graduation thesis. For my thesis I developed a theory to support my believe that all architects more or less think the same on a certain level, or more specifically deploy the same modes of reasoning when they design. But that’s another story I’ll reserve for the final part of this series.

shared on 26 August 2009 | 10:34 pm via: Action! Creating knowledge through practice

As a student of architecture there is a certain point in your studies when you start wondering about how you should position yourself towards society when you’re practicing the craft of designing space. What are your moral codes, what principles do you design by, what influence does your work have on real life, real people? Can you do harm with a building? Can you do good? Is it possible to bring about systemic change? Is there a utopian ideal to aim for? In other words, you start to search for legitimations justifying what you’re designing. You do this partly from the insecurity every student (and probably professionals alike) have about what you’re designing. Insecurity comes with design, because every choice you make is to a greater or lesser degree arbitrary.

Illustrating the ‘arbitraryness’ of design choices: Six random entries from the several hundred of entries in the Stockholm Public Library International Architectural Competition. All radically different, all legitimate ’solutions’

In design there is no such things, that one specific site and brief leads to one specific design (if you think you do have an example of this please let me know!). In the design arena you are looking for bearings, a framework, an artificial limitation that can confine the problem, limiting the range of possibilities that you have to work with. For example, you can decide to only make rectangular buildings, this already excludes cylinders, cones, spheres, and the entire array of blobby and deconstructivist configurations. While this is a formal limitation which has to do with developing a style, a handwriting, one could also search for an ideological, political, philosophical or moral framework which guides you in doing design. When one searches for bearings in this more abstract and not so formal realm one ends up in the theory department.

My theory interest started with Koolhaas, who emerged as this enigmatic figure since the start of my studies at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft. In Delft we are very effectively brainwashed into the modernist tradition. Many students come in favoring Gaudi over Corbu, Romanticism over Modernism, and we leave the school favouring Corbu over Gaudi. But then there is Koolhaas, for a first year student these are very weird building, strangely intriguing, but you cannot quite get your head around it (at least this is how it was for me). Then you find this architect actually writes (as one of the very few who are alive), and that his texts are like his buildings: hard to get your head around and often misinterpreted by architecture students. One thing that sets Koolhaas apart in his writing was his engagement with all the building which were not part of the architectural canon, the office blocks, shopping malls and skyscrapers (as Rory pointed out earlier in the comments) here I found agreement with my own views, as I described in part 1 of this biography, in architectural discourse we should not in advance remove 90% of the built environment out of view as not worthy of looking at or thinking about.

Another aspect of Koolhaas’ writing is that he doesn’t offer hope, or a way out. He provides coping mechanisms, strategies to deal with a reality. One of the ‘ideologies’ that slumbers under the surface of his writing is the Constant Nieuwenhuizen’s uncomfortable utopia for the homo ludens: New Babylon.

Winy Maas speculating about ‘critical projection’ on the Breathing in an Utopian Vacuum mini-symposium, Stylos, TU Delft 2004

As intriguing as Koolhaas’ essays where, they were also deeply unsatisfying. The disenchantment and disillusion were too great for a young student of architecture who is searching for the meaning and legitimation of his discipline. Thus, fueled by naiveté I kept searching for ‘a way out’. This search manifested itself with through organizing a mini-symposium (a summary of the lectures and debate between Winy Maas, Winka Dubbeldam, Ole Bouman, Hilde Heynen, Hans van Dijk and Alexander D’Hooghe can be found here (pdf in Dutch)) with the bold title: “Breathing in an Utopian Vacuum (or drowning in a reality without critique)” Again it started with recognizing one of my own unarticulated sentiments in a text. This time in a text by Roemer van Toorn that he had written for the yearbook (the best sold architecture book in the Netherlands). Roemer was also looking for something, he was trying to theorize how architecture could be political, how it could resist capitalism and push agenda’s containing alternate ideas. This raised my curiosity, thus I visited him. We talked and he introduced me to a new buzzword, namely ‘projective’ that had been emerging in American academia and which seemed to hold the promise of a new theoretical framework or paradigm for architectural practice. A theory than embraces reality and takes it as a starting point, instead of reality as merely a domain in which ideas are deployed without any feedback. The outline of this idea was articulated in “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism” [pdf] by Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting. The outcome of this event wasn’t giving me a clear image yet of of an ‘ideology’ on which to base practice, but the issues that were was raised made me aware that this ‘projective’ thing touched upon sensitive issues, because it sparked much discussion. The main issue was that apparently there was a great disconnect between architectural theory and practice. Intrigued by this problem and eager to investigate further I initiated the The Projective Landscape project, but that part of the story has to wait till the next part of this biography.

shared on 25 July 2009 | 1:09 pm via: Action! Creating knowledge through practice

Now that we’ve stated our ambition to dive into design practice to search for what designing and architecture actually is, I’ll introduce some context why this is of interest to me and why it lead to my graduation project ‘Reasoning in Architecture.’ In a three (or so) posts I’ll share with you a short biography that should clarify what drives a person (me) to not graduate as an architect (officially) but to write theory on how the architectural mind works, on how the brain of a designer produces a form of reasoning. You will probably think now: “I’m not in any way ‘reasoning’ when I’m designing, this is a preposterous idea!” Just give me the opportunity to convince you.

What struck me when I was in my 2nd year of architecture school (TU Delft, I was 22) is that there was a difference between ‘Architecture’ -with capital ‘A’- and ‘building.’ Apparently teachers as well as magazines didn’t deem every building worthy of bearing the title of Architecture. This is confusing for a student, since according to the status quo a building isn’t necessarily architecture even though it’s designed by an architect. Thus obviously the question arises, what does make a building architecture? To engage this discussion is pretty futile … as a student of architecture this is sort of a brain-fuck, since your actually studying architecture, struggling to understand what you will become, what you will do and how to do it! The tragedy here is that there is absolutely no consensus about what architecture actually is, when it is, what it can and can not do. So, there you are, a student that doesn’t know what he is studying because academia, architects and journalist didn’t have the courtesy agree on the basic definition of their trade!

Although the fact that architecture’s definitions are shaky and subject to constant discourse, one can take advantage of this situation of chaos and draft your own definition of architecture. With this we have probably found one of the sources for the continuous disagreement in architectural discourse (yes I am taking my share of guilt for mayhem).

And thus my Odyssey began. I figured out pretty soon that I thought it was a bit elitist to say only ‘craftily’ and ‘intelligently’ designed and constructed buildings are Architecture. Next to that I thought it was weird to exclude let’s say 90% percent of the built environment from our discourse just because it was merely ‘building production’ and not the ‘art of building.’ To exclude the bulk of the worlds building production in which the architectural profession of course also plays a fundamental but less glamorous role, seemed utterly insane to me. Because when we are educating bright minds to become architects when the dominant image of aspiration is architectural cover porn, we’re excluding not just 90% of what is built, but also 90% of the worlds problems. When you receive an academic education I sincerely believe, you are indebted to society and should feel responsible for the world at large, and a university should strive to embed this morality in you. Instead of eduction, universities should be involved in ‘bildung.’

Ok, so I removed the capital ‘A’ and I now believe that architecture should address society and its issues in some way. What happened next … next post!

shared on 21 July 2009 | 1:38 pm via: Action! Creating knowledge through practice

Boot up your laptop, fire up your styrofoam cutter, sharpen your pencil and prepare yourself for fierce arguments defending your design to your boss and/or client. Architectural practices are complex engines that generate vast amounts of information and knowledge. Ideas are tested, models are developed, and conversations occur that can have far-reaching consequences in shaping our built environment. However, much of this knowledge produced through the process of design is implicit and difficult to articulate, leaving the nature of this knowledge and how it relates to the practices and people that create it as subjects largely underrepresented in architectural discourse.

Action! Creating knowledge through practice is the blog we have initiated in order to investigate practices’ specific forms of knowledge and organization as a means to better understanding the design process. We expect this aim to lead us into diverse territories including: collaboration, practice models, modes of reasoning, emerging technologies, media, representation, design strategies, design research, economics and even neuroscience. Above all, Action! will engage practice as a lens for looking at architecture itself.

This blog will also act as a forum for the re-digestion and extension of our respective fields of research into aspects of practice. Rory has recently completed his PhD at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology which explored the tools, strategies and organizational structures of small ICT enabled architecture offices. Similarly, Edwin’s Master thesis at Delft University of Technology investigated how creativity and intuition in design can be explained as a form of reasoning. For both of us the blog will function as a tool to extract this work from the rigourous academic context to present it in a more journalistic and speculative framework for discourse. The blog will also be a way to gather further illustrative examples and anecdotes. Finally, it will also function as a more public platform to shape a conversation between the both of us, and to sharpen our own ideas, and of course, you’re welcome to chip in.

- Edwin Gardner and Rory Hyde