ALEXANDRIA // Anonymous Studio

Recent GaTech CoA Grad, Arseni Zaitsev, and Jonathan Henry, Sci-ARC Grad, are exhibiting their new installation ALEXANDRIA this weekend at YAF’s Summer Salon at Southern Polytechnic State University.

ALEXANDRIA is a project, designed and fabricated, by Anonymous Studio. Southern Polytechnic State University commissioned “ALEXANDRIA”, an architecture/art/sculptural installation from Anonymous Studio to be placed in the Architecture Gallery on campus from August 23, 2010 through December 15, 2010. Young Architects Forum opens its biannual exhibition of young professional work “SUMMER SALON 2010” with the opening reception for “ALEXANDRIA” by Anonymous Studio.

Anonymous Studio seeks to employ digital fabrication techniques and responsive conditions to create a physically and discursively interactive installation called ALEXANDRIA. They utilizes a simple conical figure emphasizing its place in the room and transitioning from a canopy system into an object in the space.

Hovering inches from the floor, ALEXANDRIA suspends itself in the space and refuse to acknowledge its relationship with the ground. The symbolic disillusionment with the political datum of the ground relinquishes the installation from prescriptive idealizations. ALEXANDRIA’s canopy will not be tainted by agendas but will be appropriated but those who are most likely to contribute to it.

ALEXANRIA is a recursive element meant to become a repository of current work occurring at SPSU. Each panel of the surface is intentionally documented and easily producible in order to allow the students to participate in the layering of their projects onto the frame of ALEXANDRIA. It will be a place of storing and retrieving the ongoing studio work that occurs concurrent with its lifespan. Upon entering into the space, the surface is fully opaque. This lends itself to the presentation of student work. As you transition to the far side of the piece, the work of the student fades and the work of the artist appears. The increased opacity, thinner panel coverage, allows the viewer to see the paneled surface behind the students work and creates two surfaces, the surface of the exterior screen element and the reverse surface of the opaque presentation area. This internal/external dilemma is produced with its internality prohibited from occupation, creating an imagined space of occupation surrounded by the amassed knowledge of the higher education system.

Sourced from Anonymous Studio

ALEXANDRIA // Anonymous Studio

ALEXANDRIA // Anonymous Studio

ALEXANDRIA // Anonymous Studio

ALEXANDRIA // Anonymous Studio

When using glass as a medium the outcome is part experimental and part intentional. The outcome of the final product is, like most arts, a byproduct of the characteristics of the material itself. Shayna Leib plays off of the fluidity of glass but does so with intense aggregation. While the overall effect might be able to be accomplished through a single unit, the aggregation of multiple pieces creates a textural surface that promotes a visual investigation of the depth of the individual pieces.

Leib utilizes the frame as a constricting unit of most of her aggregated pieces. This frame mimics the frame of the photograph resembling the images from national geographic of the coral reefs in the deep ocean. Leib projects the designs out of the frames and created an extended three-dimensionality to the glass fields.

Through the larger framed pieces  you can see the intensity of the extruded forms supported by the color gradient achieved. If we look at ‘Andaman’ we can see the background is a beige field of tubes. As we move across the surface and encounter moments of extreme formal extrusion, the color intensifies. From left to right the color of maximum extrusions change, suggesting that behind the tubes is a rainbow field but that only comes to surface in conjunction with the formal intensity.

The glass works suggest an aggregated mode of field creation along with utilization of color correlation and sea creature figuration. The pieces are frozen moments of intensity for us to study topically and recognize three-dimensionalliy.

Antilles-Shayna Leib

Bypass Detail-Shayna Leib

Current Detail-Shayna Leib

Flores-Shayna Leib

Penobscot-Shayna Leib

Emerge Detail-Shayna Leib

Organelle-Shayna Leib

Sourced by Shayna Leib

Yeah it has been a month since the last post but I have not left. This is a blast from my inspiration past and continues to feed me with an ever intensifying intricacy.

Jose Parla’s work centers on his ability to mobilize the skills of a graffiti artist into a layered effect of painting that resembles the natural formation of the urban condition. The focus of his work is calligraphy that is often a flurry of white on an intense and richly conceived background.

While the calligraphy resembles the chaotic script of the hastily tagged walls that you will find in any major city, there is not just one tag.  Through my life in cities I have always found tags as creative expression of an artist and not necessarily the public nuisance that some would situate it. I found myself intently studying tags to try to cut through the swoops and swirls and piece together the typographic lettering into a recognizable word. This contrived formation is intentional. Tags are not created on the fly. They are worked over and over again until the right amount of individuality and aggressive directionality is reached. This is much the same way that any design field works. Parla’s work however is through a style of charretted tagging, leaning towards copious output rather than a finalized and crisp singularity. While the motions and the flows from one stroke to another are held in his muscle memory, the tag itself maintains its intentional illegible. Without content to uphold the meaning of the tag, the emphasis is placed on shape, form, aggregation, and directionality.

The stage set for the tagging is ripped straight from the urban fabric. Resembling the construction site walls of plywood in the city, the backgrounds are created to reproduce the layering of posters plastered then ripped, and plastered again. Serendipitously the urban plan is produced in this same piecemeal and palimpsestic way. These works show the way in which contemporary forms created in the architectural community can layer into the existing fabric to register new layers into the city. Parla’s compositions hold great variety while focusing on a narrowed set of problems.

Jose Parla

Jose Parla

Jose Parla

Jose Parla

Jose Parla

Sourced from Jose Parla

Rift - Object of Desire Exhibition - Anonymous Studio

The computer has created a new way of understanding our world (see previous post), and in turn have created the ability for the designer to produce that which was previously inconceivable.

The objects displayed in the ‘Objects of Desire’ Exhibition at the MODA in Atlanta are not buildings but can be seen as an investigation in the processes that will soon enough have an impact on the building community. Concepts such as modules, sections, and pattern are various ways of extracting from the computer the information needed for the designs to become manifested in reality. Coupled with these modes of transcription, the designers seemed to be extremely specific with materials, their limitations and assets. Each of the projects utilizes the materials they are made of as an integral part of their designs and utilized their attributes as friction for their forms.

The theory of the object is something that has blurred the lines of the architect and the artist. Each of these object have function and so reside on the side of architecture, but through the use of the computer they are able to attack the senses in similar ways to sculpture. The objects create sensation and seek play off of preconceived notions of formal typologies of furniture and ask the viewer to imagine the world in a different way. They ask us to forget the obvious, the standard, and look for the designed and the abnormal. These objects are not always comfortable nor are they always antagonistic. There is a wide breadth of styles and types that give all the opportunity to seek empathy with one and to make foes out of others.

Rift - Object of Desire Exhibition - Anonymous Studio

In this piece, ‘Rift’, the digital, the physical, and the conceptual coalesce into a singularity of the object. The form created is a mix of materiality, gravity and design. The modualistic properties of the surface create the variance that allows for emergent form. This piece is a great example of one of the foremost issues that designers deal with. As ‘one who creates’ it is not possible to see and understand every outcome of the design process. If this were the case we would never have the ability to create anything other than what we already know. This piece and the rest of the pieces of the show ask us to accept conditions unforeseeable in design as a way to propagate our knowledge and our search for the object within our desires. When we allow the reigns of design to flex and relax the outcome produced becomes richer and more vibrant with conflict that gives flavor to the design.

Atlanta Invasion - Object of Desire Exhibition - Anonymous Studio

In Atlanta Invasion, we see this conflict purposely inflicted on the object. When what looks to be a stool in one images, we look to another and it is presented as a formidable skyscraper in the Atlanta skyline. This friction codifies Anonymous’s relationship to their children of objects. Never content with the outcome they seek to push for more and see their baby birds fly.

Urban Intimacy - Object of Desire Exhibition - Anonymous Studio

When the objects are not being wrangled into pins they were not intended for, the lessons learned are used to produce intrinsically architecturally scaled projects. ‘Urban Intimacy’ takes the sensibilities of the objects designed. It takes their tangibility, their construction technique, and their core values and amalgamates the content into an environment that has the texture of the object.

While the objects are of desires, they too are objects of the age, objects of the zeitgeist. The pieces are manifestations of the principals of design thought that is being pursued by young professionals in design. The pieces cross the boundaries of architecture, sculpture, and product, made sit in a purgatory of design that wishes not to make claims of one classification over the other. The most powerful aspect of this collection is this recognition of cross discipline design and it willingness to take full advantage of this blurred line.

The exhibition was , contributed and curated  by Arseni (Senya) Zaitsev, Founder and Creative Director of Anonymous Studio. Anonymous Studio is a creative laboratory for design that helps bring innovative ideas to reality through experiments in architecture, design, fabrication, material research and management.

Spinal Lamp - Anonymous Studio

Spinal Lamp - Anonymous Studio

Swell - Anonymous Studio

Swell - Anonymous Studio

Envy - Gabe Landes

Envy - Gabe Landes

Wrath - Ritesh Rathi

Wrath - Ritesh Rathi

Greed - Lindsay Miller

Greed - Lindsay Miller

Glutony - Karen Mackay

Glutony - Karen Mackay

Urban Intimacy - Anonymous Studio

Atlanta Invasion - Anonymous Studio

Rift - Anonymous Studio

Rift - Anonymous Studio

The program was a Recreational Center located just outside the doughnut of highways that create an implied demarcation line around the city proper. The main intent of the brief is a struggle that defines the avant-garde approach.  I myself have fallen, many times, into the trap that their studio was seeking to relieve themselves of. Known as the top down approach, the model for the process of architectural design is easy. Start with a concept. With a well flushed out concept make every move echo your intent. By the end of the design process (i.e. when your instructors give you a deadline) your design will reflect your intent and will be legible, if not to society, to the jury invited.

Rather than creating what you plan on creating, the studio professors sought to use a bottom up approach. What this entails is a kind of wandering exploration through geometry. While some of my classes used formal geometry as the condition to create the unexpected, this studio was utilizing networked and aggregated systems. First, they started with physical explorations. The students went to models without preconceived notions. Stacking, grouping, folding and twisting, the physical models were objects of their own, devoid of architectural intent. Step two was to be critical of your newly emerged conditioned. While some explorations were wildly more successful than others, the next step was to infuse program. They were to take their models and site them with programs of their choice.

Here is a twist. Identifying topologies of objects through the classifications of line, surface, volume; the explorations were categorized and appreciated for what they were. As anybody knows who has worked on the creative fringe of formal geometries, you cannot just take your diagram and put it on the site. Some would caress, some would jam and cram and some just threw it all away in favor of what they already know. Taking a leap into the unknown is no easy feat. With direction from those that came before you blindly follow some procedure that does not fit your understanding of architecture.

I always say that if you are in school and you are a rebel and you rebel against anything anyone tells you, you will never learn. The point of being in school is to broaden your horizons and to seek for other ways of doing things in an effort to learn. Only after appreciating and learning can we be critical. Criticality without understanding is just short sidedness.

The professors left the students with a lot of room to work. Rather than dictating program, the students were allowed to choose their own programs from a matrix of possibilities. The professors were being VERY generous with this open-endedness. The point of this freedom was kind of like asking someone to be your valentine and giving them a box of chocolates. The candy is there to tell you that things are going to work out despite their reservations. To prove that their earlier studies were not in vein the students could choose programs that fit their interests (unfortunately some of the students still needed to do their homework on the specificity required of the programs they chose).

The matrix consisted of [line, surface, volume] in the x direction, and [vertical, horizontal, and differential] in the y direction. From this matrix they could choose the programs that best fit their emergent conditions or choose ones that directly fought it (I am in favor of contrasts as much as the next designer but in this situation if you choose to select programs that are not conducive to your initial studies, then you waste time and waste the opportunity for extracting an emergent condition from them).

What a lot of the students did was to choose programs but not pay attention to the requirements of the programs.  Some used their choices as a way for all geometry to be appropriated. This is an easy way out. These students chose specific programs in order to relinquish program from becoming a design principal. By doing this they are shot in the foot just before the hike leave and will be in the rear of the pack the entire trail.

Precisely what their exploration needs is a critical choice of program. Because program was pushed from the onset, and real buildings are expected as an outcome, the programs they choose will give their formal explorations the  much needed push to change them from concepts to designs. While some students chose well and some chose poorly, out of those that chose well the attention to specifics was lacking.  This problem led some of the jury to suggest more restraints (I agree). Looking towards the final, the students needed more than program to tackle the transformation from the emergent to the designed. Suggestions ranged from multiple ontology, buildings system, structural systems and site conditions. I totally agree. Their next step is to take the fascinating things that they made and poke at them and make the objects do things that they were not intended to do. This would create a feedback loop of emergence.

Final note is that this is one way of attacking the problem of design. In the same way that the brief rails against procedural design, this is just that, a procedure. Follow the suggestions of your professors, they are very talented and have been working at these problems for longer than you knew that they were problems. Explore with intent and have fun. This is just the midterm and a lot of work is still to come and I look forward to seeing the final outcome!

Much the same way a picnicking couple would search in the clouds of the sky; these monolithic single surface objects are doomed to the reading of figuration. Within this style of design there remains a vast separation from the gesture of the form and the sensation of the audience.

Value must be placed in the sensation created in the audience through the articulation of surface geometry. Through utilization of the visual sense to initiate sensations of the tactile, the geometry will play off of multiple senses of the audience in unison. It is my intent to not only to solicit the reading of the overall form, but simultaneously layer discrete sensational readings of the building that unfold through proximity to the surface. As the procession from afar to the interior of the building progresses, the building will initiate multiple and varied readings. Through the use of surface articulation at multiple scales, the building can engage notions of the visual and tactile in the audience and produce a more sensorial building in the built environment.

This method of surface articulation is possible on many levels of design. Each scale, while having the ability to achieve this effect, requires varied scopes of concentration. With the building, it is necessary to work with articulated surface. When approaching the urban scale, it is the built figuration that can produce these effects.

Through the utilization of varying layers of surface articulation, I intend to make room for the use of ornament in contemporary design. If successful, the design will be able to shift audience perception of it and allow for legibility of discreet sensations in combination to changing proximity.

Villa Muller - Adolf Loos 1930

Loos likes to make a distinction between the fields of art and architecture. He sees the main factor of separation through the intended functionality of each. Art is created with no functionality in mind. To say that, means that when art is sold or commodified that it ceases to be art. Arts function is not that of the object to be owned and traded but as the medium for arousing the emotions of the audience. Therefore regardless of the emotions being conveyed, if the art is conveying anything at all within the realm of emotion, whether it be disgust, lust, fear, play, banality or sadness, then art is doing its job.

Architecture on the other hand has an extremely specific functionality to its definition. Architectures function is to enclose space and it attempts to comfortably accommodate a structural need within the most efficiently functional manner as possible. While art has the freedom to express and convey any message the artist deems fit, it is the sole responsibility of the architect to create comfort. While art is responsible to no one, architecture is responsible to the client.

It is in this dichotomy that I must first make my grievance. After the protests of the Situationist and more importantly the Dadaists, arts function has continually come into question.  This is especially so within the art realm of sculpture.

Stan Allen, dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University,  describes the ambiguity of the line between sculpture and architecture through the critical associations of each. By suggesting a building is sculptural detonates a figural aspect of the design. Through the suggestion that sculpture is architectural is to denote the presence of tectonic form.  While these fields might differ, using one to talk about another provided the vocabulary to link the effect of one to the other. Rosalind Krauss, art critic and theorist based at Clolumbia University, sees this process taking shape because of the critic’s use of historicism.  Things that appear new and avant-garde are made to feel safer, comfortable and digestible with the assistance of historical precedent.  The ability to see the line from boy to man allows society to better accept the actions of the man. While the bounds of contemporary architecture are continually shifting further outside their socially held definitions, the use of fields outside their own becomes a necessity for the shift to remain viable.

Having the contemporary lines of art and architecture blurred places the functionality of one into the field of the other.  This most directly affects the field of architecture and its internal definition.  Even Loos is able to begin to breakdown his delineation of the two definition but does so only for architecture of specified function.  He sites in his essay ‘Architecture’ that, “Only very small parts of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.” But he goes on to state, “Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.”  Loos’ exceptions are made because of the tomb and the monument act in the service of evoking various emotions through respective external appearances.  He also sees these two programs as functioning in the visual plane because they lack an internal functionality.

Loos in a sense becomes a proponent of the moniker “Form follows function.” stated by Ludvig Von Mies Van der Rohe.  Loos advocated architectures necessity to truth.  He believes that architecture must not only efficiently function, but it must also be recognized as itself.  In his essay “Architecture” he gives the example

“When we find a mound in the woods, six feet long and three feet wide, raised to a pyramid form by means of a spade, we become serious and something in us says: someone was buried here. That is architecture.” (A.Loos)

Here we see the effects of architecture to convey both emotion and sensibility.  Yet as a rebuttal to the Post modernists, we have seen a social understanding of the non-necessity of a buildings form to impart subconscious understanding of its function.  I myself had at one time attended a church that had no naive, had not towers and had no bells.  My one time church was located in a brown field abandoned strip mall.  Every day we see revived old factories, the place of production being converted into high-end trendy lofts.  We even see churches and tabernacles once held in reverence by society as a house of god, fitted and adjusted slightly to be utilized as concert venues for the music that, more than likely, would have be admonished by the very audience that housed the pews.  What used to be the job of the architect has become the job of the marketer?  When the bank needed to look like it was a place of security and a place of stability, it was the architect’s job to convey the message, but now with the FDIC insured (maybe not so much now considering the timing) and the proliferation of the Automatic Teller Machines, it is no longer a message needed to be conveyed.  Architectures permanence is continually challenged and so too should the forms that it takes.

Another layer of information that the architect has at their disposal is the use of decoration and ornament.  Loos make note to differentiate ornamentation and decoration.  He allows the use of decoration as a means to appease the client.  Ornamentation, defined by Loos, is the excessive use of decoration.  When the architect’s use of decoration has surpassed its necessity to create a sense of comfort for the client, it moves into the realm of ornamentation.  Referring back to our classical view of ornamentation, ornament seeks to be subservient to the truth of the structure and never stifle or conceal it.  Here too Loos has a definite view.  These views stem from his understanding of function at the heart of architectures definition.  Loos quotes Leon Battista Alberti’s definition of beauty in his article ‘Furniture for Sitting’ as, “An object that is so perfect that one can neither add to it nor take away from it without harming it is beautiful.” This is said in an effort to display the manner in which ornament might detract from the beauty of a building.  Decoration for decorations sake is pointless and worthless.

Loos make a distinction that is worth noting, and will be the point of reference for our future explorations. In “Vernacular Art”, he states that

“The house should be discrete on the outside; its entire richness should be disclosed on the inside” (AL)

With this statement Loos narrows the scope of decoration to the interior of the building. Loos sees the exterior of the building being in service to society.  In the era of his capitulations on the role of architecture, his state of mind was in contrast to the excessive and ornamental designs of those being produces by most of the turn-of-the-century architects in Vienna. His statement therefore allows those designed to express themselves and the will of their clients on the interior of their homes. But when it comes to the exterior, society at large should conform to one another and maintain an edict of stability and restraint. Restraint is what was currently missing from his Viennese society.  But how do we rediscover the concerns of Loos and implement his suggestions in the contemporary society that is not too distant from the one he criticized.

I would propose first that the melding of architecture with other professions allows architecture to respond to the concerns and solutions of other fields and incorporate the knowledge into theirs. These interests may have at one time not been of concern to the architect but with the speed of information and the instability of design intent it has become the architect’s responsibility to reflect on the current coexisting fields of art, politics, science, theology etc to forge a comprehensive design reflecting society’s density of information.  The current trends towards excessive decoration (ornament) is a reflection of the over load of sensation that occurs in our urban areas.  While in Loos’s day the use of architecture was to support the authoritative figure of the government and society and give permanence to each.  In contemporary society, architecture reflects not the socialist agenda but the capitalist system. While Loos draws the distinction from the interior to the exterior and their respective responsibilities in culture, our current culture has fundamentally changed.  Not only has society changed but so has the topology of the program.  If Loos would extend his statement outside the home and into the un-delineated public space of the capitalist mall, what would he suggest?

So this combination begs the question of how! How can you be both minimal and ornamental at the same time?  A shining example in HdM’s work is that of the Signal Box.  On first sight the Signal Box is a cube, a minimalist mass that defines the word minimalism.  Special care was taken by HdM in ignoring the possibilities for the site to influence the project.  Most contemporary architects that utilize context as a generative process of form would have jumped on the chance to explore

“the fact that the signal station belongs to remote networks and inter-urban infrastructures and, therefore, that its architecture should be conceived more in terms of flows and intensities…” (J.Kipnis)

Signal Box - Herzog & De Meuron

Instead of using vector primitive masses of formless geometry, due to the lacking demands of human inhabitation and the relatively stark conditions of the surrounding site, HdM pushes the rectilinear figure you see today, into the site.  But what differentiates this monolithic cube from pure minimalism is the surface treatment.  This articulated surface of copper ribbons functions as ornamental architecture, but Kipnis would suggest that is also undermines the very definition of ornamentation.

Kipnis sets forth a definition, or affect of ornamentation by stating, “Ornaments attach as discreet entities to the body, like jewelry, reinforcing the structure and integrity of the body as such.”   In this manner ornamentations responsibility is to the structure and integrity of the body, of which is constituted by the architecture.  If we reflect back on the classical notions of ornamentation as can be read in Styles of Ornamentation, by Alexander Speltz, we see the limit of the definition of ornamentation.

“The art of ornamentation therefore, stands in intimate relationship with material, purpose, form, and style.” (A. Speltz)

“Lightly understood, the conformation of an ornament should be in keeping with the form and structure of the object which it adorns should be in complete subordination to it, and should never stifle or conceal it.” (A. Speltz)

From this definition we are left to wonder, and rightfully so, how does ornament work on a minimal form? When the form, style, and structure of the ornamented is void of the nuances that breed ornament, where does this ornament come from? Or better yet, can Hdm treatment of the Signal Box surface be considered ornament? The easy answer is of course, NO. This is why Kipnis understands that ornament is not the right term for the conditions that HdM is exploring.  He makes his point through the use of analogy.

“Cosmetics are erotic camouflage; they relate always and only to the skin, to particular regions of skin. Deeply, intricately material, cosmetics nevertheless exceed materiality to become modern alchemicals as the trans-substantiate skin into image, desirous or disgusting.” (J.Kipnis)

Cosmetics are the realm of the creator and are framed on the skin.  Although it is necessary to have the body as host, its intentionality is to work on the exterior surface.  Such is the case of HdM Signal Box.  The surrounding copper case is an artificial surface.  The true surface of the space inside the box is held within, just slightly hiding, out of sight behind the cosmetic facade.  HdM creates this canvas in order to give place for their acrobatics to occur.

HdM utilizes their love for the minimalist when creating the form for their cosmetics.  This is most appropriately done through the use of the denuded form of the cube.  The featureless faces of the minimalist shape helps to emphasize the subtle articulation that occurs.  Kipnis explains this by returning to the roots of cosmology.  The cosmetician wants the “gaunt featureless visage”, a kind of minimal body/face from which to work, in order to demonstrate the true power of their work.  So is the approach of HdM.  This moves the reading of the building from that of the form to that of pure surface engendered affect.

The title of the article that initiated the retrospection of Kipnis, “Minimalismus und Ornament”, sets the stage for another layer of discourse in the field of surface architecture.  While ornament can only enhance the form, cosmetic treatment will negate it.  While ornamentation becomes subjugated to the body, cosmetics in some sense, becomes the body.  Cosmetics redefine the relationship of the surface to the figure and remove the surface from being the figuration of the body.  The surface becomes the affective manifestation of the new figure.  But let’s take for example a form that is not articulated.

Say we take from the headlines one of the ever so popular vector primitive forms that is being created now.  Featureless and gaunt, the new white box becomes the vector primitive shapes.  When attempting to articulate the surfaces, adding affect to the affectionless gestures does this become ornament, cosmetics, or something new all together?

In an article in TIME entitled Cosmetic Architecture, circa 1963, at the beginnings of the minimalist movement there were cries for differentiated forms.  The postwar period brought with it the standardization of the high-rise into towers of curtain walled glass.  This is the manner which has been circumvented in contemporary designs.  Although we are starting to vary the forms of our urban cityscapes the realm of cosmetics should not be relegated to the minimalist form. Paul Rudolph, once dean of the Yale school of Architecture, emphatically decrees,

“It’s not a question of beauty. It’s a matter of significant form.  There is something in human beings which demands that we sense the support and the supported–even though it may be sheathed with other materials, and decorated.  Look at the difference between these bland cosmetic boxes and a Gothic cathedral, where every last rib and column is structural.” (P. Rudolph)

This should not be misinterpreted as a need for structuralism.  Rather his remarks, although dated should emphasize forms unique ability to derive difference and give potential to the figure.  When both the form and the ornament/cosmetics work in harmony, one not subjugated to the other, the seamless transition from form to surface articulation will allow a scalar shift linked to the users proximity to the building.  This will achieve an active form and active surface and an active audience.

Although our search for the truth in cognition has been worked on by philosophers and scientists alike, ever since the self actualized ego was born, it wasn’t until name such as Derrida and Heidegger, in the 80’s, came along that philosophical cognition was to be understood as a totally verbal assemblage. They believed that language was not only used in verbal communication but was also the very essence of cognitive thought. They suggested that all knowledge and all mental capacity originate from language and the ontological classifications of the tangible and intangible. This new thought on though became wildly popular and gave the Post Modernists the ammunition they needed to communicate their designs.

Soon, as this new understanding of humanity purveyed through society, all fields took up its cause. As the concepts ran their course, one by one, fields of research began finding holes and uneasy situations that the philosophy had no clear answer to.

Culture is an important part of our understandings of the times, ie Zeitgeist. As culture changed so did our understanding of the importance of visual imagination.  Even though other fields worked on these issues, architecture was stuck until the widespread use of the computer allowed architects to visualize their designs in new methods.  First let’s see where the rest of the fields began and how architecture eventually caught up.

“With that demise, the belief in language as the vehicle of thought (as opposed to understanding language as the mere vehicle of communication) lost its credibility and, as a result, formalism in aesthetics, visual imagination in psychology, and internationalism in historiography became viable and credible theoretical positions.” (B.Mitrovic p. 18)

During the 1970’s scientists diverged from populist topics and continued to pursue a deeper understanding of cognition. Meanwhile the philosophers and their converts were happy to become squatters in the house of linguistics. What the science community did was to begin exploring the role that visual imagination plays in our understanding of our world. The cracks in the wall began with an experiment conducted that sought to test human capacity of imagination (a mental model of the world). The experiment called for each participant to visualize a given geometric shape. They were then asked to rotate the shape and decipher the resultant shape. It took participants twice as long to rotate a shape 180 degree than it did to rotate 90 degrees. These tests concluded one result with two different explanations.

The first is that this imagined transformation occurs visually in our mind and needed some medium with which to translate, maybe even words (linguistic model). The second concluded that the transformation occurs because of our innate understanding of how object behave in space, either from intimate knowledge of these circumstances, or through primal knowledge of our environment and required no medium (visual imagination model or mental model). This mental model suggests that out knowledge of physical events invades our visual imagination. A good way to illustrate this point is by proving the negative, that without a physical basis we cannot imagine events that can be verbalized. Mitrovic illustrates this through the thought experiment of imagining a nine corner cube.  While the words make sense and we might even believe that such a thing is possible, it is impossible to create the mental image in our minds. This is where we will have to break the mold of monocognition and implement a polycongitive state. Our minds cannot function on linguistics alone if we are able to use words to create conditions our mind has no ability to comprehend.

While the scientific field continued to broaden our understanding of cognitive imagination, architecture took up the linguistic torch and ran, rarely looking back. Soon the overwhelming adoption of linguistic principals in architecture created a stifled search for other answers. The outcome of this concretized rhetoric was to secure the place in architectural discourse for the hegemonic control of the ‘parti ‘as a driver of designs. Architecture became a place where legibility of the concept, through linguistic communication, becomes the litmus test for projects in all design fields.

Changes in technology reflect changes in representation. Until the renaissance perspectives and building sections were not able to be understood until the technology of their representation was unlocked.

In the early 90’s widespread use of the computer began to change the way we think about architecture and specifically the cognition of architecture. There were new requirements to produce modes of representation that convey new spatial qualities. Axons, perspectives, and sections could not be used in the way they had been but must be appropriated to a new cognitive role. These shifting sands revived some concepts that had all but died during the linguistic brainwash. Computers coupled with this cognitive shift coalesce into the revived interest in a visual spatial imagination within the architecture community. While the computer was not the first spark of this new cognitive reality, it did mark the shift in its adoption by the architectural community.

“Rather than replacing the visual means of architectural communication with nonvisual ones, the digital revolution introduced technology for developing a completely new generation of visual, analogous media that have revolutionized the way architects deal with the spatial properties of their work.” (BM p. 18)

Architecture is a slave and a building block, no pun intended, to our cognition of the world. As architects we use the people in the world to bring life to our designs/buildings. By embracing the newly accepted duality of cognition (visual imagination and innate understanding of physical properties) we must also come to terms with the difference. In architecture there are concepts that can only be experienced through words, such as program, function [linguistic intent], then there are concepts that can only be conveyed through visualization; space, atmospheric effect and complex form [mental model]. You can describe the golden ratio in words but the beauties of its effects are not empathetically felt until it is visualized. The same way that our imagination is reliant on the way we have experienced our world, so too is the visual effects that architecture creates.

The visualizations come from specific and verbalized conditions of the architecture. “The architecture is beautiful because…” “The architecture is grotesque because…” The answers to these questions are verbal visible attributes. Without our visual imagination created we would have nothing to back up these statements. These statements differ from the Linguistic statements which presume formal processes becoming legible. Our new understanding is that form is meant to be visually imagined and not process driven.

With the loss of linguistics as a driving factor, architecture recoiled to favor theory. Theory requires justification out of architecture. It requires verbal narratives to evaluate the architecture, effectively circumventing and role that visual cognitive properties could play in design. The last bastions of linguistics found safe haven in the necessity for justification of architectural design. Its justification found in its theoretical intent.

Now it is understood that architecture needs a driving force, maybe even a linguistically slanted force that drives designs to be understood as visual and aesthetic objects that utilizes visual imagination. Notions such as beauty and aesthetics are only conceived through visual imagination. While they can be described through linguistic means, they cannot be imagined without our mental model. We can describe a beautiful building that is no longer around or has never been built. This beauty only can be recreated in real time through our imagination. The requirement of physicality is not even necessary.

The physical building is a tool to relay spatial composition. The example of the Parthenon and its tweaked physicality give the visual effect of continuity of the façade, while the physicality of the façade uses varied diameter columns and uneven plinths. The physical building is not the aesthetic object of the building, but is an assistant to the visual imagination. Imagination compensates for visual physicality. Take for example the effects of perspective on the eye. The view is understood in the brain and allows us to draw a planar façade without viewing it as such.  Our imaginative capabilities do not run linguistically or verbally. These images are manifestations into our visual imagination. This imagination derived from our physical world but required a visual interpretation to allow spatial cognition. This we can call a ‘mental model’ and it comprises a total understanding of the object and not just a single vantage we are presented. Architecture is not like paintings. They require a visual imagination to produce three dimensionality, where paintings capitalize on a single vantage point.

A mental model has always been present in our cognition of physical objects or represented objects, as through renderings or spatial diagrams, but the ability to utilize and capitalize on this cognition has stifled through the social theoretical slant towards linguistics.

For more on the role of representation in architecture please refer to my previous post.

After the evolution of linguistics, after the much needed jolt provided by the digital revolution, architecture is now situated to take advantage of the concepts that have been brewing under the surface for a long time. Architecture has the capacity to utilize linguistics and visual imagination/mental model to convey the intent behind their designs. What architecture must deal with now is the misunderstanding that the built environment is the only means of accomplishment for the architectural designer. Means of cultural theory, digital exploration and more importantly the ability for the image to convey meaning all become tools in the architectural tool box. What ‘Log 17’ advocates it a lowering of the public’s pretentiousness towards the manifested object of the building and embarrassing a multi faceted and even indefinable scope for all designs.

Mirrovic suggest that, “architecture need not produce any particular ‘movement’ or ‘avant-garde,’ but, more profoundly, they cannot fail to result in a reconfiguration of the field of architectural theory and praxis, and ultimately determine new means of theorizing architecture.”(BM p.20)

Because the culture is so connected to our cognition we must not hold ourselves solely to the realm of architecture but allow ourselves to become reconfigures of society itself. It is not enough to limit ourselves to the built environment, but we must change the cognition of our world to reflect our interests. Every step further in our understanding in how we internalize our external world is one more way we, as designers, can present the concepts and ideas we have.