Monument et al.
Anthony Gagliardi
This section is part of an ongoing series of design studios, each investigating a specific topic as it relates to monumentality in architecture. Throughout the series, our goal is to create a contemporary definition of the term while analyzing its visual characteristics and architectural potential. The Fall 2023 studio will explore specifically - the tower - and its relationship to a collective consciousness and scale as necessary, interdependent components of monumentality.
Few other architectural typologies are more pure and acute in embodying the “collective consciousness” as is the tower. It is fundamentally a collection and densification of various methods of inhabitation, uses, symbols, current knowledge, and values. Thus, the tower is deeply entwined with the city -- a physical manifestation of urban life. Yet, more than any single street, sign, or plaza - the tower can be argued as the most visible expression of a collective identity within the city.
It is also clear when in a city that all towers are not alike - and some are more monumental than others. Why? Although monumentality, much like architecture, can be subjective - a study of scale, rather than size, offers an empirical and systematic means of analysis.
Studious Sarcophagi
Daniel Markiewicz
This project combined the techniques of sculptural relief with an interest in color to create proposals that reflect on death and memory. The sarcophagus is a vessel for the dead but also an ode to the memory of its contents. Students were asked in this project to develop towering sarcophagi adorned with the analysis of their own preliminary work.
This semester began with an investigation into sunken relief and the work of the graphic designer Norman Ives. Various methods of relief were studied—sunken, low, high and bas—and used to develop sets of surface conditions, formal logics and ultimately initial study models. Working iteratively, students analyzed their own models to develop strategies for crafting a sarcophagus to house those models. Each piece drew from their own work as well as loose reference to a series of contemporary mural artists (KAWS, Jessie Katey, Louise Zhang among others). This grouping of references shares a common compulsion for color and intricate layered work. These references combined with the rigor and analysis of their own initial studies became the tools that student groups used to develop positions for their Sarcophagus-Towers. Various materials, methods of fabrication and techniques of finishing were employed to fabricate their creations.
Performative Beacons
Laia Mogas Soldevila
Performative Beacons intend to contemporarily redefine the "beacon building", the lighthouse, a structure of power and of hope. We reinterpret these as inclusive structures by investigating concepts of translucency, patterning, and glow. Scaled towers practically discuss concepts that can be transposed to the studio’s final project and that refer to both human organization and structural design strategies; bottom up - top down, inclusive - exclusive, transparent - translucent, collective - hierarchical, distributed - centralized, concealed - exposed. Teams design lightweight, yet robust and stable, tall faceted assemblies with a starting point in traditional canvas making techniques of wood and linen, and upgraded into contemporary digital design and manufacturing methods. Irregular triangularization, functional detail, and non-standard joinery make the skeleton. Skins depict selective patterning with layered mesh fabric to achieve Moire perceptive effects of light and shadow, as well as illuminated from the inside-out to attract and welcome, to highlight rhythm, and to map illusion.
Figuring out the Frame
Ryan Palider
The “Viewing Tower” explores Architecture’s potential to be a mechanism through which one sees the world in unforeseen ways. The studio’s three installations use different architectural techniques to create an architectural installation that uses familiar architectural elements and figures in unfamiliar ways to engage with and to question an architectural context. Robert Venturi’s chapter “The Inside and the Outside” from Complexity and Contradiction discusses how differences between interior and exterior formal qualities can be a productive architectural condition. In Learning from Las Vegas Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown argue that buildings can be separated into two camps “Decorated Sheds” and “Ducks”. Buildings that project meaning through surface articulation and buildings that Project meaning through form. The work of this studio conflates these two concepts by hybridized Venturi’s Duck -v- Shed diagram into a “Decorated Shed” with a volumetric “Duck” interior to produce installations that used both surface and form as communicative devices. The studio reexamines these postmodern ideas by questioning: How can contemporary ideas of materiality, ornament and graphics bring new qualities to the “Decorated Shed”, How can hybridization and abstraction of iconic forms bring new readings to the “Duck”? Like Venturi we started our architectural adventure by looking at historical architecture, but rather than restaging them as pure quotations, we abstracted and hybridize them into new compositions that seem new yet vaguely familiar. As one moves around the towers iconic architectural elements and forms come into focus and are quickly obscured as new qualities emerge. Understanding and engaging with these projects will not be a static process, it will depend upon one’s point of view.
Vehicles for Earthly Survival
Eduardo Rega
Vehicles of earthly survival is the conceptual framework for the design of the towers. Following Donna Haraway’s commitment to rebellious and hopeful storytelling, vehicles of earthly survival are prototypes of world-and-life-reproducing infrastructures that exist despite the un-worlding basis of the modern-colonial world-system. The towers are vehicles that reject the modern-colonial capitalist world-ecology and the continuous destruction of the planet’s biodiversity. Each vehicle bears an eco-system that mediates relations of interdependency between organisms and their surroundings. They are mobile devices connecting trees, plants, shrubs, humans and insects capable of mitigating the effects of global warming at various scales and stimulating biodiversity. The towers are vehicles to dream of a pluriversal and decolonial Noah's Ark that preserves life-forms and aims to withstand the current ecological catastrophe and extinction.
The pavilions are made of off-the-shelf materials with a clear building manual for anyone to build, for anyone to unbuild, for anyone to build differently after the pavilions are dismantled. The structures can be disassembled and re-built to serve other purposes, where the beings, plants and otherwise, can be taken to enter and participate in other contexts, other ecosystems.
Ontological Formations
Danielle Willems
‘Hyperlapse Chambers’ explore and re-examine digital techniques in regards to details and tectonics within the architectural world. Our discipline has a long and rich history of architectural details and of our contemporary digital tools relationship to technology, art, science, material and structural innovations as well as their implied politics.
The studio methodology consists of three feedback phases: the generative diagram, prototyping /iterative modeling and formal /spatial animations. The first exercise starts with the generative diagram phase, which operates as the abstract machine of assembly. The prototyping and iterative modeling phase is a method of rapid and recursive generation of form and materials experiments. The feedback loop between the digital and the physical is also tested in this prototyping phase. The final phase experiments with new mediums of digital representation. Animation, VR and AR allow students to experience, test and develop possible scenarios of program and the transformation of architectural space and form through time.
The focus of this research in the Hyperlapse Chamber is to develop innovative fabrication techniques using carbon-fiber in relationship to the exhibition experience, spaces and objects. These projects use pre-preg carbon-fiber as a material that tests the limits of lines of structure and the geometry of interior and external vantage points. There is also a focus on the 2D to 3D textile qualities and techniques of woven, loomed and wrapped fibers. This studio explores new mediums of contingency through material experimentation and behavioral systems analysis, looking deeper into the intelligence and complexities that surround our everyday experience.