Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE! and Commoning the Museum

Abstract

In 1970, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City hosted the exhibition Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE!, a mid-career retrospective of the Viennese architectural collective. Most historians have studied the range of design works created by the trio—and featured in the exhibition—alongside contemporaneous architects’ concerns with sci-fi fantasy; temporary, inflatable structures; and countercultural liberation. While not ignoring the emancipatory potential of these works, this essay focuses primarily on the set of performative actions Haus-Rucker-Co staged within the museum during the run of the exhibition, including: their decision to live within the museum galleries, the hosting of weekly meals in the exhibition space, and the ritual devouring of a scale model of the museum made out of cake. Taken together, these acts foreground a sense of sociality and community that counters the museum’s standard emphasis on individualized aesthetic absorption.     

THE ARCHITECTURAL NARRATIVE: On Michael Speaks' Ruminations on a ‘Big,Soft, Orange’

The Big, Soft, Orange exhibition on four Dutch architectural firms focuses on the (soft) processes these architects have evolved for dealing with the large scope(big) of contemporary architectural undertakings and the particular historical and geographical conditions these attempts address in the contemporary Netherlands (orange). Following the precedent of the curator. Michael Speaks' comments, the content of the exhibition will be seen to have broader relevance for Architecture. Speaks' own circumstance is considerably influenced by his relationship with, and critique of the work of, Frederic Jameson. By reading between Jameson and Speaks, this paper will use Speaks' exhibition to question the success of the architecture of postmodernity's preoccupation with overtuming the modern-modernism's Utopian assertions, its preoccupation with form, its totalising tendency, and the strictures of the ‘handed-down’ discipline of architecture with a telos in Building.From a Heideggerian perspective the paper will consider the architectural process as the concrete materialisation of the narrative of architectural production informs other than, but leading toward, the traditionally privileged architectural form: Building. Rather than the architectural approaches of postmodernity overturning modernism,it will be concluded that these approaches are merely innovative differentiation as they ‘flesh-out’ and articulate hitherto unformed narratives already extant within the reductive frames of modernity     

Book Reviews

When design and technology are too widely separated in the architectural curriculum, the informing knowledge of technology is not engaged as a design issue. As an outcast to the creative design process, architectural technology itself becomes outmoded: It is not thought about and developed as a partner to the expression of architecture. Design becomes disengaged from the means of making architecture and disconnected from the world and its informing environmental insights.

Lack of knowledge of technology and environment is evident in the negative and in some cases disastrous impact of buildings—some held up as design exemplars—on both the natural and human environment. To bridge the gaps that exist in the architectural curriculum, educators must establish sustaining linkages between design inspiration and technological and environmental knowledge. Technology here does not mean the mechanistic icons and artifacts of current construction techniques. It is best defined as knowledge gained in the making, the accumulated insights into architecture learned from the experience of its processes and its place. If there is agreement on this conception, only modest changes are needed to integrate design, technology, and environment throughout the curriculum.     

A Room Within a Room Within a Room: AA 125 Travelling Exhibition or,the Period Room as Staging Device

Abstract

The following paper takes as its starting point a posed photograph of the members’ room space within the Architectural Association’s AA125 exhibition. The image is one of the only published traces of this travelling exhibition, a show first installed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, from April 5 to 29, 1973, to celebrate the AA’s 125th anniversary, which included a full-scale “reconstruction” of the institution’s members’ room at 36 Bedford Square. AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky’s staging of the AA members’ room, we argue, functioned as an inhabitable exhibition environment that simultaneously reinforced the enduring identity of the AA—one of the most important architecture schools in Europe—as an independent institution, while also signaling its recent reinvention under Boyarksy’s direction. Recent research on the institutional history of the AA has drawn attention to Boyarksy’s role in revitalizing the school through a series of ambitious teaching and publication initiatives. The paper builds on these studies by repositioning this underexplored exhibition and, more specifically, the members’ room installation as an important part of Boyarsky’s political and pedagogical project for the AA during the 1970s.     

Issue PDF

Abstract

As increasing numbers of architecture schools introduce new degree programs based on postgraduate research, often engaging other disciplines, emerging technologies, materials and environmental concerns, this new species of architectural education demands an approach distinct from those that dominate professional programs. The authors present The Stratus Project—an ongoing body of design research investigating kinetic environment-responsive interior envelope systems, as a means of identifying a potential range of issues, models of inquiry and disciplinary influences for postgraduate research.     

Under the Sign of the Reproduction

With the advent of technical reproduction, the publication of architecture, as a medium through which architectural ideas have been disseminated, has both conditioned our understanding of architecture and exacted profound changes within the very art that it has reproduced. In this article I investigate this twofold phenomenon, using the example of the Italian publications Casabella and Architettura from the period between the two world wars, and focusing specifically on the publication of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, held in Rome in 1932. I examine this exhibition through the means of its production and reproduction, under the assumption that publication is a cultural text, with its own message and its own potential to condition our understanding of architecture.     

动态性博览建筑展示空间的导向性研究

从建筑空间动态性的角度,阐述了博览建筑展示空间的特征及发展状况,探讨了动态性博览建筑展示空间的导向性特点,并对其教育及信息传播功能进行了分析和探索,以期满足当代博览建筑展示空间设计的需要。     

筑境·山水间 访中联筑境建筑设计有限公司

＂筑境·山水问＂展览展示了建筑大师程泰宁和中联筑境十年来完成的建筑设计项目,呈现了程泰宁的三个＂立足＂、三个＂合一＂的建筑设计思想以及＂抽象继承＂的设计手法,并回顾了筑境建筑十年的发展历程与未来发展目标。     

From the Ground Up

Abstract

Over the coming year, readers of the JAE will see a significant expansion of the Reviews section to include critical commentary on exhibits, symposia, competitions, buildings, practices, films, and, of course, books. In enlarging the scope of this section, the editors wish to open a dialogue and critique around research, modes of inquiry, and new forms of practice as they influence both architectural production and education. In this first article, Dan Hoffman was invited to provide a context for understanding the work of architectural firms such as Duvall Decker whose practices promote new forms of extramural research and inquiry.—The Editors     

Toward a Theory of Architecture Machines

Abstract

The fall 2009 option design studio at MIT—Ferry Slip Mashup—was the site of a pedagogical experiment in engaging the vast historical archive of disciplinary knowledge for the purposes of designing a ferry terminal on the Maine State Pier in Portland, Maine. While the first premise of the studio was that we needed to relearn how to think historically, its second premise was that we had to find an appropriately contemporary way to do that. And if the first premise pointed us to engaging the issue of precedent head on, the second ensured for our precedents the status of entries in a vast archive of architectural knowledge.     

Continuity,Criticality, and Change

Abstract

This article reconsiders a joint seminar and studio that studied how an expanded vision of site and culture influences architectural production. The Barnes Foundation controversy provided a vehicle for this study. The Barnes is a private, world-renowned collection of art situated in an unlikely suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. Arguing that its current home was untenable, in 2002 the foundation announced plans to relocate—a move that runs counter to its founding charter, which bars any change to the collection, its content, or its location. Against a background of continued public protest and legal appeals, the Barnes decision prompts myriad vexing questions that are valuable for consideration in architectural education. Chief among these: is replication a valid, meaningful, or sufficient way to preserve cultural value, and if so, how?     

Drawing research

To understand research as new to architectural design is to ignore the history of the architect. Research—as the drawing forth of ideas—has been fundamental to the practice of the architect since the Italian Renaissance. The term ‘design’ comes from the Italian disegno, meaning drawing, suggesting both the drawing of a line on paper and the drawing forth of an idea. Disegno enabled architecture, painting and sculpture—the three visual arts—to be recognised as liberal arts concerned with ideas, a position they had very rarely been accorded previously. Alongside the traditional practice of building, architects acquired two new means to practise architecture—drawing and writing—as important as building. Since the Italian Renaissance, independently or together, drawing, writing and building have all been examples of architectural research and means to develop architectural design and the architectural discipline.     

Architecture as Conciliator: Toward a Unifying Principle in Architectural Education

We believe that architecture has lost its role as conciliator between humanity and the universe, it has lost much of its meaning. We use an example of a studio problem and process to explore issues in architecture, science, and meaning as they relate to architectural education. The confrontation of this problem in architectural education should involve the infusion of scientific thought and theoretical issues into the design studio, as well as other courses, to aid students in formulating their own world view in order to create an architecture of meaning. A seven-week design studio offered to second-year students included reading Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time and analyzing the spatial theories outlined in the book. This research informed site analysis as well as the architectural and landscape design.     

Keswa: An Uncovering

Keswa, Arabic for covering, is a public installation of folded digitally cut steel that evokes the image of Arab Gulf women by abstracting the stretch and flow of black fabric found in the abaya, or traditional black robe used to cover women's bodies in public. Two Saudi women, both architecture students, designed the piece and did the work of fabrication. Falling between the typology of the pavilion—a favored vehicle for architectural experimentation—and a piece of public art, Keswa invites the public to enter the space of the abaya, simultaneously venerating the garment and subverting its power to subordinate.     

What can be taught in architectural design? — <Emphasis Type="Italic">parti,poché</Emphasis>, and felt qualities

This essay begins with a reflection on what has been taught in architectural design since the turn of the twentieth century. I shall trace back to the two disciplinary foundations of the French École des Beaux-Arts — parti and poché — in the education of an architect in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I shall then attempt to superimpose parti and poché on a modern disciplinary framework, say that of mathematics, which leads to musings on a series of architectural problems that include pattern versus type, stability versus mobility, orthogonal versus oblique, confinement versus transparency, and aging versus metallic sheen. These paradoxes, I suggest, demand the education of an architect to address both the instrumental pattern of a building configuration and the ambient felt qualities of a room, rather than vision alone.     

Re-viewing The Way Beyond “Art”: Herbert Bayer,Alexander Dorner,and Practices of Viewership

Abstract

Architect, painter, and designer Herbert Bayer was a progenitor of modern exhibition design that emphasized the visual perception of its audiences; his associate and occasional collaborator, Alexander Dorner, also approached the conception of exhibitions by focusing on viewer experiences. Their similar emphasis on the centrality of subject-viewers and differing philosophies of perception and publics came together in the first United States touring retrospective of Bayer’s work, organized by Dorner. The story of that exhibition, The Way Beyond “Art,” is one episode within a larger, trans-continental conversation between two modern exhibition-makers. Bayer’s galleries oriented information for a visitor’s optical register, often at a massive, immersive scale. Dorner’s conveyed experiences of cultural perception, allowing exhibited objects to be overpowered by “atmospheres,” were meant to progress learning and action outside of exhibition spaces. In the book associated with the Way Beyond “Art” exhibition, Dorner advocated (now famously) for the museum to become a “powerhouse” for producing new energy, rather than exhibiting only existing artifacts and works. Their negotiations over Bayer’s art within Dorner’s “Way” ultimately were not only discussions about the roles of curator and artist in determining subject matter, but also reckonings over the degree of responsibility that an exhibition has to its public: whether the task of the exhibition is to situate and inform or to catalyze new cultural movement.     

Organicist concepts of city landscape in German planning after the second world war

The debates surrounding post-war reconstruction of Germany centred around three planning strategies as described in: the books Organische Stadtbaukunst (The Organic Art of Building Towns) (1948) by Hans Bernhard Reichow and Die Raumstadt (The Spatial City) (1949) by Walter Schwagenscheidt, as well as the 1946 exhibition Berlin plant—Erster Bericht (Berlin Plans—First Report) organized under the direction of Hans Scharoun. Despite the different political attitudes of their authors, these three planning strategies seem to be connected by the same goal: the big city was to be radically broken apart and a new green city landscape created. In order to plan and build this new city as a complex system integrated with the native landscape, the planners conceived the city to be like an organism in relation to its environment. Their shared organic conception reveals traces of natural science and nature-oriented philosophies. This investigation traces the origin of this new city landscape concept back to the intellectual-historical context at the beginning of the 20th century.     

基于使用者行为的展览空间设计研究 ——以深圳某高校改扩建展厅为例

随着社会的不断发展以及文化自信不断深入人心,人们对文化的需求与日俱增,陈展类建筑日益受到关注。其 建筑设计也趋向综合性发展,设计需要解决的问题越来越复杂,从以往单一的空间营造转向以“人”的行为为核心。 选取深圳某高校改扩建展厅为研究对象,并对该空间做了两种传统单线序列式流线的布展设计,分别为走道式和串联 式。通过应用UWB 室内高精度定位技术分别采集两种不同布展设计条件下的观众时空行为数据,并通过问卷调查采 集观众个人信息。通过分析两种动线设计下的观众观展时长、观展路径以及观众的停驻行为,探究观众观展行为与展 厅布展设计之间的潜在联系,总结归纳出小尺度展览空间设计的三个原则：灵活性原则、片段性原则以及多样性原则, 为日后陈展类建筑设计提供参考。     

Counter-planning from the kitchen: for a feminist critique of type

Whilst housing has long been a terrain of struggle in terms of its scale, provision, urban morphology and technological advancement, it often escapes a political critique of its interior logic. And yet, it is perhaps only from a political perspective that we might be able to see beyond the impasse we are witnessing. If most of the newly built stock conforms to models established more than a century ago, an increasing number of ‘experimental’ proposals reimagine domesticity with a chequered success that is surprising if we consider how ill-fitting the petit-bourgeois family flat is to our current conditions. In such a conjuncture the concept of type seems to be still a useful ground for debate as it helps us to read housing as a tool for the construction of subjects.

At the core of this mandate crisis lies a great unsaid non-said of western society, namely the role played by the house in the institutionalisation of reproductive labour. Reproductive labour is the care, education and actual production of the labour force from childbearing to housework to the care of the elderly—a form of labour that, before mature capitalism, was never seen as separate from other productive activities. In this sense, this paper assumes a feminist standpoint in that it re-reads modern housing as the place of women’s hidden, unwaged work, and typological discourse as the intellectual and technical arsenal that has allowed the fine tuning of such a labour system.

The hypothesis that will be explored is that reproductive labour itself is undergoing a large-scale shift that architecture is struggling to register. In order to understand this shift, we will look at the recent architectural production of three nations—the Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan—where a strong design culture has met an acute awareness of the recent changes in the organisation of work. Looking at work by MVRDV, Christian Kerez and SANAA, we will try to construct a map of possible solutions for housing beyond reproductive labour—and, perhaps, beyond type itself.