Thesis Abstract

The act of building can be seen as a rational act in which the necessities of program and function are met with a logically organized solution. Architecture, however should be asking deeper questions about the human experience of the world. That is not to say that there is no need to be rational and logical, rather there should be an effort to develop a methodology to both quantify and qualify human experience. Modernist architecture made every effort to dilute architecture to the rational and quantitative realm further reinforcing the Cartesian split in the human spirit. This attitude is reflected in everything from the treatment of the landscape to the use of material. The methodologies I seek to develop attempt to combine the quantitative analysis with a qualitative understanding of the human experience.

Each day, a person’s experience of the world can be characterized by such things as distance traveled, amount of time spent inside or outside, or the number of people encountered. This quantitative analysis would most definitely lead to increased information on the person, but it would it increase the understanding or knowledge of that person? Each experience could also be characterized in terms of the events of the day. Some might see these as thresholds crossed or boundaries encountered, both physical and perceptual. These events are not limited to their physical construct; they are defined also by the intangible context of experience. Humans have tried throughout their evolution to escape their own corporeality and become more powerful, knowledgeable, or immortal through the use machines and tools, or religious or other myths. Does architecture engage in dialogue or does it seek to become more than its own physical construct? If so, how does it do so? If not, then why? Is it the case that an architecture which is sensitive to emotional experience would actually become part of us?

In order to test these ideas, it is necessary to study an experience which is characterized by inherent tension. Elementary age children are engaged in very tenuous situations daily, especially in the ‘inner’ city, but more specifically in areas of high ethnic populations. Ethnicity adds the dimension of cultural ritual which may conflict with educational standards set forth by the United States government. Any racial tension certainly would be felt by students as well as educators. Students are also subjected to high rates of crime and poor living conditions, and possibly domestic issues. What are the events in the experience of the educational system which have the potential for architectural intervention? How can architecture engage in the human experience?

Spatial Control

Schedule v1.0

Interesting Student Project

Student Project, Yaohua Wang, Sci-Arc

The Opposite of Control?

28.03.2011 "Self-organization is indeed one of the concepts that continually pops up in modern artificial intelligence. By self-organization we mean that some structure or pattern- for example, patterns on butterfly wings, stripes on the fur of a zebra, or a particular social organization in insect societies-comes about as a result of the local interaction of many components, rather than by external direction, manipulation, or global, centralized control. Self-organization is an extremelly powerful concept but hard to grasp intuitively because we always try to understand the phenomena around us in terms of control." How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Pfeifer and Bongard, p. 50
The research into artificial intelligence and the contemporary obsession with creating life that is capable of thinking and acting like us has revealed several important issues about modern culture. First, modern society is based on the top-down approach of creating a system to which every component must adhere. The centralized control of a modern system is panoptic in the sense that it does not require of us that we are aware of who is controlling the system. In fact there are many systems in place to disguise the location of control or defer attention elsewhere. In the panoptic society, as long as the subjects submit themselves to the control, the system remains operational . The counterpoint to this is self-organization. The goal then should be to design the components and allow them to organize themselves. In other words, we need to realize that acceptable patterns of social behavior can arise independent of control mechanisms.
Another key point is how the control of modern society has manifested itself. This will be covered in depth throughout the thesis proposal but the essential crux of it is that modernism strips emotional content away from us producing a gap which is filled by consumption. If the new acceptable view of intelligence is embodiment, in other words emotion and reason are required in the truly intelligent being, then modernism strives to control subjects by means of denying intelligence. The promises of consumer goods filling an emotional gap rarely are fulfilled. This objectification makes it possible for us to divorce emotion from our consumer goods and dispense of the old in favor of the new. Extended to buildings, this premise allows us to discard of buildings and never engage in an emotional dialogue with them. This is critical in our current culture based on consumption. This is the reason that the environmental crisis has reached its current status. We believe we are exercising control over the objects in our lives when in reality they are being used in an effort to control us sacrificing our own health and well-being.

Control

I found myself staring at a skyscraper the other day. Not the twisting bulbous form characteristic of a supramodern construction, but the boxy gridded depthless surface of a glass enclosure. Made possible by the industrial revolution, this building is among a typology that is symbolic not only of the prosperity and corporate identity of post-depression economic recovery, but also of the historic divide between rationality and emotionality. The Cartesian duality introduced in “The Discourse on Method” reached its penultimate representation in the form of the mid-century modern skyscraper. The building takes the form of an entirely rational construction. Highly-standardized grids control the image of the building. The highly machined components of the building necessitate an architecture in complete juxtaposition to the environment in which sits. Its standardized, boxy grids are not experienced anywhere in nature. The intangible content is no less perceivable. Clearly in such a building there is no expectation of individuality, in fact the building’s image drives home the ideology of a socially unified inhabitation.

“Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings,” (Pallaasma, p. 11). Architecture should in some way provide something to the society and culture for which it is built, and really it shouldn’t be limited to ‘significant’ buildings. Any buildings should contribute to a person’s embodied being in the world. Modernist architecture, while it clearly furthered the belief of a split of rational and emotional being, it was also interested in the individual. The difference is that the architecture of Modernism, while it may not necessarily have arisen this way, is primarily an architecture of control. “A culture that seeks to control its citizens is likely to promote the opposite direction of interaction, away from intimate individuality and identification towards a public and distant detachment,” (Pallaasma, p. 49). Modernism explicitly chooses not to participate in the development of the inner soul of a person, rather it forces the collective into a state of constant supervision. As Pallaasma goes on to say in the same passage, consistently high levels of light can function as mental torture. High levels of light can also serve to provide a system of surveillance. An architecture of control necessarily eliminates low levels of light providing an evenly distributed high level completely dependent on electricity and divorced from the dimension of time recorded by the sun. From a very functional point of view the over-abundance of light makes it possible for those in charge to keep tabs on everybody at all times. In Panoptic perfection, the presence of the light assumes the role of the all-seeing eye which removes the necessity for someone to be physically present. Interestingly now that workers are increasingly performing their jobs from home or other remote locations, what has taken the place of the all-seeing eye?

If the goal of architecture should be to participate in the development of the human soul, then what are the architectural techniques that can do so? Modernist culture leaves no space for withdrawal from the surveillance, providing no opportunity for a person to find oneself or to develop a voice in a culture which is dependent on constant transfer of information and never-ending communication. The Modernist use of materiality reinforces a distancing of one’s emotional being from one’s physical being.

The eye is the organ of distance and separation, wheras touch is the sense of nearness, intimacy, and affection. The eye surveys, controls and investigates, whereas touch approaches and caresses. During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close of the distancing sense; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy. (Pallaasma, p. 46)

We can logically conclude from this paragraph that emotional experiences necessitate a blocking of vision or more specifically confusing the perception of depth and distance. Fundamentally this differs from the confusion provided by glass in architecture. First there is no tactile experience connected with glass. What is seen in the reflection has an entirely different tactility when experienced in real life. While the reflection of ourselves in a pane of glass may be physically intimate, there is an ethereal distancing of imperceptible range. The mind’s experience of reality is separated from the body’s place in the world. Second, if the glass offers little reflection, it then objectifies whatever is beyond. The world beyond the glass is flattened to an image in the plane of the glass. No sound, touch, smell or taste is transferred to the body. Imagine experiencing a shark behind a pane of glass. The body’s experience is completely divorced from the natural experience of being in water with a shark. The emotional response required for survival in the presence of a shark is lost in the creation of an image of that shark. To the importance of shadow, darkness fundamentally requires certain heightened emotional states. When vision is deemphasized, the other senses pick up the slack in detecting potential dangers whether it be a predator or some other environmental danger. Shadows provide depth and record the dimension of time. Darkness elicits emotional response, some of which are tied fundamentally to survival.

The specifics of the use of transparency and reflection, light and shadow, and a unifying grid of similarity are the contributing factors to the Modernist control of the soul. Is there a contrasting point of view which uses these architectural techniques in an attempt to provide an embodied intelligent being with a soulful point of view? Could it be that Le Corbusier’s famous quote, “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light,” is the thing that sets him apart from the Modernists? I am searching for the characteristics of architecture which provide emotional experiences. The link between emotion, rationality and the soul lies in architecture that provides an embodied experience of the world through the senses. There is a lacuna between emotional and rational thought as seen through the eyes of Modernism. What is the architecture that fills the lacuna?

Method

27.02.2011  In the outstanding novel Confessions of Taoist on Wall Street, David Payne tells the story of a little boy, Sun I, who is born of a Chinese mother and an American fighter pilot in China. His mother dies at birth and his father returns home to theUnited States; he is left alone and grows up in a monastery. His mentor and teacher is the chef, Wu, who takes good care of him. The monastery is on a high rock upon a river. One of their daily chores is to carry water from the river to the monastery up a rocky path. The boy remembers that whenever they arrived at the top of the rock his buckets were empty, all the water spilled, whereas Wu's were always full. Here are Sun I's thoughts:
'It was true. By some extraordinary luck or skill Wu never seemd to lose a drop, though he hurried along the treacherous stair at twice my pace. (I tried to cut my losses by moving slowly, plotting my course in advance and picking each footrest with deliberate care.)  
    "I don't understand it," I confessed to him. "You must know some kind of trick. Explain your method."
    . . . "You haven't yet caught on. It's precisely this-excess of method-that confounds you, leaves the buckets nearly empty. . ."
     "If you're so smart, how do you do it then?"
     "How do I do it? . . . I close my eyes and think of nothing. My mind is somewhere else. My legs find their way without me, even over the most uneven ground. How can I tell you how I do it? . . . I can't even remember myself!" (Payne, 1984, pp. 18-19)'
-from How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Pfeifer and Bongard, 2007, pp. 370-1


See also Malcolm Gladwell, Blink. If we divorce this for a second from the obvious connections with the over obsessiveness over process in the architectural discourse, what else can we take from this story? Is it possible that true intelligence resides in the body, not the mind? Or better still that the balance in this story between body and mind illustrates true intelligence. Maybe the abstract expressionist painters were on to something half a century ago when they allowed the subconcious (could this be the body) control their paintings. Overly rationalized buildings are not intelligent if they are impoverished in sensory stimulation in relation to the body.

Statement 1.0

21.02.2011 This thesis takes the stance that architecture should occupy the void, or the space between, the traditional categories of form and content. Throughout various movements in art and architecture the debate between form and content has forced designers and artists to choose a side. Modernism for example was entirely concerned with form. In the eyes of the Modernist architect the emotional content needed to be stripped away from the program to explore the most pure form of the built work. On the side of the coin, Post-Modernism studied the essence of the forms by cartooning them and using pure forms in unconventional manners. Supramodern architecture is essentially a combination of both lines of thinking in that it studies the relationship of meaningless form with the content stripped away.

The Lacuna is the Cartesian gap between form and content. Descartes drove the wedge that formally split the concepts of form and content in his writing “Discourse on Method”. By dividing rational thought and emotional feeling, he introduced a dualism which infected the thinking behind every discipline, not the least of which was architecture. The underlying assumption behind the dualism is that there is a ‘good’ side and a ‘bad’ side. In other words, the emotional side corrupts the rational side and therefore the rational should assert its dominance over the emotional. The Lacuna accepts the idea of a dualist approach to the world, however not in a hierarchical manner. There is a difference between rational and emotional thought yet neither can exist without the other. 

Another assumption at work is the fundamental link between architecture and culture. The built world is driven by the culture and in fact it is no less than a physical manifestation of the beliefs of a culture. Thus to understand where architecture is going, it is necessary to understand where culture is going. The Capitalist Empire (it is widely misnomerred as the global culture, however the myth of democracy is the driving factor) is in the early stages of a shift from the material culture of industrialization to the post-material virtual world. Industrialization stripped the imbedded content from objects such that the container of the form could be filled with content in service of selling more objects. In the virtual world there is no longer a need for the object only a need for the image of the object.

The movie, The Matrix, deals with the idea of a virtual world head on. At the beginning of the movie, we only see people in what we believe to be real life, and they are depicted as soulless, emotionless beings. Facial expressions are kept to a minimum. We soon discover that everybody is only a “digital projection of your virtual self.” Aka an image. The human race has been conquered by (the) machines empowered by artificial intelligence and the Matrix is merely a computer simulation fed into the brains of people who are encapsulated in pods in a comatose state from the moment of their birth. There is no more object and no more sensory perception. There are numerous similarities between the Capitalist Empire and the machines of The Matrix. Is it possible that we are already living in the Matrix?

There were a handful of people who had managed to escape the grasp of the Matrix and were living underground in the real world because the surface world had been rendered completely uninhabitable save for the unconscious human storage towers. The characteristics of the real world in the movie embodied a highly sensory experience bordering on the grotesque. I am using the grotesque in this sense to refer to experiences which have no precedent in our memory. Although the allegory of the cave is strongly embodied in the real world, the general living conditions are extremely removed from our experiences of house and home.

The real human beings in the movie are able to plug in to the Matrix and operate within the context of the simulation either to pull more people out of the Matrix or to accomplish other tasks. The protagonist in the movie is a human who after some time training in the Matrix while still living in the real world, learns to manipulate the Matrix. His powers also then extend into the real world where he is able to affect the machines in the same manner as the Matrix. In other words, He learns to operate in the Lacuna. This means that it is time for architecture to embrace the immaterial world. That is, the objectform is no longer of any importance. The form of experience is hugely important. The content of our experience is hugely important. Architecture should be about memory and experience first and foremost and in order to occupy a place in our memory, it has to connect with us on an emotional level. Emotions are driven by sensory perception. The emotion of fear is based on the memory of something that caused harm to us, such as a predator in the caveman age. This memory includes the sound of the animal, the smell of the environment you were in, and mostly the unconscious memory of your body’s reaction to the situation. When faced with this situation again, the rational mind uses the emotional feelings of the mind to illicit a response. In the case of the predator, it is more than likely a response of flight. Thus, there is no separation between emotions and rational thinking. They work in tandem in the memory of an experience. Architects are no longer responsible for designing objectforms. They are responsible for designing experiences. The form of the experience and the content of that experience are the products. The media used are the sensory inputs. What does it mean to design the immaterial?

Designing the Grotesque

2.2.2011This student(Isaie Bloch) project from Austria illustrates the meaning of the term the Architectural Lacuna. The grotesque structure ignites a curiosity in our minds. It is representative of something that we cannot yet understand.
Descartes' Discourse on Method laid the foundation for Modernist culture as we know it. The dualism he proposed divided the world and placed it into categories of polar opposites. Since his proposal, we have seen architecture as superior to nature. In fact, we have seen it as harmful to architecture. In recent times the reaction against this has flipped the view somewhat to encompass a view that buildings are harmful to nature. Realistically both are true. If you are a pessimist. This building occupies the space between buildings and nature.
Network theory has taught us a valuable lesson about the way in which the world operates. It is simply not possible to view the world as an abstract form of cause and effect. The Modernist spirit of control attempted to simplify everything to its root cause and believed that controlling each one individually would result in the desired effect. Network theory proposes a system of nodes and links. In a system certain nodes can be removed or altered and indeed have the effect that was pursued. However its not always that simple. Some nodes are more tied in then others. If we reduce our view of the World Trade Center to that of one simple node, we need not look any further for an example of what happens when one node is removed.
Is it possible that the oversimplification of life in the Modernist view stripped away emotional thought and feeling? The perfection of the world offered by the Modernist utopia has left us desperate to feel something, anything. The pursuit of the grotesque, the imperfect, and the ugly embraced by the avant garde is rooted in this. In contrast to the Greek ideal beauty, the Modernist Empire, contemporary society acknowledges that the most interesting experience of any day exists in the space between. The Architectural Lacuna is interested in studying what Descartes wasn't. The rational and the emotional are inextricably linked and it is the job of the architect to design the link.

PROPRIOCEPTION - Final XLab Testa from fm h on Vimeo.

Another example from a SciArc student.



On the verge of collapse from Karsten Huitfeldt on Vimeo.

Example of the general tone and feeling that I am aiming for with my thesis.



Thesis Animation Part1 from edward k on Vimeo.

ShapeShifter from Charlex on Vimeo.