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.

A Personal Experience of Architecture

Within earshot of each other stand two iconic buildings in the architectural history of Chicago. Crown Hall and the McCormick-Tribune student center illustrate an inseparable dichotomy in their contemporary cultural influences, yet they are both products of the same culture. While the former erases all memories and leaves no space for memories, the latter aggrandizes memories to a form of irony. While it is nearly impossible to address the experience of every individual sense, memory remains. The question derived from that memory is; what is truly authentic? Each building is certainly an authentic representation of its time; but is the spirit of authenticity lost in that culture? The former offers nothing of superficiality while the latter offers everything of superficiality. The irony in the dichotomous relationship is that the former approach necessarily leads to latter. To strip away the memory from a building, and by extension the emotional content, is to provide them with the space in which to tell us who we are. Maybe the search for universality has indeed led to universality by stripping all content from everything(one).
There exists a general trend in contemporary culture toward an entirely visual experience. The development of the internet and of email have divorced people from the sensual experience of their world and disconnected people from their emotions despite claiming to enhance the experience. The impending death of language is evidenced by the reduction of everything to mere iconography. Iconography at the service of capitalism and consumerism reduce the amount of time needed to metabolize information. It is possible to say a lot while talking or writing very little. An old axiom states, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ What is truly interesting is; a picture is worth how many memories? or worth how many emotions? In the reduction of imagery and language to icons is the necessary process that of reducing emotional content?
The visual experience of Crown Hall is that of minimal imagery. The Modernist search for universal space produces a space devoid of identifying character. Enclosure is reduced to levels of transparency and translucency. If we were bird-like, we might imagine ourselves colliding with the transparent skin in a desperate, losing attempt to experience universal space. The implicit meaning, rather explicitly stated, is that interior is no different than exterior, yet the oppressive control of everything not natural seems contradictory. A rigid, 24’ column spacing unites the entire IIT campus in a simplified engineer’s grid. The modulated exoskeleton provides the only distinction between the controlled and the dangerous. If the impressively thin sheets of glass transmit too much heat one direction or the other; don’t worry. We have scientifically engineered temperature control systems for that. The celebration of genetically engineered steel, taken directly off the ‘shelf’, completes the temple to the gods of engineering. A temple which serves to host a funeral at one time, and a concert at another time, yet the memory of neither is present in my experience of it. It is easy to imagine the solemn whispers of a funeral as well as the gloriously loud symphony of a Duke Ellington concert because the space is representative of neither.
On the opposite side of State Street stands a strange mix of similar yet dissimilar approaches to the creation of architecture. Rather than standing heroically as an object in a field, the McCormick-Tribune student center physically engages with the preexisting condition of the elevated tracks above. The force of gravity exerted by the tracks pinches the building in the center forcing either side to bulge upwards in much the same way as a balloon acts when squeezed. The image of the building seems to be at once both an ingenious use of residual space and a deliberate stance of arrogance in an ‘I can do anything’ manner of speaking. The fascia of the roof form provides a glimpse of the interior amalgamation of materials. A sprayed-on rubber membrane overlaid with some other material references, in an extremely campy manner, a wood-grain pattern. On the interior the experience borders on kitsch. Materials take on a character of playfulness, like a child randomly choosing crayons out of his box in an effort to ensure that each crayon remains the same length. Aluminum flooring transitions to epoxy-covered concrete marking the threshold between path and island. Transparency is juxtaposed with translucency. Overhead, green sheetrock is left bare; the joints and screw holes taped and mudded in a contrived memorializing of the “God is in the details” approach of the campus icon and creator. An orange glow emanates from colored glazing complementing the ceiling plane. The rigid, 24’ column grid controls the structure of the building but is interrupted by the intervention of the structure of the elevated tube. Even the ceiling plane is pierced by the underbelly of the tube that encloses the elevated tracks in a deliberate collision of materials. A founders’ wall of pixilated images of full-story faces created using iconographic imagery replaces engraved stone. The written is replaced with the pictorial, reducing the founders to icons themselves, surrounded in a surreal orange glow.
The quest for the universal, the socialist agenda, the machine aesthetic, has matured in concurrence with the quest for a disposable culture. Objects are increasingly temporary place-holders for memories and emotions. Experience a new emotion simply by throwing out the old and buying something new. In his essay Junkspace, Koolhaas himself addresses the modernist project. “Its role is not to approximate the sublime, but to minimize the shame of consumption, drain embarrassment, to lower the higher.” The minimalist aesthetic has been swallowed up by the capitalist machine because the universal space is the space of commerce. With the modification of one façade a box can become the retailer of an entirely different set, or more likely under a different brand the same set, of products with no memory of the previous life. Strip the expressive façade of a retailer and you are left with a Modernist box, the only differences lying in the opacity of the exterior wall clearly demarcating interior and exterior, and the ambiguity of the structure in the tilt-up concrete panels. Efficiency is the game; everything off the ‘shelf’.
A closer reading of the McCormick-Tribune student center reveals another dichotomy. The building acts at once as a comment on contemporary culture and as a beautifully nuanced spatial symphony. It is difficult to argue the brilliance of the layering of levels and spatial relationships. I find myself, ironically, experiencing a characteristic of Junkspace according to Koolhaas himself. “There is a special way of moving in Junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful.” It is easy to simply follow the aluminum-floored path or to easily detour to one of the ‘islands’. In the midst of these spatial relationships, it seems to be an overload of information to add the superficial iconography, the superficial materiality, the feigned emotional content. The dean of the architecture school at IIT, Donna Robertson, claims that, “18-year-olds really have a different way of engaging with the world than you or I. They're used to responding to multiple layers of information, and their response level is incredibly quick. They get this right away, and they love it.” Is it a matter of ‘getting it’, or is it a matter of them being perfectly conditioned to accept the cultural milieu? What would be the impact of the building if the superficiality was stripped from it?
Emotions are memories in their essence. It is my contention that my memories and therefore my emotions, compose the person I am, my soul. Modern architecture strips the memory of everything seen as non-progressive, non-uniform. The result of this is an architecture which claims to turn the gaze of the observer inward, but in reality creates an emotional void. This emotional void renders possible the emotional void of cyberspace and of capitalist consumerism. The formative years of young people leave them now with a memory of this emotional void. A home is defined by the kitschy welcome mat in front of the door and the Ikea painting on the great room wall. After such a resoundingly negative essay, you might ask; What do you like? The answer to that question is; What do you truly like? “You are complicit in the tracing of the fingerprints each of your transactions leaves; they know everything about you, except who you are.”