Color and Client – Preview

Columbia’s C-Lab recently published an essay by the LADG’s Andrew Holder on their COLUMN page.  The following is an excerpt. 

You may read the entire article here.

In early November 2010, The Los Angeles Design Group (LADG) receives a commission to renovate the lobby of a residential loft building in Downtown Los Angeles. The client is new to us, a respected regional developer, and we are eager to impress. The brief is both open-ended and severe: make the building desirable to prospective tenants, adhere to a strict budget. Built in 1906, the structure has changed ownership and use several times. Each new owner, confronted with the problem of how to bend the building to a new program, added more walls, but only added walls. There is now an absurd number of subdivisions. The lobby, for instance, is roughly a 20 x 30 foot rectangle composed of twenty different vertical surfaces (a conservative accounting). There are now so many walls that it’s impossible to trace the genealogy of any particular one. Each wall is the result of necessity (fireproofing around columns), program (enclosure around private stairs), or whim (separation of the elevator vestibule from the rest of the lobby). Untangling the use value of each wall would be almost impossible, so we quickly settle on retaining them and restricting our intervention to a graphic with some supporting built material at the scale of furniture. The scheme we concoct uses a large number of slightly tapered parallel stripes. Viewed frontally the stripes look like shading on a flat surface. Viewed obliquely the stripes and the wall blur into a fog. It looks like you can touch cloudiness… (Continue Reading)

Candid LADG Desk Views: Featuring Hilarious Lack of Architectural Mystique

Today we paused work at The LADG offices to conduct a surprise candid camera shoot of our own desks.  Stopping arbitrarily at about 1:22pm, we documented the contents of each desk. The results are equal parts excruciating (Ben’s reading a copy of DWELL? An issue entitled Cheap and Chic, no less?), gross (Andrew’s desk plays host to a greater number of week-old food items than architectural implements), and eye-rollingly predictable (Noah ”accidentally” composed a still life of Architectural Record, a fresh orange, and VINTAGE RayBan Wayfarers). Where is a shred of architectural mystique? The evidence of big ideas? The material culture of design?

Ben's Desk - Excruciating

Andrew's Desk - Gross

Noah's Desk - Eye-rollingly Predictable

One ray of hope: we all have snotty headphones. In fact, in every case, the headphones cost more than our disposable Ikea desks. Or maybe that just means we think ignoring each other is worth a capital investment.

 

 

 

Another Day, Another Bench – Final Fabrication View

Here’s latest finished piece Machine Histories has completed for our lobby renovation project.

The ribs are made of painted MDF with PVC edge-banding. Edge-banding gives such a tight, uniform fit that it looks like the edge of the rib has been sliced to reveal a plastic interior. Black spacers between the ribs are cut from integral-color MDF, which was important because finishing the spacers would have made for inaccurate fits because of variations in paint thickness.

 

 

Almost, ALMOST Done…More Furniture Fabrication for the Lobby Downtown

Machine Histories is wrapping up fabrication on the furniture for our downtown Los Angeles lobby renovation. Here are two pieces of a bench that will eventually be about 18 feet long when assembled. We like this phase of fabrication when computer-controlled production techniques are revealed to be a messy and very manual business.

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No matter the precision of the computer model and the translation of that model into machine code for the router, assembly requires wrestling with all sorts of other, dirtier factors: gravity first of all, which dictates that each section of the bench be built in a different orientation (one laying flat on a table, another stacked up in sections from the ground, and another build like a bridge, spanning between the other two sections, using a disposable jig as support until the final connection is made and the thing can carry its own weight. Then there are nicks and scratches and sharp things in the shop that mean the entire affair has to be swaddled in padding until it’s delivered to the site. Slowly, an entire life support system for the thing emerges, tending to its eccentric needs until fabrication is complete.

 

Lucile Avenue Condominiums – Structural Steel

Here are some construction progress photos of a four-unit condominium complex we’re building in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. On site, we notice the connections between steel profiles becoming points of fetish. We look at them repeatedly to grasp some sense of the weight each one carries. This is a strange act because in our other work we’ve gone to great lengths to avoid the expression of these kinds of details. But we can’t help it: there is a palpable excitement staring at a 33-fot span in steel. It’s heroic. The steel, though, is inscrutable. It gives no real sense of the forces in transit. The I-beam discusses the load it carries in the code of its cross section, but it does not express that load. We would rather it drooped a bit, or maybe dripped beads of sweat in complaint.

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The building structure is a layer-cake: a steel moment frame is stacked above a concrete pill box, with a hybrid steel and wood system perched on top. Each system is the result of a collision between a structural type and a living requirement. At the base, bedrooms occupy the fortified hillside retaining system. The middle level is vacant with no skin – a place for cars to park in the center of the building; just a steel moment frame. At the top, two living levels are built like conventional townhouses.

Furniture fabrication for our downtown Los Angeles Lobby project

We’re working with Machine Histories to fabricate the furniture that we have designed for our lobby renovation project in downtown LA. In these photos the Machine Histories guys are applying PVC edge banding to our benches. By painting each piece then applying edge banding, we get a two-tone color scheme with a durable plastic edge to protect the faces that people will eventually be sitting on. The holes in each profile are designed to accept the custom spacer that was described here

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We like seeing the profiles before assembly because they’re a good document of our design intent. The piece was designed both as a monolithic form and as a set of profile curves so that each profile has a very particular, plucky kind of curvature. Each curve in the array is thought of as a springy band that we’ve attempted to coil into a loop with overlapping ends. The geometry has its own limits of plasticity and spring, a tendency to return to a set of primitive shapes in opposition to our attempts to bend it. This is a slightly different way of working than slicing up a surface model and accepting the sections, no matter what the resulting kind curvature at the scale of single slice. Here the design has as much to do with the parts as it does to do with the entire assembly.

DavidClovers Exhibition

A while back the Hong Kong firm Davidclovers showed some recent work at the Sci-Arch Gallery, most of it fabrication studies in concrete and corian. Even though the installation is long gone, we think the photographs are worth another look. Call it one of our 10 Best picks for 2010, although we can’t possibly be bothered to come up with the other nine.

Most recent installation work by architects hangs limply on one of a few crutches: heavy repetition with the hope it will achieve escape velocity beyond the relentless and into the fantastic; or cozy visual associations with biological monstosities that end up looking like second rate horror effects (with none of that genre’s sense of humor or squirmy self-conciousness [or radical politics or soft-core sexuality]). Immuring, instead, rolls around in the dirt with architectural convention — windows, doors, walls, thickness, mass — and emerges with something original and provactive. Typical of Davidclover’s work, the craft is imppecable. It’s, you know, fresh old school.

Downtown Los Angeles Lobby Renovation: Fabrication Studies

Serial sectioning is an easy way to fabricate complex form using flat cuts stacked together to imply the continuity of a surface. The technique is easy and cheap, but like lots of other things that are easy and cheap, it’s also lazy and problematic. The intense, repetitive visual order of the sections frequently overwhelms the object being fabricated. It is difficult to meet the following criteria using this technique:

- Cut sections non-uniformly (not all sections cut in a straight line)
- Amplify desirable qualities of the form using sections instead of allowing the cuts to suppress them
- Distribute ribs and spacers in non-linear arrays to assemble the sections (find an assembly technique that is constrained by the properties of the form instead of constrained by some arbitrary system, like a grid)
- Work only in sheet material so that all cuts are flat 2D profiles
We’ve been working on this problem and have arrived at a solution for some lobby furniture we are designing. The method is shown here with a bench.

Front and back views of the bench surface model. The form is conceived as a thick sheet of material, pliant in the way that thick foam can be rolled in a loose tube while retaining some of the willful resistance of that material's stiffness. Lines embedded on the surface follow the tucks and overlaps of the tube form.

Sections are cut perpendicular to the direction of the tube. There is a "wobble zone" where the sections not only turn a corner but "shake" slightly in orientation at the end of the turn. This wobble and shake in the surface normals corresponds to the willfulness of the material idea: it is impossible to achieve turns and radii without a "recovery period" of adjustment in the form immediately before and after the turn.

Spacers are arrayed along the form so that they follow the curved trajectory of the rolled tube.

The spaces are designed so that there is a rigid lock between adjacent profiles, while allowing: 1) flat custom cuts to vary the angle between sections; 2) drift between the placement of the spaces so they can follow a curve instead of straight line.

Greatly encouraged

Hidden behind the Mona Lisa’s smile is a mysterious code made of letters and numbers, according to a controversial claim by members of Italy’s High Council of Painting, Sculpture, and Sorcery.  Members of the council found that magnifying high-resolution images of the world’s most famous painting revealed hidden letters and numbers added by Leonardo.  Da Vinci, said Silvio Silvusconi, chairman and Grand Wizard of the High Council.  “To the untrained eye, the symbols are hard to discern, however, with a microscope, you can see the letters”.  Silvusconi speculated the symbols (somewhat hard to make out) could be a number of things, including Leonardo’s initials, the phrase B-I-N-G-O, or a recipe for brownies.

A more likely theory is that in an effort to thumb his nose at the Pope, the Renaissance master was actually embedding a code revealing ancient eastern techniques of Tantra.  Known as “Monato” from the Italian word “Monare” (meaning to moan), the technique created subtle sensory effects effects that confuse the central nervous system and promote an explosive reaction of great pleasure.

Obviously this discovery sheds new light on the mystery of the Mona Lisa Smile. While previous theories have speculated the woman was happily pregnant, suffering from emphysema, or awash in the intoxication of chemical inhalants, the High Council now finds it more likely that the Master’s subject was painted after a decent roll in the hay.

Dan Brown fans everywhere are said to be “greatly encouraged” by these new technical advances.

An expedient fig leaf

Alison Gregor’s article on re-purposed building materials works hard to see innovation where there is none to be found. Yes, sustainability and recycling are virtues in construction, but the shipping container projects of which the author is so enamored are nostalgic, kitsch architectures. They provide at best, the images of innovation and fiscal chastity without the substance.

Shipping containers, it turns out, are poor substitutes for other construction methods. Steel is a terrible insulator. Toxic chemicals abound in the painted walls and quarantine chemicals applied to the flooring (including arsenic and chromium). An entire generation of architectural students learned this lesson in the 1990′s when containers were briefly in vogue as a subject of design study.

The Real Estate Industry, embarrassed by its excesses of the last decade, has predictably gone shopping for the most expedient fig leaf. We should ignore it.

Coral Gables

I recently returned Miami, more specifically Coral Gables, Florida.  Here is  what I observed…

Each morning a young man, eyes ringed with exhaust soot, drags a shoulder harness carrying a 150  HP Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine from a worn pick-up truck.  With a quick jerk of his arm the blower sputters to life, ejects puffs of black smoke, and drools diesel oil on the immaculate green grass.  He wears the same earmuffs used by airport ground crews; the neighbors do not.

This young man then proceeds on a well orchestrated flight plan along the perimeter of the yard blowing leaves in his path using a sweeping motion from side to side.  As he throttles the blower it coughs, he coughs, and both spit phlegm onto the grass – his yellow bile, the machine’s black bile.  He finishes, wipes his brow with a soot-covered handkerchief and shuffles back to the truck and drives away as black puffs of smoke are ejected from the rusted exhaust pipe.

Ten minutes later a slightly different worn pick-up truck pulls up to the house next door and a young man, eyes ringed with exhaust soot, drags a shoulder harness carrying a 150  HP Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine from a worn pick-up truck.  With a quick jerk of his arm the blower sputters to life, ejects puffs of black smoke, and drools diesel oil on the immaculate green grass.  He wears the same earmuffs used by airport ground crews; the neighbors do not.

This young man then proceeds on a well orchestrated flight plan along the perimeter of the yard blowing leaves in his path using a sweeping motion from side to side as he blows the leaves back into the neighbor’s yard from which they originated only a few minutes before.  As he throttles the blower it coughs, he coughs, and both spit phlegm onto the grass – his yellow bile, the machine’s black bile.  He finishes, wipes his brow with a soot-covered handkerchief and shuffles back to the truck and drives away as black puffs of smoke are ejected from the rusted exhaust pipe.

The leaf blowers are wielded by young men who commute over an hour every day to the upscale suburbs of Miami.  They are overseen by homeowners, who, perhaps afraid of diabetes and high blood pressure and on the recommendation of their doctors, hurriedly hand the young men envelopes filled with cash before climbing into their SUV’s for a trip to the gym. The gym is in South Beach.  It has huge glass windows and it is cooled to a comfortable 65 degrees.

At the end of this transaction, many gallons of fuel later, not a single leaf has been been removed from anyone’s yard. They have, however, been thoroughly shuffled.

Michigan Central Station: Beaux-Arts Damsel in Distress

Michigan Central Station is a grand Beaux-Arts building in the Corktown district of Detroit. Built in 1913, it used to serve thousands of rail passengers daily, with two hundred trains passing through the hub every day at peak traffic time. After the decline of passenger rail travel, the building fell into disuse and was eventually abandoned. The building has not remained empty for lack of trying to fill it with something, and it remains adored for its use of classical forms and motifs, including an entrance lobby modeled after Roman baths. There have been proposals to use it as police headquarters, a casino, and a trade processing center. All the plans have fallen apart for one reason or another.

Why would a train station have lobbies that imitate the architecture of Roman baths? Baths are for bathing and train stations are for things to do with trains. Was the architecture ever a good idea? Or was the train station successful in its time because it was the only large train station in the region during a time of rapid economic expansion?

The trouble with Beaux-Arts is that it’s hard to fill up classical forms without classical cultures. Once upon a time, the cornice, Doric columns, entablature, harmonious facade proportions, and colonnades, meant something to the viewer and performed a social function. Stripped of their cultural guts, classical forms persisted, but had to be filled in a different way as they were revisited by waves of successive architectural movements. Rail station lobbies got jammed into Roman baths. Classical form became a kind of seductive advertisement for its own existence long after the supporting cultural framework was stripped away.  We’ve been programmed to know and love it by sheer volume of repetition.

The trouble is that the love of classical form, and the programmed memory of how it should look, remains compelling even while the building decays. It seduces the public into dreaming up new uses for it. The decay of the building dramatizes the agony of formal collapse in a slow, wrenching departure from ideal form. Michigan Central is a damsel in distress, her condition melodramatic as we observe the slow collapse of the perfect classical forms. It almost physically painful to watch the thing slowly fall out of conformity with the standards of classicism. And the pain comes packaged with the guilty pleasures of watching something naughty happen to something beautiful; the building appears in countless photographs documenting the elegance and titillation of its ruin.

Dreaming up new uses for the building are dreams of becoming a heroic rescuer to the distressed maiden. The dreams are self-glorifying as much as they are motivated by genuine interest in historic preservation. Or perhaps more accurately, there is no real distinction between an altruistic motive to preserve the building and a self-aggrandizing impulse motivated by the building’s pitiable appeals of beauty under duress.

The upside is that at a certain point the pain will subside and be replaced by pleasure. If we’ve been programmed to venerate classical form, we also love a good ruin. Barring a major public works project to restore and re-use the station, we just have to wait for it to crumble into a sufficient state of rubbled collapse — there is a tipping point beyond our desire to restore perfection, where the entropy of a ruin, the grand sense of elapsed time, allows us the greater pleasure of imagining a grandiose perfection that never was.

Restore it or keep a stiff upper lip while the thing falls to pieces. The pain is only temporary, and a good melodrama has its own pleasures. In either future, a happy ending.

Downtown Los Angeles Lobby Rennovation III

Here are some study models for the lobby renovation project downtown. In both models, we’re trying to make graphics deep in a way that allows built material to occupy that depth. We want to design objects that can insinuate themselves into the graphic and then peel away into the real space of the room.

The foggy shadow patterns of the last studies have been turned into stripy, linear figures that meander across the walls and ceiling. The figure has an optical jitter that we think gives the foggy drawing a shimmery material quality.  It is important to us that this register as a synthetic material in optical space – a  tentacled creature adrift in a painty sea. (In other words, we don’t want to be drawing a picture of something, we want to be generating a thing.)

We think the shimmery qualities of our graphic are related to optical contrast phenomena. When contrasting tones are put next to one another, the human visual system amplifies the perception of the most intense tone and suppresses the perception of surrounding tones. This exaggeration of perception – called lateral inhibition – tends to increase sharpness and create the false perception of tone where there is none.  We understand this to mean (perhaps incorrectly) that color can appear to “leak” when contrast is high and the region of tones is small.

For examples of this phenomenon, look at the Hermann Grid Illusion or the Mach Band.

Downtown Los Angeles Lobby Renovation

We’ve settled on a graphic technique for the lobby renovation project.

The scheme uses a large number of slightly tapered parallel stripes. Viewed frontally the stripes look like shading on a flat surface. They produce an optical jitter and at the same time imply that the wall is made of soft, billowy material. Viewed obliquely the stripes and the wall blur into a fog. It looks like you can touch cloudiness. The flat plane is no longer distinct.

Color is a control device to determine the kind of fog we’re able to achieve:  smoky, misty, dusky, murky, aqueous.

Black and white (frontal)

Black and white (oblique)

Lavender (frontal)

Lavender (oblique)

New Project: Downtown Los Angeles Lobby Renovation

We’re working on a new project to renovate the lobby of residential building in Downtown Los Angeles. The building has a lot of walls. Most buildings do, but this one more so. Built in 1906, the structure has changed ownership and use several times. Each new owner, confronted with the problem of how to bend the building to a new use and program, decided to add more walls instead of gutting the thing and starting over.  The lobby, for instance, is roughly a 20′ x 30′ rectangle compromised 20 different vertical wall surfaces (a conservative accounting). There are now so many walls it’s impossible to trace the genealogy of any particular surface. Each wall is the result of necessity (fireproofing around columns,) programmatic demands (enclosing a stair), and whim (separating the elevator vestibule from the rest of the lobby). Untangling the use value of each wall would be almost impossible, so we’re going to embrace them and create more of our own.

What if walls were deep instead of flat? What if graphic and color got confused with three-dimensional objects? Sure, all colors and graphics impact the spatial character of a room, but we’re talking about something more. We want to manufacture more space without changing the size of a room.

Trompe-l’oeil is one method of doing this by using an extremely realistic painting or drawing to fool the viewer into thinking that a flat image is actually real, occupiable space. One of our favorite examples of this technique is Palladio’s Teatro Olympico in Vicenza, Italy. The theater uses forced perspective and a trompe-l’oeil painted set to give the appearance of a street-scene just beyond the stage. The combined techniques allow productions in the Theater to convincingly stage largeness, communicate qualities like vastness and grandeur.

Vicenza Teatro Olimpico

Veneto Vicenza

Theater

Trompe-l’oeil makes deep space on walls by making it look as though the rules of perspective project through a surface, but there are other ways to achieve depth. Walls can be shaded to imply material qualities, like painting the shadows of drapery on a surface to make it look soft and pliable. Optical effects achieve depth in yet a different way: they don’t represent form (as in painting a realistic picture), they engage the mechanics of sight to create the perception of qualities that don’t exist; colors and lines can be used to achieve a kind of direct “feeling in the eye.”

Here’s a sample of design studies we’re doing for the lobby renovation project. Each pairs an idea about form with an idea about color in order to achieve depth in a flat plane. In our office, these are “sketches.” They’re what we do to find design after we have established intent. In the early phases of a project will produce hundreds of images like these.

Lobby study

Lobby study (b)

Analog Vitality –

“Computing” sounds obvious. It is not. The popular conception of a computer as a digital device that executes software programs is a fairly new concept, and an incomplete reading of the term.  At its root, the verb “to compute” has more to do with a rigorous construction of problem-solving techniques. The development of computation has been deeply enmeshed with the embodiment of computational techniques in machines, but it is only in the last few decades that those machines have been digital. Although it has been a great boon to the flexibility of computers – allowing their application to almost any imaginable task though the development of new software – the transition to digital technologies was at first a great mathematical and intellectual sacrifice. Whereas their analog predecessors could theoretically solve problems with the entire range of real numbers digital computers first require that problems be “quantized” in increments.

The Waterintegrator

Analog computing uses a physical medium (water under pressure for instance, or maybe the flow of electricity) as a model to solve a problem. Sometimes one physical phenomenon is used to model another phenomenon that is too large or abstract to measure. In 1936, for instance, the Soviets built the Water Integrator, capable of solving differential equations by the flow of water between pressurized tanks.

The DELTAR

Dutch researchers constructed DELTAR in 1960 (the Dutch acronym for Delta Tide Analog Calculator) to model the behaviors of several flood-prone rivers based on the physical analogy that flowing water behaves much like flowing electricity.

The MONIAC

MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analog Computer), built in 1949, again used water flowing between a system of tanks to model the national economy of the United Kingdom.

In any of these examples, the hallmark of analog computing is a continuously variable, physical system that models as a stand-in for some other phenomenon. (Let’s expose this history lesson right here and now for what it is: an agenda. We locate the source of our contemporary architectural troubles in the shift from analog to digital computing. We propose a return to analog conceptions of the computer to achieve a perhaps richer set of outcomes.)

What might seem a hard-nosed, counter-revolutionary, back-to-basics return to the analog is in fact an insistence on a return to territories of computing that were passed by in a rush to achieve particular aesthetic outcomes. The latent agenda of this return to an analog conception of computing might be termed:

• Vital Experimentation: The physical media used in analog computing privilege the possibility of experimentation, of achieving novel, unanticipated outcomes, activated by the latent material intelligence or willfulness of any model.

• Bypassing Language: Analog computing privileges behavior over language. The challenge of digital computing is one of lingual translation, restating a problem to be solved in the incremental units of rational numbers. The challenge of analog computing is the precise measurement of outcomes that have been modeled physically.

• Managing Complexity: Complexity is inherent, and inherently managed, in analog computing devices.

We love maps

We love maps because they seem like a pure expression of data, of geometric fact, but in fact are deeply entangled with bias and human behavior. And we love maps because they are instrumental: the way we see the world graphically on a sheet of paper becomes the way we imagine the world becomes the way we inhabit that world. The Mercator projection map of the earth is a wonderful example of this entanglement. Originally developed as a navigational tool for ships, the Mercator map is valuable because it shows certain nautical routes (so-called “rhumb lines”) as straight lines, and can be published to fill a neatly portable, rectangular sheet of paper. As a consequence of showing the round earth in this flattened format, the most popular version of the Mercator map shrinks the size of Africa, inflates the size of Greenland, makes North “up” and South “down,” slices off a piece of Russia, and shows the Atlantic shipping lanes between Europe and America as the center of the world. A well-meaning cartographer’s abstraction becomes a parable of racism, imperialism, cold war politics, and first-world vs third-world flows of global capital. The push and pull of the Mercator projection on area and orientation exert literal pressures on the sociological reception and utility of the map.

Causality flows in the other direction, too. In 1961, cartographer Arthur Robinson, commissioned to produce a Mercator alternative that was “pleasing to the eye of general viewers,” invented a new method of projection to describe the round earth that fit the continents within a kind of squashed circle instead of the Mercator rectangle. (While we won’t parse the phrase “pleasing to the eye” at great length, we can only assume that as a criterion, it embodied the current state of the map-viewer’s biases. We’re imagining a dinner-time conversation that goes something like, “Don’t you think it would be nice if our map showed a little less Russia and little more Mexico, dear? You know I’ve always wanted that Acapulco vacation.” [Forgive the period-specific vacation destination. Of course today one would never dream of vacationing in Acapulco.]) The map was used in official National Geographic Society publications from 1988 to 1998, but was eventually abandoned because the complex system of projection extends the points of the poles into long lines and does not accurately represent the shape or area of geographic formations.

By definition, maps force their makers and their viewers to make choices and priviledge one set of values over another. When cartographers draw the three-dimensional earth on a flat sheet of paper, they can choose between preserving shape locally (so that that the boundaries of continents are accurate, for instance) or preserving area (so that continents are the right size). But they can’t do both at the same time. Each choice provokes a cascade of consequences, some of which the cartographer gets to make, other just unavoidable consequences that emerge from the process. And the choices get pretty fundamental. Almost all maps, for instance, assume that the earth is spherical. Map projections find ways to convert this spherical topology to a flat plane. But of course the earth is not a sphere, it’s a slightly lopsided ellipsoid with a fat midsection. And so it goes…the aura of the map as a truth-telling device dims, politics blur into geometry, design etches indelible consquences…

Here is a sampling of our favorite maps:

Barn-House Lexicon

The Los Angeles Design Group (The LADG) is starting a project for a residence in rural Minnesota. The client brief specifies the use of ecologically responsible design and a farmhouse vernacular style. This demand has ginned-up a small crisis in our firm.

Well, two crises actually. First, there is an image crisis. Scanning real estate listings, it is clear that farmhouse is a term loaded with power to differentiate one house from another in a shoppers mind. Farmhouse is different than ranch house is different than rambler. In this informal real estate survey, farmhouse does not seem to be a precise type with organization and formal characteristics. Unlike brick house it does not imply a construction technique and set of possible outcomes specific to its material. Instead, the word is a center of gravity for a cloud of thumbnail images related to each other in the popular imagination. The trouble is working backward toward this image cloud. How do we build a house so that when, years later, its picture is taken, that picture will be captioned farmhouse?

Then there is a substitute crisis. The industry of so-called green building products promotes a logic of substitution where conventional products, like countertops, are swapped out for green products that have sustainable performance values or sustainable inputs, like countertops made out of recycled glass. As in the substitution of soy-based Tofurky for the genuine article, these run the risk of disappointment: disappointment in comparison to the qualities of the original (Tofurky is a listless stand-in for thanksgiving bird) and disappointment at being more of the same (Tofurky is trying to be turkey instead of simply inventing a new thanksgiving food made out of soybeans). At best the outcome is to avoid disappointment.

 

The Substitute

We are intent on finding ways to sidestep both crises. Both are in a way stuck in a discussion about the value of reproduction ñ reproduction either of a romantic, popular image or reproduction a conventional building component where the original thing, the thing being copied, persists as a reference for the measurement of success. Our engagement with the client brief – both the vernacular and the green is a mandate to operate instead of copy. It means that we will scour technique for opportunities to induce change and generate novelty. A green window that looks exactly like a conventional window is, to us, a missed opportunity to speculate about possible futures motivated by differences in performance values between the two types of window. Similarly, a gabled roof is, to us, an opportunity to speculate about possible futures for design moves that have fallen out of favor in the contemporary avant-garde. To that end, we are assembling a lexicon of terms that we think have the potential to motivate novelty. In each case, the terms have been abstracted somewhat to make them more easily applicable to our work as operations and arguments about material ordering systems instead of images. Weíre hoping this degree of abstraction doesn’t impede readability.

So without further ado, here is the beginning of the lexicon:

Corbel: When a mass is sheared, a response that maintains poise. Corbels emerge  in a mass that would otherwise droop, sag, or fail when it encounters a cantilever or span. Force is retransmitted through the corbels along a path that the materiality of the mass can accommodate without failure. They are spongey and porous tissue, not a smooth re-shaping of the mass to a structurally poised, static form, but an additive that visually registers the act of compensation.  Corbels preserve material continuity — they are made of the same “stuff” as the mass itself. They are distinct from other responses that accommodate similar structural crises by switching materiality (ie. transitioning from wood steel beams in order to accommodate a cantilever).

Maisons a Colombag

Svedborg Museum

Dormer: A way of making oblique or curved surfaces habitable from the underside. Dormers reinforce difference between volume and surface – they are the place where the requirements of the interior swell beyond the limits of the surface that wraps it. As such they are antagonistic to smoothness and force an accommodating move if continuity is to be maintained. They force a choice between expanding the plastic limits of the roof surface to fold and skin the dormer or allowing volume to be registered as solid, substantial material, independent of the skin that defines its limits. In other words, a choice between a surficial, externally focused architecture and an architecture that can conceive of negative space (the empty, habitable space inside a house) as solid material, thick with its own sets of requirements and performance characteristics. Dormers presume orientation with respect to the body and as such are a little bit about phenomenology whether you like it or not: up is in the direction of standing; habitability is the capacity to traverse the area under a dormer without hitting your head.

German granaries on the Brda rive

Colombier at Manoir d'Ango near Dieppe

Ames Gate Lodge by H. H. Richardson

Granary in Zurich, circa 1897

Straw Bale Wall: A way of thickening the region of exchange between inside and outside in order to slow down transmission of energy. The energy transmitted through this region is both physical and informational. Physically, the conduction of heat through the wall is slowed by high thermal resistivity of cellulose. Heat is slow to move from one side of the wall to another. Straw bale walls also necessitate a theory of the occupantís gaze and the amount of visual information stored in the region between inside and outside. Looking through a cut in a thick wall implies perception of distance, so that the thickness itself becomes a surface populated by information (detailing of frames around doors and windows, for instance). In this sense, the thick region is information-dense and perceptually slow

Strawbale Construction

Thoughts on prototypes

This article in Wired made us wonder, what makes a prototype better then its mass-produced offspring?

One answer: using off-the-shelf componentry to solve aesthetic and engineering problems produces novel design.  Material transitions are expressed, not suppressed.  At the same time, the individuality of the components is overwhelmed by the performance ambitions of the prototype itself. The prototype is stuck between parts and wholes.

The endgame of this experiment has a degree of absurdity. It’s catchy. It rhymes instead of repeats. (Rhymes in the way componentry is organized to kind of look like the final product but not exactly, not just yet at this stage of production.) The baggage of slick focused-grouped packaging and overuse of the fillet as a means for resolving edges falls away.

COOP Himmblau – MINI temporary opera

Wolf Prix of the Viennese architecture firm Coop Himmelblau frequently refers to his buildings as pieces on a chessboard: characters that make moves on an urban grid. This has always stuck us as being a little bit lunatic and a little bit dangerous. Every other contemporary architect we can think of would flinch and starting sweating with nervous anxiety if buildings were compared to people, but Mr. prix almost invites that kind of thinking. It’s  as though his structures are waiting for an analyst to have a decent chat about their perverse behaviors and Oedipal complexes. Coop buildings are, after all, known for being intentionally ugly. (Okay, so we’re doubtless putting some words in his mouth, but still…no?)

Coop just finished the visually arresting MINI temporary opera house in Munich, Germany. What kind of moves does this thing make, anyway? We sent our Munich agent from KF Corporation to investigate. (He’s the one who looks like a miniature Karl Lagerfeld, or maybe Sacha Distel for you French Pop nerds.)

1. It’s aggressive; it gets it’s hackles up. Of course there’s the obvious sprout of stiletto blades bursting from one side, but there other signs of this thing’s fighting spirit. It has an aggressive stance, like a badger cornered at one end of the public square, slightly off-axis. It’s low and hunched. It bristles its quills. It’s a loner, nothing like the other buildings around it. It’s a fighting color, metallic like knife blades and cyclone fences.

2. It rolls out the red carpet for itself, literally. The building is theatrical, and goes to great lengths to set the stage for itself, to let the viewer know that it is aware of its own theatricality. It’s a ham, a born performer, an actor.

3. It cares. From its situation in a public square to its personal red carpet to its look-at-me form, MINI is a building that wants to engage the public. It cares about the role of private buildings in public space, it demands conversation about architecture and the public good.