S K Y L I N E | 44 | What does it matter what something looks like?
S K Y L I N E | 44 | What does it matter what something looks like?
We're all still thinking about the UCSB prison dorm.
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What does it matter what something looks like? I asked all of our writers to consider this question this week. When we think and write about architecture (as we do here in SKYLINE), we engage with it at a level of abstraction totally alien to most people. Most people engage with architecture as an object — something concrete and literal, a building — not as a subject — something abstracted or historical, something that often has agency. Eva Hagberg’s recent article about Heatherwick’s Lantern House is more about what it looks like (object) than what it does (subject). It read to me like a breath of fresh air, starting its analysis of the building with the same questions someone with no expertise in architecture might ask.
Next week, CCA will host a discussion about what architectural discourse looks like, and Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal will present their work at the Architectural League, which makes things that already exist and look one way look a different way. There will be more to each one than looks, I’m sure. Or maybe not. Find out in next week’s SKYLINE.
— Marianela D’Aprile
WHO CAN SEE ANYTHING FOR WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS?
I was talking to someone recently and realized that I was having a hard time describing a building that I wanted to tell them about. “It’s tall, and it has these things on it,” I said. It reminded me of all the other times I’ve tried to describe buildings and how hard it is, which is weird, because some would say I’m a professional building describer. Except I’m not, really. I’m a professional building interpreter.
Does it matter what something looks like? I think the question is: can we tell what something actually looks like? Maybe this is sort of philosophy 101 — is your red my red? — but I think we often have no idea what something looks like because absolutely everything we see is filtered through some kind of lens. Sometimes I take my students outside to look at a building, and I ask them to tell me what they see. They say things like “power” and “knowledge” and “California,” and I say no, really, what do you see, and then eventually they say things like “three windows” and “a big door,” but doesn’t it tell you something that it takes half an hour of coaching to get them to factually describe what it looks like?
I don’t think it matters what anything looks like because nothing looks like anything because who can see anything for what it actually is? What matters is what we see when we look at something and how well we can articulate that. That tall building with the things on it made me think about hope, so that’s what it looks like.
— Eva Hagberg
DISPATCHES
10/28 – Abolishing Property as Architectural Care
“What does it mean to own your body and what does space have to do with that?” RINALDO WALCOTT and DR. THANDI LOEWENSON explored this question across different scales and geographies at “Abolishing Property as Architectural Care,” the second of five conversations in the Praxes of Care lecture series, hosted by the School of Architecture at Waterloo. Walcott, the Chair of the department of sociology and equity studies at University of Toronto, developed his argument for the abolition of property and a new ethic of care through four observations. Using examples of changes in design in parks, bus shelters, and bank machines, he illustrated how urban form creates systemic fear towards “people who are deemed to be outside of the norm.” He ended with a call to action for a new kind of social commons and reclamation of territory where care functions with the desire to “live better collectively together.” Loewenson, whose PhD in Architectural Design at The Bartlett focused on contesting the extractive agendas which drive the urban development of Lusaka agreed. She discussed mineral excavation in Zambia, which once followed a model of colonial extraction and now has an “agenda of internalization towards collective and social care,” funding the construction of schools and hospitals. The talk concluded with a discussion moderated by ELLA DEN ELZENS, a designer and Waterloo professor, in which the two speakers argued that a different relationship with property could expand the definition of design. A follow-up question might be: does abolishing property have aesthetic implications?
— Poun Laura Kim
10/28 - Opening at a83
The exhibit BITS (open until December 10, 2021) opened on Thursday night at a83, also our printer, with work from the gallery’s archive by Takefumi Aida, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Graves, Edward Schmidt, Charles Luce, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, RUR/Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, Bob Stanley, Sam Tippett, and Roger Welch. Spotted: CHARLES LUCE, SAM TIPPETT, STEPHANIE BRODY-LEDERMAN, JOHN & KAREN NICHOLS, ERIK FREER, HANNAH LEE, BRUNNO DOUAT, JORDAN HRUSKA, ALEX KLIMOSKI, SAMUEL MEDINA, AYA MACEDA, and MICHAEL COHEN.
10/28 – Confronting Cities
“How do we situate the problem of the modern?” Cooper Union professor ELISA ITURBE asked LIZZIE YARINA and ALBERT POPE at the second Confronting Carbon Form conversation, hosted by the architecture journal LOG and organized by Iturbe, STANLEY CHO, and ALICAN TAYLAN. The question followed two presentations on “the city,” where case studies in Ho Chi Minh and Houston revealed divergences on the legacies of modernist urbanism and carbon form.
Questions about the role of expertise undergirded both talks. Yarina, a research fellow whose focus at the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism is on the relationship between climate models and the built environment, showed that Ho Chi Minh’s so-called resilient urbanism sustains the same destructive logics it ostensibly works against, displacing residents and climatic effects into less protected areas while relying on foreign expertise and capital for new development.
The main concern of Pope, coordinator of the research-based present/future program at Rice’s architecture school, was “how do we begin making the epistemological shifts necessary to respond to this crisis?” Comparing the need to reexamine modernist urbanism’s legacies to Doctor Frankenstein re-entering his laboratory to face the “creature he bungled at first,” he argued for reigniting a modernist sensibility of professional experimentation and applying the designer’s expertise in proposing different futures.
Both agreed that the practices and relations of experts in these processes need to operate “between [the] scales [of] the strategic and the tactical,” in Yarina’s words. But these questions are in no way settled, and the future is in no way fixed.
— Nicholas Raap
11/3 – Not “Enough” — Clarity
Pinks, blues, and greens washed the architecture presented as part of this year’s Kenneth Frampton Endowed Lecture at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. WONNE ICKX of the Mexico City based firm PRODUCTORA presented nine projects at a range of scales. The lecture yielded a variety of topics for discussion, but the two terms Ickx favored the most, “enough” and “clarity,” seemed in tension.
“We're really interested in creating buildings that are legible at a number of levels. That doesn't mean it's understandable. It's a manifestation of clear intentions and clear goals. It allows for people to react to architecture in a direct way,” shared Ickx. But how does an architect know when they’ve “done enough” in design, especially in relation to a building’s legibility? Should a term related to taste and minimalism, like “enough,” have a place in public-space design?
That’s not to say that PRODUCTORA’s nine projects were not clear. New interventions nestled into appropriate relationships with existing urban and historical contexts. Color and structure denoted form and program. However, it’s hard to square the fuzziness of a term like “enough” in a conversation around a building’s legibility.
— Charles Weak
11/3 – A Failure of Solidarity
“Shared spaces are hard to come by, and this is especially true if you don’t have money,” said sociologist ERIC KLINENBERG as he paused his lecture at the GSD on a slide showing two people sitting at a fast-food restaurant’s table. “There are places that seem accessible,” he continued, “but when you look close enough, they have signs that say, ‘no loitering.’” The result, he observes, is a public sphere that requires purchase to gain access.
Klinenberg positioned his 2018 book, Palaces for the People, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social infrastructure debate currently occupying Congress. He invited attendees to imagine an alternate United States in which a key piece of social infrastructure — the public library — did not exist. The introduction of the public library's equivalent in 2021, he argued, would be seen as a revolutionary (and hardly fundable) proposition. This alone should make us realize that the notion that we need to invest in each other already exists. "This incredibly radical idea [of social infrastructure], something that seems so outrageous, is something we already have." And that, he concluded, "tells us something profound."
— Sebastián López Cardozo
11/3 – Grounds for Play
NYRA and Urban Omnibus converged on Zoom and in Brooklyn for Grounds for Play with MARIANA MOGILEVICH, JULIA JACQUETTE, and MARIE WARSH, all three of whom have recently published books on adventure playgrounds in NYC. At the core of the sites and stories shared was the fact that children are experts at making their own worlds, and so any good play space in the city has to be in support of what kids are already doing. This is the core appeal of the adventure playground as a non-prescriptive and topographic vehicle for play.
The villains of the night weren’t risk-averse designers, but the reality of what it takes to maintain and care for exciting spaces for kids in a changing world. The aesthetics of play have less to do with sterility and bright colors and more with textured spaces of expansive possibility — characteristics we should demand of all public spaces.
— Xio Alvarez
EYES ON SKYLINE
(The most-clicked links from Skyline 43)
A bunch of you were curious about Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design, an HBCU that’s re-opening as a free design school as of March of next year. A similarly sized group clicked on Shannon Mattern’s article in Places on maintenance and care.
IN THE NEWS
…The Santa Barbara Independent broke a story about the resignation of a consulting architect on UCSB’s Design Review Committee over the design for a windowless dorm for 4,500 students, promptly dubbed “the undergrad prison” by the guerrilla comedians of twitter dot com…
…and Alexander Luckmann said in Slate that this is what happens “when we leave the public realm up to the whims of the superrich.”
…Alexandra Lange answered the question posed by last week’s Skyline: WHO CARES?
…SHoP’s shiny Brooklyn Tower is now as horrifyingly tall as it will ever be…
…and, in a sentence that seems fake but is not, STUFISH Entertainment Architects designed a transportable, hexagonal, 3,000-seat stadium for ABBA’s holographic comeback tour.
Housekeeping. Submissions due November 14 for NYRA’s inaugural essay contest!
What should the public demand from the built environment? First prize $600. Submissions due November 14. Click here for details:
DATELINE
The week ahead...
Friday, 11/5
Rethinking Concrete Construction with Philippe Block
12:00 PM | Rice University
Meadows Fellowship Symposium: Plant Potential with Sanford Kwinter, Mae-ling Lokko, Ron Finley, Oliver Kellhammer, Eduardo “Roth” Neira
2:00 PM | University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Beyond ‘Slave Food’: Re-Organizing the Perceptions and Potential of African American Foodways with Michael W. Twitty
6:00 PM | Harvard GSD
Saturday - Sunday, 11/6-7
Landscapes of Slavery, Landscapes of Freedom: The African Diaspora and the American Built Environment with Jarvis McInnis, Anne Bouie, Matthew Reeves, James French, Matthew Mulcahy, Pauline Martha Kulstad-González, Nicholas Paskert, Elleza Kelley, Max Grivno, Everett Fly, Joyce Chaplin, Andrew Sluyter, Douglass Armstrong, Sara Zewde, Justin Dunnavant, Daniel Sayers, Diane Jones Allen, Michael W. Twitty
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM (Saturday), 10 AM - 3:15 PM (Sunday) | Harvard GSD
Monday, 11/8
Generic Specificities with Elias Anastas, Yousef Anastas, Ziad Jamaleddine
12:00 PM | GSAPP
Connecting Dots: Circular Metabolism and Regenerative Practices for the XXI Century with Teresa Gali-Izard
1:30 PM | University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Baumer Series with Michael Murphy
5:30 PM | Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
Worldmakers Unite! A Loudreading Guide to the Post-Colonial Method with Cruz Garcia, Nathalie Frankowski
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
Wednesday, 11/10
Baumer Series with Luis Callejas, Charlotte Hansson
5:30 PM | Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture
Race, Space and Architecture: Reflections on a Curriculum with Suzi Hall, Huda Tayob, Thandi Loewenson, Emanuel Admassu
6:00 PM | GSAPP
Current Work: Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, and Frédéric Druot with Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal, Frédéric Druot
7:00 PM | The Architectural League of New York, American Institute of Architects New York, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union.
Imagine with Li Hu, Huang Wenjing
7:30 PM | Harvard GSD
THE MATERIALITIES OF ARCHITECTURAL DISCOURSE with Jess Myers, Cruz Garcia, Nathalie Frankowski, Kate Wagner
8:00 PM | California College of the Arts
In a Strange House with Victor Jones
10:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Thursday, 11/11
Lecture with Elaine Scarry
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
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