S K Y L I N E | Ways of Being
The stickiness of Carbon Form, solar diversity, Rural Studio, and Tropical Modernism
Issue 53. If someone forwarded you SKYLINE, sign up here to receive it weekly.
In this week's SKYLINE, the dispatches are full of people looking for alternative ways to be in this field and declining to fixate what something looks like. NICHOLAS RAAP reports from the final session of Confronting Carbon Form where the panelists describe a “stuckness” and need for correction, NICOLAS KEMPER observes Keller Easterling's response to Geoffrey Bawa's insistence on being on site, SOFIA GULAID relays new forays in intelligent solar harvesting, and JEDY LAU shares how Rural Studio is interested what something is "made of, who builds it, and what it affords."
Spring lecture series are ramping up next week, albeit with a delayed start as we all rearrange ourselves in the ongoing in-person-or-remote charade. U.C. Berkeley’s CED will host Berlin-based architect and Arno Brandlhuber, who I hope will elucidate his practice's way of being (and appearing), and his multiple projects that include the character "+". There will also be an AA files launch this weekend, events at the Farrell Centre and Columbia GSAPP, and an exhibition opening at the Cooper Hewitt. Have a great week.
—Tiffany Xu
1/15: Confronting Carbon Form, Pt 5
Confrontations collided in the concluding fifth session of Log 47: Confronting Carbon Form, organized by ANYONE CORPORATION and moderated by scholars ELISA ITURBE, STANLEY CHO, and ALICAN TAYLAN. Returning participants LIZZIE YARINA of MIT, BRITTANY UTTING and ALBERT POPE of Rice Architecture, MATTHEW SOULES of University of British Columbia, KEITH KRUMWIEDE of California College of the Arts, and CARA NEW DAGGETT (“the lone non-architect,” in her words) of Virginia Tech, closed the series with an ambitious conversation that ranged from a critique of urban enclaves to tendencies toward binaries. Yarina and Utting mentioned mega developments. Krumwiede and Pope focused on suburban sprawl. The group discussed the extent to which such separatist spaces are corrigible. Daggett brought up desire and stuckness. The concept of typology was contested.
But while the discursive ghosts of well worn debates occasionally lingered, Carbon Form’s participants are interested in what lays ahead. Soules challenged the discipline to alter its record of doing “a relatively poor job at holding a number of lenses in play simultaneously.” He calls for an architecture that is still more capacious: not just form or function, aesthetics or ethics, economy or ecology, not “mutually exclusive binaries…[but] more attuned to these kinds of relations, and holding them simultaneously.” This confrontation is far from over: Keep your eyes peeled for Confronting Carbon Form’s forthcoming exhibition in 2023.
—Nicholas Raap
1/17: You had to be there
"You cannot have an answer to playing pool—you can only react to the next arrangement of the balls on the pool table. And a good player knows how to react to those conditions," said architecture professor KELLER EASTERLING, as though to set up the title of the exhibition, “It is Essential to be There” that opens on February 1st at the Geoffrey Bawa Trust in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The title pulls from a quip by Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa about the importance of the site to design, and implicitly lays a case against the internationalization of architecture. Easterling was in conversation over zoom with SHAYARI DE SILVA, the Curator of Art & Archival Collections and organizer of the exhibition.
Easterling primarily focused on her recent book Medium Design, asking, as architect MITCH MCEWEN of Atelier Office put in her review of the book, “us to be aware of what we are doing and not doing in deep ways.” Easterling was de Silva’s professor (and, full disclosure, my classmate) in architecture school and it was probably not a coincidence that the book and the journal de Silva edited, Perspecta 51: Medium, shared a name.
In the talk, Easterling urged architects to move away from “geometric shapes and outlines” and look instead “at the rules and relationships that shape our space.” Easterling can be oblique in her methods—she cites rumors as an effective tool. But this morning, Easterling saw a kindred contextualist in Geoffrey Bawa. Bawa, who graduated from the AA in London at the age of 38 before returning to Sri Lanka in 1957. Bawa is widely regarded as the father of Tropical Modernism, a legacy Easterling addressed: his work was “not an attempt to make the hybrid or the combination (what you see in colonial and postcolonial architecture) - not the assimilated flattening—things remain distinct and lumpy, so you can see that China pattern and read where it comes from—but at the same time it must sit next to something else."
—Nicolas Kemper
1/19: Solar Intelligence
When it comes to the average solar panel, they all look exactly alike, but are serving drastically different contexts, said designers and educators PROVIDES NG, ALBERTO FERNANDEZ, and DAVID DORIA at their research collective’s, REAr (Rational Energy ARchitects), brainstorming session hosted by The Bartlett on Wednesday evening. The three asked: How can we reach consensus on solar transitions as humans, who are inherently diverse? Drawing upon interdisciplinary examples from the Dyson sphere, to works such as Jonah Freeman’s “The Franklin Abraham,” to biodesign, the session showcased the collective’s speculative design projects where they look to other organisms: Plants do not have to agree on everything to survive; They compete and collaborate, and each species develops its own method for collective light harvesting. Equipped with bio-inspired intelligence and rule-based and machine learning systems, REAr explores the circular feedback between machines and humans. In perpetually visualizing and iterating on possible reconfigurations of these relationships, their projects explore the possibility of such a decentralized energy system in the near future.
—Sofia Gulaid
1/19: Sustainable Rural Living
Rural Studio’s lecture, The Challenges of Sustainable Rural Living, organized by the Architectural League of New York and originally hosted by the Cooper Union, finally took place on Wednesday after being postponed for two years and forced back online at the last minute.
"We take our work seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously", said ANDREW FREEAR, director of Rural Studio, between presenting a photograph of students donning costumes as porta potties at a final review, and a slate of recent works. Since its founding in 1993, Rural Studio, a program within Auburn University, has completed over 200 projects serving its home base Hale County, Alabama and its neighboring regions; many were constructed by the students themselves. Freear and Associate Director RUSTY SMITH, presented numerous works that included Newbern Town Hall, Perry Lakes Park Birding Tower, public restrooms, bridges, ball parks, community parks, Akron Boys and Girls Center, farmers markets, and much more. The majority are timber construction and many occupy dilapidated buildings that have been abandoned, damaged by arson, or fallen into disrepair.
The buildings are the tip of the iceberg of the Rural Studio’s Front Porch Initiative, a feedback loop of research, advocacy, and training that questions conventional building practices. The initiative proposes an intellectual framework that concerns less with how a wall looks than what it's made of, who builds it, and what it affords. When asked about the intricacies of building in rural areas where regulations are scant, Smith answers: "When nobody's watching, that's when it's most important to do the right thing."
—Jedy Lau
EYES ON SKYLINE
(The most-clicked links from Skyline 52)
Many of you were interested in Sammy Medina’s take on SO-IL’s Amant Foundation.
IN THE NEWS
Speaking of Ukraine, a story of learning architecture in Soviet Kiev: "I come from Uganda and I’m an architect, scholar, and educator. I was trained in Soviet Ukraine, and I still have good memories of my time there. At that time, I entered adulthood and I was forming my tools as a professional. I have good memories of Kyiv—I miss it in a way—"
Zaha Hadid Architects has paid almost $16million to keep founder’s name
…Block-For-Block, another entry for unbuilt New York...
The Spanish architect and master of blocky architecture that inspired games and served as show sets Ricardo Bofill has passed away at age 82
CALL FOR DESIGNS
The deadline is February 12 for designs for a 100% affordable 5 WTC. Register here.
DATELINE
The week ahead...
1/21 Friday
1:00 PM | AA Files
1/22 Saturday
FOREIGN EXCHANGE: 18TH-CENTURY DESIGN ON THE MOVE
10:00 AM | Cooper Hewitt
1/24 1/21 FridayMonday
Brigitte Shim, Shim-Sutcliffe Architects: “Crafting Place”
6:30 PM | Columbia GSAPP
1/25 Tuesday
8:00 PM | ICAA
1/26 Wed
Arno Brandlhuber + Olaf Grawert | B+ with Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert
11:00 AM | University of California Berkeley
Towards Another Architecture with Gonzalo Herrero Delicado
12:30 PM | The Farrell Centre
1/27 Thu
11th Annual Women in Architecture Recognition Award and Holiday Party
6:30 PM | Center for Architecture