SKYLINE | 28 | Resource Management
with Barry Wark, Kontextur, Subtilitas, Log'rithms, the Cassatt Mansions, and Frida Escobedo
This past week Cuba witnessed the largest protests the country has seen since the Maleconazo uprising in 1994, or even the 1959 Revolution by some accounts. Immediate causes can be attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic shutting down Cuba’s tourism industry, on which the country’s state-controlled economy is highly dependent, and a number of government actions including the mismanagement of essential commodities and devaluing of one of the country’s three currencies. However it is the decades-long trade embargo enacted by the United States in 1960 that is most striking in a social environment with heightened sensitivity to systemic oppression, and which has exacerbated all material hardship that Cubans face. In the wake of the protests the world has observed Cuban President Diaz-Canel and US President Biden wipe their hands of agency from this resource disaster—in the form of crackdowns on social media and blaming anti-government supporters, and in leaving the sanctions in place and maintaining the Trump administration’s remittance restrictions.
Agency and resources—in both built and discursive space—loom large in this week’s dispatches. ANNA GIBERTINI reports back from a lecture by BARRY WARK who considers non-humans as active agents in the built environment, JACK MURPHY describes two content creators’ curation of voices and projects in a content-saturated world, PHILLIP DENNY conveys the power of materials from the second Log’rithms exponential conversation on architecture, and I share thoughts by FRIDA ESCOBEDO on the space, rights, and labor of domestic workers. Scroll to the bottom for next week’s events.
–Tiffany Xu
7/12—Degradation, Disintegration, Ruin
“There is no such thing as ancient architecture... They are all contemporary structures that are allowed to display their natural state, and they act as a bridge for us to consider a new way of designing,” said architect BARRY WARK in his lecture "Ancientness and Future Forms of Coexistence," hosted by SCI-ARC. Wark presented a model of eco-centric architecture, which de-centers humans within the built environment and makes intentional space for human and non-human lifeforms to cohabit. According to Wark, humans need to consider the aesthetics of ancientness—irregular masses, patinas, craggy facades—not as an immutable feature of the past but as contemporaneous a look as any monolithic, all-glass supertall.
Such a model requires a re-evaluation of temporal perspective. Thinking in terms of Earth-time—eons rather than millennia—allows architects’ definition of the built environment to broaden; one takes both the macro- and micro-worlds into consideration, and plans for a building’s use to extend far beyond its human occupants’ needs. Wark shared several projects featuring cliffs, grottos, serial modification, and machine learning that illustrated this point. The most illuminating example was his “House by the Sea" project, which challenges the picturesque audacity of the crisp, white, seaside cottage with a jagged textured facade that makes a perfect home for nesting birds and colonizing lichens. Compared to the saccharine green-washing that has run rampant within architectural discourse, Wark’s celebration of decay is a breath of fresh air.
-Anna Gibertini
7/15—How to Share Architectural Knowledge
“Every SEO manager would cry on our website,” KATHARINA BENJAMIN said of Kontextur, the architecture platform based in Leipzig and Berlin that she co-founded in 2017. She joined JEFF KAPLON, operator of Subtilitas on Tumblr and Instagram and partner of the architecture firm Part Office, in conversation with CHRIS MORGAN, of the architectural project management software start-up Monograph, for a weekly guest Zoom about office operations hosted by the former outfit.
The tears would flow because the website of Kontextur, designed for immersion, is incredibly slow, featuring only interviews, mostly with young European practices. (Their website contrasts with their original Instagram profile, which is responsive and interactive. Today they have 77.8k followers.) The two guests shared their initial intentions and how their platforms and audiences evolved. Benjamin started Kontextur with a friend when they were unsatisfied with the architecture scene in Germany, where it seemed the big 3-letter offices were building everything. The website format offers a way for practices to develop their stances, rather than hosting “PR people who have everything copy-and-pasteable.” Kaplon started Subtilitas on Tumblr almost twelve years ago as a response to an oversaturated architecture media landscape in which he was “struggling to find any coherent throughline.” He focuses on a lineage of work that he’s interested in and resurfacing older, different projects. (It remains a personal favorite from the golden era of Tumblr architecture blogs like Archive of Affinities or Beton Babe.) Order matters: there’s an “intention around the adjacency of the posts,” Kaplon said. He later began posting on Instagram, where today he has 59.7k followers. Kaplon is okay with staying more anonymous, and the Tumblr remains visually similar to when it started.
Both content creators noted that much of the value of their efforts is not visible to followers; it arrives in direct exchanges, the network of contributors, and the personal discovery of new practices and methodologies. Both are interested in books: Kaplon features them in a “daily read” feature on Instagram Stories and, increasingly, the Instagram feed of Kontextur includes images of print publications, new and old. Kaplon will continue posting at his own pace; lately his time goes into Part Office. Benjamin, who teaches, has plans to grow Kontextur journalistically, perhaps with maps and opinion pieces—they’re more actively looking to feature women and are interested in starting a column about architecture and money. The hour-long conversation showcased how sharing architecture can create community and sharpen our collective attention, even when it’s hosted on platforms that are doing their best to steal it away.
–Jack Murphy
7/15—The Science of Architecture
The second event in the monthly series “Log’rithms: Six Exponential Conversations in Architecture” featured design research presentations by faculty members of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Log’rithms is a collaboration of Log and CityX Venice for the Italian Virtual Pavilion at the Biennale (which you can visit online here).
Introducing the event, Log Executive Director CYNTHIA DAVIDSON clarified the terms of the discussion: “By science, we don’t mean biology or chemistry, or anything you automatically associate with the sciences.” She continued, “Rather, science here means knowledge—knowledge built from research and from experience.”
Working to address planetary challenges like the climate crisis, these architect-researchers are designing at new scales and reevaluating the fundamental stuff of building. “Today, for the first time in architecture, we can design materials to the molecule,” said Assistant Professor LAIA MOGAS-SOLDEVILA, “All to take control of the matter of architecture.”
Penn’s Chair of Architecture, WINKA DUBBELDAM, detected a profound change in architecture’s assumedly static materiality. “Typically in architecture we think of materials as passive; they’re just things that hold a building together,” Dubbeldam said. In the work of Assistant Professor DORIT AVIV and Mogas-Soldevila, materials and spaces “act as agents. They operate both internally to themselves, as well as on the outside.” It’s the outline of a new metabolism of architecture and environment based on dynamic transactions of energy and matter.
Longtime theorist-provocateur SANFORD KWINTER chimed in at the end of the session, challenging the presenters to articulate a broader philosophical position for their work. “Might anyone be willing to express a wider, more systematic allegiance to a supra-formal or worldly concern?” he asked. Answer: Yes, and no. “The challenge to to address a larger issue is challenging,” admitted panelist KAREL KLEIN, before elegantly laying out the stakes of an architecture that approaches “ecstasy,” a literary concept outlined by Welsh author ARTHUR MACHEN in his polemical 1902 book Hieroglyphics. Klein stated, “That’s been associated in the past with a kind of transcendental sensation that one found in religion; now perhaps, it’s accessed through art.” The conversation continues with Log’rithms 3: Re-origination on August 19.
—Phillip Denny
7/15—Yesteryear’s Super Wealthy
I wish I had more to report from “Living Well: the Cassatts & Their Main Line Houses,” hosted by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The lecture by historian JEFF GROFF centered more on the Cassatt family—of which the most prominent member is impressionist painter MARY CASSATT—than their Gilded Age mansions. Located in Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line suburbs, the gargantuan homes were the Cassatts’ pastoral retreats from city living—a mere 10 miles from the family’s main residences in urban Rittenhouse Square. They were built in a variety of overwrought Revivalist styles and a few still exist today as museums, community centers, and private residences. I was hoping for an in-depth look at the relationship between Gilded Age architects and their patrons, or maybe a comparison between the tastes and thinking of Philadelphia-area architects compared to those designing in New York for people like the Carnegies. Instead, the talk amounted to long-winded pap, detailing the marriages, land acquisitions, and leisure activities of yesteryear’s super wealthy. Thrilling stuff. I have never clicked “Leave Meeting” faster.
-Anna Gibertini
7/16—Spaces of Reproduction
In the latest installment of the CCA’s year-long investigation “Catching Up With Life,” FRIDA ESCOBEDO explored domestic workers’ living quarters and the role of architecture in structuring private life. The points of departure for Escobedo were two events in 2018: the release of the film Roma by Alfonso Cuarón that tracks the days of a live-in domestic worker in the neighborhood of the same name in Mexico City, and the Mexican Supreme Court’s decision to recognize domestic workers’ rights and social security. Through testimonials from domestic caregivers and floor plans of the Roma house drawn by Floor Plan Croissant and Casa Estudio designed by Luis Barragán and redrawn from her GSD studio Domestic Orbits, Escobedo questioned the invisibility of reproductive labor—most frequently performed by women—and their mirrored hiddenness in residential design. The small antechambers in Casa Estudio that allow movement among rooms without being seen were highlighted in neon green, revealing layers of performance within private space. “One of the important questions is why do we keep doing this?” Escobedo asked, “Many people recognize the work of Barrágan, but it's always about the proportions, the color, the materials, etc. We forget that there are strategies that have to do with the configuration of space... it is rearticulating something that is highly traditional." The grafting of decades-old feminist theory and the years-long research by Escobedo onto of-the-moment cultural programs underscores the slowness of inscription of thought not only in cultural consciousness, but built space. She noted, "What is really surprising to me is that every time we try to create to new architectures—we have seen [this in] the work of Mario Pani—the work is exactly the same thing. He did the first condominium building in Mexico City, but the domestic quarters are still hidden from view. The only way to enter those spaces is from the parking area."
-Tiffany Xu
IN THE NEWS
To be demolished…
Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower set to be disassembled and donated to museums or turned into rental units.
Another Amazon encroachment…
Jeff Bezos gifts the Smithsonian $200 million for National Air and Space Museum
New Commissions…
Snøhetta and HGA tapped for new Parnassus Research and Academic Building at UCSF
Design Team Led by Selldorf Architects Selected to Reimagine London’s National Gallery
Glenstone Expands With Pavilion For Richard Serra
DATELINE
The week ahead
MONDAY, 7/19
In a Garden with Brian Eno
1:00 PM | Serpentine PavillionIT IS NOT ONLY ABOUT TYPE with Maria Doreuli
6:30 PM | Cooper Union
TUESDAY, 7/20
Summer Lecture Series with Benjamin Ennemoser, Yara Feghali
10:00 AM | UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
WEDNESDAY, 7/21
2021 President’s Medal with Walter Hood
5:45 PM | Architectural League of New York
(In person! With the Marching Cobras! At Marcus Garvey Park!)After Property with Emanuel Admassu
11:30 AM | Columbia GSAPPArguments Lecture Series with Vo Trong Nghia, Jessica Ngan, Alireza Karbasioun
8:00 PM | Columbia GSAPPMaster Architects of Southern California 1920–1940: Paul R. Williams with Marc Appleton, Bret Parsons
8:00 PM | Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
Thursday, 7/22
Summer Lecture Series with Brennan Buck, Michael Pickoff
10:00 AM | UCLA Architecture and Urban DesignCAT - 'Some Fresh and Saner Way of Living’ with John Urry, Tim Coleridge
4:00 PM | Society of Architectural Historians of Great BritainA talk with Sharif Khalje, David Bench
7:00 PM | Sang's
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