Architecture that Challenges your Concept of Reality | Mark Foster Gage | TEDxMidAtlantic

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so typically when architects are invited to speak in front of audiences there's an expectation that we're going to talk about things that are new some fantastic new 3d printing technology or the solution to climate change I'm not gonna do any of that I'm gonna talk about something old and boring which is philosophy my life kind of occurs at the intersection of architecture technology and philosophy and architecture is what I do technology is how I do it but philosophy is why I do it and I think oftentimes it's overlooked in favor of the newness and novelty of the technology or the work itself the particular expertise I have in philosophy is aesthetic philosophy which is the philosophy of how you relate to the world of how you relate to appearances and how you relate to the realities behind them so in order to share with you this one particularly useful idea from aesthetic theory that I I'm going to talk about I need to start by telling you a story so I'm gonna take you back to 1980 if you're having a hard time picturing yourself in 1980 you just had less money and more hair so it was right after the Star Wars movies and I desperately wanted to go as c-3po and if you don't know who c-3po is you need to be smacked he's a gold robot in case you don't know but we were a military family and we didn't have a lot of extra money laying around so my family couldn't buy the official mask which was plastic but my mom offered to make an outfit so she went to the store she bought a bunch of gold fabric she bought me some made some custom gold pants a gold shirt a kind of gold hood a little round thing and then she cut out the eyes from the hood and cut out a square mouth just like c-3po and I put on the hood and I was all ready to go out with my friends and I realized I couldn't see a damn thing she had cut the eye holes in a different location than my eyes so I went out as well she's very quick thinking on her feet and she just decided to cut out the whole face since sent me on my way and it worked I'm walking down the street people like hey they're going to c-3po until we get to this one house and this woman comes to the door we say trick-or-treat and she looks at me and she goes oh you are just adorable are you corn so it hurt it still hurts but I'm gonna use that tail to tell you a little bit about aesthetic philosophy and the tale is this that there's you there's the world of appearances and then there's your assumption of the reality behind those appearances so the woman and I both saw the appearances which is little boy in a gold outfit but we had different assumptions of the reality behind those appearances and I'm gonna give you a kind of aesthetic philosophers view of the human condition right here when people have different assumptions of reality and they're more or less close when there's slippage --is it almost always comes off as humor so most sitcoms rely on things like oh I finished that beef stew that was the dog's food you know some like stupid misalignment of little realities and it's it's it's a joy this is why we have things like Ted this is the human condition that we have different perspectives but it becomes problematic as your assumptions of reality get farther apart when assumptions of reality get a little bit farther apart you get things like bigotry when these people hear of an assumption of reality and they don't want to associate with people over here that have a different assumption of reality when they get even farther apart you get things like war that these people's assumption of reality is in direct conflict with these people's assumption of reality and war is when one group tries to impose their assumption of reality on the other so this more or less defines the human condition there's not a lot of things we do outside of humor and for but what I'm interested in in my work and in writing is thinking about realities that are larger than that distance what happens when you expose people to a reality that's over here another way of describing that is just say if there's let's say there's two people arguing one is saying you deleted emails you take naps you know you kind of know the the political you kind of know how that looks lately but imagine a person here and a person here and they're having an argument but all of a sudden you put them in a proximity of a aspect of reality that's much larger than their little definitions of what's going on in that larger context their differences seem smaller and that's a social idea but it's a social idea that comes from aesthetics which is unusual so there's one really great quote that I'd like to read to you we live in a universe whose age we can't compute surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know filled with matter we can't identify operating and conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand it's a quote by Bill Bryson and it's hard to have an argument about who didn't put down the toilet seat after you've read that it should put you in a kind of like wow moment right I think architecture historically has had this idea of form follows function you've heard of it where the building is supposed to look like what it does my interest is that architecture should be form follows this form follows vastness architecture should be an ethical reminder of the things which are greater than us and in doing so make our differences seem less apparent I'm not saying it's a solution to all problems but I'm saying this is a step in one discipline and combined with other steps in all of your disciplines that's how differences get made and I'm going to show you some very modest examples of this in my work for instance a store where we wanted to dematerialize the store and in the sense I want architecture to become a perspective shifting machine so we wanted to change people's attitudes about what a store would be or what retail would be and we did this faceted structure that we covered with mirrors and this is actually a terrible photograph of it the Vogue magazine photographers spent three hours in the store said it was the most beautiful retail environment she'd ever seen but she couldn't get a single photograph of it because the reflection was so great so I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go down in history is designing the first Instagram proof room if any of you want to lock your kids in it we've done this with retail with products instead of doing this is for a fashion company hired us to design this store instead of designing racks of clothing we put them in trees if you look at the orange shirt in the back we scanned a piece of that shirt blew up the pattern and made this little alcove to the right where you could walk into this alcove and see the pattern at a larger scale then you could put on oculus rift headphones and we had a 3d scan of the fabric or you could actually walk across the fabric like a microorganism so you're looking at fashion at three different scales up in trees at the level of pattern at the level of bacteria and that's trying to get something as mundane as a shirt to be once again mysterious we try to do that with regular found objects we are probably one of the holders of the largest digital library in the world of just regular objects and we tried to recombine them in such a way that they become strange once again so we've started doing these configurations of this language we call kit bashing which is using not only a couple language to design but masses and masses of objects so this was our competition entry that didn't win didn't win so don't worry it's not going to be built but it's the Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki and to do it we used a vast amount of figures in really high-resolution and the idea is that there's millions of different ways to read this building you might see different objects than your wife sees and come up with an entirely different narrative this is a video that just shows that elevated platform and it shows how you can recognize some of these objects how some of them obscured but the point is to create not an answer not me telling you this building represents a bird but a mystery a mystery that you're allowed to dive in deeper into we also want to make these things so part of my work is research and this is a little bit of technology for you but and my work at Yale I also teach some of these techniques and kid bashing and I sent two of my students to the middle of Italy to study with master robotic Italian stone carvers and they programmed this robot on the left to carve out of solid block of marble this kid bashed language on the right and you can see a little minion in there because we literally grabbed random objects that we could find to create these kinds of structures we don't want to encode the architecture with something that you're supposed to read if we want you to give you the opportunity we want to give you an invitation to curiosity we did that again with this building which the press named the Khaleesi after Game of Thrones it's a little more obscure than c-3po so no slapping this time but it was a building on Central Park South which is intended to give something back to the city instead of a tall building being a tall abstract construction like you see in the background this was intended to provide people again with this kind of mystery in the sky that allows them to look at things in different way asks them to understand things in a different way gets them to take apart their assumptions of what architecture is or even what objects are so this building is unusual in that every piece of the building is made from something we found online you'll of course recognize the weight the wings but some of the things are much more difficult to recognize and in that sense it becomes a little bit of a puzzle my guess right now is that you're looking at things trying to imagine what it is you recognize and what it is you don't we did some collaborations with Patrick foul-weather who's a concept design artist to come up with the interior perspectives of these so you see the image of the entrance on the left the grand lobby in the middle and the sky lobby which has restaurants that let out to those large back balconies which is on the right this trickles down to some of our smaller projects like a hotel on the Left which uses the same language but uses it to appear almost cloud like hovering above the city or a residential building on the right which uses this language of objects in relief which is of course less expensive but still allows you the ability to read different ideas into it the last project I'm gonna show has to deal with fractals one of the things we've been experimenting with in the office is trying to find the thing we can use that has the most possible and fractals are recursive and dense and they take incredible amounts of computer power so we actually had to design this fractal sponge in one computer and then we had to use MRI medical technique to scan it to then put it into our architectural software so what you see here are getting scans taking over that are these different layers and then we're taking aspects of these layers and using it to design for instance this building which is our national center for innovation and science in Lithuania it was our design entry for that and out of a hundred and forty-four entries ours was the only American entry which was either a finalist or an honorable mention we received the latter so it won't we built but it should so you can see the fractal language these things these pieces kind of moving around supported by earthworms you see the skin has this other level of a level of detail and you would get closer to the main entrance you see that it's it's hidden it's withdrawn its intended to withhold its mysteries and ask you to walk in through the door you see the entrance here is very thin and when you look above the entrance you see a little bit of detail and when you get closer to that detail you see another level of detail and it keeps drawing you in further and further making you question your scale relative to this making you question the assumptions of how you occupy the world the last image is of the atrium that you experience when you walk inside and it uses this fractal language and yet another way that stretches it and pulls it and implies senses of motion and aspects of science that aren't literal but are in some way again inviting a type of curiosity that once you wants to make you learn more once to destabilize your assumptions of reality now you guys have been very patient and very good and I know you wanted to see lots of really great 3d printing and stuff and I made you listen to philosophy but I'm gonna offer you all one thing to hopefully make up for it a little bit if any of you would like to go as corn for Halloween my mom is over there in the 6th row and she brought her sewing supplies thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 151,337

Rating: 4.8805642 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Design, 3D Technology, Architecture, Industrial design, Inequality, Philosophy, Social Justice, Technology, Urban Areas, Urban Planning

Id: 7v5hmQt57lc

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2017