"Discrimination" by Jeffrey Kipnis

good evening on behalf of the Department of Architecture and Toshiko mori I'm happy to introduce tonight's speaker Jeffrey Kipnis Jeffrey is a professor of architectural design and theory at The Ohio State University of the Knowlton School of Architecture actually has a long long history of periodic involvement with the school in 1983 and no one knows this I think he actually taught us to do with Peter Eisenman here and if I remember it was really that marked his first full entry into architectural discourse he's discussed and some of you will know these he's discussed and debated ideas about music and cept conceptual art with Jorge Silva T in the Harvard design magazine he shared theoretical anxieties with Rafael Moneo he's written some of his most important some of the most important criticism of hair SOG and de marrón and also Col Haas so he has a part of a history with the GSD No now how often can you say this Jeffrey is the best person in his field he is the best single best living writer of architectural theory of course the only three left but system still still he is he was one of the he was one of the first writers to bring the work of Jacques Derrida into architecture and as important for for our generation writing about Derrida with Derrida he actually taught many of us he taught Derrida to us more recently in an effort to mount a concerted critique of the ideology of collage which is an sort of design theory and design practice ideology and it's a century-old he's moved away from issues of deconstruction toward what I think is his most richly original thought I think they're two lines of research that are that are important and jeff's works one is out of or against collage to theorize new types of cohesion new formal organizations that are different from the fragmentation and disjunction and spacing of collage to design new realities as opposed to critiques of old ones now this has meant going deeply into architectures specific irreducibly architectural dimension and he's one of the best readers of architecture that I that I know of the deepest readers it's important that rather than applying theory Jeffery has derived theory from architectures effects now out of this shift has come out of this shift from collage has to cohesion has come the discourse that most goes by the word expertise and it's in the past couple of years that discussions of expertise architectural expertise has spread across conferences in America and Europe related to this related to expert practices is his second line of research that I think original and important and that's the research on effect mood atmosphere and the distinctions between those and this too has sponsored very fruitful research that has been taken up by by others this inauguration of sort of collective research projects the way that Jeffrey can start an inquiry that is taken up by others is part of what I regard is his extreme intellectual generosity an entire generation has benefited from that intellectual generosity we did not say he can't also be irritating and irritating is sometimes the first reaction the the students in my class in 4201 we're introduced by Jeffrey when I was giving this very clever lecture as much I think if I first liked your great clever lecture about how a Beethoven quartet and the spontaneous applause that erupts after a Beethoven quartet is material evidence of constant of the spontaneous judgment of the spontaneous individual judgment of taste and also its universality and Jeffrey from the back of the room says what if it's Barry Manilow which of course immediately undermined any credibility that I might have been able to establish but I think that that that wit and the humor that goes along with the erudition is actually legendary in his in his teachings and his writings he's published widely I'll just mention very few of the books the articles are extensive choral works the Isum and dari da collaboration perfect acts of architecture which perfect acts is one of those books that make you wish you had written that that book those and these imported a very important addition on Philip Johnson's Glass House which contains some of the best architecture writing I think out there is design and architecture curator of the Wexner Center for the Arts he organized several exhibitions maybe the most important I think being the survey mood River it had things like this sort of aesthetics of smoothing and translucency everything from toothbrushes to to to doorknobs these amazing self-defense instructor armor to this analytic array of a hundred automobile taillights it was an amazing catalog came out he's produced a film called a constructed madness which look it looks at Frank's Gary's work on the unbuilt house of Peter Lewis the subtitle is the best is called a constructive madness in which Frank Gehry in Peter Lewis spend a fortune and the decade end up with nothing and changed the world we're very fortunate to have Geoffrey giving a course here at the school I think basically we have this class here in the auditorium tonight I mean his class is almost this big it's what I mean we're fortunate to have him at the school and for tonight's lecture welcome Jeffrey that's why I don't say you have to have a gag setup I want to thank Michael obviously who wouldn't want to thank Michael for an introduction like that it's amazing um I also want to thank Toshiko for having me here it's been a long time since I've been here I'm having a ball one thing the students are fantastic it's also kind of I realized that Harvard is becoming it chips around and it's interesting to discuss why she's around and you know what Dean comes and what Dean leaves and what changes but without my realizing it Harvard is has become I think the flagship school for speculative design in the country and I think that's Toshi come and she it hasn't yet started to get the credit for that but that if you'll notice it took Columbia for a long time and I'm even but it's really quite amazing that if you look for the work that's selling possibilities in studio of caring for the research that's going to affect not just the practice but the pedagogy it's really coming from here right now it was a bit of a surprise to me to say that and since I particularly am interested in speculative practices in fact it's the only thing I'm interested in I need to say a little bit about that speculative practices are my interest to my Sensibility but I'm not opposed to conservative practices in fact I really like conservative practices I'm really glad people theorized those I mean find people do those when I go to it for it to anybody I want to go to a conservative practitioner I'm not particularly interested in being the victim of speculative practice I just like to think about it and talk about it for example if you were to go to a dentist you don't really want to speculate the dentist you want it to be exactly right sighs so I do I used to speak in opposition terms I don't really think that way anymore it's a matter of sensibility I did promise my class the first day that I would do the entire ten weeks tonight so it's going to go real fast so if it's supposed to be sort of a skiing trip for you um am i interest in the two things I want to touch on the night off my my interest is and how its architectural political I mean that's the question I'm always asking myself and I'm particularly interested in that because one thing I know for sure is not true is that it can't be political by sounding political like politics sounds like even though it tried it tried very hard to do that it continues to trying to do that I believe that it's political in way that each medium and each discipline not time about medium specificity as much so much as Disciplinary specificity discipline Disciplinary specificity means to me the way each discipline produces this a body of effects which shapes the way the world relates to that we relate to the world and to one another meaning the politics of the world and it never talks about politics and so I'm interested in that problem I particularly became interested in it because the first version of tallit political thought I mean great political thought in history of modern is a history of Architects were certainly modernism modernism effort to strategically install a new politics through our you know architectural revolution this idea T to install one in a strategic move and also that it would be related to an idea of politics a democratic idea when that failed when let's call it the coup d'etat Bismol failed architecture had to find other strategies in fact it had to abandon the idea I think of strategies and started to take up questions of tactics how could it to resist the Thais condemnation of architecture as always the friend of our how is it going to undermine its relationship to power even the without divorcing power I think what modernism proved as you can't divorce it and what those of us that continue to be interested in speculative architects are looking at is how does how do you participate with power enjoy your relationship to it it's an important thing but at the same time undermine that's why for a long time it was called critique but I think today critique is only one of the strategies that we can do that with and so tonight's talk is basically governed by that it's also governed by another it specifics will show up in a second part of that argument is that I don't think political effects on the processes of disciplines are best explained any longer I don't believe this any longer in terms of ideas I make a distinction between ideas concepts and effects we won't do that tonight but the idea the question can you install an idea or is there such a thing as adding material the materialised idea in the abstract that can go from discipline to discipline the finest instantiation I think we've learned that that's not the case so I definitely think that the question of the democratic question and architects or the political question and architecture perspective it's of architecture has moves to the problem of effect and I think that's interesting for me because I think of democracy as an idea has an idea that's debated there are nine or ten forms of democracy they're theories of democracy there's slogans of democracy but I think most theorists of freedom believe that theory is an effect theory is not freedom as a feeling that you have a confederacy of feelings that you have in relationship to the removal of the weight of unwanted Authority now there's a lot of dangers in that because how do you know when to stop the Tocqueville it basically asked the question how does America is moving toward this process mercantilism and freedom that comes with it the problem is how do I know when to stop how will I know when to stop disestablishing Authority and it's an interesting question but anyway so I'm interested in Kalama vamping but mostly as Michael talked about a little bit I'm interested in the problem of the details of how architecture takes up this problem from its own forms of expertise now I'm starting my watch this lecture is over in exactly fifty five minutes regardless of where I am so you can relax I this painting it's one of the reasons I moved to New York I absolutely loved this painting I saw when I was 15 years old I've thought a lot about it I still love it I know the joke is there's two jokes okay but I could not I don't think described to you from the point of view of painting or criticism of painting why is either a good painting or bad any why it's theoretically important what's going on with it in terms of painting so however eloquent I might be however moved I might be by however well I am able to convey that to you I'm not going to be an expert critic of this work because I don't know the problems its posing for the experts that that's posing those problems to and that leads me to this problem and that is these are buildings I'm about to tell you that recently have received incredible accolades in journalism and journalism chrism this was called the most important museum built after the Cold War which was a kind of an interesting idea this is the most important concert hall built in the century both Paul Goldberger and Herbert bleuchamp essentially said that and they hate each other and they disagree with each other about everything so you know all of a sudden you're getting these kind of accolades that I cannot figure out what did what do they mean what's it about and the other thing that's really weird about this building is after the first sentence of Frank Gehry did a really exciting building everything after it is acoustics every discussion after it is acoustics and thank you know so what's in this building and this building have exactly the same acoustic diagram and that acoustic diagram comes from this building which is the constant music music Brian Indiana it's the square footprint is the classic shoebox footprint every acoustician uses it for every concert hall there it is in Porto and if you look closely you can see it in the orchestra plan of Gary's building so the minute you're talking about the acoustics you're no longer talking about the architecture and at that kind of bug me I needed some way to think about discriminating among these projects and making a comment not to the treble is a fine journalism speaks to the general audience it has its job to do but when architectures own critical discourse becomes journalistic and starts to appropriate its understanding of its buildings and its practices from journalism that worries me and so I needed to try and see if I could put together an idea of how I was going to be a critic which is why tonight I'm giving this lecture called discriminations and it's about criticism usually I give one of the lectures Michael was talking about which is a meta critical lecture it usually has lots of movies lots of fun to watch it's fun to listen to you don't after really dealing tonight unfortunately is about criticism so you have to can deal with some architecture everybody this was the most important library I mean I was amazed by the most important library this entry in fact every time architects are built the building these days it's the most important building of the century of the week so this is so this was you know and I like this building I went to it I didn't took me it really took me two years to figure out what I thought was going on what and what I thought about the building where it stood in the discipline so I want I thought I was going to make it that sort of the focus tonight things come up I mean look at this building is should we be comparing it to Dresden's Theatre by her I mean I'm sorry by coop himmelblau it has a very similar attitude about the internal form the skin the partition made the separation of the skin from the volumes design it kind of looks like it is this the comparison we should make or is this the comparison we should make we're where the herringbone skin and the the kind of prismatic form is the real issue as these are the kinds of comparisons that we should use to discuss and I didn't know because I didn't really know what problem I understood that library to be undertaking an architectural sense if that got particularly egregious to me in the reception not by the journalistic community but by us the professional community with an expert interest on this competition because all you heard was look at how much time laser and Liz and Ric ripped each other off exactly the same project you know virtually identical and it was pathetic you know everybody's doing exactly the same thing and everybody's copying each other and it doesn't matter and of course yeah that meant a completely indiscriminate response to the work and I felt like that now I have a collection of these I have about 75 of these what I call single surface buildings oh I'm sorry so this building belongs to the problem of the single surface building this just recently opened this is the firm mini Church it belonged to the single surface building there it is it opened the discourse to using a spiraling surface as a programmatic tool so the problem is old and the problem is interesting and the problem has been going on for 10 years there are 75 at least and it's not clear it's not clear to me for example is is a single service building because it's also sometimes they look like other buildings that are really about topological problems and not really about written surface problems and here's an interesting question that as I asked you if there are 75 of these buildings I mean these projects most of them are unbuild there's in fact I don't think there's an exemplary building yet bill why is it that there's not one not one essay that you can find discussing the theoretical problem of the written surface or single surface building in ten years ten years of these projects ten years of going on why isn't it we're discussing it it's not that I blame anybody because I'm part of that I'm the one also who hasn't written these things so I get this I see this project by 100 fire scene as myself you know what what are what's at stake here was good about it what's bad about it is it adding anything is it becoming Mannerist is it how does it contribute to the project Nicholas I see this project in Seoul and it it's a strong resemblance to the other project with certain small issues and I need to be discriminant I need to be able to look at these projects in a small detail way and that had that detail make a difference to my intervention on the work how I came across this painting by Roy Lichtenstein one of my favorite painters and I was actually amazed by this painting I mean I ask you is it a good painting would you buy it do you like it is it pretty would it go in your den do you there's a subject now I mean what how would you relate to this question now it was interesting to me is this is the quit this is the painting he did a series of these paintings in the last year of his life I don't know if it means that there's some sort of tragic dimension to the work but it's completely different for 40 years for 40 years without fail he stayed dedicated no matter how often he changed his paintings and took up new problems in this mode he stayed dedicated to the black outline and so you'll see so basically so I think of this painting really is picking up a problem that I date to Cezanne in which color patchwork is used to replace my contour line and modeling to produce a painting it's not really about whether it's a you know pretty painting or tragic painting it's not about the effect it produces we are interested in the effect it produces but it is about a technical problem in painting you can trace for a long time he clearly was interested in historical paintings and how they affected his work but for example this painting on your left is heralded by scholars because it shows a new evolution of the bed they don't ability to perform a new task in other words solve the problem of how does a graphic device it flattens the work and it's completely repetitive start to indicate motion and modeling but also there's these paintings by Jonathan Lasker that that I think the other one is in dialogue and so what I think I didn't did I basically just draw the black lines back in to see could I make a judgement and I think these are the kinds of exercises I think I'm expecting all of the my critical colleagues to be doing in our work and did I want to show you that now I believe that the painting on the Left has some remarkable qualities in particular the degree to which it abandons the space of pop work the ways flit in the way it acts as a kind of abstraction but I also think it's quite a poignant and powerful painting and would be described easy to describe in journalistic terms the minute you care about it the minute you become sort of let's say attached to it emotionally you're something that you're not thinking about it as a problem in a field now tonight I'm basically going to be discussing one ninth of a book a book I'm writing part of that I'm not only telling you one night but that's usually when you give a lecture everyone in the audience can't help thing and that's all you're thinking that's all you know they come up and I say what about so-and-so and you say well I only had an hour so this one night and it's about essentially a problem which I traced back to this diagram in the same way that I might trace the lincoln sting back to the Cezanne now this is a diagram I'm not in 1914 this was a proposal for a concrete pouring system for a low cost housing it had a direct political agenda I doubt if any of many of you know and if you know it you certainly don't use it and if you if you knew it and watched its assisity it's probably in lectures as long as you've been the students at architecture if you've been you know for six years of undergraduate ready you've probably seen this a hundred times and lectures it's probably the most repeated diagram because it operates as a diagram meaning it disseminates through the field as a reorganizing engine and sets up problems not one of which can be traced to its original intentions or its political discourse so I Drive a kind of set of arguments from this diagram I'm going to do is it's about the diagram and it's basically three problems that I start to see one is that you know it all has to do with the relate how far it is from the ground basically for me the district court right mises right was close to the ground nice was kind of close but a little further away and right was far away from the ground and so I'm going to follow these diagrams and basically on most of my time is going to be on the middle diagram and only on one portion of it and that's the relationship to the ground because one of the ways architecture has been most effective at producing effects that we can argue our political or any degree to which it takes up the problem of the relationship with the building to the ground and either establishes it like a column does or dis establishes it like a fields of pillow D does so the problem of dis establishing the ground because it's not the ground it's the land land is the reason you can kill somebody with someone standing on it land is the politics of law and economies as it governs land land is the legacy of feudal of a few it's the feudal legacy in our relationship to graham and so if you can change our relationship to the ground then you've engaged in an argument which is intrinsically political without ever particularly taking up the problem I do think abou za in the the list of WOD for example very clear that it's an effort to disestablish the gram except he's interested in installing a new one so we he installed he he changes ground from land and I'm sorry he changes land to datum so that word atom so that all so by erasing the crucial differences of hierarchy and and property that are contained in the land and he installs this idea which he believes has a democratic ambition but something we should be paying attention to and that is replacing the idea of ground land and data so when I like RIT it bugs me to yours so students say you know the land or the ground of the datum as if they were interchangeable because it for me there's a crucial difference and we need to understand for example we're not we don't work on datums today what are we working on so the three are the three lines of inquiry this way I can have long arch problems there's the consensual performative and the new authenticity it's not true I don't believe it's true that practices lined up I can't say that Hertzog is one and eysan is what I think eysan is largely conceptual but it's it's not practices that line up it's projects that line up you know Einstein with the launching gave the launching insight to quantum mechanics when 1905 with the photoelectric effect which was the bane of his existence he hated it he hate you know he hated one so lots of work happens it's oh it's not about practices is about building so this is the conceptual model but it closed off the object the object has a far distance from the ground you can only understand its architecture in remove from the building so the building you can go to the building instead of the building but the point of the architecture is to operate at the level of the conceptual project and so I've discussed a little bit about why I think this building does that and that's why I also talked about the five points about how the remove the five points add up all add up to an idea of erasing the ground as land and turning it into one datum among many so the rooftop garden the horizontal wind does a blow the aisle today which means if you can get the hidden secret there's a hidden secret missing from the five points and if you think about a building and you're most you're interested in the building what is the one thing you're going to be talking about a building if you're thinking about the ground that's not in the five point it's the door and the reason there's no comment about the five in the door about the door in the five points is an unsolvable problem and so he talked about everything else but he hides the door find it for me please and he hides it eventually as he becomes more manager romantic as work the door finds a new place with it he never is really able to theorize the door because the door has an establishing effect on the ground unlike any of the conceptual effects he's able to produce with all the other elements now it's you don't have to be high off the ground I have to do is create a new relationship which distances the project from the ground and then used and also means you start to think about it now today this is a conceptual project am i thinking because the project is not about it gains its architectural energy from having relationships that you thinking about in terms of other work this is it's also says something about the ineptitude of our criticism maybe neither refers to these projects as a blob what are they talking about look if you if it's a blob how do you do the next step in a blob what does a blob do so anybody that refers to this body of work which has to do with vector primitives and how does one articulate the occupational possibility of the change in architecture fundamental change in architecture from scalar primitives to vector primitives then you can start to think about it one of the problems was for example how do you introduce apertures and the language has to change you can't use Windows you have to introduce apertures and this happens over the isoparm line so everything you see here is about working at the problem of the relationship between the vector primitive and the art in other words these windows can't be built this way and they're not going to work that way they're there as notational devices to remind you of their relationship to the isoparms of it on the work you have to be thinking about it but to solve the problem of criticality it's sent into a serialization so that the problem now is producing in other words this is the concept it's producing multiplicities and so that each individual production of the building can start to do other forms of performances condemned can be interested in materials can be interested in athletics can be interested in use and so this is the one which is sort of pretty and this you know first fairly well you don't actually need drawings you don't need to know anything about it but the project itself is the relationship between this this object and all of the ones in its family and expose the production it's very much like this this is a Roxy pain you know Roxy Payne's worked it's kind of a nice gooey thing and looks pretty neat and you know you kind of look like ice cream and that took me absolutely forever you cannot imagine how much peanut butter I had to put on that name but in fact this is the conceptual project there's a painting machine which essentially puts produces a large number of similar families of work so this is the concept of the project this is the artistic aspect of the project and he separated that from the perform from the let's say the way the perform the object performs that concept is a score one at a time you know these are probably if you're interested in new materials you would think this is the standard understanding of the new authenticity that you have probably you know draws from the ground and to try to find new authenticity zhh is one of the possible conceptual projects and I think you can see it works that I don't really think that project is the best for me this is one of the most interesting projects for one thing it solves the problem of the ground I mean it solves a problem of the door the way it sounds a problem of the door is incorporating it into a set of graphic devices that flatten the work and essentially eliminating the semantic issues of door window and wall and once you do that the course can only do that if you're that close to the ground because you need a foam structural system and you don't have to solve the problem of how do I get up but you know that so I think other I think there's interesting dialogues between these these works and it also explains why there has to be a geometric form to the ground to the landscape in a relationship to the disposition of graphics in the building they sort of change places it helps me I don't know if you what raged in Berlin for a number of years in a tub years of shield mothers was it which one ripped off who did Danny I mean did Peter rip off Danny's you know Danny Billy's Stella first and it was their first the people walk around must be Peter must have ripped them up well this is a project about new authenticity this is a project is simply a you know project about where the where a new authentic ground is in fact almost all of Danny's working that's high but why the windows are like this and you can also tell because look at the the cobblestones are skewed to the main axis of the walkway and you feel when you walk on so the whole project is dedicated to making its effects there and to using the presence of being there to establish the possibility of an architecture of new authenticity whereas this project is not about men at all this is the standard paving all over Berlin wherever you go that's it in all ways this project about the kind of theatrical theatricality of this space this project is about a new ground this project is about the idea that about the concept that the murder jurors review the murdered Jews of Europe opened the possibility of a new kind of ground for Europe and that out of the tragedy comes a new possible politics and so this is the concept and if you go there it's very hard to see and so I think you can always if you follow this I mean it'll explain to you for example why this is not an earthwork project but this is also a project which is a critiquing the problem of land as either datum or emigres on is either dinah more land and open and opening that new strategies to conceptualize it it's been most of our time on the performative I think this staircase is there if a critical discrimination is going to work it also has to work in retrospect we speak of East Andrew Corbusier is both using the free plan as if an undifferentiated filled slab of a differentiate by program is a free plan if that's true if I my argument is true and that is they have separate programs then that can't be true there has to be a difference between the plan the the slab in Nice and the slab in liquor booth will be there I believe it has to do with the degree to which it's staging artificial performances so unlike new authenticity I think the political direction of this work is to remove you from the ground put you on stage not far so you're not there you're not there this is an authentic but neither are you entirely in the world of concept you're in character and by being in character you can have got new possibilities of character and new possibilities of character introduces that freedom without establishing the new territory you're supposed to be and I really think that's what the basis of this work is so we're not I'm going to show you basically the at night in a lecture in case I don't finish it this is what I'm gonna be trying to tell you we're going to be following the vicissitudes of this first problem is how do you solve the problem of undifferentiated spaces inability to state hierarchy in space residual space interstitial space and that's why you see this so all of a sudden you introduce another introduced walls I don't want to introduce walls I think Bob Stern said something one thing really smart he says I don't like space I like rooms you can say that because you have a choice today do you make rooms or do you make space when you couldn't when loads supporting walls required you to make rooms it wasn't a question but if you now get to choose and you can if you're not going to choose to differentiate the interior on the problem by putting walls in you're going to have to find something that stays with a diagram and that's why you see all might be constructivist work is it for me about exploring the possibilities of introduction introducing techniques of differentiation and maintaining that once you do that however it rien gauges the ground and then you've got another problem because then you're back to us to the very thing you were taking about working with and so that means that you have to we think that and that at this point that's when the metropolitan project comes in in other words it's not these partners are not about the city Ram cool houses in my opinion it's not about bringing the city into the library it's about Yuri conceptualize they are the urban ground as a set of field of forces and so it essentially field has replaced the notion of day them in this kind of work and it comes from the fact that you can't help but it reengage it then technology allows another kind of formal language to come in and the differentiation becomes more mobile and essentially the first diagram but then once the ground is no longer land or scape but a metropolitan field it can it can start to move up and then you start to see a series of projects which looks for the identity of ground land I'm sorry ground metropolitan field and and then yeah this is one of the possibilities of where you can go because there are certain questions that certain problems the other buildings pose that aren't answered so I'm now going to think about this Brooke yeah yeah you read about this project everyone says bring the city in what does that mean bring the city I'm not quite sure what bring the city in means I know it means you go inside it's a big open space it feels like the city and the other thing I'm not kind of wondering about is why everything that's a good idea Marcel Breuer Breuer did thought that was the worst possible idea MRSA if you look at his libraries you look at his museums he thought the single thing in architecture should do is to protect the significance of the programmatic material which is whether it's a books or aren't from the ravelin noise of the city and so if there is a debate it needs to be engaged in on not only how it brings the city and what it means to bring this to you but whether it's a good idea to break this idiom is a pretty interesting library particularly if you're not interested in books now the the way the project is often considered in old form of this is this is the section where history is not going to help solve the problem we can't study the history you can study the history of the problem but we're not going to study the history of the problem the generic history of form and skin which is oftentimes used to discuss this start to this model notice is that there's a detached skin and then the skin of the free-floating volumes and so all of my attention as a critic from now on is going to be on skin and form and so I have a problem this is the exact same project now I know they're not the same I know they're not doing the same work I know that they are after other work and so that the formal relationship to form and skin is not going to help me distinguish these in fact they become the same project so something else has to be going on I know it was there I've been to these two projects the architecture is about different things this is a project by Branford a bronzer Dale taught here in 1983 I met him here we became partners it is the project I think that's the the the this is be called I'm sorry these are well this box and box came the idea that you would put a box inside of another box and use the space here to solve the problem of the differentiation of that field so you have an object here and you have another surface here and then you squeeze people in here more or less to produce both the continuous space and the idea that you can start to differentiate it but this project is done in 1990 way before Rams project there's the public space the only thing that's interesting about that to me however is it Braun got that project from this project was as a reversal project of the OEM a project for the library in the bible-- affect national Braun thought this was fantastic you use that as a diagram for the project both of them got that project from this project which is stark and nouvelles entry to the nouvelle come to the 1980 1981 competition for the Tokyo Opera House which these fantastic see if I could do it these fantastic theaters are floating in a put in a sea of poche space without any way to get into it way to get out so it's not going to I can't derive the work these projects now look difference to me because the work reflects back on it because of Seattle I see these projects differently now how is architecture how's performative architecture political that's it at least it was a new tune most of you know this is Pilate OHS Teatro Olimpico and are familiar with a wonderful recessed perspectival trick of the billing when you go there if you make your pilgrimage to Vincenzo what you may or may not know is that actually this was the original plan it had a single point perspective when Claudio died before was finished his his protege scamozzi introduced this plant introduced his scheme in which he put perspective about all of these five doors which were the five doors come from Vitruvius he puts perspective drops he also instead of using just painting here he models it in three dimensions so he makes it much more immersive that it produces this effect and you can decide is this a commercial effect yes because this is exactly why his clients asked him to do it and this is exactly why he did it more good seats it's that simple on the other hand this project produces an ideal perspective and an ideal audience there's one vanishing point everyone knows about it the project accentuates its conceptual 'ti this project gives all these people experiences it more baroque it pulls them into the work but also begins to introduce the idea that they're not a coherent audience and eventually I believe that idea leads to romanticism the modern I mean that basically this is the way this insidious effect of these of this understanding of the difference between the idea of a perfection and the production of an immersive effect in production it's fundamental to the way the performances are political I don't think that's a concept I don't think that's an idea nor do I think it's a new form of authenticity so that means we're going to start paying attention to different issues one is the stair this is the important diamond this is the this one of the things that the evolution of the domino diagram required if you invest a with it is that this slab and this slab have exactly the same cross-sectional depth you're going to see that protected theoretically to get that cross sectional depth they had to put the floor intention now I have no idea what that means I swear to God I have no idea what it is but I do know that they had to go to through some extremely interesting thing that the engineers had to do because and then it wasn't exactly right and so he introduces this cornice to take up the slight differences in the tube but conceptually you see the two slabs you had differentiated problem and then when Graham critiques this building I met whether you noted on he says this the problem with this building is it defeats the diagram by the up by though whatever your colors this kind of lighting it's not nice had specified concrete ceilings with open fluorescence when he left he turned it over to Phil Johnson Phil Johnson put all this kind of nice lighting and went and what REM says is that it destroys the diagram it interrupts the program it interrupts the formula and he's exactly right what it does is restores the sky and ground difference between the floor and the ceiling and for whoever whatever audience is particularly interested in that it turns the problems problem back towards a bridgewater problem which i think is really incredibly to me what grim says there he says it could be any you could when you're looking up in those offices they could be anything you could be looking at beauty polish i want you to remember that comment so one thing is to constitute the person from the ground you have to make a ceremonial entry and in so doing you put them on stage which means the doors and those floors are going to be extremely important the performances of the doors then everywhere you look at nice they are they said that every possibility of please come up there's also got to be a different the glass and the void so you're inside so in the two con that house when he tries the one time to roll down the window in the summer garden and roll it back up he never does it again so for 25 years he made a clear distinction between what glass did and what voids did because when you're inside then the performance is starting now this is one of the two buildings I think has the right to has a claim to be the greatest work of architecture of the 20th century the other one being Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York I hate Frank Lloyd Wright but I'm not indifferent to him but I reckon I recognize his greatness but his greatness just makes my skin crawl but nevertheless I do think it's one of the these are two buildings and I won't go over them so I did so we're this is the UM we're now following that diagram so we started it at the stage deconstructivist sets in and this becomes the most literal statement of the argument you could still see it in AHA's work she's still trying to figure out how to use that escape space even if she's moved on to the sort of morphing ideas of us that you saw earlier on as part of the technology she's still working on the project and so it affects the windows it because this has to be a field and then it has to stay a field this has to be the ground so there's the new metropolitan ground and in fact if you look at this people are standing there and people are standing there and so this idea that the ground of the building is I mean that the field of the building is going to be different from the ground and neither one of them are dated are joined to that diagram I see her to him that problem I think advances in to projects that I think are economic one is agadir argan deer continues the problem of the differentiated space but starts to recognize that the Metropolitan ization of the land has to mean that there has to be a new level of artifact into the land so the land has to become an artifice and and that's what I give you is that so this is this sits on top of the surface is entirely programmed this is program it comes from Strasbourg the the Palais des congrès by Corbusier which also uses that is one of the most important projects in the single surface argument which really interesting is that firm any Church was the immediate predecessor to Strasbourg and also draws heavily on the diagram for me it's not programmed at the top of the way programmed at the bottom it so Agadir becomes this continuation of the research into the diagram not using historical precedents but building on problems that belong to the same problem and and for example this is another example of how you transform the land into a metropolitan data this project was on every kids desk this is very this drawing was on every kids desk for a year or two years everybody thought was the most amazing thing so look at this fantastic relationship collage relationship with programs what did it mean it was amazing it ran 24 hours how do you get that you know how do you find that the project well when the secret got revealed of how he did this project I believe I'm the one that revealed it but I'm not sure I certainly am the one that's been a lot of I found it I may have found that independently of others and others may have discovered it but I lectured about it everywhere what this is is the geological cross-section of Yokohama with qalaat with program collage in it means nothing it's just a picture of the idea that the ground itself has to become something else and once it kind of went away then I think this absolutely wonderful project that live from wah by Bernard take you I'm going but I'm not that far down where this where the existing buildings produces the possibility of an occupiable ground and so Alison you don't have to build a ground in occupy it Scott you can you can put buildings over buildings and treat those as a new ground Scott so in our diagram those are the Metro that's the red line face this possibility inference it becomes literal and just you the most important the single service diagrams in the place where the launch of the project and the place where the idea of a metropolitan ization of the field as opposed to the datum and is the other thing that's really important is that the idea of modernism flows out of the domino diagram it's a it's a centrifugal diagram meaning the space is established the equal datum established the neutral datum and the equal potential field and it flows out from that this single surface work starts to become centripetal picking up from Strasbourg it starts to bring forces from the field into the building as part of its move from the question of idea of democracy to the production of the effect of freedom it clearly draws on Frank Lloyd Wright it also is stacked copies of the base and domino diagram which says circuses at the corner the and the under engine slam once you inside it also produces this kind of libidinal feel where you're one person is starting to look at another without being seen and so did rather size of the space another project I think is really important is the this is a single surface project it looks like a collage but one programmatic surface starts to connect everything it's important because it shows the possibility of doing a single surface project without actually having a literal single surface although it does it has the floor it has the seating the seating goes into the stage the stage comes into the balcony so they seem to be literally connected but they're not quite literally which becomes really important of course when he when he entered this competition it's great you walk in the lobby you see all the way there you see all the way on the theater and then and you feel yourself as part of the audience in this thing because he showed it to the jury and immediately got disqualified because this is a 40-ton metal door which every time a program every time the theater is going to be used in order to block off the lobby what you have to do remember the wall problem Scott he just would raise this this is the to cannot window now raised raising low and the fire marshals have what if there's a fire what if the electricity goes out and end of end of building still one of the most important projects this for me this is a great moment in the problem of the single surface it draws on the idea doesn't have to be literal but can't and it also is a metropolitan fort so the forces that's fairly clear that it's drawing its energies from the context and its job will be to get them into the building this is called the skateboard wall it's the most published photograph of all in this other than the outside it's got nothing to do with a project in that particular photograph the project is actually to bring the street in turn it up there which is why these this is now the circulation is in the street and penetrates the good of the galleries and this fact that this extension at the top is absolutely essential this is the we have to read this difference for the single surface to be working I think if it would have been the same corner site it would not have worked as well it's probably some code reason it had to be there doesn't matter it also frames off the buildings as a work of art actually really wonderful building but wonderful building if you understand how its advancing the problem I don't know how it is is a gallery particularly I think it's probably not so good as a museum it's also related to some of the problems of the Wexner Center but that's a different lecture now let's start to look at this this doesn't this doesn't have equal slabs so for the first time the single surface is starting to differentiate the commander's he's proposing 148 are proposing that he they are proposing that it take on a figural quality and that relate to the BBC film street strip but the issue for them is the problem of getting away from abstraction and the possibility of figure ality and we begin to understand what is the allure i think of the single surface because it has now when i understand it has three problems properties that you can start to see as far back as there and that is it's not semantics is not doors walls and floors but neither is it structural so whatever effects it has cannot belong either to the problem of architectural semantics or the problem of architectural engineering it's an entirely architectural surface that can only be understood in terms of predicts it produces re-visit i think that's why the that's why we see so many of these projects and he says can you can you project on it can you put interior walls on it most importantly is it a horizontal extrusion you'll see that here's the staircase and so he puts this kind of glass to inset the staircase because he's believing that you need to treat it as a horizontal extrusion which is when we could begin to distinguish it from Neil's project where he cuts it off and puts the railing to define it I think this is actually closer to the problem too it's not so much about an extended Universal field as it is about a localized I mean extended datum is localized field and so these two projects which by the way look at denticles you don't know any different I challenge you this is the FOI project which is now discussing how do you pull a staircase off the surface and neil is using a topological solution to do that it's why I would argue that I think Neil is advancing the problem more but that the introduction section of the figure ality is going to belong to another problem we're now ready I think just to point out I won't do it for you but we cannot point out the difference between these two this is the ricks and you'll notice that to solve the poche problem they double the single-surface so you see there's two there's a blue one and a white one and they're doing that to solve the single surfaces biggest problem which is where do you put the services where do you find poche but since the single surface is dedicated to the problem of not building poche and I find this a Mannerist advance of it I mean I think this is in my teaching this is what not to do and whereas I prefer Tomas is because he basically Alyssa he bifurcates office he maintains the integrity of the single surface all the way through but wherever he needs that he just introduces a kind of budding off so that he could start to get services I think because it maintains the integrity of an hands relationship to the street I find this more I would judge this and whenever the exercising judge it has a better work for me in terms of the problem I'm interested in Solomon now the problem we already introduced it when we looked at Carnot the card of Opera House is do you actually have to make these things literal do you actually have to build a single surface literally for it to work or is there some way to conceptually give it to work and still fragmented that's what I think is going to be our my best approach to this I believe that this project grows out of that pea look at how this building meets the ground you enter here and you always stay on the ground so actually this building I think of this building as belonging to new authenticity a new way to reinforce the ground I've built putting a building on it maintains the status of it but doesn't copy the architecture so I think it's a very smart entry this building looks like it's the same but if you look carefully it uses the slope of the site and look at the herringbone pattern here and look at the vertical striations here this is actually the building so the single surface is that and the front door is there and the back door is not inside there's a treatment of the street in a very different way it's a it has this problem of sort of bringing the vortex of the field in here does it continue down here and goes up through here if you dug if you think it's just a question of the grade you got lucky then why did he go to so much trouble in Portland so therefore I think ox I think a Seattle probably has a lot more to do with this the effect of sort of sexy and smart at the same time and I think I'll let you judge I mean you have to design I have to put it you know we're getting lazy so I'm now going to think of this as a single surface problem and see if I can see it an amazing that diagram the way I did and I noticed that it has the legacy of jeshu in its section but when I find the working diagrams I see the amount of attention that's paid to all the decoration every surface is hyper decorated every the walls the use of the herringbone which I put in other words that the point is how can I get the surfaces relating to one another in two ways they have to be highly artefactual that's how you maintain the performance there's it cannot be any reinforcement of their locality they have to be stages and they have to connect to one another but not so it doesn't really be literal and so I'm no longer interested in the mass or the structure which kind of looks just like my brother but it looks just like the structure massing in Dresden I'm now interested in these surfaces and seeing if he can pull that off and notice that you'll notice that the escalators will go from floor to floor to floor and that the circulation let's try to do that so the yellow decoration becomes where the architecture for me is occurring in this photograph is now wrong I now know this photograph is wrong because it's emphasizing the interior condition separate from the exterior condition this is the right photograph where the localized field is brought in and equalized by by treating the surfaces as artificial surfaces that are continuous so your hanging over too little is it gives you the visual effect it also begins I begin to realize that there's a very relationship between this church its predecessor but it was open after it because it meets the ground exactly the same way and so you walk up in a very interesting thing because when josée finished his church in 2006 he was very interested in ram cool house so here's an interesting problem he doesn't want to simply stipulate the religious status of the church he is like he is a speculative architect interested in destabilizing the authority and authority in cities and here's the church so this this processional that Lacroix busey a design which takes you from the ground up he's no longer interested in disestablishing the ground in a church because it's no longer ran the ground in the church is earth it's part of the gut the relationship between god man earth and whatever is left and so he's pulling you up this is a standard cathedral entry where you leave the ground you leave the profane you go out to the sacred notice in this wall he blocks off the view it's a bridge you're crossing the bridge but you blocked off the view the whole way so you're not actually seeing the outside world actually josée puts a window right there so right if they're right when you're supposed to be finished but the most important thing is the builders portico so he dead ends the sequence and then you turn and you see that I kind of incredible because for me that's a work of art in fact that's an Ellsworth Kelly and to be immediately extracted back from the earth the place I just left and I can no longer maintains the simple stipulation to whether it's my belief in the religion orbit eyes belief in the power of the church it undermines it in a very interesting way and then when I see the Sun and the moon which are the pinnacles of the symbolism of the church I this is too strong for me I don't I it undoes it enough that doesn't say what it should be but it just undoes what it does so I start to look at these develop I'm now looking I'm no longer looking this way there's I'm looking all the roses so I started to see this red chair and always black tears yeah is that all of a sudden the interior furniture colors manner in establishing the relationship between democracy and freedom and and there where the architecture is occurring you go down we have we talked about the Dukes they were responsibility to bring the Metropolitan field into the building at the level of artifacts and so you start to see this set of gardens which doesn't and then every place you look everywhere you look all you see is artificial surfaces artificial materials decorations that match each other from Florida Ford for continued with each other yeah that means we can say something even about and Hamilton's work of art and Hamilton was a commissioned by people that don't know either architecture or art to do the reading room when she installs a wood floor with words from the books this is a new authentication factor the architecture is competing with it neither one of them are served well by it it's a kind of pathetic one percent for art inevitability now remembering that the rams attack on philip was an attack on making the Mies building look like a beauty parlor I'm asking you to pay attention to his last set of surfaces which is this naugahyde surface at the top which i believe is also belongs in a beauty parlor so whatever ram is telling you and it sounded like he's criticizing he's trying to steer you away from it so you won't do it and then he turns around to do it so I don't know if it's convincing to you but I now have an apparatus that I can I think I can understanding I don't think in the end what this means is I think ITT IIT is a better building in terms of this research although it's still more literally in turn continuing source and others I think the grim advances the project more there and I would compare that to this then that brings us as stuff like this which is what I'm most interested now I really love I this is the new work but I'm at the end of my lecture so I'll just leave that to you thank you so I have three minutes left 161 slides in 55 minutes I have three minutes left I will take exactly three minutes of questions if anybody has one and then I'm going to dinner well I know how to make you ask questions whether you want to or not I've been teaching a long time watch so you look I'm not going to screw with you and I know you don't have a question but if you had one what would it be see they can't help it it's why you don't like people asking you for quarters on the street it's not that you mind giving them a quarter is it if you they ask you a question you don't know how to get out of it so go ahead and another guy yeah sure well I was trying tomorrow Michael and I are going to be doing this work on dairy by the way if you're in like ten o'clock class tomorrow my 10 o'clock class is with Michael in here what I think is wrong is that the historical word authorizes and produces the early word historical work sets up problems and that's why I was so attentive to the nascent domino diagram is a diagram rather than work and then new work causes us to see that owes work in new original ways so I don't think that project led to this I think your reading of Lee Baskin and Danny gives you a chance to get and Peter gives you a chance to go back and see that work in a new way and the only thing you're interested is a new technique I commend the Prague Jewish cemetery to you for both projects for example but I I've been to applaud cemetery number times until I started to see this project I didn't really understand and it's not that it explains that to me and so it's very important art architectural history get done it's very important we understand the precedence relationships and it's also important I think you should understand that every architect I showed you tonight the rook is cognizant of the work and is building on the work as if it were a problem as opposed to as if it were an icon so Agadir is Strasbourg but Agadir is driving through the diagram of Strasbourg to solve another problem and in the end that makes all works contemporary art I mean all architecture contemporary literature I think I get really excited about the Teatro Olimpico that is for me an incredible work that's contemporary architecture because the new work is keeping it alive by not discovering things that were already there but by putting things that we're never there there and making them the origin which i think is we're going to be talking about for an hour tomorrow thank

Channel: Harvard GSD

Views: 8,881

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: 10182006, Kipnis

Id: vur3TRzFztQ

Length: 67min 26sec (4046 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2013