Ferda Kolatan: In pursuit of the allusive object (March 7, 2018)

welcome back to another of our lectures [Music] my pleasure to introduce tonight Farah decola tan which has been a longtime a friend of the house of SIA and but and it has been a visiting faculty multiple occasions and currently teaching this semester here so he is a boys that we are familiar with so it's always interesting to see people who we talk often enough but sometimes we don't have time or enough time to speculate or to think about the war that they produce within the confine of academic work but also the work of practice and this to me is a crucial is it crucial always conundrum it's always interesting and I think it's always challenging and I imagine that this is challenging for him he's always challenging to talk in from your close colleagues because is it quite a different kind of reading and so it requires a different kind of conversation so I always curious how these things play out and it's always tricky for the ones and we have to introduce when you have to introduce a close friend you have to introduce a colleague that you respect and admire one will think that that make it easy at the same time is not it's not really so because when you get to know somebody close or you know somebody well enough also it gets more difficult to start to figure that out what what will be fair to say because in a way you don't want a completely over support him or you don't want to go over undermining him so it's a tricky thing so I tried to navigate the best as I could and somebody was asking I'm gonna clip or a quota tonight I mean somebody was saying that only friends get video clips and people who I'd know let's get a Quora further I get both but occur to me that also is important to put not only the introduction of further as a speaker tonight but to put in larger context about what are the things that we deal in today and what are the context and why I think is work is important and why I think his work is relevant and why I think his work is really good and I think he had to do with the forces had been that we are in we have been in for a while in in an interesting territory in which we tend to incline more for a culture in which the the notion of obsession of the notion of excess attention to certain things and I will say further will consider him a formalist and I hope that he takes that as a compliment and not as a challenge but I think we are in a strange time in which like this this quote of the Douglas MacArthur which are like it he says American soldier that the world is in constant is in a constant conspiracy against the brave if the a is an age-old struggle the roar of the crowd of the one side and the voice of your conscience on the on the other so I'm not saying that being a designer to be focused in a particular way design you need to be braver courageous but it requires a confidence and if you leaving what you do to keep going out of it so it's in that spirit that I thought that this clip is a good clip to to try to introduce further king of the Britons I seek the finest and the bravest Knights in the land to join me in my court at Camelot you have proved yourself worthy will you join me I have no I move what I'm saying is you really have to commit where you believe and the people that you would allow to cross the bridge that you so carefully protecting and building and I think further belongs to those class those kind of night hopefully tonight he will show us where he's been also up to outside with only teaching and yet the other part which is a complex one so is with what with great pleasure and Happiness then I'm welcome further to the stage thank you my arms still attached to my body thank you so much hang on what a wonderful introduction and thank you for the student body to get me here to speak I'm I'm really particularly excited to talk today here at SIA because mmm not only as an and also mentioned there are a lot of really dear colleagues and friends teaching here but also because CyArk to me always has been a place really not unlike the metaphor of the Black Knight that keeps going forward no matter what and I think these are exactly the kinds of schools and institutions that today I think you know we need more of and be in support of so to me again it has always been a pleasure to come here for many years now either as a reviewer jury or now also as a as a visiting guest so I wanted to really thank you again for having me and so let's see let's get started as Shannon pointed out I think a lot of us are in this kind of interesting sort of wrong between teaching and practice and our practices usually are also in some kind of an interesting hybrid condition in terms of how we think about practice so when I call today's lecture in pursuit of the elusive object it doesn't only refer to the object of architectural object of desire in my case what I'm interested in but also the notion of illusion which I will be obviously talking a little more in detail about later has something to do in how we really look at the world right and how we try to approach the world the world of design through the way how we think and how we make design which is already in this sort of hybrid state between academia and practice and as I said practice our type of practice I have a relatively small practice in terms of numbers and I want to quickly say that my longtime partner founding partners Eric shoenberger we called s11 architecture and design and we started in 1999 in New York and for the last few years we have an Associate Partner heart Marlowe so basically the core of what our New York practices and throughout this entire time actually prior to even founding su 11 I have been a teacher taught in many different places and just today like half an hour ago one of my students here asked me if that's something I always wanted to do and I had to say no not really particularly not when I was a student in Germany where the difference between academia and practice was categorically defined and you had to really belong into one or another so the idea of basically formulating your take on architecture culture by simultaneously teaching and practicing is something that I really understood when I came to study at Columbia University in the mid 90s but today I wouldn't be able to think about what I do as a professional really outside of the sort of hybrid category between being a teacher an academic and a practitioner so we do a lot of different kinds of work some of it is I guess more in the realm of art and sculpture and installations some of it is architecture a lot of interiors that's what happens if you are a small office in New York you get a lot of interior projects of course competitions and so forth when I was wondering about what I would do today and what I would be talking about what you do is you go back and you look at your work and you sort of retrace a particular line of argument and then you choose the kinds of projects that make that argument hopefully the most legible and convincing and that's what I'm attempting to do today it will be a mix between some teaching work some more research oriented projects and I hope it will somehow together in a convincing way but for those of you are interested in what we do in general you can of course always check our website and see you know the whole of the projects that we have been working on I want to start with this quote mmm it's by Steven Shapiro I don't know why this cognition slip down there but let me read my working assumption is that fictions and fabulous are basic modes of sentience and that cognition per se is derived from them and cannot exist without them I really like this quote because I also find it you know really a rather simple or I like to look at it as a simple cord not as a complex quote to me it really means that the world that we see that we inhabit what we call knowledge is a mix between fictions and facts and that in one way or another both of those belong to the same medallion and it is not the right way of thinking by when we separate categorically into two camps the thing we call fact and we say well that's my knowledge comes from and the other camp fiction and belongs to the arts and so forth I think naturally to architects designers it seems to be you know a convincing way of looking at the world that these things are truly combined if we think about fiction as as a term that is on the other side of you know the world of facts facts are something that we can verify and we can prove and so forth but when we look at architecture and architecture history and here are some very common well-known examples on the left we see an image it's called the divine geometers comes in all kinds of different versions is basically what I would call kind of fiction of the Middle Ages of what the world is right and it is a fiction because as you can see there is the Creator divinity that is outside of the world the world is something that can be held in in one's hand if one is a creator there's a tool that tool is an element to measure the world and understand it and it's actually the entire universe that we see in in the in the hands of the Creator here so then of course is a fiction right I mean it's sort of places very clearly the would be called nature or the world into sort of one side and we humans in one way are in that sort of weird blueish bubble clueless really of what's going on but not entirely clueless because clearly the Creator is not only like us or we are like him but also the tools he's using our human tools right so there's already kind of a relation ality that's being built up there and of course when we think in terms of the Renaissance again the fiction I would say of the Renaissance would be to say that the world and nature is something that is eternal we can understand it through numbers and harmonies and proportionality etc and then the role of the architect basically is not to seek novelty but actually find the right path to truth why the truth is there and unlike to the left in the center we can actually understand the truth we can access it we can draw it we can build it we can represent it and then there is another image all the way to the right and I'll be talking a little more in detail about this in a moment it's what we call a rock I or what is called a rock I it's basically the sort of interesting artifact that was generated during the time of the Rococo and that is another fiction and if I were to look at these some kind of a rough sampling of architectural fictions of the past I would say what I'm the most interested in is the one all the way on the right the fiction of the rock or the fiction of the rock I and I we'll get to that in a minute in more detail why that is the case I can say so much already I do think that it's the most elusive and in in that way it is the most contemporary in its rejection of any kind of eternal truth or idea which then leads to the architectural mission of unearthing that truth an idea I'll be reading a little bit today because some of the things I want to talk about I want to do precisely so please bear with me I'll be reading a little more in the beginning and then later on I'll be freestyling so what you see here are these wonderful strange objects I called Nautilus cups the nautilus Cup emerges in the early 16th century predominantly in seafaring countries such as Holland Italy in France distinctly secular both in form and function this artifact was primarily an expression of taste wealth and worldliness the colonial explorers would bring back exotic natural objects like shells and ostrich eggs for local artisans to transform them into familiar household items like cups of Oz's and chalices to me they represent the earliest type of hybrid objects I'm interested in a combination of the found with the made the unfamiliar with the everyday the real with the fictitious unique in its formal expression and yet reproducible as a design product a commodity of early global trade and local artistic style the Nautilus Cup displays what I would call an elusive aesthetic which is fueled by all these incongruities the emerging artifact produces novelty not by composing subservient parts into an aubergine hole but rather by linking individual objects into a coherent yet unexpected totality what we perceived to be the familiar in this case the shell is fictionalized just enough to draw associations beyond its original round two versions the rokai is another hybrid object along the same vein but even more remarkably it began largely as a graphic element before it spread to furniture and architecture to generate the 18th century style of the Rococo it is remarkable because usually when we talk about a style it begins as a larger idea which then sort of goes all the way down to its details to Raqqa is a notable exception and really began as some kind of you know graphic device and idea an element and object which then sort of grew into a fully-fledged style these two examples let me talk quickly about them and what I believe is relevant in the way how they kind of influenced my thinking so on the Left we have a Jean mondo very famous Rococo artist in Mon Dawn's engraving LaVon Devo one can see most of the typical current characteristics of the rock I the construct made of parts that show shell and rock like structures water plants but also how to fish elements like Scrolls sculptures vases etc human figures commingle Wilin dis conglomerate without taking center stage rather they are pushed to the periphery of the object in a clear break with earlier baroque principles of compositional centeredness well the mood is governed by the human condition longing melancholia etc the image is dominated not unlike the Nautilus Cup by a set of paradoxical qualities are we looking at a design object or at nature where does one begin and the other end the bottom part of the engraving appears to show an interior architecture which mutates into a sculpture resolving on top into a forest like background the human figures are all but absorbed into the rock eye itself with no clear way of understanding how they could have physically gotten there so that would be the left and you can see the bottom part looks like a stage and interior T then begins to sort of through these loci elements basically the rock eye is the artifice you see in the engraving well it's a mix of all these elements together it's not a single quality on the right hand side is another very famous Rococo architect and artist Jean Francois Cuvier in Covidien engraving we see another important characteristic of the rock I a subtle play with abstraction and figuration his rock eye is an elaborate picture frame opening to view to a building in the background it begins at the bottom left with a typical mix of plants scrolls fountains and Cupid figurines toward the top the naturalism of the scene begins to dissolve into more abstract geometrical lines we are witnessing a process of transformation from three-dimensional object to do it to two-dimensional line work the abstract elements occupied the same picture plane but appear to serve more as a library of parts that can be developed in many different ways so again the top is almost like a sketch of what then later develops into a full-fledged rokai but all simultaneously at the same time abstraction figuration foreground and background another famous master historian Estonia in may soon years engraving the rock high in the rock is intricate play with foreground and background with frame and content becomes evident the rock eye elements begin as a picture frame and distort directly into the background seen here the rock eye is no longer a single object or framework but it becomes the entire image rules of perspective drawing are willfully broken to achieve this transformation the resulting effects are legible in the planar geometries which are bent out of shape in order to reach backward and connect with the scenery behind really see that best on the kind of left part and a really kind of a distortion in order to sort of bring in touch the foreground and the background the frame of the image and the subject matter behind it missiny expands on its take on his technique in his furniture designs in a clever role reversal his canopy becomes now a foreground object to the background as if it is emerging forward by delaminating from the ornamental decor of the wall the pattern of the fabric continues to require motifs as do the wood carvings of the canopy in an effort to erase the visual cues that separate space from object the furniture itself also exhibits a bizarrely distorted quality with six feet instead of four with the from two legs placed in an awkward position you can see that I think rather clearly that's usually not wearing furniture you would have the legs the strangeness of the object canopy is direct as a direct result of missing his desire to break with the conventional reading of space and object as oppositional entities so again what I think is really interested in Mason years work is how he plays with those conditions of foreground and background object and wall and space and reverses it from the engraving to his furniture design the rock I was developed in the early part of the 18th century in France and Rococo is also described as the style LOUIE LOUIE 15th as it emerged during the Regency years of the monarch as such it is often viewed as a continuation of the late baroque suited for kings and aristocrats however the rock I distinctly differs in scale mannerism and theme from baroque ornamentation in fact coincides with a newly affluent emerging middle class in Europe which desires art for their own homes it also coincides with an early onset of mass production each of the mentioned artists mon danke villian Missoni a produced books with engravings to be sold across Europe and emulated by local artists and architects the idea of the original and the authentic is so fundamental to earlier artwork was substituted with a modern notion of our production which should be distributed and copied here we see two examples right the one on the left is a template for sealing and the one on the right are individual studies of rock I so these guys would basically create books those books would then be sold to Kings aristocrats wealthy people who then in turn would hire their own artisans and architects who would make copies and would build off of these copies so I don't believe this really was happening before the age of Rocco as one of my favorite rooms in talking about some kind of excessive insanity to me this room basically fits the bill it's the porcelain room in Madrid and again we see a lot of interesting characteristics of what Rococo does in interior space the ornamentation does no longer expand on classical themes or individual building parts but has taken on a more autonomous role weaving together objects furniture and architectural parts the ornamentation erases typical ordering principles such as the entablature and collapses our sense of depth in space so you can still see the entablature but then it's overburdened by the sort of excessive ornamentation people often say well Rococo is a lot about ornamentation it's like you know more and more and excessive ornamentation but I think what people who think that way really myths is what that ornamentation does and to me what that ornamentation does it begins to sort of soften or break categorical ideas of architectural ordering principles and I think sort of the disappearance or the dissolution of the entablature through the excessive quality of the ornamentation I think really shows that quite well the wall rokai pulls forward absorbing objects like the chandelier and the vows in the foreground have you seen the chandelier and what gives it away I guess is the pineapple because you think why would you have a pineapple there well that's the top of the chandelier which then sort of reaches all the way down and really completely dissolves objects like the chandelier and the vows in the foreground to form a totalizing effect in space which supersedes the simplicity of the rooms original geometry we're getting bigger and bigger right now we already at the at the scale of an interior of a church it's a very famous church by dominic Zimmerman it's called devistation the final aspect of Rococo I want to point out is relevant to my thinking is represented exquisitely in Zimmerman's viscacha this aspect concerns a play between what we perceived to be real or fake in architecture while typical Rococo interiors look sumptuous and precious their competitive comparatively cheap most materials are made of stucco mimicking expensive materials like marble highly sophisticated techniques such as Kalle Oliver used to produce effects that allude to a material real other than what is actually there so scale Yola is a way how these marble patterns are being generated on the columns it's not marble let's just all stucco and paint the expertly mixing together form color material both abstractly as well as figuratively creates an architecture of fictions and fabulous the stands in stark contrast to an architecture that privileges do real and truthfulness as the foundation for its ideology as is largely the case in the earlier periods of the Renaissance and the Baroque as well as a neoclassicism which follows at the heels of the Rococo okay so let's summarize seven short points of what I would call the elusive character of Rococo one the rock is a hybrid artifact that mixes elements from different realms into a coherent whole the play of objects is distinctly different from Alberta's definition of part-to-whole natural objects like rocks streams plants are merged with building elements like Scrolls frames and pediments categorical distinctions between the realms of nature and culture become obsolete to human figures commingle with sculptures and rock formations without occupying center stage they are self-absorbed with no direct contact to the observer and appears appear as if they were physical if if they were physical components of Taraka itself the entrepot centric focus of both the observer as well as as well as the figures in the image has softened three abstraction and figuration are often simultaneously present in the same rokai and are treated as a continuation of the same motif for plainer elements are distorted into objects to to foreground and background both an image as well as in space there is no strict oppositional quality between planes objects and space 5 the depicted scenes are often mundane and take from taken from everyday life they become special only for the unusual composition of the rocket 6 the value of art as an authentic original yields to the practice of copy and emulation by using engravings and prints to distribute design templates and 7 by using techniques like scale Yola questions of what constitutes the real are brought to the fore unlike in illusionistic painting where spatial effects are generated saying from play or Quadra tula the marbleization of columns is another phenomenon all together here deep-seated disciplinary presumptions of truthfulness nature and materiality are in play I have been fascinated with rock eyes for a very long time that doesn't mean that my architecture the way how we think when we produce architected as you 11 is necessarily a modern-day version of rock I but what it does mean is that a lot of these ideas I think are really relevant not only to the work that we produce but also to a lot of the kind of discourse that's going on right now so that's basically the the preamble under which I wanted to begin to talk about our own work the first one I want to show is called Coraline's it's it's kind of an art project that we did for the first istanbul design Biennale in 2012 and we were basically invited to produce a project there was no specific definition of what that project would be but the curator and the hottelet was sort of bemoaning the the fact that we live in a spectacle society right and he in his brief had written about that we either fall into two camps either we produce architectures a spectacle or we basically localize and really deal with vernacular problems and you know what our ways of breaking out of this so the Coraline's were in sort of you know some tongue and cheek fashion our response to that and having had studied rocailles i was really interested during that time to come up with some kind of an object that would associate itself with many different kinds of categorical conditions rather than becoming you know adherent to specifically two to one category one realm one genre one idea this was in 2012 and 2012 was also the Year actually Graham you'll remember that where we had and David rhew was there as well where we had a roundtable in Istanbul which I was moderating and I had called it objects and crafts and to me 2012 was important because for the first time it became really very clear to me that the sort of Orthodox use of digital techniques was was basically hitting a wall right and it was either becoming for me like or become Spectre a spectacular spectacle architecture and this project to me was also an attempt to bring back some kind of you know formalism that was clearly distinct from the formalism of you know the digital up to that point by the way I remember now hang on yes I do take it as a compliment to be a formalist for sure okay so what we did with these creatures is we basically took conditions that really are unrelated to each other like the cuff done and the cuff down is as you can see a particular clothing piece but it comes with a very interesting geometry shape and pattern and we wanted to basically blend different kinds of ideas at that point in time we're still very interested in notions of nature and natural conditions so that's where the name curl in comes from and we were basically beginning to mix Oh variety of formal exercise into each other these also belong to the same problem or project was doing a set of drawings I guess or paintings and I called occult and chemical drawings which was basically a cooking up of material substance and then you know sort of manipulating them further through photography and other kind of representational means and they would generate these sort of figures and you know we were basically interested in taking this sort of seemingly abstract material figuration and work it into the idea of the cuff down through the shape and then try and see how we can come up with some kind of abstract sculptural object and these are basically the results of that so I look at this project Coraline's more like an exercise in some way where in the end when we look at these we see textures and colours and form and shape some of them I think still have an association with clothing pieces a lot of people look at them and say they look like corsets for instance other people only see a kind of organism in it and think it looks more like something that was taking out of the sea so to us that was really an interesting kind of a testing ground of some of ideas that we read in the Rococo and wondered how that could basically take on sort of a new kind of form or some sort a lot of you know ideas that we worked in on Coraline's then really I believe at least sort of got to the next level with this project which we did for show at CyArk in 2016 which was curated by Hernandez Alonso and David rhew called close-up and so as the name already says coral in coral column there's a clear kind of relationship however there's there's also also clear differences between these two projects and how we were looking at this so what I'm gonna do is again I'm gonna like read a little bit about this because I think it's rather important that I get the idea straight here so while Coraline's were liberally dubbed artifacts the column of course came with a set of disciplinary markers that acted historically as expressions of style many of these expressions were tied to questions of truth justice beauty beaten the proportionality of Greek columns which reflected unchanging laws of nature or in the mission column with it's not toward modern laws of standardization and the politics of universalism the Barcelona column in a way claims to be the end of all columns through a narrative of demystification and by substituting truth with the real the real in this case does not require any pointing toward an invisible other it is as is claimed just a necessary expression of Technology and economics and therefore just and beautiful of course misuse of precious materials and sophisticated detailing infuses this point with some irony so mise aesthetics relies on the abstraction of extrusion in order to liberate the column from a reading contingent on age culture class etc all of which are deemed fictions in his case his own fiction of course is the privileges of Technology as a universal engine of progress which simultaneously produces and interprets to real we were interested given the question of digital technology to focus on what constitutes a contemporary definition of real image technology itself has overridden all the paradigms where it seemed at least the confidence in concepts such as truth reality progress etc was largely unshaken our column and get that for a minute on the other hand is embracing this loss of confidence and trying to locate an aesthetic for it like in Coraline's and my reading of the rock I we're doing it through a set of seemingly paradoxical Meuse the column is true to size and girth but severely shortened in height rendering it dysfunctional stock extrusions are used with a nod to modernism but based on capitals are added the real geometric expression caused by the extrusion press is reproduced and thus fictionalized by the powder printed parts or get that to a minute but we basically picked stock extrusions we jumble them together in all kinds of different versions and then we extrude it or put the extrusions together we understood or we realize that when we do oblique cuts we reveal a lot of the sort of ornamental qualities of the extrusion we positioned the oblique cuts where usually the base and the capital in a column is again with a knot in sort of legibility within the larger disciplinary history of the column and then we provided or reproduced one of the prototypes the curators actually had asked I mean the big question of the exhibition was the role of detail or what detail is in the age of digital production digital design the key part in this project I think is this where we decided to use two different kinds of Technology and techniques and materials to mimic the same kind of overall structural profiling so on the left hand side these are the pieces that later become the capital or part of the capital and these pieces are modeled and produced exactly within the same scale of the extrusion profiles that you see on the right so again the goal or the idea here was a very deliberate play between what is considered to be real quote unquote material versus artificial or fake material of course um if you think about it there is no such thing powder is just as real as an aluminum extrusion however it's true that powder can be put in all kinds of different forms as absolutely no necessity to actually have it built in this sort of structural composition so we chose to do that in order to create some kind of attention between the necessity of the formal expression of the extrusion with the sort of deliberate but also artificial nature of the same formal extrusion aesthetic that came with the printer itself these are the pieces and elements that then all sort of slide into place to formulate the column itself as you can see here in details was really important to us that the kind of ornamental parts of the column were mixing and matching between the oblique cuts in the in the shaft of the column as well as in the projected printed parts which is basically the marbleized top again that's also intentional we wanted it to look like marble even though of course it's not but it was just another way of playing with more layers of reading that we would sort of introduce into the column I'm also really proud and I think that's sort of my German background that we were able to put this whole thing together without a single screw and we just sort of the white things you see on top are like plastic prints that sort of plug into place and then the whole column basically holds itself up and we can easily remove them and rebuild wherever we want just an aside what we often do in our office is we do sort of small projects or assignments almost I mean something like a musician would basically practice and we like to practice with certain kinds of ideas and some of them never make it really anywhere and utter has become more important in the way how we think about other types of projects this was one of those playful attempts I guess but it it really is important in many other ways I think you can see to a certain degree already its kinship with some of the earlier projects and maybe even the ideas that I listed in the real cab but it also does something else so the Fawcett series we did a number of these faucets as one we have an imaginary Hardware catalog and in that imaginary hardware catalog you will find these and you know we can buy them and try and see if you know you can control water with it but what we wanted to do is we wanted to basically look at things that are you know what I would consider like like a background architecture secondary auxiliary elements of architecture and infrastructure usually is exactly that it's my interest in infrastructure which I know a lot of you know is not so much because I want to celebrate it it's it's just I like infrastructure because it seems to be so neglected and it either is being used in architecture you know in high-tech architecture of the 80s and sort of glorifying it or really in the most pragmatic way by us hiding infrastructure or maybe at the very end of a project you go and choose a catalog item and you you you know you spec it but it's something if you in an isolated way look at something like a faucet or any other kind of infrastructural piece there's real magic in it and what we wanted to do is we wanted to understand what makes it to us magical and when we were playing around with it and creating these kinds of individualized forms or expressions of everyday objects like like like faucets I think we were really sort of honing in on some ideas that would then go up and scale for projects later on so there's a whole series of these and we have many more but these are the ones that you know I think I would like it's not so much about surrealism people asked me that too they say was this kind of a surrealist project where you just do sign a kind of exercise an absurdity I honestly don't don't think of it that way it's not about absurdity it's really just sort of adding a little bit of fiction to the thing that seems to be the most real within the realm of architectural practice in order to see it in a different light and this ties it to a project that we did actually quite a long time ago as you can see this was 2003 and the project was probably developed even before that 2002 for an exhibition at the Walker Art Center called strangely familiar it was really called that and I kind of rediscovered this project it's one of those things I give a presentation it may sound like this is all kind of linear and conceptually completely figured out that's totally not the case a lot of it is going back within basically the library of work that we've been produced and then rediscover certain affinity is right and then run with it so I have absolutely no qualms in doing that and so that this would be an example for that what we did for this composite house we call the composite houses we didn't want to think of house as something that comes through the totality of a plan or a party or a section or anything that sort of galvanizes a larger picture from which then you know you work down into the nitty-gritty of the house instead we wanted to have objects that are partially functional and programmatic and they blend together in order to create these unique artifacts and then in the combination of these unique artifacts the house would actually be generated and this was during the sort of more sort of computation heavy time so the way we set this up is we took a cube and basically all these indentations were reflections of things like shower boots and and you know toilets and sings and kitchen counters and so forth which would be impressed into the cube and then develop a series or family of individual objects and then these individual objects would be textured and again we already played with the idea of texture as something that is autonomous so it's not only a bathroom tiling inside the bathroom but it begins to creep out and reverse it its role and creates tensions between the formal the problematic the textural yes and this is basically one of the combinations that we put together in this small model but you can clearly see it's almost like a puzzle that could be organized in multiple different ways I'm gonna very quickly show one image each for projects that we actually build these are interior very small scale into your projects and basically all we did is design one object or furniture type piece for each of these but I think it's interesting because it shows a certain kind of progression on our take what that particular object is how we think about it and how it can be deployed within you know a larger context of an architectural project and apartment in this case so the dates 2009 13 and 17 the first one is this where we rather literally took the composite house objects and we designed one of them be the one to the left as a single sort of object which was then finding itself into the apartment which you see on the right hand side and but the language of it is one of free-flowing form of malleability pliability I mean it clearly speaks about form in this particular case as something that's coming through some condition of abstraction through machine and we built this out of Korean Korean basically the go-to material for anybody who wanted to do continuous object like forms the second project which came a few years later is this one and you can see in the bottom conceptually it's very similar this time we had to combine two apartments that were on top of each other so it became a vertical piece and so we created basically an object that was derived from the stair but in this case rather than using a kind of a language of formalism if you will of free flow we work with the rhythm of the stairs so everything started basically with the rhythm of the stair and tread and the spacing and then from there we grew the the elements that then grows then grow around to become the library and they move all the way into the kitchen counter on top it's continuous but again the continuity is broken by the rhythm of the vertical pieces this one doesn't have any good photographs because it's under construction right now I still wanted to put it up because I think I hope it makes the point I want to make again it's just basically a single piece that we're designing in an apartment to change the quality of the apartment and here we took mouldings similar to the column project that I just showed and we started to experiment with oblique cuts and with combining moldings in all kinds of different ways to create this kind of wall shelve unit and so the one on the left is not painted the one on the right is already a portion of it that we painted so it's sort of registers it's kind of yeah a particular pattern and then they're like these elements that look like cuts and basically they are and the profile of those cuts are actually the things you see on the bottom left and when we took those profiles and be applied them in order to create you know the patterns you see on the heater cover so here the continuity of the individual sort of space object is broken as far as the material continuity but there is some kind of step or translation that goes from how the molding as almost a found object is being cut and then reread through the profiles and then the profiles find themselves in a very different way or on a different kind of object but would hope there's an echo between those two so the echo between different elements some kind of relationship or association I think is what is really interesting us today or in the last few years so the continuity is no longer or within the object is no longer important in terms of singularity but I still care very much about creating associations and relationships within the elements that are used for design obviously jump in scale but I don't think jump in topic hopefully not what we see here is a beautiful landscape it's mount Aquino in Japan and maybe some of the hard core people here know what's coming next because if you were to go into this mountain this is what you would see or at least this is what the photographer andreas gursky saw or at least what he produced which is a photograph of the interior of cameo kundan kamiokande is a neutrino detection facility but those of you who don't know what an eternity detection facility is basically a facility that is trying to you know grass detect hold on to the most elusive particle that exists at least to our knowledge up to this point so neutrinos are have almost zero mass and they basically fly with light speed through the universe and they're produced by such things as solar explosion supernovae BIGBANG and so forth right so how do we capture something that barely exists well you do it by building a facility into a mountain and by literally turning the mountain into a facility so I find this so interesting on so many different levels and to me it is actually in a strange way some kind of a larger weirder loci of some sort right the blending of the natural obviously is one element but also in this case where technology is completely erasing our ability to tell apart what used to be a very clear categorical difference between an apparatus or nature or you know a technology but all of this sort of merges elem into each other now if you ask why a mountain the mountain is basically meant to create an obstacle for the neutrinos so imagine you a neutrino you're super super small right so if your neutrino and you zoom through the entire mass of the earth the overwhelming chances you will never hit anything else right so all the atoms of the earth are basically miles and miles apart if your neutrino you're just kind of basically gonna fly right through it the only chance is to densify as much as we can so you'll find a very dense mountain and then you turn that mountain into this facility now that's one aspect of it of course there's another aspect which is the photograph the representation that we see here by gursky himself and so when we look at this I don't know how you guys feel about it but when I first saw this image I was immediately drawn to it and the associations I had were not really of a scientific facility other things came to my mind things like the pond tail I do it's kind of dome structure and kind of the lightness it goes toward the top I'm another association I had is like this you know famous Schinkel stage said that he designed for the Magic Flute sort of again don't shaped very classical architectural imagery that is being evoked by Gursky and I'm going to kind of zoom in and look really really close what we see is some things are seemingly off right so on the left hand it's a detail of course of course keys photograph on the right what we see is the actual facility from the inside so if you look for a moment you'll realize some things just don't match for instance the size of those round balls which are basically sort of super-sensitive photomultiplier tubes so the idea is the the neutrino goes through the mount and it bounces off one of the molecules the lake is super sterilized water so you see the trace of the bouncing in the water which is reflected to the mirrors and then basically registered in the machines behind the mirrors yeah and you know at that point we will learn more about the Big Bang and the universe I mean that the craziness of it all but back to the representation so what you see is there is there's a difference in size clearly the people that were put in to me these people are perfect Rock eye-to-eye people right there they're not at the center they're seemingly lost they have a certain melancholia they're like in their little boats staring through this weird space you know do they belong do they not belong how did they even get there in reality of course it looks much more like that the mirrors are smaller even the reflection of the water you will recognize is quite different when it's real water so I can give that away this is actually the water part was later at it by Gorsky there are many more really interesting sort of representational moves that i'm not going to give away for those of you interested you should really enjoy this painting this is this photo this photograph but the reason why I'm why I'm talking about this is the actual image here the representation gets much closer to the enormity and the absurdity of what kamiokande is what it is it is a much better vehicle in my opinion to speak about the things that really only can be alluded to as opposed to let's say the image on the right which would be the quote-unquote real way of portraying the facility itself this brings me to another quote this one's by Donna Haraway and she's calling this fantastic beautiful term which is odd King and she says beings requiring each other and expected collaborations and combinations being situated someplace and not no place meaning being in the world entangled and worldly I like what can a lot as a term precisely because it seems to both infuse character into the thing and and talk about kinship but not kinship like relations or relationality but much more in terms of that we force things to become kin and that's kind of how I'm reading this it's not it's not a seemingly natural state but we are sort of pushing elements together in order to form odd kinship once a couple projects that may or may not I hope they may relate to some of that notion of odd kid so of course you can also say the rock is an art can I mean it seems to be the original art can or maybe you know the Nautilus Cup this is a project we developed with some of my expense students Angela Wong Alexander Chen he knows Angelica Morelli on the Samba tourism Miguel bonza and Amelia Landsberg is and we did this for the Medini Malaysia Biennale in 2017 and as you can imagine it was it was one of those projects that was basically asking to create you know kind of new townships and Malaysia basically cities that are you know had to put together tabula rasa and everybody could pick a particular element and sort of you know riff on it and what we were interested in was one of the major industry in Malaysia is palm oil farming and palm oil farming apparently is a really bad thing because it leads to deforestation you a lot of diversity and and you know everybody is planting these palm oil so it's not really a good thing but be that as it may it's it's it's the major you know farming activity in Malaysia and this is how it looks right so not surprisingly you have farmland you have the palm trees and then you have the facilities where the oil is being extracted and produced and distributed and so forth and we wanted to basically test the idea of art can with this particular project and you also see the kind of high end low end the Machine the labor the plant um but we basically literally forced these elements into some kind of odd kin relationality mine they already related they already touching each other they all have some kind of causal you know kind of relationship to each other but usually we still like to look at these elements as separate from each other - or to pull apart and again one is the ground and then one is the architecture and one is the resource and then the other thing is this technology that takes two resource and then it becomes something you can sell its capital and so forth and we're just interested if you just Paulie is closer together well I pushed them to kind of work with each other in new and different ways so you can see the plan the idea was that the facility is also the farm or the farm is also a facility and one is on top of the other and the way we approach this is something we usually do at least in recent years is we very accurately model all the things that belong to the problem we don't look at technology or machines or details really anything else as you know less important it's almost like a flat ontology of stuff before we start right so in this case because it the the farm or the facility itself has a lot of machinery we looked into these machines and they look like this these are not you know we didn't invent them they look very much as you see them we just started to put them together in slightly different ways and what you see on the left-hand side for instance is a little bit of the earth or the ground which then begins to formulate a different relationship with the machine that is sort of collecting the fruit and then beginning to process it and I realize I mean this is one of the questions I get as well you know why why do you show these or why do you basically develop these kinds of machines in this very sort of particular way and you render them as objects the reason is because once I see them as objects I see the whole problem in a very different way all right there's no kind of tracing back your steps I mean the moment I look at the machine and I model it it like this it already forces on me a different way of thinking how to put it together or you know how to put it into you know the larger design of the facility or the architecture itself has really become I guess a technique in some way to model things very accurately and render them and look at them in some kind of decontextualized way and then take it from there so here we did already some kind of quote-unquote design moves the piece you see on the top is like a big funnel so the idea is that you know you collect the palm fruit fruits you drop them into that funnel from there they go down under the ground and then they're being processed so a next step would be like this and again I don't look at them as at all as diagrams I'm not it's not a diagram that is explaining to me how something would work but it's the thing itself right I mean this is what it would be so the trucks are important because I need to know that I have trucks that actually bring the fruits you know I need to understand what basically where they drop the fruit how it kind of tumbles down the hill and how it's being sort of eaten up by the machine so the ground turns into the machine turns into the ground and so forth and as a next step we started to basically fill in the bits and pieces to create these larger conglomerate objects and what I also realize is the moment you look at let's say a machine as a decontextualized object and as I said in the beginning it forces me to think about the design process differently what it does is that the ground for instance and also has to be Delp in a different way when the way we chose to deal with it is we look at the ground as an object as well and it's an interesting reversal of a kind of a trope that's more sort of a 90s digital trope where landscape architecture became all of architecture because we did a lot of surfaces and surfaces look like landscapes there were a lot of projects that started as landscapes and then they become architectural this is almost like the reversal we start with objects which then forces us to see quote-unquote landscape also just as another object and so we keep building and giving more material to base but it forces us to stay within the same kind of I guess design ethic so again the trees also no longer are just trees they're not just kind of you know well in this case they wouldn't be auxilary because they're really the thing that provides the fruit but we look at them as it's as bits and pieces of the architecture itself so how does wood work I think it's self-explanatory right on top you have your plantation people are picking up the fruit either by hand or with these trucks you drop them into these zippers the zippers are in the ground from there the fruits tumble down and then they're being sort of you know processed into oil and other kind of pulp and and whatnot there's not an element to this project where we also basically wanted to design housing for the workers and we basically organize the housing around sort of the solar facility that would generate energy on top it sings like a corkscrew into the ground and then basically underneath the solar cells you have a theater and then outside of the theater you have individual housing and you would have many many many of those and they would be literally like these coke screws in the ground you'll have the sort of small-scale housing organized around it which would of course also take on or take some of the electricity that is being generated by the solar cells above and then you know the inside of the theater could look something along these lines so again what we're trying to do here is look at you know the same kind of programmatic problem through very different lenses some of them sort of immersive in terms of a more superior quality others like the way we see it in the plan and in terms of relationships that are generated by Orkin qualities as I would call it this is not a project I I'm showing this for the first time even though it's a 2016 competition we worked on it and I was shelf for some time and then we worked on it again one of one of those kinds of things I have been going to Cairo and Egypt in the last two and a half years frequently and the final project which I'll be showing after this one is actually the project we did with my students at Penn in Cairo and during that time there was like this competition for a science city outside of Cairo and it's basically a number of museums and you know some of them dedicated to technology some of them actual showing artifacts but the idea was to create it sort of outside of Cairo again tabula rasa and well tabula rasa or outside of Cairo is something like this is really one of the most interesting and amazing places you fly over it this is a photo I took and all you see is like sand and from the far the sand begins to rip a little bit and then you see how that ripple is actually the beginning of the city and then what you see on the right hand side down there that's actually a quarry so you have a lot of sandstone and marble quarries in in Egypt and most of the building material outside of the brick and the concrete is being sort of quarried out of these facilities but from the top they just look like these strange sort of yeah elements in the ground and then when you get close they look like this I believe everybody has seen or has an understanding how marble quarry works but I hadn't really looked at it up close until I went there and it's a super interesting process mmm and the way how the the marble is being cut the sort of really low-tech technology at least in Egypt that is being used to basically remove larger parts of rock from you know from the cliffs and then begin to sort of cut them into smaller pieces as you go along and it's all happening in in this sort of in the same place only the final finishing is been done someplace else where the facility becomes more sophisticated so here you can still see there is the kind of residue or the trace of the tools that are used in order to cut into these stones and also on the left hand side what you see over here it's very typical that's something I didn't know for instance there are all these strange diagonals and makes perfect sense so basically the the marble is being removed from the rock I have another fashion so I can slide down and I went caught up and then you know caught into smaller pieces and these guys are the coolest guys ever all they do is they stand there in these incredibly picturesque poses and smoke okay so what we wanted to do I don't know if this is really truly an odd connect I haven't figured that one yet out but what we wanted to do is basically create an architectural aesthetic or a formal language that was really kind of derived and associating itself with the technology with the place with the color with the sand but but also obviously move beyond that and generate you know its own identity a lot of these quarries the backside of it looks like this where access material is being pulverized and used to create boulders and then these boulders are used by the military police to put it up all over Cairo Graham is here I mean he knows very well how that how that goes so there's that kind of sinister side to it as well however mmm so we developed this project from the outside in this is one of the projects we really started from the exterior and you know used similar techniques that we basically observed and began to yeah formulate our science city or at least a building of the science city when it comes to the interior organization of it this goes all the way back how we dealt with the composite house mine it's just sort of blown up and scale because it has to be but it's very similar so I mean these chunks or larger scale objects are a way for us to think about architecture or think about design in a way that doesn't start with let's say massing or it doesn't start with a party or doesn't start with a plan or you know we we want to deal with it in different ways and that's our way of doing it we look at objects that are partially formal partially they have information that we understand as programmatic we clearly see where that's happening we develop them more and more and then we begin to sort of bring them together in a larger sort of coherent manner but the individual quote-unquote objects maintain a particular autonomy and the particular quality in the way how we further develop them right so we force an exhibition onto one of these right even if it seems that is not the way to do it or at least in terms of conventionalized categories or what an exhibition would be like so we have these big chunks we use the top we use the interior we use the bottom again we bring in qualities that are machining and we merge them with qualities that are in this case also ornamental hieroglyphic exterior and interior are also blending into each other the top of this this makes obviously a lot of sense it's in Cairo I think 360 days of sunshine the entire roof we thought again would be some kind of a solar roof not because we are so interested in the ecological aspect but because we believe that the quality of the solar roof is another way of creating an art cane which is sort of visceral it's a marble stone Rock massive quality of the rest of the building and we also decided to take the quality of the roof inverted into this sort of solar funnel which then becomes an important element of the interior exhibition inside the museum itself and then the interiors follow literally we take these Chung's and we press them together and we just test what works and and when they come together in a way we're an interesting speciality emerges then that's what it is and from there we take we take the next step and the next step would be to develop it you know put handrails on you know do all that kind of stuff so this is the last project I'm going to show and I want to do that by starting with a quote it's actually out of one of Graham Harmons books and I'm so glad Graham you could be here it's maybe the book for me at least I was the most influential we had realism Lovecraft and philosophy and for all kinds of reasons but I just want to read this one short passage and take it from there in here Graham is is basically talking about the fiction or the science fiction of Lovecraft and so this passage is as talking about kind of a science fiction depiction of a city and let me read this quote to innovate and science fiction we cannot simply replace New York and Tokyo with exotically named extra galactic capitals which is merely trading a familiar content for bizarre but comparable one instead we must show that everyday banality of New York and Tokyo undercut from within subverting the background conditions assumed by the existence of any city at all rather than inventing a monster with an arbitrary number of tentacles and dangerous sucker mouths and telepathic brains we must recognize that no such list of arbitrary weird properties is enough to do the trick now gone these monsters etc of course refer to the writing of Lovecraft and I think Graham's take or a way out of this is kind of interesting or specific play between the artwork itself and its background in this case the background I believe is understood to be the medium of science fiction genre now I don't know what the background or the median order genre of something like an urban project or kind of urbanism would be but I really would resonate it with me but that particular part of the text is the monsters of course are the sort of exuberant sort of spectacular designs that we produce and what I mean to me I was immediately struck by that definition because I guess we have our monsters and we're producing them all the time and do they really do the job or are they being sort of consumed rather quickly into a kind of a mainstream condition be that again through becoming banal or in more sinister ways of becoming part of a spectacle society feeding into neoliberalism and so forth right so but what can we do so what what is a background what would a background be in in a project like this one so that's something I shared with my students when we started to work on the project real fictions Cairo this project grew over three semesters it's in collaboration with the Heritage Centre which is an arm of the cultural ministry in Cairo so it basically invited to go there with Penn design graduate architecture students work for semester and produce projects they invited us because they thought we will give them solutions for real-life problems and what is interesting about that let me quickly Oh shout out to my assistant Michael Zimmerman he was the one constant alongside me in all these three semesters and you can see the students listed here that that worked on on all of these but I want what I wanted to just say is like so we were basically invited to look at Cairo which looks like this even though this was taken in 1902 by a guy called ed Watts Bell torini who was one of the first sort of hot balloon adventures and he flew over cities and the orbs and took photographs as one of the very very first aerial views that were taking of Cairo to me it's amazing because it hasn't really changed much at least not from the distance and so we're basically invited and then you know sort of confronted with informal settlements everywhere completely chaotic infrastructural situations traffic everything you that you can imagine right and then we were asked well how would you how would you address that how would you solve that and usually there are two ways how one goes about these kinds of projects mean you either make something like a master plan which is you completely neglect anything you see and you come up with something that's better right quote-unquote and then you put it there and then you go home or you are basically completely sort of hands-off ish you say well I don't know maybe we can do a little bit here a little bit there or we do you know some kind of you know small-scale interventions we didn't want to do either one of them we wanted to do a real project that could have an impact but clearly also be understood there's no way that this could be along the lines of any large sort of patronizing privileges of a modernist scheme or competition that's where um the part that I was just quoting to you guys from Graham came came became a really important input how do we define what is the background of a city like that in a real way not in not in a political way no just really what are the things that we see and deal with at all times and yet they don't seem to register in in in the best possible way or let's say in ways that become productive and become progressive so we looked at a number of I guess examples and then we try to through this methodology come up with architectural ideas for it so the first one was would be called realist estate and conglomerate urbanism so this is the situation seventy percent or something in in Cairo lives in informal settlements which means there's no infrastructure there's no planning things are done at hawk and this particular edge used to hold more houses and they all sort of crashed down the cliff because they were built without foundation so these things happen and then you know thousands of people die so what we wanted to do is we wanted to basically very similar to the way how we design the machines in in the Medini project we wanted to look at what's there with without having any prejudice and so we started modeling the kind of informal houses that we found in the most accurate way and then what we realized is they actually a lot of them look like classical modernism and the only thing that doesn't make it look like classical modernism is the material difference because they are unfinished the art of break and so forth right so we developed a fiction in this particular case by turning the existing informal houses into in some cases really recognizable in other cases maybe less recognizable but you'll get the idea you know masterpieces right which then could be rebranded as yeah architectural signature elements that could be rented out and resold and so forth we have something that looks like christow project we have a mala party we have something that's a red felt or Schindler we have a called boozy and scheme conjoined twins that one's really interesting with the cranes what they often do is they keep their animals in their homes and put them on the roofs and so we animals live on the roof but the problem is how do we get food up and how do you get all the crap do the animals produce down and the way they do it is by these little cranes that they create and put on the roof that basically take material up and down so in that case we took that on and the cranes turned themselves into a kind of building envelope of sorts and we took that idea to the next level which was the urban level and basically called it in conglomerate urbanism where we again spun a lot of possible scenarios where seemingly what is a disadvantage could be seen in a different kind of light there's another example highways underbelly you see often because there's no real planning somebody draws a highway across the city that's what you see on the left and splits the neighborhood into two and what happens is that the zone in between completely falls into pieces and is unusable and you like old cars rotting away etc so we look at this as another example and then what we saw is like these really bizarre beautiful columns and rosette elements that our local artisans create and sell and they put them up on the wall so people on the road can actually see them stop come down and buy them so this project takes takes that on again as a as a fiction so to speak as a real fiction where the wall and the individual pieces begin to formulate new kinds of relationships with each other they also merge or become sort of again odd kin partners with infrastructure elements and you know hopefully generate this kind of strange and yet very locally specific architectural qualities and then there of course also these bizarre hybrids if you will that emerge between a door and rosette window and so forth there's another one is a convair house they're like these it's called the Zabaleen like christian people who live coptic christian people who live in egypt who basically make a living from collecting all the trash and then recycling it in their neighborhood and it literally looks like this and the trash is being recycled in their homes so this project was taking on that notion by creating a conveyor belt system really straightforward very simple and sort of revolving it around the houses and sort of generating that project open Bazaar I'm gonna fly over these because I think it's getting late but I think you get the idea in this case there are tons of open-air bazaars none of which have any kind of infrastructure they need water they need electricity at light they don't have it so this one is a proposal where that canopy system is basically plugging into existing buildings and sort of like a parasite taking their electricity and infrastructure like water turning it into canopy and then under the canopy you have opportunity for these bazaars to further emerge this was a beautiful old vault where I think they were producing weapons but nobody can get there again the there's a long story to it I'm not gonna get into that anyway no team of students took that on remained within the language of the existing wood began to sort of spin their own architectural story on the interior over under was a look that was the the next semester from the first one so went on in the second semester a lot of space is being gobbled up by a chaotically plant often on ramps and they're really why because there's a lot of traffic so they create really these sort of dead zones and that was in a nutshell what we wanted to focus on in this particular project again these are all so far as ways of articulating why this project could be useful for our hosts because of course they want to know well you know what would we do why is you know how can we actually improve the situation now if you don't have you know billions of dollars with which you can actually change the entire system you need to develop some kind of tactics it's not about strategy it's really about developing tactics which shouldn't add up into a larger approach so by now this should look very familiar we looked at bridges we studied what was basically the background condition of a bridge which are the things that are hidden underneath smaller not part of the main functionality of the bridge we modelled them very carefully we begin to sort of alter some of them in order to produce qualities that would go beyond what they were already achieving but never far beyond always but in the realm of plausibility and then these bits and pieces started to add up to grow and articulate yeah I hope a particular aesthetic quality so here you can see also the blending together between what is considered to be an ornamentation with what is an infrastructural element piping and tubing and turning into Islamic patterns this is actually in front of the subway station so you see in the background the subway rushing by it's a part of a train station underneath the train station again you have these sort of interesting desire strange I don't know what the word is atmospheres so again a play with what is technological what is machine this piece is actually next to the Nile so the turbines you see are basically sucking in the water which is then being transported up and sort of creating the luscious garden on top but you would of course never be aware of it if you're in the garden only the representation of the object is basically confronting us with that reality you know some one of my favorites it's basically underneath like underneath that particular model you'd have these kinds of spaces that emerge the final studio this one is actually the one we just finished mixing and making it's a little different it is a little different in the way that for the first time we actually had an actual site so the projects weren't anecdotal that we would sort of find and then develop and and decide is again very typical for Cairo but what we would be considering a rather strange the the parking structure you see on the right stands where not that long ago I mean actually about a hundred years ago you had this Opera House so it's still called opera square the opera house burned down was never rebuilt and instead of the Opera House they built this parking structure and of course it's terrible because it's a really beautiful place in in modern Cairo and Cadle Cairo and so they basically asked us to come up with schemes for it but they already decided to rebuild the Opera so they're going to rebuild exactly what you see on the left but it's no longer functional as an opera because it would be too small and and whatnot so they're only rebuilding the facade of it so we again took their own we basically said alright great so we rebuilt the facade it doesn't really matter if you rebuild it or you find it I mean it's all part of kind of the larger strangeness of the individual conglomeration of objects in Cairo but then we kept the the parking structure or the students who work on this particular project kept the parking structure and design basically again relationships that are basically forced in order to create tensions things that we look at as primary architectural capital a architecture find themselves at the periphery other things that may usually be more in the background are being pulled to the foreground it's another part of the project slightly further back in what you see on the right hand side is a old department store beautiful or niveau design falling into bits and pieces so this group of students designed a kind of a new bathhouse elevated the kind of ground floor up to create the sort of two floors have a new access into the buildings again a mixing of sort of the the water fixture to kind of maximize a more sort of gigantic faucet of the water tank which is then being displayed and becomes part of the architecture it drips down and creates these individual baiting hooks and niches in in the bathhouse there's another element kind of a continuation of an existing overpass which is being turned around to become an amphitheater but then the underside of the amphitheater is also used to create sort of yeah stuff local real fictional architectural moment the thing on the right in case you were wondering is another element that works bit sort of all the garment that's being sold on the street so these students came up with a rail system that begins you know all the way from the top of the highway and is being pulled down turns itself into a rack and then you know has all kinds of clothing and hangers that can be sort of pulled and pushed around and then this is the final one the final fiction of this particular project there is an existing subway and these students decided to basically take the infrastructural part of the top of the subway expose it and then use it to create an artificial natural artificial park right and then on top it would look something like this lush and green there used to be an existing park exactly at that spot where the highway where the highway is right now is just basically sand on top so it would be creating the sort of new park condition but you'd be walking on top literally of the infrastructural elements and pieces of the subway and I think that would be it thank you

Channel: SCI-Arc Media Archive

Views: 2,120

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Rococo, Hybridism, 2D/3D, Mass production, Scagliola, Andreas Gursky, Farm buildings, Urban design, Interior design, Houses, Water faucets, Plumbing

Id: sFl2ftimSRg

Length: 94min 40sec (5680 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018