Envelope: Media and Performance

Cosmetics: Physical decorative enhancements applied to a surface. The effect produced by the application or use of cosmetics arises not from meaning inherent in the the cosmetics or the surface, but from the relationship between the two.

Lʼespirit Nouveau: Literally translated, l'espirit nouveau means the new spirit. Le Corbusierʼs new spirit was the move from the spirit of the avant-garde to age of consumption, or the machine age. The change in spirit can also be seen as the idea that the spirit or meaning of a thing can change depending on it's classification, which can be provided by physical space or by crossing a physical barrier, as exemplified by Duchampʼs Fountain, which transformed from everyday object to art by crossing the threshold of the museum.

Envelope: The physical barrier of a building, which can also be a ideological barrier when one considers what is allowed to permeate the barrier--who and what is kept outside of the barrier, who and what is kept inside of the barrier. 

“Ornaments attach as discreet entities to the body like jewelry, reinforcing the structure and integrity of the body as such. Cosmetics are indiscreet, with no relation to the body other than to take it for granted. Cosmetics are erotic camouflage; they relate always and only to the skin, to particular regions of the skin. Deeply, intricately material, cosmetics nevertheless exceed materiality to become modern alchemicals as they trans-substantiate skin into image, desirous or disgusting. Where ornaments retain their identity as entities, cosmetics work as fields, as blush or shadow or highlight, as aura or air.” (Kipnis, The Cunning of Cosmetic)

"Viewing a landscape through a a window implies a separation. A window, any window, breaks the connection between being in a landscape and seeing it. Landscape becomes visual, and we depend on memory to know it as a tangible experience...Le Corbusier's window corresponds, I would argue, to the space of the camera...The point of view of photography is that of the camera, a mechanical eye. The painterly convention of perspective centers everything on the eye of the beholder and calls this appearance 'reality.' The camera--and more particularly the movie camera--implies that this is no center." (Colomina, LʼEsprit Nouveau: Architecture and Publicite)

"The building envelope forms the border, the frontier, the edge, the enclosure and the joint: it is loaded with political content." (Zaera Polo, The Politics of the Envelope)

The envelope of the building can contain many layers of meaning within the relationship between inside and outside. What is cosmetically applied to the surface of the outside creates a new relationship between the structure and what is beyond the barrier of the structure as it changes the surface. Punctures in the envelope, which allow transpiration between the inside and the outside, alter the political structure of the envelope by permitting physical and ideological dispersal beyond the barrier.

Program: Events and Scenarios

Scenario planning: A method used to discover potential futures and existing uncertainties. The method is usually centered around a specific question, and the possible outcomes, while arranged on a four-square grid, provide a spectrum of possibilities. The benefit of this method is to be prepared for many possibilities, rather than just the expected outcome.

Program: Program is the narrative given to a space by a designer. It describes the ways the space will be used--the events, activities and flows that the designer predicts will transpire there.

Dialectic: A dialectic is an approach to debate that allows for contradictory yet simultaneous points of view, and seeks to find common ground between them. In architectural theory, this approach is useful when seeking to discern between movements, such as Modernism and Post- functionalism.

“Furthermore, closely associated with this architecture is a number of ideas -- ideas expressing modernity in one sense or another, nearly always either by analogy with the past or by analogy with some other activity than architecture.” (Summerson, The Case for a Theory of ʻModernʼ Architecture)

“We had begun with a critique of the city, had gone back to basics: to simple and pure spaces, to barren landscapes, a room; to simple body movements, walking in a straight line, dancing; to short scenarios. And we gradually increased the complexity by introducing literary parallels and sequences of events, placing these programmes within existing urban contexts.” (Tschumi, Spaces and Events)

“Our goal is not to try to tell four stories, one of which--we hope, as futurists--we be true. Instead, we recognize that the “real” future will not be any of the four scenarios, but that it will contain elements of all of our scenarios. Our goal is to pin down the corners of the plausible futures. These corners are exaggerated--the outer limits of what is plausible. Thus our scenarios will have a near-caricature quality.” (Wilkinson, Scenarios)

Creating a program for a space is analogous to writing a story for the activities and events that will occur there. It is not a simple linear tale. Instead, the narrative branches as in a “choose your own adventure” story. This is because it requires attempting to predict, as does scenario planning, a spectrum of possible ways in which the story could unfold. Creating program allows one to create space that is prepared for the unfolding of a variety of narratives.

Representation: Communication and Information

Hybrid: Jenks uses hybrid to mean something that holds dual meanings at the same time. He uses the example of the duck/rabbit illustration, where, depending on what you look for, you can see a duck or a rabbit within the drawing. He contends that you might be able to see a third creature, a double-faced monster, but you cannot view two of the meanings at once (both “all duck” and “all rabbit”).

Placelessness: Placelessness occurs where there are no unique signs or markers that define a place as separate from the universal space continuum. The aim of Critical Regionalism is to intercept this “universal civilization” (Frampton, 21) and view it through a uniquely regional lens.

Hyperreality: Hyperreality occurs when reality has been over-mediated and over-saturated with communication to the point at which it ceases to exist. Baudrillard believed that this had occurred, and that we no longer live in reality, but instead have signs or stand-ins for reality.

“Itʼs all confusion and strife, and yet this invective is still language even if itʼs not very comprehensible or persuading. There are various analogies, architecture shares with language and if we use the terms loosely, we can speak of architectural ʻwordsʼ, ʻphrasesʼ, ʻsyntaxʼ, and ʻsemanticsʼ. (Jenks, Language of Postmodern Architecture)

“Heidegger argues that the phenomenological essence of such a space/place depends upon the concrete, clearly defined nature of its boundary, for, as he puts it, ʻA boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.ʼ” (Frampton, Critical Regionalism)

“But just so: as long as there is alienation, there is spectacle, action, scene. It is not obscenity-- the spectacle is never obscene. Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh-and inexorable light of information and communication.” (Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication)

In moving toward a universal culture we are moving toward the idea of communicating a solitary idea. When we cease to communicate regional ideas, we lose what defines regions. This is dangerous, because when we loses what marks a region as separate from another, we lose not only what marks where a region ends, but also where it begins. Without beginnings or endings, there is no reality, only, to use Baudrillardʼs term, an un-nuanced hyperreality.

Ground: Topology and Emergence

Field Condition: The field condition describes the behavior of points that compose a field. The behavior of the points is swarm behavior; each single point is affected by any change in location of surrounding points. Because the movement of one point creates a multitude of movement in the surrounding area, form can arise and take shape out of the field.

Epigenetic landscape: a model landscape that demonstrates the possible movement of a body through space and time. As with the field condition, every point of the landscape is dependent on other points in the landscape, and so the ever-changing epigenetic landscape never provides pre-determined paths for the body.

Symmetry: Symmetry is the repetition of form that occurs as a result of the loss of information. Where a new form would occur as a result of new or continuing information, symmetry occurs as a default when the information needed for differentiation is not available. 

“The inchoate qualities of the form ʻfragmentsʼ that traditionally we are conditioned to see here are, in fact, nothing else than the manifest work of time plying the folds of matter to release the virtual forms within it. Each panel defines a unique field of unfolding, a section through a distinct epigenetic landscape in which forms exist only in evolution or equilibrium, that is, as event- generated diagrams, incarnating the multiple conflictual play of forces across all the dimensions of space and their modalities of convergence at a single specific instant in time.” (Kwinter, Landscapes of Change: Boccioniʼs Stati dʼanimo as a General Theory of Models)

“Organisms are not attributed to any ideal reduced type or single organization; rather, they are the result of dynamic non-linear interactions of internal symmetries with the vicissitudes of a disorganized context. These contexts become ʻgenerative fieldsʼ once they are organized by flexible and adaptable systems that integrate their differences in the form of informational constraints.” (Lynn, The Renewed Novelty of Symmetry)

“Crowds and swarms operate at the edge of control. Aside from the suggestive formal possibilities, with these two examples architecture could profitably shift its attention from its traditional top-down forms of control and begin to investigate the possibilities of a more fluid, bottom-up approach. Field conditions offers a tentative opening in architecture to address the dynamics of use, behavior of crowds, and the complex geometries of masses in motion.” (Allen, Field Conditions)

Form can be seen as a moment in and of a field; it is the arrangement field disturbances at a point in time. Thus, the act of creation can be seen as the act of disturbing the field. This implies that, while not predetermined, the form created was inherent to the field, and has the potential to return to the field. The form created is never an end result, but rather a single moment in time representing the positions of the points of the field. It embodies the potential for change.

Ground: Promenade and Derive

Thoroughfare: A place whose only meaning is provided by the movement of people through it.

Parallax: Parallax is the name for the occurrence of a change in location effecting perception. It is when one location of viewing causes you to visually perceive something differently than you would from another viewpoint.

Gizmo: A device that allows for portable technology. The ability to transport technology is the ability to transport place.

“Back at my window, the palimpsest of a new city flaunts its hypertextuality in black and light; its mental map of diverse subjectives rarely operates while one is on foot, a predicament that hints at the possibility of a new visibility, a new field with emergent, unexpected megashapes newly apprehensible but only at vastly different scales of motion.” (Lerup, Stim and Dross, 25)

“The center is a thoroughfare, i.e., an indifferent place, with no other identity than the one conferred on it by the passersby, a nonplace that exists only by the experience of time and motion that the stroller may make of it.” (Bois, A Picturesque Stroll Around Clara-Clara, 50)

“True sons of Archimedes, the Americans have gone one better than the old granddaddy of mechanics. To move the earth he required a lever long enough and somewhere to rest it--a gizmo and an infrastructure--but the great American gizmo can get by without any infrastructure. Had it needed one, it would never have won the West or opened up the transcontinental trails.” (Banham, The Great Gizmo, 110)

Movement and perception are intricately tied to one another. Whether it is the way in which moving around an object changes oneʼs perception of it, that moving through a place provides a different perception than a stationary view would provide, or the ability to transport a portable place, movement has a great influence over the ways we perceive things of a large range of scales. Furthermore, the rate of motion exerts further influence over these perceptions.

Interior: Surface Treatment

Developed Surface: The Developed Surfaces is a method of drawing the interior of a space in a manner that folds the surfaces outward and flattens them, so that the interiors are legible as two-dimensional elevations. This method is notable because developed surface drawings trace the history of the wall's significance to the room as well as the hierarchy of the objects within the room.

Wallpaper: According to Lavin, Wallpaper is the use of multiple media on the surface of the wall. She believes that Wallpaper moves the architectural wall surface away from the Greenbergian painterly surface, but that at the same time reinvokes Greenberg's focus on materiality.

Hyperpainterly: The Hyperpainterly is an effect used to contemporize the architectural wall. An effect that arises from the use of color, shifts in pattern and tone can be used to lend the wall the qualities of both indeterminateness and presence. 

“The room is no longer a circus, but a miniature internal landscape. It is no longer an edge and a centre (distantly but distinctly related to those spectral archetypes, the domed space and the ideal city), always looking towards the latent authority of the centre, as was so well parodied in Reptonʼs Cedar Parlour. It is now a topography of varied elements distributed picturesquely across the floor, without evident formality, but nevertheless with concern for the niceties of subdivided, heterogeneous association.” (Evans, The Developed Surface: An Enquiry into the Brief Life of and Eighteenth Century Drawing Technique)

“They also, however, take a distinct pleasure in being wallpaper because they understand the wall in an architectural way. While painting suffers from the brutal realism and abstraction that Greenberg forced on the surface, architecture suffers from the historic and unaccounted for disappearing act of the walled surface. For architecture, the wall and its surface were generally seen as getting in the way of other truths like those of materials, of structure, and of space.” (Lavin, What Your Surface is What You Get)

“Color becomes contemporary as it moves away from indexicality, symbolism, codification, and ideation because this move away from signification allows color to register traces of a much more complex series of historically specific conditions and forces: those of technology, sensibility, capital, taste, materiality, manufacture. In other words, when working through the field of effects, color can do more engage contemporaneity than when it works through the structures of meaning.” (Lavin, What Color is Now?)

The wall once was defined by the furniture within the room, arranged as almost a connection to the wall surface. As furniture began to migrate away from the wall, the wall began to disappear. This disappearance was also at times intentional, with Modernists attempting to make the materiality of the wall recede from sight. The wall surface has re-emerged, though, through the use of effects such as wallpaper.

Interior: Dark Space

Junkspace: Junkspace is the interstitial space that is seemingly inadvertently created through the layering of surfaces. Junkspace pushes the individual through the space, to move, to consume, to be consumed, to relinquish mental capacity; all becomes one, all inherits the quality of nothingness within Junkspace.

Mimicry: Mimicry in the natural world occurs when an organism evolves to resemble its surroundings or another organism. This evolution occurs to ensure survival of the organism, life-giving, but it also can be life-taking, in that an organism loses personality as it loses what differentiates it from its surroundings.

Entropy: Entropy is the process of moving from order to disorder. As entropy moves out from the center, emptyness increases within the center, creating antimatter, or negative space. 

"I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." (Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia)

"Junkspace is post-existential: it makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, dismantles where you were. Who are you? You thought that you could ignore Junkspace. Visit it surreptitiously, treat it with condescending contempt or enjoy it vicariously. Because you could not understand it, you've thrown away the keys... but now your own architecture is infected, has become equally smooth, all-inclusive, continuous, warped, busy..." (Koolhaas, Junkspace)

"The physical confinement of the dark box-like room indirectly conditions the mind. Even the place where you buy your ticket is called a "box-office." The lobbies are usually full of box-type fixtures like the soda-machine, the candy counter, and telephone booths. Time is compressed or stopped inside the movie house, and this in turn provides the viewer with an entropic condition. To spend time in a movie house is to make a "hole" in one's life." (Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments)

There are spaces for which the sum is not equal to the total of the parts--the sum is so much less that it becomes a subtraction. It can be called dark space, junkspace, or negative space, and it takes rather than gives. The space has no coherent gestalt, and it envelopes its contents so that they, too, mimic the surroundings and become bland, uniform, continuous, and personality-less. It is the anti-élan vital.

Program: Disciplining Bodies

Panopticon: The panopticon is a structure that is built such that a central viewing station provides views of the occupants of surrounding cells without allowing the cell occupants to view the observer.

Matrix: A matrix is an egalitarian arrangement of zones. The zones have no hierarchy and movement between zones is unrestricted--from each zone there are multiple zones to move into.

Reterritorialization: Reterritorialization is the reclaiming of a zone (mental or physical) so that it once again belongs to the occupant.

“In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but it so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations.” (Foucault, Panopticiscm)

“The matrix of connected rooms is appropriate to a type of society which feeds on carnality, which recognizes the body as a person, and which gregariousness is habitual. The features of this kind of life can be discerned in Raphaelʼs architecture and painting. Such was the typical arrangement of household space in Europe until it was challenged in the seventeenth century and finally displaced in the nineteenth by the corridor plan, which is appropriate to a society that finds carnality distasteful, which sees the body as a vessel of mind and spirit, and in which privacy is habitual.” (Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages)

“This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a while “diagram,” as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs.” (Deleuze, How do you make yourself a body without organs?)

Architects have the ability to control power through the structures the design. This is done through the ways in which visibility, traffic, and communication are allowed or restricted. By making choices in regards to these elements, the architect creates a hierarchy, thus providing or taking away power from occupants of the structure.

Precedent: Case Study: Johnson and Mi(e)s

Genealogy: Genealogy is a non-linear view of history. With genealogy, it is possible for alternative/multiple/branching histories to occur.

Historicism: Historicism is a viewpoint that places emphasis on the social context, with one event leading to another in a linear manner. From this viewpoint, something that may be true at one moment may not be true at another moment.

Eclecticism: Eclecticism draws from multiple concepts to create new concepts. It does not stay within any one theory, but applies aspects or ideas of styles from different theories.

“Since eclectic architecture is an architecture of connoisseurs and not of purists, it serves to protect architectural borrowings from questions of principle. Thus, we see one of the effects of Johnsonʼs multiple inversion. Eclecticism allows him to choose from history whatever forms, shapes or directions he wants.” (Peter Eisenman, Introduction)

“To see it, as Johnson encourages us to, as the result of an interplay of multiple, overlapping forces, is to perceive its fundamental modernism--original and traditional; autonomous and dependent. Johnson was not engaged in a recovery of the past; rather, operating within what was presumed to be a consolidated tradition, he demonstrated its fundamental heterogeneity.” (Owens, Philip Johnson: History, Genealogy, Historicism)

“The approach to the house through meadow and copse is derived from English Eighteenth Century precedent. The actual model is Count Pucklerʼs estate at Muskau in Silesia.”

 

and

 

“The idea of asymmetric sliding rectangles was furthest developed in the De Stijl aesthetics of war-time Holland. These shapes, best known to posterity through the painting of the late Piet Mondrian, still have an enormous influence on many other architects besides myself.” (Philip Johnson, House at New Canaan, Connecticut)

Johnson, in his eclectic approach, is not simply copying ideas from past designs. He shows that a design is not the result of a linear progression of ideologies, but will always reference different branches of designs throughout history, and employ these references to create something new.

Precedent: Repetition: Playing Good Copy/Bad Copy

SIMULACRUM: A simulacrum is a copy so far removed from its original that it ceases to carry the idea of the original.

OEUVRE: A body of work created over a lifetime.

CAMP: A work of art that was produced in earnest, which an audience, though enjoying the piece, is unable to relate to the original intent.

“The simulacrum implies great dimensions, depths, and distances which the observer cannot dominate. It is because he cannot master them that he has an impression of resemblance. The simulacrum includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum, which is transformed and deformed according to his point of view.” (Deleuze, Plato and the Simulacrum)

“Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we donʼt perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.” (Sontag, Notes on “Camp”)

“It is in Kleinʼs desperate (or is it facetious?) attempt to protect himself against the erosion of painting and to maintain it as a form of sublime and privileged experience that he reveals most poignantly (it is unclear whether his clairvoyance is innocent or cynical) the extent to which painterly production had already become subservient to the conditions of the culture industry.” (Buchloh, The Primary Colors for the Second Time)

The historical avant-garde viewed the monochrome as the logical conclusion of painting, stripping paintings of any ideological, symbolical or emotional meaning. The neo-avant-garde used the monochrome as a way of proving that there is a difference between art and rote production. Yves Klein's blue monochromes were produced in an identical manner, yet the audience felt there were differences in value existing among them; they were willing to pay different prices for identical monochromes. Kleinʼs was not “art for artʼs sake”; the audience response, or the spectacle, was necessary to complete the idea of his work. This spectacle turned the monochromes into simulacrums: there is no original and the meaning of the copy shifts according to the audience viewpoint. Because the audience both completes the idea of and provides the meaning for the monochromes, the paintings no longer independently carry the original intent of their creator, thus rendering them “camp”.