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THE COOPER UNION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT
OF SCIENCE AND ART, School of Architecture
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DESIGN II
spring 2009 professors -Kevin Bone
(coordinator),
Felicia Davis, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa,
Michael Young
The design studio
started from an imaginary site developed from specific topographical conditions
located at 40 degrees north latitude that were partially abstracted, while at
the same time, the representational model became a real site. This model-site
presented a common structure that forced students to measure and mark its
conditions and propose design interventions considering the specifics of a
place, but also enforced a sense of collective communal approach that informed
programmatic decisions.
The first exercise
called probe was to measure the site conditions where the student would
operate architectonically. An architectural measuring is quite different from an
engineering or a surveyors measuring of a site, in the sense that the
architectural operation accounts both for a measurement of the territory (its
scale, distance, relation to the horizon, etc), as it simultaneously creates a
category to that territory with a particular tectonics that transform those
existing qualities that are being measured, exceeding its mere marking. The
projects would need to index this measurement of the territory as their form
relate to the conditions of the place where it is developed, a non hierarchical
bottom up tactics where the understanding of the particularities of the place
would provide the logic for the project. The first measurement was highly
structural as some projects worked striations in the territory that measured the
multidirectional change of slope of the topography in relation to gravity and
the relative horizons. This set up the first problem in the confrontation of the
topo-logos: the recognition that demanded a suspension of categorical
thinking and the appreciation of the qualities and characteristics of a place
that resist generic categories but demand a specific particular response. Two
alternatives arose from this problem: one, the logic of the site developed a
particular method intrinsic to that reality; second, this logic is confronted
with a structuralist logic, a Cartesian logos that remains as the
universal parameterization of space. In this sense, the measuring probe was the
confrontation of these two dialectical problems: one from a tactical and
specific reality and the other from a strategic and generic reality. Many
projects referenced the Cartesian both to gravity, that played against the slope
of the site, and to the artificial limits of the site-model that became a
referential frame developing a strategy of opposition.
This built site
presented a thin volume with parallel surfaces that forced the student to
confront a particular consideration of the development of the footprint of the
project. This footprint became an architecture operation, in itself, an
articulation of the ground surface, that would simultaneously measure the
territory but also index the presence of the architectural decisions taken. The
irregularity of the slope of this site-model forced a special consideration in
the tectonics and grounding of the architectural operations, that produced a
sharing and sometimes an exchangeable reasoning between plan and section in the
relationships between object and ground. While in section projects responded to
the slope and the sun condition, in plan the projects grounded themselves
against the slope but also strangely related structurally to the artificial
frame of the site-model bringing back a frame reference.
The figure-ground
relationship resulting from the projects in the site presented alternative
solutions in relation to the structural incorporation of a connector road that
forces perpendicular relationships of subordination between their figural
presence and this linear structure. The opposite alternative would have forced a
continuous non-hierarchical negotiation between projects that would have forced
tactical relationships, until a more structural but yet local moment would have
emerged from these field of tensioned spaces. Taking this alternative as a
critique, the linear hierarchical structure was unmotivated as a figure as it
was interrelated to the particular projects that intertwined with its
trajectory. This strategy made those projects become part of this road and
simultaneously to deconstruct by splitting, deforming and weaving both parallel
and perpendicular in relation to potential alternatives. The development of
architectural figures that index particular places, developed an idea about a
community that may be analogous to certain problems in the architecture of a
city: a set of distinct independent figural striated moments where the fabric
in-between them is also striated but as an homogeneous and continuous landscape.
