World Trade Center Site Proposal: Client: New School University, coordinated at Princeton University Program Proposal: NSU University Campus, World Trade Center Redevelopment and a New York Metropolitan Opera. Peter Eisenman Studio, Emmanuel Petit Assistant.  Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa / Meredith Bostwick, Graduate Students PRINCETON UNIVERSITY School of Architecture. Project Presented at Columbia University WTC Symposium, June 2002. 

MEMORIAL: MEMORY AND TIME ACCUMULATION within the project.

 

 FACADES: memory and the first displacement. First radical attack to the symbol. The unavoidable metaphorical charge of intervening in the site. The figures of the twin towers became literally their own FIELD, their identity in NY skyline collapsed suddenly into dust together with the identities of the people inside. Public NY landmark facades and private individual faces were being mourned by the public.  The IMAGE and the Figural condition of the twin towers were related to the skyline, and this has to do with their facades. The face is the figure and the personal altars always relate the figure of the faces with the disappeared bodies into the field. The parti sets up the idea of rendering the figure of the project from this field condition (Bacon), unmotivating the symbol. Producing a symbolic and metaphoric reference to the attacks in this stage only allows for parti projects that are going to be unable to be flexible enough to include memory. Render the writing of the disaster within the field condition. Work the new landscape and render by unmotivating the symbol of the façade of the Twin Towers, the tensions that are going to derive in the writing of the project. Work with a symbol but using it as a striation and a point of departure for going backwards.

 

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 This is the way the project deals with its ground condition. From an UNMOTIVATED first surface, striation that provides the structure for a fertile ground, the first territorialization appears.

 WRITING THE DISASATER The idea of working directly with the facade of TT is then unmotivated by the striation. This parti so consists of both a typology (striated lines, bars) that arises from the identity of the facades and the condition of the Field as a workable surface. Flattening the figure of the facade (by the unfolding in four continuous facades as one flaten surface and displacement in scale) A set of step by step operations for unfolding the static forwarded parti into a sound group of relations: the diagram.  Francis Bacon works specific relations between faces (figures) and backgrounds (fields) in his paintings. Bacon works out this dual condition of figure becoming part of the canvas by certain catalogued operations. Our strategy was performed in an oposite dual condition, by trying to render the figure from a field condition as opposite from Bacon.

 

The catalogue of procedures are borrowed from Delleuze’s critic on Francis Bacon paintings. Delleuze  relates Bacon’s working figure-ground condition by describing procedures on the distortion of the figures to the background canvas. This description  introduces the relation of diagrammatic distortions described by Delleuze about Bacon’s paintings, and starts to be the project own’s disciplinary condition.  Analyzing these procedures, becomes a way on how to use certain material and put to work its’ qualities.


Standardized OPERATIONS: provided the project a way for a fluid interaction of forwards and backwards developments between actualizations (static final performances) and diagrams (unfinished dynamic morphing with a time based approach). This was the way we found our writing of the project. The operations unmotivated our own intuitive intentions by placing homogenized systematization between our demands and the development of the project. This strategy made us displace ourselves from our own motivations and perform the projects demands.

 

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 MEMORIAL 

Although the footprint of the WTC is the place were the most forces of the disaster were placed and thus were the most tension of the project is found, the intervention all together performs a memorial.   The rendering of the disaster occurs with more intensity fragmenting the diagrams within the zone of the footprint of the WTC. In this specific points the image of the project is inverted towards the becoming figure of the space. The shadow or second place of the displacement of the representation of the disaster is related to the work played by the WFC by C. PELLI. C. Pelli worked a set of relations informed by the footprint of the WTC. The group of towers place their figure in the skyline and waterfront together with the WTC. The missing: playing the courtyard condition and letting it appear from behind the winter garden. Now again the WFC are identity for placing the location of the site of WTC. The Missing two (condition for the development of Pelii), now plays back into the past by placing the relation more clear than ever before. The Shadow or Representation of the special shape of the footprint of WTC breaks again the project where Pelli played the missing condition to the courtyard. The narration opf the project should argue that we are RENDERING The forces of the disaster by made them visible with the operations borrowed by the description of the work on Francis Bacon by Delleuze. The appearance of the figure within the field of strips is not made by an object, but by the negative condition of the space. This is made possible by the contracton played in these strips in order to motivate the figure of the space around and shape the extensions of it. The strips in ths case transforms itself into a kind of poched of the negative space: the figure becomes the space and not the strips that disappear into the landscape, its own field integrated with the city forces.

 The figural protagonist of the disaster of this space is opposed in the shadow of its urban representation in the way the dissipation into the water has to do with the becoming non figure and unmotivating this space.The BODY FIGURE escapes into the field.

 

ANALYSIS OF THE WORKED  PROCESS:

The present-ness of the grid and the abstract condition of a certain a-priori of the project, in relation to the objective condition of the resolved parti. The writing of of the grid and the information that can incorporate producing displacements in the interpretation of certain analyzed problems.

 The final/first object of the result of the writing -paradoxically becomes the parti-.

 

The writing is, in the context of the studio, a way of developing architectural problems from a diagrammatical condition. The diagrams themselves are ways of dealing with architecture as the way of writing architecture. The diagram pretends to extract interpretation from a unique condition of placement, particularities and fragments that exist in the site. By these means, extrude all particularities into a system. The system should be able to absorb the fragments and work them into the totality by its systematization. To bring particular problems into a field were facts can be inscribed systematically.The parti is the thesis of study, an intuitive first approach to cover the problems in an unique trace movement and at an unique time. To cover the impossible of writing by doing design. This is going to set up the beginning of the writing. By this way the writing is going to be delimited by this preexisting condition that, sometimes is on top of the expression of the writing of the project.  What is to find a parti without starting to write. Or we should start writing trying to find the parti? Is the parti going to be inscribed in the writing. Is really the final product. Or is the beginning product that needs to be written (explained) backwards?. So why we need to write after finding the parti? Or should the studio be always trying to find the best parti by a continuous approach to writing forward? The writing exercise that keeps a problem in movement. In this case, should the writing unfold the intuitive condition of the parti changing the direction of the decissions already made and re-make the un-writing of the parti by unfolding the parti-object into a field  that is going to write another possibility of the project.