RESEARCH STATEMENT
The discipline of architecture has readily assimilated digital design technology and unconditionally accepted the terms dictated by computer-assisted observation and the digital interface. This fundamental reliance on technology in the perception and conception of architecture marks a shift to a post-digital paradigm. The post-digital in architecture implies a reevaluation of digital design tactics as well as notions of surface that have pervaded architectural discourse in recent history. This critical disposition has raised questions about the coherence of the architectural object and how its boundaries are defined, provoking a return to metaphysics to recuperate architecture’s formal and disciplinary distinction. Considering that the digital paradigm defines reality in terms of media (image) and simulation (repetition), valuing the virtual (appearance) over the real (existence), it is propitious that architecture should direct its critical response of the digital towards the ontological. My research engages the post-digital as a constructive and theoretical apparatus that facilitates a reevaluation of the physical (formal) and conceptual (disciplinary) boundaries of architecture. I have concentrated this critical response into three current and emerging research projects, which reposition architecture’s formal, representational, and tectonic affiliations.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Previous engagements between architecture and metaphysics have been the impetus for multiple formalistic and stylistic expressions from the Renaissance to Modernism, from the Baroque to the Digital. However, for architecture to continue to be productive in its ability to project new forms of reception, these philosophical underpinnings should be reconsidered. The resurgence of metaphysics today is being approached as an ontological status of reality, rather than an epistemological question of presence. Epistemology has forced the architectural object into extreme positions, dismantling it to reveal deeper meaning or dissolving it into a contingency of external relations. Ontology contends that architectural and all other objects always hold something in reserve and cannot be fully consumed or comprehended through empiricism or subjective experience. If our realities are entirely mediated by the virtual and we have capitulated to the commodification of culture, then the fundamental nature of architecture and its relations have become estranged, indeterminate, irresolute, or otherwise speculative.
The Commonplace, Forms of Estrangement
Recent ontological claims assert that architecture and all other objects are already invisible to experience, because they so thoroughly make up the fabric of our existence. This thinking locates the status of objects within the realm of the commonplace – that which is simultaneously ever-present yet largely escapes notice. The commonplace does not radicalize the architectural object; on the contrary, it may provide insight into the usual and everyday interactions of diverse things.
Commodity: Commodity as a concept undermines the status of objects by erasing all heterogeneity and qualitative differences among things. Architectural contingencies (representations, mechanical production, nature, etc.) have in a similar way become the commodities of our discipline, validating architecture as a consequence of its relations to other things, rather than by its own autonomous qualities as a discrete object. This research contends that contingencies are external relations that instead compel the interactions of autonomous objects.
Estrangement: The recurrent theme of art-as-commodity in the work of Andy Warhol was significant to this inquiry. In Warhol’s early works, everyday objects and their representations maintain their status as commodities through appropriation. His later works exhibit a deliberate, but subtle act of transformation or defamiliarization, producing a tension between the appropriated object and its qualities. This tension or estrangement signals the commonplace, which elicits a delayed reaction to something surprising or significant after an initial failure to notice anything unusual.
These ideas were investigated in a series of design studios, in which everyday objects were physically and digitally transformed through techniques of defamiliarization to develop the formal, spatial, and material qualities of the building. Unlike appropriation or abstraction, which negates or exaggerates aesthetic experience respectively, these forms of estrangement instead only elongate, intensify, or emphasize the initial moment of their engagement.
EMERGING RESEARCH
The Profligate, Representations of the Unfinished
The non finito or unfinished is a term referring to a work of art that is seemingly incomplete. These provisional implications have been the motivation for numerous modes expressions throughout the history of art. Architecture’s temporal, entropic, and indeterminate dimensions have a distinctive relationship to the unfinished, which may be just as and at times more potent because of its ambiguous affiliation with metaphysics, its status as an object and a representation, and its literal and speculative realities. This research outlines an alternate trajectory of theory and design that challenges the pervading immutability and permanence of the architectural object.
Materiality: Rather than elucidating an original creative impulse or methods of making, a more enigmatic idea proposes that an unfinished work is instead a finished work that is not seen. This phenomenon is related to Aristotle’s notion of the profligate. The profligate is an indeterminate state of an object. For example, a chunk of marble that is not cut, is also uncut or yet to be cut. Similarly, concrete is both solid and liquid, natural and artificial, ancient and modern, base and spirit, etc. Correspondingly, architecture has immediately perceivable qualities as well as a diversity of qualities that are not perceived at a given moment depending on its external relations, contingencies, and forces. The profligate not only acknowledges architecture’s irreconcilable status as both building and ruin, frame and mass, solid and void, but more importantly suggests that this quasi-materiality registers within the object itself. Architecture’s indeterminateness, therefore, is not motivated by subjective engagement or critical interrogation, but rather acts within the metaphysics of presence where its reality is only partially revealed through illusions of its own agency.
Representations: The profligate can also be defined as the disposition that keeps a body in a state of constant irritation or still-less-ness. Perspective or projection drawings are always considered “real” because they provide a “natural” way to depict the mechanics of space and have a one-to-one relationship between drawing and building. However, examination of the unfinished art-work that appears out-of-focus, in a state of decay, or otherwise incomplete may liberate architectural drawing to explore alternate dimensions and contrive new realities.
The Irresolute, Tectonic Expression of the Virtu-real
According to Kenneth Frampton, tectonics is first an act of construction, and therefore fundamentally ontological, rather than representational. Detail need not be simple, standardized or repeatable. Instead, detail emerges as something over and above its relationship to the whole, while also withholding itself from relations with other parts.
Scale: The hegemony of the digital interface enables the limitlessness of virtual space and unimpeded powers of magnification, preventing any possible reconciliation of human scale with the infinitesimal and the immense. Furthermore, the proliferation of GPS software, Google Earth, and Retina Displays has shattered the subjective frame of reference and with it the antiquated notion that architectural ideas unfold at standardized scales. These technological circumstances suggest that the idea of scale be approached as an artificial construction, rather than a natural one.
Detail: Detail does not necessarily occur at isolated instances (Modernism), nor is it necessarily ubiquitously distributed (Parametricism), legitimizing architecture by its relations to smaller parts or larger systems. Resisting the tendencies of classical holism and modern abstraction involves new diverse relations between parts. Instead, detail may occur at multiple scales as heterogeneous and incongruous tectonic resolutions. Rather than discovering “truth” in the details, tectonic expression may reveal an entirely different fiction.
I intend to enhance these initial ideas about scale and detail with associations found between tectonics and textile production. These textural considerations will solicit incongruities between the scale of the detail and that of the body, producing eccentricities between textile patterning and overall tectonic expression. The implications for future research and design confronts conventional architectonics and antiquated notions of part-to-whole relationships, provoking a return to the structural unit as the domain of architectural authorship and intense speculation.
