JtFSP Log - UCLA A.UD · Anthony Vidler and architect Peter Eisenman's guest editorsh1p of...

JtFSP fJ.'• • ,

EDITOR

Cynthia Davidson

GUEST EDITORS

Peter Eisenman Anthony Vidler

MANAGING EDITOR

David Huber

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Luke Studebaker

PROTAGONISTS

Denise Bratton Tina Di Carlo Catherine Ingraham Manuel Orazi Julie Rose Sarah Whiting

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Coincidentally, two things in particular bear on Log 28. :he fi~st is hi~t~rian Anthony Vidler and architect Peter Eisenman's guest editorsh1p of th1s 1ssue, in which they reprise the idea of "stocktaking" from Reyner Banham's s~ries of probing articles published in Architectural Revin~~ in 1960. The second IS

the exhibition "Archaeology of the Digital," curated by architect Greg Lynn for the Canadian Centre for Architecture. In both this issue and Lynn's show, which opened in Montreal in May, the unspoken question seems to be, Have we really come very far, so fast? . .

Vidler and Eisenman use the framework of stocktaking to talk w1th col­leagues in their fields about architectural practice and pedagogy t_oday, ju~t as Banham did more than SO years ago to interrogate the then perce1ved sch1sm between tradition and technology in architecture. Lynn goes back 25 years to establish a framework for inspecting archives of digital work - such as they are -and projects that he considers at the root of what I mi~h.t call co~puta­tion today. In fact, the weight of the seemingly ephemeral dig• tal practice (and its very definition) hovers over this issue. Brett Steele ~ells ~idler, "The digital thing is yesterday. It's 20 years old. In terms of machme time, the mo­ment is over."

If Steele is to be believed, there is all the more reason for "Archaeology of the Digital," which, CCA director Mirko Zardini writes in thC: cata~ogue, defines the digital as experimental projects that "engaged proactively m the creation and use of digital tools to reach otherwise inaccessible results." Lynn puts it in !et another context; "Too often in archite.ct~e, the wor~ digita~' has been quahfied by the words: m the future." The exh1b1t~on, he contmue_s, as­sumes that technology can no longer be discussed [as] m the future but m the recent part."

The exhibition spans six galleries that display in rich depth four very different projects: Frank Gehry's sculptural Lewis Residence, Peter Eisenman's analytical Frankfurt Biozentrum, Chuck Hoberman's operable Expanding Sphere and Iris Dome projects, and Shoei Yoh's roofs_for s~orts complexes in Japan - one of which, the Galaxy Toyama Gymnasm~, 1s the only project in the exhibition that was built. Each, however, radiates a freshness that begs the question of time. More telling of the very partness of their making is a room of bulky darkened monitors sitting alongside beefy hard drives, slack printers, a fax machine, a FedEx envelope, and software manuals - now faded if not forgotten precursors to the machines and systems common in architecture today.

"Archaeology of the Digital" is not the first, nor will it be the last inves­tigation of the inroads of computation in architecture, but i~ is a provocative starting point. Just as the exhibition looks at the recent past. m ~rder to see the present anew, this issue attempts to take stock of current thmking and work in architecture as a way of looking in the mirror again, if only to see whether that mirror might be cracked. - CD

Log 28 Copyright © 201l Anyone Corporation. All ~ghts Reser:ed. . ISSN: 1547-4690. ISBN: 978-0-98!6491-6-8. Printed m USA. Log 1s published

three times a year by Anyone Corporation, a nonprofit corporation in the State of New York with editorial and business offices at 41 West 2Sth Street, 11th floor, New York, NY 10010. Subscription for l issues: $36 US; $40 CAN/ME~; $60 International.. Di~tributed by Ubiquity (US) and Idea Books (worldwide). Single1ssues are $1~ plus sh1ppmg. The opinions expressed herein are not necessartly those of the ~r~tagomsts or of the board of the Anyone Corporation. Send inquiries, letters, and submlSSlons to log@anycorp.com.

Log SUMMER2013

Pier P'ittorio Aureli

Preston Scott Cohen Elizabeth Diller Peter Eisenman

& Anthony P'idler Lydia Kallipoliti jeffro Kipnis Greg Lynn

Patrik. Schumacher Felicity D. Scott

Brett Steele

Bernard Tschumi

Anthony P'idler Sarah Whiting Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Cover Story:

28

Stocktaking

67 A project is a lifelong thing; if you see it, you will only see it at the end

27 21

143

53 1H 59

39 79

87

99

12 109 119

The inevitable flatness of floors interests me

Architecture is a technology that has not yet discovered its agency In Conversation

It is our obligation to translate the emerging ecology of the cloud I am for tendencies

If I can take a ride in a driverless car on a public street, then I see no reason why my building can't wiggle a little

I am trying to imagine a radical free-market urbanism

I want to argue that contemporary scholarship be cast as a sort

of ongoing counter-memory to familiar historical narratives The key project of the architectural school today is the

making of audiences, not architects

I do not mind people being innocent, but I hate when they're naive

Taking Stock: Architecture 2013

I am interested in a project of engaged autonomy

Humans are not so interesting now; at least not exclusively interesting

Reyner Banham at John Muir School, Santa Monica Postcard photo: © Los Angeles Times

kits; manufacturing at home through per­sonal3D printers; a Wikihouse with open­source plans that can be replicated, improved, and updated anywhere; and countless other examples."4 This certainly does not mean that the discipline is dead, but the identity of. the architect as the single author of space m1ght be. So is the venture to classify disciplinary objects based on their iconicity. According to Sylvia Lavin, some buildings now produce "mood boards" for collective action, "de­ferring iconicity to the Internet, wh~re an endless supply of videos, maps, tounst p~o­tographs, tweets, logos, and blogs offers Im­age after image of the [building] in use, not

d . . »5 s h in use, about to move, an m mouon. uc an organizational platform, where different creators, collectives, and projects can mix and remix, and the open-source assemblage of information in mixed-media clusters relate to our data-driven culture and the emergence of cloud computing. Perhaps postmodernism died with Google. Growing out of Google's model of detecting correlations through ap­plied mathematics and not th~ough context, information clouds rank fractional connec­tions above holistic perceptions of phenom­ena. We can no longer speak of systems, trees, and networks of practices as understand-ing the complexity of the world of i~eas as .a whole. The cloud necessitates an enurely dif­ferent way of understanding the world, "one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its ~otal­ity."6 What is essential about the cloud 1s the absorption and collection of data that crystal­lizes in a region rather than the overall con­textual interpretation of the data.

4. Elian Stefa and Ethel Baraona Pohl, "NCR-01 [Agenda] : An Ad-hoc Revolution," Istanbul Design Biennial, May 24, 2012, http:/ /istanbuldesignbiennial.iksv.orglncr-01-agenda-an-ad-hoc­

revolution (accessed September 29, 2012). 5. Sylvia Lavin, "The Report of My Death," Log 25 (Summer 2012): 159. 6. Chris Anderson, "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes ~he Scientific Method Obsolete," Wired, June 2l, 2008, http://www.~. com/science/discoveries/maguine/16-07 /pb _theory (accessed April

26,2013).

ss

LYDIA KAI.LIPOLITI IS .AN AllCHITECT1 ENGINEER, .AND

THEOI\IST TEACHING DESIGN STUDIOS, ENVIRONMENTA

TECHNOLOGY, .AND HISTORY .AND THEORY AT THE COOPI II

UNION .AND COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YoRK.

Greg Lynn If I can take a ride in a driverless car on a public street, then I see no reason why my building can't wiggle a little

PETER EISENMAN: Greg, I have three questions for you. One is the nature of your project, the second is what you feel about consensus, and the third deals with mechanisms, i.e., robots, etc. I want to start with project. About 15 years ago, your two books were a new idea of where architecture could be after postmodernism, not just heralding the digital but framing the digital in an architectural context. Part of that heralding involved an idea that this was something new. And precisely because of this - what I consider to be the fatal flaw of any theory that postulates itself as new - it isn't new anymore. Tell me about your project, then, today and tomorrow.

GREG LYNN: Anything associated with the digital starts with the claim, "In the future" - in the future we'll being doing this, in the future we'll be printing buildings, in the future we'll be paperless. It's always in the future. There are still too many claims of "in the future" attached to discus­sions of digital technology. I think now it's very interesting to say, "In the past" -in the '70s and '80s - and look at what was going on then with the digital. Having done that, I think a lot of history is repeating itself, in terms of how architec­ture is being designed and how buildings are being built. And in terms of taking stock, I would not put a huge amount of energy into the digital paradigm right now, because it's here. There's no sense in trying to run the same experiments or looking for the same happy accidents all over again. I think

S9

ETIENNE-JULES MAREY, CtrALIER ARABE, 1887.

most of that innovation has been done and it's time to think about things in a slightly different way.

PE: That means a project. Not thinking about the new or innovative future, just project.

G L: By the way, I never would have said that my project was about the new. I was look­ing at [:Etienne-Jules] Marey, I was looking at [Eadweard] Muybridge, I was looking at Borromini. My personal histories and pas­sions have always been about techniques of geometric description and drafting. I love to draft. The computer came along and I loved the computer as a drafting tool. I didn't like it as a computer. My project has changed in that I'm tending to look back, more than forward, for new things and innovation. I do believe in the new.

PE: What we were doing together, and what your show at the CCA, "Archaeology of the Digital," is about, had no premonition of what has happened. It wasn't looking to promote Patrik Schumacher, Hernan Diaz Alonso, and all of that work. So what went off the track?

GL: I wouldn't necessarily say that it went off the track. If anything has gone off the

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track, it's architectural discourse and its au­dience. It's like a broken record to ask who's going to do the next Delirious New York. or what is the next treatise going to be. I'm not totally sure that our field is equipped to pro­duce a young person - I mean somebody in their thirties- who is going to make a trea­tise like that.

PE: Pier Vittorio Aureli is not one of those people who could do that?

GL: Is he a young person? He certainly has the ambition to write a treatise but I associ­ate him more closely with the revisiting of the neorationalists and Tafuri. I have always found PV to be cynical.

PE: Rem [Koolhaas] is more cynical. Listen, you were there 15 years ago. That's the ques­tion: what has happened to your project?

GL: It was a vibrant time to be in conversation with my colleagues and my mentors. There were Any conferences annually. There were museums and institutions looking to sponsor thoughtful shows, like the FRAC and MoMA. Those shows were meant to take what was happening between a small number of architects and find its intellec­tual and popular audience. The possibility of

Log28

getting into discussions with other archi­tects, and the possibility of addressing n different kind of audience to change the way people thought about architecture, was tangible. You could see how to do it. It was very clear who the interesting people were and which institutions were doing the work. As these events have disappeared, in the last several years I have become nccustomed to and content with working with a higher degree of isolation, and I am therefore less polemical. I find the current situation to be more vacuous than those halcyon days of discourse when positions were being formulated.

PE: You were involved in the Venice Biennale with Frank [Gehry] and me under Philip (Johnson]'s auspices. And it was all set up. Philip was appointed the curator so he could do this. Money was made available from a Republican state legislature for us. Why can't that happen today?

GL: Nicolai [Ouroussoff] and I are trying to do the US Pavilion right now with [Richard] Koshalek. To do that pavilion, we're going to have to raise our own money, and the subject and intellectual agenda for the show are in response to this fact to some degree. We had to find our own institutional partner, and thankfully there is Richard at the Hirshhorn. All these critical decisions regarding institu­tion-building needed to be made before we could even start curating the show. Nobody is interested in the US Pavilion anymore be­cause it poses a massive institution-building project. That's where we're at. Before, it was Philip's project, or it was Marshall Cogan's project, people interested in ideas and inter­ested in architecture.

PE: Let's get to the second question. The last theme of the Biennale was "Common Ground." Bob Stern, quoted two weeks ago

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in the New York. Times on Eric [Bunge] and Mimi [Hoang]'s project that won the micro­housing competition in New York, said that what was good about it was that it showed "common sense." The whole notion of the common, as opposed to the uncommon, has bred an era of consensus - we have to have a million voices that have to agree on the least common denominator - a certain kind of backward populism. What do you think about this consensus?

GL: Common sense would say that when the times are unstable the architects pro­vide stability, and when the times are stable architects shake things up. You could not say that there is consensus in America right now. I can't think of a time when there has been less consensus in the States. I think the future of the country - finance, cultural values, race relations, everything- has never been worse off. Never. The govern­ment right now is bananas - every two months there is some manufactured crisis. When people are in that milieu, they look to architecture for cute, happy, artificially stable values. Nobody wants to do Wexner Center right now. Everybody wants to do a countrified museum. So if there's a consen­sus in architecture it's probably because it's trying to be ameliorative rather than representing what is going on in the culture right now.

PE: No one wants high culture today. If we're not producing stuff like that, cultural stuff, then looking back on today in 100 years it will look like an aporia. If we don't have a good US Pavilion, people are going to say nothing. You're saying consensus reigns, that when things are rough they go soft and smarmy. And you agree with that.

GL: No. You're asking about the architectural landscape, not my project.

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PE: But you're saying there is no discourse. How do we change that? Because you could argue capital is under duress. That's the real problem: we can't support social services, we can't afford security, we can't afford welfare, we can't afford all the things that capital promises. That's what is under stress.

GL: No, I just think it's more work. Look, will we get the US Pavilion? I don't know. But it was easier to focus on the content of the pa­vilion 20 years ago. Now, one not only has to provide the content and make sure the thing shows up in Venice but also organize institu­tional partners, travel to Washington, and all this other stuff. If you have to do all that other stuff it means something else is suffering.

PE: What is interesting is you would be curat­ing your own show. Frank and I didn't curate our show. Philip was the curator. Why curate? Why do you want to curate your own show?

It's not your project.

GL: It is my project, and Nicolai's.

PE: Well that's why I ask about consensus.

GL: I'm interested in all the people with CNC routers cutting the walls that are in all the hotel lobbies I go to, if they've ever even seen a Frank Lloyd Wright block house. And if they've even thought about how, if you had a robot, you would make a Frank Lloyd Wright block house. That's why I'm curating. It helps me to think about my own work to put the contemporary design world in discussion with recent history.

PE: What does the robot have to do with the idea of making, not the process of making? How does the robot change what Frank Lloyd Wright was doing with cutting blocks, the idea of cutting blocks, not the cutting? What would the robot have done for Frank Lloyd Wright?

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.. Window beyond n. Light below Coffee Table

b. Coffeelable .. O.ybtd

~ Storage •· Storage d. Light below Dining Table q. Window beyond

e. Bed '· Dining Table

f. Nlghtstand beyond .. Dining Seating

g. Hudboard Table t. Couch

h. """'" u. Heorth

Light below Headboard v. Storage

j. Kitchen Cabinets w. Storage

~ Refrigerator ~ Coffee To1bletop contents

I. Dishwasher y. Couch beyond

m. W.at«He.ater

GREG LYNN FORM, RV PROTOTYPE (RooM VEHICLE), 2011. SECTIONS (LEFT TO RIGIIT): EVENING ROTATION, KITCHEN RO­

TATION, AND DAY ROTATION.

GL: I would not describe him as being surrounded by the sharpest tools in the shed. He really liked to be surrounded by automatons. So, would Frank Lloyd Wright love a robot? Of course he would. Robots

are exactly what Frank Lloyd Wright would love, because he put a high value on the labor visible in an object, and he loved decoration and pattern. All that stuff you get free with a machine. Now, if you are asking what's the difference between orna­mental grotesquery facilitated by digital tools and Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright, I would say, very much; the former is mannerist and the later was the end of the 19th century coming into contact with paradigms of modern space and the free plan. One is looking backward to justify it­self, the other was dragging its history into

the present.

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PE: But listen to where you're going. You're saying that robots with Frank Lloyd Wright is good, so now robots and Greg Lynn must be good. It's a parallel.

GL: No, I am saying that looking back at canonical work is how I keep myself honest. If I take a robot and cut up a bunch of blocks or stack a bunch of bricks, if it's not either better than or an evolution from a Frank Lloyd Wright block house, then there's a problem.

PE: What makes it better? Who decides what is better?

GL: You have to do that on a case-by-case basis.

PE: Well, what is better? What can a robot do for you that you couldn't do on a computer with an algorithm? Why do you need to have a robot do it? Why do you care about robots in the first place? What do they do for your mental processes?

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GL: For me, now, robots move stuff. And that's why I'm interested in robots.

PE: You mean as in, move this chair to there?

GL: Yeah. Or roll this room over.

PE: Roll the room over. You can roll a room over on the computer. You can take a drawing of the room and roll it over. You don't need a robot to do that.

GL: But if you're going to build the room to roll over you're going to need a robot.

PE: Build the room to roll over. Here we go again.

GL: When you say, "Here we go again," do you mean here we go again with you and me, or here we go again with architec­ture rolling things over? Where do you think I got the idea to roll houses over anyway? You spent the better part of your life rolling houses over, tracing their

Log28

position and rolling them over again. I am just interested in doing it literally and phenomenally.

PE: It's architecture rolling things over. So, what robots do for you is easi/y roll things over?

GL: No. They make movement possible.

PE: Tell me: why would I want my house to move?

GL: Take Nike, for example, as I was just in Beaverton last week. Instead of making things in Southeast Asia they have developed robots that knit the tops of the shoes; there's no waste from cutting shapes out of rolls of cloth and every shoe can have its own knots and shape if they like. The soles are being printed with 3D printers. Like the Russian cosmonaut program did previously, they test, measure, scan, and analyze the motion of athletes not only to customize apparel and shoes but to create training regimes, glasses, and clothing that modifies how a person moves. They have a micro-factory in their store in Portland so they can dispense with inventory and shipping. They are the best example of a revolution in manufacturing, communication, and design that I know of. They want to inform you what to eat, when to train, and when to wake up, as the shirt and the beanie you sleep in have sensors that record your activity even while you're not moving. Your phone, your watch, and your shoes are all recording motion and speed and communicating data back to a service. This isn't some future plan; this is what they are doing currently. That's the world they see.

PE: That's neopositivism.

GL: I'm not making judgments about the shoe world. I'm just saying that's where they are. And I'm asking myself where the

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architectural corollary is. Where is the ar­chitecture that addresses that contemporary fact? And who are the architects who are thinking like that?

PE: Or even, should it be represented?

GL: Well, some architects are comfortable having a disconnected relationship to culture in their architecture. I want to be in the contemporary world, thinking at today's level in architecture. If you want to do that, I don't know how you could not think about robots, and how you couldn't think about moving buildings. It's a mandate as far as I'm concerned.

PE: But you haven't written or proposed the architectural analogue for that world, not Delirious New York, not Absolute Architecture,

not the five points ofLe Corbusier. You have not made a specific notation that says what that architecture has to be in order to be critical in that milieu.

GL: No, but it's what I'm working on.

PE: Working on it in what sense?

GL: The treatise on motion, robots, archi­tecture, and this new manufacturing and information paradigm; for me, I have to work that through with my own work initially, and then theorize it.

PE: Architecture and motion, for example, seem to me like all those people in the '60s who were talking about what it was going to be like to live on the moon or in a rocket ship. What is the difference between the architects who were envisioning things for moon living and space travel and, today, the house moving and the hamster run­ning around? What, conceptually, is the difference?

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VIDEO STILL, PROMOTIONAL MEDIA FOR GOOGLE'S SELF-DRIVING CAR, 2011. COURTESY GOOGLE.

GL: Today there are cars driving themselves around California without a driver. If I can take a ride in a driverless car on a public street, then I see no reason my building can't wiggle a little. You used to be an advocate for wiggly buildings. Well, the automobile, tele­vision, all of that stuff in the '60s and '70s, made architecture go a little bit crazy try­ing to figure out how to engage that. I think now is a time like that. I don't believe there are a lot of people who agree with me, but I see today as a time of crisis - a crisis of ideas, a crisis of consensus, a crisis of occupying space - not as a time of consensus.

PE: Asking people what they want is the crisis.

GL: That's never a good idea. You tell people what they need, you don't ask them what they want.

PE: Let's say the robots are going to exist, that there is going to be the technology that allows you to do anything with them. How

65

is that going to change what this office is go­ing to be like in the future?

GL: Let's say every Yale faculty member gets an office robot. What are you going to do with it?

PE: Have it do my bibliography. I would have the robot do a task that I don't think is fit for a human. If you give me another one, I would find tasks for the robot to do that do not require thought processes. It is not valuable to me in the sense that you were when we worked together. You under­stood what the thought processes were and were able to expand those horizons.

GL: What I'm saying is, all that stuff is around and is not being used for architectural means. It's just totally rote, functional replacements for things we already know how to do. That kind of stuff is everywhere. But if you could have it change the space just for the qualities of the space ...

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PE: Well it's a different story if you could think the difference in the space. I think that at the stage that robots are going to be working, you're still going to need the Greg Lynns of this world to ideate the discourse that could use them. What we're saying is that robots are another technology. How are the kids in your class going to being able to transpose their thinking from algorithms, or from what Hernan is doing, to what you're doing, and produce critical work? That's what they have to be doing. Other­wise they're wasting their time.

GL: In my teaching I stress discourse and addressing problems with "headlines"; clear succinct ideas that a nonarchitect can understand as a problem with enough cultural relevance that it is worth thinking about. I think Hernan is interesting, but so far he has not addressed a broader culture with a claim like "The Helsinki Library has the civic role in the city of an alien ship because information today is ... " That's something you have, that's something Rem has, that's something Frank has. I think it's because in writing a treatise, in less than a sentence you're able to say, "Today architecture is showing up in the city in this way because it's relevant for the fol­lowing reasons." I think Hernan does everything else. I think he establishes a paradigm that he can talk to other archi­tects about.

PE: So, to sum up, you say that there is a crisis, and the world, when it's in crisis, responds to things that are easy. And yet, what you're trying to do is to say that the crisis is because we don't understand how to use the potential of digital technologies, i.e., provided by robots and others, to help us to ameliorate crisis. And that's what your project is right now. It's very different from blobs.

66

GL: Yeah, that was very geometrical. That work has been done. I don't need to do it a second time.

PE: What would this new thesis look like?

GL: So far it's being a hamster in a ball.

GREG LYNN TEACHES ARCHITECTURE AT THE .ANGEWANDTE,

UCLA, AND YALE UNIVERSITY. HE IS ALSO THE AUTHOR

OF SEVEN BOOKS, INCLUDING ANIMATE FORM, FOLDING IN

ARCHITECTURE, INTRICACY, AND GREG LYNN FORM.

Pier Vittorio .Aureli

A project is a lifelong thing; if you see it, you will only see it at the end

PETER EISENMAN: What do you think the state of pedagogy is today in terms of the schools that you participate in and how they relate to other schools?

PIER VITTORIO AURELI: First of all, pedagogy, for me, is a very important issue because educating students has been the main part of my work in architecture. And I've been do­ing that over the last 15 years, during one of the major trans­formations of education in Europe. This is the shift from the idea of education as a kind of free knowledge or disinterested knowledge, which is the way I was educated, to a model that is very much directed toward the professionalization of archi­tecture, making architecture a practice, something that you can apply.

PE: Rather than a discipline. The disinterested view was the disciplinary view.

PVA: Yes. Or knowledge as such, with no immediate profes­sional application. For example, when I was a student, we would spend a lot of time reading art history or philosophy, and the teachers were never concerned to justify this, although it wasn't needed for the demands of the market.

PE: There were no market demands that influenced the curriculum.

PVA: Absolutely not. But I became a teacher the moment the situation dramatically changed.

PE: Why did it change? And this is Europe we're talking about, not America?

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