this will kill that

AUDC presented our first studio yesterday at school. The studio abstract follows, below.

Advanced Studio V
Fall 2007
Kazys Varnelis
Robert Sumrell
AUDC
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

This Will Kill That

This studio begins with our observation that the process of building cannot keep pace with the conceptual ambitions of architecture. Buildings are dead before they are built.Take CCTV—endlessly hyped, it is the building of the year, complete with a MoMA exhibition on it even before it is finished. Who will want to see it now? Oversaturated in media, its Bilbao-Effect already spent in a junkspace of print, CCTV, like many buildings, is exhausted in advance of its occupation. Buildings today exist for the media, for journals, for books, for the Web. Even when constructed they serve chiefly as visual wonders to see during sporting events on television or as backdrops for photoshoots in fashion magazines. In this radical present—a condition in which the past and the future become impossible to conceive of—critical architecture is so slow and expensive as to be nonexistent. We set out to seek other strategies and to look within architecture to seek what intelligence it still has to offer.

If today the building is an after-effect of media, our method is to go against logic and turn back to it. This studio is conceptual, aimed at developing arguments and polemics, but it sets out to do so using the tools of the architect. Dispensing with the prospect of realizing buildings as constructions of matter, we instead maintain that buildings can be constructions of thought, conceptual machines that produce arguments and state positions.

Although we expressly abandon any interest in construction, we nevertheless aim at designing buildings, or rather conceptual structures that look and perform very much like buildings. Against the dominant forms of architectural education today, this is not a scripting studio, nor a place for unbuildable Hollywood fantasy, nor is it a last refuge of the real or its friend, tired from too many hours surfing the Internet, the hand. Against these outmoded positions, we propose architecture based on rigorous design, architecture as a system of thought that makes abstract knowledge experiential and conceptual thought objective, rigorous and understandable. In setting out to design buildings not diagrams, our goal is to see what the world is telling us, not what we are telling the world.

Rather than lamenting the servility of architecture to media, we engage media head on, not innocently, but rather as a praying mantis embraces her mate. 

Long ago, Victor Hugo suggested that the book will kill the building. As a dominant producer of social meaning and order, it did. But now the book is dying. This studio examines the crisis of the library, one of the oldest and most important institutions in society.

The goal of architecture has long been to become incorporated into the library, to be absorbed into the flimsy papers that would be placed on the stacks. If this will kill that, that was a suicidal masochist who wanted to die. Libraries are repositories of dead information, where things go to expire. Architecture knew this, but still always desired the stillness of the book as its real goal. Nor were architects somehow more perverted than anyone else. On the contrary, as Freud suggested in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the universal goal of life is stillness. The library gave us what we wanted, a tomb we could all dwell in, a place in which thought would quiet down once and for all, a place of silence in which noise and disruption was forbidden.

Under pressure from the pornographic thrill of the Internet, libraries, like architecture, are themselves dying. Year after year, circulation plummets and readership declines. Paradoxically, however, as both architecture and the library expire, they become pervasive. If buildings are obsolete (the current building boom being analogous to the manic expansion of Borders and Barnes and Noble in the last two decades), the strategies of architecture have become pervasive. Design is now everywhere. The tools of architecture are accessible to anyone.

The Internet and digital technology has made the library’s promise of access to knowledge laughable. One hard drive is now capable of holding as much data as a medium-sized city library. In spite of this, libraries are special places. Not only is the Internet (like television) largely filled with garbage, more importantly, books are the first products of immaterial production, and thus they anticipate the dominant economic order of the information economy. But they are also their own worst enemies, heavy objects that lie inertly, gathering choking mold and dust. Still, libraries are ideal research sites for architects, their systems of organization clear, conceptual diagrams of knowledge. As these systems of classification are undone by a world in which "everything is miscellaneous," and Open Source software and peer-to-peer file sharing annihilate any concept of property, the uniqueness and even the physicality of the objects in libraries is threatened. For any book, even the most expensive would be much more valuable if you could perform a full text search on it, something Google understands full well. Soon, books may not be valuable except for the odd collector item. When they wear out, nobody will care.

But is that the fate of the library? Against the idea of the library as a base for knitting clubs and youth sex leagues or as an Internet café for the homeless, we propose to investigate the institution itself as a system of conceptual thought, and as a form of social organization. Thus, the library becomes an ideal place for architecture to re-discover its own methods of thought, its theoretical purposes.
 
Exit Utopia:  Architectural Provocations 1956-76. New York, NY: Prestel Pub, 2005.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.
———. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. New York: Verso, 1996.
———. Screened Out. London ; New York: Verso, 2002.
Baudrillard, Jean, Paul Foss, and Julian Pefanis. The Revenge of the Crystal:  Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983. London ; Concord, Mass: Pluto Press in association with the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1990.
Bourriaud, Nicholas. Postproduction. London: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005.
Branzi, Andrea. The Hot House:  Italian New Wave Design. 1st MIT Press ed. [Cambridge, Mass.]: MIT Press, 1984.
———. No-Stop City:  Archizoom Associati, Librairie De L’architecture Et De La Ville. Orléans: HYX, 2006.
Branzi, Andrea, and Germano Celant. Andrea Branzi:  The Complete Works. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
Carpo, Mario. Architecture in the Age of Printing:  Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford ; Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Cavallo, Guglielmo, Roger Chartier, and Lydia G. Cochrane. A History of Reading in the West, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
Chandler, Alfred D, and James W. Cortada. A Nation Transformed by Information:  How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings:  Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer, New Cultural Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Chartier, Roger, and Alain Boureau. La Correspondance:  Les Usages De La Lettre Au Xixe Siècle, Nouvelles Études Historiques. [Paris]: Fayard, 1991.
Chartier, Roger, and Lydia G. Cochrane. Cultural History:  Between Practices and Representations. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea:  Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Colomina, Beatriz, and Joan Ockman. Architectureproduction, Revisions—Papers on Architectural Theory and Criticism. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988.
Couldry, Nick, and Anna McCarthy. Mediaspace:  Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, Comedia. London ; New York: Routledge, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University Press, 1981.
Eisenman, Peter. Ten Canonical Buildings:  1950-2000. 1st ed. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 2008.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo; Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. [Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1952.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Liveright, 1970.
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol:  How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic:  The Aesthetics of Consumerism. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Ito, Toyo. Toyo Ito:  Blurring Architecture. Milano: Charta, 1999.
Ito, Toyo, and Andrea Maffei. Toyo Ito:  Works, Projects, Writings, Documenti Di Architettura. Milano: Electa, 2002.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, and Ervin H. Zube. Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson. [Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture:  Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large:  Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. New York, N.Y: Monacelli Press, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits:  A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.
———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.
Mattern, Shannon Christine. Public Places, Info Spaces:  Creating the Modern Urban Library. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2005.
———. The New Downtown Library:  Designing with Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy; the Making of Typographic Man. [Toronto]: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, and Moisés Puente. Conversations with Mies Van Der Rohe. 1st ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Palmer, Alvin E, and M. Susan Lewis. Planning the Office Landscape. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.
Rattenbury, Kester. This Is Not Architecture:  Media Constructions. London ; New York: Routledge, 2002.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain:  The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media:  Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing:  Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. 1st paperback ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Sumrell, Robert, and Kazys Varnelis. Blue Monday:  Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies. Barcelona: Actar, 2007.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture:  Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land:  Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London ; New York: Verso, 2007.
Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
 

 

AUDC presented our first studio yesterday at school. The studio abstract follows, below.

Advanced Studio V
Fall 2007
Kazys Varnelis
Robert Sumrell
AUDC
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

This Will Kill That

This studio begins with our observation that the process of building cannot keep pace with the conceptual ambitions of architecture. Buildings are dead before they are built.Take CCTV—endlessly hyped, it is the building of the year, complete with a MoMA exhibition on it even before it is finished. Who will want to see it now? Oversaturated in media, its Bilbao-Effect already spent in a junkspace of print, CCTV, like many buildings, is exhausted in advance of its occupation. Buildings today exist for the media, for journals, for books, for the Web. Even when constructed they serve chiefly as visual wonders to see during sporting events on television or as backdrops for photoshoots in fashion magazines. In this radical present—a condition in which the past and the future become impossible to conceive of—critical architecture is so slow and expensive as to be nonexistent. We set out to seek other strategies and to look within architecture to seek what intelligence it still has to offer.

If today the building is an after-effect of media, our method is to go against logic and turn back to it. This studio is conceptual, aimed at developing arguments and polemics, but it sets out to do so using the tools of the architect. Dispensing with the prospect of realizing buildings as constructions of matter, we instead maintain that buildings can be constructions of thought, conceptual machines that produce arguments and state positions.

Although we expressly abandon any interest in construction, we nevertheless aim at designing buildings, or rather conceptual structures that look and perform very much like buildings. Against the dominant forms of architectural education today, this is not a scripting studio, nor a place for unbuildable Hollywood fantasy, nor is it a last refuge of the real or its friend, tired from too many hours surfing the Internet, the hand. Against these outmoded positions, we propose architecture based on rigorous design, architecture as a system of thought that makes abstract knowledge experiential and conceptual thought objective, rigorous and understandable. In setting out to design buildings not diagrams, our goal is to see what the world is telling us, not what we are telling the world.

Rather than lamenting the servility of architecture to media, we engage media head on, not innocently, but rather as a praying mantis embraces her mate. 

Long ago, Victor Hugo suggested that the book will kill the building. As a dominant producer of social meaning and order, it did. But now the book is dying. This studio examines the crisis of the library, one of the oldest and most important institutions in society.

The goal of architecture has long been to become incorporated into the library, to be absorbed into the flimsy papers that would be placed on the stacks. If this will kill that, that was a suicidal masochist who wanted to die. Libraries are repositories of dead information, where things go to expire. Architecture knew this, but still always desired the stillness of the book as its real goal. Nor were architects somehow more perverted than anyone else. On the contrary, as Freud suggested in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the universal goal of life is stillness. The library gave us what we wanted, a tomb we could all dwell in, a place in which thought would quiet down once and for all, a place of silence in which noise and disruption was forbidden.

Under pressure from the pornographic thrill of the Internet, libraries, like architecture, are themselves dying. Year after year, circulation plummets and readership declines. Paradoxically, however, as both architecture and the library expire, they become pervasive. If buildings are obsolete (the current building boom being analogous to the manic expansion of Borders and Barnes and Noble in the last two decades), the strategies of architecture have become pervasive. Design is now everywhere. The tools of architecture are accessible to anyone.

The Internet and digital technology has made the library’s promise of access to knowledge laughable. One hard drive is now capable of holding as much data as a medium-sized city library. In spite of this, libraries are special places. Not only is the Internet (like television) largely filled with garbage, more importantly, books are the first products of immaterial production, and thus they anticipate the dominant economic order of the information economy. But they are also their own worst enemies, heavy objects that lie inertly, gathering choking mold and dust. Still, libraries are ideal research sites for architects, their systems of organization clear, conceptual diagrams of knowledge. As these systems of classification are undone by a world in which "everything is miscellaneous," and Open Source software and peer-to-peer file sharing annihilate any concept of property, the uniqueness and even the physicality of the objects in libraries is threatened. For any book, even the most expensive would be much more valuable if you could perform a full text search on it, something Google understands full well. Soon, books may not be valuable except for the odd collector item. When they wear out, nobody will care.

But is that the fate of the library? Against the idea of the library as a base for knitting clubs and youth sex leagues or as an Internet café for the homeless, we propose to investigate the institution itself as a system of conceptual thought, and as a form of social organization. Thus, the library becomes an ideal place for architecture to re-discover its own methods of thought, its theoretical purposes.
 
Exit Utopia:  Architectural Provocations 1956-76. New York, NY: Prestel Pub, 2005.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.
———. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. New York: Verso, 1996.
———. Screened Out. London ; New York: Verso, 2002.
Baudrillard, Jean, Paul Foss, and Julian Pefanis. The Revenge of the Crystal:  Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983. London ; Concord, Mass: Pluto Press in association with the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1990.
Bourriaud, Nicholas. Postproduction. London: Lukas & Sternberg, 2005.
Branzi, Andrea. The Hot House:  Italian New Wave Design. 1st MIT Press ed. [Cambridge, Mass.]: MIT Press, 1984.
———. No-Stop City:  Archizoom Associati, Librairie De L’architecture Et De La Ville. Orléans: HYX, 2006.
Branzi, Andrea, and Germano Celant. Andrea Branzi:  The Complete Works. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
Carpo, Mario. Architecture in the Age of Printing:  Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford ; Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Cavallo, Guglielmo, Roger Chartier, and Lydia G. Cochrane. A History of Reading in the West, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.
Chandler, Alfred D, and James W. Cortada. A Nation Transformed by Information:  How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings:  Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer, New Cultural Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Chartier, Roger, and Alain Boureau. La Correspondance:  Les Usages De La Lettre Au Xixe Siècle, Nouvelles Études Historiques. [Paris]: Fayard, 1991.
Chartier, Roger, and Lydia G. Cochrane. Cultural History:  Between Practices and Representations. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea:  Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
Colomina, Beatriz, and Joan Ockman. Architectureproduction, Revisions—Papers on Architectural Theory and Criticism. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988.
Couldry, Nick, and Anna McCarthy. Mediaspace:  Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age, Comedia. London ; New York: Routledge, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University Press, 1981.
Eisenman, Peter. Ten Canonical Buildings:  1950-2000. 1st ed. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 2008.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish:  The Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo; Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. [Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1952.
Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Liveright, 1970.
Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol:  How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic:  The Aesthetics of Consumerism. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Ito, Toyo. Toyo Ito:  Blurring Architecture. Milano: Charta, 1999.
Ito, Toyo, and Andrea Maffei. Toyo Ito:  Works, Projects, Writings, Documenti Di Architettura. Milano: Electa, 2002.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, and Ervin H. Zube. Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson. [Amherst]: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture:  Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large:  Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. New York, N.Y: Monacelli Press, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits:  A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.
———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.
Mattern, Shannon Christine. Public Places, Info Spaces:  Creating the Modern Urban Library. Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2005.
———. The New Downtown Library:  Designing with Communities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy; the Making of Typographic Man. [Toronto]: University of Toronto Press, 1962.
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, and Moisés Puente. Conversations with Mies Van Der Rohe. 1st ed. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Palmer, Alvin E, and M. Susan Lewis. Planning the Office Landscape. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.
Rattenbury, Kester. This Is Not Architecture:  Media Constructions. London ; New York: Routledge, 2002.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain:  The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media:  Political Origins of Modern Communications. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing:  Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. 1st paperback ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Sumrell, Robert, and Kazys Varnelis. Blue Monday:  Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies. Barcelona: Actar, 2007.
Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture:  Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land:  Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London ; New York: Verso, 2007.
Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
 

 

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