Pidgin Magzaine

Issue 18

Fall &

Winter2014

Princeton School

ofArchitecture

10Exactitude and the Ethics of Continuity

Karla Britton

28We Are Professionals After All

Athanasiou Geolas

34Time Sheets

Cyrus Penarroyo

40On Not Preserving Memory

Marta Jecu

60Ownership in the Age of Digitial Architecture

Wendy W. Fok

74The Section of Empire

Zigeng Wang

88A Land Ethics for Architects

Shota Vashakmadze

CO

NT

EN

TS

98Poor, Rich Architecture

Mauricio Pezo

104Complex Surfaces

Hans Tursack

128CARYATIDS Take on Atavistic Thinking in

Design and SocietySarah Rafson

144Rebuilding

Andrew Frame

158Tarkovsky and the Architectonics of

TranslationMahfuz Sultan

168Open AccessJess Myers

180Post-Historical Suspension

Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa

CO

NT

EN

TS

HANS

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105104

COMPLEX

SURFACES

Hans

Tursack

COMPOSITION MATTERS

Evaluative architectural criticism—that is, judg-

ment of a project’s value as design—is most

productive when it engages the following three reg-

isters: What does the project look like? What does it

mean? What does it do?1 The past few decades have

witnessed a dramatic pedagogical shift whereby

the performative register (the project’s capacity to

do) has come to dominate critical discourse in the

academy. Rigorously constructed theories of mean-

ing and aesthetics by way of formal analysis are now

seen as effete historical curiosities. Where our tools

of representation have developed into remarkably

precise (though painfully dry) diagrammatic/ana-

lytical mechanisms—statistics, spreadsheet logics

and hyper-precise maps abound—our ability to

critically engage the look of a project, productively

mobilize our disciplinary history, and ask difficult

questions regarding cultural production/reception

has reached a precarious stage in which a genera-

tion of leading academics have no convincing claim

for the foundations of architectural knowledge.

Of the many historically paradigmatic conceptual

projects put under suspicion in our increasingly

technocratic and moralistic academic discourse,

“composition” is one of the most widely misun-

derstood; it is either trivialized as an adolescent,

harmless game of glittery effects and whimsical

expressionisms (the paper-thin, highly digestible,

1Peter Eisenman,

Rosalind Krauss, K.

M. Hays, Jeff Kipnis,

and et al. “Eisenman

(and Company)

Respond:”

Progressive $UFKLWHFWXUH 76, no.

2 (02, 1995).

HANS TURSACK HANS

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106 107

deja-vu pop of Bob Somol’s “cartoon plan”), dis-

missed as the irrelevant concerns of a humanist

generation who read architectural form as an elitist

and wholly arcane text (the Oppositions generation

of language-based formal analysis), or debased

through its translation into the prosaic vocabu-

lary of pseudo-scientific rationalism in the acts of

planning and programming space (the diagram-

matic turn of the 1990s). That we find ourselves in

the present decade without a meaningful, shared

discourse on the theory of composition is discon-

certing. Given that architects, more often than not,

design material objects, composition is the essen-

tial activity of studio practice (the value-added of a

designer—as opposed to a building technician—

being first and foremost their facility with manip-

ulating relationships between form, structure,

color, lighting, shape and materials). The disparity

between the fact of how students and designers

spend their time and the elaborately-constructed

theoretical apparatus set up to convince them that

their agency is located in anything and everything

except the language of object-making is as bizarre

as it is self-defeating.2

Architecture is in reality static, stubbornly mate-

rial, chronically lagging behind advanced art, new

media and technological innovation. Buildings

are indeed highly networked nodes of visible and

invisible flows of people, information, and energy,

but unhappily so. Having failed to persuade an

2See David

Joselit’s After Art for one version of

post-object network

theory as it relates to

art and architectural

theory and criticism.

indifferent culture that architects create spaces

conducive to progressive political action (on the

model of Relational Aesthetics), that we regularly

contribute to advances in computer science, robot-

ics, structural engineering, material science, and

industrial fabrication, or that we have privileged

insight into urban-scaled infrastructural problems

(rising tides, mass housing, energy consumption),

the discipline of High Architecture is left to con-

tend with the fact that its history is primarily one

of object-buildings. This is not to say that there is

any shortage of material production in or outside

of the contemporary academy, only that there is a

disturbing lack of discourse around form and how

form-making gets done. In the absence of such

discourse—some working theory of how meaning

is communicated through a disciplinary-specific

visual language—object production becomes an

aimless practice of mixing, layering, and blindly

aggregating arbitrary special effects.

Yet, while its status in the academy is highly prob-

lematic, formalism as a conceptual problem driv-

ing architectural production is alive and well in the

studios of individual practitioners and their offices.

Unlike visual art and most popular music (which

have been irreversibly fragmented into countless

factions and sub-factions of what were once mean-

ingful meta-problems, genres, and schools) archi-

tecture, viewed as a formal enterprise, can still be

understood as a collection of finite, categorizable

HANS

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109108

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HANS TURSACK HANS

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110 111

conceptual projects. A survey of post-war formalism

in architecture—the canonical essays, conferences,

projects, and buildings—or a comprehensive

typological study of the contemporary aesthetic

landscape are both beyond the scope of this essay.

However, I would like to suggest a revaluation of

formal analysis as both a critical and a generative

methodology in response to the unselfconsciously

arbitrary formalisms which characterize the ma-

terial output of most academic studios today. The

caveat of such a return being that the value system

of conventional formal analysis be reorganized

(though not entirely reinvented) in response to the

contemporary status of images and the role they

play in architectural production.3

SUGGESTIONS FOR A

SHIFT IN EMPHASIS

What this article aims to put forward is an expan-

sion of the territory opened up by the canonical

object-centric compositional theories of previous

decades by assimilating a painterly experience

of surface into the arena of rigorous, structural

diagrammatic analysis. Surface, skin, and atmo-

spheric effects should be allotted the ontological

status these theories traditionally assigned to

plane, line, and volume. I would like to suggest that,

unlike in recent decades, painterly experiences of

architectural surfaces must consciously inform

the volumetric and structural composition of the

architectural object if it is to compel any conviction

3The circulatory

patterns of images

in disciplinary-

VSHFLƓF�FKDQQHOV�and in popular

culture at large have

radically altered the

way we understand

objects, but this

consciousness

has not been

meaningfully

integrated into

our compositional

discourse.

of intentionality or express itself as a properly con-

temporary gesture.4 In short, making sense of the

language of existing contemporary architecture,

and formulating a pedagogical approach whereby

work can be put in dialectical relations with it and

the recent past necessitates a rigorous theory of

composition; a theory which accounts for the pres-

ent status of images and the role they play in how we

read architectural objects.

I would like to put forward three points or provoca-

tions as a means to suggest how a formal lens of this

kind might operate.

1. The first concerns the last moment when archi-tecture could be said to maintain an agreed-upon set of conventions for thinking through formal structures and what might be gained from re-exam-ining some aspects of those methodologies.5

2. The second deals with what was left out of previ-ous systems of analysis, namely a painterly experi-ence of architectural surfaces, and how the fissure between skin and a more or less volumetric under-standing of structure influenced compositional theory. Having established a way of setting surfaces and volumetric structures in reciprocal relations with one another, one might then ask what this added dimension could contribute to an architec-tural problem? What can surface-as-pictorial plane accommodate?

3. Finally, I would like to suggest how this system might operate in a studio setting as one goes about the very real problem of composing visual and ma-terial relationships within objects: the inevitable encounters with line, color, shape, and matter that all but define architectural intelligence as such.

4The term “compel

conviction”

is somewhat

haphazardly lifted

from Michael Fried’s

criticism of the

1960s and 70s. He

would undoubtedly

disapprove of its

usage in this context.

See: Fried, Michael.

$UW�DQG�REMHFWKRRG��essays and reviews. University of Chicago

Press, 1998.

5As Peter Eisenman

points out in one of

KLV�ƓUVW�VLJQLƓFDQW�publications on

the subject, formal

analysis, in and of

itself, is merely a

descriptive tool. It has

to be “linked up” to an

ideological agenda

in order to operate

socially or politically.

Eisenman’s reference

to the New Critics in

his paper evinces a

particular sensibility

in his case. See: Peter

Eisenman, “From

Object to Relationship

II: Giuseppe Terragni

Casa Giuliani

Frigerio.” 3HUVSHFWD

13/14 (1971): 41.

HANS TURSACK HANS

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112 113

6Michael Bell, “Eyes

in the Heat: RSE.”

3HUVSHFWD 34 (2003):

138.

ABSTRACTION; THE FLOAT-

ING WORLD (1)

A typical caricature of post-war compositional the-

ory would likely begin with the collected works of

Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky and Peter Eisenman (or

“RSE” as Michael Bell coined their collected efforts

around the Perspecta articles of the late 1960s and

’70s).6 While contributing to their diverse and indi-

vidual aesthetic theories, the early Perspecta articles

could be said to share a common view of formal

abstraction as a privileged (and largely optical)

vantage point from which to analyze architectural

objects. Within the floating world of abstraction—a

world which parallels our own while remaining dis-

tinct from it—material artifacts live one half of their

double lives as little more than ideal geometries.

Eisenman in particular built the most graphically

coherent articulation of this system. His analytical

drawings, and those made by others in the style,

take cicada-shell volumetric casts of buildings,

isolate them on the white space of a page, and then

subject the cast to a diagrammatic autopsy by way

of red, gray and black highlighting, shading, and

linear outlining. The drawings themselves recall a

science-fiction sensibility typical of High Modernist

and Minimal art of the period in which orthogonal

forms, shedding their materiality, float silently in

open fields. The mathematical sublime of these

scenarios keys readers into a purely geometric

hermeneutics of pattern recognition and morphol-

ogy, but one would be hard pressed to argue for a

more robust approach to close-reading architec-

tural objects in the second half of the twentieth

century. The graphic sophistication of Eisenman’s

approach is perhaps why it figures so heavily in

the critical field—our avatar of what it looks like

to slowly, methodically, excavate intention and

emergent meaning from within an object-build-

ing’s particular organization. And while I would

argue that Eisenmanian analysis can potentially

reveal latent complexities, its graphic, linear reduc-

tivism—optically moving through a hollow, x-ray

transparency of a building’s massing, plan, and el-

evations—implies that (what I am calling) painterly

experiences of surface effects are somehow other,

either undiagrammable or simply outside of his

particular brand of analysis.

Rowe and Slutzky for their part, identify an ex-

plicitly two-dimensional compositional issue,

“phenomenal transparency,” which deals with the

complex gestalt of elevational conditions in canon-

ical modernist works. The key to this experience in

their view, can be traced to a Cubist understanding

of space in which fragmentation, overlap, collage,

and deep/shallow perspectives play out as variables

within gridded frameworks which complicate our

understanding of the object. In terms of contempo-

raneous architecture responding to the Transpar-

ency articles, one thinks of early works by the Five

Architects—specifically a young Michael Graves of

HANS

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115114

FIGURE 2

Michael Graves and Associates, 6FKXOPDQ�+RXVH, 1976.

Image Courtesy of Michael Graves and Associates.

the Hanselmann and Snyderman houses (1967 and

1972 respectively). Claiming Grave’s early work as a

perfect realization of the articles would be a disser-

vice to Rowe, Slutzky, and the architect. However,

misread as some kind of reaction or informed re-

sponse, the houses flesh-out RSE’s fetishization of

literal complexity on their elevations with so many

murals, cutouts, stackings, protrusions, recessions,

and machinic appendages. While their sensitivity

to elevational syntax enriched Eisenman’s more

volumetrically-inclined algebraics, Rowe and Slutz-

ky’s allegiance to Cubistic fragmentation ultimately

played too well into the post-modern love affair

with sculptural collage which, beginning with the

nuanced experiments of the Five, saw its entropic

demise in the trivial acrobatics of deconstructivism.

After one exorcises RSE’s taste for illustrations of

complexity and the anachronistic appeal to ear-

ly-twentieth century ideas about pictorial space, the

legacy of the Perspecta articles is a working method

for close-reading form in which the abstract es-

sence of the object is extracted from its real world

context and re-coded in architecturally specific

terms of analysis. Diagrammatic mapping through

the lens of RSE’s vocabulary of literal (empirically

verifiable visual phenomena) and virtual relation-

ships (implied movements and static structures)

reveals an unprecedented depth of compositional

information in privileged architectural objects.

Such structures—authored and emergent—are

HANS TURSACK HANS

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116 117

predicated on several assumptions regarding the

DNA of objects capable of engendering complex

readings. These qualities include an underlying

orthogonal logic, an understanding of the architec-

tural plane (wall/ceiling/floor/elevation) as a picto-

rial surface capable of accommodating painterly

organizations and a clear boundary condition; as an

architectural object can only be translated into its

abstract, diagrammable avatar if it can be rendered

intelligible as an isolated, discrete entity.

THE SCHIZOPHRENIC RIFT (2)

The particular sculptural qualities RSE identified

as having the capacity to communicate formal

narratives outside of semantic references to type,

vernacular style, and explicit historical quotation

are apparently compelling enough in contemporary

architecture to have spawned a series of Neo-Ra-

tionalist revival camps. Nevertheless, most of

these offices and studios repeat an error of over or

under-determining their surface conditions by fol-

lowing RSE’s model in which the white-washed box

(and its linear abstraction) somehow approximate

the “deep” structure of architectural form while

effects that cannot be easily reduced to linework

abstractions (however eloquent) or issues of trans-

parency/opacity become matters of material choice

(wood, brick, plaster, concrete) and pop appliqué

(murals, signage, quotation).

While modernist easel painting (Cubism, Fu-

turism, Constructivism, et al.) figure heavily as

points of reference and appeals to authority in

the early Perspecta articles, it is noteworthy that

contemporaneous developments in art theory—

conversations around the merits of literal and illu-

sionistic abstraction in High Modernist painting

and sculpture—are curiously absent. One thinks

specifically of the intensive theorization of shape

in the critical writings of Clement Greenberg and

Michael Fried in the ’60s and ’70s as they struggled

to articulate the dialectic between object, sculpture

and painting at the advent of Minimalist, Pop, and

Conceptual practices. Fried’s reading of Frank

Stella’s Irregular Polygons, for example, posits a dy-

namic relationship between his boldly structured

geometric frames and the shapes painted within.

Fried sites the very essence of painting (at that

time at least) within the formal conversation that

occurs between Stella’s treatment of literal shape

(his sculpturally-shaped canvases resembling

architectural plans) and their depicted elements

(the shapes painted within the support). The stakes

of Fried’s contention that a painting’s success or

failure hinges on its ability to create a symbiotic

relationship between literal and depicted shape are

difficult to imagine in our present, hyper-plural par-

adigm. However, the strength of Fried’s formalist

close readings (the true achievement of the work)

could potentially inform a re-organization of RSE’s

roughly analogous search for visual structures in

object-buildings.

118 119

FIGURE 3

Frank Stella, Sunapee, 1974. Lithograph 22.25 x 17.25.

David Winton Bell Gallery. Gift of Lawrence Rubin.

Image Courtesy of David Winton Bell Gallery.

FIGURE 4

Robert Mangold, Three Color Frame Painting, 1985.

© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

HANS TURSACK HANS

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120 121

In fact, a crude architectural analogy could be for-

mulated between Fried’s literal and depicted shape

(as expounded in his study of Stella’s Irregular Poly-

gons) and RSE’s notion of structure (plane|line|vol-

ume) and their extraneous treatment of surface

(color, material patterns, electric lighting, textures,

screens, mirrors, greenery) that would add signifi-

cant dimension to their methodology. What would

it look like, for example, to assimilate complex

surface conditions into the abstract mathematics

of RSE’s diagrams? Could not atmospheric pictorial

effects such as artificial lighting, anodized metal

panels, color-coded furnishings and plantings be

graphically abstracted, mapped and set within

hyper-precise gridded matrices? It seems only on-

tological prejudice would prohibit a compositional

theory of this kind.

COMPLEX SURFACES: EX-

PANDED TERRITORY FOR THE

FIELD OF OBJECT-CENTRIC

COMPOSITIONAL THEORY (3)

Needless to say, a meaningful revision and expan-

sion of RSE’s formalist theories would necessitate

a rule set in order to maintain its integrity. While

entertaining a thought experiment of this kind,

the temptation to blur the line between interior or

environmental design and architecture is signif-

icant and should be avoided. Some basic tenants

of RSE’s conditions for objecthood would have to

be maintained as not every material thing could

756(�ŴLUW�ZLWK�WKLV�line of analysis but

maintain an ideal,

SXULƓHG�QRWLRQ�RI�elevational form

as monochromatic

relief punctuated

by openings. Color,

surface treatments,

lighting, shadowplay,

UHŴHFWLYLW\��VSHFWUDO�effects and thick 2D

situations (double

facades with planters,

mesh overlays and

objects) remain mar-

ginal if not invisible.

be re-coded into their abstract diagrammatics.

What I’m positing as an additional set of surface

elements on par with the essentialist status of

plane|line|volume would roughly amount to that

which could be accommodated in the thick 2D. Be-

ginning in the orthogonal box, it would be enough

to start by imagining each architectural plane

(wall|ceiling|floor|elevation) as a platform for a

coherent set of pictorial surfaces subject to laws

analogous to those at work in abstract painting.7

Again precedents in twentieth century art speak a

rich history of sculptural thinking in which form

and surface (understood as two discrete sets of

equally valid visual data as in Stella’s literal and de-

picted shape) respond to one another in affirmative,

synthetic, and antagonistic relations. Anne Truitt’s

meticulously rendered totems, John McCracken’s

candy-coated slabs and Robert Mangold’s lyrically

structured canvas-line relations are exemplars of a

genre within formalist abstraction in which the el-

emental form of a bounded object (RSE’s privileged

subject) is made to contend with its surface-play

(that which I am positing as new territory to be

absorbed into their now-conventional methods of

formal analysis).8

Within the world of architectural objecthood, a

theory of this nature would necessitate a novel

approach in which a volumetric or constructivist

mindset would be forced to address the ephemera

of surface treatments from the outset of the design

8The critical mis-

conception about

what constitutes an

architectural object

which initially created

the schizophrenic rift

between RSE’s notion

of structure and

what I am positing

as complex surface

conditions (a rift

which saw its most

extreme articulation in

the ecstatic surfaces

of the Memphis

group) could

perhaps be traced to

Peter Eisenman’s early

preoccupation with

“deep structure” as

understood through

Noam Chomsky’s

linguistics. In its later

popular interpreta-

tions, Eisenman’s

“depth” squared all

too well with the

depth of depth psy-

chology (as theorized

by Freud and Jung).

monochromatic

relief punctuated

by openings. Color,

surface treatments,

lighting, shadowplay,

UHŴHFWLYLW\��VSHFWUDO�effects and thick 2D

situations (double

facades with planters,

mesh overlays and

objects) remain mar-

ginal if not invisible.

HANS TURSACK HANS

TURS

ACK

122 123

process. Purposeful compositional research would

involve experiments and simulations in which

light, color, printed matter, textured patinas, and

atmospheric conditions would participate in the

evolution of formal iterations as material presences

of the highest order. Work generated in this man-

ner—objects embodying the compositional logic

of differential relations between skin and struc-

ture—would be read in light of its ability to com-

municate the material fact of pictorial conditions

on architectural planes while asserting the integrity

of supporting volumetric structures as two legible,

but discrete visual systems. In literature and film,

an obvious parallel could be drawn between the

richness of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s rigorously struc-

tured explorations into a “phenomenology of pure

surface” (his predilection for measurements, coor-

dinates, diagrams and descriptions of domestic de-

tritus) and the set of two dimensional information

left out of RSE’s privileged structures.9

BEYOND IDIOSYNCRASY

Clarity of volumetric expression is a familiar and

historically valued measure of architectural quality

in object-buildings, painterly surface conditions

operating independently of their volumetric sup-

ports are not. And yet it would seem obvious to the

contemporary reader of architecture that surface

matters as never before. The thinning line between

the ever-evolving imaging technologies we employ

9See Roland Barthes,

“Objective Literature:

Alain Robbe-Gril-

let.” Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet (1965):

11-25. Anathema

to Robbe-Grillet’s

subtlety, this formula

might seem to invite

garish mural-ing and

explicitly illustrated

tensions between sur-

face and structure (the

fallacy of Po-Mo eleva-

tional strategies or the

GHVSHUDWH�ŴDVKLQJV�RI�“media facades”), but

this is not the case.

An image-conscious

architecture would

do well to avoid

competing with the

overblown visuals of

the contemporary

urban fabric by pan-

dering to spectacle.

Rather, like the best

(and most formally

sophisticated) Pop

art of the 1960s, such

architecture would

co-opt the visual

strategies of other

media, translate them

into genuinely archi-

tectural gestures, and

re-deploy the best of

their formal qualities

as compositional

variables.

to produce and consume architectural objects

(and a broader cultural lust for higher and higher

levels of resolution) obliges architects to address

the way their work appears in its most immediate

and superficial formal dimension. Unlike the

condescending or alternately vapid post-modern

adoption of pop signage and kitsch (and its disturb-

ingly watered down second life in Somol’s efforts),

our contemporary situation implores a nuanced

theory of surface and skin which invites engaged

disciplinary readings on par with the rigor of for-

mal analysis as practiced by those interested in the

deep conceptual structures of literature, film, and

painting in the past. As one among any number of

avenues analysis might take to address the contem-

porary status of the architectural object, the above

formula is only a provocation; one suggestion for

a conceptual structure which might be utilized in

the material reality of design and its interpreta-

tion. The goal of any endeavor of this kind is not

compositional or hermeneutic complexity as such,

but intentionality and procedural clarity as one

goes about the difficult task of materializing elu-

sive intuitive convictions as properly architectural

expressions in the face of all that is arbitrary and

merely idiosyncratic. •

124 125

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