Oakland Arena (facade mutation)

As originally designed, the Oakland Arena façade is a study in engineered efficiency. Given a non-uniform structural parí and a complex site with frontage on what was then a shiny new BART line, the 880 freeway as well as major city arterials and traffic from Oakland International Airport, there was no shortage of factors to elicit differentiation within the façade; however, the solution was a perfectly rectilinear vertical joist system with flat Fink trusses deployed evenly around the perimeter to span from the top to bottom of the concrete primary structure rather than attaching mid-span where the wide X-bracing gives various possibilities for attachment.

My claim is that SOM's model of working had something to do with the undifferentiated detail deployed in this project. The organizational chart adjacent talks about the different players present on the design project; in this case, Architect (A) Mechanical Engineer (Me) and Structural Engineer (Str) are all SOM. The closeness of these roles and their collapse into a single epistemic community (where engineers and architects are often typified as having differing linguistic norms and teleologies) makes it difficult for any to act unilaterally, instead merging into an assemblage which acts to territorialize a large part of the project,  giving it an internal consistency created to mirror that of the formative organization not the many contextual cues contingent upon it. (De Landa, Assemblages Against Totalities, 13)

Formative Complexity: Expressed Traits in Architectural Details

“The most important issue facing architects…is how to construct a viable, progressive project capable of incorporating the innovative design research of the past decades into a productive new model of practice. This would be a form of practice committed to public legibility, to the active engagement of new technologies, and to creative means of implementation. It would be an experimental practice that takes as its object not self-referential theories but real problems — the difficult moments when architecture takes its place in the world.” (Stan Allen, with Frampton + Foster, The New Architectural Pragmatism — Stocktaking, 117)

It is the claim of my thesis that the architectural detail contains embedded information about the cohort which produced it, clothed in the material realities inherent to architectural production; that organizational typologies have ramifications in the arenas of physical construction and material joinery; and that the progressive project Allen et. al. discuss might be fostered by uncovering and responding to the points of expressive failure observed in existing modes of practice.

I firmly believe that organizational trends, at their most virulent, threaten architecture’s ability to envision its resultant object, and so undermine the very utility of our profession. Certain formats estrange the architect entirely from the empirical realities of the material world; it is this remove which can render the design process destructively autonomous and ultimately unnecessary as other professions take on large parts of the architect’s work.

At the other extreme, I believe that the design firm could act as a highly reflexive reifying organism which reliably dampens and re-distributes what De Landa would refer to as friction --- that is, anything which “interferes with the implementation of a tactical or strategic plan” --- in such a way that the final object re-presents its genesis. A designed representation of the modern world’s structural complexity would render the networked reality of our lives in material tectonics.

Volatility // Culpability: Disruptive Friction and Organizational Formatting

[If a] system is dynamic there has to be the ability to exchange information all the time. At all scales data is fed through and transformed…what begins as a small set of instructions is multiplied into a complex web. (Balmond, 7)

Systemic responses to dynamic situations vary wildly. A working knowledge of which echelon within a regime is tasked with engaging mercurial realities fosters an understanding of how that organization might manifest these responses to volatility on the ground — take for example a column line undocumented in the as-built drawings provided a design team at the outset of a project. Manuel De Landa would term this discrepancy “friction,” anything which “interferes with the implementation of a tactical or strategic plan…’noisy data.’” (De Landa, 60) This friction could be impetus to shift the overlaid grid of new construction to a more harmonious abstract rhythm incorporating the surprise columns if discovered early and responded to by an architect. The same discovery by a trade partner after design documents are finalized and the project is under construction would create a localized, intensive and materially-dependent response; the difference between a strategic response and a logistical one, then, can be seen as a reification of hierarchically-driven separation of scope.

Each bullseye is an organizational typology; each colored ring a player or set of players within the same social arena. (A=Architect, S=Structural Engineer, M=Mechanical Engineer, GC=General Contractor, F=Facade Specialist, etc.)