FRONT Inc / Seattle Public Library (facade reiterates diagram)

FRONT Inc. is a façade and storefront specialty firm known for their sophisticated manipulation of varied structural and formal systems; that is, rather than having a standard response to a given design problem they endeavor to manipulate the systems provided them per project so as to create elegant solutions arising directly from each project.

Given the folding of the "self supporting" façade around the OMA-designed programmatically composed library mass which dictates the form of the building from every urban perspective, the addition of compound folds for structural stability is a logical extension of the overarching design diagram to address lateral structural requirements as well as programmatic ones. If properly deployed, the FRONT-detailed compound reinforcing fold could act like a break in sheet metal, creating stability through the multi-planar diaphragms of the fold.

OMA / Seattle Public Library (globalized studio typology)

The main theoretical alternative to [the largely structuralist conception of] totalities is what the philosopher Gilles DeLeuze calls assemblages, [that is] wholes characterized by relations of exteriority...assemblages are made up of parts which are self-subsistent [so] that a part may be detached and made am element of another assemblage. Assemblages are characterized along two dimensions: along the first dimension are specified the variable roles which the component parts may play, from a purely material role to a purely expressive one...a second dimension characterizes processes in which the components are involved processes which stabilize or destabilize the identity of the assemblage (territorialization and deterritorialization).  (De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society, 10-19)

Among the projects I analyzed in the fall, OMA's Seattle Public Library (SPL) façade details stood out as perfect tools to investigate the complexity inherent in the transnational cooperative agreements which parsed its design process. At the most fundamental level, take the fact that OMA is a Rotterdam-based firm, which (despite the presence of an American branch) chose to partner with a local design firm — Seattle-based LMN Architects — to complete this project; furthermore, as the design team coalesced it became increasingly split into several functional groups, one centered on OMA and their European manufacturing contacts (the former provided the parti for the building and massing models for early fundraising and the latter — Seele GmbH — fabricated the façade); a second focused on the concrete and steel of the central masses of the library (Hoffman Construction and Magnusson Klemencic Associates), and a third on the discreet programmatically-defined interior finishes and public procession through the building (LMN and Arup Services Division). This territorialization of subsets of the assemblage actually acts to destabilize the identity of the overall assemblage, I would argue.

Seattle Public Library design organization chart.

The ad-hoc team tasked with creating the SPL was a highly differentiated one, with many stratifications between the architects of record and the trades physicalizing the project; the clustering of the players into groups create what social and behavioral researcher Adele Clarke would refer to as discursive discontinuities rendering more difficult daily communications between the several functional clusters of the team.

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)

Farshid Moussavi @ CCA _ Feb. 13, 2012

(photo: The Architecture Foundation)

Tomorrow (Monday, February 13, 2012) Farshid Moussavi will be lecturing at my graduate school, the California College of the Arts. I'm looking forward to this lecture for a number of reasons, chief among them her embrace of transversal approaches to design, an approach that has strongly influenced my methodological choices for thesis. In her words, "a transversal approach [is one] neither top-down nor bottom up...in which causes and concerns that are immanent...are combined to generate forms [enabling] us to incorporate greater levels of complexity within built forms, allowing multiple inputs to interact simultaneously on the same plane to generate a multitude of novel forms, each with unique expression." (Moussavi, The Function of Form, 34).

Hybridization, Hacking and Mutation

Regardless of over- or under-representation in the built world, every trait I've identified has expressive possibility. The theoretical background for each gene is my claim that all possible expressions of the gene have merit, and that observation of those expressions would be useful to humanity at large in fostering an understanding of the built world, their surround.

In the era of privatized and invisible infrastructures, understanding of our environment has never been more difficult. This disconnect between public knowledge and the process of spacial production is something architecture is particularly well positioned to address; not only do we have the power to gather the atomized components of our process back into the bounds of our profession, but we can do so with intention to reveal those bounds in a way that is experientially legible to those individuals who inhabit our creations.

Above, Utzon's Opera House hacked. Below left to right, organizational
charts for global design studio, architect-as-artist, and integrated project.

Moving forward with my thesis, I am proposing a collection of details which embody the resultants of various methods of working present in today's Architectural profession. The jumping points for these details will be projects from the sample population analyzed in the fall; I will choose projects from my study which are close to or particularly ready for mutation to express one of the underrepresented traits I’ve identified. Each of these projects has an organizational format documented and known to me; I'll start by identifying where in this assemblage of players the shortcoming of the project's detailing is rooted, then hybridize it with a more expressive detail resulting from a markedly different format of working. Some details will come from a single-handed (Architect-as-Artist) mutation implemented by me; others will require the input of other individuals, with ties to epistemic communities other than  my own.

What happens when there is no designer? When a detail is assembled without the specificity of oversight, derived wholly from standards implemented by an unknowing body? This exquisite corpse detail is a necessary bounding condition within the context of my thesis; I will assemble a few such designerless designs to contrast with more the more willful creations of designers and engineers. 

Formative Complexity: Population Study

In my previous post, I explained the traits with which I will analyze my study population of architectural details, drawn from the buildings shown below.


My original taxonomic analysis reveals a wide array of expressed specifics across the breadth of my investive realm --- indeed, the variability in my sample population is almost too much to understand using the phylogenetic representation from the last post. In an effort to more carefully unpack my analytic system, I simulated the movement of each project through a three-dimensional Cartesian grid described by the three genes within each of the investigative quadrants. One of the axes (corresponding to the Z-axis) I defined as the major axis, the traits which act as positive and negative belonging to the gene most defining of the investigative quadrant; the other two directions (X- and Y-axes) are the other two genes, less significant but still important. The projects flow through this constructed realm, with the built location of the project on each analyzed gene indicated by the terminal point’s x, y and z values.

Expression Animation: FORCE

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.