*OUTLINE* in progress

0. DIALECTICS

moving away from a dependence on binary relationships to exploring relationships, thresholds, "relational" architecture vs spaces of escape

1. SUBJECTIVITY and PLACE -- HISTORICAL ANALYSIS of the reception of our environments

1a. The repetitive experience (the resident): Body knowledge.

. ritual.  permanence.  ownership.  the engaged subject. 

. connection to place through interaction.

1b. The singular experience (the visitor): Optical consumption.

. momentary.  transience.  no responsibility/appropriation.  the freedom of the shopper.

. connection to place through image. 

 1c. Representation of these modes of perception: method for defining these connections, use in design?

1*. Transcendence/conflation of these experiences. 

. reversal of "resident" and "visitor" subjectivities in land art and monuments.  connection without ownership.  specific subjectivity.

. the intentionally (dis)placed subject.  pedagogical/politicized architecture of utopian designers.

  . homogenization in communities: second- and third-home urbanism.  ownership without connection.  generic subjectivity.

2. RELATIONAL -- NEW SYNTHESIS of subjectivity and place

 2a. Crisis: homogenization and collapse of dialectics

  . relevance: (collective) ownership today

  . privatizing public, public disappearing.  different outward appearances but same spaces.  crafting the same type of character, identity lost.  defining ourselves, our contexts, where we come from but operating with no common ground.  can we still preserve a sense of ownership and connection to physical space?

  . too much imagery, too much information: seeking our own individual experiences, but still acting as anonymous subjects.

 2b. What are we looking for?  CASE STUDIES

  . role reversals, new subjectivities, new definitions of place,connection,identity,collective

 2c. Focus on social interaction and revealing cultural forces: the contingencies of relationships between people, objects, environments

  . Architecture can sharpen consciousness of the self

  . And can thus empower people in environments of growing artificial ubiquity

3. LAS VEGAS

Las Vegas offers ubiquitous images for both tourist and resident, though completely disassociated.

  . Mapping the communities: where are the tourists, where are the residents.  who is moving, who is static.  investment in the city?

  . Perceptions of the city.

  . Synthesis: the threshold between living and playing, reality and image, environment and individual

  ...

-- meeting 8 oct

In setting up my own design projections about connecting people to the environment, I need to clearly analyze past methodologies and definitions, launching off of established theories of place and environment.  To examine: Lunch, Evans, Venturi, Weber, Koolhaas.  All offer specific techniques of connecting subject and place.  This can then transition to some argument about today and Las Vegas. 

We also discussed presentation of information (the thesis prep "book").  References: Zone, SMLXL, the Bauhaus doc.  What's your shelving system?

1 Discourse: engaged?

[context]

ARCHITECTURE WAS

1 the greatest representation of human life through time

2 the foremost embodiment of the collective

3 essential

[question]

ARCHITECTURE IS

1 the organization of information about human life

2 generic; branded; not representative of a collective

3 becoming a product (non-essential) 

[hypothesis]

ARCHITECTURE SHOULD BE

1 the connections between elements that constitute contemporary life / human interaction; the organization of human life itself

2 the spatial manifestation enabling/amplifying the contemporary (redefined) collective

3 synthesis; creating an awareness/empowerment essentially connected to place, the physical body in space communicating with other bodies

(1 engagement with society?)

(2 with public life?)

(3 with the individual?)

first thoughts updated

Placed amidst the many dichotomies present in the discourse of architecture over the past few decades—autonomy vs historicity, formal vs social, intellectual vs subjective, permanence vs transience, object vs ground, less vs more, and so on—architecture seems now always to want to occupy a realm “in between,” ideally operating at the threshold of both one and another duality.  This is particularly true in the growing discussion of interdisciplinarity in the design world; as GSD professors and Advanced Studies students examined in last spring’s inaugural publication of New Geographies, architectural thinking must address new ideas of scale that certainly challenge the parameters within which we view “architecture.”  While this all offers a new and powerful way to conceptualize the role of architecture, it also posits the discipline in ambiguous territory, and the role of architecture—and the architect—in contemporary society may be growing less clear.

 

As the effects of globalization spread ever farther, architects today must provide a consumable, immediate “image” of a project in order to captivate any kind of general public interest, as most people will only see a building in a photo or magazine rather than visit it.  However, architecture by definition must be more than a sound byte; it must take authority in creating spaces for people to inhabit that are identifiable through a synthesis of physical and social contingencies; architecture must create connections.  Kwinter writes of the problem of lives “cut” or isolated by new “social technologies,” and his interest in the “chreod” or environment of potentials offers another reconceptualization of architecture’s realm, something between the hard and the abstract.

 

I would like to engage the question of architect as agent of social change, to the end that architecture can capture public attention and root it in present physical space in order to potentially create new awareness.  If people are forced out of the anonymity offered by contemporary life, they may be more likely to take responsibility, to respond to social critique.  Taking from new discussions of subjectivity, perhaps starting with the work of Koolhaas (which largely relies on irony and juxtaposition to arrest attention), I will position my project to operate in the “in between” of a problematic urban condition, likely that of Las Vegas, where the threshold between visitor destination and residential city calls for an architecture that will synthesize contingencies of context, scale, and user in a very specific yet hopefully exemplary approach.

[from september2008]

first thoughts

If architecture is to effect change, it must create awareness. 

Proposal: Exploring how Architecture can resonate with and empower a general public by looking at architecture's potential for creating self-awareness through connections to "place.” 

PROBLEM

With the growing globalization of contemporary society, the role of the built environment is changing as Architecture increasingly operates as a product—a consumable image that one sees and immediately takes with them. This may be the only way for architecture to operate in a market-driven economy in which most people will only see a building in a photo or magazine rather than visit it. However, architecture still must take authority in creating identifiable spaces for people to inhabit, spaces that are known by feeling and association and that synthesize physical and social contextual environments—places that offer specificity as well as longer-ranging connections in the midst of ubiquitous globalization. 

QUESTION 

Can Architecture transcend the boundaries of “image” while maintaining its unique ability to create provocative relationships? By responding to new understandings of how people interact with their environments, can we design places that in fact address the inhabitant’s consciousness of a specific set of contingencies—social, environmental, political? (Can the iconography of a building be the experience of it, its presence—building itself as context rather than simply form?) 

SITE 

My site will likely be an urban condition of identity crisis, which can help me to set up an environment of potentialities. I would be interested in a site that calls for connection and rootedness, the interchangeability of figure and ground, in need of a synthesis of perhaps not-so-obvious contingencies and contexts. 

PROGRAM 

The program should offer a resistance of formal against informal, further questioning how Design as a formal art can interact with and enhance public (informal) life. I could see working with a program that is institutional and thus “global” in its function (i.e. museum) but that is simultaneously integrated with public accessibility and use, having a specifically local presence. 

[from may2008]