Thursday, July 2, 2015

CLOUD-MACHINE


















Texas A&M University. Department of Architecture. T4T LAB Spring 2015. 
ALIEN, MESSY, DISCRETE
Invited Professor: Gilles Retsin 
With Gabriel Esquivel
Team: Michael Koernig, Ryan Samadh, Josh Berry, Michael Villareal, Jocelyn Zuniga.

When discussing the project it is important to draw the distinction between representation and the limits of human perception and understanding. In order to attempt to engage the object and attempt communication, it is necessary for us as humans to assign some sort of construct that is familiar to us. Whatever perceptions are drawn by humans it is inconsequential to the object. This particular object It operates as an autopoetic machine, one that is in a constant state of proliferation of its parts, aggregating in various sizes and geometries, constantly expanding its endo-structure in all directions. It fulfills this function of accumulation as an autonomous object, defying human cognition or constructs.

In order to attempt to set up a discourse about the object, we can quantify a scale of the “city” and that of the “house”.  The house is one of the many parts that are being perpetually proliferated by the city mass. It is only one part of an ever increasing legion of aggregation, and yet within this one part of the machine, we see it emerges as a machine within the machine in its own right and wiithin the house through its own proliferation of parts. Each mereological system , the partition stones, the high-fi filaments of the slabs, or the fibers that form into beams, is its own autonomous machine, whilst at the same time creating a cohesive whole. These parts are not autonomous in the sense that they are operating in defiance, or rebellion to being part of a whole. Rather, their aggregation and expansion occurs without regard to what any other system is doing. However, the villa is in truth just as alien, incomprehensible, and in perpetual proliferation as the city itself is, functioning as its own autonomous machine unto itself.

In the development of the project, two fundamentally opposite ideas emerged as influences, those being elements found in Russian constructivism, the other being the prairie style of house that was taking hold in the west at the same time. These create conflict within the project not only on an architectural level, but on a socio-political level as well, creating a conflict of regimes within the project. In a sense, Marxist Russian constructivism and the capitalist west can be viewed as hyper objects in their own right, in the sense that they are also beyond the realm of human limitations, and exist and operate in a realm beyond that of what can be quantifiable. When these ideologies are brought together, they do possess some overlap. Marxist Russia was all about unification, and the removal of hierarchy. And while the dogma of capitalism is about fragmentation and the individual, this is evident in the project, for as the project aggregates its pieces in unification and fragmentation, there is not really a sense of hierarchy of parts, at least by the limitations that we as humans can recognize in the object.

Another fundamental tenant of Russian constructivism is the idea of building up, from the ground up vertically. And when one thinks of Capitalist architecture, the first thought that may come to mind is the classic notion of the huge, vertical high rise. However, the “house” clearly is celebrating horizontality, which we as humans can perceive as being Capitalist in different terms, in terms of land expansion, of the single villas occupying plots of land that was championed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie style of house, one that is a purely western phenomenon. At the scale of what we can perceive as the “house,” capitalism celebrates the horizontal, the long sweeping planes displayed in projects such as the Robie and Farnsworth Houses.

The conflict in regimes is not the only source of tension the project is under. Internally, what we perceive as the house scale is under a Lacanian sort of psychoanalytical tension, as it is negotiating the relationship between interior and exterior. It is in need of “therapy”, unable to come to terms with mixed conditions, is it and extroverted architecture by means of the transparent exterior curtain wall is it about  making it a condition of interior affects . The project is in a sort of Wright vs. Mies conflict, not committing to one over the other. (Is it about the interior or is it about the exterior or both?  It is, as Deluze would say, in a state of flux, and this creates confusion, tension within the inside mechanism of the project. This psychoanalytical tension gives a beautiful fallacy of accessibility. The tension of the project in how it expresses interaction of interior or exterior is palpable, and yet within it there is still space within that feels domestic,and comfortable. In actuality, this is of no concern to the object, as it is wholly indifferent to how it may be perceived by the human mind. But to us, to the viewer, this comfortability, this familiarity, is a way for us to resolve the tension, to find forms of inhabitation to find resolution to it, not in terms of the machine, for our desire of communication. 


Wednesday, July 1, 2015

MERE-O-LOGIC












Texas A&M University. Department of Architecture. T4T LAB Spring 2015. 
ALIEN, MESSY, DISCRETE
Invited Professor: Gilles Retsin 
With Gabriel Esquivel
Team: Collin Stone, Jayson Kim, Kaylan Betten, Lynn Ng, Luis Romero. 

As part of the exploration of object oriented ontology as it relates to architecture, our project is part of an architecture which is truly for itself.  There is no subject who has agency over the object as it operates on a flat plane of immanence.  The object does not share any medium of communication with the human onlooker, but exists under its own conditions where it is the qualities of accumulation and complexity.  There is a mereology formed by the constant engaging of the parts in the building, which eludes all human cognition, and remains only under the realm of its own ontology. Due to this condition, the humans' understanding of this mereology is reduced to mere mechanism that becomes its own form of distortion.
            The exact substance of the object is difficult to conceive, as it is more easily understood as a node of complexity that has the quality of accumulating qualities.  There are no literal nodes of influence or specific forces that act on the object, but the object's complexity and its abilities to distort are fundamental in the substance of the object.  Several systems of articulation form a density of information that is ever increasing in weight, giving the object not a static presence, but a presence that seems to elude what humans can understand in the instance of the present.  This disconnection from the human is evident all throughout the project as it sits atop a plinth, eliminating any mutual ground condition between the human and the object. The entry fully embodies this idea as one is denied visual access to the object as they enter the building from underneath the plinth.  The object conceals itself and does not reveal any information to a participant due to the stark lack of stimulation and absence of surface articulation on its base.  Perched atop this plinth, the object becomes ungrounded, further estranging it from the anthropocentric, which reinforces its respective ontological existence.  Having been removed from any grounded context, the object aggregates into a system of nemat spaces above the plinth, which becomes the quality of porosity.  The system of nemat spaces and, the qualities of the mereology are one in the same, as each cannot exist in the object without the affecting and becoming apart of the another.  This interaction between these properties results in a complex porosity where certain spaces are reduced to uninhabitable nooks, while others span vastly throughout the object.
            The object is a collective of void spaces, or other void objects, that all come together to form an assemblage which is the mereology of the building.  It is the act of becoming the assemblage that distorts the geometry of the void spaces.  Distortion is a quality of not the object as a whole, but it is a quality of the mereology itself.  The individual parts of the building all separated out are stark and resolved, but the interaction between them and the formation of their relationships to eachother is the cause of their distortion.  There is no hierarchy to the mereology, as one part refuses to subordinate to the next, for this project merely occupies and reinforces the plane of immanence.  It is only through analysis that we are able to view the distortion from outside the realm of the object, but due to the inconceivable nature of the distorting mereology, it is impossible to understand this quality once inside the object.