manifesto

or

where i have paused in the process

The Gesture

            This quarter has been a period of research on the forgotten,  the essentials of space, and the issues of formalism.

Program:

Space to exist (individual)

Space to communicate (together)

Space to remember (together)

Space to support (receive, feed, administer aid)

Energy flow (human, natural)

Problem:

Elder abuse is a very real issue in the Bay Area of California, and current treatment centers focus on simply dealing with the pressing issues of protecting those who are dangerous to themselves and dealing with physical treatment instead of mental rehabilitation.

Elders who have been abused and who are diagnosed with terminal illness pose a special problem.  They are a forgotten class because of their abuse, loved ones turned hostile, even selves turned hostile at times.  They have the issues of the sure approach of death as well, yet cannot grieve or deal with impending death out of fear and emotional disability.

Site:

Near the Gold Gate Yacht Club, the jetty defining this San Francisco yacht harbor holds boats of some of the wealthiest San Franciscans and Americans.  Most of those belonging to the Gold Gate Yacht Club are middle-aged or older.  The jetty (and most of the area surrounding the site), is composed of artificial fill from other sites.  This has happened over time, taking over the bay and leaving only 25% of the original marshland habitat in the bay.  This particular jetty is composed of pieces of an old graveyard (issues of memory-energy).  The site is exposed to tides, pollution of the bay, heavy boat traffic (large and small), mild to heavy winds, and the threat of liquefaction in the event of a large earthquake.  Because of its shape, however, the calm waters behind the jetty could – potentially – serve as a suitable artificial reef or even a new portion of marsh.  Both would impede the daily operations of the yacht club.

Response:

There seem to be several responses to the problems posed and the challenge: creating architecture that is totally reliant upon the human being to define its form.  This is an architecture of pure plasticity and beyond; an über-flexible system that anticipates and responds to the needs and desires of its inhabitants.

The problem required a subject, a first presence to which the building would react.  Tying this to the site required research into the demographic utilizing the nearby land; research revealed that mostly wealthy, elderly, white couples utilized the yacht club and harbor.  In response to this the hospice (assigned and to be built), would need to serve as a metaphor that was in alignment with the metaphorical connection of the building to the land.  Part of the purpose of the building being a sort of “hyper-marsh,” the building seeks to restore the marshlands of San Francisco harbor, essential to the ecosystem and water filtration, beginning with the small yacht harbor upon which the site is located.  Just as this building would perform a hostile takeover upon the bay, the subject of the hospice needed to be a group that would connect intimately with the demographic currently present while reminding them of their own mortality.  Research has revealed that a group that is a product of gross injustice, victims of elder abuse, have little solace or therapy options, and are an excellent candidate for inclusion in the design of this building.  This is because they are so incapable of caring for themselves in an active way that a building response of plasticity is almost an essential.

To add to the difficulties of the site, anchoring requires serious effort on the part of the engineer to hold the land in one place during a natural disaster; the composition of the jetty is entirely artificial fill – just as is most of the peninsula – and would liquefy during a time of severe seismic stress.  By necessity, then, the building’s reinforcement plan would need to be actively-affecting the design decisions.

In summation:

1.             Abused elders

2.             Abused site

3.             Conversations on plastic architecture

The first impulse was to turn to what exists today on the earth which would fit within the challenge posed.  Biology allowed for, at first glance, acceptable precedent for an architecture of supremely-surreal plasticity; the tendrils of the anemone or the roots of the cypress in a swamp allowed for an initial obsession with a form.  This presented a problem for several reasons.  The first: this directly contradicts the previous statements of purpose for the quarter, the ideologies of how the building is to find its inspirations.  It prescribes a form that the designer has observed to perform the functions needed; it can soothe, protect, provide sustenance, and house.  Yet it fails in that it cannot uproot itself, cannot take itself to another location; it is living as its own entity, existing without its parasite but enriched by its presence.  The new architecture would have to be actively mobile, responding immediately to promptings of the user.

A second impulse was a building with a definite boundary but the ability to reshape itself indefinitely. This sort of plasticity, a stretching of inner location as opposed to outer location, offered a different perspective on the problem.  A form similar to a sponge, it would actively grow down to anchor the building and facilitate rebirth in the marsh.  Also problematic, this too would find limited mobility as an architectural form, though this could be imagined.

The crux of this project came when I realized that the idea behind why I was designing the building was becoming too entrenched in the preconceptions of a form that is derived from icons in biology.  Whether it was the sponge or the anemone, seeking to replicate the natural in order to give relevance to the natural was an inevitable failure.  An invention that replicates natural processes of harboring, rehabilitating, and re-growing, while possible in the future of architecture, seems like a middle ground between an ideal and a current possibility.  There is also the issue of intimate time versus the interaction of inhabitants.  How would inhabitants interact / celebrate death / regain life control before passing on? [There is nothing wrong with analogical processes of self-referral or anatomical referral, as long as we keep in mind the inevitability of the constructional reality. The psycho-metaphysical references will remain that: references.]

            The solution upon which we will rest at this time is a solution of two parts:  It relies upon concepts of structure, physics, and an extreme surrealism of architecture.  Upon the site, straddling the jetty would be a retired oilrig, drilled deeply into the earth to secure the platform to solid earth.  The haven created by the oilrig for wild and plant life has been documented elsewhere to date, and this would facilitate the takeover of the waters.  Surrounding this would be pure energy, a field that would have the ability to interact with humans in an intimate way and still maintain its programmed will above all (acting as nurse for the wounded).  Time in rehabilitation and rest would occur within the energy field, while one must venture back into human-imposed structure (the oilrig) to encounter human beings.  Perhaps this is the “shift” of which Tschumi speaks; a point “between the body and Ego, between the Ego and Other…”  Yes, this is the logical conclusion of current architectural discourse: architecture not just defined by principles of the natural, but architecture that actually is the natural.  It opens the discussion to questions that would lead this project further, but for the moment we will pause with this image in mind.

The Theory:

Theo van Doesburg, in his 1924 manifesto, states that he believes in the

 “Elimination of all concept of form in the sense of a fixed type… [This is] essential to the healthy development of architecture and art as a whole.  Instead of using earlier styles as models and imitating them, the problem of architecture must be posed entirely afresh.”

In the development of the hospice project, I have been frustrated with what I have seen from the class around me.  In all, there has been a formal investigation that has lead –and is leading– nowhere of substance.  No matter where we turn -whether it be to the tendrils that pretend to reach a point of influence, to the folds that achieve merely literal folding instead of phenomenal folding as they are intended, or to the application of a language used time and again regardless of what is inappropriate for individual sites- I am finding the problem of architecture in a free-flowing environment is that pure formalism is being explored with a masquerade of delineating space.  The formalism of which I speak is the aesthetic choice or physical manifestation of a metaphysical, architectural investigation: it is the neglect of the spatial with which I am concerned.

Van Doesburg also says, later in his 1924 manifesto, that

“The new architecture is formless and yet exactly defined; that is to say, it is not subject to any fixed aesthetic formal type.  It has no mould (such as confectioners use) in which it produces the functional surfaces arising out of practical, living demands.”

The principles and manifestos of the Modernist architects attempted a way to express this architecture through re-principling what existed architecturally in radical ways.  Yet it was their basic, un-radical treatment of space and structure that was their success and, in the end, their demise.  While many find the stripped style of the modernists brilliant, a public obsessed with the Arts and Crafts never had the understanding of the beauty of modernist space; they rejected its minimalism, misunderstanding its purpose.  Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is a prime example of the radical reformatting of what we knew to be architecture through the inclusion of the machine, begging the aesthetic to disappear while the function flowed continuously.  Inside, outside, up, and down all were removed from the viewing plane as the structure served as a mere necessity of existence in the elements. It seems as though we have somehow moved back into a time out from which van Doesburg, and others, beckoned to bring us.  The Modernist principles of space, transparency, form, and function woven together were destroyed with the postmodern movement as we leaped back into drawing upon a formal approach to architecture.

In January of 1991 in The New York Times, Vincent Scully states that, “the most important movement in architecture today is the revival of the vernacular and classical traditions and their reintegration into the mainstream of modern architecture in its fundamental aspect: the structure of communities, the building of towns.”  We are warned of this becoming a sort of catalog, a “dictionnaire des idées reçues, dismissing less accessible works of an essential nature or, worse, distorting them through association with the mere necessities of a publicity market,” as Tschumi states in his essays on architecture and limits.  While this was written to a rising Postmodern movement in architecture, I would assert that this continues today even in our pluralism of style; we are quick to select a style or language of building without regard to its meaning or without intention of creating an actual architecture.

Indeed, current architectural discussion has removed function from the conversation in its pursuits, allowing form to be a dominating discourse.  Tschumi’s dialogue on limits speaks of this dissolution, stating that “by the early 1930’s in the United States and Europe, a changing social context favored new forms and technologies at the expense of programmatic concerns.”  One might argue that this is still an issue today; we have not yet recovered from such a shift in thinking.  Evidence of this is clear in current trends even within our own institution.  The critically-elevated form, while ambitious work in its own right, gives very little regard to the space it creates and offers homage to a lineage of derivation, or how it came to be.  The danger of this, of which Tschumi warns, is the loss of the influence of the human form in the creation of architecture.  He states:

The sole judge of the last term of the trilogy, “appropriate spatial accommodation” is, of course, the body, your body, my body – the starting point and point of arrival of architecture.  The Cartesian body-as-object has been opposed to the phenomenological body-as-subject, and the materiality and logic of the body has been opposed to the materiality and logic of spaces.  From the space of the body to the body-in-space – the passage is intricate.  And that shift, that gap in the obscurity of the unconscious, somewhere between body and Ego, between Ego and Other…

The disjunction here is a break in the relationship between how the body is formed and made and how this fails to inform the how, what, and why of space we see today.  The concept and failure of emergent architecture as a movement can be seen most strongly exemplified in Co-op Himmelb(l)au and its work in complexities.  Chris Abel, in his essay in The Architectural Review of February 1996, describes the firm’s layering process to blindly generate a spatial response, requiring the emotion of the artist to generate not only aesthetic but proportion, place, and motion in space.  It is this essence of the architectural movements we see today that is most troubling.  As the human as inhabitant is removed from the motive behind architecture the industry itself loses relevance and becomes self-referential to a point of solo-stimulation.