Highland Community Proposal

This proposal is final project in response to what was explored in Simon Atkinson's course entitled "Garden City to New Community" at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas. It takes as its departure point the hypothetical closing of Highland Mall in North-Central Austin.





In the absence of a limited-access Interstate highway directly connecting Austin and Houston, 290 provides the fastest, most direct route between the capital and the largest city of Texas. 290 terminates at I-35 by the site of the proposed Highland Community. This creates the possibility of anchoring the proposed community with the terminus of a high-speed railway between Austin and Houston, easily accessible from the rest of the city and downtown through the main thoroughfares nearby and the presence of a Metro Rail stop. By being accessible to automobiles while being set up for a pedestrian-friendly environment, it has the potential of introducing transit-oriented living as a viable alternative to driving.



The present condition of site is typical of the American shopping mall, with a megastructure as a distinct figure against a void ground of vast parking lots surrounding it and isolating it from the rest of the urban fabric. The proposal calls for reversing this condition by turning the existing megastructure into a void around which a dense continuation of the urban fabric would be organized as a programmed mat of mixed-use development that will fill the void of the present parking lot.





The megastructure will be reconstituted as a framework for green spaces and flexible loft spaces for residential, commercial, and cultural use. The arcades will be converted into green, open-air courtyards that bring more natural light and ventilation into the spaces along them. The larger expanses of interior space will be punctured with lightwells to decrease the need for artificial lighting and to make them more inhabitable by multiple smaller programs. The expansive flat roof of the mall will be converted into a green roof to minimize heat gain and run-off, as well as to provide a pleasant visual “courtyard” for the mat of mixed-use development that will encompass the megastructure.

Like the existing megastructure, most of the paving of the surrounding parking lots will be retained, punctured only as necessary to secure the foundations for the programmed mat of mixed-use development that will be cover most of it. The paved surfaces will thus be retained as parking space and service spaces for the programmed mat built on it, the effective area of greenery is increased by generous planting on the roof of the mat. The mat will be organized so that it is thickest in section at the periphery of the site to create a strong delineation for the new community, to shield the community from the noise of the nearby highways, and to orient views towards the green roof of the megastructure as a unifying identity marker. Existing trees in the site will be retained to define “valleys” of interconnected plazas at grade level to relieve the mat, give definition to their spaces and programs, aid cross ventilation, and provide friendly pedestrian access to and from the surrounding streets.

In addition to a healthy mix of mixed-income housing, local and chain businesses, places of employment, recreational facilities, and social services, the community will include facilities proper to its role as a transportation node and gateway, such as visitor accommodation and meeting venues.

To ensure visual and spatial variety and foster a healthy competition to encourage quality, multiple designers will be employed to realize to specificity the spaces within the proposed framework. The mat, for instance, can be a series of buildings of various scales that are unified by the proposed scheme but need not conform to a specific aesthetic. Artists will be commisioned to give the community further character through public art, with the recommendation that a certain percentage of the budget for the development of the scheme specifically set aside for this purpose from the onset.

Revelation

"Christian truth has often been likened to a statue part buried in the sand. All is there from the beginning: but all is not equally evident: it needs the accidents of time--wind to blow the sand away and man's own exertions in excavation--to bring the statue fully to light. We have all experienced, I think, how some change in human circumstances has given added point to some passage in the scriptures which hitherto meant very little to us."

--Lance Wright, "Architectural Seriousness"

Architectural Construction

Clement Greenberg wrote that the arts can save themselves from degeneration as an art forms "only by demonstrating that the kind of experience provided was valuable in its own right, and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity." Kenneth Frampton takes this assertion as his departure point in his essay "Rappel à l'Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic", in which he celebrates construction as the essence of architecture that holds promise in its quest to ground itself as an art form, while not denying "spatial enclosure" as the other defining essence of architecture. Indeed, constuction in its most general sense is not unique to architecture. A piece of sculpture "constructed" using common building construction materials and common building techniques is not architecture if does not deal with space, whether physical or virtual, as its central argument, problem, or reason of being. Construction is architectural insofar as it defines space through enclosure, demarcation, or elevation.

Tectonic Expression in the Mortensrud Church

The Mortensrud Church by Jensen + Skodvin Arkitektkontor takes the familiar materiality of stone, a material historically associated with Christian chuch architecture, and celebrates it literally and figuratively through its elevation in defiance of its expectations as a heavy material that wants to rest directly on the ground. Structures made of lighter material such as mud and wood employ stone as a practical foundation, while Florentine palaces celebrate the heaviness of stone and stability it provides through the expressively rusticated masonry employed at their lowest stories. The church at Mortensrud defies the established conventions and expectations of stone by lifting the entirely stones off the ground with a steel framework, in effect communicating the bizarre image of a floating stone wall. Beyond the already powerful aspiration to the miraculous defiance of gravity inherited from the medieval builders of Gothic churches, the specific decisions the designers made in construction take a clear, one-liner concept and invest in it layers of tectonic richness.

The stone infill wall of the steel frame is built without mortar, which allows light to shine through the gaps created by the meeting of the naturally irregular shapes of the stones. In contrast to the expectation of stone walls as formidable barriers that block light, the stones at Mortensrud form a permeable screen that modulates natural light in a manner again harking back to medieval precedents, where tracery pierces heavy stone walls to dematerialize them in light, a move not only aspiring to the miraculous, but also to the numinous in the Christian sensibility, bringing to mind the transcendence of the divinity and humanity of Christ narrated in the story of his luminous transfiguration before three of his disciples on a mountain.

As with medieval stone tracery, the stones at Mortensrud act structurally in addition to defining the atmosphere of the interior space. The stones are stiffened horizontally into a wall by steel plates embedded among them, spanning between the steel columns of the main structural frame. The plates can stiffen the wall only when the weight of the stones is added to the structure. Thus, the steel plates and the stones are integral to each other’s stability, making them integral to the structural ensemble that forms the floating wall. The floating masonry walls in turn suggest a role in stabilizing the steel frame that carries them, although their actual composition prevents them from fulfilling the stabilizing role of shear walls, leaving this role to conventional moment connections aided by an expressively singular instance of diagonal bracing. Structural integrity thus exists literally and is expressed figuratively.

One may simply copy the exact materials and structure of the church and achieve at the bare minimum, though necessarily stripped of novelty, the same immediately clear yet visually, symbolically, and structurally layered tectonic expression of the church at Mortensrud. However, the designers have anchored the specificity of the building as an instance in the world of architecture that is impossible to be replicated with its full power by the way the materials and structure of the building relate to its site placement and its environment. In the nave, bare rock protrudes through the floor and interrupts the regularity of the pews. The obtrusive rock deliberately expresses the specific design intention to leave the site, dominated by a rocky ridge, largely untouched. The church sits lightly and comfortably on the rocky site, interacting with it without disturbing it through the dialogue of contrast between stones artificially contrived to float in lightness and rock left untouched in its natural state of earthy respite as an artifact representing a comprehensive set of design decisions. The church at Mortensrud embodies tectonics as an exercise beyond internal logic. Without weaving the internal structural and material logic at the core of tectonic definition with practical and expressive concerns beyond the materials and structure of the building itself, tectonics cannot achieve its full potential in the quest to ground architecture in complex relational webs of relevance if not in the clear and solid surety of platonic truth.

Architecture's Canvas

Thomas Leslie's account of the history of Chicago skyscraper construction between 1885 and 1905 demonstrates how the form of built architecture relates to the interactions of specific conditions, such as economic pressures and technological and material availability. The lightness and transparency of the buildings constructed early in the period correspond with the cheap availability of glass in the area, necessity of employing materials lighter than traditional masonry in the infancy of metal frame structures on muddy soil of poor bearing capacity, and the demand for natural light when available technology made lighting a greater concern than controlling indoor temperature. The heavier and less transparent aesthetic later in the period relates to the increase in the price of glass and the development of artificial lighting that made controlling indoor temperature a greater concern than maximizing the amount of natural light entering the building. Shifting parametric conditions have thus enriched Chicago's physical fabric with their resultant diversity of form over time. Over a broader space, Chicago's skyscrapers have enriched the world's body of architecture with forms specifically resulting from conditions due to Chicago's specific location.

The relationship between the parameters of pre-existing conditions and the attributes of the resulting built form is not one of inevitablitity, but of possibility. Indeed, a specific built form is but one of many possibilities that could have arisen from the conditions of time and place upon and for which it had been built. It is in this realm of possibility that architects employ their skill and creativity to carry out their work, first identifying, choosing, and prioritizing which conditions demand their response and then designing and bringing it into being a specific built form. Architectural work is fundamentally a human response to pre-existing conditions, for which architectural success rests on the skill and creativity of the architect. Without parameters that require response, an architect's skill and creativity lack a mode to become substantial reality. An architect without a least a hypothetical reality of time, place, or another condition is like a painter without the bounds of a canvas. The skillful and creative architect fills the bounds of pre-existing conditions with richness pruned from the wilderness of diverse possibilities. The economic pressures and technological and material availability specific to the time and place of Chicago in the late 19th-century represent bounds within which an architect can make a relevant architectural response as Leslie recounts.


Such bounds of reality need not be physical or as obviously objectively practical as an economic demand for office spaces with plenty of natural light on the muddy ground of a city where glass prices happen to be low that that given time. Bounds of reality can take the form of such "mental" constructs as inquiry, drive for improvement, and desire for a different reality. Architects such as Ali Rahim, whose work does not necessarily get built into physically inhabitable space, deserve the title "architect" as much as more "traditional" architects based on the definition presented here. Ali Rahim's skyscrapers, now restricted to (or liberated by their exclusive existence as) bytes of digital information and images on paper and computer screens, bring into being architectural realities grounded by his inquiry of the discipline's definition, his drive to stretch the limits of available technology to expand both technology and architectural expression made possible by the expansion of technology, and his desire to conceive spaces that have the capacity to improve and inspire people's lives. Rahim's objectives have as their material the computing power of available computer technology, the curvilinear and incremental forms made possible by this computing power, and the rigidity of the modernist/traditionalist status quo upon which those curves and increments play to become visible and conscious forms of architectural power that represent the eternal quest to expand technology and intellectual thought (architectural or otherwise) to the ultimate and ever forward-moving end of improving human life.

As long as human life has space to improve, vitality drives technological advancement and intellectual thought into relevance and existence. Those who say that architecture today is undergoing an identity crisis may be correct, but the identification of their claim as a problem only underlines the continual insufficiency of present reality that invites the desire to fill the seemingly ever-multiplying voids. Architects may thus sleep soundly tonight knowing that their art is safely within the bounds of relevance and reality.

Eisenman Architects: City of Culture of Galicia

http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=91086_0_23_0_M

While still active modes of research and production, the four trajectories of articulation, notation, decoration and figuration have, in the intervening thirty years, confronted impasses internal to their development that have provoked subsequent practices to redirect priorities and hybridize modes of production as the opportunit ies of technology and demands of cultural aud iences have allowed. For example, Peter Eisenman's conceptual markings and notations of design process have been invariably registered through manipulations of the structural grid. While this worked well at the scale of the early houses, the sheer size of the later work has opened a disjunction between the structure and its ability to legibly serve as an index of the design process, reaching an extreme in his Cultural Center for Santiago de Compostela. With apparently massive volumes given over to the poche of doubled floors and ceilings, and facade fragments in danger of popping off swollen elevations, the irreparable gap between the constructional and notational logics produces a situation where the grid as disciplining geometry can only be rendered as ornamental applique.The grid, in other words, becomes a thematic trope, a drywall voice over that is necessary to maintain continuity and serve as a reminder of where one is in the critical design narrative. (Somol: "Green Dots 101", p. 31)

Bibliotheek Technische Universiteit Delft

http://www.mecanoo.com/

Praetorius echoing through New Zealand's Southern Alps

Music sung from the Episcopal Hymnal 1982, number 710. Audio recorded using Audacity, 2009 09 26. Photos taken on the TranzAlpine Train in New Zealand's South Island, 2009 03 21.

Architecture: Systems and Humanity

Systems and humans are entities often seen as antithetical to each other. A system often implies the simplification of humans into numbers, statistics, and rigid patterns. The commonly held negative connotations of systems and simplification are founded. Systems can be misused by those in power to subvert other humans for their own selfish needs. Systematic simplifications, while good in intent, carry the danger of misunderstanding by those ignorant of their intent and their role within the larger system, racism arguably being a familiar example of such ignorance. However, there is nothing wrong in this simplification in of itself when systems are kept as servants to human will to the end of bettering human life. Architects are overseers of systems that collectively fall under the term “architecture.” Such architectural systems range from the miniscule represented by tectonics to the majuscule represented by what might be termed “society building”.

Nowhere is the role of tectonics and its clarity more apparent in architecture education than in design-build courses. Not only is the conception of space demanded of design-build students, but also the putting together of space beyond the imaginary into the physical, through the gathering and assembling of material objects into a finished work of architecture. Put into a world dominated by the outdoors and the material, design-build students may fall into the trap of abandoning the wisdom of systems developed on paper, especially when met with the pressure of a tight schedule. Grids and consistency of approach fall in the wayside in favor of constructing things as they are needed and solving problems as they arise. Grids and consistency of approach, when used effectively, are systems meant to enhance communication and understanding between and among designers and builders. Clear and comprehensive tectonic thinking simplifies decision-making by minimizing time wasted deliberating over each problem as they arise. Design-build students learn the dire consequences of overlooking the design component of building when miscommunication results in wrong moves and unpleasant incoherence in the final product, and poor tectonic conception results in too many special moves that require too many trips back to the hardware store. A design-build project with healthy tectonics is not only built efficiently by persons who understand each other, but stands with harmoniously pleasing coherence, a result of the effective use of systems to better human life, be it the builder or the user.

In a scale much larger than a five-week design-build project and in more general, less concrete terms, architecture students are part of the elite armed to effect positive change on society by their university education and their own predisposition to invest in that university education. A good university education teaches the effective conception and application of systems and inspires students to put into motion these systems through the ideals it imparts from its store of human experience at its best. Successful architecture students are empowered to design good buildings that work with other good buildings in larger compositions of the built environment, whether at the scale of campuses, towns, or nations, themselves designed collectively and systematically by the likes of engineers, planners, or lawmakers. All too familiar are the ills of buildings and communities left to their own devices in the unfamiliar world of consumerism and globalization brought about by human progress. Those to whom the reins of systematic design are invested are charged with the responsibility of stirring and harnessing human progress to the positive. Architects and other people of power and good will should not get lost in the numbers and get fooled by the simplification of data. In so doing, they give architecture and power a bad name at best and at worst endanger humanity with the systems they have conceived to the end of improving human life. Systems are a means to an end, and the end is man himself. A good architect listens to a bit of Immanuel Kant’s Second Maxim: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”

Howard Davis, The Culture of Building, Part I, "Buildings as Cultural Products:" chapters 1-3

The first three chapters of Howard Davis's The Culture of Building leave much discomfort to one seeking to complete a degree in architecture in a university setting. The culture of idealism in which one is saturated in American architecture education seems at odds with the commonly understood pragmatic end of such an education to permit one to practice architecture legally in a world largely portrayed by Davis as indifferent to architectural creativity at best, and fearful of it at worst.

Creative solutions are encouraged in American architecture education, particularly in the studio. Outside of the apparently infallibly set realm of statics and technology, "preconceptions" are to be challenged, whether that of structure, space, identity, or tectonics. From the Davis’s discussion of the informal settlement in Pune, India, to the contemporary American subculture of building represented by popular home magazines, there seems to run a common thread of reluctance to deviate from the known at the seeming expense of creativity. Challenging preconceptions is a fearful thing to the Pune dweller and New York City developer alike, as it means challenging the wrath of the monsoon in one case and of the market in the other. Creative solutions are risky undertakings in architecture, as buildings carry the responsibility of ensuring human survival and the necessity of a huge investment of resources and energy.

In order to find a happy solution to the dilemma found in the relationship between American architecture education and the building cultures for which it trains the architecture student, one may examine the dynamics between conservatism and liberalism in American politics. In theoretical simplification, conservatism represents the conservation of the status quo, whereas liberalism represents a liberation from it. In an ideal democratic society, the status quo is built up by the will of the people, or at least as they are represented by the majority. New solutions that continue to work tend to be upheld many more times by many more people as solutions that will continue to work, and thus become established solutions. We operate upon much knowledge simply held as truth as no one can possibly test knowledge on their own as in laboratory experiments; we trust our doctors to prescribe drugs that will fix us as they trust that pharmaceutical scientists have concocted the drugs in a scientifically sound manner. In addition to the potential waste of energy and resources to undertake a task, new solutions present the obvious risk of being bad solutions. As liberalism presents new solutions that reflect both the ever-changing specifics of reality as well as the hope for a betterment of the present reality, conservatism protects against bad solutions by challenging and testing solutions proposed by liberalism. Liberalism is popularly associated with university culture, a safe haven where philosophical and scientific ideas may be tested presumably without endangering society at large with dangerous ideas or radioactive explosions. American university architecture education can be seen as a safe breeding ground for new architectural solutions, to be tested by realities of building culture and technology as they thrive outside the studio.

While one may hope that this model harmonizes the incongruity between the shiny idealism of university architecture education and the muddy pragmatism of building culture, glaring rows of light-frame “McMansions” fronted by water-guzzling lawns interspersed by glorified warehouses of commerce encompassed by seas of asphalt continue to consume our land and deceive our hearts’ desires for the good life. A rethinking who really is protecting who in the relationship between architecture education and building culture. Universities find roots in medieval monasteries, which have protected knowledge from times past through the copying of manuscripts. Ancient Christian tradition holds that the monks protect the world by sanctifying the hours of the day and night with their prayer. Might architecture schools be monasteries where the idealism of architecture as art be kept aflame in a materialistic world not necessarily driven by the pursuit of the ideal?
American architecture education can be seen as liberal in that it presents new solutions that have the potential of being great solutions. It is conservative in that it holds on to concerns elevated above the fleeting. One recalls the hopeful paradox presented by an author who claims that avant-gardism is the faithful carrying on of a tradition of bettering and making perfect that has sustained the arts and sciences of ancient times, from the master builders of the Gothic age to the gentlemanly draftsmen of the Enlightenment.

Ciceronian Placeholder

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Discovery

Myyrmäki church by Juha Leiviskä, Vantaa, Finland

Discovered in the course of doing digital slide quality control for the University of Texas School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ettubrute/2187800066/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kap_cris/876958857/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewmalick/373581323/

Compline in Austin Part 1

Every Sunday evening, I sing with a choir that offers the ancient monastic office of compline at St. David's Episcopal Church in downtown Austin. We meet at 7 PM in the choir practice room for rehearsal. The beginning of rehearsal is always a game of "What can we sing today given who shows up?" Our director for the evening (most often David Stevens, but sometimes Barbara Manson or Howard Burkett) determines what anthems, motets, hymns, or nunc dimittis we are to sing that evening based on what voice parts and how many of each voice part is available. The choir is a volunteer choir that is largely composed of active members of the Austin music community. Due our intimate numbers, we are quite significantly affected if one or a bunch of us happens to be touring outside of Austin with our band, be called to play violin for an oratorio, or be required to lead our section in a special offering of evensong in our church ofemployment. Thankfully, the treasury of a cappella renaissance music from the Latin and English traditions are generously vast not only in the number of liturgically-appropriate texts and settings, but also the voicings of the various pieces, be it the transparent SATB of Palestrina, the sonorous TTBB TTBB of Gallus, or the quintessentially English SSATBB of Byrd. While we have a core repertoire to which we turn if our numbers for a given Sunday evening do not favor more adventurous voicings, a great of the music we sing is encountered for the first time by most of us within the two-hour rehearsal preceding the office. Since we only have one or two voices per part, there is the joy of sight-singing to be had every Sunday evening.


Joel has a question.

David has an answer.

St. Petri Church by Sigurd Lewerentz, Klippan, Sweden

Discovered in the course of doing digital slide quality control for the University of Texas School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnout-fonck/2537476484/

The tectonic clarity of the brick vaults resting on steel members particularly stood out to me: an undulating textured surface meeting a system of clean lines. 

Doodle for Google

Here are the entries that garnered my votes:

I Wish

I wish for more hope, hope for the future. I wish there was more love. Love for the environment and people. I wish for more joy. I wish for peace, a movement for it. I wish for more trees. I wish for gay rights, now.

Name: Meaghan Parker

Age: 17

School: SPAULDING HIGH SCHOOL

City, State: Rochester, NH

Significant Others

My wish for the world is that people will help endangered animals from going extinct. I wish this because I don't think any animal, no matter how insignificant we think it is, should be allowed to die out. They all play a part in the ecosystem of our planet.

Name: Deldar Golchehren

Age: 13

School: CAMDEN ROCKPORT MIDDLE SCHOOL

City, State: Camden, ME

Lets Heal the Planet

What I wish for the world is that we could all put aside our differences and come together to heal the earth. I wish we could all unite as residents of the planet to help end global warming, eliminate pollution and strive for earth friendly energy sources.

Name: Zoe Brants

Age: 12

School: LAURA INGALLS WILDER ELEMENTARY

City, State: Woodinville, WA

One World One God

I wish religious harmony for the world. We all are equal under one God! Our world will be a better place, if we love and respect each other irrespective of our religion. With respectful coexistence of different religions, peace will prevail in the world.

Name: Sameek Das

Age: 8

School: HIGH PEAKS ELEMENTARY

City, State: Boulder, CO

Sumer is Icumen in

Blond beer and fair chocolate.
Chicago approximates Warsaw.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain save Ireland, with France and the German States, Texas denied.
Appalachian Spring?

I want to celebrate the Fourth in the Philippines.
May the next Twelfth bring together mutual finding.

Austin Raptor Center First Renderings

Glorious Architectural Learnings

I ripped this off Vince's lecture slides as I was investigating truss height-depth ratios and ideal beam shapes as I come up with my final answer for Tuesday night's not-so-literal but literal pencils down. I would appreciate it if anyone can help me identify this building.

There's a speck in my screen. I think it's embedded underneath the glossy surface. I can't just wipe it off.

Anyway.

I like how the inverted king post truss is supporting the structural glass. It also comforts me to see that those are in turn supported by steel members that sort of work like a truss with tension members underneath, but are not fully triangulated. It resembles a solution I am considering to the problem I am facing with spanning 60 feet in the most economical and graceful manner, which is imperative, given that the span supports nothing but an architectural idea. Larry told me not to give up the architectural idea yesterday as I hurried to catch my bus to the airport. He said to screw code. I brought up blind people. He said for them to walk more slowly. The simple diagonals that barely touch the ground are graceful. I ramble.

I really have to get to analyzing Kahn so that I can e-mail Liam my preliminary paper and analytical diagrams tonight for feedback before Sunday, but I really want to resolve the main idea of my studio project so I can concentrate.

Random things in my head right now:

1. How I must not blow this weekend and this week.
   
2. Iceland in June.
3. The roadtrip to the American Southwest in a couple of weeks.
4. How wonderful it was to see and hug Thomas again. He still looks and feels the same, beyond leaving correspondences dangling. The first will always be the first. :)
   
5. Going back into the 80s groove. I miss Patrick's shirts. I also strangely miss his dear friend/roommate/lover? looking right through me.
   
6. Trusses... I actually am beginning to find pleasure in their contemplation.
   
7. Keeping connections constant, but the members vary according to their span.
8. Iceland.
9. Iceland.
10. Iceland.

I am not even done processing and posting my New Zealand photos. Meep.

There go the kids... methinks.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... (by Courage Campaign w/ Regina Spektor)

Gay Marriage Is

Culture jamming final project for Housing America: An Ideological Critique of the American Dream, a course taught by Stephen L. Ross at the University of Texas School of Architecture.
All photographs shot in Austin, Texas, on November 26th, 2008.

Concept, photography, and presentation: Saul J E San Juan.
Music: Parce Mihi Domine by Cristóbal de Morales (c. 1500 - 1553), performed by Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble.

Louis Kahn's Indian Institute of Management: Initial Notes

I am taking an architecture theory seminar course taught by Liam O'Brien entitled "Contemporary Formalisms". Every couple weeks are so, we are asked to analyze a piece of art, music, and architecture. For our final analysis, I picked Louis Kahn's Indian Institute of management. I had analyzed the building earlier in the semester as a case study precedent for the housing facility for foster care graduates that we were designing in studio. In that quick analysis, I found potential for further investigation, even in simply looking at the plan that has been reproduced with reverence by the likes of Francis Ching in his catalog of all architecture truth. As I have started to investigate the building further, I find more points of departure for both diagrammatic and textual analysis:

1. How does the plan translate into the actual experience of being in the building?
2. How does it translate in section and elevation?
3. How is material employed to further the idea?
4. How generative was Kahn's approach? Is it more akin to the wholeness of classicism or the contemporary formalisms we engaged in class?

I need not have looked further than the Wikipedia article on the Indian Institute of Management to find out that an annex has been built. I quickly found a book on the subject of the annex through Google Books, which thankfully is available in our library for check-out. Here is the plan of both the annex and the original building found in the Google Books preview:


Among the several claims that the books makes about Kahn's buildings that stood out to me was the notion that Kahn's building was not intended to be generative of itself, that is, that Kahn designed the building as a complete whole. (We shall see about that.) It also makes mention of sectional variation that was not apparent to me in looking at the plan in a cursory manner, as a contrast to the deliberate flatness of the annex. The material treatment is another point discussed in the book that adds another layer to my analytical undertaking, as a connection is made between the decision of the new architect to employ smooth concrete and Kahn's use of brick as a homogenizing material. The book points out the fact that Kahn employed smooth concrete in his seminal building, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

I was hoping to continue working here at Progress Coffee in East Austin across I-35 from Downtown until it is time for me to go to compline choir practice at 7 PM. I will now attempt to finish all my section drawings for studio before I head back to campus to pick up the book at the Architecture Library. The soy white chocolate mocha I have just consumed in tandem with a green-apple-and-brie sandwich was surprisingly nourishing, giving me the impetus to crank out a lot of work this afternoon.

Austin Raptor Center Structure and Assembly as of Monday, April 27th, 2009