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/