Aesop Fable

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.
They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.
Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him;
and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak.
And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

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)