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Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:06:53 -0500

Archi-Salon’s second installation “From outside the Discipline” at the Art Institute of Chicago this past weekend stirred up positions of disciplinary exchange, but also confused means for ends, at times. Extra-disciplinary association and influence is a mainstay, if not driving force, of architectural practice, yesterday and today. So That is to say, clichés like “guilty by association” or “by the company you keep” make a lot of sense in terms of what you produce. If you are around visual artists pushing some form of products out of graphic based practice, you may end up with a very graphic project. But these things are normal; because we are creatures of habit, we enjoy conversation, exchange and transactions with our peers – intellectual, physical, and emotional. But understanding the terms of exchange and the modes of transactions can mean the difference between allowing yourself to become consumed by a technique/trend or using it for your own ends.

Project and research presenters included Neeraj Bhatia, Kathy Velikov, Clare Lyster and Jeanne Gang, with a roundtable of critics and practiconers like historian Johnathan Mekinda, theorist Ellen Grimes, architectural historian Sean Keller, editor Chris Bentley and architect Paul Preissner. Conversations amongst this group ranged from critical to optimistic about the relationship between research, outward influence and architectural practice. Neeraj’s and Clare’s projects, however, set up the conversation of what research can mean in contemporary architectural practice. Neeraj discussed the oil-industry funded Cornell project, Petropia, which explored the relationships between offshore oil production systems, modes of living within this system of production and new ways create an efficient model of live/work within different open/closed loop networks of oil mining in Brazil.

Clare Lyster, on the other hand, took a very personal obsession with delivery and commerce systems like FedEx, Amazon and Peapod to discuss a lower, maybe more relative relationship between architecture and the networks that occur around it in the city of Chicago.

Both of these projects visualized research, which were the bulk of the presentations, in a way showing the ability for architects to create information for a very specific architectural ends – emphasis on specific.

After their presentations, Ellen Grimes and Jonathan MeKinda brought up seemingly opposing views as to the position of research in contemporary architecture – one towards all-inclusion and the other towards prudent separation. These arguments are essentially two popular positions within discourse, namely the (1) critical separation or autonomy of architecture from its adjacent practices, and (2) the complete openness of contemporary architecture to include any practice affiliated with a project.

The critical position is not as productive for practice as is the open definition, but even then there are problems regarding what’s in an out that too often become the basis for debate i.e. Archi-Salons II – From Outside the Discipline.

I don’t necessarily care for the inside/outside question because of its inability to end with anything other than an agreement to disagree. There’s a gold nugget in this debate though, one that suggests a definition of practice in terms of its association with…anything. But since architecture can’t literally include everything, it is not everything; hence no need to be in disarray as to the strict separation between Church (architecture) and State (anything else). But the instrumentality of practice, in more pragmatic terms allows architects to discuss their projects, alongside their tools, techniques, and strategies from anywhere. That is to say, one can make a very nuanced definition of practice based on the associations with outside influences, specifically in the forms these influences take. From this, a transactional specificity of what one puts in and leaves out can paint a much more direct picture of an architectural practice.

The big elephant in the room here is that architectural discipline is not a place to practice from, with a set of tools or types of representations or techniques or drawing styles or building methods, since at one point each of those were outside the “discipline”. The contemporary condition of discipline is precisely based on how you associate with the outside. In the gaps between the different techniques, tools and strategies one uses in architectural practice is a sort of DNA of personal discipline. In this way, discipline is more an idiosyncratic act than a cozy familiar place.

If one were to look at Clare’s and Neeraj’s projects closely, one might see precisely the moments in which research becomes instrumental to their architectural project, but then again one might see, as many did, that research became the architectural project. That’s problematic because although research and understanding can be a central to a very real project, we don’t deal with reality in its current state as much as we produce synthetic proposal to augment it. That’s not to say we never take complicit, critical or projective stances with reality, but within these alternatives, outside practice should serve an architectural project instead of becoming one.

Succumbing to contemporary trends towards info-graphic fetishes is easy, cosndiering their beauty in compiling sometimes complex information, but as a visible part of Clare’s and Neeraj’s practices, I would be interested in seeing a much more deliberate place for these projects, more specifically how they make the jump from information to architecture. For example, in each project, a network of movement and flow is established, usually in plan view and on the scale of the region, city, street and/or personal enclosure.

Once these networks are developed, there seems to be a jump to the design of architectures that relate to them. This jump is the same jump architects have done for centuries, some with clear intentions and others with uncertainty, but the significance is in what they are making, not how they are making it.

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Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:55:09 -0500

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Sun, 04 Nov 2012 01:08:35 -0400

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Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:25:57 -0400

what does a street begin to tell you about a culture? This video...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:11:19 -0400

what does a street begin to tell you about a culture? This video is a compilation of recognizable urban textures and marks our initial investigations of US-41 in Miami on SW 8th St. Lets just say we love Calle Ocho.

Project 41

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what does a street begin to tell you about a culture? This video...