In recent years, there has been a spate of posthumously built works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using ... more In recent years, there has been a spate of posthumously built works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the…
In June 2017, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York marked the sesquicentenary of Frank Llo... more In June 2017, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York marked the sesquicentenary of Frank Lloyd Wright's birth with the opening of a major new exhibition, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive’. Drawing extensively upon the holdings of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, acquired by MoMA in partnership with the Avery Library at Columbia University in 2012, the exhibition was announced by its host institution as an occasion to ‘open up Wright's work to critical inquiry and debate’. Given its promise to assay the archive for new interpretations and insights, it is curious that MoMA said nothing of the kind of questions needing to be asked of Wright's work—nothing of the proverbial stones that remain unturned. After all, what needs to be said about an oeuvre that has been so exhaustively researched, so extensively published, and so widely celebrated that Frank Lloyd Wright was already a household name in his own lifetime? MoMA ultimately addressed this question by delving deep into the archive to present a small number of works – many largely unknown – in rich detail. But what was surprising for an exhibition drawn from, and ostensibly about, one of the world's most coveted architectural archives, was how little it had to say about the archive itself, and its silence on the archive's present-day relationship to the more than 400 extant buildings, and many hundreds of unbuilt designs, that are identified with Wright.
Proceedings of Digital Cultural Heritage: FUTURE VISIONS, 2018
In recent years, digital heritage has emerged as an important new eld of research and practice, ... more In recent years, digital heritage has emerged as an important new eld of research and practice, with an implicit ambition to record, conserve and even reconstruct culturally signi cant sites and artefacts threatened by war, climate change, natural disasters, development and neglect. Digital heritage initiatives have been enthusiastically promoted and adopted by government bodies, institutions and philanthropic organisations from around the world. Despite its allure, the application and utility of preserving, managing and reproducing built heritage via digital technology remains largely untested, and carries with it risks that may ultimately undermine the practice altogether. Drawing from recent examples such as the Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA)’s replica Palmyra Arch, and Factum Arte’s facsimile of Tutankhamen’s Tomb, this paper identi es some of the particular challenges raised by the physical replication of heritage using digital technologies. Issues such as the quality of reproduction, the motivations for such projects, and unintended outcomes (e.g. neglect, complacency) are considered, as are more philosophical questions such as the revision of history. As such, the paper takes on a critical and provocative future vision of digital heritage technology and its use in replication, by highlighting some of the threats such practices may pose to the very cultural heritage it aims to protect.
Quotation Quotation: 34th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Gevork Hartoonian and John Ting, 537-48. Canberra: SAHANZ, 2017., 2017
In 2015, the first stage of O.M.A.’s Fondazione Prada in Milan was opened to the public. Led by O... more In 2015, the first stage of O.M.A.’s Fondazione Prada in Milan was opened to the public. Led by O.M.A. founder, Rem Koolhaas, the project consists of a campus of re-purposed industrial buildings to house the art collection and associated cultural activities of the Italian fashion giant. Of all the extant buildings, the visual focus is on an ordinary five-storey structure, which has been covered entirely in gold leaf. While O.M.A. have employed gold leaf on a small number of earlier projects, there are also other contemporary parallels, including Mario Botta’s church in Seriate, located just fifty kilometres east of Milan. Completed in 2004, Botta’s church establishes a curious inversion of O.M.A.’s gold building: its interior is lined extensively in gilded timber slats.
While both buildings produce seductive atmospheres of reflected light and glowing golden colour, the interest of their association goes beyond their geographic proximity and their surface effects. Rather, this paper will examine how both Koolhaas and Botta seem to be compelled to justify their material choice. For example, Koolhaas has made pragmatic claims that real gold is cheaper than many other ‘traditional’ cladding materials. He thereby brings together longstanding themes in his work concerning luxury, and the conspicuous use of both cheap and expensive materials for visual and rhetorical impact. By contrast, Botta explains his interior based on the tradition of gilt timber picture frames, reinforcing a pervasive archaising rhetoric that surrounds his practice, and its insistence on historical memory.
Despite it being a mere fraction of a millimetre thick, the use of real gold therefore carries much semantic weight for both architects. By exploring Koolhaas and Botta’s representations of the two projects within the broader context of their work, this paper examines what is at stake in their respective use of gold, and will show how both projects rely on the material’s authenticity for meaning and rhetorical power.
Architecture, Institutions and Change: The 32nd annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. Sydney, Australia, 7-10 July 2015, Jul 2015
For nearly three decades, Brisbane-based architects Donald Watson and William Spence Jamieson hav... more For nearly three decades, Brisbane-based architects Donald Watson and William Spence Jamieson have employed striped polychrome masonry in their respective architectural practices. Indeed, the two ostensibly have much in common: they are of similar age; both studied at the University of Queensland; and for many years they worked side-by-side—although never together—on a similar array of institutional buildings for the Queensland State Government. Some of their work even looks similar, due in no small part to the common use of stripes. However, through a closer examination of Watson and Jamieson’s banded masonry, and through discussions with the architects themselves, quite different attitudes towards colour and surface are revealed. While Watson’s stripes tend to engage with matters intrinsic to construction, annotating the building’s surface with bands that mark its material and organisational discipline, Jamieson’s seem to embrace extrinsic meaning, including historical and cultural references, and often appear to have an independent logic all of their own. What is also curious about their work, is that it seems to repeat opposing nineteenth century positions on polychromy, mirroring the debate between proponents of the High Victorian Movement. More precisely, Jamieson’s stripes seem to reprise aspects of William Butterfield’s work, and the influential arguments of John Ruskin, whilst Watson’s banding appears to follow the ideas of G. E. Street, who advocated for a “constructional” school of polychromy in contradistinction to Ruskin’s “incrusted” approach.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it will document the use of striped polychrome masonry in the institutional architecture of Watson and Jamieson. Second, it will attempt to establish a critical understanding of their adoption of such distinct concepts of colour, more than a century after they were first debated on the other side of the world.
Architecture, Institutions and Change: The 32nd annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. Sydney, Australia, 7-10 July 2015, Jul 2015
Atlanta’s oldest Jewish congregation, The Temple, occupies a classically modelled building comple... more Atlanta’s oldest Jewish congregation, The Temple, occupies a classically modelled building completed in 1931. Listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, the edifice was designed by local architect Philip Trammell Shutze (1890-1982), a Rome Prize recipient and prolific classicist. Today the building stands not only as a place of worship, but as a proud monument of the robust Jewish community of Atlanta, despite few outward clues to its identity. In fact, the Temple’s restrained classicism and limited exterior religious iconography gives little indication of the actual purpose of the building; it could easily be mistaken for a neo-classical church or school.
In this paper, the Temple is examined as a response to the social and religious tensions present in early twentieth-century Atlanta, and as an embodiment of a broader move towards Jewish assimilation due to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in the inter-war years. As such, the Temple is demonstrative not only of this desire to be inconspicuous, but of the flexibility of the institution itself. Indeed, the Temple’s appliqué of borrowed classical motifs is not the first time synagogue architecture has adopted the architectural language of another time, place or religion. Rather, similar strategies can be seen throughout much of the history of synagogue design, and most prominently, in a large number of nineteenth-century synagogues across Europe and the United States, which consciously used the language of Moorish Spain. By tracing such historical precedents, the paper will therefore argue that the decorated Temple built by Atlanta’s Jewish community does not so much turn its back on Jewish tradition and culture but, instead, highlights a pattern of appropriated symbolic forms and iconography, as well as a broader willingness to embrace institutional change.
This paper will examine the presence of stripes in the work of Mario Botta, and the range of hist... more This paper will examine the presence of stripes in the work of Mario Botta, and the range of historical interpretations that the stripes have attracted, as an index of broader, and often contradictory, tendencies in his practice. These interpretations oscillate between claims for the Modernist rationality of Botta’s work on the one hand—its formal autonomy, lack of excess, and its emergence from the internal logic of its construction—and, on the other, its Post-Modern continuity with the past—its archaism, symbolic forms, and reference to traditional and regional typologies. These tensions are all revealed in the discourse surrounding Botta’s stripes.
While most writers remain silent on the matter of Botta’s stripes, a small number have made various claims about their origins. These include what appear to be chronologically and stylistically incompatible framings of Botta’s stripes: as a reference to a medieval Italian tradition of striped construction (argued by Joseph Rykwert); as an abstract form of classical rustication (proposed by Charles Jencks); and as a continuation of a 19th century Ticinese masonry tradition (presented by Kenneth Frampton).
Such interpretations oscillate between literal and abstract forms of historicism, and seem to float around Botta’s work, with no one reading ever gaining purchase as a definitive explanation of his stripes. The result might therefore be called a striped historicism, built upon multiple layers of rich speculation, myth and semantic projection. In other words, his stripes construct a “fabulation,” which will be shown to be a productive, albeit ambiguous, layering of meaning that offers new insights into some of the implicit contradictions of Botta’s work.
Stripes have adorned architectural façades for centuries, and can be found on buildings as divers... more Stripes have adorned architectural façades for centuries, and can be found on buildings as diverse as the celebrated striped churches of medieval Italy, and Adolf Loos’s notorious unbuilt house for Josephine Baker. It is the purpose of this paper to begin to piece together an account of such varied extant and unrealised striped façades, to establish an understanding of their techniques and forms, as well as the theoretical interpretations and justifications that have been put forward in support of their use. The study is significant as there appears to be no existing historical survey of striped façades, coupled with very little discussion or analysis of the compositional operation and use of stripes in architecture. By redressing this largely overlooked body of architecture, this paper is not only able to speculate on connections between numerous striped façades over nearly one thousand years of building, but also to suggest the presence of an inherently deceptive function of stripes, that has the power to manipulate, exaggerate, clarify and confuse the appearance of the architectural façade.
Conference: Inside | Outside: Trading Between Art and Architecture, 2017
Unlike the display of most museum artefacts, exhibitions of architectural interiors often employ ... more Unlike the display of most museum artefacts, exhibitions of architectural interiors often employ strategies of deception and illusion. In the case of period rooms and other conventional formats for display, the window presents a particular problem, and must frequently rely on trompe-l’oeil backdrops, lighting effects and scenographic sleights of hand to maintain a semblance of reality and the original view out. Mostly, however, the theatrical effects fail to convince. Instead, they help to expose permanent tensions between museological demands for historical, material and visual authenticity.
In this context, the paper turns to the reconstructed environments and windows of artist Spencer Finch, whose work does away with formal reconstructions in favour of simulated light qualities, atmospheres, and temporal moods. In particular, the discussion will focus on the work Light in an Empty Room (Studio at Night) (2015), which recreates the light effects of streetlamps and passing traffic through the windows of the artist’s Brooklyn studio. It will argue that by simulating the effect of the window rather than its outlook, Finch effectively reverses the problem of the window for staged architectural interiors, by turning the viewer’s gaze back onto the interior
itself.
The past decade has seen a proliferation of digital heritage organisations and initiatives gainin... more The past decade has seen a proliferation of digital heritage organisations and initiatives gaining media coverage and industry acclaim for their efforts. When news cycles are filled with reports of war, unchecked climate change, conflict, and unstable economic systems, the use of digital documentation and reproduction to ‘protect’ cultural heritage offers a glimmer of hope for increasingly dark times. The fear of slow, incremental loss that propelled heritage conservation over past centuries has evolved into a paralysing mix of desperation and resignation: we are more aware than ever that heritage can—and will—be destroyed more rapidly today by natural and manmade forces, regardless of diplomatic and industry protests to the contrary. Digital documentation and 3D printing technologies have flourished in this anxious atmosphere; the optimistic rhetoric that surrounds these programmes offers reassurance that heritage will be ‘saved’ for all humankind, present and future. For precisely this reason, digital documentation, archiving and replication have been launched into with altruistic aplomb by government bodies, heritage institutions and philanthropic organisations. However, its application and utility in preserving, protecting or reconstructing built heritage remains largely untested, and carries with it risks that may ultimately undermine the practice altogether.
The striped interior of Siena Cathedral is often cited as a wondrous experience: the intensity of... more The striped interior of Siena Cathedral is often cited as a wondrous experience: the intensity of its patterned surfaces often strike the viewer as at once dazzling and disorienting. Its banded stone is a remarkable demonstration of the psycho-perceptual effects of stripes on the beholder. It also illustrates the spatio-visual behaviour of stripes, and their capacity to assert both the physical and visual conditions of space in a dialectical interplay that oscillates between materiality and immateriality. Of course, a striped pattern can itself be understood as both a material and immaterial condition: as a physical organisation of matter into a pattern of banded chromatic oppositions; and as an optical structure independent of its physical support. With this inherent duality of stripes in mind, this paper looks specifically at the interaction between stripes and form, and their interaction with the viewer through the production of phenomenal effects.
Stripes obtain their phenomenal power because they are fundamentally conspicuous. They draw attention to themselves, and lead our eyes across a given surface. These operative qualities of stripes can amplify, unify and clarify building form, but they can also be used to overwhelm it, destroy its unity and obfuscate its extents. In the same way, stripes can also enhance the directionality of architectural space—by asserting the frontality and flatness of the façade, or by exaggerating the phenomenal rotational movement of the building by emphasising its curvature, obliqueness and depth. These effects of stripes therefore enable a kind of articulation and visual control over form, achieved through the manipulation of our visual apprehension.
Such phenomenal effects of stripes also have physical implications for the observer. The frontalisation of architecture compels the viewer to pause, to stand still before a building in a face-to-face confrontation. As Rosalind Krauss argues, this is a contemplative stance that distances the viewing subject—it is ideational and pictorial. By contrast, dynamic and rotational compositions suggest a more corporeal engagement with space, amplifying spatial and phenomenal sensation. Such affective interactions with the viewer reach their extreme in an interior where stripes entirely surround the percipient, or when one ventures so close to a striped surface as to lose reference to the supporting form. In such cases—and the interior of Siena Cathedral certainly approaches this condition—stripes create an immersive field in which form is overwhelmed, spatial boundaries are obscured, and any sense of directionality is lost.
The paper is located within the broader contemporary context of resurgent interest in pattern and ornament, and its effects on the viewer. While the use of stripes on the architectural façade has its origins in Roman construction—and there are a remarkable number of striped buildings all across the globe, from all historic periods—it will be shown to have significant implications for contemporary “surface” theory and practices. It will be argued that the effects produced by stripes—oscillating between materiality and immateriality—actually constitute a unique kind of ornamental condition. This might be understood in terms of “perceptual artifice,” which locates the viewer and choreographs their movement through space, by exerting its control over the visual perception and affective phenomena of architecture.
In recent years, there has been a spate of posthumously built works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using ... more In recent years, there has been a spate of posthumously built works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the…
In June 2017, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York marked the sesquicentenary of Frank Llo... more In June 2017, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York marked the sesquicentenary of Frank Lloyd Wright's birth with the opening of a major new exhibition, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive’. Drawing extensively upon the holdings of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, acquired by MoMA in partnership with the Avery Library at Columbia University in 2012, the exhibition was announced by its host institution as an occasion to ‘open up Wright's work to critical inquiry and debate’. Given its promise to assay the archive for new interpretations and insights, it is curious that MoMA said nothing of the kind of questions needing to be asked of Wright's work—nothing of the proverbial stones that remain unturned. After all, what needs to be said about an oeuvre that has been so exhaustively researched, so extensively published, and so widely celebrated that Frank Lloyd Wright was already a household name in his own lifetime? MoMA ultimately addressed this question by delving deep into the archive to present a small number of works – many largely unknown – in rich detail. But what was surprising for an exhibition drawn from, and ostensibly about, one of the world's most coveted architectural archives, was how little it had to say about the archive itself, and its silence on the archive's present-day relationship to the more than 400 extant buildings, and many hundreds of unbuilt designs, that are identified with Wright.
Proceedings of Digital Cultural Heritage: FUTURE VISIONS, 2018
In recent years, digital heritage has emerged as an important new eld of research and practice, ... more In recent years, digital heritage has emerged as an important new eld of research and practice, with an implicit ambition to record, conserve and even reconstruct culturally signi cant sites and artefacts threatened by war, climate change, natural disasters, development and neglect. Digital heritage initiatives have been enthusiastically promoted and adopted by government bodies, institutions and philanthropic organisations from around the world. Despite its allure, the application and utility of preserving, managing and reproducing built heritage via digital technology remains largely untested, and carries with it risks that may ultimately undermine the practice altogether. Drawing from recent examples such as the Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA)’s replica Palmyra Arch, and Factum Arte’s facsimile of Tutankhamen’s Tomb, this paper identi es some of the particular challenges raised by the physical replication of heritage using digital technologies. Issues such as the quality of reproduction, the motivations for such projects, and unintended outcomes (e.g. neglect, complacency) are considered, as are more philosophical questions such as the revision of history. As such, the paper takes on a critical and provocative future vision of digital heritage technology and its use in replication, by highlighting some of the threats such practices may pose to the very cultural heritage it aims to protect.
Quotation Quotation: 34th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Gevork Hartoonian and John Ting, 537-48. Canberra: SAHANZ, 2017., 2017
In 2015, the first stage of O.M.A.’s Fondazione Prada in Milan was opened to the public. Led by O... more In 2015, the first stage of O.M.A.’s Fondazione Prada in Milan was opened to the public. Led by O.M.A. founder, Rem Koolhaas, the project consists of a campus of re-purposed industrial buildings to house the art collection and associated cultural activities of the Italian fashion giant. Of all the extant buildings, the visual focus is on an ordinary five-storey structure, which has been covered entirely in gold leaf. While O.M.A. have employed gold leaf on a small number of earlier projects, there are also other contemporary parallels, including Mario Botta’s church in Seriate, located just fifty kilometres east of Milan. Completed in 2004, Botta’s church establishes a curious inversion of O.M.A.’s gold building: its interior is lined extensively in gilded timber slats.
While both buildings produce seductive atmospheres of reflected light and glowing golden colour, the interest of their association goes beyond their geographic proximity and their surface effects. Rather, this paper will examine how both Koolhaas and Botta seem to be compelled to justify their material choice. For example, Koolhaas has made pragmatic claims that real gold is cheaper than many other ‘traditional’ cladding materials. He thereby brings together longstanding themes in his work concerning luxury, and the conspicuous use of both cheap and expensive materials for visual and rhetorical impact. By contrast, Botta explains his interior based on the tradition of gilt timber picture frames, reinforcing a pervasive archaising rhetoric that surrounds his practice, and its insistence on historical memory.
Despite it being a mere fraction of a millimetre thick, the use of real gold therefore carries much semantic weight for both architects. By exploring Koolhaas and Botta’s representations of the two projects within the broader context of their work, this paper examines what is at stake in their respective use of gold, and will show how both projects rely on the material’s authenticity for meaning and rhetorical power.
Architecture, Institutions and Change: The 32nd annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. Sydney, Australia, 7-10 July 2015, Jul 2015
For nearly three decades, Brisbane-based architects Donald Watson and William Spence Jamieson hav... more For nearly three decades, Brisbane-based architects Donald Watson and William Spence Jamieson have employed striped polychrome masonry in their respective architectural practices. Indeed, the two ostensibly have much in common: they are of similar age; both studied at the University of Queensland; and for many years they worked side-by-side—although never together—on a similar array of institutional buildings for the Queensland State Government. Some of their work even looks similar, due in no small part to the common use of stripes. However, through a closer examination of Watson and Jamieson’s banded masonry, and through discussions with the architects themselves, quite different attitudes towards colour and surface are revealed. While Watson’s stripes tend to engage with matters intrinsic to construction, annotating the building’s surface with bands that mark its material and organisational discipline, Jamieson’s seem to embrace extrinsic meaning, including historical and cultural references, and often appear to have an independent logic all of their own. What is also curious about their work, is that it seems to repeat opposing nineteenth century positions on polychromy, mirroring the debate between proponents of the High Victorian Movement. More precisely, Jamieson’s stripes seem to reprise aspects of William Butterfield’s work, and the influential arguments of John Ruskin, whilst Watson’s banding appears to follow the ideas of G. E. Street, who advocated for a “constructional” school of polychromy in contradistinction to Ruskin’s “incrusted” approach.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it will document the use of striped polychrome masonry in the institutional architecture of Watson and Jamieson. Second, it will attempt to establish a critical understanding of their adoption of such distinct concepts of colour, more than a century after they were first debated on the other side of the world.
Architecture, Institutions and Change: The 32nd annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. Sydney, Australia, 7-10 July 2015, Jul 2015
Atlanta’s oldest Jewish congregation, The Temple, occupies a classically modelled building comple... more Atlanta’s oldest Jewish congregation, The Temple, occupies a classically modelled building completed in 1931. Listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, the edifice was designed by local architect Philip Trammell Shutze (1890-1982), a Rome Prize recipient and prolific classicist. Today the building stands not only as a place of worship, but as a proud monument of the robust Jewish community of Atlanta, despite few outward clues to its identity. In fact, the Temple’s restrained classicism and limited exterior religious iconography gives little indication of the actual purpose of the building; it could easily be mistaken for a neo-classical church or school.
In this paper, the Temple is examined as a response to the social and religious tensions present in early twentieth-century Atlanta, and as an embodiment of a broader move towards Jewish assimilation due to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in the inter-war years. As such, the Temple is demonstrative not only of this desire to be inconspicuous, but of the flexibility of the institution itself. Indeed, the Temple’s appliqué of borrowed classical motifs is not the first time synagogue architecture has adopted the architectural language of another time, place or religion. Rather, similar strategies can be seen throughout much of the history of synagogue design, and most prominently, in a large number of nineteenth-century synagogues across Europe and the United States, which consciously used the language of Moorish Spain. By tracing such historical precedents, the paper will therefore argue that the decorated Temple built by Atlanta’s Jewish community does not so much turn its back on Jewish tradition and culture but, instead, highlights a pattern of appropriated symbolic forms and iconography, as well as a broader willingness to embrace institutional change.
This paper will examine the presence of stripes in the work of Mario Botta, and the range of hist... more This paper will examine the presence of stripes in the work of Mario Botta, and the range of historical interpretations that the stripes have attracted, as an index of broader, and often contradictory, tendencies in his practice. These interpretations oscillate between claims for the Modernist rationality of Botta’s work on the one hand—its formal autonomy, lack of excess, and its emergence from the internal logic of its construction—and, on the other, its Post-Modern continuity with the past—its archaism, symbolic forms, and reference to traditional and regional typologies. These tensions are all revealed in the discourse surrounding Botta’s stripes.
While most writers remain silent on the matter of Botta’s stripes, a small number have made various claims about their origins. These include what appear to be chronologically and stylistically incompatible framings of Botta’s stripes: as a reference to a medieval Italian tradition of striped construction (argued by Joseph Rykwert); as an abstract form of classical rustication (proposed by Charles Jencks); and as a continuation of a 19th century Ticinese masonry tradition (presented by Kenneth Frampton).
Such interpretations oscillate between literal and abstract forms of historicism, and seem to float around Botta’s work, with no one reading ever gaining purchase as a definitive explanation of his stripes. The result might therefore be called a striped historicism, built upon multiple layers of rich speculation, myth and semantic projection. In other words, his stripes construct a “fabulation,” which will be shown to be a productive, albeit ambiguous, layering of meaning that offers new insights into some of the implicit contradictions of Botta’s work.
Stripes have adorned architectural façades for centuries, and can be found on buildings as divers... more Stripes have adorned architectural façades for centuries, and can be found on buildings as diverse as the celebrated striped churches of medieval Italy, and Adolf Loos’s notorious unbuilt house for Josephine Baker. It is the purpose of this paper to begin to piece together an account of such varied extant and unrealised striped façades, to establish an understanding of their techniques and forms, as well as the theoretical interpretations and justifications that have been put forward in support of their use. The study is significant as there appears to be no existing historical survey of striped façades, coupled with very little discussion or analysis of the compositional operation and use of stripes in architecture. By redressing this largely overlooked body of architecture, this paper is not only able to speculate on connections between numerous striped façades over nearly one thousand years of building, but also to suggest the presence of an inherently deceptive function of stripes, that has the power to manipulate, exaggerate, clarify and confuse the appearance of the architectural façade.
Conference: Inside | Outside: Trading Between Art and Architecture, 2017
Unlike the display of most museum artefacts, exhibitions of architectural interiors often employ ... more Unlike the display of most museum artefacts, exhibitions of architectural interiors often employ strategies of deception and illusion. In the case of period rooms and other conventional formats for display, the window presents a particular problem, and must frequently rely on trompe-l’oeil backdrops, lighting effects and scenographic sleights of hand to maintain a semblance of reality and the original view out. Mostly, however, the theatrical effects fail to convince. Instead, they help to expose permanent tensions between museological demands for historical, material and visual authenticity.
In this context, the paper turns to the reconstructed environments and windows of artist Spencer Finch, whose work does away with formal reconstructions in favour of simulated light qualities, atmospheres, and temporal moods. In particular, the discussion will focus on the work Light in an Empty Room (Studio at Night) (2015), which recreates the light effects of streetlamps and passing traffic through the windows of the artist’s Brooklyn studio. It will argue that by simulating the effect of the window rather than its outlook, Finch effectively reverses the problem of the window for staged architectural interiors, by turning the viewer’s gaze back onto the interior
itself.
The past decade has seen a proliferation of digital heritage organisations and initiatives gainin... more The past decade has seen a proliferation of digital heritage organisations and initiatives gaining media coverage and industry acclaim for their efforts. When news cycles are filled with reports of war, unchecked climate change, conflict, and unstable economic systems, the use of digital documentation and reproduction to ‘protect’ cultural heritage offers a glimmer of hope for increasingly dark times. The fear of slow, incremental loss that propelled heritage conservation over past centuries has evolved into a paralysing mix of desperation and resignation: we are more aware than ever that heritage can—and will—be destroyed more rapidly today by natural and manmade forces, regardless of diplomatic and industry protests to the contrary. Digital documentation and 3D printing technologies have flourished in this anxious atmosphere; the optimistic rhetoric that surrounds these programmes offers reassurance that heritage will be ‘saved’ for all humankind, present and future. For precisely this reason, digital documentation, archiving and replication have been launched into with altruistic aplomb by government bodies, heritage institutions and philanthropic organisations. However, its application and utility in preserving, protecting or reconstructing built heritage remains largely untested, and carries with it risks that may ultimately undermine the practice altogether.
The striped interior of Siena Cathedral is often cited as a wondrous experience: the intensity of... more The striped interior of Siena Cathedral is often cited as a wondrous experience: the intensity of its patterned surfaces often strike the viewer as at once dazzling and disorienting. Its banded stone is a remarkable demonstration of the psycho-perceptual effects of stripes on the beholder. It also illustrates the spatio-visual behaviour of stripes, and their capacity to assert both the physical and visual conditions of space in a dialectical interplay that oscillates between materiality and immateriality. Of course, a striped pattern can itself be understood as both a material and immaterial condition: as a physical organisation of matter into a pattern of banded chromatic oppositions; and as an optical structure independent of its physical support. With this inherent duality of stripes in mind, this paper looks specifically at the interaction between stripes and form, and their interaction with the viewer through the production of phenomenal effects.
Stripes obtain their phenomenal power because they are fundamentally conspicuous. They draw attention to themselves, and lead our eyes across a given surface. These operative qualities of stripes can amplify, unify and clarify building form, but they can also be used to overwhelm it, destroy its unity and obfuscate its extents. In the same way, stripes can also enhance the directionality of architectural space—by asserting the frontality and flatness of the façade, or by exaggerating the phenomenal rotational movement of the building by emphasising its curvature, obliqueness and depth. These effects of stripes therefore enable a kind of articulation and visual control over form, achieved through the manipulation of our visual apprehension.
Such phenomenal effects of stripes also have physical implications for the observer. The frontalisation of architecture compels the viewer to pause, to stand still before a building in a face-to-face confrontation. As Rosalind Krauss argues, this is a contemplative stance that distances the viewing subject—it is ideational and pictorial. By contrast, dynamic and rotational compositions suggest a more corporeal engagement with space, amplifying spatial and phenomenal sensation. Such affective interactions with the viewer reach their extreme in an interior where stripes entirely surround the percipient, or when one ventures so close to a striped surface as to lose reference to the supporting form. In such cases—and the interior of Siena Cathedral certainly approaches this condition—stripes create an immersive field in which form is overwhelmed, spatial boundaries are obscured, and any sense of directionality is lost.
The paper is located within the broader contemporary context of resurgent interest in pattern and ornament, and its effects on the viewer. While the use of stripes on the architectural façade has its origins in Roman construction—and there are a remarkable number of striped buildings all across the globe, from all historic periods—it will be shown to have significant implications for contemporary “surface” theory and practices. It will be argued that the effects produced by stripes—oscillating between materiality and immateriality—actually constitute a unique kind of ornamental condition. This might be understood in terms of “perceptual artifice,” which locates the viewer and choreographs their movement through space, by exerting its control over the visual perception and affective phenomena of architecture.
Uploads
Books by Ashley Paine
Papers by Ashley Paine
While both buildings produce seductive atmospheres of reflected light and glowing golden colour, the interest of their association goes beyond their geographic proximity and their surface effects. Rather, this paper will examine how both Koolhaas and Botta seem to be compelled to justify their material choice. For example, Koolhaas has made pragmatic claims that real gold is cheaper than many other ‘traditional’ cladding materials. He thereby brings together longstanding themes in his work concerning luxury, and the conspicuous use of both cheap and expensive materials for visual and rhetorical impact. By contrast, Botta explains his interior based on the tradition of gilt timber picture frames, reinforcing a pervasive archaising rhetoric that surrounds his practice, and its insistence on historical memory.
Despite it being a mere fraction of a millimetre thick, the use of real gold therefore carries much semantic weight for both architects. By exploring Koolhaas and Botta’s representations of the two projects within the broader context of their work, this paper examines what is at stake in their respective use of gold, and will show how both projects rely on the material’s authenticity for meaning and rhetorical power.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it will document the use of striped polychrome masonry in the institutional architecture of Watson and Jamieson. Second, it will attempt to establish a critical understanding of their adoption of such distinct concepts of colour, more than a century after they were first debated on the other side of the world.
In this paper, the Temple is examined as a response to the social and religious tensions present in early twentieth-century Atlanta, and as an embodiment of a broader move towards Jewish assimilation due to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in the inter-war years. As such, the Temple is demonstrative not only of this desire to be inconspicuous, but of the flexibility of the institution itself. Indeed, the Temple’s appliqué of borrowed classical motifs is not the first time synagogue architecture has adopted the architectural language of another time, place or religion. Rather, similar strategies can be seen throughout much of the history of synagogue design, and most prominently, in a large number of nineteenth-century synagogues across Europe and the United States, which consciously used the language of Moorish Spain. By tracing such historical precedents, the paper will therefore argue that the decorated Temple built by Atlanta’s Jewish community does not so much turn its back on Jewish tradition and culture but, instead, highlights a pattern of appropriated symbolic forms and iconography, as well as a broader willingness to embrace institutional change.
While most writers remain silent on the matter of Botta’s stripes, a small number have made various claims about their origins. These include what appear to be chronologically and stylistically incompatible framings of Botta’s stripes: as a reference to a medieval Italian tradition of striped construction (argued by Joseph Rykwert); as an abstract form of classical rustication (proposed by Charles Jencks); and as a continuation of a 19th century Ticinese masonry tradition (presented by Kenneth Frampton).
Such interpretations oscillate between literal and abstract forms of historicism, and seem to float around Botta’s work, with no one reading ever gaining purchase as a definitive explanation of his stripes. The result might therefore be called a striped historicism, built upon multiple layers of rich speculation, myth and semantic projection. In other words, his stripes construct a “fabulation,” which will be shown to be a productive, albeit ambiguous, layering of meaning that offers new insights into some of the implicit contradictions of Botta’s work.
Conference Presentations by Ashley Paine
In this context, the paper turns to the reconstructed environments and windows of artist Spencer Finch, whose work does away with formal reconstructions in favour of simulated light qualities, atmospheres, and temporal moods. In particular, the discussion will focus on the work Light in an Empty Room (Studio at Night) (2015), which recreates the light effects of streetlamps and passing traffic through the windows of the artist’s Brooklyn studio. It will argue that by simulating the effect of the window rather than its outlook, Finch effectively reverses the problem of the window for staged architectural interiors, by turning the viewer’s gaze back onto the interior
itself.
Stripes obtain their phenomenal power because they are fundamentally conspicuous. They draw attention to themselves, and lead our eyes across a given surface. These operative qualities of stripes can amplify, unify and clarify building form, but they can also be used to overwhelm it, destroy its unity and obfuscate its extents. In the same way, stripes can also enhance the directionality of architectural space—by asserting the frontality and flatness of the façade, or by exaggerating the phenomenal rotational movement of the building by emphasising its curvature, obliqueness and depth. These effects of stripes therefore enable a kind of articulation and visual control over form, achieved through the manipulation of our visual apprehension.
Such phenomenal effects of stripes also have physical implications for the observer. The frontalisation of architecture compels the viewer to pause, to stand still before a building in a face-to-face confrontation. As Rosalind Krauss argues, this is a contemplative stance that distances the viewing subject—it is ideational and pictorial. By contrast, dynamic and rotational compositions suggest a more corporeal engagement with space, amplifying spatial and phenomenal sensation. Such affective interactions with the viewer reach their extreme in an interior where stripes entirely surround the percipient, or when one ventures so close to a striped surface as to lose reference to the supporting form. In such cases—and the interior of Siena Cathedral certainly approaches this condition—stripes create an immersive field in which form is overwhelmed, spatial boundaries are obscured, and any sense of directionality is lost.
The paper is located within the broader contemporary context of resurgent interest in pattern and ornament, and its effects on the viewer. While the use of stripes on the architectural façade has its origins in Roman construction—and there are a remarkable number of striped buildings all across the globe, from all historic periods—it will be shown to have significant implications for contemporary “surface” theory and practices. It will be argued that the effects produced by stripes—oscillating between materiality and immateriality—actually constitute a unique kind of ornamental condition. This might be understood in terms of “perceptual artifice,” which locates the viewer and choreographs their movement through space, by exerting its control over the visual perception and affective phenomena of architecture.
Reviews by Ashley Paine
While both buildings produce seductive atmospheres of reflected light and glowing golden colour, the interest of their association goes beyond their geographic proximity and their surface effects. Rather, this paper will examine how both Koolhaas and Botta seem to be compelled to justify their material choice. For example, Koolhaas has made pragmatic claims that real gold is cheaper than many other ‘traditional’ cladding materials. He thereby brings together longstanding themes in his work concerning luxury, and the conspicuous use of both cheap and expensive materials for visual and rhetorical impact. By contrast, Botta explains his interior based on the tradition of gilt timber picture frames, reinforcing a pervasive archaising rhetoric that surrounds his practice, and its insistence on historical memory.
Despite it being a mere fraction of a millimetre thick, the use of real gold therefore carries much semantic weight for both architects. By exploring Koolhaas and Botta’s representations of the two projects within the broader context of their work, this paper examines what is at stake in their respective use of gold, and will show how both projects rely on the material’s authenticity for meaning and rhetorical power.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it will document the use of striped polychrome masonry in the institutional architecture of Watson and Jamieson. Second, it will attempt to establish a critical understanding of their adoption of such distinct concepts of colour, more than a century after they were first debated on the other side of the world.
In this paper, the Temple is examined as a response to the social and religious tensions present in early twentieth-century Atlanta, and as an embodiment of a broader move towards Jewish assimilation due to the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in the inter-war years. As such, the Temple is demonstrative not only of this desire to be inconspicuous, but of the flexibility of the institution itself. Indeed, the Temple’s appliqué of borrowed classical motifs is not the first time synagogue architecture has adopted the architectural language of another time, place or religion. Rather, similar strategies can be seen throughout much of the history of synagogue design, and most prominently, in a large number of nineteenth-century synagogues across Europe and the United States, which consciously used the language of Moorish Spain. By tracing such historical precedents, the paper will therefore argue that the decorated Temple built by Atlanta’s Jewish community does not so much turn its back on Jewish tradition and culture but, instead, highlights a pattern of appropriated symbolic forms and iconography, as well as a broader willingness to embrace institutional change.
While most writers remain silent on the matter of Botta’s stripes, a small number have made various claims about their origins. These include what appear to be chronologically and stylistically incompatible framings of Botta’s stripes: as a reference to a medieval Italian tradition of striped construction (argued by Joseph Rykwert); as an abstract form of classical rustication (proposed by Charles Jencks); and as a continuation of a 19th century Ticinese masonry tradition (presented by Kenneth Frampton).
Such interpretations oscillate between literal and abstract forms of historicism, and seem to float around Botta’s work, with no one reading ever gaining purchase as a definitive explanation of his stripes. The result might therefore be called a striped historicism, built upon multiple layers of rich speculation, myth and semantic projection. In other words, his stripes construct a “fabulation,” which will be shown to be a productive, albeit ambiguous, layering of meaning that offers new insights into some of the implicit contradictions of Botta’s work.
In this context, the paper turns to the reconstructed environments and windows of artist Spencer Finch, whose work does away with formal reconstructions in favour of simulated light qualities, atmospheres, and temporal moods. In particular, the discussion will focus on the work Light in an Empty Room (Studio at Night) (2015), which recreates the light effects of streetlamps and passing traffic through the windows of the artist’s Brooklyn studio. It will argue that by simulating the effect of the window rather than its outlook, Finch effectively reverses the problem of the window for staged architectural interiors, by turning the viewer’s gaze back onto the interior
itself.
Stripes obtain their phenomenal power because they are fundamentally conspicuous. They draw attention to themselves, and lead our eyes across a given surface. These operative qualities of stripes can amplify, unify and clarify building form, but they can also be used to overwhelm it, destroy its unity and obfuscate its extents. In the same way, stripes can also enhance the directionality of architectural space—by asserting the frontality and flatness of the façade, or by exaggerating the phenomenal rotational movement of the building by emphasising its curvature, obliqueness and depth. These effects of stripes therefore enable a kind of articulation and visual control over form, achieved through the manipulation of our visual apprehension.
Such phenomenal effects of stripes also have physical implications for the observer. The frontalisation of architecture compels the viewer to pause, to stand still before a building in a face-to-face confrontation. As Rosalind Krauss argues, this is a contemplative stance that distances the viewing subject—it is ideational and pictorial. By contrast, dynamic and rotational compositions suggest a more corporeal engagement with space, amplifying spatial and phenomenal sensation. Such affective interactions with the viewer reach their extreme in an interior where stripes entirely surround the percipient, or when one ventures so close to a striped surface as to lose reference to the supporting form. In such cases—and the interior of Siena Cathedral certainly approaches this condition—stripes create an immersive field in which form is overwhelmed, spatial boundaries are obscured, and any sense of directionality is lost.
The paper is located within the broader contemporary context of resurgent interest in pattern and ornament, and its effects on the viewer. While the use of stripes on the architectural façade has its origins in Roman construction—and there are a remarkable number of striped buildings all across the globe, from all historic periods—it will be shown to have significant implications for contemporary “surface” theory and practices. It will be argued that the effects produced by stripes—oscillating between materiality and immateriality—actually constitute a unique kind of ornamental condition. This might be understood in terms of “perceptual artifice,” which locates the viewer and choreographs their movement through space, by exerting its control over the visual perception and affective phenomena of architecture.