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013456784954 4 47 796 556105  5557  !"#$%&&$'(% )"%*"+ ",-$('$'./%'.0+&&(1-+-.2+$-3 4 ,-(&"45"6766 74 CLOSEUP - BREAKFAST TABLE PLACE SETTINGS CLOSEUP - PHONE STOPS RINGING CLOSE SHOT - WOMAN LIVING ROOM. The TV is ON the morning news. She GLANCES quickly at the TV screen. CLOSEUP - WOMAN'S HANDS, STEAMING COFFEE MUG INSERT - THE DECK, THE POOL, AND THE WALL She looks at the wooden deck. Ipê wood. She remembers her architect friend and the way the project came together. MAPUCHE WOMAN on TV "...we are running out of water because of the pines. This industry is predating the water and our land. We are fighting for..." WOMAN (sighing and shaking her head) This world is hopeless. WOMAN Expensive... She REMOVES her sandals to feel the wood against her feet and spends some time LOOKING AT the contrast between her skin and the reddish wood. CLOSEUP - WOMAN’S FEET AND THE WOODEN DECK Her cell RINGS. She GETS UP to fetch it from the kitchen. She WALKS barefoot across the wooden floor, which extends from the terrace to the edge of the pool, covering the entire interior floor of the living room and also the dining room. She WALKS towards the kitchen past a glass coffee table, on which there is an ashtray, a book about photography — She LISTENS TO the news. WOMAN You can't start a good day watching bad news. She TURNS OFF the TV, SIGHS, and WALKS towards the porch. CLOSEUP - WOMAN'S HANDS, SILVER SPOON, AND WOODEN FLOORS CLOSEUP - WOODGRAIN She TOUCHES the wooden floor and SIGHS. She GETS UP, CROSSES the glass door that separates the living room from the balcony and SITS back in the metal chair, quickly returning her attention to her coffee. CLOSEUP - She TAKES the cup to her mouth and SIPS the coffee. WOMAN CLOSES her eyes. FADE OUT END OF SCENE middle management for an insurance company.” (anon., n.d.). ➎ From Yale School of Badminton: A Shining Tradition. The Spring Polar bears are often used as the de facto symbol for climate change. As their dépaysement1 portrays vivid imagery of the ongoing ecological crisis, corporate greed intensifies habitat loss by deliberately capitalizing on carbon emissions. As architects sign off environmentally hostile material schemes in our dream homes, are we also endorsing the trade-off being the decimation of vulnerable animals to extinction? How does architecture participate in this unilaterally beneficial exchange between humans and non-humans? Through wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh’s lens, this text interrogates architecture’s role in orchestrating polar bears’ existential nightmare. In a photo series titled Polar Bears, Kokh documents a group of polar bears’ disturbing occupancy of deserted weather stations formerly operated by the Soviet Union. Prompted by vanishing glaciers and food scarcity, these marine mammals are coerced to adapt to lives on land and scavenge for new sources of food. This is particularly visceral in an image of one polar bear scouting for potential prey on the porch while the other rummages for food inside the dilapidated cabin, evident through dirt marks on its face. While it is unclear whether this mission is successful, what we can see is the reinhabitation of abandoned human architecture through non-human activity. In the background of this same cabin occupied by the two polar bears, discarded fuel barrels present traces of human impact and concrete proof of habitat destruction. Based on the remoteness of Kolyuchin Island, where these weather stations are located, it is likely these metal containers supply necessary fuel for resource transportation. Almost indistinguishable from naturally found geologies, these haphazardly placed objects seem to provide entertainment for our curious giants, evident through another image of a polar bear cub sniffing inside one. Nevertheless, the melancholy behind this observation conveys polar bears’ obliviousness in caressing the artifacts of their own demise. Further, the material presence of these weather stations persistently reinforces opportunistic values that threaten the livelihood of native species. Almost thirty years after human occupancy, biting shards of glass, jagged pieces of roof shingles, and knifelike chipped furring strips collec- tively foreground architecture’s culpability against the defenseless: a polar bear remains vigilant next to a guardrail with its head dodging the rundown power cord, while another rests its claw on a window sill, its head poking through the mullions. This image points out the irony in humans’ collective obsession for code compliance and scaled uniformity. While vegetation carpets unfamiliar material assemblies in their eyes, polar bears are once again forced to acclimate to a new environment. Beyond learning to walk on terrains, these fluffy beasts are compelled to climb up porch risers into the bleakness of domesticity. Often, we neglect the butterfly effect of a simply located architecture that engenders terrestrial repercussions.2 Dmitry Kokh’s work begins to formulate a visual accusation, one that is long overdue, of architecture—especially that of temporal settlements—being an enabler of environmental injustice. As the physical and chemical organization of hydrocarbon geologies coalesce into building materials, our comfort somehow comes at the expense of the Arctic marine ecosystem. When a group of peripatetic migrants regard broken wooden enclosures as protection from hunters and start to disrupt this archaic emblem of a no-longer existent nation, humans are reminded of irreversible climatic damages. Once media coverage of these alarming images subsides, architects return to their indifference towards material compositions. In doing so, architecture is complicit to a coup de grâce of these vulnerable giants. 1 The feeling of being out of place; disorientation in a foreign environment. 2 Kiel Moe,“Climate Change, Architecture Change” (lecture, The Architectural League, New York, NY, November 12, 2019). and remain nimble, adjusting information and When Edgar Kaufmann, jr. [sic] entrusted engagement strategies as needed, based on visitors’ Fallingwater to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy interests, preferences, and modes of engagement. in 1963, he envisioned the house serving a greater, eduVisitors’ questions might lead to group cational purpose as a museum. Fallingwater’s benefactor was a renowned scholar of art and architectural history— inquiry, especially questions rooted in aesthetics. both a professor at Columbia University and director of During tours, a frequently asked question is s “Why are the ceilings so low?” This kind r MoMA’s Department of Industrial Design. Given his prou fessional experience, it may be surprising to learn that To ces of question can be opened up into a l a Kaufmann’s vision for Fallingwater was as a sort of group discussion by restating and n r t u e r ie anti-house museum, offering architectural tours expanding the question: “The c te xp ter that break from the tradition of didactic, question is ‘Why are the ceili h E h ings so low?’ Why might Wright lecture-based museum interpretation. rc ive gwa c t A vi have designed them this way?” Using Kaufmann knew that the d rs lin ko indefinites like “might” and “may” de me Fal y educational value of Fallingwater i r u was in the experience of the nd signals to the group that there are multiple G s Im at A a place. Therefore, he envisioned a ey possible answers which, in turn, establishes a hl more comfortable environment for participation guided tour that, first and foremost, s A by removing the pressure to guess the correct answer. acknowledged architecture and nature as universal reference points for all people. He 2 recomended that “tours should not be dunked in Our efforts to create more immersive, expertise, but kept simple, human, and informal… for an participatory Fallingwater tours require ongoing immense variety of individuals to absorb and question, research, practice, and experimentation. This means each in his or her own way.”1 accepting that we might occasionally ask an ineffecToday, Fallingwater seeks to honor tive question or feel awkward during a quiet moment. Kaufmann’s vision through an approach to interpretation Recently, as we entered the master bedroom, I asked that’s unlike most other house museums and architeca group, “What do you think?” which resulted in tural sites, challenging those of us that lead the tours to about 30 seconds of silence. I realized the question provide an aesthetic interpretation of the house. This was too open-ended for this group. Slightly more speapproach requires our educator team to step away from cific questions like, “How did you feel as you moved a lecture-based tour and embrace each group of visitors through the hallway to the master bedroom?” made it as collaborators in aesthetic meaning-making. Despite easier for this group to participate. I’ve learned quite our knowledge about Fallingwater and Frank Lloyd a bit by asking ineffective, “bad” questions, which Wright, educators keep in mind that facts only get us makes it worth the awkward moments. If we do our so far in understanding the house. Visitors benefit from job well, visitors will barely remember us as educators constructing meaning together and insights can come or the methods we used (or any awkwardness) and, from surprising sources. Near the end of a recent tour, a instead, remember the sensations of experiencing young child asked, “How did Wright see into the future?” a truly great work of architecture. In this way, each The question made everyone in the group pause and tour brings us closer to achieving Kaufmann’s vision: consider how Wright’s influence is still felt today. There “There are many places where…Frank Lloyd Wright’s was eagerness to discuss the answer to this surprising yet work can be studied; there is nowhere else relevant question. where his architecture can be felt so Fallingwater’s Guided Arwarmly, appreciated so chitectural Tours are for small groups intuitively.”3 of people and often include a mixture 1 Edgar Kaufmann, jr., of visitors from different parts of the Remarks on Fallingwater as world with various interests, experiences, administered by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and prior knowledge. Tours are led by (speech, March 1985). Fallingwater educators who skillfully 2 This conversational strategy is blend a curated selection of contextual adapted from Abigail Housen information with strategies like obserand Philip Yenawine’s “Visual vation-based discussion, open-ended Thinking Strategies,” a framework for facilitating group questions, prompts for close-looking, and discussions about works of art. quiet moments for immersive experience. 3. Edgar Kaufmann, jr., Remarks We approach each tour as an experiment on Falling Water. Timothy Wong Mike Tully H. Masud Taj Christopher Pin Harish Krishnamoorthy Pouya Khadem Andrew Y. Jiao Robin V Hueppe Kayci Gallagher Clare Fentress Kyle Dugdale Maximilien Chong Lee Shin Claudio Astudillo Barra Linda Schilling Cuellar Luciana Varkulja Ashley Andrykovitch STEP; foul play is . In Case The sentence above is only one example, but everything is broken. There is a rift, an open fissure, in every being, room, and building. The unknown X constantly shifts our reality through a thick layer of ambiguity. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shows how a system needs to malfunction somewhere to function at all.2 The Turing machine, a blueprint for digital computers, proved him right.3 And what accounts for mathematics and computer science is true for language, too: systems fail to prove themselves as consistent. So misreading is our primary tool to hint at the malfunctions required for things to exist in the first place.4 It cracks the static and brittle ideologies structuring past modes of reading. A countering, flimsy feeling of the future follows. The vibratory energy of language also translates to the material level (or vice versa): quantum theory tells us that everything consists of energy waves.5 Our bodies are in a vibrating, quantum-mechanical ground state preceding any particular figuration, which Julia Kristeva calls the “chora,” the pre-lingual chaos of feelings and perceptions—our state of purest materiality—or the dance of being alive.6 Before any thought, our bodies feel the room, resonating and flickering. One of our own malfunctions emerges from this dance. We call it anxiety. of plants riv al The seco the Houston stud nd night ios. living ro om of JE ends in the AN PROU home; as VÉ’s sembled ily one by his famsu pre-fabrica mmer from lef tover te from dawn d parts. We walk to dusk; jumping from their ned c ov to sig us I-de ings of ome ACCHIN e draw ration e iv V f welc t pec proli LIVIOol. Pers ws. A o scho e wind h er t RPA n ). l d e t 22 Ve Se ’ s I x n h va B o m e e r e t rc . A a n e th e S m e (M | J m ring eri IS Fro Sp , P 2 : ➊ v 2 02 4 r 2 te e mad table LSEN th e IE N p e e to k USTAV G by 1. See Level 2: Leisure 2. Elizabeth K. Meyer, “The and Escapism of Expanded Field Rem Koolhaas Of Landscape and Samir Bantal, Architecture,” in Countryside: The Ecological Design Future, 2020. and Planning (John 3. Corinna Anderson, Wiley & Sons, Inc., “Architects in 1997). Agriculture,” in 4. Niklas Fanelsa, What About the “Countryside Provinces?, CanaNarrative,” in dian Centre for What About Architecture, June the Provinces?, 1, 2018. https:// Canadian Centre www.cca.qc.ca/en/ for Architecture, articles/issues/26/ December 13,2020. what-about-thehttps://www.cca. provinces/58829/ qc.ca/en/articles/ architects-in-agriissues/26/whatculture. about-the-provinc5. Milica Topalović, es/76638/countryArchitecture of Ter- side-narrative. ritory: Beyond the Limits of the City: 6. Anika Gründer Research and Deand Florian Kirfel, sign of Urbanising “Gründer Kirfel x Territories (Zürich: PIONIRA,” filmed ETH Zürich 2020 in Bedheim, D-ARCH, 2016). Germany. https:// Fire ‘offi des cial ’ P per ate aris.”) ly tr y We to Kyle Dugdale I recently found myself discussing architecture with my brother-in-law, a firefighter. To be precise, we talked about the experience of walking into a burning house, and about recent developments in home construction. Ever the optimist, I expected enthusiasm about improvements in building code. Instead, I found ambivalence about advances in construction technology. pioniraproject. com/gruender-kirfel/. What is there to dislike? Compared to dimensional lumber, engineered joists are lightweight and easy to handle; they promise longer spans, more open plans, brighter spaces; they allow a more open structural system, which makes it easier to route mechanical and electrical systems. They are cheaper. Materially efficient. Less squeaky. They sustain the architectural-industrial complex, not least the glue industry. Their acronyms enrich our vocabulary: LSL, LVL, MSR, OSB, OSL, PKI, PSL, SCL, TJI, TSL, their names stamped onto their surfaces so as to facilitate brand recognition. 2 The incompleteness theorem shows that any consistent system has at least one true but unprovable value or statement. See Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I,” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik (1931): 173–198, esp. 175. 3 Alan Turing’s halting problem proved that computer science is similarly flawed, which still has implications for computer-based problems today. Within the algorithmic system of Turing machines, certain programs cannot exist. See Alan M. Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, Series 2 (1937): 230–265, esp. 259. 7 Architecture precipitates as crystals from the solution between lifeforms. See Timothy Morton, “Dancing About Architecture,” Kerb Journal 28 (2020): 48–51. 8 Ivan L. Munuera, “An Organism of Hedonistic Pleasures: The Palladium,” Log 102–112 (2017): 105. 9 “Where he goes the space follows him.” Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2014), 116. 10 For just one out of many examples, see Esra Akcan, Open Architecture. Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA 1984/87 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018). 4 One of the recurring arguments of Derridean deconstruction is that all readings are misreadings. Some are simply more established than GAËLLE REY, beloved others. Without an “outside-text,” our French teachor any metaprogram explaining er, apologizes the program, misreadings are the grounds on which we build meaning. See Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). The studio lies on mounds of grass outside of SANAA’s Lou- Observation, Not Interference Kayci Gallagher g sla in dis Tw he . t ns Le in evr aps he tance. A culture of industry replaced by an industry of enjoy using various site-specific herbs and produce in your dishes, and you’d like to know more about how your flavors are created. When you visit the sources of Discourse on architecture in rural contexts is developing, your ingredients, you meet local farmers and growers, especially given the recent growth in the leisure industry, and they explain how the environmental context helps which has largely abandoned interest in cultural and landinform the character of the harvest. In order to respect scape significance and instead focused on creating spaces the quality of the food, would you try to learn about for commercial consumption. Unfortunately, adaptive rehow your ingredients are grown and the best practices use projects that transform authentic villages into wellness for their cultivation? Or, do you tell the grower how to resorts are unsurprising;1 within discourses of modern arcare for their land based on cultivation techniques you chitecture, an ingrained binary relationship has relegated learned elsewhere? Problems arise when people who the landscape to elements that are not the architecture.2 refuse to read context are also interested in a perpetuHistorically, this thinking has made it easy to ignore inal sense of ownership. Architects must foster deliberate grained and natural contexts. Even if urban-based designers practices that allow us to acknowledge and appreciate don’t have a major role in the design of rural architecture, contextual lifestyles, practices, and cultural memories. they’ve often carved out space for themselves by either criticizing existing typologies or proposing “better” new ones.3 Fortunately, there are a growing number of architectural precedents to learn from. In 2020, architect Niklas FanelAnalyses of rural ecologies are often communicated via exsa hosted a series of workshops called Patterns of Rural ternal urbanized perspectives.4 This “outside” territory has Commoning throughout various local networks in rural always been imagined from the perspective of the “central” Gerswalde, Germany. In contrast to typical efforts to ascity, and current architectural research continues to ignore semble narratives of countryside communities, Fanelsa narratives of the countryside coming from people within. sought to understand it from within, all while giving credit There is a long history of architects’ engagement with terto the generosity of its inhabitants. The locals shared their ritorial processes, using industrialization and rural exoresources, rendering rural life visible to its participants dus as the rationale for new types of non-urban projects.5 from the city and inviting them to engage with their con- text.7 When approaching unfamiliar contexts from the In 2013, when the partners of Studio Gründer Kirfel arrived outside, architects should hold an underlying intention in the German countryside to open an architectural practice, 7. Niklas Fanelsa, of learning from and deferring to local communities. they described their expectations: to move into the quaint “Countryside Having recently moved to New York City from the rural village, meet and form a relationship with the locals, and Narrative.” Midwest, I’m increasingly interested in the general misintroduce new examples of non-urban architecture. Howkee p p readings of perceived “non-architectural” areas. Within FR ace A F R N Ç O with ever, they were shocked to learn that the village was “unroO th r o M O I S E NO s tr e u g h T th e Pa r e t s is. se c o on d In o f u urb r an Like others at his firehouse, Mike has a keenly felt mistrust for interiors with floors supported on engineered lumber. He has a particular aversion, that is, to houses built in the last several years. e s th iscus erly we d rm walk, l” of fo muros a d “reviv ial intra y an tr indus of Berc e and h areas ive Gauc R Paris failure once fire But as the UK’s National Fire Chiefs Council puts it, such products are “prone to rapid on joists that have resting floor a onto step you alarm, an to responding when If, breached.” is protection hidden behind othbeen weakened by fire, you are done for. Worse still, such supports are typically to read the room. hard it makes This .” identification for visible readily not therefore “and er materials the situation based So instead, before walking into a burning house, firefighters are trained to assess tendencies. on the presumed year of construction. In this regard, at least, they have antiquarian suspected, though unconfirmed. and critic KAROLINA CZECZEK (M.Arch II ’15) create warmth in the 4th floor for their studio review using a Lazy Susan, twinned screens, and strawberries in a colander. 5 critics at the review fight over who gets Andrew Y. Jiao A member of ITURBE REJECTS sprains an ankle playing against CHUDDER of death and presents it, with ANA BATLLE (M.Arch I ’23), to the public. He hopes to one day become a tree. ➑ Ibid. During the second half of the week, review snacks are baked by local women refugees from Unbearable 2022 iteration of the Rudolph Open completes its second round. Cynthia Zarin Yet the room around you, too, has that humming ground state.7 Architecture emerges from rhythm and rhyme in material like poetry from prose, and you can observe it: sequences, arrangements, or pauses. Of course, we could actually perform a dance to fuse our bodies with the room into a single agent.8 But the point is that pulsation exists before architecture: it acts on you before you can even think about it. That room around you, seemingly solid and steady, is really a shimmering dance of liquid energy, constantly rematerializing from the sticky sap of relationships and the forcefield of ideas—just like your body, but at a different frequency. Although the two often get confused, time is more than its measurement, and likewise, vibratory rhythms pulsate before their measurement. Forever trying to close the gap, the room translates us through a slow dance: an intimate, mutual translation that can be painful all the same. When the dance is not a choice, space becomes coercive.9 But the future haunts the misread hiding somewhere off meaning’s edge. Like oppressive principles structuring the past, the future is with us in the dance and shimmers through its ever-crumbling layers. We find rifts because sentences, rooms, buildings, and spaces are never static, but continually opening up to new dancing partners.10 If you look away, they dance about you anyways—about anything, in fact. Music wrote about it. I’D SMASH THAT wins in under 7 minutes—domination. ➏ From The Food Systems of Architecture. “23—24,” Aubeterre Cynthia Zarin The first I heard of Aubeterre it was June in the Charente, and we could sit out late as nine or ten in the evening, watching the pink light hover over the fields. Eric, who had come to France for a few days, was telling us that if hay bales get wet and then dry, they can explode. He had seen it happen. At the end of the table, Pascal said to Seamus, beside me, that there was a cathedral built into the side of a cliff at the top of the Dordogne. We should go, he said, before Seamus leaves for Ireland. Seamus shakes his head. He doubts the Citroën can get that far. But every afternoon we take it out and drive for hours through empty villages, the quiet shuttered fields. We go, a few days later, coaxing the Citroën along, to see L’Eglise de St. Pierre, the cathedral carved out of the stone face of the white cliff. It’s a two-hour drive. As we go, I read aloud: work was begun on the church in the fourth century; it was completed in the twelfth century. The ceiling is among the highest in Europe. Over time, vegetation grew and covered it until by the eighteenth century the church had disappeared from view. Vanished. Forty years ago, I read, two trucks collided with such force that they fell through the paved road and down into the crypt. And there was the cathedral, huge, buried alive. Un étonnement! says the guidebook. An astonishment. At noon, the heat is intense. We manage to park the car on a side street, and follow painted signs to the entrance of the cathedral, which we find at the end of a wooden walkway. The ticket table is attended by a boy of about thirteen. We are the third and fourth visitors today, he says. Is that usual?, I ask. He shrugs. We pass under the high arched door into unfathomable green gloom. To the right, the fretwork of countless tombs, declivities in the stone floor, are the shape a sleeping body takes. Above, the ceiling devolves into darkness, the stone walls wet to the touch and green with moss. In the center of the cavern is a Romanesque reliquary, twenty feet high, based on the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The reliquary chapel has a peculiar glow in the green darkness, its slim columns and architraves soaring upwards, a captive unicorn. It is impossible—the vision is too searing, too immense to comprehend—to see the church at one go. We emerge from the ark of the dead into the hot sunshine visit DOMINIQUE PERRAULT’s four to in ilt bu d ar bo e the sidgainst wall a which the door comes to rest. You open the cupboard. The door swings out. It swings out to close the room that was until then doorless. To be a door is to understand openness and closure simultaneously. To be a door is to be a pilgrim, who never sto tioning. ps quesYou o ente pen a d oor t sw r a ro o i om. to ngs The clo in doo se . It r a d sw oo ing rle s i ss n cu p- Contributors: a puppet show in Hastings. Their studio exacerbates the ongoing plywood shortage by using up all the shop materials available. AVLEIGH DU (M.Arch II ’23) hires hand models. Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor FRIDA ESCOBEDO The silver spoon she was carrying from the kitchen CLATTERS to the wood floor. She BENDS DOWN to pick it up and SEES a small chip in the wood flooring. out on a bamboo exercise/wind machine, spotted by TIM HAWKINS (M.Arch I ’23); teammates SIGNE FERGUSON and BENJAMIN DERLAN (both M.Arch I ’23) hold their breaths. Cf. YONG CHOI (M.Arch I ’23) decides on his date WOMAN Let me enjoy my coffee in peace. Juhani Pallasmaa’s 1996 book The Eyes of the Skin argues against the primacy of vision in Western conceptions and constructions of architecture—or so a vague and buried memory tells me. I’m not sure how I know what this text is about; I can’t recall ever having seen a copy of it, let alone read it. Did I absentmindedly scour its dust-jacket blurb at a bookstore? Did a friend draw its arc for me during a long dinner conversation? I once heard a psychoanalyst describe memories as Word documents and our minds as vast hard drives. Every time you open a memory, he said, you write a new copy of it. Sometimes you end up with many copies of the same story, its narrative static over time, repeated with precision and care. But usually, the memory changes. A transposed letter here, a different word there. Gradually, the order of events gets mixed up. Key details drop out. Years later, all that’s left is garbled text and some feelings. In my mental copy of The Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa writes that sight was prized by the Greeks, then by the Christians, and finally canonized as the dominant sense in the Renaissance when perspective was developed. During each phase of this history, the human body was progressively deemphasized, reduced to the one sense that (supposedly) does not produce sensation and is easily externalized. Architects must reclaim touch, smell, taste, and hearing as elements of spatial experience, Pallasmaa claims in my apocrypha. Don’t just orchestrate views and sightlines; don’t just design through drawing; don’t create architecture that is only articulated by what the eye can perceive. But I can hardly relay this spurious summary without the feelings asking for a turn. They begin with someone else’s words: “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” This quote, a paraphrase of Paul Valéry and the title of a 1982 collection of interviews with Robert Irwin (another book I haven’t read), comes to mind often. It’s such a clear description of how visual experience can release you from the cages of language, of categories, of the conscious self. To lose the capability to name an object as other is to lose the hard edge around oneself as subject, too. In 2013, when the Whitney Museum of American Art still lived in the 1966 Marcel Breuer building at 75th and Madison, there was a temporary exhibition of a site-specific work Irwin made for the building’s fourth floor in 1977. Just a piece of translucent, almost transparent white scrim stretched taut across the gallery, bisecting it, running flush with the ceiling, and ending about five feet above the floor. When I walked into the gallery, time paused; then it began to dissolve. The scrim, all but invisible, couldn’t be comprehended by looking straight at it. You had to observe other visual phenomena—blurred figures on the opposite side of the room, the last rays of twilight sun refracted along the wall, ceiling panels that suddenly turned black as your eye traced them overhead—to understand what the scrim was doing. But there it was, in plain sight, hiding nothing of itself or its mechanisms. I had to sit down. Mystery is easily fetishized. It’s harder to make things that are so clear, so just themselves, that their fullness hits you in the gut and makes you forget, for a little while, who you are. But to find a rift—the fissure in meaning from which the new flows—we should misread the sentence altogether. When we observe its rifts carefully and break them up a little more, we can unveil at least one silent object (X) hidden in the making: music writes about us like architecture dances about us (3, 1, 2, X). Both do it all the time, in a shimmering ground state and pulsating on a different frequency. 6 Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 89–136. DE s L ad NE le e d I O rg h a p e s . . L ou s ur tx t sb ric ul t e a ne tra fab c Gr isto f S o e o th A a n t w r o m l H k s F ra c to ENS urb of ➍ c tu c r a n ty ci m a on d . ru e e f r o g h l i s i i l s t th o n S ro u c o l s w fr a i n BU th e goe n In gs] u s th n e : A r i n by o r i s n d e No Pa [wa er (“ ry EXPERT on TV "...the thing is that these plantations are not their forest, eucalyptus monocrops are endangering the Mapuche people’s ecosystem and threatening their livelihoods..." Reading the sentence backward adds an easy, playful twist: architecture about dancing (3, 2, 1) is as significant as music about writing. In this second installment of Clare Fentress’s recurring column, we asked her to review a "canonical" or commonly read architecture book that she herself had not yet read (and was not permitted to read during the writing of her review). FROMONOT ANÇOISE dio; culture. FR we give up on stu s the Page recommend On .” <<< de tsi ou is “living On the table are also a bowl with fruits, She LOOKS BACK at the flooring. The a small plate of fresh cheese, and a bas- shadows from the tree canopy outside ket of bread. Hot steam is coming out of project onto her floor, dancing bits of the coffee pot. warm sunlight. Fortunately, others rejected the naïve irony.1 Writing about music is as significant as dancing (1) about (2) architecture (3). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses by Juhani Pallasmaa. London: Academy Editions, 1996. 5 The binary of the moving and the fixed can no longer be sustained. Tiny objects at their lowest energy level still vibrate without mechanical causation. See Peter Rodgers, “Nanomechanics: Welcome to the quantum ground state,” Nature Nanotechnology 5 (2010): 245. ➏ . .” e d lls b a 3 rd r , ou a ris P g tin ter s ur e a “b Gr r fo r o m F WOMAN (pondering) Annoying cheap drawer... pine or eucalyptus? Can’t quite remember. Someone once said: writing about music is like dancing about architecture. is spilled. ➌ From Spring Break in Nancy, Strasbourg, and Colmar. Students from École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Nancy WOMAN (smiling and running her hands across the tablecloth) Incredible trip... talented artisans... In Plain Sight Clare Fentress (1:50 0), a nd a rea l sca two ditc le h view (Paris ) ➋ See es (1:30, no men) : M trave 2022). M idterm R t to jo l from e en (an in th d o acro e of w ine is jury. Po ss the w nly st-rev orld poure iew, d, an a lot d on ly a little CLOSEUP - DRAWER, SILVERWARE Linda Schilling Cuellar, Claudio Astudillo Barra, Luciana Varkulja CLOSEUP - LACE TABLECLOTH 1 “The line on ‘dancing about architecture’ is often quoted to suggest that writing about music is silly; to me, it is a way of saying that writing about music is a form of writing, […] it is an activity that we should, and must, pursue.” See Vance Maverick and Brian Belet, “Dancing about Architecture?,” Computer Music Journal 17, no. 1 (1993): 4–5, esp. 4. Finding Rifts – A Slow Dance Robin V Hueppe is. Pa r R S A T ER ell in nd PIE t in w ge , a and live PUT TE t they quarr y is a E ), ha pirit VAND del; w 1:1000 s y ( ar RE e mo a rm tion IER f volu RIE-P r a sit 000), A e re fo :1 . Th INI, M ask airs (1 e r u t A R s G D ct , e E D ) it P 0 X h Arc ERICO HE of t (1:100 F E D A L S C e fo r e s W DE n is th r r e tu WOMAN (smiling) The balcony and the living room are conThe nected through large sliding glass doors. feeling of the wood The garden wall muffles the TRAFFIC noise texture on my feet... coming from the street. KITCHEN. She GRABS A 37-year-old woman with long, flowing her cell phone, OPENS hair that slightly covers her face is the kitchen cabinsitting in a metal chair, holding a large etry, and SEARCHES ceramic cup of black coffee. She wears a for a small silver colorful robe. A white lace tablecloth spoon. She has a hard time closing the covers the glass table. drawer. The views expressed in Paprika! do not represent those of the Yale School of Architecture or the Rice School of Architecture. Please send comments and corrections to paprika.ysoa@gmail.com. To read Paprika! online, please visit our website, yalepaprika.com. This issue was published in collaboration with PLAT. Additional contributions from Ignis Zhang, Diana Smiljković, Nathaniel Leazer, Signe Ferguson, and Rae Atkinson. EXTERIOR. CHARACTER'S HOME - OUTSIDE AREA - EARLY DAY CLOSEUP - THE OBJECTS OF THE GLASS TABLE Issue Editors: Jane van Velden, Paul DeFazio, and Jerry Chow Graphic Design: Junyi Shi and Ainsley Romero Coordinating Editors: Chloe Hou, Harry Hooper, Joey Reich, Jeeu Sarah Kim, and Signe Ferguson Publishers: Ethnie Xu, Louise Lu, and Uzayr Agha Archivists: Christopher Pin and Sara Mountford FADE IN: comes an opening. Walls and openings are not doors; they are walls and openings. HowevThere are always two er, no matter how long the door resides to a door. It has mains in a state two faces without of non-doorness, being two-faced. the possibility of changing its mind It is derived by merging two Old always remains. English forms: the singular “dor” and To be a door is to the plural “duru.” never be beyond redemption. To be a door is to embrace multiplic- However familiar it becomes with the ities. extreme states of total openness and To be a door is total closure, the to make choices all your life. More door is never pulled to extremes. It balaccurately to be ances both sides a door is to perand maintains an petually unmake equipoise. Migratthe choice that you last made; to ing forever between one state and the choose between being opened, or other, settling in neither, at home in being closed. transit and never on To be a door is to arrival. choose without To be a door is to taking sides. be a nomad. For the door that stays shut forever Its pathways are becomes the wall; clockwise as well as the door that stays anticlockwise. The open forever be- axis of its rotation is the axis mundi. Forever circumambulating and retracing its steps forever. Door H. Masud Taj Syria. Senior critic MARTIN FINIO insists we each take two. Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor TATIANA BILBAO, IWAN BAAN, and senior critic ANDREI HARWELL (M.Arch II ’06) pull off an unexpected delight: Sebastião Salga do’s Amazônia — and a wicker basket. SCENE 1 cookies, hot chocolate (still thicc), and stale coffee. Chicken wings are eaten over Systems Integration drawing sets. ➐ See Midterm Reviews (New Haven: 2022). Core 4 Studio critic ELIHU RUBIN (BA ’99) works REMOTE CLOSEUPS mantic”; they couldn’t find a way to enter daily life with the the first week of moving, someone who grew up in the local villagers and nothing was as aesthetically charming as city asked me: “How does it feel to suddenly live around they’d expected. The team quickly identified areas for imsuch a wide range of architecture after living in the Midprovement and even held workshops for locals that demonwest?” Though I know this person was genuinely curious, strated how technical building strategies could be used to the question was representative of the common belief create more beautiful architecture. One such workshop was that rural ecologies have little to do with architecture, called “Hands On: Do-It-Yourself Building, Between Hardnot to mention a wide range of it. Architects have a role ware Store-Chic and Architectural Masterpiece.” Though in transforming environments, whether it’s mediating they’d expressed concern about not wanting to arrogantly between a client and market trends, or owner-driven detell people to create more beautiful buildings, they quickly sign explorations. It’s essential that we give prominence pointed out that what the locals build is neither sustainable to learning from the immediate context surrounding each nor attractive. Further, when the architects reflected on project. Beginning from a place of observation, not entiwhat was needed in this village, they said, “people need to tlement, will be the only model that allows rural contexts see alternative examples, otherwise, they won’t change.”6 to have a critical role in future architectural discourse. In order to uncover solutions to this problematic type of approach, it’s perhaps helpful to explore an analogy outside of the architectural realm: Imagine you are a chef. You unknown forest. An ch Class. en aming a books fr e Last Fr Se en ➎ op tal, AD!” monumen , “PARIS IS DE ts man shou a mysterious baked goods pop-up, advertises an assortment of pies—limited run. More bribes from the administration: Milano and have lunch at a restaurant across the way, a not very good lunch, but we were hungry, and the bougainvillea was pretty. Then we return, walking down to the crypt, holding a rope handrail to keep from slipping on the slick steps. Underground, we stand close together, but it is impossible to look at each other, it is at once too dark, and too shaming, as if we were affronting the dead in our light summer clothes, the sun warm on our skin, and after a few minutes we go out into the bright afternoon, and the church becomes a momentary shared dream—a dream, that for the village, went on for centuries. And for us? “They bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen,” said Forster, of the Marabar Caves. But something has happened. In the car, we barely speak. On the way back to Lussac, the route, which had evaded us on the way to Aubeterre, unfolds straight ahead, to La Couronne, past La Rochefoucauld, and on to Chasseneuil. Seamus’s profile is bleached against the fields as the Citroën makes its way west. From the north, a smell of burning. The sky above the trees turns violet streaked with green. To the east, the shimmering void of the church at Aubeterre, a great dark green space; an underground mirror of the sky. Virginia Woolf wrote, about Forster, “His concern is with the private life; his message is addressed to the soul: it is the private life that holds out the mirror to infinity.” Before I came to France, that look of remoteness came over you and I once again wanted to be anywhere else, anywhere else at all, to walk into an empty room. When you first read these pages, a long essay of which these paragraphs are an excerpt, you said, but the church must be moved to the center. It is the kind of thing you like, a burrow under the earth, a space that opens, opens and opens. Here it is then, a few lines on a page, sketching an emptiness, excavated over eight hundred years by farmers, masons, monks. Hidden until two trucks collided, and the past emerged from its dream. As now in these past weeks, a collision between the past and the future has opened, and grieved and astonished we have fallen into the last century, lined with trenches stacked with the dead. How can we read the place and time in which we find ourselves?