Gibellina could be a city in an Italo Calvino book. Destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, with tragic loss of life, the city was not rebuilt. Rather, the residents relocated to a new site nearby (new Gibellina), leaving the ruins behind. At the request of the city, the artist Alberto Burri created a huge commemorative sculpture from the remains of the town. The sculpture / site is a literal Nolli map, where the streets are void and the buildings are entirely poche. It's a surreal place - a fossilized city that no one can ever inhabit again.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Alternate architecture 1 - the guidebook
"The Colosseum was the temple of the sun. It was of marvelous beauty and greatness, disposed with many different vaulted chambers and all covered with a heaven of gilded brass, where thunder and lightning and glittering fire were made, and where rain was shed through slender tubes. Besides this there were the supercelestial signs and the planets Sol and Luna, which were drawn along in their proper chariots. And in the middle dwelled Phoebus, who is the god of the sun. With his feet on the earth he reached to heaven with his head and held in his hand an orb that signified that Rome ruled over the whole world.
After some time the Blessed Silvester ordered that temple destroyed and likewise other palaces so that the orators who came to Rome would not wander through profane buildings but instead pass with devotion through the churches. But he had the head and hands of the aforesaid idol laid before his Palace of the Lateran in remembrance of the temple, and they are now falsely called by the vulgar Samson's Ball. And before the Colosseum was a temple where ceremonies were done to the aforesaid image."
- the medieval guide to Rome Mirabilia Urbis Romae
- from the translation The Marvels of Rome, Mirabilia Urbis Romae, Francis Morgan Nichols, 1889, republished 1986, Italica Press.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Alternate architecture - a series
Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Lost Highway, 1997
A building is a slippery thing. It seems so solid, so unchanging and objective. But it's nothing more than a collection of experiences in the mind. It's a sequence of sights, sounds, and smells woven into a movie by your brain. And it's a group of memories bundled under an arbitrary category - "my house", "the office", "the pyramids". These experiences, these memories, seem like external, objective things. But they're all in your head.
Your mind is building these places all the time. It takes your perceptions (a splash of color, a smell of paint, a feeling of cold or sun on your face) and bundles them with your stream of consciousness ("what room is the 11 o'clock meeting in again?") to make an image of a place. It uses this image to locate you in space, to fix you in time. It overlays time after time to build your memory of home. It shapes your dreams. It uses both experienced and borrowed images to personify institutions and far flung places. Your mind uses its spatial memory to structure your life.
No buildings aren't really made of concrete. They're made of memories. And memories are not a stable thing. They change all the time. So do our experiences of buildings. They drift over the course of our lives, with new spaces coloring old ones, with places mis-remembered, with changing opinions, and ageing physical abilities, and with forgetting. Our experience is a heterogeneous thing, full of holes and overlaps. Our brains compensate by automatically smoothing things out in the background, without us even knowing it. But the instability is there, just under the surface.
And our collective experience of buildings is even less stable. It's built up from a collage of different people's (unstable) memories, dreams, and desires. And it suffers from (mis)interpretation, imperfect documentation, and propaganda. It's codified in maps, pictures, and descriptions - with varying degrees of accuracy. Our collective spatial experience is partial and biased to begin with, even before it's colored by our cultural point-of-view. If our individual experience has holes, our collective experience is swiss-cheese.
Which leaves a gap between the bricks and mortar of our world, and our experiences of them. This allows our individual experiences to slip away from each other. Your experience of a place is very different from mine, from anybody else's. And our collective experience of a place may be only lightly connected to reality (if there even is such a thing). It enables fascinating, different experiences, from one person to the next, from one culture to the next, from one time to the next.
But "our" image of a place seems so familiar! Our brain does such a good job of smoothing out the kinks that we can't even imagine another point of view. It's an illusion. When we are confronted with the other perspective, a place may seem strange, even scary. I call this experience "alternate architecture." Explore it with me...
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Lost Highway, 1997
A building is a slippery thing. It seems so solid, so unchanging and objective. But it's nothing more than a collection of experiences in the mind. It's a sequence of sights, sounds, and smells woven into a movie by your brain. And it's a group of memories bundled under an arbitrary category - "my house", "the office", "the pyramids". These experiences, these memories, seem like external, objective things. But they're all in your head.
Your mind is building these places all the time. It takes your perceptions (a splash of color, a smell of paint, a feeling of cold or sun on your face) and bundles them with your stream of consciousness ("what room is the 11 o'clock meeting in again?") to make an image of a place. It uses this image to locate you in space, to fix you in time. It overlays time after time to build your memory of home. It shapes your dreams. It uses both experienced and borrowed images to personify institutions and far flung places. Your mind uses its spatial memory to structure your life.
No buildings aren't really made of concrete. They're made of memories. And memories are not a stable thing. They change all the time. So do our experiences of buildings. They drift over the course of our lives, with new spaces coloring old ones, with places mis-remembered, with changing opinions, and ageing physical abilities, and with forgetting. Our experience is a heterogeneous thing, full of holes and overlaps. Our brains compensate by automatically smoothing things out in the background, without us even knowing it. But the instability is there, just under the surface.
And our collective experience of buildings is even less stable. It's built up from a collage of different people's (unstable) memories, dreams, and desires. And it suffers from (mis)interpretation, imperfect documentation, and propaganda. It's codified in maps, pictures, and descriptions - with varying degrees of accuracy. Our collective spatial experience is partial and biased to begin with, even before it's colored by our cultural point-of-view. If our individual experience has holes, our collective experience is swiss-cheese.
Which leaves a gap between the bricks and mortar of our world, and our experiences of them. This allows our individual experiences to slip away from each other. Your experience of a place is very different from mine, from anybody else's. And our collective experience of a place may be only lightly connected to reality (if there even is such a thing). It enables fascinating, different experiences, from one person to the next, from one culture to the next, from one time to the next.
But "our" image of a place seems so familiar! Our brain does such a good job of smoothing out the kinks that we can't even imagine another point of view. It's an illusion. When we are confronted with the other perspective, a place may seem strange, even scary. I call this experience "alternate architecture." Explore it with me...
Thursday, November 24, 2011
the Project
the project I've been working on for 2 years is occupied!
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS
CNS RESEARCH AND EDUCATION GREENHOUSE
Amherst,
Massachusetts
2011
PROGRAM COMPONENTS:
Classroom,
Research Laboratory, Teaching and Research Greenhouse
PROJECT TEAM:
Owner: University of Massachusetts Building
Authority
User: University of Massachusetts College of
Natural Sciences
LEED administrator: Payette Associates
Architect: Payette Associates
Landscape Architect: Payette Associates
Civil Engineer: Nitsch Engineering
Structure: LIM Consultants
MEP+FP: Vanderweil Engineers
Greenhouse Design: Greenhouse
Engineering, Inc.
General Contractor: DA Sullivan and Sons
Greenhouse Contractor: Stuppy Greenhouse
CLIENT QUOTES:
“These
state-of-the-art greenhouses, enhance the college's research, teaching, and
extension endeavors. The sophisticated design is as beautiful as it is energy
efficient, provides a sustainable infrastructure to facilitate plant growth.
The new laboratory and classroom spaces are housed in the same structure,
provide a one-stop-shopping space for learning and experimentation.”
Steve Goodwin,
Dean of the College of Natural Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
"It is
great to see, after so long, that we finally have a state of the art greenhouse
complex where faculty can conduct research for the floriculture industry and
students can gain hands-on experience in a facility current with industry
standards."
Bob Luczai,
Massachusetts Flower Growers Association
PRESS:
UMass Amherst -
Youtube Video:
UMass Amherst
Sustainability Initiative:
UMass
Facilities press release:
Thirty Spokes
"Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there."
- Tao Te Ching, Eleven; Lao Tsu (The Old Master)
translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, 1997
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there."
- Tao Te Ching, Eleven; Lao Tsu (The Old Master)
translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, 1997
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