Toys
Kristy and I didn’t know anything about graffiti. We invited an artist to come in and talk to us about working on a project. We had a wall adjacent to our property with a large tag on it. Instead of buffing it, we wanted someone to paint over it. Make art on it. Our invited artist tagged subway cars in the early nineties under the mentorship of street art legends. He spoke in a technical language that we didn’t understand- but it was fascinating. He explained to us that the previous work on site was created by toys (amateurs whose work can be tagged over).
Kristy and I didn’t know anything about graffiti. We invited an artist to come in and talk to us about working on a project. We had a wall adjacent to our property with a large tag on it. Instead of buffing it, we wanted someone to paint over it. Make art on it. Our invited artist tagged subway cars in the early nineties under the mentorship of street art legends. He spoke in a technical language that we didn’t understand- but it was fascinating. He explained to us that the previous work on site was created by toys (amateurs whose work can be tagged over). We were hoping he’d do some throw-ups (quick pieces) on our project, but after buying 200 dollars worth of spray-paint, he had to cancel due to a scheduling conflict.
With the help of Wikipedia, eHow and urbandictionary.com we got the basics down and decided to do some graffiti of our own. We were going to throw-up some pieces in the sheet metal freezer that was to be demolished.
It’s a lot harder to paint with a spray-can than I thought. Especially on sheet metal, where the paint bleeds and runs. We painted our names in faux-wildstyle. We painted some nonsense, project related architectural drawings.
Even with masks, the fumes were unbearable in the air-tight space. In the end we were left with 220 feet of gallery walls covered with total amateur, rookie art. Kristy’s looks a little bit more professional than mine. Luckily it’s been locked inside the vault for some time and no one can get in to see how bad it is. . . until now, when we post it online. With the help of eHow, we are now learning how to do wheat paste-ups. Be prepared to see some ill paste-ups in Bushwick soon.
Aural Refrigeration
We’re about to tear down this old building. It’s a windowless cold storage facility, a giant drive-in refrigerator. 25 ft wide and nearly as tall. The interior is lit by metal-halide lights that buzz, loudly. The walls are constructed of 6” insulated panels, clad with sheet metal. The reverberations in the room are scary and endless. When you speak to someone 10 feet away from you, the flutter echo drowns out their response, warping words and decreasing conversation to a wavy mess of sound. Sounds stay way longer than they are welcome- a random “whoop” can hang out for minutes before it loses it’s noise and cedes the space to the hum of the lights.
We’re about to tear down this old building. It’s a windowless cold storage facility, a giant drive-in refrigerator. 25 ft wide and nearly as tall. The interior is lit by metal-halide lights that buzz, loudly. The walls are constructed of 6” insulated panels, clad with sheet metal. The reverberations in the room are scary and endless. When you speak to someone 10 feet away from you, the flutter echo drowns out their response, warping words and decreasing conversation to a wavy mess of sound. Sounds stay way longer than they are welcome- a random “whoop” can hang out for minutes before it loses it’s noise and cedes the space to the hum of the lights.
Maxx Katz, walks in, holding a flute. Maxx is an amazing improviser, a flute player and singer in rock band(z). We cut the lights, no more buzz, and now there are footsteps and the shuffling of microphone stands. I’ve positioned two mics in the center of the room, 40 feet away from each other, each facing their own noisy corners. Maxx plays the flute. She walks around the dark empty space. I record it all to a laptop. I listen to her for several hours, riffing on her own thoughts, themes that arise in her music and mutate. Did she mean to blow out that note? Or was that the space, stretching the sound and throwing it back at her? Is she wrestling with something in the music or is this the equivalent of doodling? I don’t know. We talk about Steve Miller; she sings a verse of “Come on in my Kitchen” like he sings it. She interprets a verse through Robert Johnson’s ghost (not present).
There is a solid 45 minutes of incredible audio now stored on the hard drive. After the building is torn down and rebuilt, I’ll go back into the space and temporarily install speakers in the same spots. We’ll be able to hear the music as it was recorded in the original space. It’s a form of building preservation, an aural memory of the space. The last frozen performance in this old refrigerator.
Check out Maxx's website.. https://maxxkatz.wordpress.com/
Jewish Architectural Experiences in Modern Europe
Sara returned from travels in Europe and shared some of the architectural inspirations she found there. A specific area of her interest involved the traditional synagogue forms of London, as she visited and documented these sites. We discussed the specificity of Jewish architecture to the rituals practiced in the synagogue and the way in which the Synagogue architecture relates to the city through its external forms. We discussed the power of expressing continuity of religion through a shared spatial arrangement as a universal way to relate, globally, despite national or language barriers.
Sara returned from travels in Europe and shared some of the architectural inspirations she found there. A specific area of her interest involved the traditional synagogue forms of London, as she visited and documented these sites. We discussed the specificity of Jewish architecture to the rituals practiced in the synagogue and the way in which the Synagogue architecture relates to the city through its external forms. We discussed the power of expressing continuity of religion through a shared spatial arrangement as a universal way to relate, globally, despite national or language barriers.
She also walked through Peter Eisenmans’ holocaust memorial in Berlin. The discussion centered on the power of the memorial in relation to the simplicity of the concept. Variations on spatial relationships to the stone markers through a changing sectional relationship with the ground plane create an array of experiences, from understanding the monument as a whole to the specific subjective experiences of being in particular areas.
Forecasting
If you can correctly identify a problem, it's already a historical condition. Going beyond solutions, we have to envision the potential beauty of our design implications, how spaces will evolve and react to the environment over time. Speculative design should be an instigator, raising questions and creating a mirror-world to aid our thinking, an alternate reality that continues to influence our own.
If you can correctly identify a problem, it's already a historical condition.
Going beyond solutions, we have to envision the potential beauty of our design implications, how spaces will evolve and react to the environment over time. Speculative design should be an instigator, raising questions and creating a mirror-world to aid our thinking, an alternate reality that continues to influence our own.
We consider it part of an architect’s responsibility to look past the current projects towards the future of the built environment.
The earliest stages of design are contemplation of larger social and environmental problems. Going beyond solutions, we have to envision the potential beauty of the complications of our solutions, how they will evolve and react to the unknown. What if we introduced the unknown as a basic fact at the beginning, a precondition? Randomness or intuition can bring seemingly unrelated design ideas into architectural “visioning”. This is a natural concept to anyone who has studied creativity and cognition.
We don’t know the future. If we propose a solution to a social or environmental problem, we are accepting that problem as a fixed condition, disregarding unpredictability. Our solution will address an historical condition resulting in an exercise that becomes immediately obsolete, an instant relic of our time–and perhaps hubris.
Only by moving forward with creative vision can we positively integrate design in the future. Promoting awareness only goes so far–It is ineffective in creating action. Design should be the instigator, raising questions, creating a mirror-world to aid our thinking, an alternate reality.
Rock-itecture: Album Art and Design
Steve switched courses to talk about the different ways architecture is expressed in album art, from pure representation of buildings to graphics influenced by the process of creating architectural drawings and diagrams. Showing a series of album covers, with the accompanying music in the background, the group talked about the architectural significance of each image.
Steve switched courses to talk about the different ways architecture is expressed in album art, from pure representation of buildings to graphics influenced by the process of creating architectural drawings and diagrams. Showing a series of album covers, with the accompanying music in the background, the group talked about the architectural significance of each image. Some of the highlights include: The Sea and Cake’s architectural abstract landscapes; Physical Graffiti by Led Zepplin, which shows the façade of two East Village tenement houses and the windows populated by interactive movable images;
Talking Heads, Songs about Buildings and Food, where the incorporation of architecture is a common theme. The images of the band are constructed from an assembly of small photographs to form a cohesive whole in much the same way a physical structure is built by smaller elements. Black Mountain “In the Future” has a forward-looking geometric cover.
Luna’s “Penthouse,” which upon close inspection, turns out to be a photograph the Empire State Building, and Wilco’s use of Chicago’s Marina City as the cover to their classic, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” are a few more examples.
