Michael Grieve

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Thesis Proposal Board

 

This is the first draft of my thesis project.

Defining Urban Sites

Based on the essay “Defining Urban Sites” by Andrea Kahn

This essay speaks of urban sites and how they should be considered within the context of a city. The author makes the case that in order to understand the impact of a project (she is referring to an urban scale project throughout the essay) the boundaries of the site must be re-understood as something far outside the property lines. She discusses two examples to clarify her point, the Palmanuova plan and a sketch by da Vinci of Milan. In the Palmanuova plan, the city is drawn as “a fixed object in an open field.” The boundaries are clearly defined and nothing is left to interpretation. In the drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, nothing is defined. The city is defined by its interrelations, not by the edge. This is how sites need to be read.

“[The site] realities are constituted through the experience of radically shifting programs in constant interaction.” In other words a site is defined by its context. This is, of course, is referring to context outside of the buildings next to a site or in the same neighborhood. This is where mapping comes into play as a useful tool. Mapping allows you to reveal different layers of information individually and then use the analysis to define the site boundaries. The importance of mapping comes in discovering those things that are not found on a map.

Once this information is discovered, the site can be defined. Once a designer understands “the city in the site” the project will inherently be site specific. The project is founded on the understanding of the site and context; therefore the project would be different if it were done in a different site.

The criticism for the essay comes when she separates the architectural site from the urban site. She speaks in this essay almost exclusively about urban design sites but the two scales are intrinsically linked. All of what is discussed in terms of bringing elements of the city into the site and extending the site outside its boundaries are applicable to architectural sites as well. Many architectural projects are lacking because they don’t understand the context and to separate the urban from architectural is to progress these types of projects.

Trace Concepts

based on the essay “Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture” by Christophe Girot

In this essay, Girot explains his four methods of understanding a landscape or site. Each takes place at a different stage of visiting a site and each successively buries deeper into understanding the place. What is important about this method and why it should be done is stated on page two of the article. “…A designer seldom belongs to the place in which he or she is asked to intervene.” This method is designed in order to help one establish his or her sense of the place even though it is foreign to them.

First is “Landing” and is the initial perception of the site. As he says it “invokes the passage from the unknown to the known.” One thing that is also crucial to landing is whether the site is approached “properly” or “improperly.” This is important to how you will later understand the landscape and how the building will eventually be sited.

Second is “Grounding” and is similar to landing although this can occur more than once. Grounding is based on research and analysis of the site and builds off that first impression of the landing. It is about uncovering the multiple layers of a site to read the history, ecology and context.

Third is “Finding” and is about discovery. It has to do with finding that one aspect of the site that makes it unique. Then that unique feature can be used to drive the site strategy. When I read this I immediately thought of the Getty Center and how Richard Meier used the two crests of the hills as guidelines for the rest of the project.

And finally fourth is “Founding” and is based on taking what you learned from the previous four methods and formulating a reaction based on that information. It is about creating a project that is specific to the place because you are basing the project on information that was directly collected from the place.

What I find interesting about these four terms, landing, grounding, finding and founding, is that they could also be used to describe how a building meets the landscape. Landing being an object lightly touching the surface, grounding being a building that interacts with the land but not to the extent of mutating it, finding being a building as ruin or something that is “found” within the landscape and then founding as a traditional building simply hitting the ground like a brownstone in Boston.

"Architecture and Freedom?"

Based on the essay Architecture and Freedom? Programmatic Innovation in the work of Koolhaas/OMA by Kim Dovey and Scott Dickson

The authors of this essay attempt to reveal how OMA and Rem Koolhaas use programmatic innovation to reinterpret a building and create social roles and implications within. The important thing that seems to run through almost all of OMA’s work is the idea of the social encounter. They always go to great lengths to create an ambiguous plan in order to promote “chance” encounters. These ambiguities involve the space, enclosure, visibility and permeability of the project. This brings to the table not only the idea of physical encounter but also sight encounters. To see and to be seen. In various projects of OMA they allow the unsuspecting visitor to be seen throughout the building. Is it in our natural tendency to become the voyeur? What if the unsuspecting visitor wasn’t unsuspecting?

They go on to discuss the idea of the correspondence model whereas spatial zones “correspond” to social groupings and high correspondence is when all those who share a spatial zone also share a social label. In this case space operates to exclude random encounter and to keep “difference” at a distance. In the next paragraph they say “each of these is a contradiction: random encounter would undermine the social reproductive function of interior space, and the determinism of interior structures would kill urban space.” Koolhaas prefers to play with the tension of these two. What is intriguing about this idea, as it coordinates with my thesis is that in certain opportune times, when two high correspondence zones collide, education can occur. Is there a way to make buildings educate? If I am walking to the grocery store and pass a museum, is there a way to make the museum make me think differently about something?

"Recent Transformations of Urban Public Space"

based on the essay, Recent Transformations of Urban Public Space by Bart Eeckhout and Steven Jacobs

The reading, Recent Transformations of Urban Public Space, is interesting because it is directly related to the ideas that I have for my thesis. One of the things that has worried me recently, which is directly related to my tour of Europe, is the lack of public space in the truest sense of the word here in the United States. This of course is talked about at length in the article. In the article they talk about the privatization of public space and this seems to me to be the main killer of American public space. Shopping malls, movie theaters and even grocery stores have replaced the need for public space.

While I was studying abroad in Florence I decided on a Sunday to take the train to Bologna, just north of Florence. I arrived around 9 to find the city without people. I wandered around for a few hours finally finding their main green space within the city center. Here is where all the people were. People of all ages were doing every activity possible in this relatively small park. I sat there for almost two hours just watching people and thinking about why I had never seen anything like this in America.

The conclusion that I came to was that suburbia killed the American park. It still survives in places like New York and Boston where the density is still high and land is scarce. But in most of the country, and most of the places I have lived, everyone had a front or back yard. This negates any reason for going to a public park. Besides the fact that parents no longer have to keep a close eye on their children because they are only in the backyard, and thus spending less time with them, gone are the opportunities for chance encounters that only happen within the public realm. This has, possibly more than anything else, caused families to be segregated from each other. Now those chance encounters are happening at the supermarkets and shopping malls. But many Americans, including myself, wouldn’t even recognize some of their neighbors if they ran into them at the market. Each house with its white picket fence becomes its own gated community, keeping in the children and keeping out the unwanted. Now the twenty-first century parks are enclosed and surrounded by The Gap, Best Buy and Walmart. This trend cannot last as more and more people are moving to cities.

"Shopping"

based on the essay "Shopping", in the book, Mutations by Rem Koolhaas and Harvard Project on the City

This essay seeks to make it blaringly apparent that economy, and specifically shopping drives our world. It starts with the quote, “Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity.” This is a strong statement. As the normative public parks of cities are shrinking in favor of density, shopping centers are becoming more important for the urban dweller. Malls are the new public arenas. No one meets in the park anymore, the mall is the default meeting place.

It is interesting to trace the lineage of the shopping mall. It started as a simple store, then developed in a marketplace, then an arcade, and then finally a modern mall. Each one of these steps comes with a new technological innovation. The example most discussed in the essay is air conditioning. AC allowed people to enter an alienated interior space, completely separate themselves from the outside and shop. And this could happen for multiple hours at a time. Before the advent of AC there was no sense of getting lost in time when shopping, now you could spend a whole day in a mall and not realize it (and more importantly spend more money).

There is an interesting turn in the article when it goes from shopping=malls to everything=shopping. This outlines how shopping has taken over our world and forced a new design of cities. No longer are there just malls for shopping. Airports, museums, theme parks, libraries, schools and hospitals are all becoming almost indistinguishable from malls in a lot of ways. Shopping is the lifeblood of the 21^st century city.

Finally the article drops a depressing hammer. After fifty pages of making the case that shopping is transforming our society, it brings the reader to a halt with the statement that shopping is always almost obsolete. As much as the mall is important to American society, it is not a necessity meaning it could disappear tomorrow with any number of devastating events. This would be catastrophic to cities that have embraced shopping (aka almost every major and mid-level city in the world). I am not speaking of being catastrophic in the sense of economy (although it certainly would be) but in the sense of public space. In the last 60 years, there has been a transformation of the public space (and public domain) from the street to the mall. If the malls were to suddenly become obsolete the public would be homeless because the street has been handed over to the car.

Where will the evolution of public space take us next?

Why do we rely so much on a transient process for public interaction?

"Perverse Space"

based on the essay "Perverse Space" by Victor Burgin, in the book, Sexuality and Space

The essay, “Perverse Space” begins by discussing the photograph by Helmut Newton called, Self-portrait with wife June and models, shown here. The importance of this photograph is two-fold. First it allows Burgin to critique how modern critics speak of the “objectification” of this photo whereas in the past it was only the casual “masculine gaze” that was important. The shift from a mild gaze to intense objectification has led to censorship and exclusion (i.e. political correctness) in contemporary society. Secondly, the author brings up this piece of art to segway into the discussion of denotation vs. connotation. Denotation is the explicit or direct meaning of something. In this photo we see the female nude figure, both from the front and back, the photographer, a clothed female figure sitting on the right, etc. Connotation is the underlying meaning behind the things you immediately see. For example, the clothes on the floor implies that the female undressed hurriedly suggesting a feeling of being naked (as opposed to nude) and thus making the image about not the figure as form, but as something much deeper. Denoting can be done by anyone. It’s a matter of pointing out what is going on around you. Connoting takes intelligence and knowledge. This is where photographing nudes becomes a problem. To some (and often way too many), they see a naked woman or man and are “offended” by the stark nudity. They don’t get beyond this. For the intellectual the first question should be “why is this figure nude and what does it signify?”

Buildings work on a connotation/denotation level as well. Far to often though a building is designed by the unintelligent. These people don’t see what they are doing as a way to implicating something much deeper. Connotation is a way to reference history, society, contemporary thought and so much more, but all this is lost when you only think of a window as something you pick out of an Anderson or Pella catalog.

What do you gain from objectifying a building?

Can a building support a connotation on level of an inside joke, with an apparent second meaning (similar to someone like Georgia O’Keefe)?

Manifesto (First Draft)

ANTI-COMMUNITY

Architecture has a problem, an overabundance of  “community spaces.” It seems that every building that is designed these days has some area marked off as public or community space when in reality, most of the time it is no more than a lobby into the building. Architects have this utopian idea that if a space is labeled “community” on a drawing, somehow this will open it up to all sorts of users. This does not work.

The next two topics help define anti-community. The question that I raise is:

Can a building with a morally questionable program (in terms of a “prude” society) support or survive within the public realm?

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACE

The end of public versus private space is close at hand. That is if you define public space as a space open to everyone and space that can’t be owned. What is taking its place is called collective space.

Collective Space: Previously called public space. Nowadays, the relation between property and use has disappeared. Private property is used publicly (shopping centers, airports, etc.) and vice versa. Public space is absorbed by private space. A new reality is created in which the collective, an ample group of individuals, is the only constant characteristic.[1]

This mixing of public and private space is creating a new breed of architecture, one that is simultaneously private and public.

Will this make places like the public square extinct?

What happens at the intersection on the public and private?

VICES, SPECIFICALLY SEX

One of my more recent interests that developed has been sex in terms of a vice and in relation to society. This started as I gained interest in fine art nude photography. As I dove deeper into the subject, I saw how nudity (and the association with sex) made a lot of people uncomfortable. This is intriguing. Here is something that everyone is familiar with and sees on a regular basis (a nude figure) and it offends some people.  This was compounded when for our semester ending exhibit on campus we were told we couldn’t show any nudity. After this I began researching sex in terms of society and saw that this idea of prude-ness and censorship is prevalent in the U.S. especially.

This made me start to think about buildings (programs) that evoke these same emotions. Places like brothels, casinos, strip clubs and even bars are morally wrong to groups of people.

How do these buildings respond to these issues architecturally? 

How can these buildings progress the good aspects of vices?

What happens when these spaces “intrude” on the public?

Architectural Themes:

·       Privatization of Public Space

·       Publicization of Private Space

·       Ambiguity between public and private space

·       Building censorship

Theoretical Position:

·       Can a building that historically hides its program, act as a promoter in the public realm?

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[1] “The Metopolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture” pg. 563