Let me get this straight: you're asking architects for information about people who willfully trash architecture, crap up the visual environment with irritating noise, and think it's somehow cool and interesting? No thank you. Try worldstarhiphop.com. It might be more your speed.

Immediately relating graffiti to black culture and not poverty.

http://www.monopoleinc.com/catalog/index.php?action=viewprod&num=77#

gwharton -

Please, tell me, when was the last time you've seen graffiti on a beautiful piece of architecture?

I grew up on the streets so understand your interest. But I've come to think this topic sounds much more provocative than it actually is.

For example the cultural references in graffiti are very pop culture, stereotypical, sometimes dumb, and postmodern ironic. The most interesting research on graffiti that I've seen has been sociological. The architectural relationships are usually metaphorical.

What do you mean by   
"I have chosen to explore graffiti culture in a search to create a means of refuge through architecture'" 
Are you trying recreate five pointz?

I think there are many other, more beneficial, countercultural movements at this time than graff. But maybe I'm getting old.

If you're that interested, there is this book. It basically shows examples of different mediums for graffiti. A tag as building for example. 
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Calligraphy-Beyond-Markus-Mai/dp/3899550625

these guys guys too, 
http://www.itnarchitects.com/folio/main.php?g2_itemId=2553

The artist DAIM has also done some landscape work using his name

why say graffiti has to make the architecture worse?

There have been proposals, talks, and implementations for "graffiti zones" before for buildings. I think I read they tend to attract more graffiti artists as opposed to the taggers that scare Mr. Wharton.

This is acceptable in architecture:


This is heresy:

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
-Banksy

It seems more architects are afraid of graffiti, not because it is a scratch on their pristine masterpiece, but  because it is a direct hit at their ego telling them how shitty our environment really is and that their contribution was better painted by someone else than what they could have done on their own.

I did my thesis on bathroom graffiti as means of bladder refuge and 12 years later I own my very own port-a-potty!

Just gonna leave this here...

The painted walls of San Bartolo are, in my  humble opinion, history's most bad ass murals (http://www.flickr.com/photos/doncoyote/sets/72157608783430242/with/3014831585/). There are many other painted walls that were, are, and will continue to be enjoyed by millions of people (all the while millions have, are, and will continue to remain ignorant to the existence of these and other countless painted walls).

Try to look past the anger that someone painted your property or project, challenging your authority. Perhaps the new paintjob isn't what's making that old rickety fence look bad. Even if it's a shiny new storefront - someone felt unwelcome enough to want to 'hit it' - but you can't try to please everyone, and neither can the guy with the spray can! I'm guessing the overall quality of the urban environment and vandalism statistics would both improve should the builders of today seek to commission the best contemporary painters to adorn their 'products', rather than outlawing an activity that has been a central aspect of the multiple expressions of culture our species has collectively invented since crawling into a cave.
Le Corbusier gave so much shit about this, he painted his own garage doors:

I wonder how many idiots scrawl something stupid on this church!

Come check out Melbourne. Graffiti is actively commissioned by the city and forms an integral part of the laneway aesthetic. I agree w/ metal that there are more interesting counter-cultural movements to pursue at this point, as graffiti is already alive and well accepted down here.

crap taggers tagged the building next to me a few years ago .. the building ain't Architecture but the tagging also ain't Art.

hey i think we can agree if a city commisions 'graffiti' for a blank wall it's different than the hack kids who tagged the building across from me.

and, speaking of corb and graffiti, this is for 1-post <username> jungle up there: http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/070613oubrerie.asp

Also, OP, if you want an actual answer to your question check out 12ozprohet.com

Touche FRaC

I have two thoughts about graffiti and architecture:

First, in relation to Robert Smithson's concept of entropy, look at Bernard Tschumi's account of his visit to Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Architecture and Transgression (1976) in which he finds a sort of pleasure/transcendence in its state of decay: “Stinking of urine, smeared with excrement and covered with obscene graffiti...the Villa Savoye was never so moving as when the plaster fell off its concrete blocks.”

A second, more contemporary thought is about a growing trend of guerilla artists creating non-permanent "digital graffiti" via digital projections and using the facades of building as a surface for projecting political statements and art installations.

There is also this guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5MEC5MPjvg

yeah crap tagging is frowned upon even in the graff world, no skill whatsoever.

*I would think crap tagging is frowned upon even in the graff world, no skill whatsoever.

is this tagging?

To the above, if it was illegal, definitely. I think graffiti is about making a disruptive statement in a counter-cultural manner (really like that term). Billboards happen through a "proper" social process, so I think they're more about an established form of visual communication, like Randh points out.

But In many ways graffiti culture has infiltrated our everyday lives. Graffiti has played a role in things like motion graphics and communications design. Walk into any big name advertising agency and you will meet people who have a street culture background. The creative class has basically digested spraypaint graffiti.

I'm willing to bet that Frac's examples are gang graffiti, or the shenanigans of a few underclass middle schoolers. Bear in mind though, that good things still emerge from the bottom. One day those troublemakers might be doing graphics for Fox news billboards, or study psychiatry in an attempt to understand their childhood behavior (any stats on this?)

Yeah, with all this irony it is difficult not to get PoMo about graffiti.

This video relates to a link metal posted (ITN architects), and maybe to what intotheloop is referring to.

http://vimeo.com/49149385

You guy's are realy funny, first you reject building methods that profit from the computers calculating potential to slice a buildable structure out of the Solids _some_ of you can maneage and want to stay with building methods and aproaches towerds the structure as it was "modern" a hundred years ago,  -- shape modern wonders with oldfasion technikes and use bullying to keep more visionary away, and now you reject the art to unfold with new inspiration just it remind you that modern world are different than how the old Dutch painters illustrated life..

You keep talking about "Graffiti" as if that will ever evolve, you don't even mention that the most skilled og Graffiti long ago went into Streetart and in your critic you forget how each and every painter today, are So inspired" by Graffiti.

Please let me put up an example about how "Graffiti" and architecture will wotk perfect together ;

Image you move from a flat into a new. Then the last thing you do in your old flat is to paint over your Murals, in your new flat, the first thing you do is to put up the Arts Stencils you bought becaurse they are cheaper than a modern painting even more expensive than a Poster, but the Stencil are bigger than a tradisional oil painting it is numbered and yours,  --- You spray it yourself with Graffiti Spraypaint and in 20 years, the big Stencil is still perfect -- it just replaced the tradisional oil painting eith a wall painting. The artist that cut the Stencil just see the Stencil as "The work"  and it is a compleatly new aproach to having art on the walls. 

So "Graffiti" are justvandalism and foul ? You reject to see Graffiti as "The inspiration" most modern painters see it as.  And "Graffiti" have no place in modern architecture ?

I think it has .

If you have any additional questions email me [email protected]

GI/GIAM (Graffiti Idenity and Graffiti Identification and Analysis Methods) Graffiti Fighter – 2012 Resources Guide, Stop Urban Blight, pg 19

Tag 18.3 – Graffiti and Its Vandalism Characteristics (January 2011), by Ken Davis

Graffiti http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_culture

; 

doug graf is a cop?!?

"You guy's are realy funny, first you reject building methods that profit from the computers calculating potential to slice a buildable structure out of the Solids _some_ of you can maneage and want to stay with building methods and aproaches towerds the structure as it was "modern" a hundred years ago,  -- shape modern wonders with oldfasion technikes and use bullying to keep more visionary away, and now you reject the art to unfold with new inspiration just it remind you that modern world are different than how the old Dutch painters illustrated life"

huh?

watched a cool doc. last night called "Bomb It"  and thought of this thead.  check it out. 

One guy (I think it was Marc Ecko) stated that graffiti is always the enemy because it is easy to erase unlike poverty, failing schools, etc. 

What about 3D Graffiti (Graffiti Technica’s videos)?

http://vimeo.com/14922378