I was wondering if anyone had any idea why representation and concept in architecture has seemingly switched very rapidly from process and system-based explorations to black and white plan oblique, formal/object based explorations? Return to critical practice?
Simple. It's because when you have nothing real to present it's best to abstract it to the point of absurdity. This masks the underlying emptiness of the scheme and positions the architect as an artist, especially when the scheme is justified with pseudointellectual bullshit.
The audience is for the most part a willing accomplice, unable to understand either the scheme or the bullshit and afraid to expose their ignorance by admitting it.
That's an opinion for sure...but you could probably say the same thing about the parametrics, "systems" people, ie that it's just a bunch of bullshit spewed out and justified by the computer. I'm more interested in what is bringing a resurgence in this stuff rather than if it is, (or ever was) valid.
You can say the same thing about parametrics, or the majority of it.
Most of those illustrations are pointless. The first one makes sense being represented as an ortho-pro because the point is to illustrate the different roof pitches, and this is probably the most easily digestible way to show that. There's really nothing to be learned from the others.
I tend to agree with you Alien 8, but again my original question is not the validity of the drawings or the concepts but rather why there is a return to this kind of representation. I typically get invited to reviews at architecture schools and in the last year there has been a dramatic shift - all the students are doing these kind of drawings again. After years of seeing voronoi cells in various configurations I'm wondering what caused the sudden shift and would like to hear others' thoughts.
What year level at these arch schools are doing these types of drawings? In my first year in undergrad there was a heavy emphasis on students learning different drawing techniques and the advantages/disadvantages of different drawings.
Maybe some students are using ortho-pro to better illustrate aspects of their projects, maybe it's the professors, who likely were in school when this was popular, that are influencing the students' work, or maybe some students just think they look cool and use them as filler to create the illusion of work/thinking.
Your first example is the only one I've "noticed" recently because it is a useful illustration of the idea, most others have just been noise that get passed over.
^ Exactly. On one level it is the failure of any building to live up to it's original PIXAR presentation. On another it's the completion elimination of the viewer's imagination in the viewing of such images. On still another it is simply a matter of style - if you're doing is what everyone else is doing you're not being original (insert long rant on architectural education here).
The real question is we will see a return to the post-modern garbage that followed the first incarnation of isometric presentation? The tool shapes the work.
Well, exactly, if this what you're seeing, this is back to Eisenman's/Rowe's redux interest in studying form for form sake in isolation - knowledge of form as getting at what they think is the core interior of the disciplinary knowledge of architecture. But the interest in form without discussing background process perhaps reflects a shift in what I heard Jeffery Kipness say last year, where he said he wasn't interested in discussing process, he was interested in discussing the qualities or formal affects or as he says 'gloss' produced by that final form. So these drawings are perhaps being used for the purpose of disussing the resultant form and it's spatial affects.
Speaking as someone who was very much invested in putting much effort into the final design solution/form/concept in school, I'd say that it could not have been produced without the exploratory process; and that process was always very interesting, and i can't see how i could've ignored showing those drawings when talking about the project.
Of course in practice the opposite is going on, formal discussion relates to its ethical responsiblity to respond to problems, pressures and constraints outside of itself. That is, buildings that consider form as an restorative response to the damage done to the environment, sustainable architecture, or damage in cities, architecture that looks at urban ills and introduce building programmes that help restore cities. Or there is human factors architecture/people architecture, where a buildings form/layout is determined by habitatabilty or responding from the particularties of client/user experience. Or even evidence based design, where the study of how people actually use space and optomize space dictates form. And this dicotomy was pointed out in a lecture by Rice Dean Sarah Whitting, where she notices in some schools there's an interest in the architectural object in itself as knowledge, and others where architecture has an ethical responsibility to solve practical problems by searching for them and building up this kind knowledge.
Have to agree with many of Miles points. I think in a weird way because "realism" is really damn easy in the computer now - maybe for educational purposes, to ensure as the instructor the student is thinking about the process, or to at least require evidence of thinking about the process, this black/white iso communication may be required......the danger as Miles suggest is when this "style" becomes the language of architecture.
Is there a some sort of piggybacking on Sol Lewitt on PE's work one might also ask. There is also a well known article by Rosalind Krauss called Grids.
I think you all raise some really good points. Seems like an interest or a return to formal investigations and the autonomy of architecture as opposed to the computer or the process dictating the final form.
I think Miles' question is really interesting though - if we are here again, what has changed? Will we have to cycle through post modernism again? And what did we actually learn from Eisenman the first time around? After 15 years of digital exploration, are we just supposed to accept the formal arguments as truth again? Or is this a new version?
What's funny to me is why we went straight back to the 70s and 80s and not say, the 50s or 60s. It's still so recent.
And Alien 8, these drawings are across the board - ie not part of some introductory representation classes but undergrad, grad, every year. And the drawings I linked to are not student drawings but the sort of new US young avant garde offices. So it's not the old guard teaching this but the new one.
What is the age of the new guard? Are we talking mid-thirties, mid-forties or mid-fifties? If mid-forties and mid-fifties it makes perfect sense - first they fought the change to computers, lost, adapted or even became enchanted, came to position of influence while the old died off and now for nostalgic reasons perhaps returned to the days of ink on mylar when a good ISO could make the jury swoon? If mid-thirties, its because it takes 5 seconds between Revit, Sketchup, and photoshop to make such an image, which makes older generations believe they are witnessing a great presentation of the design process and reinforcing their belief in abstracted form and space.
Actually, boy in a well, it's not trash, but thanks for trolling.
It's a legitimate question. After about fifteen years of seeing parametrically/digitally produced projects emphasizing process and systems represented with renders, diagrams, and color, I have this year started seeing a complete return to an obsession with shape and form that has been generated from grids/platonic solids represented by black and white oblique projected drawings.
All I'm asking is if anyone has a theory about why. Why a return to THIS particular period, why NOW.
So far I've seen it mainly at architecture schools, in the latest issue of Log journal, the journals Project and San Rocco, the work of the faculty at SCI Arc and UCLA, and Syracuse, and a new interest in the philosophy of Speculative Realism by people like Michael Speaks.
I definitely have - right now there are many answers, some defensive, some dismissing quite broadly the last fifteen years of work.
I was curious to hear if others in the profession had an opinion.
The main reasons I have been hearing that it is mainly a reaction to the people that were obsessed with the "truth" of the digital process, ie, you plug something in, and you get something out, and that form is "good" or "true" because the computer said so. They are rejecting that and using architecture's own language and syntax (grids/geometry/representation) to create form.
Again, I am not questioning the validity of either method with this thread, more what people's own thoughts were of this new trend.
The parametric vs formalist/deconstructive argument is a lot like a dispute between different religious peoples, and I'm not interested in adopting either, because I do question the validity of both.
I second Olaf's suggestion, "because it takes 5 seconds between Revit, Sketchup, and photoshop to make such an image..." and add that many just aren't interested in questioning what they see/hear/read, that because something is "popular" is all the reason they need to do it.
Ha this is great, formalist/deconstructive methods are trending as representation fashion, pretending to have substance?..... Like cover songs of cover songs where the trendy people accuse the original song writer of plagiarism. What is blues music?
Look for interviews with kersten geers/david van severen. And for sure SAN ROCCO magazine. They are reacting against the idea that the diagram can make a building, against excess, against post rationalization. They seem to be searching for compositional principles and formal archetypes. Making sure architectural language has autonomy. Banal/background architecture coming to the foreground.
Naturally, representational techniques then follow this mindset.
Their philosophy is best summed up as follows: “While every attempt of making architecture seems to drift off in rhetorics of programmatic organization and ironic provocation, form and space as such have become a rare good. In our projects we try to counter this by making direct and precise spatial proposals, formal compositions without rhetoric. This literal architecture aims for a phenomenological experience, perhaps despite of its program.”
Don't lump the work of my alma matter (SCI-ARC) with that bunch. Syracuse has become the home of west coast nobodies who couldn't cut it in the real world.
I've bothered to check the links and see no coherent anything. burden's on you, zoolander, far as im concerned, to demonstrate why your small sample size demonstrates anything about the culture at large, let alone about any sort of 'truth', procedural or digital or whatever, in your sample set. Whose afraid of an axo anyway? Is Choisy giggling in his grave? Or is he drowning in shitty laser projected bjarke diagrams? Your thread still stinks.
eisenman redux
I was wondering if anyone had any idea why representation and concept in architecture has seemingly switched very rapidly from process and system-based explorations to black and white plan oblique, formal/object based explorations? Return to critical practice?
Any thoughts?
pics or it didn't happen.
technology
yeah I'm not seeing it....pics?
here are some pics....
as well as conferences, exhibitions, journals...I'm interested to see if anyone knows why this is re-emerging....
http://archinect.com/news/article/93727634/possible-mediums-exhibition
http://archinect.com/features/article/104868902/screen-print-21-log-31-new-ancients
http://www.jonathanlouie.com/2014/04/09/parti-wall/
Simple. It's because when you have nothing real to present it's best to abstract it to the point of absurdity. This masks the underlying emptiness of the scheme and positions the architect as an artist, especially when the scheme is justified with pseudointellectual bullshit.
The audience is for the most part a willing accomplice, unable to understand either the scheme or the bullshit and afraid to expose their ignorance by admitting it.
That's an opinion for sure...but you could probably say the same thing about the parametrics, "systems" people, ie that it's just a bunch of bullshit spewed out and justified by the computer. I'm more interested in what is bringing a resurgence in this stuff rather than if it is, (or ever was) valid.
You can say the same thing about parametrics, or the majority of it.
Most of those illustrations are pointless. The first one makes sense being represented as an ortho-pro because the point is to illustrate the different roof pitches, and this is probably the most easily digestible way to show that. There's really nothing to be learned from the others.
I tend to agree with you Alien 8, but again my original question is not the validity of the drawings or the concepts but rather why there is a return to this kind of representation. I typically get invited to reviews at architecture schools and in the last year there has been a dramatic shift - all the students are doing these kind of drawings again. After years of seeing voronoi cells in various configurations I'm wondering what caused the sudden shift and would like to hear others' thoughts.
Thanks.
Why the sudden resurgence in 80's fashion?
Because people who copy have been told that's what's worth copying.
What year level at these arch schools are doing these types of drawings? In my first year in undergrad there was a heavy emphasis on students learning different drawing techniques and the advantages/disadvantages of different drawings.
Maybe some students are using ortho-pro to better illustrate aspects of their projects, maybe it's the professors, who likely were in school when this was popular, that are influencing the students' work, or maybe some students just think they look cool and use them as filler to create the illusion of work/thinking.
Your first example is the only one I've "noticed" recently because it is a useful illustration of the idea, most others have just been noise that get passed over.
Geometric precision over atmosphere ?
^ Exactly. On one level it is the failure of any building to live up to it's original PIXAR presentation. On another it's the completion elimination of the viewer's imagination in the viewing of such images. On still another it is simply a matter of style - if you're doing is what everyone else is doing you're not being original (insert long rant on architectural education here).
The real question is we will see a return to the post-modern garbage that followed the first incarnation of isometric presentation? The tool shapes the work.
They are analytical and much easier to critique for their geometry than for their experiential qualities.
No idea where this takes us ?
Towards new ideas of form ?
Well, exactly, if this what you're seeing, this is back to Eisenman's/Rowe's redux interest in studying form for form sake in isolation - knowledge of form as getting at what they think is the core interior of the disciplinary knowledge of architecture. But the interest in form without discussing background process perhaps reflects a shift in what I heard Jeffery Kipness say last year, where he said he wasn't interested in discussing process, he was interested in discussing the qualities or formal affects or as he says 'gloss' produced by that final form. So these drawings are perhaps being used for the purpose of disussing the resultant form and it's spatial affects.
Speaking as someone who was very much invested in putting much effort into the final design solution/form/concept in school, I'd say that it could not have been produced without the exploratory process; and that process was always very interesting, and i can't see how i could've ignored showing those drawings when talking about the project.
Of course in practice the opposite is going on, formal discussion relates to its ethical responsiblity to respond to problems, pressures and constraints outside of itself. That is, buildings that consider form as an restorative response to the damage done to the environment, sustainable architecture, or damage in cities, architecture that looks at urban ills and introduce building programmes that help restore cities. Or there is human factors architecture/people architecture, where a buildings form/layout is determined by habitatabilty or responding from the particularties of client/user experience. Or even evidence based design, where the study of how people actually use space and optomize space dictates form. And this dicotomy was pointed out in a lecture by Rice Dean Sarah Whitting, where she notices in some schools there's an interest in the architectural object in itself as knowledge, and others where architecture has an ethical responsibility to solve practical problems by searching for them and building up this kind knowledge.
Have to agree with many of Miles points. I think in a weird way because "realism" is really damn easy in the computer now - maybe for educational purposes, to ensure as the instructor the student is thinking about the process, or to at least require evidence of thinking about the process, this black/white iso communication may be required......the danger as Miles suggest is when this "style" becomes the language of architecture.
Is there a some sort of piggybacking on Sol Lewitt on PE's work one might also ask. There is also a well known article by Rosalind Krauss called Grids.
I think you all raise some really good points. Seems like an interest or a return to formal investigations and the autonomy of architecture as opposed to the computer or the process dictating the final form.
I think Miles' question is really interesting though - if we are here again, what has changed? Will we have to cycle through post modernism again? And what did we actually learn from Eisenman the first time around? After 15 years of digital exploration, are we just supposed to accept the formal arguments as truth again? Or is this a new version?
What's funny to me is why we went straight back to the 70s and 80s and not say, the 50s or 60s. It's still so recent.
And Alien 8, these drawings are across the board - ie not part of some introductory representation classes but undergrad, grad, every year. And the drawings I linked to are not student drawings but the sort of new US young avant garde offices. So it's not the old guard teaching this but the new one.
still not convinced.
What is the age of the new guard? Are we talking mid-thirties, mid-forties or mid-fifties? If mid-forties and mid-fifties it makes perfect sense - first they fought the change to computers, lost, adapted or even became enchanted, came to position of influence while the old died off and now for nostalgic reasons perhaps returned to the days of ink on mylar when a good ISO could make the jury swoon? If mid-thirties, its because it takes 5 seconds between Revit, Sketchup, and photoshop to make such an image, which makes older generations believe they are witnessing a great presentation of the design process and reinforcing their belief in abstracted form and space.
@boy in a well head over to this student blog, the sole image is a black and white. http://archinect.com/mdlocblog/the-new-school-of-medicine-for-ucla
What's funny to me is why we went straight back to the 70s and 80s and not say, the 50s or 60s. It's still so recent.
The lauded professors teaching now are the same people who were in school learning that shit 35 years ago. Garbage in, garbage out.
Miles confirmed the age - mid-fifties - that's the new guard?
this thread is trash.
non-event puffed-up by the opportunity to spout idiotic preconceptions.
if you sit a monkey down at a computer, it will not produce literature.-peter eisenman.
Peter eisenman is a monkey
A couple of monkeys at cad terminals could produce better work.
Actually, boy in a well, it's not trash, but thanks for trolling.
It's a legitimate question. After about fifteen years of seeing parametrically/digitally produced projects emphasizing process and systems represented with renders, diagrams, and color, I have this year started seeing a complete return to an obsession with shape and form that has been generated from grids/platonic solids represented by black and white oblique projected drawings.
All I'm asking is if anyone has a theory about why. Why a return to THIS particular period, why NOW.
I've not seen anything resembling this "trend" you speak of.
So far I've seen it mainly at architecture schools, in the latest issue of Log journal, the journals Project and San Rocco, the work of the faculty at SCI Arc and UCLA, and Syracuse, and a new interest in the philosophy of Speculative Realism by people like Michael Speaks.
It hasn't quite made it out of academia yet.
If you are sitting in juries with students putting out this work and the professors teaching them, why not ask them why they make these drawings?
I definitely have - right now there are many answers, some defensive, some dismissing quite broadly the last fifteen years of work.
I was curious to hear if others in the profession had an opinion.
The main reasons I have been hearing that it is mainly a reaction to the people that were obsessed with the "truth" of the digital process, ie, you plug something in, and you get something out, and that form is "good" or "true" because the computer said so. They are rejecting that and using architecture's own language and syntax (grids/geometry/representation) to create form.
Again, I am not questioning the validity of either method with this thread, more what people's own thoughts were of this new trend.
The parametric vs formalist/deconstructive argument is a lot like a dispute between different religious peoples, and I'm not interested in adopting either, because I do question the validity of both.
I second Olaf's suggestion, "because it takes 5 seconds between Revit, Sketchup, and photoshop to make such an image..." and add that many just aren't interested in questioning what they see/hear/read, that because something is "popular" is all the reason they need to do it.
Ha this is great, formalist/deconstructive methods are trending as representation fashion, pretending to have substance?..... Like cover songs of cover songs where the trendy people accuse the original song writer of plagiarism. What is blues music?
Look for interviews with kersten geers/david van severen. And for sure SAN ROCCO magazine. They are reacting against the idea that the diagram can make a building, against excess, against post rationalization. They seem to be searching for compositional principles and formal archetypes. Making sure architectural language has autonomy. Banal/background architecture coming to the foreground.
Naturally, representational techniques then follow this mindset.
Their philosophy is best summed up as follows: “While every attempt of making architecture seems to drift off in rhetorics of programmatic organization and ironic provocation, form and space as such have become a rare good. In our projects we try to counter this by making direct and precise spatial proposals, formal compositions without rhetoric. This literal architecture aims for a phenomenological experience, perhaps despite of its program.”
Phenomenological rhetoric.
Don't lump the work of my alma matter (SCI-ARC) with that bunch. Syracuse has become the home of west coast nobodies who couldn't cut it in the real world.
maybe somebody found a copy of House of Cards at a used bookstore.
I've bothered to check the links and see no coherent anything. burden's on you, zoolander, far as im concerned, to demonstrate why your small sample size demonstrates anything about the culture at large, let alone about any sort of 'truth', procedural or digital or whatever, in your sample set. Whose afraid of an axo anyway? Is Choisy giggling in his grave? Or is he drowning in shitty laser projected bjarke diagrams? Your thread still stinks.
Not sure why you insist on being insulting.
Not sure why you insist you have a point.
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