Can anybody recommend a book or article that speaks in somewhat phenomenological/poetic terms about such things as carpentry, pouring concrete, working with tools, the spirit of the construction site, etc? I'm looking for something like Zumthor's "Thinking Architecture" as if it was written by a contractor. I think a somewhat rhapsodic take on the physical act of making a building is just what I need to counter all these RFIs rolling in.
I don't have anything more topical to contribute but I did think it was an interesting, if a bit worshipful, portrait. Maybe it will be more inspiring than RFI's.
I don't know if this has anything to do with what you're looking for - but what about that book by ETH professor Andrea Deplazes 'Constructing Architecture'? Its more of a reference/manual, sort of Neufert's style, but with love of materials apparently. I haven't read it, but I was at a lecture in London about new Swiss arch, and he was plugging his book while presenting work done in his class, and how much they study materials in switzerland... Might be worth a go?
I found a similar books on one of those bookstores around Columbus circle last time I was in DC, the book has a compilation of letter written by FLW to contractor and clients,
Some of the are hilarious!! like the letter to “Bob†the job superintendent on the Kaufmann residence telling him to place some 2x under the cantilevered balconies to satisfy the building inspectors inquiries and to removed them after he had left the site,
Or the one about why “white†was the not a color but all the colors to the Geggenheims while working on the museum in NYC
Good stuff
Shambloks:
I recently bought "Constructing Architecture". It's a very interesting (and extensive) book on the culture of constructing buildings - very swiss so to say. What I particularly like is that it jumps between detailing and architecture history, between building physics and asthetics. An honest book.
frankencense looks for an alternative to one swiss architect, and all that's on offer is another one! Is Switzerland the only place they aren't afraid to be in love with building?! I wish there were more schools that meditated on materials like they do... Sorry I'm off subject
this would be a good book to have if anyone comes up with one to recommend. if there isn't one, maybe one of us should get crackin' writing it right now. (small print run, though.)
There's also "Japanese Architecture as a collaborative process" by Dana Buntrock. More pragmatic than poetic, though. Somehow I think one can only find inspiring examples in countries with good contractors.
I'll try to elaborate what I'm looking for by something I've mused on:
A concrete slab pour is an emotional experience. It's the accelerated solidification of thought and manual labor. This thinking about top of slab, dead load & live load, plumbing block-outs, and mechanical chases, coupled with the physical labor of welding steel, hauling materials, carefully spacing rebar, crafting formworks, and cutting pipe--all of this gets encased in a sloppy avalanche of rock, lime, water, and cement, binding all that work together within a matter of minutes. As the concrete truck dumps out concrete and workmen furiously spread it around, the visceral fear of disaster reaches its creshendo. The relief of a successful pour, after all surfaces are nicely smoothed out, and the several hours of sustained fear is over, is not unlike how one feels after having wept all day upon the death of a terminally-ill loved one.
I guess if no such book exists, I invite everyone to share their own musings on the phenomenology of the jobsite. What aesthetic experiences have you had while witnessing or participating in the act of building?
frankencense I wish I could be more help, I'll be excited to hear what others come up with! I enjoy what you wrote above re: the stress level and imminent disaster during a pour.
At risk of everyone slapping me for being so repetitive, I'll link to this previous thread re: concrete where I posted some of the famous Schjeldahl essay on concrete, jeepers it's hot.
I think there is a section of Moby Dick (help me, vado!) that discusses at great length and in loving detail the various tools used in killing/treating the whale. Not jobsite tools but a love of the specificity of tool usage at least.
There was a movie starring/written by John Turturro called Mac that was a love letter to a father who built houses, it had some lovely images and words about the jobsite, the pounding of nails into 2x4s, etc. It's 15 years old so may seem pretty trite by now, I saw it when it first came out but remember it as a lovely movie. (totally not like that Kevin Klein life as a house one as I recall)
I know there is more, but let me think on it a bit. Great ide for a thread. I can say when concrete has just been poured I walk around the site breathing deep, what an amazing smell.
Take a half a year off and be a laborer. Pay is crap but usually enough to survive if you can find a halfway decent company. $12 in the CA Bay Area kept me alive for six months (landscaping).
i've been told by a couple contractors that a good way is to go w/ habitat. there you don't have to provide your own tools and they are pretty good about training.
Thanks Liberty that Schjeldahl essay's exactly what I'm looking for! I put Mac on the netfix too.
I'll keep it going by saying: I love it when they do a full blown fire-alarm & smoke evac test for the fire inspector. All those fans kick in at full power, the air is being sucked out of the rooms, klaxons are blaring, strobes are flashing--it's as if the building is being pulled from the womb with forceps, giving its first screams upon birth. It even gets a birth certificate in the form of a C of O.
It's prosaic but I love the smell of wood dust all over a site during the finishing phase. One of the contractors we work with has a crew of dudes who run all the trim onsite (awesome!) and every time I walk in the basement there I am greated by the scent of freshly cut and shaped poplar/mahogany/white oak. I love it. I love the warm woodsiness of it, I love watching them run the blades, I love the check-and-recheck of fitting new trim onto existing doorways in a renovation, I love the pride these men take in their work.
One of my jobsites is only two blocks away from the office and I find myself wandering over there most afternoons just for a pick-me-up. That's probably the greatest thing about being an architect.
There are many sensory feeling that one encounters as a job gets going- my most favorite of all is seeing the trenches for the footings, the first gesture of what is to come- the culmination of those early sketches moving the building around in ones head and on drawings until it’s anchored at that point in time and place- like Mr. E. Moss said in one of his books…. those erogenous areas of a building are there for a precious moment only never to show their content again, but only to participate in the final outcome.
i love/hate that the effect of morning light coming through tyvek and framing (no sheathing, in this case) - a glowing wall softly lighting a sawdust covered concrete floor - created possibly the best architectural moment one of my projects will ever have.
Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it might be worthwhile to check out The Ontology of Construction by Gevork Hartoonian.
Blurb: Ontology of Construction explores theories of construction in modern architecture, focusing on the relationship between nihilism of technology and architecture. The essays articulate the implications of technology in works by such architects as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies Van der Rohe. Hartoonian also examines Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic and the relationship between architecture and other crafts. Emphasizing "fabrication" as a critical theme for contemporary architectural theory and practice, Ontology of Construction is a provocative contribution to the current debate in these areas.
"No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of."
A friend of mine helps young architecture students understand ways of building by classifying the inhabited world into two categories: spaces made by carving away at a mass, and spaces made by building up with pieces. There are even terms for this, I think the carved spaces are "stereotopic", and the stick-built are something that sounds similar that I can't remember or find online. Seems a useful way to classify the built world. However, when I look at one of my current jobs, a master suite/garage addition, and see this bit of wall/column:
it almost eludes those classifications. This beam support looks carved out of a mass of wood, like the tree has been dissected into manageable portions and reassembled with a chunk cut out for the beam seat. Dimensional lumber is an amazing material, so easy to assemble with two hands, so willing to gang together and try.
Which reminds me, I have an article somewhere, it's 12 years old at least, that discusses the 2x4 stick built house as representative of the American democratic system: a huge number of voices speaking as individuals, yet twisting and bending in resistance to outside forces and ultimately holding together as one. Let me see if I can find that, frankencense, you'd probably enjoy it. I remember it includes a photograph, taken from a cherry picker, of a few laborers surrounded by neat piles of the hand-sized materials they will assemble into a single family home.
lb, that sounds something like the article i mentioned just this week on another thread - i think it was called 'an american culture of construction' by tom peters, from perspecta.
I'm not sure what he's written, but there are numerous interviews and articles about one of my profs, Mark West, who does amazing things with fabric-formed concrete. Maybe his drawings tell the story better than his words, but he's still worth looking up
sorry...the image, from the jobsite, is a terraced garden space brings light into the cellar (which is otherwise subterranean). we issued the demo set today. bye bye garden.
one of our large projects right now includes the tear-off and reroofing of three buildings - a 145k sf multi-sectioned high school among them.
the roofers won't work in rainy or windy weather because the school is occupied, in operation, and they don't want to risk leaks during the ongoing work.
we've had particularly strange and damaging weather over the last couple of months but the construction manager told me this week - unabashed admiration in his voice - that the roofers hadn't made a bad prediction yet:
they showed up and it was clear,
they didn't show up (even if he questioned the decision) and it stormed.
100% accuracy rate.
these guys are all about understanding the conditions/life of the site, i think.
first - no one would ever use the wrod phenomology on a jobsite or about a jobsite or the process. Its not real. Second, the building is most interesting under construction. The temporary spaces and structures are most interesting. imagine what massive brick vaults and arches looked like while under construction, or marina city, a complex framework of scaffolds and planks - beautiful.
phenomology takes the position that feelings are more important than real things. This is how you end up with postmodernism, this is how end up with an ineffective government. This is dangerous shit - rooted in socialism no less.
phenomenology is about the relationship between real things, perception of real things, and how we process perception into meaning related to real things. you're using the word 'feelings' sort of as a pejorative, but, sure, how what we perceive makes us feel is part of it. it's the 'more important' part where you're wrong. in phenomenological terms, the feelings on their own don't cut it without those feelings being intimately relative to the real stuff.
how you get from this to pomo baffles me. phenomenological thinking would more likely pitch one toward:
-real stone with its particular texture, temperature, weight, etc than eifs;
-design that arises from and celebrates environmental conditions, materials, and relationships rather than knowledge of the past; and
-construction as a process of revealing construction rather than as a layering of surfaces that pretend to be something other than what they are.
ineffective gov't? wtf? you gotta give me more to even know what this could possibly mean.
lots of both good and bad things are rooted in a history of relationships with socialism. that's hardly a helpful/meaningful critique.
Theres making things, and thinking about making things, and when the feelings get before the goal, the real work the thing needs to do, not how I think it will feel, you have bad things - dishonest things being made.
phenomenology of the jobsite
Can anybody recommend a book or article that speaks in somewhat phenomenological/poetic terms about such things as carpentry, pouring concrete, working with tools, the spirit of the construction site, etc? I'm looking for something like Zumthor's "Thinking Architecture" as if it was written by a contractor. I think a somewhat rhapsodic take on the physical act of making a building is just what I need to counter all these RFIs rolling in.
when talking about problems on the jobsite. the phrase "it is what it is" often comes up. you can't get any more phenomenological than that.
I hate that phrase, because usually it doesn't/didn't have to be.
I came across a book on Corbusier today, apparently written in the 80s by one of his former protégés and published by the MIT press. It's called "Corbusier's Hands." It really in no way focuses on the building process, but it's basically a poetic collection of anecdotes about Corbu, and some of it relates to the building process.
I don't have anything more topical to contribute but I did think it was an interesting, if a bit worshipful, portrait. Maybe it will be more inspiring than RFI's.
I don't know if this has anything to do with what you're looking for - but what about that book by ETH professor Andrea Deplazes 'Constructing Architecture'? Its more of a reference/manual, sort of Neufert's style, but with love of materials apparently. I haven't read it, but I was at a lecture in London about new Swiss arch, and he was plugging his book while presenting work done in his class, and how much they study materials in switzerland... Might be worth a go?
I found a similar books on one of those bookstores around Columbus circle last time I was in DC, the book has a compilation of letter written by FLW to contractor and clients,
Some of the are hilarious!! like the letter to “Bob†the job superintendent on the Kaufmann residence telling him to place some 2x under the cantilevered balconies to satisfy the building inspectors inquiries and to removed them after he had left the site,
Or the one about why “white†was the not a color but all the colors to the Geggenheims while working on the museum in NYC
Good stuff
Ha ha, awesome! I love the fantastic disregard for paper trail in those days. Wish we could operate with that much freedom.
were those letters clarifications or responses to requests for information???
Shambloks:
I recently bought "Constructing Architecture". It's a very interesting (and extensive) book on the culture of constructing buildings - very swiss so to say. What I particularly like is that it jumps between detailing and architecture history, between building physics and asthetics. An honest book.
"it is what it is" and "done is beautiful"
frankencense looks for an alternative to one swiss architect, and all that's on offer is another one! Is Switzerland the only place they aren't afraid to be in love with building?! I wish there were more schools that meditated on materials like they do... Sorry I'm off subject
this would be a good book to have if anyone comes up with one to recommend. if there isn't one, maybe one of us should get crackin' writing it right now. (small print run, though.)
There's also "Japanese Architecture as a collaborative process" by Dana Buntrock. More pragmatic than poetic, though. Somehow I think one can only find inspiring examples in countries with good contractors.
Two words at our jobsite will get you far: 'F*** You' . Even further if you say it in Portuguese
Saves the cost of a book.
And call me a Vado 'suck-up' but I love: "It is what it is." Because it forces decisions.
I'll try to elaborate what I'm looking for by something I've mused on:
A concrete slab pour is an emotional experience. It's the accelerated solidification of thought and manual labor. This thinking about top of slab, dead load & live load, plumbing block-outs, and mechanical chases, coupled with the physical labor of welding steel, hauling materials, carefully spacing rebar, crafting formworks, and cutting pipe--all of this gets encased in a sloppy avalanche of rock, lime, water, and cement, binding all that work together within a matter of minutes. As the concrete truck dumps out concrete and workmen furiously spread it around, the visceral fear of disaster reaches its creshendo. The relief of a successful pour, after all surfaces are nicely smoothed out, and the several hours of sustained fear is over, is not unlike how one feels after having wept all day upon the death of a terminally-ill loved one.
I guess if no such book exists, I invite everyone to share their own musings on the phenomenology of the jobsite. What aesthetic experiences have you had while witnessing or participating in the act of building?
frankencense I wish I could be more help, I'll be excited to hear what others come up with! I enjoy what you wrote above re: the stress level and imminent disaster during a pour.
At risk of everyone slapping me for being so repetitive, I'll link to this previous thread re: concrete where I posted some of the famous Schjeldahl essay on concrete, jeepers it's hot.
I think there is a section of Moby Dick (help me, vado!) that discusses at great length and in loving detail the various tools used in killing/treating the whale. Not jobsite tools but a love of the specificity of tool usage at least.
There was a movie starring/written by John Turturro called Mac that was a love letter to a father who built houses, it had some lovely images and words about the jobsite, the pounding of nails into 2x4s, etc. It's 15 years old so may seem pretty trite by now, I saw it when it first came out but remember it as a lovely movie. (totally not like that Kevin Klein life as a house one as I recall)
I know there is more, but let me think on it a bit. Great ide for a thread. I can say when concrete has just been poured I walk around the site breathing deep, what an amazing smell.
forget the book...go do it yourself
Take a half a year off and be a laborer. Pay is crap but usually enough to survive if you can find a halfway decent company. $12 in the CA Bay Area kept me alive for six months (landscaping).
i've been told by a couple contractors that a good way is to go w/ habitat. there you don't have to provide your own tools and they are pretty good about training.
chapters 91-106 are the cetological chapters and contained within them are chapters to which refer miss lb...
Thanks Liberty that Schjeldahl essay's exactly what I'm looking for! I put Mac on the netfix too.
I'll keep it going by saying: I love it when they do a full blown fire-alarm & smoke evac test for the fire inspector. All those fans kick in at full power, the air is being sucked out of the rooms, klaxons are blaring, strobes are flashing--it's as if the building is being pulled from the womb with forceps, giving its first screams upon birth. It even gets a birth certificate in the form of a C of O.
It's prosaic but I love the smell of wood dust all over a site during the finishing phase. One of the contractors we work with has a crew of dudes who run all the trim onsite (awesome!) and every time I walk in the basement there I am greated by the scent of freshly cut and shaped poplar/mahogany/white oak. I love it. I love the warm woodsiness of it, I love watching them run the blades, I love the check-and-recheck of fitting new trim onto existing doorways in a renovation, I love the pride these men take in their work.
One of my jobsites is only two blocks away from the office and I find myself wandering over there most afternoons just for a pick-me-up. That's probably the greatest thing about being an architect.
I even love the smell of the bondo for patching. Ha ha! Smells on a construction site are wonderful.
There are many sensory feeling that one encounters as a job gets going- my most favorite of all is seeing the trenches for the footings, the first gesture of what is to come- the culmination of those early sketches moving the building around in ones head and on drawings until it’s anchored at that point in time and place- like Mr. E. Moss said in one of his books…. those erogenous areas of a building are there for a precious moment only never to show their content again, but only to participate in the final outcome.
i love/hate that the effect of morning light coming through tyvek and framing (no sheathing, in this case) - a glowing wall softly lighting a sawdust covered concrete floor - created possibly the best architectural moment one of my projects will ever have.
tyvek's covered up now.
Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it might be worthwhile to check out The Ontology of Construction by Gevork Hartoonian.
Blurb: Ontology of Construction explores theories of construction in modern architecture, focusing on the relationship between nihilism of technology and architecture. The essays articulate the implications of technology in works by such architects as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies Van der Rohe. Hartoonian also examines Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic and the relationship between architecture and other crafts. Emphasizing "fabrication" as a critical theme for contemporary architectural theory and practice, Ontology of Construction is a provocative contribution to the current debate in these areas.
"No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of."
This may have more to do with the nature of perception than phenomenology, but I hear "paint it white and you won't even see it" at least once a week.
A friend of mine helps young architecture students understand ways of building by classifying the inhabited world into two categories: spaces made by carving away at a mass, and spaces made by building up with pieces. There are even terms for this, I think the carved spaces are "stereotopic", and the stick-built are something that sounds similar that I can't remember or find online. Seems a useful way to classify the built world. However, when I look at one of my current jobs, a master suite/garage addition, and see this bit of wall/column:
it almost eludes those classifications. This beam support looks carved out of a mass of wood, like the tree has been dissected into manageable portions and reassembled with a chunk cut out for the beam seat. Dimensional lumber is an amazing material, so easy to assemble with two hands, so willing to gang together and try.
Which reminds me, I have an article somewhere, it's 12 years old at least, that discusses the 2x4 stick built house as representative of the American democratic system: a huge number of voices speaking as individuals, yet twisting and bending in resistance to outside forces and ultimately holding together as one. Let me see if I can find that, frankencense, you'd probably enjoy it. I remember it includes a photograph, taken from a cherry picker, of a few laborers surrounded by neat piles of the hand-sized materials they will assemble into a single family home.
lb, that sounds something like the article i mentioned just this week on another thread - i think it was called 'an american culture of construction' by tom peters, from perspecta.
Steven that does sound right - I feel like I remember the name of the author was this wonderful solid prosaic name, like Tom Peters.
Oh and look! Here is an article written by the friend of whom I speak that discusses the Tom Peters article and notions of stick building:
here
Resources resources resources the internet is so amazing.
lb... one of my undergrad professors used the same analogies of carving away at a mass vs. building up with pieces...
the words that he used were stereotomic and architectonic...
i thought this was a thread about eating off of burrito trucks and pooping in overflowing porto-lets
Bump.
Because these are the things I'm thinking about again recently and this was a lovely thread.
At least it was until mdler showed up ;-)
I'm not sure what he's written, but there are numerous interviews and articles about one of my profs, Mark West, who does amazing things with fabric-formed concrete. Maybe his drawings tell the story better than his words, but he's still worth looking up
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=mark+west+concrete&btnG=Search&meta=
i am moved by the plumb bob.
i enjoy the rhythm of a day on site compared to a day in the office.
sorry...the image, from the jobsite, is a terraced garden space brings light into the cellar (which is otherwise subterranean). we issued the demo set today. bye bye garden.
"it is what it is..........
and it does what it's supposed to."
heard that one on site today.
thats why they make shims
one of our large projects right now includes the tear-off and reroofing of three buildings - a 145k sf multi-sectioned high school among them.
the roofers won't work in rainy or windy weather because the school is occupied, in operation, and they don't want to risk leaks during the ongoing work.
we've had particularly strange and damaging weather over the last couple of months but the construction manager told me this week - unabashed admiration in his voice - that the roofers hadn't made a bad prediction yet:
they showed up and it was clear,
they didn't show up (even if he questioned the decision) and it stormed.
100% accuracy rate.
these guys are all about understanding the conditions/life of the site, i think.
I just found one of my profs' thesiseseses that might be (is?) relevant:
http://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/bitstream/1993/1223/1/MQ32194.pdf
I attended a lecture by him today, and I was impressed with the way he didn't bullshit at all about his work. So there it is.
first - no one would ever use the wrod phenomology on a jobsite or about a jobsite or the process. Its not real. Second, the building is most interesting under construction. The temporary spaces and structures are most interesting. imagine what massive brick vaults and arches looked like while under construction, or marina city, a complex framework of scaffolds and planks - beautiful.
4 roofs temp shored by 1 kingpost
Inside a gohst....
i totally disagree!
Phenomology is word invented by nerds for other nerds.
not saying your a nerd steve ;)
phenomology takes the position that feelings are more important than real things. This is how you end up with postmodernism, this is how end up with an ineffective government. This is dangerous shit - rooted in socialism no less.
feelings are real things. dont you watch oprahbama?
phenomenology is about the relationship between real things, perception of real things, and how we process perception into meaning related to real things. you're using the word 'feelings' sort of as a pejorative, but, sure, how what we perceive makes us feel is part of it. it's the 'more important' part where you're wrong. in phenomenological terms, the feelings on their own don't cut it without those feelings being intimately relative to the real stuff.
how you get from this to pomo baffles me. phenomenological thinking would more likely pitch one toward:
-real stone with its particular texture, temperature, weight, etc than eifs;
-design that arises from and celebrates environmental conditions, materials, and relationships rather than knowledge of the past; and
-construction as a process of revealing construction rather than as a layering of surfaces that pretend to be something other than what they are.
ineffective gov't? wtf? you gotta give me more to even know what this could possibly mean.
lots of both good and bad things are rooted in a history of relationships with socialism. that's hardly a helpful/meaningful critique.
Friday afternoon trolling attempt, methinks. And a pretty bad attempt.
"it is what it is" is usually restated to me in the form of "shit happens".
Slant - Im not trolling, I just hate that archi bullshit "phenomology". No one seems to want to stand up to pseudo-acedemics anymore.
Steve -
Postmodernism
its the first sentence
Theres making things, and thinking about making things, and when the feelings get before the goal, the real work the thing needs to do, not how I think it will feel, you have bad things - dishonest things being made.
evilp - what i liked best about sci_arc was that making and thinking were encouraged to be simultaneous and mutually informative.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.