Fall 2010

Prof Jeffrey Kipnis

Assuming we live Today In The Future, a brief and violent “post-apocalyptic” time of intense disillusionment with all artistic pursuits that laid claim to ambitions other than amusement,  the purpose of the studio was to revive the discipline of architecture as an aesthetic adventure; however, in such a way as not to oppose or criticize the Neo-utilitarian values of Today, but to augment them. To do so, a controlled exercise consisting of a given and limited archive of information and an ambition to resume an investigation of architectural abstraction as a non-utilitarian, valuable cultural instrument was the prompt behind the project.

For this three-story farm museum, my archive consisted of a single Jonathan Lasker painting entitled Articulate Ectasy, John Hejduk’s Bye House, and José Oubrerie’s Miller House.

Lasker’s painting served as an aesthetic example of color and composition, while Hejduk’s formal, expressionistic characterizations of the architecture filled in the transparent urban conditions of Oubrerie’s post-modern shell. The program of the farm museum is articulated through the separate characters and tied together using Oubrerie’s system of urban pathway.

A separate exploration of the studio was the idea of an autonomous plan, where the plan is able to stand alone from the building itself and have separate affects that are only experienced while reading the drawing. For example, the character expressions of the forms rhyme with those in the plan - features that can only be experienced through the drawing.