Vietnam Veterans Memorial

“Vietnam Veterans Memorial” http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/card1.html 


This article discusses how Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as experiences of sight, sound and touch. This creates a full-bodied experience of the viewer, connecting us to the design in many ways. She was still an undergraduate at Yale University when she conceived this proposal. Its very simple, unique and beautiful created out of polished, black granite. From a distance it looks like a cut in the landscape, however when you actually enter the work it is designed for the reader of the deceased names to stand below the horizon. 6 feet to be exact, the typical height for the dead to be buried. Lin designs many projects with ways for the viewer to connect to the project without even realizing. The visual scar of the landscape was used to display grief and pain. Its sole proposition is that human life is a harsh cost of war. The names are written along the horizontal walls and the memorial is responsive to the individual experience of the visitor. When a visitor looks at the wall, their reflection is shown within the engraved names, this was meant to symbolically bring both the past and present together. One of the most interesting points of the design is the names are left without rank or unit and everyone is considered the same including women. In total there are as of May 2011, 58,272 names with different symbols beside their names of a cross, a circle or diamond to show if they are missing, dead or returned alive. Lin connects human activities through a beautiful design of a memorial inscribed in the landscape. 

Maya Lin - Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington DC)

photo taken from http://mayalin.com

TECTONIC (class notes)

SENSES + ENVIRONMENT

• Environment as an extension of body 
• Investigation of body (body-space)
• Implied action 
• operational/ contextual/ sequential/ experimential 
• inhabitation/ narrative condition - dwelling
• function is NOT a space 

Creation of built environment = creation of sensorial environment that body inhabits 

OTHERNESS + SOCIAL

• "work of art implies a bodily interaction"
• presence of other 
• presence through "character"/craft
• "architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly" 

Peter Zumthor - Thermal Bath  (Switzerland)

photo taken from http://valeriehassett.wordpress.com/tag/thermal-baths-at-val/

Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen - Temppeliaukio Kirkko (Rock Church) (Helsinki)

photo taken from http://rosemariejohn.com/2011/02/06/finnair/

Diller & Scofidio - Blur Building (Switzerland)
 
photo taken from http://themodone.com/2010/04/fashion-show-venues-1/

TECTONIC vs STEREOTOMIC

Tectonic      : layering construction/ materials 

Stereotomic : compressive mass to mass

• Scenographic (visual operation) vs Tectonic (act of construction) 
• Ontological vs Representational
• high art (bourgeois) / labor 
• scenographic / thingness
• structure symbolic / structure technical 

Tectonic can consider as a "craft" - "presence of the hand" -

Sterotomic work of Alberto Campo Baeza

Moliner House

The Moliner House is a representation of stereotomic architecture based on the large mass of concrete used in the structure.  It displays a jointless nature and uses minimalist detailing.  The project was started in 2006  in Avda Spain.  The raised high walls created a stark white box, with little to no detail on the exterior.  The interior of the space was dug into the ground and trees were installed to mimic an intimate landscape.  It's not common that such minimal materials are used in such a mass volume form and Albertos structure seems to be a representation of stereotomic architecture.

Tectonic Precedent

Frampton discuss the disposition of current tectonic form that aims toward scenographic that accommodate with all the repercussion that signify the future environment. He adds that the doctrine governing has altered from being the autonomous realm of techno-science to extremely insubstantial. Architecture needs to be divided into structural and constructional form to find its equivalent foundation.  There exist the figurative origins of abstract art and the constructional basis of tectonic form.

TECTONIC

•       Technological Object
•       Scenographic Object
•       Tectonic Object

1.               Ontological – constructional elements: represent the static role and cultural status
2.        Representational – constructional elements: represent the present, but hidden

STEROTOMICS

•            Compressive mass
•        Common materials: wood and brick (represent the interest of permanence)

Fundamental syntactical transition may occur if one passes from the stereotomic base to tectonic base, which also evoke the essence of architecture.

The difference between:

• Kernform (nucleus)

o   Address the fabric of a structure

• Kunstform (decorative cladding)

o   Symbolize the institutional status of work

Through the concept of site and the principle of settlement (in structural terms), environment becomes the essence of architectural production. Tectonic dissolves between the culture of the heavy-stereotomics and the culture of the light-tectonics symbolizing load-bearing crafts and tends towards the earth and opacity and the dematerialized a-frame and tends towards the sky and opacity respectively.

“BREAK” vs “DIS-JOINT”

•  Things break against each other rather than connect: indicates the essential part at which the materials end to give way to another unexpectedly.
•  Rupture may have just as much significant as connection

Frampton conclude that tectonic advocate itself as a mythical classification and the critical myth of tectonic joint subject to the unaffected passage of time as well as separated from the continuity of time.

Authenticity/ Placelessness/ Identity (Class Notes)

Tectonic Precedents Oct 4^th

Authenticity

-What is the source of authenticity?

            Patent something

-What constitute/ construct authenticity?

-Who has authority to claim/ declare?

-How does a place become a place?

-Death of the author/subject

            -Situation/ history/ time-culture

Placelessness/ identity

-Where/ how do we start this?

Identity (home-ness)

-Why are we obsessed with identity?

-*This all has to do with authentic connection to objects. Maybe Isolation?

-How do you create/ develop an identity?

*We now design for resale

Bjerg parking apartments

-Life with a garden, and a life with a city. You can have both

Seven mountain of asapichan carbon neutral island in central Asia

Sense of connection is important to Canadians

How do you engage in all these distractions?

-Animosity… You don’t know the user or the next viewer

Craft/Materiality

Craft: Relationship to the Hand

-All that work of the hand:

            -Praxis/ craft/ tectonic

            -Cost (up front vs. lifetime/physical vs invisible)

-Weathering and aging materials/ durable material resale

*More lasting is more damaging?

Architecture should be biodegradable

Oral tradition/ invention of printing

-Thought expression sight

-Sound-space vs sight-space

-View vs. experience (ontology) in the world

-Tectonic (Material) logic/ copy

            -Can ‘copy’ be non-visual?

Sight

-Culture of distance

-“de-sensitization and de-eroticization”

-Privacy

-Liability

“Society of surveillance is necessarily a society of a voyeuristic eye”

-What’s so negative about optical culture?

Time

-Building and city as instrument of time

-How do you put architecture, as part of history?

-Timelessness vs material weathering?

-*Loft!*

Scent

-How do we plan/design the smell within the culture of temporary contracts and obsessive-sanitization!

-Why contemporary structures are sterile?

-Understanding can bring our renewed strategy for a factory design

Touch

-Can you design a room not be function, but by a different reason why do we design for functions that we don’t use any more?

Virtual Tourism

My Secure Cyberspace on Virtual Tourism

The article discusses about the viable of “virtual tourism” by the Internet that limit “tourist” to engage with the practical environment (destination). Users instead, explore their destination with easy directional camera control using 3D graphical program. When others are trying to perfect their program interface, “GigaPan” project aims to provide extreme high-resolution panoramic photos that allows user to zoom in on and pan across at anytime. Besides virtual visiting, “Second Life” allows user to buy virtual property, virtual goods and interact with other users in these “virtual tour”. Although, the initial intention was to promote tourism, it became a quick getaway for those too busy to get away from their comfort homes. Another example is the Google’s Street View and related Web 2.0 technologies which provides users to “tour” the city and watch created video at specific points. With the help of YouTube, users can also embed video on YouTube onto Google Maps service to produce interactive environment for new users (virtual tourists). This trend has grown extensively that some companies such as K Zero claim to be the "resident expert in virtual world" that offers many related articles for keen visitor. 

Credits: flickriver.com

Architecture of Seven Senses. Questions of Perception

Juhani Pallasmaa says there are seven senses of humans that occur during an architectural experience and they are eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, bone and muscles.

The idea of buildings losing their plasticity and their connection with the language and wisdom of the body leads to isolation. Disconnection from construction doesn’t justify authenticity. Natural material showcases age ie stone, brick, wood, which enriches the experience. Materials of today don’t convey anything of their material essence or age. Every touching experience of architecture is a multi-sensory experience. Sound connected to imagination. Spaces traced by the ear create a sense of connection and solidarity.

Most essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquility and silence of matter and space. Examples such as a museum waiting patiently because they silence external noise and you focus on existence. Another example is memory of space for example scent of candy leads to thoughts of our childhood.

Skin reads texture, weight, density, and temperature of matter. For example the clean shimmer of ageless wear can turn a doorknob into an image of welcome and hospitality.  There is also density and texture of ground that was connecting us with skin to home, comfort and intimacy. Great architecture offers shapes and surfaces molded for the pleasurable touch of the eye. Eye senses most importunately separation and distance of a building.

A real architectural experience is approached, confronted, encountered and related to ones body. The authenticity of architectural experience is grounded in the tectonic language of buildings and the comprehensibility of the act of construction of the senses. Constant dialogue with environment is impossible to detach the image of self from its special and situational existence. This means the encounter of any work of art implies bodily interaction.

When experiencing the building and construction they will accept unconsciously lots of phenomenon’s by the brain and include all of the bodies sensory organs.