The Le Corbusier Shoe

This shoe features a diagram I did in studio. It also has one of the most important architecture quotes of the twentieth century! You can order a pair here.

Taipei 101

I always thought this building was ugly. And then I was asked to draw it for a new graphic identity for the Taiwanese American Students Association at Princeton, for use at their upcoming East Coast conference. The graphic designers, Andy and Tiff, chose this napkin sketch instead of another, more meticulous drawing I did. Hearing from them about the bright lights of the city, the bustling markets within it, the mountains in the background, and this tower rising up to symbolize a new Taiwanese identity and a bright future, made the project very exciting. And I no longer think the tower is ugly.

When I have fears that I may cease to be

As a year full of so much activity, accomplishment, loss, and production comes to a close, I can't help thinking about it all, and about where things will go next, and later on. O'levels and the days in which we used to read John Keats's poetry seem so long ago and so far away. Has real life begun now? Does it ever begin? Anyway, I like this poem.

When I have fears that I may cease to be
     Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
     Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
     Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
     Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
     That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
     Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

-John Keats

Harvard - First Snow

First, I had breakfast in Annenberg at 7:30am. Seeing everyone study for their exams reminded me of my freshman year and that fateful Math 104 exam when I walked out of the auditorium early not because I knew everything but because I had no clue!

Then, later, I braved the cold to photograph some things I see everyday but which today were covered in snow for the first time. The bright, reflective ground was so welcoming and everything seemed to be lit up.

Click here to see the complete set on Flickr.

Notes from a meeting with Momin in Karachi, at T2F

Grades? What Grades?

Last night, we put all our work from the entire semester in Piper auditorium. Now, the critics are sifting through the four projects, deciding who will get which of the respective non-grades: Distinction, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail. These photos were taken from the circular window on the second floor. Another way in which Architecture enables transparency (and here I don't mean the literal or the phenomenal kind).

Does the Eiffel Tower Qualify as a Piece of Architecture?

In this week’s reading, Roland Barthes compares the functional- or use value of the Eiffel Tower with its symbolic value. He explains the latter thus: “The tower attracts meaning… for all lovers of signification, it plays a glamorous part, that of a pure signifier, i.e., of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their knowledge, their dreams, their history).” Barthes argues that, even though Gustave Eiffel wrote long explanations of possible uses for the tower, the tower is in fact an utterly “useless monument” and that this is actually a good thing: “in order to satisfy this great oneiric function (that of being a pure signifier)…the Tower must escape reason.”

The second important “function” of the tower is that it allows everyone—the Parisian, the visitor, the common person on the street—to rise to the bird’s eye view and gain a “structural” understanding of the city of Paris. It allows us to “transcend sensation” and “read (the city)” in a manner similar to that described by Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris. This structural reading—the connection of places as they are experienced on ground level to the same places as objects on a kind of map—allows/forces the visitor to think critically. It gives the visitor a sense of agency and “initiates” him or her to the city itself.

These two functions—(i) the symbolic function and (ii) the function of the tower as an instigator of a new critical understanding of one’s place in the city—are deeply architectural characteristics. But are they enough for the tower to qualify as a piece of Architecture? Or is Architecture, as many at the GSD will argue, more about cost, comfort, convenience, utility, functionality, and other practical concerns? And if it is the former (i.e. Architecture’s symbolic function and Architecture’s role as a mediator of society and the way we think and interact), then can we do away with the practical concerns in Architectural discourse, concerns which are obviously important in certain building types, but are not worthy of discussion when we talk about Architecture as a discipline? 

MIT’s Radiant Landscapes

Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall building at MIT can be read as both a celebration and a critique of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Its social goals (fostering community and providing a comfortable living space suited to its time in history) and physiological concerns (modulating light, for example) are similar, if not exactly the same. Its articulation of those concerns in architectural form is both linked to and divergent from the Unité’s.

Simmons Hall was designed and built from 1999 to 2002, almost 50 years after Le Corbusier built his renowned and highly influential Unité d’Habitation (1947-1952), a prototypical block housing project in the French city of Marseilles. Both buildings house a large number of people in stacked standardized units made largely of prefabricated materials. Both buildings are legible as monolithic blocks that undergo formal transformations without losing their defining block geometry. Both buildings have a regular grid on the façade, generated by physiological concerns such as the flow of natural light, but modified to create a varied and more interesting composition (Figure 1). Both buildings are spaces of pedagogy: the Unité is a place that facilitates Modern life for an idealized Modern man, and Simmons is literally a place where students come together to live and study. The most striking similarity, however, and one that is not immediately visible, is the presence in both buildings of playful, curvilinear, and sculpted concrete forms (Figure 2). These forms are irregular and undulating. They are in no way legible as rationally generated geometry, at least at the experiential scale. They are reminiscent of nature and I will therefore refer to them as “organic”.

These similarities suggest a kind of narrative in which the Unité may be seen as a precedent to Simmons. This narrative is complicated when we also begin to observe how vastly different the two buildings are. At the Unité, the organic space of disorder and play is limited to the roof and to the massive piloti that raise the entire building above the ground. It is tempered and restrained. The housing units themselves remain rational and standardized. Rues intérieurs (interior streets) run through the building, complete with shops and a restaurant. The building itself becomes a dense cityscape, and this is evident in the project’s second name, La Ville Radieuse. At Simmons, Holl takes the organic forms of the Unité’s roof and pulls them in and down through the building, creating ever-changing undulating walls and light wells. If we pursue this narrative in which Simmons is read through the lens of the Unité, we see Holl augmenting the grid condition of the Unité’s façade. He maintains the color but pixelates it further, creating an even finer and more monotonous grid. He then counters this move by making the brise-soleil (the larger openings) incredibly large, so large in fact that they begin to poke voids right through the building. He is heightening the effect of the Unité to an extent where Simmons is no longer a representation of Le Corbusier’s project but a 21^st-century reorigination of it. This reorigination is both a celebration and a trenchant critique of the Unité.

Before I discuss how Simmons both celebrates and criticizes the Unité, I want to say what I mean by reorigination. Jeffrey Kipnis defines the term in his 2006 essay, explaining that Gilles Deleuze’s elaboration of the idea of the diagram can be a good way to understand it:

The diagram and its processes are to reorigination what the sign and its processes are to representation. The diagram, therefore, is the basis for all medium specificity. Medium specificity is the production by any medium of signals that are, in total, irreducible and irreproducible by any other medium. Reorigination is nothing other than the total effect of the signal.[1]

For Kipnis, reorigination is different from mere representation because it expresses the diagram in an entirely original way. In Simmons, Holl preserves the diagram of the Unité. Its architectural expression, however, is specific and inventive.

The similarities I have listed at the beginning of this essay illustrate some of the ways in which Simmons celebreates the Unité. Simmons’s critique of the Unité is more subtle. There are two important differences in the two buildings that establish Simmons’s position as a critique. The first has to do with the way the building meets the ground. In this regard, Simmons departs radically from the Unité. Whereas Le Corbusier’s building is lifted off the ground and set against the mountainous landscape as a distinct object that frames it, Holl’s building meets the ground directly (Figure 3). This meeting is not gradual. The object quality of Simmons is preserved because it sits on the ground as a block. Figure 3, however, begins to show how Simmons is actually much more a part of its surrounding landscape. Its footprint mimics the pattern of the existing soccer fields. Its voids allow the surrounding landscape a visual connectivity that begins to deconstruct and dematerialize the building’s object quality. Even the goal posts, it seems, are literally repeated as punctures in the building’s façade, marking it as a continuation of the surrounding landscape.

This same question of whether the building wants to be an object in space or to meld into the very landscape it exists in can be explored in the treatment of the entrance as well (Figure 4). Because the Unité wants to be distinct from its landscape, the entrance at ground level is not immediately visible. That would expose the building’s connection to the ground. The entrance at Simmons is expressed. The building’s skin is punctured or it folds out to acknowledge the arrival of its inhabitant. The squares become circles and the circles become amorphous shapes. This begins to critique the lack of variation or individuation at the Unité. This is a point I will return to later.

The second way in which Simmons departs from the Unité is quite radical as well. Instead of bringing the city into the space of its architecture, Simmons brings in the landscape, or nature. It is interesting to compare again the recurring undulating wall in Simmons’s interior spaces to the regularity of the rues intérieur at the Unité. The Unité introduces efficient connections and dense stacking of program. Simmons does this to an extent and then it begins to depart from efficiency and to tread into the world of ambiguity and redundancy. The organic form of the curving wall appears and reappears on various floors, continuous but ever-changing. Often, one finds a small laundry room or a study space with three walls that are orthogonal and one that drastically challenges this otherwise regularized space. The problem of homogeneity in mass housing is resolved in Simmons by introducing in its space a shifting landscape, complete with intimate passageways, larger (12-feet wide) passageways, alcoves, and loggias reminiscent of Isamu Naguchi’s sculptural gardens. This landscape is distinctly legible precisely because it exists inside the ordered space of the pixel grid.

The curving wall creates valleys and caves which often connect several floors. The contrast in its texture in the entrance lobby seems to be an exact reference to the playful textures of the roofscape at the Unité. Holl describes his wall as a sponge (Figure 5) but to me it is more reminiscent of a mountain. At the entrance of Simmons, you can climb a stair along this wall. Because it opens up unexpected views, the wall becomes a site for reflection and meditation, and this intention is labeled in the building’s section diagram (Figure 6, relabeled for clarity). For MIT’s students, this space of meditation is a pleasant change from the stressful, urban condition of the otherwise industrial-looking campus.

A comparison of the section diagrams for the two buildings reveals other relevant details. The theatre, which is situated on the roof of the Unité, has moved to the basement of Simmons. In this way, the site of play is incorporated within the building’s interior space. An actual play room is also part of the program. Also, while Le Corbusier acknowledges the automobile by allowing it to pass under his building, Holl illustrates a delivery truck literally backing into the space of Simmons on the left side of his section drawing. In the same drawing, we see a fragmentation, where common rooms become smaller and more scattered, and we see recognition of individuals with specific needs, evident in the labeling of spaces reserved for visiting scholars and graduate students.

Simmons is strikingly similar to the Unité and yet radically different. This dialectic is what holds the two in tension and allows a reading of Simmons as both a celebration of the diagram that produced the Unité and a critique of the reality of its architecture. Simmons indexes a disintegration of the mechanical sameness of the Unité, where each unit was designed as a drawer that could be plugged into the frame of the building. It records the disintegration of the Ville Radieuse, almost as though the city was allowed to grow and shift organically, and nature was allowed to infiltrate it. At the same time, however, the monolithic object is unified like never before: as the curving wall makes it way up through the building, its continuity establishes the link from one floor to the next and allows an appreciation of the vastness of this landscape—an appreciation that is missing from the incubated interiors of the identical units of the Unité. The building is deconstructed piece by piece to acknowledge the presence of individuals and of nature—and all the excitement and serendipity that accompanies them.

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[1] Jeffrey Kipnis, “Reoriginating Diagrams,” Peter Eisenman: Feints, Ed. Silvio Cassara, Milan: Skira, 2006.

Equilibrium Sculpture

Tian, Parsa and I did this as a group project for our Materials and Construction class at the GSD. The assignment was to make a sculpture that illustrates principles of equilibrium. The sculpture should have a pivot point at least 12 inches from the ground.

We wanted to take an everyday object and suspend it in an unusual orientation, in order to preserve a moment in time and space. This moment — when the stool is about to fall — is one of alarm and distress. We wanted to turn it into a pleasant surprise. The viewer who happens to glance at this stool thinks that it will fall and that they’ll hear a crashing sound, but it doesn’t. That makes the viewer happy.