Coffee Table Gamelan

The coffee table gamelan offers its users a chance to engage in a dialogue that goes beyond mere coffee talk.  Each person has a series of tuned surfaces that act as a table tops and also instruments.  The concept behind the work is conversation through proximity and exchange, but not necessarily with words.  This performance was done prior to applying the finish.  A follow up will be fast on its heals!

Parking Garage Aurora Borealis

An interesting weekend in the Providence Place Mall Parking garage.  The reflection of the vehicles on Interstate 95 projected on the parking lot structure.  Unexpected performance!

Glenn Gould!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2JFgfc7c70

Glenn Gould's So You Want to Write a Fugue?  Mentioned in my midterm review and worth mentioning!  Gould's performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations was what I was listening to the night before the review!  I must be on the right path, if riding its shoulder a bit hard right now....

Making Cities is Easy!

A wonderful video about architecture and adolescence for all to enjoy.  This video was made last semester and dealt with overlay.  It gets a bit strange towards the end, but strange is such a great thing!  I don't know what this has to offer the elephant in the room (thesis), but . . .

Schoenberg's Patonal Matrix

Schoenberg begins with a tone row, which consists of twelve notes.  They are the twelve notes of a chromatic scale that omits unison or the octave.  This becomes the module of sorts to construct a composition.  These drawings are visual versions of his aural procedure, where a unit value of measurement is assigned to each note value.  Schoenberg's matrix allows for the atonal melody to played up or down the standard scale as well as backwards and inverted.  This grid shows how that looks visually.  The plan is to produce many of these (there are 144 in total!) and seek out the greatest 9x9 grid of intervallic tension.  This will become a module to be used in a future model.  It is sort of improvy, but mostly just strict theory.

Helmholtz Intervallic Model

Helmholtz' breakdown of the interval between all the notes in a scale is Pythagorean (because he got it right) and offers a great deal of proportional information.  If one believes that there is a parallel between the way our ear hears intervallic change and the way our eyes see it, having this tool at my disposal is very useful.  The benefit of proportion to an improvisational architecture is huge, because it can be riffed on (see Mannerism).

Bauhaus Redux

The interiors of the Bauhaus represent the ambitions of painters to redefine color in architecture.  Through the work of Kandinsky, Itten, Moholy-Nagy, and several others within the school, color became a methodical approach to spatial program.  While visiting the school, it made sense to photograph these buildings in an attempt to return them the second dimension.  These prints represent the flattening of 3D space to show the strictly visual effect color can have on the eye.    

Color Wheel of Life

From this wheel, all color flows!  Working through some of the examples that Johannes Itten discusses in his book, The Art of Color, I am beginning to understand the magnitude of which color can affect architectural surfaces.  The variations described, detailing how to create different contrasts, have a special significance to defining how people feel and behave in space.

Color Studies

The Conductor

Hans Scharoun's Berliner Philharmonie represents a true marvel in acoustics, each surface seemingly dialed in to produce pure tone, without distracting distortions, reverberation, and echo.  Within this space, there is a secondary architecture, something more akin to pure structure . . . a diagram of tension and compression.   Though notation is provided in a modest manner - sheet music, it is the conductor who animates the written word.  Every musician dividing his or her time between casual glances at the notes before them, and passionate, physical engagement with the conductor.  Like waves, he pulls them closer, only to push them away.  The scene is volumetrically, spatially, and physically controlled by his hands, and body.  He is the marionetteer of puppets, descendants of the Bauhaus Theatre.  More on that later!

Stairs: Reichstag. Informed and Unaware Performers

The front stairs of the Reichstag provided another opportunity to confront the issue of light and shadow on a folded form.  The digitized quality that results from the ebb and flow of cast shadows over surface and void; reducing the human form to pure information.  The poetic quality of this reduction is one of architecture's great offerings to humankind: an awareness of ourselves and our connection to our environment.  The daily interactions produced through the nearly sexual threesome of light, movement, and form is not to be taken as a given, accepted without reverence.  Under this type of analysis, the stairs and lighting are not part of a set, they are also performers, maybe the makers of performance.  While Annabelle, Sina, and the others provided the only conscious movements, the angle and intensity of the lighting, its multiplicity, projected a secondary performer - the shadow.  Engaged in an eternal dance, the shadow holds onto the stairs tightly, professing its form.  A continuous exchange of information that resulted in the video you have just watched.

The two performers who were aware of this video's making were surrounded by pedestrian users of the stairs, who contributed equally.

A Video Made a House

Gestalten:

A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.

Oskar Schlemmer described light as a vital "plastic form."  His use of the term plastic is interesting, because he is basically stating that light makes form . . . even if the thing we see is not the actual physical shape.  Schlemmer contrasts this with the idea of haptic perception, which - to take Bloomer and Moore's summary:

"To sense a mountain haptically is to climb it, not just to look at it"
                                                                                                        (Trimingham, 49)
This video response to the previous solo performance on stairs is meant to be a gestalten.  It switches the role of the performer from a man under constant sun to a constantly moving sun, which performs as a sculptor on the architecture.  Light, shadow, and form all become a singular statement.  It does not need to be experienced haptically to be enjoyed as a performance; however, just like the previous video, it can become a performance between person(s), lighting (ambient and radiant), and a formal space.

Stairs: Solo Performance

One topic of interest is the issue of layering.  Building a three-dimensional composition through layering enables change over time and position.  Morphosis' project for Cooper Union used layering throughout the entire building.  By doing this, every movement of the eyes or light changes the space and the relationship of the students to that space.  This performance piece shows how a simple shadow can be layered over a surface, producing an analytic description of what stairs are.  The geometry of stairs breaks up (almost digitizing) shadows and creates a rhythmic acknowledgement of their rise/run relationship.  Interpretation of a  simple fact - sun on stairs makes for interesting shadows - allows for a design response.  Let's see what happens!     

http://www.morphopedia.com/

Cecil Taylor

"The first level or statement of three; an opening field of question: how large it ought or ought not to be.  From anacrusis to Plain, patterns and possibility converge, mountain sides to dry rock beds, a fountain spread before prairie, form is possibility; content, quality and change; growth in addition to direction found.  Third part is area, where intuition and given material mix group interaction.  Simultaneous invention heard, which these words describe.  The paths of harmonic and melodic light give architecture sound structures, acts creating flight.  Each instrument has strata.  Physiognomy, inherent matter-calling, stretched into sound (layers) in rhythms regular and irregular, measuring coexisting bodies of sound.  Measurement of sound is its silences.  Acknowledging silence, its definition in absence.  Reactive occult, in action unknowable – detached – rationalization of inaction and detachment, mathematical series, permutation and row-underlying premise = IDEA PRECEDES EXPERIENCE. 

The player advances to the area, an unknown totality, made whole through self analysis (improvisation), the conscious manipulation of known material; each piece is choice; architecture, particular in grain, the specifics question, layers are disposed, deposits, arrangements, group activity establishing the plain. 

Rhythm is life, the space of time danced thru.

Rhythm then is existence and existence time, content offers time quantity to shape: color mental physical participation."

                                                                              -Cecil Taylor (Unit Structure Liner Notes)

Cecil Taylor once said that he received more gratification looking at an architectural drawing by Calatrava than he ever did from a musical score (Brown, xviii).  Taylor was and is one of the most confusing jazz musicians.  He often stated that the audience should study music so that they would be responsive to his work, a statement which the saxophonist Branford Marsalis later labeled "self-indulgent bullshit" (Burns, Jazz).  From my perspective, my thesis is essentially the reverse engineering of his album Unit Structures, where he attempted to make jazz improvisation architectural.  "Rhythm is life, the space of time danced thru" . . . holy shit that is cool.

First of Many Thanks!

I forgot to mention . . . . thank you to Annabelle Tran, Max Dehne, Nathanial Vice, Nazli Ergani, and Caterina Belardetti.  I hope to archi-jam with you all again soon!

Hired Guns

This project was the first architectural improvisation, using a modular system.  I gave each of the four group members a one page descriptor of the objects at their disposal and let them play.  Their only task was to connect four points on the ground to four points on the window.  This video becomes an integral part to the presentation of the final object.  The performance carried all the risk of an improvised musical performance in that it relied entirely on the real time construction skills of the crew with no do overs.  The criticism that I received for this project was that the final object was no longer improvisation, but a static object.  Nailed!  Back to the drawing board.  Still fun and entertaining to watch though.

Architecture as a Record

Duke Ellington was once quoted as saying:

"Art is dangerous.  It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it."

When in front of an arch-i-critical firing squad - with the ball decidedly not in my court - I find myself thinking of this quote.  How does improvisation find its way into architecture?  What paths have I already traveled that have led to another damn building (a derogatory term in this case)?  Where did the life of improvisation go once the realm of walls and rooms and bathrooms was breached? This has led me to the confusion of whether a building should be considered a record of an event or the site of one?  Maybe both!  

When I gather a group of people together to have an architectural performance, I get the same feeling that I once had performing music in front of a crowd.  That is a good sign.  The other day, I woke up around four in the morning and wrote "from music to performance to film to still image to architecture", which is one path I could take.  My task is to clearly elucidate this performance idea I have in my head to an audience through something that is architecture.