Third Order of Simulacra

"The point of view of modern architecture is never fixed, as in baroque architecture, or as in the model of vision of the camera obscura, but always in motion, as in film or in the city. Crowds, shoppers in a department store, railroad travelers, and the inhabitants of Le Corbusier’s houses have in common with movie viewers that they cannot fix (arrest) the image. Like the movie viewer that Benjamin describes (“no sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed”), they inhabit a space that is neither inside nor outside, public nor private (in the traditional understanding of these terms). It is a space that is not made of walls but of images. Images as walls..."

- Beatrice Colomina, Privacy and Publicity

"...Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication." - - Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstacy of Communication

The overlap

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “Newark, New Jersey, 1962”,

Photographs, New York, Haywire, 1978

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “Hillcrest, New York, 1970”,

Like a One-Eyed Cat, Photographs by Lee Friedlander 1956-1987,

New York, Abrams, 1989.

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “Texas, 1965”,

Like a One-Eyed Cat, Photographs by Lee Friedlander 1956-1987,

New York, Abrams, 1989.

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “New York City, 1963”,

Photographs, New York, Haywire, 1978

Lee Friedlander’s unique vision underscores the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and the potential for photographs to contain varying levels of reflection, opacity, and transparency. Friedlander’s images of shop windows evoke a certain ambiguity, an oscillation between reflected and actual reality, that invite inspection of the space and the meaning of the image. Similar responses are encouraged by Friedlander’s street photographs, in which shadows of figures (usually Friedlander himself) and other subjects overlap in the photographic image. The projected outline of Friedlander’s body as within the picture frame implies the notion that the photographer can be both behind the camera and in front of it. Interpreted further, Friedlander’s shadow can be taken to represent the imposition of the photographer upon his world and his subject.

Reference: Museum of Contemporary Photography , Chicago

Seeking new horizons

We yearn for uncertainty in our environment; the uncanny balance between yours and mine, alien and home. While protected and intimate enclosures at the end of a familiar path offer security, opportunity rises from ambiguous territories that allow for exploration. We seek out suspense in space.

"Though the house is an area of security and peace for man, he would pine away if he locked himself in his house to escape the dangers of the world outside; the house would soon become a prison. He must go out into the world to transact his business and to fulfill his role in life. Both security and danger belong to man, and consequently both areas of lived-space, as life develops in the tension between outer and inner space. " (O.F. Bollnow)

There is a growing obsession in contemporary culture with the awkward systems prevalent in both our homes and the city. At each scale there is a personal investment made by the inhabitant to understand and move through space. The impulse of the traveler is to pursue; either for sheer enjoyment or personal pleasure, but always for satisfaction. As early as ancient Greece, Aristotle contended that strange things with complicated aesthetics brought pleasure to the viewer. The process of trying to understand how and why things are the way they are has followed us ever since. Edmund Husserl and M. Merleau-Ponty indicate that our perception of the world is not a series of unrelated shots but rather hinges from one phase to the next, forming a continuous; we constantly imagine what lies behind closed doors.

The following is a study on design guidelines that will be investigated as a template to understanding how to craft the identity of spaces that offer both security and opportunity.

The Basic Structure of a suspenseful situation consists of seven components: a barrier; realms created by the barrier; a target hidden in the unknown realm; human interest associated with the target; hints disclosing the target; various expectations aroused by the hints; and the feeling of suspense proper generated during this process.

Diagram Credit : Miao, Pu

Prescribing Four Patterns of Uncertainty to specific forms of suspenseful places.

Diagram Credit : Miao, Pu

Reduplication

Spiritual Barrier and Hint

Guiding Element

Movement

Unusual View

Incompleteness

Association of Human Being

Infinity

Light from Unseen Sources

Relevance in

Intimate Space. The House

Sacred Space. The Temple

Public Space. The Piazza

Circumstantial Factors in Spatial Suspense

Cultural Factors

Viewer's Previous Knowledge: frequency of users in the space

Reference: Pu Miao, Suspense of Space: Theory and Design.

Breaking Territorial Structure

"Everyday personal experience of small scale settlement is usually limited to places in which we or our relatives, close friends and colleagues live, work or shop. When we exit into the public realm, the world seems to comprise giant infrastructures and ubiquitous institutions. While traveling, we do not easily venture beyond familiar networks. Visiting distance cities and countries, we seldom penetrate into small scale domestic worlds where we do not know anyone. We may not even notice their vast extent as we fly over them. We experience the modern world as increasingly public and large scale, while in the actual occupation of the earth's surface, the small scale and the local is growing at a tremendous rate." N.J. Habraken, Structure of the Ordinary

What if we could reverse ordinary patterns.

Rethinking the apartment

a narrow sunroom ("engawa"), which constitutes an intermediate space or buffer zone between interior and exterior.

The Gifu Kitagata project proposes a shared urban community of closely knit apartments that create an urban allegory of the village. The circulation routes, storage space and laundry areas are used as the physical and communal connections. These are zones that are given the least attention in contemporary residential design.

Sejima allows the daily chores of laundry and basic house maintenance , usually completed by the women of the household, to become more prominent.

"These free zones of undefined ownership become "baits" for the inhabitants to gain extra space, more light and better ventilation. By enhancing the idea of sharing resources, this colonization of spaces tends to break the isolation of social housing and creates various types and sizes of communal space for the inhabitants to meet one another, hang out, team up and exchange conversation: a modem envision of the traditional neighbourhood.

Such communal space ultimately leads to the genuine public space of the housing scheme, blurring the boundary between the private garden and the public space. As a result, the design as a whole attempt to rethink how housing units and shared spaces function spatially, and on a macro perspective, how the identity of a locale is defined. "

Resource : http://www.irbdirekt.de/daten/iconda/CIB12250.pdf

Unraveling

Sou Fujimato, HOUSE N, Oita Japan, 2008

infinte nesting

We build walls. Single walls and double walls, thick and thin, concrete and brick. We call them thresholds, barriers, surfaces, boundaries; each undulating, rotating, solid or permeable. I am learning now to merely look at , but rather, look in between walls, understanding the 'wall' not merely as a surface but a flexible place to inhabit. Streets and houses are not separated by a single wall, but by a gradation of rich domain with a variety of possibilities; each established by the varying distances.

"Three nested shells eventually mean infinite nesting because the whole world is made up of infinite nesting. And here are only three of them that are given barely visible shape. I imagined that the city and the house are no different from one another in the essence, but are just different approaches to a continuum of a single subject, or different expressions of the same thing- an undulation of a primordial space where humans dwell. This is a presentation of an ultimate house in which everything from the origins of the world to a specific house is conceived together under a single method."

House N brings structure to the natural environment. A distinct boundary is abandonned. Outdoor spaces are given interior placement and interior spaces are invariably the outside. The architecture does not stress form or space or material, but simply expresses the riches of what is between the street and the bed.

Wall Games

Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion. SANAA Architects. Ohio 2006.

The spatial organization comes from the "idea of the wall and its relationship with space". "Normally one wall has two sides , so if you define the shape of the wall, this will affect two adjacent spaces... We decided to make a wall with two thin membranes not necessarily linked together, and we found that this created a kind of double wall with two thin membranes not necessarily linked together, and we found that this created a kind of double wall between these two spaces and marked the independence of each room. Both are close and you can perceive one from the other, but they keep their Independence". The double wall thus creates a third space between the glazed volumes of the room that is purely 'relational'. It connects the volumes visually but not physically. Its purpose is to articulate the architecture, not to facilitate circulation through it.

Sejima's description is telling: " All ( the) glass is transparent but there are so many curved layers that the building has an opaque feeling to it. You cannot grasp if the reflection is from one layer of glass or another, or whether you are just seeing the other side of the museum. The building produces a completely different feeling of transparency. You can see through it, it is opaque." Transparency works in this building as a tool to layer spaces, rather than images and planes. In other words, transparency operates here in terms of projection, generating space beyond the object itself, which is experienced optically but which is immaterial.

Reference: TENSIONS IN TRANSPARENCY by EVE BLAU

Speculating Interface

Comfortable Systems. Constructing identity based on the structure of a tree root system with the home as a central source of strength and support. Away from the other. The city becomes a place of passage and social interaction.

Awkward Systems. An emerging system brought upon by mobility and multicultural interaction. Constructing identity based on the structure of an anthill where the individual is realised through exposure. The city becomes a place to eat, sleep, play and work.

Locating Markers. Understanding boundaries and thresholds at different degrees of privacy with varying levels of control.

Overexposed.

In an era of expanding digital technologies, I wonder whether the culture of self-exposure is a function of the subject's willing abdication to the watchful eye or rather the symptom of the need, distorted or deformed as it may be, to be related to others. Has the possibility of digital exposure constrained or broadened one's self of self? "Does exposure, as we tend to think, render the self more vulnerable, posing a threat to individual autonomy, or does it provide grounds for a new kind of relatedness?"(Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Interiors at Risk). Are we witnessing the end of interiority as we know it, or simply a change in how it is conceived-- a shift from the notion of spatial depth to the idea of surface or interface? How are we to imagine subjective autonomy in the era of cultural mobility? Should inner space be protected or shared? Do we even need depth?

The bar

Brasserie, Diller Scofidio+ Renfro

Restaurant in the Seagram Building, NY 2000

"The restaurant is without glass, view or connection with the street. This irony prompted a series of alternate responses to the relation between glass and vision. A plasma monitor at the entry, back-to-back with a video camera to the street, produces a virtual transparency...The ritual of making an entrance is split into two events. A sensor above the revolving door triggers a video snapshot with the entry of every new patron and his or her image is added to a continuously changing video display over the bar. The most recent video portaits assumes the first position and racks the previous 15 across, dropping away the oldest".

WithDrawing Room

All Images © Diller+Scofidio

The property line: Codes of Privacy and Publicness, the skin

Shaping Etiquette: Social Order, dining room

Crafting Intimacy: Private Order, body in bed

The WithDrawing Room is a means to "address the issue of domesticity and the complicity of architecture in sustaining its conventions". The installation, put up within an existing house emphasizes --

"how building design serves to construct our social and personal experiences. Moving through " the WithDrawing Room", the audience experienced an eerie sensation of disequilibrium, which heightened appreciation for the power of architecture, and the particular kind of order it imposes on our lives. By cutting a two-inch slit in the floor and exposing the homes' archaeological and legal histories, Diller + Scofidio forced the viewer to contemplate the meanings of "private property" and the home's relationship to the larger world. Moving next to the social circle of the dining table, the artists upset the notion of etiquette by suspending furniture fro the ceiling...once the viewer left...he or she was likely to think twice about how and perhaps why, architecture maintains a not-so- neutral relationship to conformity"

(

Intimate creativity: partners in love and art

By Suzanne Sarnoff, pg 244)

Living Room

Diller Scofidio+Renfro, Living Room,London 2003

Images that bleed through walls

"Life: a user's manual is a series of public performances and online mappings by Michelle Teran that examine the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they intersect with the visible world around us."

"Puzzlement, amusement, disorientation, surprise" are normal reactions...People are feeling insecure, but their security equipment gives only an illusion of protection," Teran said. "It's just something that comes in a box and they pick it up but they don't really understand how their contribution is affecting the city. I like the idea of people transmitting their personal narratives that are overlays of the city, these invisible stories. The camera starts to create a story about the person who has it and where they're placed within the city. I see the same scenes over and over again; the camera is watching daily banalities, maybe something that is a private moment that maybe I shouldn't be watching. For example, a son had set up a camera for his elderly mother just to make sure that she doesn't fall, and I was able to see her sitting up and calling to him. Am I invading somebody's private space or are they coming into mine?"

All Images: MICHELLE TERAN

MONTRÉAL WALK

May 19, 2005

http://www.ubermatic.org/life/walk.html:

"During Agnès Varda's 1986 film 'Vagabond, the viewer is first introduced to Mona, a drifter, as a frozen corpse. For the rest of the film, through interviews and flashbacks, Varda uses other people's memories to construct an image of the drifter, as she moves from village to village, in the deadness of a French winter. In Montréal a small group is led through China Town and into the parking lot of theHaunted House dinner theatre where a female vagabond wearing a leather jacket and backpack and carrying a portable cd player stands waiting. They are led on a nomadic journey through a dead/non dead area of Montréal by this transient woman who acts as a (silent) medium to the unseen. The walk takes them past construction sites with billboards depicting futuristic scenes of condominium dwellers, into the dead spaces of alleyways, across Boulevard René Lévesque(famous for his fight for Quebec separatism), and finally ending in front of theHudson's Bay Company."

Related Articles:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/11/69445

http://www.ubermatic.org/life/walk.html