Devyn Weiser and Peter Testa at Städelschule Architecture Class

Representational Objects 

Notes:

“Looking is when Architecture becomes speculative " - Peter Testa 

Outline becoming the mask 

Representation as being the absence of something 

Against presentation 

Adding layers with projector to the 3d printed white model 

Wrinkles in Architecture 

There are only wrinkles 

Architecture as game pieces 

Thickness as detail inside and outside are the details of representation 

The project works as machine, always producing and making 

How do parts start to recognize each other ?

Coherence and differences in Architecture 

Art and Objecthood by Micheal Fried 

Drawing Architecture or Architecture of Drawing

Reading Robin Evans, In Front of Lines That Leaves Nothing Behind 

Architects draw. They draw and they represent things. A representation project is an Architectural project. Every act of ‘Drawing to Building’ is process of translation and every time the translation occurs it results in certain misreadings. Misreadings of Form, space and representation. 

To truly understand architecture one must understand its drawing. A building distances itself from its creator, it becomes an allographic project. The autographic project is the one when architect engages with the act of drawing.

A drawing is projective, it is speculative. Buildings are ephemeral, drawings are not. So a drawing is the Architecture. ‘A drawing emerges not only through a coherent organisation between mind and hand but also by the technology it engages with. According to Marshall McLuhan, when a new medium appears, it does its best to simulate the preceding one before it inevitably succeeds it. 

Every new technology destabilizes the practice before it. It alters the relation between mind, hand and the technical. It is essential to look at these deconstruction possibilities which the new tools allow us for.

Fragmented relationships

Fragmented relationship between parts / Anti-resolution and not the absolute one. Pixel vision.

Vocabulary for Architecture and the spectacle

Understanding a conversation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J-giyFlROM

The conversation between Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas offers vocabulary to understand architecture and its critical practices. This vocabulary deals with autonomy, Content- Form, subjectivity and Diagram- Figure relationships. It seems through the conversation that the evolution of an architectural discipline has only occurred through ‘breaks’ and not out of continuities. Hence it is important to identify these breaks in the social, political and economical scenarios to know what shapes critical architectural practice.

In an age of Image saturated consumer culture the idea of spectacle engages the architectural discourse. The Form-content relationship and its diagrammatic representation offers an architectural process.

How does one understand the genesis of ‘Form’ and what affect it creates at the audience over time?

Does the spectacle says more than it allures attention? How one does engage with the spectacle in different contexts?