ARCH_317 Architecture Core Studio I: ‘Picture Houses: Accumulating Images’

“[T]hings consort without discrimination, literally crawling over the picture frames and structural bays that might sort and segregate them. The sense of endless contents … is a resignation to the possibility that anything might be here. It is not the intellectual discovery of quantity, but the fact of it as an incipient coming-into-view or already-in-view … it is storage exactly coincident with the space of occupation.”

 

—Andrew Holder, on the Basilica of Saint Margaret at Osterhofen from “Notes on More,” in Harvard Design Magazine: Shelf Life, No. 43 (2016), 101.

 

In this studio, students grappled with a disciplinary definition of “complexity” as it relates to depicting and making architecture. In contemporary discourse, terminology and formats are in flux; drawing is being supplanted by image and composition by accumulation. Looking at the conceptual underpinnings of these four terms allowed students to brush up against their productive limits through hybrid investigations.

 

— Picture Boxes: Drawing vs. Image

Drawing has already been pronounced dead; it has been declared in books, exhibitions, and symposia. But as with all inanimate deaths, there is no finality. Occasional zombies abound, but it turns out the flatline was misread. Robin Evans’ assertion that “architects don’t make buildings; they make drawings of buildings” still rings true; contemporary architects continue to invest in architectural drawing. However, drawing is no longer tethered to orthographic projection. The majority of drawings made today are the product of electronic imaging, generated from digital models that yield series upon series of animated images.

 

As a result, each actor in the studio acknowledges and challenges the default, orthogonal relationship between the “box” that constitutes architecture and the “box of pictures” that constitutes the projection planes. Throughout the semester, students examined and integrated orthographic projection and electronic imaging to produce drawings wrapped in the guise of images.

 

— Picture Frames: Composition vs. Accumulation

Architecture is embracing “more”—a greater diversity and collection of disparate things—not only in visualization tactics, but also in form-making strategies. Robert Venturi’s “difficult unity of inclusion” addresses complex compositions and part-to-whole relationships. However today, according to Andrew Holder, “things” are finding new relationships as ordered, arrayed, and accumulated conglomerations. As these things “crawl out of the picture frames and structural bays,” they enjoy affinities with one another, pushing into and defining the interstitial space.

 

Students analyzed the composition of precedents and collected elements from them. Reassembling these amassed pieces, they attempted to establish new relationships between them, not as compositions, but as a recast set of interrelated architectural characters.

 

— Picture Houses: A Cinema and a Photo Studio

Students researched two projects: an outdoor cinema and a photography studio. Pictures—both moving and still—had to be incorporated into a direct relationship with projects confronting the nature of images in architecture. Both had to be sited near existing art institutions in St. Louis and metaphorically draw the museums’ contents into the public realm.

 

Models could be conceived as film sets or protophotographic dioramas. Sets and dioramas both fall between categories as hybrids of pictures, built-ins, models, rooms, or buildings accumulating disparate things within their boundaries. Through layered production, students were challenged to negotiate the tensions present in a picture of architectural complexity.