This is the link to the final paper

This is the link to the paper on Google Drive. 

Question: Is it still art and does it still connect to the building within a rootless creation?

Framed through introduction to theory

Content analyzed by types of furniture and their particular significance

• Types
  • major types and function
  • design values of types
  • implications of values
• Theory
  • Benjamin Reading
    • Reproduction increases access but can also decrease quality
    • Art before modern age had mystique/earnestness that makes it irreproducible; unique phenomenon of distance
    • Argues that modern art has no aurora; photography/film, made by mechanical process, direct reproductions. Still art but aurora is gone
    • Art has translated from use value to exchange value. Benefits: democratized, access, exposure. Negatives: cheapens it
    • No patrons; need to make money has infected everything
  • Loos
    • Three dimensionality, materiality. Expression of modernity on the exterior, interior concerned with human: represents the duality of modernity
    • Architects have strayed too far from cultural ties and have become rootless city dwellers. (Furniture as a mass manufactured urban entity?)
  • Corbusier
    • Aesthetic based on pure form – regulating lines/proportions add a rational sense of coherence to the buildings

• Chair: Form or Function? (https://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1853&context=theses)
  • How is design centered around form or function depending on the designer, firm, or company?
    • Nicos Zographos – form 1st, sitting 2nd
      • Studies in comfort meaningless because everybody is different
    • Niels Diffrient – Sitting 1st
      • Comfort integral part of design
  • 3D form as means of expression
    • Functional chair could be made by computer, so why is it still designed by a human?
      • Ergonomics research as foundation to build the visual elements
  • Mass design
    • Cannot be overly complex for manufacturing purposes
      • DeFuccio (Triangle Chair), Pettit (Petit Ply Chair), Snodgrass (Continuum chair)
    • Joinery and Aesthetics altered with mass manufacturing
  • 1950’s
    • Companies all making similar chairs
    • Office furniture
      • Chair type was a sign of status and position within the company (secretary vs. boss)
      • Designed of where and how chair will be used
• Desk: Where and How?
  • Functional and manufacturing issues prime design parameter
    • Original design altered for functionality
    • Materiality chosen for manufacturing
    • Aesthetic removals sometimes coincide with ease of manufacturing
  • Conference Table
    • Design adaptable to different sizes and proportions (structurally and aesthetically)
    • Design for multiple materials/what is commercially available
• Shelving & Storage
  • Parameters
    • Strength for variety of storage (magazine, book, clothing)
    • Is it being designed for the office or the home? Or is it a flexible design for both?
    • Design with regards to materials that are in fashion
  • Fabrication
    • Simple assembly with minimal joints
    • Modular system that is collapsible
    • In order to be successful, must be able to assemble and install in any city in the country (should not hang from ceiling or mount to wall, not practical for mass ease of use)
      • Design in a way that the design cannot be installed incorrectly

What now? What is Art?

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin). In Architecture, people have the tendency to dismiss furniture as a finishing component to the space and not as an integral part of the work itself. In the furniture not considered to be the architecture, it is pushed to a mass produced piece that may fit the space but never perfectly as it is an outside component moving into the system. It often falls into the idea of prefabrication representing the commodification of a modern and efficient frame of mind.

However, it is often argued that furniture manufacturing itself is a science and a way to improve the standards of comfort and function. The growing dichotomy addresses issues of phenomenology in the most detailed interaction of being. In the methods of Ray and Charles Eames, the mass manufacturing of their art remained human in a sense as the forms used were their original forms. In the analysis of furniture design, does the movement of distinct specialties within architecture lead to the loss of craft and detail within the living space of a building? When furniture is designed for mass manufacturing, it inadvertently morphs and becomes a new design entirely. The question in this case becomes, is it still art and does it still connect to the building within a rootless creation?

Architects from Corbusier to Van der Rohe to Aalto took pride in their furniture design just like their architecture. While the shift to postmodernism reflect a growing complexity, the furniture has done the opposite aesthetically. The manufacturing lends to a different narrative though through CNC prefabrication techniques and various design tools that allow for an illimitable system of design to emerge. Within this body of research, the phenomenology of furniture as a mass manufactured presence versus a custom display of craft reaches the forefront.

“But is not architecture similarly complex in its very inclusion of commodity, firmness, and delight? And are not the wants of program, of structure and mechanical equipment, and of expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable not to mention the broader scope of city planning? I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties. By embracing contradictions as well as complexity, I aim for vitality as well.”

I traveled internationally for the first time last spring for one of my classes. I picked the class purely because of my fascination with London and its intricacies. I had spent a large portion of my childhood reading various novels that took place in Victorian and Georgian London, the history fascinated me. When I thought of London, I thought of Fleet Street, the Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Westminster, Covent Garden, and St. Paul’s. These were the icons of London and British life, they embodied the whole city to me, until I went to London.

I arrived at the London Heathrow airport and was immediately taken aback by the massive glass and steel construction before me. It was an asymmetric imposing building constructed from new materials, the future of architecture. In reality, it was the modern but in my initial ignorance, I had not seen London as having a dichotomy between new and old. The wants of the building, of the city, in the words of Venturi, give way to a complexity and vitality I had not understood before.

Venturi describes the complexity of architecture in terms of the wants of the program, the structure and equipment, the expression. He sees the confliction as a way of creating architecture anew, the complexities and contradictions embody the unimaginable for people. Architecture had become a simplistic fossil of its previous glory and in order to achieve greatness again, it must welcome problems.

I saw Venturi’s ideas in completion in one of my impromptu happenings, I went on a guided night tour of the Jack the Ripper crimes. I arrived via train to Whitechapel and noticed immediately the mixture of history and modern life. There were old pubs advertising ghosts of Jack the Ripper victims and new Burger Kings selling fast food to the working class. This combination embodied the exact ways in which an urban space should be constructed and planned to respond to the wants of program. I see the wants of program as the needs of the locale, the program is dictated by the modern human as an architecture without vitality is dead.

The uncertainties dwell in the controversy of removing any part of history to make way for new. The council block flats which were built in the 1950s, lack any sort of complexity in form or program. However, there was complexity in the lives and stories that occupied those apartments though they are no longer living and breathing entities, just memories of the past. The question becomes, is it better to amend the building or start again?

The chaotic order of Whitechapel is made beautiful and complex within its historical contradictions. One of the most famous locations of a Jack the Ripper murder was the Truman Brewery. The Brewery, a representation of the dark history of crime within London was transformed into a new space, The Old Truman Brewery, a space for revolutionary arts and media. In a place of death and crime, a place of creation and innovation was placed. A concept diverse and conflicting in one of the most unimaginable ways. While the building was renovated, it appears in a hybrid of new and old, a complexity and contradiction. The roof frame was all open exposing the materiality, it became the structure and mechanical equipment shown through the building. Some of the restaurant spaces in the building are renovated with more futuristic approaches, it is the vitality of the modern city taking hold of history.

These complexities in contradictions are not just about the building as an entity, they are not just about a single architect, his goals, or his ambitions, they are not frivolous detail without intent. I saw commodity, firmness, and delight in the old, the new, and the old-new. I experienced the city in Victorian London, I experienced the city in modern times, and I experienced the modernized history of the space which called to a new and previously unknown experience. Complexity is not dependent on the destruction of what is bland and simple, it can be the dramatic retelling of a building as a story. The complexity of the story, the function and expression. I welcomed the problems when I went to London and I saw the broader scopes of city planning through Complexity and Contradiction.   

What is an Architect? Merriam Webster had two definitions, a person who designs buildings and advises in their construction, or a person who designs and guides a plan or undertaking. To Loos, the architect is a bit of an enemy. He tells a story of a house on a lake that does not pay attention to what it is taking from that space. His central question is why would the architect desecrate the lake? Why is a space in nature being designed by a city dweller without roots? In his eyes, culture is a balance between physical, mental and spiritual being. Often times in architecture school, we are taught that culture is classicism or modernism, it is subject to whatever people want to consume. In this, Loos is not wrong. Architects, in many ways, lack the culture and craft that create pleasing buildings that respond to needs. They also neglect what is or is not architecture. They see it as the singular definition of a person who designs buildings, a person who advises their construction, not necessary a person who designs and guides a plan for undertaking. For architecture to become a true machine for inhabitation in the words of Corbusier, it must evolve through revolution.

All the time, I tell people I am in Architecture school but I am not in love with designing buildings. They usually follow up with the question of why? To which I reply, Architecture is more than the brick and mortar of shelter, it is craft. Corbusier knew that architecture went beyond utilitarian needs. An engineer could create a structure using mathematical calculations and harmony of proportions but is it architecture? The architect looks beyond to order, form, and beauty.

In architecture, there is poetic emotion; when we experience a building in its entirety and feel emotion, it is in essence, a punctum. The punctum, according to Lucida, is what cuts through and pierces us, an emotion between the observer and the object. I go into a space and I look at the furniture, I ask myself how it is operating. Is it adding or subtracting from a space? Did the architect even care or were they too caught up in their singular role of designing the brick and mortar while forgetting that a building is more than it’s facade and walls.

The building, to me, is a system. A set of parts that operates as more than just the sum of said parts. When we think of a house, we see the exterior. When we think of our house, we see the rooms, the beds, chairs, couches. Furniture is an emotional linkage to what is sacred within our lives. Thinking about architecture and design as just walls in which to live is reductive in its linearity. The issue with such thought is, systems are often non-linear. There is an inter-connectivity between the parts of the whole and the network of connections is what creates the punctum. This inter-connectivity is what makes the building and the furniture more than just a collection of consumable products.

Furniture is the skeleton of life, we spend a third of our day, every day, lying still in a piece of furniture. Whether we realize it or not, our lives are tethered to these objects and so to disregard them as a finishing stage of the building is to disregard architecture, the plan and design of undertaking. To throw in a piece out of context is no better than throwing a large house on a lake with little to no regard for the nature. It is without culture or reverence. It is taking from an epoch that is not relevant in the context and because of this, it will never truly be, a work of architecture. As the philosopher Graham Harmon points out, objects are inadvertently metaphysical. Objects can only react with other objects inside of an intention. If furniture is not designed with an intention, it cannot react with the objects of inhabitation and they exist without attachment.

The issue in architecture at present is our existence without attachment. In designing urban reactions to contexts we do not know or do not understand, we are putting a spaceship on a lake. We are not building and designing for our epoch that demands more of living and ownership. We halt design on merely structure which could be work of an engineer if devoid of art. Corbusier acknowledges that art, in its essence is arrogant. Architecture has become high art and is, in its essence, arrogant. It is time for the architect to return to craft in search of an understanding of epoch, for architecture, as revolution.  

When we think of architecture, its is not commonly in terms of complex systems. There are roles played by economics, environment, structure, multiple elements. Everything in architecture is an element and relation and together, they form complex systems. That in mind, because a complex system is often non-linear in its behavior, it poses the question of how we examine all compounding factors to build responsibly.

Ben Van Berkel, a Dutch architect, sees the solution in diagramming. There is a separation between the technicalities and the abstraction in architecture and that is where the diagram rests. Essentially, the diagram is meant to be a representational compression of all important information. It is, according to him, a “proliferating, generating, and instrumentalising approach to design.” He sees it as a shadow of the piece, a relation within the system. When looking at his approach, we can see an interconnectivity between components hinting at a network of connections rather than a system of disordered parts. The complex systems become an aid to design through illustrating specific properties that shed a new light on the project.  We see how the project is no longer just a project, it becomes a part of the network, a part of the system.

Robert E. Somol sees the diagram as a theoretical, pedagogical approach to architecture. He believes it is the only method of understanding that moves between form and word. Like Berkel, he sees it as projective, it opens up new territories for the practice. By looking at a diagram, we are assessing the parts that make up the whole, the parts that diverge from the whole, and the parts that somehow, exist separately but connected to the whole. It leads to the emergence of another world, much in the same way that parts self-organize in a process of systems emergence. The diagrammatic practice signifies a process, an order or network in the chaos that dictates laws and outcomes. The diagram is mainly an organizer and channeler of information to be used both in a form of analytical reductionism and synthesis.

Some would argue that a diagram is just a diagram, merely another tool for architects to draft nonsense. With non-linear systems, the world operates in perceived nonsense, a balance between chaos and order. A certain synergy can exist between elements or even in a particular relation between elements. A strictly technical and analytical approach that assesses parts rather than the whole can neglect the coordination that exists. Diagrams represent a synthetic holism in architectural thinking and systems thinking. They take everything that we think we might know to that point and draw connections so that the architecture itself is forced to evolve. When people see the whole as nothing more than the sum of its parts, they neglect the entire idea of emergence. In the world exists complex adaptive systems, there are many parts acting and reacting to each other leading to shifts in equilibrium. It is impossible to cover complex theories and topics through linear thinking. Diagrams represent a sort of network theory in which people are empowered to visualize connection and data in a new way.  Through this inherently nonlinear system, architecture is able to find order within chaos.