Lineament: Material, Representation and the Physical Figure in Architectural Production

Gail Peter Borden, Michael Meredith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138929548
• eBook ISBN: 9781317397045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This comprehensive catalogue of contemporary work examines the renewed investment in the relationship between representation, materiality, and architecture. It assembles a range of diverse voices across various institutions, practices, generations, and geographies, through specific case studies that collectively present a broader theoretical intention.

Part 1
Interviews

Interview 1

Gail Peter Borden and Wes Jones

GB:You have an amazing body of work. You’ve been able to build a lot, but like all Architects there’s a lot of un-built work. In both, you’ve taken a very curated, choreographed and intentional kind of cataloguing and display in two beautiful monograph volumes, but also in a variety of other sorts of printed media to focus on the representation as much as the work itself. So, what’s the significance of representation to you and your work?

WJ:I have noted about my own practice and kind of regretted over time that there is a difference between what I would call my “art practice,” and my “professional practice.” I think this is somewhat unusual, since the models of this relationship are architects like Le Corbuiser or Mies Van Der Rohe, whose drawings and work are absolutely integrated. You can find a compositional sense and particular forms in their paintings that then show up in their work. I feel that has really never been the case in my own work. Instead, there have been two practices. One is a strictly representational/documentary practice related to the work, consumed with illustrating or presenting the work within the architectural arena in order to make whatever points the work was interested in making; the other is a parallel art practice that has been as important to me, and that is much more related to the art world and its interests than anything I felt I could connect to architecture. I originally got into the comic thing from this direction as a way to bring the two practices together, and at a certain point …

GB:Like the “Meet the Nelsons.”

WJ:Exactly. And unfortunately I suspect I have lately become known more for that than the architecture. I found comics to be a really rich and complete medium I thought I could use to bring the practice and the art sides together. Comics cover all the bases relating to representation, not only the visual, but also the ideational, and they go from abstract to super figural. But after the first few, where the comics were used to present an architectural project, my interest became more of an exploration of the medium itself and an opportunity to consider it more critically; and this medium was fascinating because it was not bound by real world constraints, physics or program or budget. The discipline of comics is so clear, and so easy to fiddle with. My work in comics became a way to satisfy an urge toward criticality without getting me in trouble by doing things that maybe were not entirely appropriate to any particular architectural opportunity. I started this interest even back when I was an undergrad at Berkeley. My dad was an artist and since I was a little kid I always imagined that I would do something like that. And so, I always applied an art sensibility to my presentation work and in fact, when I went to the GSD that became my thing. I was told that one of the reasons why I was admitted with advanced-standing with a less than awesome undergrad experience from Berkeley’s four-year program was because they were trying to pump up the quality of drawing in the class, so they sprinkled in people who were selected specifically for their drawing abilities. I came into the school as the crazy guy from the West Coast, with a strong collage sensibility, and my drawings at the GSD were quite unusual. This was the period during the decon/pomo era when yellow trace was a big deal but there was also a lot of very careful ink on mylar drawing. I came in putting little gold stars on my drawings and rubber stamps and spray paint and all this other kind of stuff. It was very messy and I believe quite liberating to the school. It gave me notoriety. In fact, I am proud to think that I introduced spray paint into the studio, certainly with respect to models. That attitude, that sensibility, that interest has always informed my presentation work in architecture. But I have never tied them together as an argument in a way that the folks I mentioned earlier had always been able to do, because it sort of only went one way after school. That is, the art did not make its way into the building design so much.

GB:Right, but there is something wonderful about it, that your work has evolved with this kind of consistency since its inception. It has always shown a dedication to craft and to the object. Though perhaps messy and quick, or hard and meticulous, there was a real care and consideration of all those media, either experimental or well harnessed and applied. What is interesting to me in your work is that medium has been a consistent weather vane for you. Media has changed since when you started back in a fully pre-digital time, but even now I think a lot of the sorts of visualizations you produce still show the kind of graphic screening from the newsprint kind of elements. Then there are moments for me when your work has actually found a kind of total synthesis: the UCLA chiller plant for instance. When I look at those drawings, the visual graphic is the building. In the end I think the built artifact has a real connection to its representation. In some way maybe that is facilitated by the program of a giant machine, more than a conventionally occupiable building, but there is a kind of beauty in that. I think it has led you in a lot of ways. Obviously it is the “boss architecture,” the “souping up” of modernism, but that comes out of the representation.

WJ:Despite what you are saying about the Chiller Plant, I regret an inability to bring the two together intentionally. I think they have grown in parallel, naturally over the course of my career, but rarely come together. The notion of consistency is something that I have defensively decided to embrace in the face of current, more fashionable things. This was never an intention, but the result of a selfish desire to do the stuff I found most satisfying, and maybe I lucked into a vein of interest that has been, in my view, barely tapped. In other words, as they say in the south: I feel there is “more meat on that bone.” I could easily imagine a career just exploring that territory and so I haven’t really worried about what was considered by everyone else to be cool. I have to say in all honesty my career has been entirely selfish in that regard. I never looked around to see what was fashionable or compared what I was doing to what was thought to be most “advanced.”

In fact the early notoriety I gained was a total fluke—the culture machine always needs new material, and so is set up to consume young practices. I was caught in that, without any ambition on my part at all. What I thought that I was doing at the time was straight modernism—Foster and Rogers—but because of the P/A Awards, and my particular habit of going over the top with my representation, I was noticed by some juries. I was briefly seen at this time as a representative of decon, which was a total surprise to me. Despite the fact that I had worked at Eisenman’s office and had learned the lingo and used those arguments in texts, the work itself was always pretty straightforward (I thought), tech-oriented stuff. I was only ever interested in that, and I never did the kind of disruptive collage design that characterized decon as a critical practice, yet somehow I got labeled, or stuck …

GB:Plugged in.

WJ:Yes. Put on that team and consumed by the media that way. Which was of course completely useful, because it took me places that I never would have gotten if they realized what I was really interested in. Eventually of course they caught on. The digital thing kind of took over and gave them something else to work on.

While selfishly pursued, the work has never been personal. The nature of the representation has been a result of this. The presentation is in my mind completely neutral. It’s ink on mylar, no hand, as absolutely neutral as possible, like drawings in a manual, or construction documents, rather than anything that could be identified with a particular hand or author. Luckily there have been enough people who share my interests that I have been able to attract an audience and a group of like-minded people to help me to keep practicing this very selfishly …

GB:You spawned generations of emulators.

WJ:Exactly, but it was never like I sat down and said ok I am going to do the representation in this way in order to attract attention. After my youthful collage presentations I stuck to my core principals of no hand, no personality, just a completely neutral presentation. Which I always relate to the ethical responsibility of the architect to stand behind the work rather than in front of it, and all the arguments that go along with that.

GB:So that is an interesting conversation: the idea of the manual and the technical graphic. We talked a little bit about the influence of comic books, are there other kinds of graphic sources that you look at—music videos? fine arts? or …?

WJ:Not so much music videos. But I would say Science Fiction.

GB:Right, the music video really represents a specific era. It is not the modern video, but that period in the 80s when the visualization of music was new and created a different way of experiencing music.

WJ:Well, I grew up during that period when MTV first came out, and I would binge all night watching that stuff, just waiting to see what the next one would be. But, I don’t think it ever affected me graphically. I think the bigger interest was Science Fiction and the art direction associated with that—Ralph McQuarrie, for example, who did the original Star Wars designs, was a big hero. I had his books and that was really what I wanted to do. My greatest fantasy at the beginning of my career was that I would do a design that would be noticed by ILM (Industrial, Light, and Magic). In fact, when I was at the American Academy in Rome I sent a design for a spaceship to them (that I found recently in a box of my stuff), several pages of sketches supplemented by six or seven hand-written pages of explanation. With it I was trying to make the argument that the back story behind this stuff, the apparent physics and the program, was as important to the story as the imagery. I was faulting some of their stuff on that basis and trying to make a demonstration through this particular vehicle design of such a close relationship between form and function. I just wanted to get involved. But, the package I sent was returned unopened with a note from their lawyers saying “we can’t accept un-solicited submissions” like this, because of the fear of getting sued. Ironically, I noticed that in Avatar the vehicle I had designed showed up almost exactly as the transport shuttle the bad guys were using … except Cameron had neglected the physics involving “the force,” which of course was not available to his story.

This science fiction stuff was not even mostly about graphics, though. I was mostly captivated by its speculative nature, which gave the permission to invent new things, while simultaneously requiring those things to be realistic within the imagined universe of physical possibilities.

GB:The kind of pragmatism in their visionary core.

WJ:Absolutely. It was a way to advance a form of pragmatism, which lately I have pursued under the rubric of “purposefulness,” but have always felt was evident in the work. It has always underlain the operative representation and the conceptual ethic in my work—that notion of laundering the hand out of it, as well as the ability to explain everything I did in terms of some pragmatic reason, some program. I liked to feel that I did nothing just for purely willful reasons.

The constraints that science fiction relaxed have become less important lately and outlandish science fiction possibilities are now very conceivable—whether as the virtual reality or cinema special effects that are becoming continuous with our “real” reality, or nano-technology, which may allow things like gravity and other physical constraints to be elective concerns in the future. All the limitations that have given architecture meaning throughout its history might be eliminated, leaving us with the disciplinary crisis of how to decide what to do when nothing is preventing us from doing anything we want. It’s a scenario in which your mom could whip up a house as easily as anyone else just by mixing up the right goo together. How will the discipline figure out a way to survive when that survival has leaned on the props of physical constraints for the last 3500 years and will now have to discover something else?

GB:Then is architectural representation as important as its physical building? For you, can architecture reside and culminate in representation as much as i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction and material premise
• 1 Interviews
• 2 Material representation and design
• Part 3: Material representation and process
• Part 4: Material representation and technique
• Part 5: Material representation and perception/effect
• Index