Support evidence for first argument of Windows Without Buildings.
For all the time I have spent in federal buildings I have never managed to convene in a room with windows. This is strange because the archetypal federal building, dating from the post-war population swell of government bureaucrats but before the retraction into privatization, is outstanding in most city landscapes for having the most windows. Certainly there are all-glass buildings, but these are single gigantic monolithic windows. The federal building is characterized by the Cartesian relentlessness of its glazing subdivision where what is expressed is the window frame rather than the window opening. There couldn’t be a more Kafkaesque resolution to the federal building design problem. A building envelope that fluctuates between communicating the sovereign existence of the individual as one of many or the loss of that individual identity through the homogenization of bureaucracy and bean-counting, all expressed through the primary conveyance of hope in a structure: a window to the sky; and all of this meeting a building whose interior we are fortunate enough to gain access to (sorry K!) only to find that there are no real windows.
Perhaps these shots of Kulper’s ‘Texas Range’ show from “my files!” will wet Thos.’s whistle and provide some context to the ‘Windows Without Buildings’ writings sifting around the site.
Also, as my life continues on, day after day like the grey suit of the genius, the sameness builds up in columns of like items where an occurrence that was long ago a ‘one-off’ is now in a stack of familiars that are warmed by their approaching a constant ‘room temperature’ and ooze together into a single item. That unforgettable visit to the Marquis as a youth, wandering alone to Peachtree Center mall to look at Stephen King books in B. Dalton is now, although still distinct as a base, the beginning of a long dive through what now must be hundreds of visits, no one separable from the others. Conversations, even those with friends or those with stimulating content become grouped together. As Merrill spoke on the terrace over Congress at the Stephen Austin one night I sadly told myself that I would forget every word she said. Unfortunately it is not as easy as flipping the switch to the recording mind. That mind has contextual controls. I don’t think conversations can be picked up this way unless their grain is somehow concurrent with the material of the experience (either reflecting it or shaping it, more likely the latter, see the numerous ‘getting dumped by your fiancé in the Zocalo ruminations’). Conversations are more of a way of marking time. They are necessarily fleeting. They don’t create space. (more…)
We sat for quite a while talking at his desk. It struck me how removed the practice gets from academia (note, in PK’s lecture he shared his belief that the academy does not educate you on how to practice architecture, but more how to conceive of it). Even as much as I struggle to keep my efforts unshackled by the general concern of practice for assimilation, applicability, and communicability (business), or transcendence (silence, ‘the building’), I find that it is the residues manifested in the bureaucracy of practice that grind down my resolve to include the unnecessary, the intransigent, and the intangible, the wet paint of thought. But the schism, or the inability to communicate with Leach, was not out of differing pursuits but of differing exposures. Necessarily the attitudes were different. That is a matter of survival between the worlds of practice and thought. I liken it to the perception of a teenager by an adult: their naivety is offputting yet their enthusiasm and immersion are enviable. They have not stultified. It is academia’s job to unearth tangents, the nodes, the inflections. Is their nuance to ephemera, to steam? It is a coaxing of unknowables into a shadowy image cast by successive puffs of smoke. Practitioners often scorn that ephemerality or uselessness. But often in history (where?) the constellations of history, interdisciplinarianism, and personality have inflected practice at its mid-to-elevated strata of frontiersmen. If not directly then at least categorically by organizing trends into cultural milieus that could be operated upon in an evolutionary process by practitioners (wittingly or unwittingly). The real schism though is language. The language of practice and thought are divergent or they circle one another like prize fighters. The language of practice is active, it looks to quantify known systems (money, construction, time, spatial requirements, all bundled into the lamentable ‘scope’) while academic thought is communicated in terms that never become real (this sounds like a ‘you see, white people talk like this… bit), about which there is question (language itself in words and drawings)(triggered, ready to go off), its langage is pointing, rather than structural, and immersive (as a surrogate to the built experience), and absolute. Having sat in a holding pattern for so many years on my Austin job I didn’t have such a severed relationship with the inherent commitment to deferral I sensed in Leach’s language, his referentiality, I didn’t think these jots were useless, I envied them in fact, although structurally similar to my efforts, the way in which they were categorized, the interests and pursuits more searching, and as they diverged in their aspirations I didn’t have the language to engage them. If obscure architects are heavy-bundled adjective, I was only getting the nouns. The clouds were thin to me.
‘The body’, no longer ‘her body’, there in a diorama almost set precisely in an alcove filled out with flowers, two roseate globe lamps and two red-shaded tapers, become as a whole array, a fetish upon which the emotions and memories about the woman are channeled, but try as I might, looking upon the face, not quite right, slightly off, as though molded and coated with the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust, I could not picture a moving living memory, the body had taken them from me, it was not until later, in bed, that I could ’see’ her laughing, with her partial plate and coffee-rasped throat, because what was there and the way it sat in the room was the hinge point in the forgetting process, where life becomes the caricature of ‘the sleeping body’, of ‘her sleeping body’, and it is at that point you are shaken to abandon your attachment to embodied memories, by depositing them onto the fetish doll, and the final time you turn your back, after all the receptional and conversational dismissals, you leave those desires and applications, and equations of ‘her’ upon ‘it’ and you take her away as a completely memorial construction. (more…)
Most everything north of the Capitol, before I got to West MLK, was closed. An off assortment of daycare centers, old law offices, and a bootmaker lined the street in low-slung 1960s far-past-modernism main street USA storefronts made of deep-raked painted-over brick or stucco with mold constellations. They felt like they were turning their backs on me. The gold foil lettering on the plate glass blistered. I loved stretches like this where the glass was so black and dirty and the spaces so dark or dim that I could place myself in them via reflection and transparency. But also I stop to try to pick something out of their architecture. (more…)
Entering my thesis work I was very concerned, from slights I had felt tremendously injurious in my fully one-summer-long professional career, with the reformation of practice into a more democratic or pluralistic adventure. I foresaw a chorus, or at least some kind of organized chaos where I could make some marks and have them left to be noted by someone who took an interest. But perhaps what shook out of that professional experience was not that I wanted to reform practice, but that I want practice to be reformed. I had learned that I had not the ego strength to run an office, and destined to wallflowerdom in the field I wanted to imbue those peripheries with some kind of voice, an intern’s bill of rights. It is hard for me to recall ten years later what made me nauseous every morning I went to the office. I think at the time I saw it as a personality conflict. But I can see a more lasting reading being the acclimation to loss of control. This was not only the loss of creative control, which I had held to varying results over my five years down of schooling and studies, but the loss of lifestyle control that every person must choke on as they edge into the professional world. It was like a first time smoker suffering through those first several butts. I had to really want to stick to it. Having no interest in acclimating beyond emersion enough to provide me fodder for my intellectual inquiries, the experience made me gag emotionally.
Sprawled alone with long summer dusk still high and slow through the trees beyond the Kimbell with my back against a bench and my legs flat stretched out across the floor toward the fountain I fingered pits in the travertine. I don’t think about giants when I am right up against them. (more…)
