In an interview with Ellen Lupton in 1994, Michael Rock said something about meaning coming from “the forms of design itself”, and mentioned that the aesthetics of letterpress having class identity encoded within. I assume by “the forms of design”, he was referring to the relationship between process and meaning, rite?

Similarly, my drafting critic last fall in the BEB said that each drawing methodology (orthographic, isometric, perspective et cetera) can tell a story, and by privledging different viewpoints, you change the story. Seems obvious when I write that point down here, but it was quite illuminating at the time.

Figures 1 and 2: Two views of my final Design Principles project, Geometric Confusion.

But so this weekend, I was having a drink with Laura on the roof of the Gansevoort Hotel, kicking off a >48h bender of idiotic decadence and intoxication, and I was amused that I could see some brilliantly clean examples from the typology described in Steven Holl’s Pamphlet Architecture number 5, The Alphabetical City. I’ve always been sort of a fan of this book, probably just because it addresses urbanism in terms of type, however formally.

Figure 3. T-shaped airshaft in some building in the meatpacking district.

I could only see this shit, however, cuz I was on the roof of a pricey hotel. Generally this is the case with any sort of planometric design: you have to be high up to actually see what’s what, or be the architect.

Figure 4. The cover of the book in question.

My mom used to be the head of the dance department at Wellesley College, where she worked for almost 20 years. I grew up playing around on its campus, which really is quite elysian and gorgeous. I was always struck, specifically, by the distinctly non-elysian science center. The building is actually a strange mashup of an older building, Sage Hall, and newer construction. When I was a kid, I would enjoy getting lost in there, because it was deliciously disorienting.

I revisited the science center when I was in college, and I was amazed at how completely incoherent it seemed. Bridgelike pathways went everywhere, the signage was kind of nuts, and you couldn’t get to where you thought you could get when you looked around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really, but hey.

My friend, one of my mom’s students, knew how to get up onto the roof, tho, so we did that in short order. When you looked down into the building through the one of the skylights, it suddenly made a great deal more sense, visually. The crazy bridges were actually radially arranged around a central core. Programmatically separate areas were deliniated cleanly. And so forth.

(At this point in my life I had much to learn of bullshit design language, it should be noted, so I didn’t say anything about programmatically separate areas or radial fuckshit. I just probably blurted, “oh so now it makes sense” or something like that.)

So yeah, you could say that planocentrism (a word I just made up just now) is a class thing, no? And a problem, I think. The idea that a program diagram can become a plan is so tempting, given the nature of drafting technique (including, of course, the methodology enforced by contemporary CAD systems). But people end up looking up at buildings way more often than they look down on them, cuz of gravity and whatnot… one could postulate a class gradient that follows elevation from sea level linearly, as well.

Indeed. As I ranted about two or so years ago, these starchitects enjoy their helicopter rides. At that level, one can free-associate with elaborate metaphor, and talk about a monstrous idea like a city as if it was a painting. Such thinking is constrained by the viewpoint, and makes little sense outside of the narrow socioeconomic strata the thinker is operating in. The upshot, then, is that we get coffeetable books filled with baroque but useless theory, and designers who earnestly believe that they are operating somewhere outside their own navel.

Not like I’m any better, of course; I was up at the rooftop bar having an overpriced mojito with the rest of ‘em. I’m just sayin’. Yeah.

-fish

The High Line was urban infrastructure and architecture, in harmony. It came about in accordance with the economic logic of the day, that which produced buildings whose programmatic ties to train-based logistics were physically manifest… the remnants of which can be seen along any of the rundown exurban areas Amtrak’s northeast corridor passes through, where sagging warehouses directly interface with little rusty side-branches of track that split off from the main route. There was no abstraction between commerce, logistics, infrastructure, and architecture… all such interactions were right there, in the open, and quite legible.

Figure 1. High Line train passing through what is now Westbeth Artists’ Community.

… When Bryan had talked about infrastructure in housing as an API, my first thought was something like

Ok yeah, but unless you are stamping like thousands of these things out, all with slightly different structural, logical, and perhaps programmatic requirements, the API idea kind of breaks down, cuz it’s overkill, I mean after all an API is something you use in order to approach a component-based system of structures in a black-box sort of way, whereas in architecture that makes little sense considering the amount of post-construction, errm, dynamism in the system.

… points which, I should mention, a) went unuttered outside of my own bedroom and b) were summarily addressed, more or less, immediately afterwards. But I am always wary when ideas from software engineering are brought into other disciplines, because really most everything in software is metaphor to begin with. That, coupled with the “fail better” mentality fostered by apple-Z and, more recently, the whole agile-development thing, seems like a philosophy that would complicate things faster than it could simplify them.

But fuck that, really, because “complex” and “simple” is probably the worst false dichotomy like ever. The manhattan grid, and later the 1916 zoning law, created (by dint of abstracting the ideas of “city block”, “avenue”, etcetera) a simple system in which people could build shit. This happened to coincide with the advent of individualism in the last century, and the dovetailing of said individualism with rabid hypercapitalism, and so volia, yes, the modular and slightly abstract system made a lot of sense. so people built shit.

The edge cases are the most interesting, tho… like when people want or need to programmatically exceed that system. The inevitable friction between the parties involved when such things are executed is, too, a consequence of the abstraction; if we’re still talking in terms of things like APIs, it’s kind of like “DLL hell” I would say. The almost balletic integration of the High Line with the buildings it serviced does, I will concede, have a nice parallel with the earlier days of computer engineering, before APIs were trans-national legal concerns, when code was written for love, and not much else.

Figure 2. The High Line, immediately prior to the commencement of reconstruction.

Most designers (including myself on most days) would like to ignore the cold, hard, logical fact of the economic context. It is always the thing in the background that drives all of these engineering decisions, whether you’re building an API for software or for plumbing. I mean, the Friends of the High Line are going to end up with a mighty fine bullet-point to lend to nearby luxury condo developers, despite their proclaimed 501(c)(3) status. It looks to be very pretty, yes. But I fear that the simultaneous decoupling of the place, from both its economic and physical contexts, will rob it of its power.

Is this sort of universal abstraction simply the spirit of the times, or is it a fluke of globalization? Who knows. I don’t. If you know, tell me. In the meantime I’ll be reading more Houellebecq, which is what started me thinking about all this nonsense in the first place. Yes.

-fish