LECTURES + READINGS
VISUAL DESIGN THEORY?
week 01
The opening lectures provide an overview of the course and general introductions are made via the BIO ASSIGNMENT. Important key concepts and terms will be discussed. As well, a presentation is made that explains how to create and manage your JOURNAL. The template for your journal can be downloaded HERE.
Peter Zumthor. Atmospheres. (Birkhauser, 2006)
Vladamir Nabakov. Speak, Memory. (New York: Vintage Books, 1967)
BLINDNESS + LIGHTWRITING
week 02
We begin the course by denying the privileged sense of sight - the VISUAL - with a consideration of darkness and blindness:
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does…
- Jorge Luis Borges, writes in “A New Refutation of Time” in Labyrinths
An examination of photographic precedent reveals that the photographer, and less often the designer, relies heavily on the subtle nuances of place as it transforms from day to night and year to decade in the same fashion that a writer’s characters wrinkle with time. This was never more evident than throughout the nineteenth century as photographers reacted to the transforming physical landscape, the loss of night’s mysteries to the imposition of artificial light. Now, the ever-increasing illumination of our waking moments has turned the silence of the moonlit agrarian landscape into a distant memory and almost total fiction.
With this industrial transformation, the possibility of oscillating in the uncertainty of human thought and emotion, a kind of intellectual twilight where vision succumbs to the imagination, has been eliminated from everyday life. Photography’s (literally translated as ‘drawing with light’) early portrayal of time and its ability to qualify experience through degrees of darkness offers a realm of opportunity for resurrecting the poetry and sublimity of night as a driving element in the conception of space. Lightwriting: Constructing Night challenges our translations of space as seen by a more majestic light than the sun, reconstituting the poetics of the night and reestablishing the potential for a symbiotic relationship between the design process and the photographic image.
For photographers, the spiritual essence of moonlight and glowing cities devoid of moving objects were ideal subjects for the necessary longer exposure times. Clearly, if the physical realm could not preserve the sublime qualities of the night then it fell to the mechanical eye to stimulate the imagination and record this disappearing and soon to become fictional night-world.
Photographs from late nineteenth and early twentieth century document the poetic qualities of night as captured by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Brassai. These photographs exploit themes seldom incorporated into conventional architectural representation and are certainly worthy of further exploration such as temperature, absence and presence, reflection, the blurring of representational boundaries (i.e. photography becomes painting), inversion – where the negative space becomes the positive, the transformation of technology to the poetic realm (i.e. streetlights become constellations), the fragment, commentary on technology and the disappearing night landscape, and finally degrees of isolation and melancholy.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Blindness,” in Seven Nights (New York: New Directions Books, 1984).
Jun’ichiro Tanazaki, In Praise of Shadows (Sedgwick: Leete’s Island, 1977), 1-23.
Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin (Wiley-Academy, 2005)
James Agee. “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” in A Death in the Family (New York: Penguin, 1957).
Washington Irving. Tales of the Alhambra (Granada: Ediciones Miguel Sanchez, 1832).
L'OEIL DE L'ENFANT
week 03 + 04
This set of lectures considers origins. ‘How do we learn to draw?’ is the central question and focuses on Rudolph Arnheim’s seminal research with regard to developmental psychology. The oldest and most widespread theory or explanation of children’s drawings is that since children do not depict what one assumes they see, some mental activity other than perception must intervene. Intellectualist theory asserts that art at an early stage is derived from a non-visual source – or abstract concepts. But where would these concepts come from and in what form if not in the form of visual data? The exercise entitled DISEMBODIED CIRCLE: A TWELVE STEP PROGRAM will be conducted.
The objective is to represent an architectural idea at one-to-one scale. This is the architectural act in a compressed form… It is right that somewhere early in students’ education they come into contact not only with the conception of an object but the enormous and joyful responsibility for realizing it as well.
- Tod Williams, “OBJECT” from Education of an Architect
The exercise entitled Disembodied Circle allows young designers to engage a highly personal three-dimensional space, one that makes the often more abstract processes of the design studio more tangible. The exercise provides a forum in which to examine the consequences of various physical conditions and question fundamental design decisions related to scale and site as well as appreciate various phenomenological determinants of place. The magic of this exercise lies in its absolute simplicity, its ability to emphasize how subtle shifts in dimension can profoundly affect one’s psychological reading of a space. In a relatively short period, students undergo a wonderful transformation from an interstitial state, that of the wall, to an external and then internal realization of an archetypal condition – the inscribed circle.
We begin the fourth week by looking at examples of children's books. Specifically, we will examine illustrative techniques that focus on the frame, narrative structure, the imagination, color, printing techniques, and movement. As well, we will travel some 35,000 years back in time and examine the oldest known pictorial creations of humanity as documented in Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). As such, we will expand our investigation of drawing beyond mere developmental necessity to include prehistoric persons who used graphic techniques to cope with and better understand the complexities of the world around them.
Michael Ondaatje. In the Skin of a Lion (London: Picador, 1988), 1-52.
Crockett Johnson. Harold and the Purple Crayon (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1955)
week 04 reading
ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE
week 05
An investigation into what Michael Graves referred to as the artistic conscience. “It goes without saying that what the architect chooses to draw, using his sketchbook as a tool for observation, reveals an examination of the artistic conscience.” This week will examine how the architect “first looks, then observes, and finally discovers” and will present how the Grand Tour served as a primary vehicle for such discovery for two centuries.
Michael Graves. The Necessity for Drawing in Brian Ambroziak. Images of a Grand Tour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).
INFINITE PERSPECTIVES
week 06
This lecture provides an overview of cartographic relief presentation techniques from antiquity to the present. We will examine the quantitative and qualitative artistic methods that paralleled advances in the sciences as the Icarian point of view was slowly realized.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984)
ASSIGNMENT [ad]VANTAGE POINTS : ICARUS LANDED /// a study in remote sensing
COLLAGE + PROSE
week 07
Everything is known, including that which is still unknown. The Paranoid-Critical Method (PCM) is both the product and the remedy against that anxiety: it promises that, through conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium, and that ever-new generations of false facts and fabricated evidences can be generated simply through the act of interpretation.
- from Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan by Rem Koolhaas. 1978
This series of lectures reflects upon the creative process and examines an alternative design methodology for the conception of spatial ideas. This pedagogical approach incorporates a series of steps that biases writing, embraces qualitative accident, and finally yields representational artifacts positioned somewhere between the written word and the physical construct. For this particular series of assignments, each student is asked to accumulate brought-together elements and place them into what Max Ernst referred to as his plane of non-agreement. The source material for the assignment, the worn, consumed contents of the world, is language culled from issues of Vogue magazine that is by default a representation of contemporary culture. Students scour its pages for wording that strikes them as having a strong visual and auditory component. These fragments are then crafted into written prose with the underlying charge to challenge the perceived limitations inherent to conventional representational techniques. In many ways, this work is more closely related to the development of a screenplay where one’s ideas about what constitutes place are quickly inhabited by dripping gutters and coke bottles filled with sand. Ultimately, through this process of conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium.
Our guest lecturer Andrew McLellan will deliver his lecture “The Gunslinger and the Pharmacist: Collage in the Poetry of Michael Ondaatje and Christian Hawkey.” The lecture examines the various techniques of collage employed by writers, with a particular focus on Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl.
ANDREW McLELLAN / COLLECTED POEMS
Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 38-73.
APERTURE 3Ps
week 08
Consideration of the three P’s as they relate to aperture: [p]hysical, [p]hysiological, and [p]sychological.
MONTAGE
week 09
This week will focus on a workshop entitled Vogue: Mapping Pop Culture.
One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obsession which held under my gaze the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and paleontologic demonstration. There I found brought-together elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple, and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep.
These visions called themselves new planes, because of their meeting in a new unknown (the plane of non-agreement). It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a color, a pencil mark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon…thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed into revealing dramas my most secret desires – from what had been before only some banal pages of advertising.[1]
- Excerpt from “Beyond Painting” by Max Ernst
Thomas Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus that “tangible products” are said to be reduced to the categories of “Cities… Fields… and Books” with the worth of books “far surpassing that of the two others.”[2] The intent behind citing this passage emerges not from being partial to the written word, but to establish a sympathizing companion to the more often cited chapter “This Will Kill That” and out of optimism that the transformative power of literature evident here will inspire architecture and expand upon traditional practices of imagining and representing space. In the foreword to Collage and Architecture, Juhanni Pallasmaa quotes the poet Joseph Brodsky, reminding us that even though collage has long been associated with visual art and film, “it was poetry that invented the technique of montage, not Eisenstein.”[3]
The verse contained in this publication is a valiant attempt by twenty-one students to jumpstart their design process through prose. The assignment entitled Vogue: Mapping Pop Culture aspires to expand the present tense of the design process. This workshop asked student to identify a series of fragments from the most recent issue of Vogue magazine and organize them into what Max Ernst referred to as a plane of non-agreement. Drawing upon the aesthetic nature of language as defined by Borges as he describes the near symmetry of the English moon, the signifier plays a central role in searching out a vocabulary that describes qualities seldom associated with the errant trajectories initiated by the hand in the early design process. While the sketched line as well as the typewriter’s hammer both create shapes that evoke symbolic associations, sketching, or disegno as it is referred to in Italian, relies more heavily on composition and geometry and drawing convention in its primary reading. So while two parallel lines might create an almost instantaneous reading of a wall, either in plan or section, and a series of these lines might further begin to evoke a sense of materiality, language possesses the ability to, with the same effort, open the reader’s eyes to a scale unimagined by first marks in graphite and ink. When James Agee describes the material of the sharecroppers houses as bone pine hung on its nails like an abandoned Christ, he is metaphorically connecting the structure’s skin to that of the human body while reinforcing the daily even religious struggle inherent to the life of its occupant.[4] The signified image thus plays a vital role in expanding the potential of a simple subject to command an emotional quality seldom achieved through drawing alone.
The theorist Ben Nicholson emphasizes the importance that an artist appropriate “raw material that is directly associated with the age in which he lives.”5 In his book Appliance House, the source material for his collages comes from the Sears Catalog and the Sweets Catalog, “the American institution for store bought articles and the encyclopedic collection of brochures aimed at the building industry,”6 respectively. In the 2nd Century, one of the earliest examples of the use of collage in writing, can be found in Saint Irenaeus’s Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies), which includes a cento composed of various Homeric verses to demonstrate how easily the heretical (in Saint Irenaeus’s opinion) Gnostics altered the Gospels. Saint Irenaeus stitches together lines of verse from both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Well-mined source material lends to the authenticity of a newly rendered scene.
Culling Vogue magazine, the students in the Cal Poly workshop scoured its pages for language that striked them as having a strong visual and auditory component — it was by default a representation of contemporary culture with a strongly inherent bias. As such, their starting point drew not from memory but was external and negated the notion of a random process as students consciously choose words or phrases for a variety of reasons. One could see precedent or a site’s context as providing a similar kit of parts with which to begin a conceptual process; a kind of jump-start to the creation of a truly original idea. Douglas Darden’s Condemned Building as well as Dali’s Paranoid-Critical Method (PCM) as described by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York, served as valuable guides to the workshop and stressed the necessary strategies and desires required to make a fresh start and acknowledged that these methods are by no means a novel approach.
Ultimately, the prose contained in these pages exists as both a physical object that maintains its own aesthetic existence as well as a construct that conjures up as many readings as there are readers. The writing contained in this publication serves as a record of the possibilities afforded by an experiment meant to challenge the limitations of the design process.
1 Max Ernst, Beyond Painting. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 14.
2 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 138.
3 Jennifer A.E. Shields, Collage and Architecture (New York: Routledge Press, 2014), ix.
4 James Agee and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Mariner Books, 2001), 19.
5 Ben Nicholson, Appliance House (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 18.
6 Nicholson, Appliance House, 12.
THE PLANE OF NON-AGREEMENT / MAPPING POP CULTURE VOLUME 001
THE PLANE OF NON-AGREEMENT / MAPPING POP CULTURE VOLUME 002
THE PERIOD EYE + SURVEY
week 10
Focuses on the medieval and renaissance eye Central to this discussion is the work of Michael Baxandall entitled Painting and Experience in 25th Century Italy. We will attempt to understnd the complex psychological condition faced by the medieval painter who created exterior visualizations... the public's interior visualizations, for an illiterate society as it pertained only to the written word.
Unberto Eco. The Name of the Rose (New York, 1984).
READINGS
John Hejduk. Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953-1996 (Boston: MIT Press, 1998)
Readings. Robin Evans. “Persistent Breakage,” in The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 55-69.
Lois E. Nesbitt. Brodsky and Utkin (New York: Princeton Architectural Press)
Rebecca Solnit. A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Penguon Books, 2005)
Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Wind, Sand and Stars (New York: Harcourt, 1939)
Henry David Thoreau. The Journal 1837-1861 (New York: New York Review Book, 2009)