Confluences

The Worlds of Art and Science
Reality and Experience in Architecture and Art

Juhani Pallasmaa

Human culture has deviced three approaches for the search of meaning in our existence: religion, science and art. The first seeks meaning through faith, the second through rational knowledge and the third through sensory experience and emotional encounter. These are independent paths of search, which cannot be fused, regardless of such attempts in history. Whereas scientific thought progresses and differentiates, artistic thought seeks a return back to the undifferentiated and experientially integrated understanding of the world. Science and art are distinct views of the world and differing categories of understanding and representing it. Yet, art and architecture have been moving towards the realm of science, first through geometric and proportional aspirations and today particularly through digitalization and algoritmic generation of structures and forms. Artistic imagination seeks expressions that can mediate the complexities of human experiential encounters with the world through poetic images. ”If the painter presents us with a field or a vase of flowers, his paintings are windows, which are open on the whole world” (Jean-Paul Sartre).

Since the Enlightment there have been repeated efforts to turn architecture from an artistic and cultural endeavour into a scientific and fully rationalized practice. In today’s materialist culture architecture is increasingly reduced to a techno-economic service. However, as Alvar Aalto argued, architecture contains a far too complex interaction of conflicting and irreconcileable requirements to be rationally resolved. Architecture calls for a poetic vision of a better world and a synthesizing capacity which can fuse facts and dreams, technology and art, science and poetic sensibility into an integrated entity. This is always more a personal and existential confessions than a completely rational solution to a given problem.

Appearances and Phenomena

Michael McGarry

Both metaphor and representation involve relational engagements between two conditions; the interest here is the imaginative stretch between these two conditions. Stretch meaning both reach and gap, a lacuna where phenomena surface such that they can be viewed. The figure is the instrument of discovery and knowledge, through our presence real or imagined or through the simulated presence of others or indeed other figures, correspondences direct or vicarious. George Moore painted his Views of Westport House in 1761, some twenty-one years before the Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon facilitated aerial viewing. Moore’s views reveal an unseen landscape, a phenomenon, predicated on the figural agency of the House. His two views negotiate between figure and ground, aspect and prospect, front and back, far and near, presence and absence, with viewer and object in correspondence and presaging later work, notably Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog and Gerhard Richter’s Betty. The spatial sensibility in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is similar, grounded in picture making, figural agency, and the phenomena of appearances. Frank Stella wrote that “the aim of art was to create space, space in which the subjects of painting can live”1. That presence and hence figuration spans media and disciplines confirms that existence is spatial, the vital correspondence.

1. 1

   Stel­la, Frank. 1986. Work­ing Space. Cam­bridge and Lon­don: Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

The Diagram as an Abstract Map

Georges Teyssot

Whether graph or chart, the architectural diagram is today an ubiquitous presence. As graphic inscription of abstraction in space, since the 1990s, the notion of diagram has been so much extended that now it nearly encompasses every aspect of design. To think of the diagram as an architecture of ideas, or, more classically, the idea of architecture, means to be still ensconced in some sort of platonic conceptions. To avoid this trap, a first step would be to turn to Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the diagram as an abstract map, and to show how the model acquires its meaning, specifically when confronted with biological paradigms.

Probable Architectures of Improbable Reason
Confluence in the Work of Eladio Dieste: A Belated Book Review

Nader Tehrani

The purpose of this essay is to re-examine the question of confluence in the work of ‘designer’ Eladio Dieste on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his passing. Identifying Dieste as a designer does not do justice to his protean abilities, but here it serves provisionally to problematize the various characterizations that have been cast onto him in prior texts. As a professional ‘engineer,’ Dieste worked an entire lifetime, addressing challenges of structural design in an Uruguay of restricted means, putting his knowledge and speculative spirit towards the combination of material exploration, calculations, graphic statics and the construction of prototypes to advance the proposition of some of the most extraordinary structures built to date. However, his status as an architect is almost always left open-ended, in part, because of the ingenuity of his structural insight, such that all arguments are led to the inevitable positivist slant proffered by structural determinism thus leaving some of the complexities of his architectural decisions unaddressed. They are always treated with scientific fidelity, but alternatively, they are also left in the ineffable fog of artistic value as an aftermath. Somewhere in between, the nature of the architectural discourse and rhetorical intentionality of the language Dieste produced is left open, and this is an opportunity to engage that liminal intellectual space. Indeed, Dieste was a master engineer, obeying the many laws of science, but he also disobeyed a myriad of other laws requiring a sophistication of mind to bridge the art of rhetoric, optics and perception to overcome the very laws of physics at work, drawing out the architecture contained within the structures he designed.

Forms of Penumbra
The Codependent Existence of Light and Darkness

Paulo Barbaresi

The paper is framed within a body of research concerning the generative role of Light in design processes and reviews several aspects of the interstitial relationship between light and darkness, unfolding points of co-existence and correspondence between the phenomena. It questions certain processual modes used to approach the above relationship and posits the thesis that penumbra is a fundamental medium for understanding and developing transmutative modalities within the design process. The essay approaches penumbra, its connotations regarding space and time and its role as a core element for structuring content, via the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso, László Moholy-Nagy and the architect Alberto Campo Baeza. It concludes by stressing the potential importance of understanding and using penumbra within design processes as well as presenting it as medium, a condensed manifestation of light and darkness, an element of transition for creating correspondences between architectural processes and the manifestations of space.

Imagining the Space-In-Between
The Elaboration of a Method

Marina Lathouri

Taking the 1950s architectural debates as a point of departure and entry, the paper reflects upon the architectural explorations of the space-in-between as a social, relational approach and mode of working from within. The paper focuses on words and imagery, situated within the international framework of CIAM (Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), which project new ways of thinking the building, the city, the social and the historical. The paper argues that these become accounts of architectural and urban modernity that claim the ordinary, the scale of the human gesture, the lived experience of the city along with increasingly global scales of operation and immaterial systems. Proposing the terms ‘in-between’, ‘doorstep’, ‘threshold’ and ‘liminal’ to draw together a manifold system of scales and relations – perceptual, social, material and cultural, the questions, which are posed remain as relevant as ever.

Poetic Spontaneity Beyond Context of Meaning

Levent Kara

A predominant reference for the poetic unity of thinking and making in the work of art has been the original notion of poiesis, techne as phronesis, where a collective significance concretizes itself in the artifact through its making. The artifact carries the conditions of such significance as its making is handed down by an effective tradition in the continuity of a life practice. In this original notion of poiesis, the thinking of what is to be made is also thinking in a context of meaning which is a shared world in the unity of culture as a whole. This is understood to be the main domain of intentionality of the work of art, the aboutness of poetry in a shared life. In what follows, I will develop an alternative view that reconstructs the intentionality of the work of art as an order of spontaneous imagination beyond effective contexts of meaning, still very much about life but in its own almost singular projective way. I will also argue that the real ethical question about the work of art is not its aboutness per se, but how it performs this aboutness in a broader universe of meaning freed from any existential hinge of shared worlds.

Reinventing the Collective for Ethical Design
The Theoretical Confluences of Fumihiko Maki’s “Collective Form” and Thom Mayne’s “Combinatory Urbanism”

Colleen Chiu-Shee

Fumihiko Maki published the theories of Collective Form in 1964 and reflected on the theories after fifty years of practice. Coincidentally, Thom Mayne joined the discourse and expanded on Maki’s theories in his book on Combinatory Urbanism (2011). The continuation and expansion of the discourse about the “collective” point to its enduring impact on fields of environmental design (mainly, architecture, urban design and landscape architecture). Practitioners, researchers and educators in these fields share ambitions to improve the built environment, shape human behavior and influence social-political values. Discourses about the “collective” provide ethical implications for contemporary urban practice and pedagogy. This essay first contextualizes the emergence of the theories of Collective Form in Maki’s formative years (the 1950s and 60s). Those were a transitional era when the favor of Modernism was declining and human-centered considerations were on the rise. Grounded in historical investigations, this essay highlights the essential notions underlying theories of Collective Form, such as the interlinkage between parts and the whole, the flexibility and adaptability of urban infrastructure, and the open-endedness of urban systems. Viewing the built environment as combinatory, complex systems, Mayne echoes Maki’s viewpoints and expands on the roles of cities and designers in today’s globalizing societies. The confluence of the two renowned architects’ thinking transcends the time dimension, the East-West cultural divide, and the disciplinary boundaries. Dialogue on the “collective” in architectural and urban practice quests after more ambiguous, yet more adaptive ideologies that can lead to more equitable solutions to complicated problems in human environment and urban system today.

On Slowness, Revisited

Billie Tsien, Tod Williams

In 1999 for the Spanish Journal 2G we formalized our thoughts on the conditions of architecture as the computer had just begun to enter as a tool in architecture. Begun as a lamentation for the loss of hand drawing tools, we more broadly reflected on our long held values to think slowly, iteratively, and intently on the process of designing. 20 years later, revisiting this text, we acknowledge that while the computer has played an essential tool in representing and coordinating what we do, our values and principles that it is but a tool, and not a design device remain solidified, and even bolstered. This essay, paired with the original texts, makes the case that while architecture can be at the whim of changing technologies, its essential practice lies in the many hands, disciplines, and people that come together to bring a design to life, the relationships that it develops, the physicality of its material and the land it occupies.