“As architects, as artists… the first lesson I would I tell any of my students: stay alert. Observe, stay alert, understand the nature of the change that is taking place and adapt to those changes. Darwin already got it–the strongest, the smartest are not the survivors. It’s the most adaptive. He got it 100-some years ago and he was correct. Not the smartest, not the strongest, the most adaptive. Those are the ones that survive. And we’re in a profession–not the artistic part… I’m talking about the profession as a whole–the broader notion of what an architect is… and that takes some energy in this culture to stay alive. And it starts here (in architecture school). You want to come out of here and look at the world and be alert to that world and feel comfortable that you have something to offer. The world is a competitive place right now. The schools are fascinating… Schools should be, of all places, where you’re looking at ideas. Building is about opportunity, and (you have to look at) exploring possibilities and potentials. It should be filled with failures AND successes–because you can’t succeed without failure. It’s not possible. And this notion of History is just killing us. Absolutely KILLING us. I look at some of the things on this campus (CMU) and it’s just frightening–they are dead. Dead on arrival. They build something that was dead a hundred years ago. You should be looking at these things and be stimulated to see things that you’ve never seen before. They can be environmental, formal, social, cultural, technological, or things that behave in a certain way. And it should be constantly demanding inquiry–because that’s the basis of education–to push curiosity. And it’s that inquiry you’re here for. It’s not momentary–it’s embedded, internalized. So you leave that way so that ten or twenty years after leaving here you still have that drive.”

Thom Mayne
Lecture at Carnegie Mellon
22 April 2010

Just a quick update on a great project that is slowly finishing up in downtown Pittsburgh, Edge Studio and Pfaffman‘s Gateway Center Station. I worked on this project a few years ago while interning for Edge, and I am really excited to see the project under construction.

The geometry of the structure above ground is generated by the intersection of three separate cylinders. This simple geometry allows the curved members to be grouped into families of the same radius, creating an efficient fabrication procedure. The entire process of designing this project was incredibly interesting, from the contract of the tunnel engineers, to the constant exchange between physical and digital models. Matt Fineout’s paper, The Tower of Babel: Bridging Diverse Languages with Information Technologies, describes this process in further detail.

Three cylinders describe the geometry of the three curved planes

What’s great about the enclosure is its change in perception. The form flattens and expands, is frontal or oblique, and curved or flat depending on your view. There are moments where you can see both sides of the same surface. It’s wonderful.

Moving around the station, there are moments when you can see both sides of one plane. The slight curvatures change the reading of the object from differing views.

I’m excited to see it complete, because the excitement of this project continues down into the station platform. Stay tuned!

The frame is highly distorted at the left end of the structure.

A few of us are starting a new architecture discussion group called discourse.

discourse is an invited forum for young, inquisitive architectural thinkers to discuss issues in theory, history, and criticism.

Each of us will curate a design topic and facilitate a discussion surrounding it. You can follow what we’re up to on our informal resource page.

Stay tuned for updates!

During next week’s gallery crawl, the Pittsburgh Architectural Club is hosting its first event! Steel City Suppositions is an exhibition of young designer’s imagation for the city. Hope to see you there!

Download postcard [PDF]

Mies van der Rohe / Barcelona Pavilion + Installation by SANAA from 0300TV on Vimeo.

Well done film of Sanaa’s amazing installation at the Barcelona Pavilion. link.

Max Abramovitz’s 1963 proposal to fill Panther Hollow in Pittsburgh would, without any modesty, “transform into one of the architectural wonders of the world a desolate ravine.. The net result will be a center for research which aesthetically and functionally will have no equal.” While researching the site of my thesis project, I found this great promotional pamphlet for the project.

The cover:

Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives

The cover itself was enough to amaze me, it felt exactly like a concise thesis for the project. Knowing the site makes this project more amazing than just seeing these images,but imaging that where the building is currently is a very large ravine.

Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives

As the description continues, “According to architect Max Abramovitz, Panther Hollow may well become the nucleus of the nation’s first 21st century city, a city in which the individual can find rewarding employment, recreation, culture, and higher education, all within walking distance of his home. A person could live his whole life within a half-mile radius of this center – and an extraordinarily rewarding life it would be.”

Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives

Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives

In a way, I think its great to see this modernist project of Utopian life pop up here in Pittsburgh in a way that possibly would have transformed Pittsburgh. But like all those projects, it seems like there a few drawbacks of living deep in the guts of the building. Also, the hollows of the city highlight the topography’s connection to the urban fabric, and negating it completely ignores the potential of this condition. Either way, it blows my mind.

Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives

And the final trademark image:

Courtesy Carnegie Mellon Architecture Archives

Photography has a clear relationship to architecture: the documentation of space for those who are unable to experience it. It provides an opportunity for people to understand the physical relationships of a certain situation. Its use allows architects to publish their work, for news agencies to inform the public, and for google to document the world. Slowly, the physicality of the world is collected in images and stored in databases, accessible to everyone.

Backwards and forwards.

Architects rely on representational forms of art to design. Drawings, models, virtual reality, and photography enable viewers to understand architecture they cannot experience. The architecture lives in an imagined arena manifested by each representation. Viewers piece together this information and create their own imagination of the architecture. Each medium creates a different understanding of the architecture that another medium cannot give. None of the mediums, however, allow a viewer to understand the architecture as an experienced reality. More interestingly, the experienced architecture will not tell you what a drawing or photograph can tell you.

Each medium edits reality and displays the most pertinent information that the medium can explain. A plan of a building allows us to understand the circulatory relationships between spaces, their various sizes, etc. A plan, however, cannot help us to experience to the architecture, it enables us to understand a holistic interpretation of various aspects of the architecture. A plan is important, however, because experiencing architecture will not make such relationships obvious.

These images are both inside and outside.

Photography, on the other hand, can only document the reality of the world, not our imagined proposals for it. In architecture, photography comes after the fact, once the design (the imagination phase) is complete. It is used to document the product and to inform people about the architecture.

A house in Mongolia is not important unless it has been photographed. This same house in Mongolia need not be visited if it can be seen in a photograph. The house has become important because of the photograph, but at the same time the photograph denies the importance of experiencing the house. The photograph of the house is more important than the architecture of the house.

These are dark.

I think it is important for architects to challenge photography’s assertion over the reality of architecture. The process of creating a photograph alters reality. A few examples include the altered perception of time, the flattening of space into two dimensions, viewing the world from a single viewpoint, and the distortion the camera lens creates. These are aspects, among many others, that separate the medium of photography from the reality it represents.

These are also the aspects which make photography an interesting medium. I think it is interesting that unlike any other medium, photography begins with reality. It alters and distorts many spatial relationships, but it must always have the trace of the real located within its representation. Unlike drawing or painting, the essence of photography is its distorting relationship to the real world.