Thom Mayne
Lecture at Carnegie Mellon
22 April 2010

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.

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.

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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.

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

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.