T4T LAB Spring 2020
Invited Professor: Gonzalo Viallo from Morphtopia
Team: Finn Rattana, Manuel Alvarado and Joey Reich
As human actors, we lose ourselves to a cognitive condition
related to the conscious awareness of ourselves. It is this obsession of
ourselves as objects, and the condition of “I” or ego, that drives the speculation
of this project. This condition also lends our engagement to qualities, rather
than objects themselves, thus lending the project to the mediation of the
Jective mereological system. In doing so, we utilize metaphor to speculate on
the pursuit of unknown excess, in terms of the Other, and the trajectory of the
Architectural Project beyond its manifestation alone. In these first images, we
establish the project as an assemblage of parts with unfamiliar qualities,
operating within the intrigue of unknown excess. Ultimately, this quality of
the project begins to cross the lines of culture and nature, house and garden,
and subject and object.
The studio began within the framework of pursuing the space
of abundance with regards to the relationship between the Architect and the
Architectural Project. The way we pursued this idea was to dive into the
concept of Jectivity and utilization of the process of
Metaphor-Variation-Repetition as initial drivers for the studio. Our approach
led to an ontological treatment of Metaphors as mediators within the
manifestation of the project, which we redefine as the Jective-Metaphor, which
allowed us to liberate the Project from the limitations of subjectivity and
objectivity through the connection of these legible qualities. In doing so, we
were able to establish the trajectory of the project and the metaphorical
vehicles through which the metaphorical vehicles we pursued the unknown qualities
of the space of abundance.
In practice, the project began as a pursuit of the unknown
via our selected images and subsequent representations. In each of these
explorations we were able to refine tendencies that essentially became the
first layer of references within the project. From these tendencies, we were
able to align the Maison Bordeaux and selection of bugs in a way that created
the condition of host capable of embodying desire and a condition of growth
capable of delaminating, enveloping, and transplanting that host in a way that
created lost familiarity.
Through this lost familiarity, we re-engaged the pursuit of
unknown excess, which is understood explicitly as the gap between cognitive
capacity of the subject and the perceived object. It was this relationship to
cognition and subject that led to significant research into ideas of otherness
with regards to its relationship to the space of abundance. In this pursuit,
the metaphor of the Lacanian Mirror Diagrams emerged as a means of driving the
project within the Jective system, which was focused mainly on the reality of
the Other to remain just outside of reach, despite attaining everything up to
and around that unknown quality of excess. In doing so, it became clear that
within this diagram, consciousness lends itself to issues regarding
identification of representational qualities as object qualities, thus
establishing the problem of representation within the project.
In doing so, we were able to speculate on project of the
built Bordeaux House as an indexical analysis done with the aims to unify the
ideals of the Miesian space with Corbusien principles. Ultimately, these
attempts to unify ideals will ultimately never be attained within this
metaphorical construct, as is the limitations of the subject within this
speculative framework. To move beyond representational analysis, we recognized
the persistency of the Diagram as an architectural tool as it relates to
identifying qualities between the thing itself and its sensations. In doing so,
we established a pursuit of new diagrams as tools for discovering these
in-between conditions. Ultimately, this provided the proceeding referential
layer of diagrams of the insects, house, and context.
This diagrammed otherness allowed an understanding of the components
through their perceived alignments, generating a series of chunks and insects
most productive to the importance of these diagram. These chunks were then
augmented in a way that refers back to the sensibilities from the project
origins and combined these concepts in a series of iterations centered on the
excess qualities of the project. In this pursuit, it should also be
acknowledged that each of these assemblies are equally valid within the framework,
but as cultural mediators we implemented a curatorial process of further
references that resulted in the final arrangement and its proceeding
developments.
To progress beyond this point, we placed ourselves within
the repetition stage of Jectivity and once more entered into the Lacanian
metaphor that cyclically drives this project. In doing so, we were now able to
move the shift the house to the role of subject, projecting through the added
reference of the Levi Bryan diagram, to produce a condition where the house is
able transition to an ontological status of viewing and, thus, break down the
separation of marked space. In doing so, this metaphor allows a criticality to
be pursued regarding the qualities of otherness in terms of speculation on what
forms of otherness the object-subject is able to project to in its own pursuit
of otherness. Therefore, a condition emerges where the input references of the
project engage within a flat ontology of context. This allows the house to
cross the bounds of culture and nature to free it of typological constraints,
blur distinctions between house and garden, and move towards unknown excess.
Ultimately, the assemblage of these references and
strategies culminates in the final state of the project, having fully displaced
into the Lacanian diagrams as a means of driving the pursuit of unknown excess.
In this way, we are able to dialogue not just the qualities of this
manifestation, but through new diagrams we are able to discuss new ways of
conceiving the real and sensual qualities of objects around us. Ultimately this
speculates on the bounds of the diagrammatic tool to produce the manifestation
of the excessive. In the way this Jective mereological system facilitated our
production of heterogenic complexity, ambiguity of typology, blurring of culture
and nature, and complex balance of presence and absence that creates the visual
excess in the project.
