T4T Review April 29 2018

Jury Members: With Nate Hume.  Michael Young, Kivi Sotamaa, Kristy Bailliet, Courtney Coffman.

T4T LAB Spring 2018 Stitching Immanence

T4T LAB Spring 2018. Rough and Saturated

Invited Professor: Nate Hume

Team: Paul Germaine McCoy, Grant Parker and Daniel Enyon

 We think that reality and truth are not separate, and while they are not the same, they engage selectively.

Our project operates, in reality, as a research and development center for the Texas A&M Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences with a focus on algae biofuels and aquaponics. The project started from the simple notion of the line as an object and evolved in our process. When we projected these lines onto our ensemble, a series of immanent figures created slippages between the ensemble and the site, resulting in a difficult whole. Through a series of soap casts and color studies, the project became saturated with a texture that referenced familiar notions of material. Yet, while these things all serve to estrange canonical architectural materials and forms, the truth of our project is that there still lies a deeper issue of correlationism.

The distortion between reality and truth is due to the innate perspective of the human. Thus, the state most informed by the truth within this perspective is reality. As a result of the distortion, we adopted the method of stitching things together to further explore the issue of correlationism in a clear way. The stitch brings together various views of the object to reconstruct a reality based on the epistemology and ontology of the object. This reconstruction occurs in the manner that knowledge of the real and the being of the truth are weighted equally. Weighing these as equal and stitching them together shows the disparity between them when considered on their own. To allow clarity in this stitching, the drawings, and the model only give selective sets of information, furthering our argument by letting the drawings and model act unknowable and false, yet be operatively real and true. The clarity that occurs in this process lets all the information be questioned in a detective like game, where the viewer, is given multiple sets of information and has to sort through where they connect and then wrestle with what is correct.

We put forward the notion that it doesn’t matter so much in the traditional sense that the drawings are “correct” or consistent, but rather that the most important discussion to have is of how we view things. As a result, we have coined the term “immanent drawings”. These appropriate the idea that there is manifested, yet unused.

T4T LAB Spring 2018 Interlock

T4T LAB Spring 2018. Rough and Saturated

Invited Professor: Nate Hume

Team: Madison Green, Finn Rattana, Ray Gonzalez, Lauren Miller

Our project is an investigation into the use of interlock as an estrangement technique, that when implemented across Ground, Material, Surface, Line, and Volume, creates ambiguity from their overlap that seeks to operate outside digital tropes, producing objects that confound the boundaries between these conditions.

Interlock is an operation that fuses objects together while creating an edge. It is a characteristic inherent of objects created in the physical world, connecting parts by gluing, welding, joining, sewing, riveting, among others depending on the material in use, and is frequently moved to the background of our consciousness. The building seeks to implement vaguely similar qualities of interlock to inject a sense of familiarity, and misuse these qualities as Surface, Material, Ground, Line, and Volume, extracting the functional preconceptions of their traditional use from their now estranged figuration.

Interlock operates as Volume via implied geometric articulations of separate parts. Interlocked parts suggest an unfixed disposition, puzzle pieces that were assembled, or perhaps are intending to move or shift. At times parts may match seamlessly and at other moments are misfit, forced together against their geometric will to create a difficult interlocked whole, and the scale and inhabitability of these volumetric interlocks serve to further displace our preconception of their traditional use.

The Site specifically influences our conception of alignment and misalignment, with vegetation jumping across roads and paths, or ignoring these boundaries altogether, or embedding unnatural geometric figuration with the vegetation itself.

Interlock serves to diminish any hierarchy between Building and Ground, and creates ambiguity in differentiating which of the two categories parts belong to. Ground serves as a way of displacing inside and outside conditions across the site by giving enhanced interior qualities to the non centralized points of the complex and enhanced exterior qualities to the most central point of the building’s mass. Ground and Site begin to operate as Volume, Surface, and Line with the top layer of the land separating from it’s vertical edges, or becoming tensile volumetric lines interacting with the building. These moments are expanded upon with Material and Texture.

Texture is derived from familiar architectural and geological sources and maintain their traditional scale, but are subtly distorted to become unfamiliar via Color and Materiality. The misalignment of textures to aforementioned fluctuating typologies results in a hybridized materiality, relying on a different system of interlock that is mildly aware of the system of geometric interlock the project establishes volumetrically. At times Textures align to these underlying moments, but also smear across the implied division of parts, producing new conditions of discontinuous interlock that operate between Volume, Surface, Line, and Material.

Hybridization is critical to our interpretation of the project’s program as an addition to the Crop and Soil Sciences Department in the College of Agriculture, to which we have assigned a mixed use as Plant Hybridization Facility and Soil Analysis Center. The Building and Site catalyze this program to produce strange architectural qualities, specifically in the large plant volume in which vegetation begins to behave as dynamic poche growing between the layers of the double shelled metal mesh, in the seed vault with pods for containing each generation of seeds the facility produces through experiments in selective breeding and genetic manipulation, in the site’s pits that monumentally reveal the underlying sediment of the site to visitors, and in the central soft serve space which displays a gallery like array of soil samples currently contained in the college.

These moments disrupt the edges between the work produced in the Crop and Soil Sciences Department and the access to that work, and reinforce the overlapping hybridized interlock and material conditions produced by the project.

T4T LAB Spring 2018 A Billboard

T4T LAB Spring 2018. Rough and Saturated

Invited Professor: Nate Hume

Team: Luis Fernando Munoz, Stephanie Maddamma, Sephora Belizor, Brazoz Pinto.

This project is an exploration of graphics and their interpretations and possibilities. We define “the graphic” as two-dimensional figures that overlay or project over objects. The graphic is no longer a representational vehicle but is now used as a means to unroll an object and connect or disband parts, constantly oscillating between being fixed and becoming. We take the notion of the architectural billboard and unroll it, using the graphics as a way to exploit the spatial latency that lies within them.

The billboard has historically acted in many different ways but mainly as 2-dimensional imagery used to promote specific values of any given subject. It is as well a cultural icon that yields attention yet denies interaction. However, in this project, the billboard becomes an architectural object that develops into habitable graphic space through giving volumetric qualities to 2-dimensional figures.  The binding of dissimilar yet congruent figures though the application of the graphic projections, that at times unroll over the surfaces and generate phenomenal objects, and at other moments transpose though dimensions to flatten spaces. We move away from an application of a super graphic, and materials no longer only slip from floor to wall to ceiling but they also cross boundaries and thresholds beyond dimensions to create their own graphic space that trespasses and unrolls the building, the objects, and spaces. This unrolling, as opposed to an unfolding poses an object that is always in the state of trying to know itself, in a point of self-reflectivity.

The project operates in terms of Triple-O as outlined by Mark Foster Gage in his essay, Killing Simplicity. Acting as objects themselves, the graphics exist within the building in a three-dimensional state, allowing other objects to inhabit them. These objects which are inhabiting graphic space are unaware of the qualities of the graphics themselves, causing the building to never be fully knowable at any point in time. Through the use of graphic as an object we question the subject and destabilize their relationships.  Objects inhabiting graphic space are unaware of their placement within, however the graphic as an object is aware of its placement and of that which inhabit it.

We further destabilize the subject by denying a privilege to plan or section, as the architectural billboard unrolls in many different orientations and does not solely revert to one. The ability of 2-dimensional representation to imply a 3-dimensional object contributes to the ungrounding of architecture by removing the privilege of verticality and horizontality through section and plan opposing Colin Rowe’s argument in Transparency, literal and phenomenal. In the essay, the privileging of verticality and horizontality is argued by its necessity in achieving phenomenal transparency since a subject must perceive a widely accepted given reality that, through its ability to be recognized, allows a subject to determine the ontological and orientational properties of that which is unseen. In this project, the reality provided has orientational qualities not widely accepted, causing a disconnection between object orientation and ontology, enforcing object to object relationships.  The interior and exterior are no longer elements which allude to each other in their design, but the material logic and surface phenomena of the exterior inserts itself within, generating breakages, folds, and slippages that imply new phenomenal objects within that diffuse boundaries of interior and exterior that exist in through multiple dimensions.

We place implications on reality and unground the monocular subject. This is not done by removing gravity, instead it is done by the behavior of the surface and material logic that does not respond to its intrinsic placement. Through this, the subject becomes a meandering object. Subject/object relationships are developed as object to object relationships. We now see the subject as a non-centralized entity existing as human, object, or machine that occupies graphic space. Graphic Space presents itself as a non-physical redefinition of interior and exterior spatial conditions, using bleeding material to extend spaces past their volumetric containers and scale down space within each volume. This overlapping spatial condition then develops a new volumetric system that uses graphics as means to bind or disband space.

The strange project lends itself to cultural familiarity through its materiality, combining banal, monochromatic material such as brick, concrete and scalloped shingles with bright, saturated colors. With the multiplicity of material and spatial conditions, the project finds itself as a graphic object, constantly oscillating between 2, 2.5, and 3 dimensions. Working within the canons and what is fixed in architecture. The billboard now gains volume and is inhabited. Graphics become volumetric and no longer solely representational, and material unrolls the Architectural billboard. It’s constant state of unrolling and self-reflectivity decentralizes ontology and allows for the co-inhabitation of graphic space.