Stan Allen and Marc McQuade eds., Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2011)

Landform Building sets out to examine the many ways in which landscape effects are manifest in architecture today: not as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon (architects working on the landscape) but as new design techniques, new formal strategies and technical problems within architecture itself.

Landform building in contemporary architecture is more than a formal strategy. New technologies, new design techniques and a demand for enhanced environmental performance have provoked a re-thinking of architecture's traditional relationship to the ground. Some of today's most innovative buildings no longer occupy a given site but instead, construct the site itself.

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Stan Allen, Urbanisms in the Plural: The Information Thread, in Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman eds., Fast Forward Urbanism: Rethinking Architecture's Engagement with the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011)

There is a principle specific to environmental ecology: it states that anything is possible - the worst disasters or the most flexible evolutions.
- Felix Guattari

Image: Still from Jacques Tati's Playtime

Field Conditions refers to design strategies based on the aggregation of small, self-similar parts to create local difference while maintaining overall coherence; field conditions implies the design of systems and assemblages, paying close attention to intervals and the spaces between things. This exhibition revisits these working concepts through drawings and models documenting a competition project completed in the spring of 2010. As we began working on the new Contemporary Art Gallery for the city of Maribor, Slovenia, we were struck by a close fit between these design strategies and what we understood to be at issue in the competition.

EISbox Projects
Oct 8th-16th 2010
DUMBO, Brooklyn, New York

Stan Allen, Contextual Tactics, in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)

But what characterizes the montage and hence its role as a cell or movie frame? The collision - the conflict of two opposing pieces.
- Sergei Eisenstein, 1929

Montage is the determination of the whole...by means of continuities, cutting and false continuities.
- Gilles Deleuze, 1983

Image: Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera, 1928, Still

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Stan Allen, Infrastructural Urbanism, in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)

In an interview conducted fifteen years ago, Michel Foucault noted that Architects are not the engineers or technicians of the three great variables: territory, communication and speed. While it is hard to argue Foucault's point as an assessment of the current condition, it deserves to be pointed out that historically this has not been the case. Land surveying, territorial organization, local ecologies, road construction, shipbuilding, hydraulics, fortification, bridge building, war machines, and networks of communication and transportation were all part of the traditional competence of the architect before the rise of disciplinary specialization. Territory, communication, and speed are properly infrastructural problems, and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal effectively with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation, and visualization are among architect’s traditional tools for operating at the very large scale. These procedures can be reclaimed for architecture, and supplemented with new technologies of design and simulation now available.

Image: Aircraft Carrier USS Lexington

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Stan Allen, Terminal Velocities: The Computer in the Design Studio Postscript: The Digital Complex, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

It has now been more than a decade since the experiments that launched a new set of digital design protocols in architecture. Driven by practitioners and theorists such as Frank Gehry, Greg Lynn, or Bernard Cache, schools of architecture (Columbia, SCI-Arc, UCLA and others) were the first to retool their technological infrastructure and teaching methods. The practice followed close behind, and by the middle of the 1990s, a new virtuosity had emerged as architects borrowed software and techniques from digital fi lm animation and the aviation industry. The computer made complexity look easy, and designers were fascinated by the new plasticity enabled by fluid modeling techniques. The ability to map the invisible vectors of site and program encouraged a process-driven work modeled on D’Arcy Thompson’s dictum that form is a diagram of forces. In these early stages, the effect of digital technology was primarily formal. It was characterized by an interest in continuous surfaces and complex biomorphic forms. But the novelty of the outcomes rapidly grew formulaic as techniques became codified.

Image: Deleuze + Guattari, Diagram of a Partial or Blocked Deterritorialization

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Stan Allen, Los Angeles: 4 (Artificial) Ecologies, in Hunch 1, 1999

She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses, which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

Image: Circular Community, Sun City, Arizona

Stan Allen, From object to field: field conditions in architecture and urbanism, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

The field describes a space of propagation, of effects. It contains no matter or material points, rather functions, vectors and speeds. It describes local relationsLondon of difference within fields of celerity, transmission or careering points, in a word, what Minkowski called the world.
- Sanford Kwinter, 1986

Field conditions move from the one toward the many, from individuals to collectives, from objects to fields. The term itself plays on a double meaning. Architects work not only in the office or studio but in the field: on site, in contact with the fabric of architecture. “Field conditions” here implies the acceptance of the real in all its messiness and unpredictability. It implicates architects in a material improvisation conducted on site in real time. Field conditions treat constraints as opportunity. Working with and not against the site, something new is produced by registering the complexity of the given.

Image: Reindeer Herd Reacting to Helicopter Overhead

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Stan Allen, Practice vs. Project, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

I must say that what interests me more is to focus on what the Greeks called techne, that is to say, a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal… if one wanted to do a history of architecture, I think that it should be much more along the lines of that general history of the techne, rather than the histories of either the exact sciences or the inexact ones.
- Michel Foucault

Art and architecture are practices, not sciences. The constructions of science aspire to universal application. Pictures and buildings need only work where they are.
- Dave Hickey

Image: Gio Ponti, Eleven Meter Structural Test Model, Pirelli Tower, Milan, 1956

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Stan Allen, Constructing with Lines: On Projection, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

Architecture is often defined as the art — or science— of building. Yet architects, when they build, influence construction only indirectly, at a distance. As Robin Evans has succinctly put it, architects do not make buildings, they make drawings for buildings. In Alberti’s treatise, a privileged place is assigned to the abstract, intellectual work of Lineaments — linear constructs projected in the mind,as opposed to material constructions in the world. But to see the working constructions of the architect — drawings, models, notations, or projections — as simply opposed to the concrete physical reality of building is to miss what is specific to architectural representation. Projection, in particular, implies movement, transformation. By the translation of measure and proportion across scale, architectural projections work to effect transformations of reality at a distance from the author. Projections are the architect’s means to negotiate the gap between idea and material: a series of techniques through which the architect manages to transform reality by necessarily indirect means.

Image: Albrecht Durer, Artist Drawing a Lute, 1525

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Stan Allen, Notations and diagrams: Mapping the Intangible in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

The architect’s papers, writes philosopher Nelson Goodman, are a curious mixture. Although Goodman is looking at all the working tools of the architect (drawings, specifications, and models), his insight can be extended to architectural drawing itself. Architectural representation is in some basic way impure, or unclassifiable. Architectural drawings are often thought of as scaled-down pictures of buildings. Like traditional painting and sculpture, they are, to some degree, representational, and that mimetic trace is transposed spatially, across scale, to the built artifact.

Image: Philip Glass + Robert Wilson, Final Scene, Einstein on the Beach

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Stan Allen, The Thick 2-D: Mat-building in the Contemporary City, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

The objective of architecture is works of art that are lived in. The city is the largest, and at present the worst of such works of art... The kinds of repetition and control that are now offered to the building industry can be edged towards a kind of dreamy neutrality.
- Alison + Peter Smithson

Image: Candilis, Josic, Woods, Free University, Berlin, 1963

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Stan Allen, Mies' Theater of Effects: The New National Gallery, Berlin, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

No architect has been more strongly identified with the reality of the built work than Mies van der Rohe. The clarity of his tectonic expression and his uncompromising use of materials point toward an architecture that begins and ends with construction. Mies’ laconic statement We refuse to recognize problems of form, only problems of building, is emblematic of an architecture that justifies itself entirely by reference to the built work and not to design procedures. For many historians and critics, Mies has been unproblematically identified with questions of materiality, construction and tectonics. It is not surprising that drawing has an ambivalent status in the practice of Mies van der Rohe.

Images: Stan Allen, Night View, New National Gallery; Philip Worthington, Shadow Monsters, 2007

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Stan Allen, Urbanisms in the Plural, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

The metropolis puts an incongruous mix of beings into circulation… it is a place of experimentation, where new operational propositions can be made concerning current practices.
- Anne Querrien

What Gravity's Rainbow tells us better than any other text is how World War II was above all an operation of modernization: how it was the necessary crucible for the obliteration of outdated territories, languages, filiations, or any boundaries or forms that impeded the installation of cybernetics as the model for remaking the world as pure instrumentality.
- Jonathan Crary

Image: Late 20th Century Urban Infrastructure

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Stan Allen, The Guggenheim Refigured: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

Written on the occasion of the reopening of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1992, this essay was an attempt to see beyond the debates surrounding the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original building and its expansion by Gwathmey Siegel Architects. Sidestepping questions of judgment, I wanted to avoid nostalgia for the idea of an untouchable original. No architect has been more willingly mythologized than Wright, but the idea of Wright’s building as a masterpiece, confirmed or compromised did not seem useful here. More than the debates around preservation, my strategy—and interest—was to reexamine the messy reality of the building’s construction and reconstruction.

Images: Jenny Holzer, Installation View, Truisms, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1989-90; Jiří Kolář, Guggenheim Museum, Crumplage, 1975

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Stan Allen, Le Corbusier and modernist movement: the Carpenter Center for Visual arts, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (London: Routledge, 2009)

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard: a late realization of the modernist dream of movement in continuity, or a new kind of movement? Thirty years before, Le Corbusier had written: A stair separates... a ramp connects. At the Carpenter Center, the ramp traces the mobile section drawn by the observer in motion. Its path moves the spectator through the building, opens interior up to exterior, and connects the building to the life of the campus. The visitor is drawn into the structure on the oblique, lifted up assertively from the ground plane, and allowed to view the campus before being drawn inside. The line does not go from one point to another, but runs between points... the line has become the diagonal.

Image: Exterior View, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

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