Zaera's Case for #SectionGang. Or Why I'm Tired of Him and All-Glass Boxes
To start - Should we be separating the art from the artist when reading through Zaera's writings? After loosely following his recent ousting from his roles at Princeton (through tweets and articles) I'm not sure how much I can in good faith listen to his previous writings. Learning to deal with problematic academics could be a whole other chapter of this course - that could analyze Zaera's case as a "what NOT to do".
Don't wanna digress, so here are my comments on this week's reading:
Zaera's thesis through The Politics of the Envelope makes a compelling case for a building's envelope to serve as the largest factor in architecture's role of organizing society. His writing aims to become the first "unitary theory of the building envelope in the history of architecture". He starts to detail how practitioners face an uphill battle if they want to break from the contemporary forms that result from urban globalism.
The quote below sets the stage for the atmosphere in which many contemporary architects will be working; where urban environments struggle to balance between representations of the people that occupy their streets, and representations of the larger powers that finance the city's skyscrapers.
"The contemporary city is built for corporations run by administrative boards for multinational shareholders’ interests; it is built by building emporiums serving multinational interests as well, who procure the buildings and often run them for decades, taking care of maintenance, security, refuse collection, energy supply and even the provision of infrastructure."
Zaera details the shitty conditions we've arrived at, to say that advancements in building technology dovetail with the financing of faceless shareholders to arrive at skylines filled with glass boxes or blobs
"Today we are considering the choice between the box and the blob as the primary articulations of the building envelope."
The chapters of the paper that talk about an envelope's ability to organize social and environmental concerns spoke to me with the most weight, and really gave me a clearer focus on how a technical architect can utilize practice to better their immediate society. Zaera places the most value in a building's section drawings and built-condition to convey the narrative of how building technologies are utilized by the architect as tools for social interventions. His framework is applied to study existing projects of many scales, and could be extended to serve as a reference for designing new proposals.
Hey Diego,
ReplyDeleteI really like Zaera's discussion of envelope which brings up the important role that a building's envelope plays in society and environment. It convince me of the envelop's power and encourage me to think more for the future design.
Besides, I also read some statements by Michelle Addington and Sean Lally. They call for seeing architecture as the energy stytems, which means only focusing on the building envelope is not enough. Even though their statements are more related to energy consumption of architecture, and nothing related to society, I still think the "system" perspective is very inspiring to me. And I also would like to use University Luigi Bocconi designed by Grafton Architects, and I think this one is more related to city.
"Its glass-framed entrance is sheared in relationship to the street, animating views into the lobby, which is wedged under the rake of the auditorium's seats, and reinforcing the visual relationship between the university and the city." (Manual of Section, Pg. 171)
From this discription, we can see the glass-framed entrance (envelop), the "under the rake of the auditorium's seats" (inclined geometry) , and the lobby (programming) works as a system to strength the connection between the univeristy and the city.
For me, Addington and Lally's statement is more like addition to Zaera's discussion. I like all of them.
I love the quotes you shared, particularly in regards to who is shaping our cities. Our cities are definitely profit driven whether it's the businesses that employ people or the enterprises who shape them. It's interesting how our need for density across the globe is shaping what a globalized architectural language looks like. Most high rises I see being erected really could exist in pretty much any urban environment in the world - the language is reduced down to glass and density.
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