TALIA PERRY | projects

LANDSCAPES OF INDECISION:

Landscape is defined by man, is captured by the weight of this definition, and struggles under this net(work) of abstract relationships. Nature, meanwhile, operates autonomously. Although man has attempted to name, identify, classify, and rationalize the components and processes of the natural world of which he himself is a part; he has, by all means, failed, and will continue to fall short in the act of quantifying the infinite system that comprises his environment. Landscape is all that we see and understand, and we recognize (longingly) that there is more that lies beyond, a pulsating, chaotic other that we can never grasp in full.

Man has defined, and continues to define, landscape in two ways: through language and through action. The difficulty with the ambiguity of "action" is that one could argue all living things "define" landscape through various acts. So, to be more clear, these are acts of intentionality, acts of artificiality. The act of definition involves division, a re-ordering through arithmetic destruction. Language, though seemingly less ruinous, is just as much a violation on the original; instilling significance through discourse alters the cultural value of the nature in question, and sets it up for a feverish pitch into the hungry depths of art and industry.

The slag heap is very much a landscape. In fact, it borders on the edge of manuscape – that is to say it came into being as a built environment, a landscape manufactured through the waste of man's creation. But it questions whether or not landscape can be returned to the natural order of things, or if a landscape, once caught, will be under the perpetual grasp of humanity until it is choked, withers, and dies. Is the only possible progression for nature to go from the natural to landscape to manuscape to ruin? Denial of this progress is only possible when an environment undergoes the act of self-definition, of re-autonomy. And this can only happen through our own abandonment and desertion.

So we begin with the desert. "The ultimate definition of a true desert may yet prove to be concerned with the number and type of people present, and what they think they are doing here." The mountains of slag appeared through the gradual abandonment of what was seen as a worthless byproduct. Small portions of land accrued under the ownership of Duquesne Slag, and the dumping moved gradually from west to east. The land beneath became obsolete under the weight of the accumulated waste above. And the waste became this new built environment, precisely calculated by its reigning corporation; the mounds of slag grew taller still.

The land became deserted twice over, though, because there was no intention of intervention post-dump, and the injection of waste came to an end after decades of deposition. Nature didn't want it back, though, so far removed from its original form, until the debris began to settle. This landscape sought to define itself as a new system of development. It turned a hair greener and these places of indecision became ingested by the threadbare natural entities surrounding and by the grumbling earth below. Simultaneously, other parts of this built ground turned the dial up instead of down. The near future reeked of redevelopment.

What follows is not a battle, but an attempted revolution. Indecision is replaced with very strong ideas about what should be, what should not be. The landscape tries to define itself, while the suburbs behind shout themselves hoarse about what it is, and a variety of strangers also voice their opinions, now trying to beat the landscape down to their own knowable creation suited for their particular ways of life. Were it just the landscape fighting against the intruding development for its independence, it might have had a chance. But the additional pressures by these various third parties make the landscape question its own identity again.

The landscape – still a landscape – has returned to a state of indecision. It continues to advance in its self-definition, but also must contend with the imposition of satellite definitions. It waits in a state of purgatory.

Two types exist under the category of landscape: high-maintenance and low-maintenance. There is always some form of interaction between man and scape, be it meticulous ordering, trimming, planting, protecting, or less direct influence, through walking, spreading, eating and less intense gardening. When maintenance is removed altogether, accessibility, and therefore observation, must be as well. The landscape only exists as such in memory, through language, while the physical landscape begins the process of redefinition, towards a second generation Frankenstein nature.

An environmental center, for the study of this complex scene, can only be sited in a landscape. The center itself exits as part of a larger built environment, and the landscape itself undergoes constant redefinition through its changing use. And then there is the space left over, that does not necessitate construction or study, but has been deserted and allowed to develop its independence, submitted to the will (or wrath) of nature. The boundaries are not definitive, but exist nonetheless in the minds of the occupants. We have, then, three types of spaces: the activated, the studied, and the abandoned.

What if, over time, these divisions slip past one another, landscapes gradually abandoned and discovered? The dialectics remain intact, and exist concurrently, but do not synthesize into one, can never synthesize, only change.

For 48-300, under Professor J. Gallagher and Coordinator C. Mondor.

101204
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SKIN OF MUSIC:

Architecture cannot be frozen music because architecture does not stand still. If music can be defined as the physical delineation of sound movement through time, architecture is then the manifestation of being movement through time. Neither can ever be inanimate. This truth is never more apparent in an urban context, or in any situation that amalgamates disparate bodies in motion. Cacophony is always much more interesting.

Skin is forced to move, too, forever wrapping and enveloping the life within its grasp. We are forced to reconcile the constraints of its own range of motion, though - we can never step outside of our skin. But such an expression exists for a reason: we wear two skins; only one is a physical limitation. The other is a shield of (solar?) protection or (programatic?) isolation. For any type of contact between people to occur, skin must penetrate the other, conversation bleeding through.

[What follows is a series of narratives that occur in and of the architecture.]

Episode of Velocity (48sc)

Exhausted after another four-hour layover in Denver, Ron had fallen asleep on the orange line heading up-town. On the other end of the car, a seventy-year-old woman in Stealth Blue Air Jordans swore at an overweight cop. The fighting ensued for twenty minutes – something about stolen sneakers – before Ron jolted awake. He cursed his bad luck. He had missed his girlfriend's apartment. The doors opened, but before he could get off the train, the old woman flashed the policeman and ran away screaming, officer in pursuit. Ron sat back down and watched the city disappear again. The layers of architecture and infrastructure weaved in and out as it started to rain. Clouds rolled in and lights came on. Ron found himself somehow fascinated by the grotesque detritus of Chicago. Amidst the rubble, Ron caught sight of a building he hadn't seen before. He thought he remembered the area being near the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he and Hannah had gone for their three-year anniversary. He couldn't think of the performance they saw. He squinted. As the train pulled up to the station, he tried to get a glimpse at what was going on, but once the car had stopped, he was confronted with a solid, dark face. The rain blew hard against the deadpan wall, and Ron could hear it ricochet in an ironic sort of rhythm, filling the momentary silence interrupting the roar of the train. The train pulled away, Ron still sitting, staring, listening.

Episode of Encounter (7mn)

Hank's lunch break was fading fast. In fifteen minutes, he would have to be back in his cubicle, pounding away ceaselessly at the keys to feign productivity. His boss was ruthless, but ignorant to the rising resistance of Hank and the rest of the team. They had all gone out drinking on Friday and discussed the possibility of doing 'Office Space' right. Or maybe the could just stage a walk-out. Hank wasn't confident in their success, but he wasn't confident that they would actually try anything, either. It was much easier to keep a crappy job than to find a new one. He turned onto Adams as he contemplated his and the fate of his coworkers. Marveling at the number of pub/restaurant combos in the area, he settled for an orange juice and a fortune cookie from Panda Express. A man with a three-legged dog and a worn bongo drum asked for change, and Hank handed him the fortune cookie. Hank tripped – he would regret only giving the fortune cookie – landing hard on the sidewalk, change spilling out of his pocket. Pulling himself up, leaving his quarters and dignity at the curb, he continued towards the parking garage. Perhaps he should have gone to Russian Tea Time instead. As he neared the corner, the light turned red. He looked up at the now year-old Institute of the CSO. His boss had a daughter that played the cello, or flute, or something musical anyhow, and his boss was a pompous ass. But this didn't look quite like what Hank was expecting. It wasn't very big – he could count the floors, which was saying something in a city full of skyscrapers. It wasn't particularly graceful, sort of screaming quietly for the respect of the more restrained buildings around it. Instead of crossing the street, Hank turned the corner, happily finding one lone bench tucked under the twisting façade. A vibrating cell phone fell from his pocket and he watched it bounce its way across the brick.

Episode of Rendezvous (4hr)

Carol hadn't seen her parents all semester, but wasn't so sure that finals week was the best time to be showing them around the city. With half a year of UChicago under her belt, she felt already significantly distanced from her family and her home, the life she had before leaving for college. After dropping off unreasonable amounts of food at her dorm, they drove – despite Carol's objections that she hadn't been in a car since the summer – towards the harbor, where Carol, unsurprisingly, played tour guide. They, her parents, were being unusually secretive about their dinner plans, something their daughter did not like. Richard and Cathy were both known for their inability to throw a true surprise party and were incapable of holding back any news, good or bad. As the sun went down and everyone started to shiver in the windy cold, they stuck close to the park, 'looking' for somewhere to eat. By the time the three reached Adams, Richard and Cathy were practically giddy. The new CSO Institute addition came into view, and Carol knew her parent's intentions were much, much more extravagant. Richard looked down through the glass at the dining room, his stomach uttering a particularly well-timed grumble. Cathy chimed in, Let's look at a menu! Carol rolled her eyes and followed them inside. Stepped back, the entrance was already a relief from the cold and commotion of their walking tour. It wasn't quiet, but the sound was warmer, even, voices replacing the mechanical rumble of traffic and train. Dinner went by without too much out of the ordinary. At a table near the staircases, Carol noted a lot of frantic rushing going on behind her, and it was making her anxious. Maybe it was reminding her of all the studying she would need to catch up on for taking an entire day out of her schedule. The waiter mentioned a few too many times the sculptures featured in the gallery on the floor above, and the family took the hint, heading upstairs after their meal. Carol remained on her toes. The space above swirled with people, and Carol was just part of the crowd again. Removed from the street, pedestrians lost their direction and the immediacy that ruled their lives. But to regain contact with the wall was to reposition oneself within the mass, and the labyrinth suddenly revealed its pattern. Carol saw an opening, and went for it. Her parents watched her wander up the stairs and into yet another crowd of people, though this one significantly more by the imposition of sleek rows of seats. Carol tried to shake away the memory, as her fingers danced along the narrow handrail, of animated polished keys… When an usher prompted her for a ticket, Carol glanced back. Her father pushed three into her hand and they sat down, waiting for the performance to begin. The lights shifted from the back of the theater, gathering into a crescendo towards the stage. Carol hadn't touched the piano in over a year, but when she saw a beautiful black Steinway sitting there, the bench unoccupied, her heart leapt.

Episode of Commitment (5wk)

The bug stared back at Nicholas. It was nine in the morning and blistering hot. Nick was lying with his stomach on the cold kitchen tiles, gazing intently at an insect he found crawling under the refrigerator. He strummed his fingers against the tile. School would be out in another two weeks, but his weekends would continue to be spent drumming. Two more weeks of fourth grade. No one would have suspected that Nick was a child prodigy when it came to music. He hadn't even been the type to bang on pots and pans as a toddler. He didn't talk much, and it was difficult to get him to play in front of other people, but his music teacher, Miss Jezebel, managed to coax it out of him every Saturday. He had gotten into the Percussion Scholarship Program only about a month ago, when his math teacher caught him composing a symphony in the margins of his long division homework. Nine twenty-five and he was standing in the parking lot, his mom kissing him goodbye. How embarrassing. He grabbed his drum sticks and ran up the garden stairs, scrambling up the side of the building, still outside despite the heat. He didn't mind the first two floors, but they were for everyone, and so not really for him. It was bad enough that he had to share a room at home with his brother. The stairs snaking upward, not quite inside but not open to the rest of the city, were for him. They were smaller, a little less grand, but somehow less constricting. Nick burst through the doors of the resource center, a bit out of breath, frantically searching his pockets for a pencil. He scribbled for paper, but only found sheet music. Mozart's notes taunted him. The beat he had been thinking of when climbing the stairs disappeared in the classical composition before him. Unable to help himself, he started to write, tentatively at first, filling up the page with modifications. It sounded better that way. Miss Jezebel walked in, shocked to find Mozart so disrespectfully graffitied. Without saying a word, she pulled the sheets from Nick's hands. He expected to be escorted out, especially after the incident at the Chicago Public Library last week, when he had appended a collection of Wagner's operas. But instead, Miss Jezebel gave back the Mozart, took him upstairs to one of the open classrooms, and gave him a stack of blank sheets, asking that he please photocopy the sheetmusic before 'enhancing it' next time. His lesson this week, she said, would be postponed until he had some time to write. Nick's eyes wandered around the room. His room – a room of his own. He slid over to the drum set, with a violin on his lap, whipped up a beat and started plucking away, spinning around every couple of seconds to press his paper against the glass so he could fill in a few more notes. A few hours passed before Miss Jezebel informed him, regretfully, that the classroom was going to be used by another group of students, and that it was a good time for a break. Nick sulked about in the resource center over his pb&j before wandering out onto the stairs. Drumsticks still in hand, he started to rattle them along the handrails, picking up speed and a light rhythm. He skipped a beat when he grazed the edge of the aluminum panels accidentally, but intrigued, continued to experiment. He was rattling about in the stairway, oblivious to the world around him. The first thing he noticed was Leroy, the security guard, walking towards him – Nick again expected to be booted from the school. But Leroy started to clap, and a flood of applause from above and below joined the montage of sound.

Episode of Intimacy (7yr)

The building was never this quiet. At least she typically left before any of the CSO employees arrived – musicians have no sense of their own volume. She preferred the quiet. Ironic that she could find so much peace in a building usually filled with screaming children and screaming violins. But she wasn't really at peace with the building. They were at war. They had been for seven years. Deborah had joined the cleaning staff the first year the Institute opened. Four thirty am was her time alone with the architecture, free to wage their epic war. She always took the elevator to the top and worked her way down, repressing its shortcomings with her disinfectant and polish. The acoustic flooring of the classrooms was impossible to clean. How was it that kids could get mud all the way upstairs? Was there even any mud left in Chicago? Last she walked around the city, there was nothing but asphalt. But she preferred to think of it as dirt. At least dirt was natural and easily cleaned. It could be chocolate cake – she cringed at the thought. Mud, definitely. Probably from the garden, tracked all the way up 'the indecisive stair', as she called it. She hadn't cleaned those for a month, the bruise on her calf still tender from the tumble she took down their too-slippery treads. Moving through the offices now. The tilted windows collected physically unrealistic amounts of dust – her past experience working in an antique shop had involved less dusting. She hated acute angles. More windows in the theater. And here, nothing was easily reached. It didn't help that she was 5'2". The broken, dead skin that found its way into the building by the stairs made her shudder. Metal panels collected fingerprints like a philatelist collects stamps. And the damn railings were always so greasy, residue from the grimy hands of the 'patrons of the arts.' What about her art? Did anyone care about the time she put in to restore the interior to its original condition every night? No. There was no appreciation. Her vacuuming continued into the lobby. Electrical outlets too far apart, so there was a small triangle in the middle of the gallery. A small grey dusty triangle. And always hit her head on the underside of the stairs. She hated it. All of it. It was ugly, it was impossible to keep clean, and it had the faint smell of a campfire that even Pine-sol couldn't erase. She locked the doors behind her and left, disgusted. Sunday, her day off, spent with her grandson in Millennium Park, watching him chase a menagerie of seagulls and pigeons. The two walked back towards the L, Deborah shivering as she passed the Institute at the CSO, the sun dancing down the sliver of space between the classrooms and the brick, picking up again on the sidewalk where they walked. Her grandson caught a glimpse, despite Deborah's attempts to hurry him past. Wow, Grandma, can we go in? Deborah wanted to say no, but she was partial to her grandson's excitement, and was curious herself to see it during the day, actually made alive by the public and the artists and the students. They walked in, and looked up, light was pouring in from above, radiating throughout the lobby abuzz with people rushing to buy tickets. Grandma, this is the building you work in, isn't it? Deborah had no choice but to concede; she had lost her war: Yep, the finest building in all of Chicago.

For 48-205, under Professor T. Bucco and Coordinator J. Ficca.

100503
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THE VENTRILOQUIST HOUSE:

To reach the southwestern coast of New Jersey, you travel along wide stretches of faded asphalt winding through dense forests of knobby-kneed trees that look as though they have all given up on the world. These roads can be eerily quiet for months, until sometime in early June, when they suddenly become congested riverbeds of heat, inescapable as cars fill out the only voids this wilderness has to offer. For one reason or another, beachgoers endure the ride every year.

Beach towns are hardy little beasts that revel in self-sufficiency. They are home to half a dozen miniature golf courses and more than twenty ice cream shops, but they're also pretty good at surviving year-round, even as tourists dwindle and the growing population of growling air conditioners becomes obsolete. You even know a few of the people who live here during the offseason. The wind is unforgiving but the beaches are still beautiful.

These places have their own culture, and their own climate. Their own pseudo-suburbanism. Maybe, you think, if real estate was a little more expensive – it isn't hard to imagine – the area would become even more like a cookie-cutter development, transplanted. Larger lawns, perhaps greener, with a bit more space between the houses.

But no, that's probably not the case. The lot size would be the same; the houses would get bigger, though, and their parasitic multi-story porches with them. Most houses are enough like suburban homes as it is, except they wobble about on stilts. Like birdhouses, they rise from their pebble-strewn properties on heavy wooden pillars. You imagine them an anticipatory Venice. Only an outdoor shower and a closet for storage share the space with the stairway rising from the ground floor.

Those not floating above pedestrians on thick pilotis (Corbu turns in his grave) have idiosyncrasies of their own. Some have a Bubblicious paint job, others Victorian trimmings, a handful with porthole windows and ship decor.

Lots, in any case, are almost entirely consumed by the structures built upon them. Residential and commercial both, buildings are less than one human wingspan away from each other; you walk between a Mexican restaurant with purple shingles and a ranch-style house that threatens to blow away in the next strong wind, and your fingertips graze the walls on either side. Refusing to touch, though, as the sticky humidity fills the summer air, the buildings rejoice in every short breeze that comes between them.

You ride your bike the length of the island, and the few streets that cut directly from the sea to the bay become debatably welcome wind tunnels.

This year, your family chooses to rent the smaller half of a well-kept duplex on the bayside for one week. The four of you, plus a few friends, arrive in the middle of July, when the days are long and heat envelops everything.

It doesn't take long for you to see (see?) that there is something odd about the acoustic qualities of the house. The entryway is muffled by carpet, but once you open the door to the first floor, you are overcome by a flood of noise. The wooden floors and wooden cabinets that cover the walls reverberate everything. Unpacking the cooler of Gatorade and frozen sweet potato fries, you hear water dripping from the faucet across the room, and you think for a moment that the cooler leaking, because the dripping water sounds implausibly close. Left alone as the rest of the group goes to fish more bags out of the car, you can hear the crinkle of cotton on your shirt. You listen to a bug walking on the windowsill in the bathroom. You start to believe you have super powers; your hearing is suddenly extraordinary.

But the room becomes populated again and sounds trip over each other in an entangled cacophonic mixture. While putting together a jigsaw puzzle that first night, laughter in the kitchen becomes migraine inducing as it is amplified in this cavern of sound. Everyone calls it quits early, not knowing why they all feel so irritated; they attribute it to the long drive just a few hours before.

Before heading upstairs, you glance out the window. The neighbor's porch light is on, and you can see wind playing with the furniture in the yard – chairs are blowing back and forth indecisively, and the table has capsized – while sideways rain pelts everything exposed like unrestrained machine-gun fire. Curiously, you didn't notice it before now. At first, you think it must have just been too loud inside. But as everyone else turns in for the night, you have the eerie realization that no sound is penetrating the exterior walls. In an attempt to calm down after this new insight, you open the window a crack. The house happily consumes the foreign noise, bouncing it around to test its potential. Someone upstairs yells down to ask what all the commotion is about, so you close the window again and walk up the stairs to your bedroom.

Lying in bed, you hear everything. You aren't sure which of the sounds is real, which are echoes, and which are memories of the noise-filled afternoon. You go to sleep, your head spinning, and you dream of impossible silence.

At nine am, you wake up. Your brother's snore is coming from the wrong wall. The side door slams not below you, where it should be, but in the attic. A toilet flushes in the kitchen.

And it hits you. The house is throwing its sound. These aren't echoes. These aren't memories. They are original, pure voices of the house.

You realize you are witnessing an architectural ventriloquist act.

By the end of the second day, the rest of your group is starting to figure it out. They whisper into air vents and run off to find where their voices have gone. They tiptoe around, paying attention to the direction of the noise they make. You decide there should be a word to describe the auditory equivalent of squinting.

The bad weather continues and the six of you are confined to this instrumental beach house. The experimenting continues. Hypotheses are drawn up, though they prove difficult to test, especially your theory that it has something to do with the home's other mystery: the other side of the duplex is vacant and unknown. You are convinced it is designed as a machine to redirect sound, a space of acoustic mirrors.

When the power fails one morning, windows all over the house are thrown open, despite the rain, to grant the stifling heat a way of escape. With the rain comes new noise, but it throws a blanket of calm over the house. The white noise of screaming suicidal drops of water whites out the amplified micro noises that have been trapped inside for days. Easy to tune out in its monotony, it, too, disappears. It is quiet.

But the power returns. Once the fans and AC kick in, the windows are shut tight, and the animated sounds return. You sit on the floor of your room, sketchbook open, and listen to the apathetic rhapsody.

Towards the end of your stay, the clouds roll out to sea, and the house is abandoned. Days tick by at the beach and in town, and meals are taken outside. Only at night can the house perform again. The evening before your departure date, you wait in the shady underbelly of the duplex, reading Vonnegut, for dinner. Sounds are less sterile outside, and you can pick out bickering seagulls, waves lapping up against boats sitting in the dock, and the boys playing baseball out front. Because there isn't much of a yard, they're tossing a ball around in the street, much to your mother's dismay. You hear a bat crack at the leather sphere, and then a different sort of crack. More like shattering. You run to the road and see that your brother has broken a window.

Shouting incurs. The glass will have to be replaced, and the owner is not going to be happy if they have to drive back down the shore. Someone has to see what sort of other damage was done inside, so you volunteer. You've been secretly hoping you would get a chance to explore the mysterious space you've spent every waking moment thinking about. You reach through the hole, a surprisingly clean break, and undo the latch. Flashlight and sketchbook in hand, you climb through, carefully avoiding glass shards scattered on the floor.

The baseball has not done any damage to the interior, because there is nothing behind the window but a wall. You find yourself in a labyrinth of walls and empty space. There is nothing there. You try to sketch and hold up the flashlight – there must be walls in front of all the windows – but all attempts to draw are futile. Any understanding of perspective you thought you had fail you. The walls cut through at unexplained angles, some two stories tall (you haven't found any stairs yet), and the floor isn't level. There are corridors you have to hold your breath to squeeze through, and open stretches of desolate space that seem impossibly large. This menagerie of bare planes is your imagined maze of acoustic mirrors. This is the ventriloquist. Your side of the house is just the dummy.

090801
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PROJECT PROJECTION:
THE FINAL (TELE)VISION:

[What follows is a working manifesto for the project, written halfway through the process of creation.]

(Tele)vision and (Talk)itecture: A Textual Collage:

Snakes and ladders indeed. A forewarning of what follows: There is a lot I want to say here, and this is due in part to the exhaustive suppression of my writing that has occurred this semester – this would seem ironic to anyone who knows my academic schedule swapped Interp for Critical Histories in January – so if what follows is a sort of incomprehensible rambling of subjects seemingly unrelated to the nature of my project, I can only suggest in a Baudrillardian way that my urge to convey my intent relies more heavily upon the fact that I get to write anything at all. Also, I think and design by writing, so most of my ideas are far from completely formed, much less developed and applied, and the disorganized nature of this 'manifesto' would better lend itself to serve as the compositional equivalent of an intensively studious sketch (or maybe collage). Rem Koolhaas begins Delirious New York by pointing out, "The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence" but explains his problem in composing this book is quite the opposite (overload of information from all directions): the "irreconcilable" and "discontinuous" nature of the unnatural in Manhattan can only be resolved by language, and though I'm certainly not going to compare myself to Rem (ha!), it is with that discontinuity and confused outpour of data that I begin an understanding of how to approach (TELE)VISION C.

Considering this, I begin with the subject of ambiguity. In an article for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes that ideas are "in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place." While he applies this argument to scientific discoveries, from telephones to dinosaur bones, it works its way into every aspect of our lives, whether we are aware of the phenomenon or not. For instance, it would seem that in recent weeks, there has been a strange obsession with ambiguity by those around me. Sort of. Lectures (Spike's just yesterday), classes (an argument in Interp about how truth is represented), things I've read on my own (Eisenman, for one, on "presentness" in architecture existing as a flux condition), and casual conversations (over milkshakes) have all brought up the topic. And it's probably just me. Sometimes, you end up looking for something by accident. This intentional accident seems paradoxical by its very existence, and yet serves as the best sort of flint for the spark of an idea. Ambiguity is not necessarily my approach to this assignment, but certainly contributes.

It's funny, though, because I've tried to distance myself so far from making ambiguous decisions in my designs, so I've forgotten that I don't need to be able to explain everything just yet. Ambiguity, to me, is something that cannot yet be described further at the current moment in time, but is a filler much like "TBD": it isn't important to understand at this second, but that doesn't mean you never can or never will.

On a similar note, Pablo recently asked whether I tripped and fell into this "basement of architecture," referring to the nearly all-encompassing topic of projection (just ask Robin Evans – projection is everywhere!), or if I knew what I was doing, and proceeded cautiously by "dipping my toe into the water." While I usually don't condone mixing metaphors in such a way, I think his question merits significant consideration. While dipping my toe in / peered into the musty cellar through a cracked door, I sort of lost my balance and fell down a few of the steps, but not all of them.

And "basement" was an interesting choice of words. On this type of space, Gaston Bachelard writes, "[I]t is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths." As much as I want to explore these depths further, dream a little and come about some logical understanding of projection as a tool of design and representation, I've accepted the fact that I have to come to terms with the qualities of this subterranean archive; I don't expect or even hope to learn very much about projection systems yet, though I have attempted to cram a significant amount of material into these last couple of days. Rather, I'll be taking a candle with me, as Bachelard suggests, and using projection selectively.

How, exactly? Well, In a process similar to my previous iteration of the Flagstaff project, I'm going to regenerate my set of frames (possibly more than four, to be mixed and matched later at my discretion) using actual systems of projection, and these frames will once again manipulate the way my form folds and bends, cultivating a relationship between the visual and the experiential effects of my manipulation of the site. More about this duality later.

On one of my recent trips to New York City, I spent a lot of time in the Urban Center bookstore, and stumbled upon a page from a book I can't remember that dealt with the impact digital media has had on our execution of design. The book must have been either relatively uninteresting or overpriced, because I didn't buy it that day, but I did steal a snapshot on my cell phone of the page I found most relevant to my current studio project. Part of the page reads: "Video's gift to the architect is the gift of articulating time. Space can be shown to change. It can be rendered in flux as a series of changing relationships. ... Space can be revealed as a multiplicity of unfolding journeys, a series of performed architectural events that invite us to enter."

Through the frames, which appear and disappear as one moves through the space, specific views come into focus. Emphasizing the distance from the viewer, the scene that unfolds inside of it intensified by its concurrent movement. The assortment the screens required for (TELE)VISION C further complicates the multiplicity of framing motion. To me, they serve as a temporary replacement for reality in this respect. With that in mind, it is my intent not to designate seating arrangements for specific viewing areas. Yes, of course I will provide places to pause, to review and reflect on the image itself, but more important to my project is the idea of moving past, moving beyond to something different. It is architecture of peregrination. The hill is used mostly as a transition space now, and due to its location, this would be nearly impossible to deny. People move into the park or out to the city; people move down the slope or up it; people move to the structured knowledge basis of the university or to the aesthetic appreciation of Phipps; people move through in direct lines that disregard paved paths and avoid benches. They do need to pause, freeze the frame and maybe even rewind, but they should then to move on after that. Wouldn't want to be late for class.

At Peter Greenaway's suggestion, I am not going to conform to conventional ratios of frame size, allowing these products of projection to exist on their own accord: "Painting, the theater, ... opera and ballet, ... cinema, and certainly television, exist disciplined within a fixed frame. ... We restrict and confine, crop, cut, shear, prune, chop, manacle, bind, imprison, and join the chaos of visual realities. Of course, it is very practical [but] it is a convention and should be open to much questioning.” Regarding the first part of this quote, architecture is noticeably absent from his list. And as a discipline, it is not so fixed by conventional frames. But at the same time, there is a default (rectilinear façade, anyone?), and essentially it is a structure made up of three-dimensional frames. Site restrictions, building codes, and cultural conventions dictate these frames. Scattered, overlapping and intersecting, ordered only by an external sequence, this new frame is simultaneously a portal, a screen, a wall, and because the frame is incomplete (like the previous project, complete enclosure ceases to exist), paradoxically boundless.

The reason these frames still work is the same reason television works and is so captivating. It is a reason embedded in language, actually. The prefix tele means "operating at a distance" – it works because what is operating, the cityscape or distant flora, or the film (at an infinite distant away), is far from the vision or the view.

The combining of frames comes from the film-editing process itself, of which Harun Farocki writes, "One monitor shows the already edited material, and the other monitor the raw material, which the videomaker may or may not add the work-in-progress. He or she becomes accustomed to thinking of two images at the same time, rather than sequentially." Alternatively, it could come from Paul Virilio's concept regarding television: "Here, the event does not take place, or, more precisely, it takes place twice, the topical aspect yielding to the teletopical aspect, the unity of time and place being split between the emission and reception of signals, here and there at the same time, thanks to the power of electromagnetic interactivity." While there may be an actual sequence that exists, that's not how they're conceptualized or understood by their user. It exists outside of functionality and any concrete physical affiliation.

One thing I was surprised never came up in any of my crits on (TELE)VISION B was a question asking how it related to my first part of the project (A). It wasn't crucial to the explanation of my design or any particular deliberate move I made, but I was sort of anxious to answer it nonetheless. And so I'll answer it now. Although my analysis of Atonement's opening scene stemmed from how sound could be used to perceive space, or how a composed music score, celebrating the motifs of time and sequence, could be combined with physical movement to produce a greater understanding of that space, I became ultimately more interested in that secondary variable, the physical movement through the restrictions of the scene. Because it wasn't just one thing, the subject, moving. What really fascinated me was the conflict between the movement of the subject and the movement of the camera. Their dance was not coordinated, but neither were they unaware of each other. In a sort of abstract pas de deux, they feed off of each other, but move in different directions, creating a sort of elastic tension and release. And the music does this too, in a way that is to me subtler, but I am not an avid musician, so the visual movement engages me further.

So I stole this idea from my previous project, because it's much more fun if you pretend it is a covert operation, and applied it to my plan at Flagstaff (I'm a sustainable designer – I recycle my old ideas). The form would move one way, acting as camera, seeing all from weird angles under strange lighting, while the people, the subject, my Briony equivalent, would move another, in sync but not synchronized, acknowledging but not understanding, feeling some connection but not quite seeing it. For my final swing at the piñata that is Schenley Park (candy!), this is some of the momentum bringing the bat around. I was never very good at bunting anyway.

Despite my emphasis on the dynamic, I'm also concerned with the conflict between this movement and the stillness allowed to coexist. To return to Bachelard, "[E]very corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is a germ of a room, or of a house." The location of Flagstaff hill lends itself primarily to the demands of student life – its primary static use is a place to study or, the opposite, a place to temporarily forget academia. This internal contrast in functionality is interesting, too, but the openness and variety in the site alone permits this to occur. Spaces created by the folds will sometimes be smaller nooks or more private enclosures, while simultaneously remaining open (for reasons of safety and maintenance).

The folds. Probably should be higher up in this essay, but have settled here instead (not that this essay has had very much organization). The Deleuzian fold (and who else can claim such possession over this word?) is "a flexible or an elastic body [that] still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending moments, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings."

The idea to have these folds was a part of coming to term with material realities (again, I still haven't decided on these particulars, but I was thinking some sort of stone, and with preexisting 'folds' or breaks among the surfaces designed to be flat and fold among them, allowing the undesignable to play a part, among other reasons). There is a certain power that resonates within the fold, allowing for discontinuity through continuity, as all jointing would. My folds undulate through the landscape, creating the Loch Ness effect from the knot project, to imply something underneath.

Meanwhile, stone doesn't want to be folded. The creases emerge, but can be filled in with nonmaterial. With light. The number of folds is dependent on the frames and the site, but easily mutable to provide a sufficient amount of lighting to secure the safety of the environment and ensure comfort without polluting the space with overbearing fluorescents. These various lines of light suggest movement without direction.

And I was thinking solar-powered? Plenty of large flat surfaces to choose from. (And could you put speakers in with the lights? Oh wait, I forgot, this is architecture school – we can do anything.)

How the land reacts to the folds is something of a tug-of-war. I wanted to quote something from Morphosis's The Crawford House, but can't seem to find it at the moment – essentially it speak of how the earth revolts against the wall's arrogant stance, chews it and spits it back out, and the two battle it out. It was an interesting concept to me: how the landscape would conform to man, and how it would rebel against his tyranny. And so it was and still is my intention to have the earth segmented in a way similar to the folding planes, as if the form bursts forth from the earth, and at the same time the earth is what is pushing these pieces, segmenting them at its own accord.

The spaces that remain open, and the spaces created between two of the structures, could be used for a variety of things besides movie viewing. Lounging, resting, studying, reading, climbing, walking, biking, skating, running, rolling, picnicking, acting, singing, performing, practicing, kite-flying, and gaming, for starters. I don't think these spaces need to be designated for specific programmatic elements for any of these activities to work.

From voids to solids – these other inbetween places can serve as the required utilities (storage and restrooms). They would be easily integrated into the rest of the plan, and only found on the outskirts of the site (maybe?). Hidden but not invisible, they could function smoothly without stripping any dignity from the design.

Despite the emphasis put on winter activity ("no, really"), major arenas or ski slopes are unnecessary here. Pittsburgh's weather is unpredictable on its best day, and most people who find themselves on Flagstaff during snowfall want only to sled, perhaps make a snowman / snowangel or two. Although I've considered putting something before the treeline at the west point of the park to discourage sledders from continuing into the street and will leave broadways of clearing for people without proficient steering, I don't plan on actually manipulating the land to add to any of these winter experiences. It seems superfluous and costly.

That's not to say winter will have no effect on the installed structures and new landforms. Charles Baudelaire writes, "Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house? The winter cottage sat at the end of a little valley, shut in by rather high mountains; and it seemed to be swathed in shrubs." He suggests the universe or external conditions manipulate our perception of the object of the structure, and that the simplicity of these words are what we connect to most, where we find joy and comfort in our experience. Covered in a blanket of white (I'm aware of how cliché this sounds, but it is a metaphor that everyone understands), the landscape becomes one again, forgetting any prejudice against the alien forms and holding them close. Winter is clean and contemporary, but slow, a time when lines disappear and it becomes okay to sit on the ground (because you're wearing snowpants). Spring is beautiful in a muddy sort of way, melted and sticky, but when no one is watching, you take a gooey bite out of the chocolate bar you sat on. Summer is kinetic and precariously balanced among the clouds of heat. Autumn is only anticipation and a frenzied search for something before lockdown for the natural (and academic) landscape begins. And we begin again. The seasons, and the weather, is only amplified by the presence of these slabs of newness.

So I suppose I should wrap this up, because it was only suppose to be a few paragraphs long and I really should work on other aspects of the studio project. Beyond the theoretical, I mean. It got a lot more concise and concrete towards the end, anticipating this moment. There is no conclusion, because I haven't finished yet (ask me in May) and my intentions will change as the results of these ideas begin to take shape. And so it goes.

For 48-105, under Professors ML. Arscott & C. Brill and Coordinator P. Garcia.

Featured in PROCESS magazine, Issue 2.

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