A New Pattern For Architecture
Axon of constructed town home
Over the past half-century, the western world has been transitioning from an economy based off production to one which provides a service of information. This shift from the modernist factory to the decentralized, economically postmodern industry has consequently crafted an immaterial labor force which is becoming increasingly removed from the products it produces.1 The turn into the twenty-first century amplified this economic transition through a digitalization of craft, production and consumption.
Within this digital revolution two consequential moments occurred. First, the arts became virtually commodified. Traded through digital platforms, the arts that first adapted to the growing digital marketplace were subsequently flattened, placing production into an equal horizontal playing field of sameness.2 Within this lateral field of consumerism, the second consequence of mass critique, which empowers consumers, is continuously shaping and forming metrics of success for artistic production. The shaping of mass critique—appropriately dubbed the main stream—entraps those in creative disciplines to forgo individuality and join consensus trends. Trending culture has filtered content and, with the introduction of new à la carte platforms, patterns for formulaic success have emerged.
Growing digital arenas for open platform competition, like iTunes and Spotify, have stripped the musician from the album and have instead privileged the single. This pressurized system of production rewards those who produce popular molded products, leaving those who do not conform unseen and unheard. Similar to the à la carte musical platforms, image based consumption apps like Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest operate in accordance to popular demand. Important numerical stats such as like counts and follow ratios similarly filter and propel successful profiles to the forefronts of user feeds. This filtration process has provided for a thin layer of public-generated consensus aesthetic values within the traditional artistic disciplines. With the consumers now in control of digital market production, an economic tilt has occurred, positioning the public as a democratic steamroller. A relatively new phenomenon, the algorithmic age has instilled a now deep-rooted digital dependency. We are addicted, secluded, and yet somehow remain connected.3 This new age of on-demand services has brought with it and well established the newly roaring digital economy.
This digital entrenchment is especially present within the architectural academy. The usage of historical reference has somehow been forsaken, eclipsed and flattened by a culture of image consumption and production. Under this criteria, a project’s measurement of merit is told solely through its scale of digital circulation, without a necessary underlying knowledge of precedent or disciplinary origins. I admit this may sound a bit misanthropic, but I believe there is substantial validity to Eisenman’s gospel of an authoritative loss.4
In his 2015 span of traveling lectures, Eisenman proclaimed that the architectural discipline was lost, inattentive, and lacked a cohesive voice to lead it into and through the digital era. Without a unifying voice, a cohort of easily distracted architecture students found comfort in what they could easily digest. Digital culture has become so omnipresent in academia that the library has been replaced with a set of highly curated feeds.5 While Eisenman’s lecture could be interpreted as his attempt in becoming our long lost authoritative figure, I do not necessarily consider the absence of a figure head to be detrimental. If one extreme solution to this problem of flattened pedagogy is to establish a leader, maybe the other extreme is embracing the plurality of image culture.
This plural embrace has recently been showcased at the Graduate School of Design within the exhibition entitled Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech. An exhibition curated by Andrew Holder and K. Michael Hays, this display of theatrically deliberate work produced by academic professionals argues itself as an expression of a decentralized discipline.6 While technique and stylistic approaches may be separate and claim to segment the curation, it is quite apparent in its organization that digital image culture stitches the gallery. Organized as a feed of contemporary work, this exhibition was almost solely advertised through Instagram and the exhibited content downloaded from the platform. Intended less as a criticism and more so as a call to put down our shields, it is time for architecture to embrace this digital economic atmosphere and position its disciplinary pursuits towards public engagement through a curated consumption. It is time for architecture to extend itself and begin sharing on a broader stage. Currently, architects have no issues with sharing amongst themselves. Through journals, lectures and biennales, contemporary ideas are readily exchanged. Through Google warehouse, render material market places and entourage sites, supplementary contexts for architectural representation are available for download. It’s time for a new pattern in architecture! A pattern which realigns itself to the early colonial books of easily digestible and tectonically legible architecture.
First, it might be useful to define the pattern book’s historical and contextual relationship to the field of architecture and, more specifically, to the architectural landscape of early colonial America. To describe it simply, patterns in architecture were imported European era designs that were illustrated with developable instruction by European architects. Imported and circulated amongst the colonies, American gentlemen craftsman and carpenters would appropriate the designs and construct based on their direction. Amongst the early cargo ships traveling from European cities to colonial America were books containing the styles of the Georgian, Dutch and the Classical architectural movements. Reduced to forms of easily reproducible designs, these patterns needed to be constructed by the comparatively unskilled labor that existed in the colonies during the early decades of colonization.7 Playing a paramount role in the country’s identity, these pattern books of early America populated geographies, formed cities, and even created the symbolism of democracy. Borne from English decent, Washington’s Mount Vernon exemplifies the reach of pattern architecture. Described as “a personal declaration of independence,” this architecture can more accurately be described as a reflection of the American architectural relationship to overseas reference. While Mount Vernon is rooted in American history as sparking a democratic image of architecture, its form, and less broadly its elements, represent a direct accordance to English pattern sources.8 In other words, the symbolism of American democratic architectural independence owes its origins to the work of English Aristocratic architects.
In their introductory paragraph of American Architects and their books to 1848, Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O'Gorman write that “architectural ideas fly on literary wings. Since the Renaissance in Italy, books and, to a somewhat lesser extent, drawings have been the primary vehicles of communication between architects, as well as architects and their public.”9 Described as methods of engagement, the platform of literature has, in recent years, taken a back seat to that of the image. The pattern has transformed from a book of instruction to one of consumption. This evolution in the pattern can most effectively be seen through the transformation in the transition towards catalogue format. As the American architectural discipline began to evolve from a practice of amateur craftsmanship to one of disciplined construction, the field of architectural knowledge became isolated. While the once mass-circulated pattern literature began to collect dust on the shelves of personal libraries, architects started to assert their knowledge in the aim of acquiring social status and power. Far preceding the digital era, corporations began to participate within the architectural market through a natural progression of the pattern in the form of curated mail order catalogs. Within these catalogs, which were published in the beginning of the twentieth century, companies like Sears Roebuck and Alladin began to advertise mail order kit homes.10 Shipped directly from the factory floor, these homes were both inexpensive and customizable. Within these corporation-driven architectural ventures, the architects were no longer culpable for construction as they had been during the colonial periods. Instead, the architect was now responsible for the creation of drawings. Advertised through plans and elevations, these catalogs were early indicators for a disciplinary transition towards image production.
Like the patterns, the kit home soon became taboo for different reasons. As a symbol for low design, over-the-counter architecture became susceptible to architectural smear campaigns. As postwar suburbs began to pop up in the late forties and early fifties, the multiplicities of catalog options began to narrow as decisions, rather than individual homeowners, made decisions. The postwar climate led towards a constructed reality of generic domesticity. Homes were multiplied, creating never-ending suburban monotony best exemplified by Levittown. While homogenous development continues to persist within new American construction, the catalog found its popularity dwindling as the cost of construction began to inflate.
After a short hiatus, the pattern resurfaced in the midst of disciplinary scrutiny and anxiety with the release of Christopher Alexander’s thousand-page instructional book, The Pattern Language. Described as the key to unlocking the Reyner Banham’s black box, the patterns which Alexander outlines offer insight towards architectural reproduction across scales.11 From roof vaulting (pattern number 220) to small parking lots (pattern number 103) to cooking layouts (pattern number 184), Alexander illustrated into construction from the scale of window placement to that of urban design. With over two hundred and fifty patterns illustrated and described to detail, Alexander aimed to empower the public with an architectural knowledge, hoping it would transcend towards a holistic vision of ownership over design.12 While Alexander’s patterns began to unlock architectural knowledge, they fell short in promoting a creative practice. Although not his intention, Alexander was instead successful in creating a manual of singular political vision. Possibly doomed from the start due to a single author, Alexander’s patterns resembled Acceptra’s manifest of Swedish socialist design propaganda more than the early patterns of plural stylistic pursuit.13
Released in 1977, we are now more than forty years removed from Alexander’s attempt at resurfacing a pattern language within architectural thought. Based off of aggregating lessons, The Pattern Language unhinged the once hermetically sealed vault of architectural knowledge. It is time to reopen the vault and engage with a broader contemporary consumer culture. Rather than engaging the pattern through a singular perspective as Alexander did, the discipline can now turn towards a representational technique similar to that of the English eighteenth century interior pattern books. Traditionally described through section, architectural interiors lack a fully descript resolution. The typical illustrated section instead is crutched by cast shadows to illustrate depth of space and supplementary drawings to understand relationships between rooms.14 Robin Evans best describes the dependent persona of the architectural section within his essay on the developable surface in 1989. Evans writes, “its [the drawing’s] power to represent is always partial, always more or less abstract. It never gives, nor can it give, a total picture of a project…”. At a time when representational experimentations were uncommon, an attempt was made in further describing the interior ambiguity outputs of conventional section drawings.15 An important evolutionary step for architectural representation, and the title to his essay, came at the creation of a developable surface. A drawing that combined plan with stitched accompanying elevations accomplished two representational feats. First, the developable surface allowed for a holistic portrayal of a room. By unfolding interior elevations and anchoring them to the plan, the developed surface was impartial to view. The developed surface was measurable and, more importantly, instructive with its content. Secondly, the drawing transformed observational engagement with architectural representation. Rather than undressing a drawing to understand interior capacities, the developed surface instead relied upon the reader to reconstruct it.16
Unfolded Town House
However, no drawing goes without its faults. As the architects of the eighteenth century quickly realized, the developable surface necessitates prior architectural knowledge in order to be decoded. Largely in part to a heavy reliance on projection technique, which collapsed furniture from plan and projected it onto the unfolded elevations, the drawings were critiqued for being busier than they were informative. The developable surface drawing also lacked a sense of congruency across space. Unlike the section’s ability to create elevational cohesion and relationships between interiors, the developed surface fragmented the interior adjacencies by illustrating the room as an island devoid of any contextual surroundings. Rather than defining a singular room, I propose that the techniques of the developable surface drawing be used in defining whole architecture.
Although unsuccessful in the English Georgian era, the developable surface drawing undoubtedly lends itself to the image consumption culture of today. One of the redeemable characteristics of the drawing technique is its ability to compress architectural volume into a single flattened image. This act of compression flat packs architecture and creates a tangential relationship between architectural drawing and architectural model. By reversing the developable surface from an interior definition to an exterior representation, the drawing technique offers instant gratification to the anxieties of superficial online culture where exterior appearance supersedes interior conditions. A New Pattern for Architecture positions the unfolded single surface drawing as a representational means of flattening architectural content into a downloadable platform. These drawings are easily printed, cut, and folded into their designated shapes. Now consumers can immediately form architectural drawing into shape with only a few tools on hand!
Pattern Construction
This embrace of a do-it-yourself architectural attitude has been around since the patterns of the early colonial craftsman, but in recent years have been exiled due to corporate homogenization.17 Now the public that seeks its do-it-yourself fix can watch the shunned movement on repeat through HGTV renovation shows. Bruce Handy relays a comedic exposure of the do-it-yourself dullness through his postmodern retrofit kit advertisement as seen in Spy Magazine. A reduction of architectural complexity to abstracted shapes, this ad pokes fun at the enigmatic movement that was postmodernism back in 1988.18 Described by Handy as “whatever you want it to be if you want it bad enough,” the postmodern movement was a vague assortment of projected-upon definitions.19 In its state of plurality, the retrofit kit aims to appeal to the masses. Similar to the catalog homes that proceeded Handy’s advertisement, the main mission of the kit was to remain as neutral as the postmodern definition had become.
The introduction of digital technology to the postmodern economy has in fact offered a retrospective to the years of pattern past. With an everflowing abundance of information, everything is not only accessible, but more importantly: everything is portable. Our devices allow us to transport knowledge, circulate ideas and remain in touch with the immediacy and urgency of life-pausing notifications. The new pattern for architecture must escape the academic library shelves and find home within personal archives of mood boards and inspirational hashtag posts. Bridging design individuality with an indexical system of overlaid construction, the unfolded drawing provides promise to a digestible architecture. Intended to position the architectural discipline slightly outside its secured circle of comfort, these patterns pry the box slightly further open.
Without the constraints of tangible media, the pattern can now progress as an arena of plural engagement. The Architect will now privilege the portfolio over the service of a single specific client, in effect reverting back to the catalogs while simultaneously evolving to fit our current mode of instantaneous consumption. On-demand services for an on-the-go audience. Unfolded Home, Office, Tower, get yours today! From a single surface drawing to a single service platform of digitally compressed tectonics, these designs are ready to download, cut, construct, and share!
Unfolded Tower
Notes
1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Postmodernization, or the Informatization of Production,” in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 291.
2 Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 3.
3 Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, (Minnesota University Press, 2017), 40.
4 Peter Eisenman, “Architecture and the Loss of Authority,” Lecture, Taubman College University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, November 06, 2015.
5 Ibid.
6 K. Michael Hays and Andrew Holder, “Architecture Before Speech,” Lecture, Graduate School of Design Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, January 23, 2018.
7 Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O'Gorman, American Architects and Their Books to 1848, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 17.
8 Ibid., XVII.
9 Ibid., XV.
10 “Tools of the Trade: 19th- and 20th-Century Architectural Trade Catalogs,” Exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, August 4, 2015–October 13, 2015.
11 Reyner Banham, “A Black Box: The Secret Profession of Architecture,” A Critic Writes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 297.
12 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Angel Shlomo. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), 395..
13 Ramia Maze, “Forms and Politics of Design Futures,” Research Network for Design, Anthropology Ethnographies of the Possible Seminar, 10-22 April 2014, (Aarhus University, Denmark), 2.
14 Robin Evans, “The Developed Surface: An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth Century Drawing Technique,” in Translations From Drawing to Building (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 200.
15 Ibid., 199.
16 Ibid., 211.
17 James F. O’Gorman, “Some Architects’ Portraits in Nineteenth-Century America: Personifying the Evolving Profession,” Transactions of American Philosophical Society, Vol. 103, no. 4, 2013, 11.
18 Bruce Handy, “A Spy Guide to Postmodernism,” Spy Magazine, April, 1988, 105.
19 Ibid., 102.