Cut with Scissors: Jean Jaminet In Conversation with Ellie Abrons and Adam Fure from T + E + A + M
Models on View exhibition. Photograph by Jennifer Noga, image courtesy CAED.
The Possible Mediums project was not initially conceived as a discourse on image. Unconvinced by the design pedagogy that emerged as a result of the personal computer’s introduction into the design studio, the Possible Mediums project challenged the hegemony of technological novelty and digital virtuosity and more radically disputed the foundations for assessment on which most architecture pedagogy relies.1 The dissolution of the formal and material orders that defined the discipline throughout much of recent history became a primary ambition of the project.2 This shift from “technique to tactics” wrenched architecture from the heights of linguistic articulation and disciplinary convention into the depths of viscous material maneuvers and contemporary design experimentation.3
Possible Mediums became a staging area for construction stockpiles and mismatched tchotchke models, as well as for specimen displays of geomorphic moon rocks, fleshy balloon critters, and mylar trash bag bladders. No longer defined by computationally complex forms or classically derived aesthetics, this ontological shuffle presented a direct challenge to the discipline and its regimes of medium specificity by anticipating fundamental changes to perception and the amplified role of the digital image as dictated by technology.
Among the many Possible Mediums contributors are Thom Moran, Ellie Abrons, Adam Fure, and Meredith Miller, now collectively known as T+E+A+M, whose work can be positioned alongside the shaggy and sticky inchoate volumes of Bittertang and Ebrahim Poustinchi as well as the dirty and imprecise “neo-primitivist” practices of Ensamble Studio and Matter Design.4 However. T+E+A+M’s subsequent introduction of image-as-material is a radical departure from the motivations of the Possible Mediums project. Post-internet art influences and innovative experiments with photogrammetry distinguish T+E+A+M’s tactile approach to scenography and introduce a more subversive direction for image-making in architecture.5
T+E+A+M’s latest foray into this unexplored visual terrain is an exhibition of recent work entitled Models on View.6 The initial intention was to show large-scale competition models from three previous projects—Detroit Reassembly Plant (2016), Living Picture (2017), and Ghostbox (2017). Unfortunately, these models were all too big for the small gallery door. Instead, new model fragments and images were created from the previous models through photogrammetry and other digital reproduction and fabrication processes. Indeed, the proliferation of digital communication technologies, particularly photo and videosharing social networking platforms, has collapsed notions of the original and the copy, making the distinction irrelevant.7 As Abrons and Fure point out, “The digital [...] doesn’t simply represent the ‘real’— but is itself another real.”8 The designers described the installation as “a show of models and images about models and images.” Similar to a meme that is posted, modified, and reposted in perpetuity, each mediation is not simply a lower-quality representation of the original but rather understood to be ontologically equivalent to any previous or subsequent mediation. The exhibition thus challenges the tendency to exploit technological novelty and approaches computation as a condition of our reality that hums quietly in the background.
T+E+A+M’s scenographic display of storefront graphics and model fragments upends the conventional use of gallery space—only the models occupy the gallery interior, and viewing occurs exclusively from the exterior. T+E+A+M operationalizes the gallery facade as a commercial shop window, provoking a distinctive separation between the art object and its subject. The gallery space is collapsed onto the two-dimensional surface of the glass partitions. In the words of Levi Bryant, “Everything transpires on the surface, on a plane of immanence, in a field of exteriority that is [...] more intimate than any intimacy [...] so much so that it is extimate.”9 The storefront becomes a large, quasi-digital display with real and perceived depth, varying scales and resolutions, and backlit interface. The fixed conceptual dualities between the interior and exterior, surface and depth, object and subject lose their coherence. The indirect occupation of the gallery (appearance of subjective agency) and direct confrontation with recycled digital and physical content (illusion of authenticity) provokes significant questions about reception and mediation of the art object. T+E+A+M’s compelling resolution to a familiar problem of dimensions inspired the following conversation with Ellie Abrons and Adam Fure about precision and making, digital composting, and authorial control.10
Jean Jaminet (JJ): I’ll just start with my own personal anecdote about the exhibit. When I received Adam’s directions for posting the project narrative—you can see his email on the door—it looks like an eviction notice. The subject line reads; “Please print and tape to gallery door.” The only other direction he gave was “Use masking tape, cut with scissors.” It’s appropriate with, as Adam described, the casual aesthetic of the project, but it brings up a larger question about the perceived lack of precision. Could you talk about that idea? What mediates these kinds of relationships—assembly, alignment, detail, and so forth? What are your thoughts about precision?
Adam Fure (AF): I appreciate the question. I think that we carry some baggage from the digital moment; it was originally about form-making, and it was done in a really amateur way, then it moved to digital fabrication. Precision and optimization were not goals, but ideologies that consumed the work. That never really felt right for us. There was a domain of materiality and making that was much more dirty and raw, that was being repressed for the optimization and precision valued within digital fabrication. A countercultural attitude started to emerge around building things in a sloppy way or making things that are less clear and precise. But also, we are just naturally drawn to those material qualities. That said, precision and control are innate to us as designers. So the gallery door—as I recall it—I just said to tape the email to the door, and Jean responded with questions like, “What kind of tape do you want me to use, blue tape, clear tape, or masking tape?” I thought, If you’re going to ask, I’ll take masking tape and please cut it with scissors. It’s a funny story, but I think that if given the opportunity to be precise, I would be precise. And there’s a lot of precision in this exhibit. I think craft is an inevitable requirement in design. I think precision and control are inevitable requirements. It’s about what changes from one project to another. It’s whether or not precision is for the sake of demonstrated virtuosity or is it in the service of something else. I would say in this exhibit it serves the visual experience.
Ellie Abrons (EA): I would claim that our work is quite precise, although it looks messy. The messiness is restricted to certain areas which are presented in contrast with things that are the opposite. We often place new materials and old materials together, or taut geometries with rough ones. And in a lot of the work that incorporates material experimentation and prototyping, the precision comes in working on the actual performance or behavior of the material itself. The look might be rough-hewn or variable or variegated, but the wall thickness and material performance in it are carefully calibrated—for example, the temperature of the heater on the slipform.
JJ: I think the work only appears sloppy, but there’s actually an underlying precision operating there, much like you’ve described contemporary computation running in the background of our reality. Aesthetically, it also ties into ideas of what Jesús Vassallo calls “dirty realism”—work that has a fixation with dirt or mud, extreme vernacularism, global ruins, and the like, which seems to touch on the casual aesthetic of your projects. What are your thoughts about this aesthetic characterization of the work and how does it relate to bigger concerns of social and cultural experience?
EA: Originally for us, the aesthetic of ruination, one could call it, came from working specifically on the site in Detroit, where we were thinking a lot about the way in which the image of the city was produced through these romanticized images of its ruin, which are incredibly popular. There is a whole tourism industry built up in Detroit around people coming and gawking at abandoned buildings. We thought about how we could shift the cultural narrative by reusing and reimaging those materials. In that ambition, we understood that there’s a line you have to walk where you don’t totally sever the association, you understand where those materials come from, but you also see them anew. There are, of course, examples of people reusing building materials in such a way that they are no longer recognizable in the way they originally existed. We needed to hold onto that. We’re also, to put it simply, interested in the emergent spatial properties of something like a pile, a pile of rocks, right? If you’ve ever encountered a huge pile of rocks, it has an incredible spatial quality. Thinking about how we can capture that as a compelling spatial proposal is something that interests us.
AF: I don’t think the answer is always there, but we’ve been processing it ex post facto. I’ve thought about the work of philosopher Timothy Morton. In one of his books, he coined the term hyperobjects to describe the phenomenon of climate change as a thing that is outside our scale of human perception. He wrote a book before that called Ecology Without Nature, which is a critique of the concept of nature as something that actually does more harm than good. One of the negative impacts he describes is how it allows us to think that there is an “away” that exists in the world, where waste can go to get purified. There’s culture over here, and there’s nature over there. That produces a distance or lack of intimacy with the material world which disconnects us from certain parts of our physical environment. Morton argues for a direct engagement of the baser forms of matter as a way of establishing intimacy with different material realms. That, to me, is an important idea, especially in Detroit where there are six square miles of abandoned industrial buildings and around 130,000 abandoned homes. It’s staggering, right? If you raze those buildings and cart the debris away to a landfill, that’s not going “away.” To accept rubble and debris is a necessary confrontation with our world as it exists. We ought to experiment and imagine new relationships that we can have with these materials as sensing beings, but also as architects who are trying to make new things in the world. Maybe it doesn’t always have to be about new construction.
JJ: You described the exhibit as a show of models and images about models and images. This idea of landfill and materials being with us is an explicit idea about an architecture of recycling. Each time you recycle something, it loses cohesion, it loses detail, it might lose resolution—it starts to break down in some way. Have you considered material and image in terms of recycling physical and digital content? Is there a point at which these materials become unrecyclable? Does architecture stop producing images, or does it become digital compost that will bear something new again?
AF: A concept influential to us, which was coined by the artist Artie Vierkant, is image objects.11 Vierkant is part of a group called post-internet artists. As a very quick history, net artists were the first to consider the impact of the internet in the nineties and reconceived of art practice as a wholly online experience—think art as software. They got out of the gallery and into the web. Post-internet artists like Artie Veirkant are reengaging the gallery. He stages sculpture in a gallery, photographs it, then post-processes the images in Photoshop and circulates them online. For him, each stage of the process, the sculpture, the photo, the edited image, is a new object, an image object. For us, this breaks down conventions of representation—original and copy—as every form of mediation is a new object that is ontologically equivalent to everything else. It’s as real as all the other instantiations. That’s more how we think about it. This is what I was saying about our Living Picture project. We design the thing, render the thing, build the thing, present the thing, then we post about the thing. Where is the thing? I think it’s all those together, but also in perpetuity. It keeps going. Like compost, there’s a recycling of content, but I don’t think of it in terms of being on its way to a death. It’s just continually reassembled.
EA: Well sometimes we do, because we’re also interested in thinking about a building as a temporary assembly of materials and space, even if that temporal scale is decades. Things are always eventually on their way to the landfill in some capacity. If you think about that in terms of a chronology that unfolds from resource extraction to landfill as Adam was describing, then there are places where architecture and architects can intervene and loop things back or accelerate certain moments in that time scale. There are projects where we are thinking about opportunities for design in that material cycle. I guess I’ve never thought of it like that before, in that the digital life starts to participate in that process. It’s actually a really interesting thing to think about.
JJ: The idea of recycling or digital processing and reprocessing raises questions about authorship. On one hand, the exhibition removes authorship by recycling materials and images from previous projects. On the other hand, it is very clear that the views are contrived. This forced perspective, or scenographic view, implicates the hand of the artist or reasserts authorship into the work. How does authorship play a role in your work and does it have any meaning in contemporary conversation?
AF: Art has a more established discourse on post-digital and post-internet. A lot of our references come from there. Some describe post-internet art as surfing, where an art practice is based on downloading a bunch of images from Flickr, doing something to them in Photoshop, and then showing them in a gallery or online. There’s a great show at the University of Michigan called “Art in the Age of the Internet,”12 exploring some of these themes. Surfing brings up the question of authorship in that finding existing content becomes the primary creative act, as opposed to creating something from scratch for example. Another colleague of ours, Andrew Kovacs, is exploring architectural form-making through the assembly of preexisting parts, often little tchotchkes bought at a dollar store, glued together to make a model. So, a question like authorship is continually in flux as new pressures emerge—technological, theoretical, social pressures—and we need to continually interrogate and develop new definitions for what creativity is. In our practice we’re deliberate with authorship, and maybe this is going to Ellie’s point about precision, we really need it all. We try and avoid irony: We build models the way that we do because we want people to believe us. We’re not invested in a representational game first, we’re attempting to come up with new ways of building. We try and build models like we would build buildings in that way. We are aware and excited by download culture, but we’re also invested in reestablishing a level of intentionality and authorship that admittedly gets a little bit murky when so much content comes from existing sources. Conceptions of “originality” and “new” are totally different now, totally different than they were. So, we keep asking this question.
EA: I would distinguish authorship from originality. The work is highly authored, but not necessarily original in the true meaning of that word. The highly authored quality often comes through authoring the sensibility of a found material or reprocessed one which has been through a number of translations. Also, collaborative practice is a really important part of our work. We’re a 4-person collaboration, and authorship becomes quite murky, but in a really productive way, where the notion of full author or authorial genius is not something that’s important to us in any way shape or form.
Note from interviewer: I am indebted to my colleagues Elwin Robison and Jon Yoder from the CAED for their helpful comments on an early draft of this manuscript.
Jean Jaminet is an assistant professor at Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design. He holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from The Ohio State University where he graduated summa cum laude. His prior academic appointments include Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas and Five College Visiting Lecturer in Architectural Studies. He accumulated a broad range of professional experience in distinguished architecture firms, including Deborah Berke Partners and Steven Harris Architects in New York. Jean received the 2021 Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award from Kent State University, and his work has been exhibited at the Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles and the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Ellie Abrons is a licensed architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she was the A. Alfred Taubman Fellow in 2009 – 2010. Ellie received her Master of Architecture from the University of California Los Angeles where she graduated with distinction and received the AIA Certificate of Merit. She received her BA in art history and gender studies from New York University and has a certificate in graphic and digital design from Parsons School of Design. Ellie has received several fellowships including a residency fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany and her work has been exhibited at the 2012 and 2016 Venice Biennales, Storefront for Art and Architecture, A+D Gallery, and the Architectural Association. From 2010 to 2015 she led the design practice EADO.
Adam Fure is an architectural designer and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Adam received his Master of Architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles where he graduated with distinction and was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi medal. He holds a BS in architecture from the University of Michigan. His work has been exhibited at the 2012 and 2016 Venice Biennales, the Beijing Biennale, The New School in New York, the A+D Gallery in Los Angeles, the AA in London, and the Grand Rapids Museum of Art. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2014 Architectural League Prize and a residency fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Adam is a co-founder of the Possible Mediums project. From 2010 to 2015, he led the design practice SIFT Studio.
1. See Kelly Bair, Kristy Balliet, Adam Fure, and Kyle Miller, “Notes from the Middle,” in Possible Mediums (New York: Actar, 2018), 19-20.
2. Ibid., 16-17. The explicit goal was the classification of new varieties of experimental projects that required evaluation beyond the geometric logic and technical mastery of computationally derived topological forms or algorithmic scripted structures that dominated design pedagogy at this time.
3. See Jason Payne, “Hair and Makeup,” Log 17 (2009): 41-48. Payne compares this shift in architecture— between postmodern semiotics and contemporary cosmetics—to the “formal virtuosity” of Jimmy Hendrix’s revolutionary guitar techniques, which consequently formed the foundation of rock’s disciplinary conventions, and the “choreographed sense of style” deployed by David Bowie to fashion his Ziggy Stardust character, which gave birth to the glam genre and demonstrated the discursive power to reshape a discipline.
4. T+E+A+M’s work more broadly connects to other established architectural discourses, including Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s appeal for “ugly and ordinary architecture” (Learning from Las Vegas, 1972), Deborah Berke’s appreciation of “raw and unrefined materials” (Architecture of the Everyday, 1997), Independent Group’s aspirations for post-medium specificity (“Parallel of Life and Art,” 1952), and Archigram’s experiments with speculative urban scenography (“Instant City,” 1968-70).
5. See Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel à l’ordre, the Case for the Tectonic,” Architectural Design 60, no. 304 (1990): 19-25.Whereas Frampton discussed scenography as something undesirable to the production of architecture, maintaining that buildings are primarily ontological rather than representational in nature, T+E+A+M’s tactile scenography collapses notions of the haptic and optic to acknowledges technology’s impact on the perception of the built environment.
6. Models on View was exhibited at the Armstrong Gallery at Kent State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) from February 27 through March 7, 2019.
7. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994): 1-3. These contemporary technological circumstances are characteristic of Baudrillard’s concept of the “hyperreal,” whereby the ambiguity between and the reversal of reality and its representation is no longer relevant to experiencing and understanding the world.
8. Ellie Abrons and Adam Fure, “Postdigital Materiality,” in Lineament: Material, Representation and the Physical Figure in Architectural Production, ed. Gail Peter Borden and Michael Meredith (New York: Routledge, 2017), 185-195.
9. Levi Bryant, “The Material Unconscious.” Larval Subjects, 12 Aug. 2015, https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/the-material-unconscious/. Bryant’s ontological appropriation of “extimacy”—Jacques Lacan’s term from psychoanalysis that expresses the topological inversion between self and other—is germane to the reception and occupation of the gallery in T+E+A+M’s exhibition, which similarly problematizes the boundary between inside and outside.
10. The interview with the two designers took place in front of the gallery with their shop window on display in the background and coincided with their public lecture and opening of the exhibition at Kent State University’s CAED on February 27, 2019.
11. See Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet,” Artie Vierkant, 2010, http://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf.
12. See Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, 2019, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Boston, MA. The exhibition was originally organized and curated for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where it was on view from February 7 through May 20, 2018 and subsequently traveled to the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor where it was on view from December 15, 2018 through April 7, 2019.