Facts wear. Reality is consumed.

DIACON

Towards Final Review

Making Sense:

1a. Figure/Ground, i.e. Aggregation

1b. Parts/Whole, i.e.Aggregation

2. Disciplinary Question of Autonomy: DIA-CON production of the diagrammatic icon or diagram icon

3. Architectural Implications

4. Urban position - City/Building Building/City

There have been varying points of both resistance and lack thereof throughout my unigroup process.

Relieving the Tower

The origin of our formal investigation here is the Willis Tower. Formerly known as the Sears Tower, the tower was originally conceptualized as structurally bundled tubes.

I would like to consider and perhaps implicate REM’s mid to late 20th century reading of individual floors as ‘virgin sites’ - grounds maintained via perpetual discontinuity. Our site, our project, is not a tower. But, we are accepting the premise and willingly appropriating those part to whole ideals projecting onto a sectional interrogation. By way of this acceptance, we are working with typologies, not topologies and the correlating set of disciplinary concerns.

So, the tower establishes a ground whereby aggregation is the politic, the method. My question becomes, as I unpacked the set, peering inside and exposing the constituents: Does only architecture, that is building, aggregate. Or does politic too not also aggregate? For politic to aggregate, whence by producing as its consequent structure urban form anew. Can this activation of grounds maintain or perhaps reconstitute a position of autonomy, and within the urban feild. Out of this line of thought then, does the thing, the architecture, continue to qualify as autonomous if it is responsible for a product other than a simulacra or REplication of itself within the feild?

SECTion

(Move forward and backward so that each slide plays multiple purposes, fast and slow.)

4. Le Corbusier removed the ground as a means of releasing architecture from the social or societal constraints (wrong word). He relieved the part from its duty to the whole, freeing it. What have we done here to the ground of the city other than reinforce it?

2. The disconnectedness of the aerial plots seemingly conflicts with the fact that together they add up to a singular megaform or building.

My understanding of a hope of the work has been to establish a position, within the productive realm of the tower-aggregate through which to negotiate a typological shift.

There is effectively no ground until Architecture produces it as such.

What is the regime of aggregate autonomy?

What is the figure that emerges?

How does this figure that emerges differ from the figure of origination?

What is the diagram of the whole?

What is the diagram of the parts?

Can these be reconciled - or rather should they really?

In exercise, once acted upon, the lobby is redefined, reconstituted. The lobby then serves as the new ground. It is the point of arrival of multiple forms.

My goal was to play with the middle ground, with the same mindset that one would rather dwell in the rabbit hole than construct a way out of it.

One of the architectural implications that my diacon has produced is the necessity of rethinking requirements of general and specific inhabitation at every differential.

140-160 Words per minute = 800 words.

5. Is the next perceivable transformation of the city a matter of development, from figural space to formal objectifiable space. We use the word aggregation, and understand it as something clean and orderly, but the possibility of aggregates of that formal specificity occurring in the city is all but an impossibility. I ask to consider in the context we have produced, the differential of aggregate and agglomerate. What is the proposed direction in regards to urban form, towards mimicry or intervention?

If the function of aggregation and the goal of the digital is to produce similar yet unlike parts, how have we done that? What, as aggregates, is their purpose? What is required of the city to surpass the modernist positioning of the building on a ground in a field?