Cultural Infrastructure

*Product of a definition of a historical moment*

bowls of lettuce
*well timed*

Interior Rendering

Final Text

Jessica Morris

Final Presentation Text

701 – The City as Aggregated Figure: Philadelphia

Prof. Peter Trummer – Fall 2013

The origin of our studio’s formal investigation was the Willis Tower. Formerly known as the Sears Tower, the tower was initially conceptualized as a structural system of bundled tubes. Within the context of the tower, we have moved to implicate REM’s 20^th century reading of individual tower floors, or virgin sites, bearing grounds that are maintained via perpetual discontinuity. While our site and consequential project is not within the lineage of the tower, we are accepting the historical premise of ground construction and are willingly appropriating these parts to whole ideals by projecting them onto a sectional interrogation.

The tower establishes a ground whereby aggregation is the politic, the epistemology. By delving into the set raised by these vocabularies of architectural intervention, peering inside and exposing the constituents, I ask, “Is it only that architecture, i.e. building, aggregates, or does not politic also too aggregate? If politic does indeed aggregate, its productive and consequent structure is a new urban form, capable perhaps of a new architecture. This activation of ground can maintain or perhaps reconstitute a position of autonomy. And while certainly not productive of a disciplinary autonomy, as the result is a product of an aggregate politic, but rather of advancement in the autonomy of architectural production. Within the urban field, does architecture not continue to qualify as autonomous if it is responsible for product, other than simulacra or replication? 

To accept that there is effectively no ground, until architecture produces it as such sets the stage to continue an investigation of a regime of aggregate autonomy, as differentiated from architectural or disciplinary autonomy. The question remains as to what figure has emerged within the project. I have called the thing a DIA-CON, i.e. a diagrammatic icon, representative of architectural politic, processes and practice. The emergent figure differs from the figure of origination through the operation of reconfiguration required by the project exercise.

The dissolution of the Sears Tower premise without clear intention produces a non-resolution. Le Corbusier removed the ground as a means of releasing the architecture from social and societal platforms. In doing so, he relieved the part, the architecture, from its duty to the whole whereby freeing it. It is not clear what beneficial consequences our relieving of the Sears does have. Furthermore, in addressing the urban question, what is required of the city to surpass the modernist positioning of the building on a ground in a field?

The trace is gone. What is presented instead is a homogeneous non-hierarchical set of lines which configure potentials of heterogeneous space. In asking what the diagram of the whole is and what the diagram of the parts are, one cannot help but consider how or rather if these two diagrammatic resolutions should be reconciled.

The next perceptible transformation of the city may be a matter of development from figural space to formal objectifiable space. The proposed direction in regards to urban form may be towards either mimicry or towards intervention. In the context we have produced, I ask to consider the difference and differential functions of aggregate and agglomerate. We use the word aggregation and understand it as something clean, orderly and understandable, but the possibility of aggregates bearing the type of formal specificity that we are loathe to produce is all but an impossibility.

If the function of aggregation and the goal of digital production is to beget similar yet unlike parts, I still do not understand how we have done that, and what, as aggregates, are the purpose of the parts. While my project may not so successfully illustrate the following lines of question, they are topics that are ripe within the discussion. Understanding how aggregates function within the whole, as parts. As a means of clarifying this, I have indexed the inter-aggregate and intra-aggregate relations that my method of relieving the Sears has produced within my project. The inter-aggregate relations consist of singular, compressive deformation, abutment which implies perpendicularity, and adjacencies of impenetrable bonding. The intra-aggregate relations are all classified as being “on” one another and not discrete. These differ being either a configuration of balance, producing and active relation, or a configuration of three point restive relation.

While it can be understood that the architecture of the ground is not complete until it is animated by that which is built upon it, the evolution of the diagram is animated only by and through its development. The ground does not fully exist before the next building rests upon it. As regards to figural relations, what I have intended to implicate herein has to do more with the relationship produced between that which is above and that which is below, or rather that what is below that which is below. Distances are sloped. Because buildings are of short distances, they cannot necessarily be sloped.

7 minutes spoken