Tag: Envision

“Cooking is the language through which society unconsciously reveals its structure” -Claude Levi-Strauss

Our stance on authenticity stems from a love affair with the primitive forms found in the dustbins of Euclidean geometry. We have been stirring them around and firing them up, all the while imagining that we can remake the physical and chemical properties of known forms by putting them under specific kinds of pressure.   

Not unlike the cook who stands between nature and the material world, we are occupied with the making of intangible forms of culture from blunt and plain objects.  The ancient Greek word for cooking, mageiros, is etymologically linked with magic. We think it necessary that the practice of architectural wizardry include both a study of formal limits and a commitment to the making of new pluralities from old architectural concepts.

This is an architectural cookbook that documents how we get from the raw to the cooked. Authenticity cannot be a hierarchical pyramid of connoisseurship or a parametric sea of infinity possibilities. Our work is based on the idea that architectural experimentation consists of a small set of technologies that incrementally transforms material culture into bursts of social expression. 

We have organized 7 projects into three states of transformation: PRIMITIVES, EXPRESSIONS & SIGNATURES. Each phase change has a story about how we understand the ingredients we have assembled. The work is described in terms of recipes encouraged to dissolve the sense of heavy material realism. We don’t have to believe that things are the way they are. A circle can be pickled and roasted into a triangle.  

We have sought to avoid the tropes of late capitalist abstraction in favor of the pursuit of a careful transformation of geometry into something we don’t know. Our proto-culinary pursuits have enabled a mixture of errand and epiphany in our labors. We analyze shapes as if they were beautifully butchered hogs that arrived on our cutting boards—entrails and guts all conjoined yet open to dismemberment. We slice and pull, anticipating the marinade, preparing the stages of fermentation, and railing behind the ghosts’ of modernism while scoping the limits of contemporary beauty.

Architectural breakthroughs consists of incremental transformation of material culture into bursts of social expression. 

“Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation.” – Elaine Scarry

“beauty is political not despite the fact that it feels subjective but precisely because it is, in fact, subjective. Beauty enters us into a world of dispute, contention and conflict at the very moment when we feel to be removed from the social world… beauty exists at the tense intersection of the individual and society, with the individual neither fully subsumed nor fully free from social norms and cultural hierarchies… beauty is not something given but something that we do and something that we change.” -Dave Beech

The professional basketball player Allen Ezail Iverson played a different kind of game. He was shorter than most of his peers yet insisted on going deep into the court to score. His speed was legendary and his trajectory never straight. He would spin back and forth in a dizzying staccato of repetitive corkscrews, testing the field in front of him then leaving his opponents flat-footed. His most famous points were made while he was almost tumbling down to the ground. 

Iverson’s movements were almost like those of a frenetic 3D printer. He tracked every possible play without predetermination then orchestrated a rapid blend of actions that left everyone—including sometimes himself—in shock. His game seemed based on the recognition of emergent patterns instead of on the execution of a preconceived plan. Iverson’s form felt nearly digital. His breakthrough was in being able to make athletic opportunities through a variable non-linear probalistic process. 

Iverson on the court looked as if he was actively learning to play.  He appeared to be sampling the environment for new forms. His game was arresting because there was something about it that we recognized yet didn’t know or anticipate. His basketball was a kind of exercise in restless prototyping. This probably explains his proximity to near failure. His successful moves exemplified a promise, at the level of the imagination that the game might be played otherwise. 

Watching Iverson play is an altogether contemporary experience of the beautiful. His game is not concerned with idealized form. His basketball is beautiful because, rather than being a thing in itself, it suggests that the sport is a game about the immediate world around us. Iverson’s plays demands an extension of one’s experience. They are models to think of athletic form as a discursive practice that connects us with the basketball court in unpredictable ways. 

Our contemporary experience of architecture is not dissimilar to Iversonian basketball. Buildings cannot be isolated from their surroundings and as such any concept of architectural beauty cannot be autonomous from the world. We cannot assume unmediated knowledge of our surroundings and our sense of enduring exile is a given in our post-humanist age of continual crises. Our buildings are similarly part of their context but not altogether integrated: building systems are widely parcelized, the construction industry is Balkanized and the execution of any project involves multiple constituents seeking consensus through design.

The whale of social media and electronic exchange has swallowed architecture. Buildings today are no longer objects of contemplation or even unmitigated distraction. We see them proliferate as images on screens dissolving their solid mass of material realism. Our image-driven economy treats buildings as proxies for future investment scenarios. Architecture in the age of unremitting online declaratives and multi-player video games has become an open interface for the emergence of infinite publics. 

Architectural beauty today is less and less actualized in any particular shape. Visit any famous building and witness how the flow of digital information mediates architectural form: countless people frantically snapping pictures to send instead of stricken still, as Odysseus once did, when confronted with the beautiful. Our contemporary relationship with architecture is entirely rhizomatic. We seek out connections and are drawn to objects because of their ability to relate to other objects. 

Umberto Eco’s comparative treatise on the history of beauty established its inexorable mutability. Beauty we learned is not absolute. Its diverse history is directly dependent on our changing models of the universe. Any reflection on contemporary beauty is, therefore, a consideration of the language we have to discourse our world. If so, contemporary architectural beauty might then be a node in a network connecting our concepts of aesthetic judgment to ideas about our environment, our political precariousness, our economic volatility, and ultimately ourselves.

The Western philosophical tradition of beauty when applied to architecture, however, has had the effect of separating the beautiful building from its surroundings.  Plato’s cave established beauty as an approximation of an idealized environment. Buildings are, as a consequence, turned into shadows of a perfection we partially glimpse through an encounter with the beautiful. Aristotle’s paradigm of organic unity set up beauty as complete which in turn makes it impossible to define architectural beauty in terms of a building’s engagement with any fluctuating spatio-temporal phenomena such as light. Immanuel Kant’s expression of the beautiful as “disinterested delight” further separated buildings from the actuality of our daily engagement with architecture. Beauty’s irresistibility thus confirmed architecture’s autonomy. 

The Iversonian model of basketball calls for an understanding of beauty based on how individuals relate to a changing field of forces in front of them. Playing basketball like Iverson becomes an exercise in the generation of new positions, rather than a rerun of known forms. The beautiful in architecture must similarly be conceived of as a creative act of ideation. The appearance of things in architecture is inseparable from their working in the world and as such any discussion of beauty in architecture is an engagement with a conceptual framework about buildings and their physical and cultural milieu. 

The trouble is that architectural beauty does not tell us what it is about. Beauty does not involve a didactic transmission of ideas. We know it when we see it. To encounter beauty is to become instantly acquainted with the mental event of conviction, as Elaine Scarry wondrously documented in her readings of the beautiful from Homer through Rilke. The experience of the beautiful is an experience of momentary buoyancy that insinuates itself as a discernibly exuberant event.

We see Iverson make the shot and feel something that leads to a declaration.  Beauty begets pleasure that in turn creates a desire for communication. The beautiful in architecture becomes an invitation to describe that which lies beyond us. Like Einstein’s theory of how stars are made, beauty demands the creation of its own space. The crystallization of beauty exemplifies a triumph in our ability to connect with our built environment and to take delight in our imaginary exploration of this outside. 

Hans George Gadamer’s essay on the relevance of the beautiful imparts a model to think of beauty as a discursive event of transgression. The beautiful is an activity centered on the possibility of exceeding the logic of current systems of thought. Architectural beauty is a proxy to play with our limits as individuals. Play, for Gadamer, is how we create community through communication. The beautiful challenges us “to construct new compositions directly from the elements of the objective visible world and to participate in the profound tensions that they set up… it challenges each of us to listen to the language in which the world speaks and to make it our own.” 

Contemporary architectural beauty offers up the possibility to think of connectivity as an optimistic gesture. We not only discern something clearly but we are provoked to deliberate. We want to make connections back and forth with other places both real and imagined. The beautiful creates the desire to relate buildings to their contexts and histories—it is a rouse to experience architecture as part of a community of people. 

Robin Evans once described his encounter with the Barcelona Pavilion as an experience that focused our attention on how see. This is an example of beauty producing a concept.  The beautiful in contemporary architecture can be like meeting Deleuze’s friend of wisdom whose “presence is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself—in short, a living category, a constitutive element of thought.”

The beautiful in architecture transforms our built environment into a repository of possible ideas about how things work and why they can be different. Experiencing beauty makes us momentarily like Iverson on the basketball court. It is an alchemical process of conceptualization that sets up a tension between facts and experience. We can talk about new perfections in the work of Alvaro Siza and Kazuyo Sejima or different truths in projects by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron or partial multiplicities in buildings by Enric Miralles. These architects produce singularities that acknowledge their contingent situation, reordering reality in ways that are both enduring and touching. 

Beauty is an activity of creating concepts in architecture. Concepts do not wait. To actualize a new world through design is to be engaged in the production of imagined communities. We live in age that exalts in the frenetic as it produces a wondrous improbability that is distinct from the silence and coherence of the sublime. Our expectations are constantly bombarded by what can happen as result of the fact that our world has been exposed to be incomplete. Our designs must be made in response to this static-filled reality. We must try, like Iverson, to imagine how we can move through space in improbable ways and make the shot even while we are falling down. If the beautiful in contemporary architecture has an optimistic structure it is in the awareness that empathy results from the desire to transform our improbable physical environment into a cultural space of exchange. 

We have started to doubt the innovation narrative. What if our thirst for the cutting edge is misguided? What if all this running does not bring us to the front? What if the nature of the new is not about disruptive innovation but about connections with people and places other than ourselves?

What if the importance of design is in its ability to foster exchange instead of revolution?

Our questions are driven in a large part by our need to survive. We reside in a converted warehouse in Brooklyn and work on projects in Manila, Hangzhou, San Jose, Cebu, Lima, and Bogota. The geographical gulf in our work cultivates a necessary fondness for resilient identities. We do not comprehend most of the languages we hear so we must listen closely, make things up as we go, and relax.

Our projects are conceived as an ongoing archive of the foreign bodies we encounter in everyday practice. We invite more associations in our work than we can realistically handle because overlapping ways of thinking are more interesting than an ideology that must be continually transgressed. We attempt to build moments of conviction upon a fragmentary universe of fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, political unrest, and mind-numbing technological advances.

We are drawn to the aberrant situations and alternate rationalities in a project. We spot an imbalance in our environment and produce a story about it: a setback dictate that exacerbates density, a curtain wall constraint that makes us rethink thinness. Our designs seek to refract these existing conditions and nest commentary in architectural form. Our formal accretions become a tacit knowledge of these places and their communities.

We are inspired by the many imperfect visions of survival on our endangered planet. The reality of environmental catastrophe is indeed frightening and if innovation is a form of exchange then perhaps we can design spaces that we have not yet seen—spaces in which irreconcilable desires co-exist. Architectural form could then be a tacit knowledge of our responsibility to dream as a community.

This is not a light task. It comes with the duty of thinking about design as a way of knowing-in-group. As we sit together in the darkness holding hands with strangers, geometry is our campfire hymn. We use measurement to manipulate, influence, and affect form. Rationality is sensible only as a system that we have incrementally translated.

Perhaps this is a foolhardy goal for a small studio in the age of corporate behemoths.

At CAZA, we all share a tenderness for these fledging realities in the form of that “very odd family of deer,” as Dr Seuss wrote “whose horns are connected, from one to the other, whose horns are so mixed they can’t tell them apart, can’t tell where they end and can’t tell where they start!”

We have posed ourselves the challenge of making environments out of a deep affection for that which we don’t control. Our romance with the idea of a manifold and optimistic future breeds an epistemological seriousness with regards to our methods. We must train, like amateur boxers, in the absence of our opponent and yet remain committed to their presence. We are natural adversaries who will fight for the chance to recognize the other person in a ring and share a delightful exchange of blows. The preservation of this wild meeting with the unknown is, as designers, our gift to the world.

We have worked for the last 5 years on projects in the Philippines—an archipelago located 5,000 miles away from our studio in Brooklyn. On a map, the Philippines floats, more like a constellation than a country, just above the equator, between China to the north, Vietnam and Indonesia to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east.

The history of the Philippines has been marked by this floating geography. Chinese traders, Hindu merchants, Muslim chieftains, European missionaries all crossed its waters. The country is a collection of things that have never truly been unified: islands, tribes, dialects, ethnicities. The Filipino sensibility has evolved to work with this idea of a loose amalgam.  Hybrid identities are a norm in this place. People and spaces in the Philippines feel as if they are constantly drifting apart. 

To design in the Philippines requires a different idea of order. We have come to think of scatter and spread as its own kind of organization. Our plane of projection is an archipelago with fifty seven dialects and an urban population of over sixty five million people. We have replaced the usual concepts of solidity and legibility in architecture with branching, drifts and other technologies of itineracy.  Our drawings seek out connections, mining the points of instability in a culture with so much room between identities. 

The story of the Filipino has become our research agenda. We have studied its history, economy and explosive diaspora. Diagrams of migration, mixed breeds and successive political revolutions fill our Brooklyn studio. Our methodologies have become married to the local knowledge we have found. We think of geometry as a means to build loose structures of association between the social phenomena we observe. Our ambition is to create an architecture that transforms the physics of everyday life in this distant archipelago into unexpected cultural expressions. 

As outsiders to the Philippines, we embrace foreignness as a boon. New York is a city that has built itself on the back of exiles. Being without a place has informed our idea of what cities can be. We are all slightly unmoored. Our prescription for the future of the profession is to practice in a hyperlocal style through our shared reality of exile.