SUPERFICIAL MATERIAL SIMILITUDE
Introduction
This chapter explores architecture through the lens of material manipulation. We see architecture through the lens of materiality, both visual and tactile. When the brain receives conflicting signals – the eyes show a world that is still, for example, and the body through the equilibrium sensors located in our ears senses the conflicting signals of a moving environment – it results in one feeling nauseated, seasick. This discordance causes the mind to send to the whole body a general alarm signal: stop all activities, this can be damaging! And in particular it halts the most complex of all our activities: the digestion process.
My argument here is that the body is equipped to sense and compile contradictory information received by its many sensors. If spatial signs are sensed to be incongruent, I argue, the trained eye feels a sense of discomfort – or pleasure – a sense that something is not the way it is supposed to be. Since much of the architecture we know of today is communicated via visuals, privileging the eye – glossy magazines, the Web, PowerPoint lectures, and clients’ rendered presentations – the photographic, the 3D render, and the diagrammatic representation have taken precedent over the “real” first-hand experience of architectural space. When visiting architecture, one engages much more than the visual sense. Aspects of climate, atmosphere, and sound, for example, determine our impression of space and time. Limiting our decision-making in architecture to how it looks, is like buying tomatoes on the Web; there is a 50 percent chance that it tastes as good as it looks. Guiding our critique of architecture to constant references to how something looks is forgetting how important the other senses are to determining how something feels and how much time and place determine our choices of space and material.
Materials
Three-year-old children playing with water and sand develop a sense of weight and volume. It looks like play, but real equivalences are being studied. Would that amount of water fill that given bucket, would that amount of pressed sand come out of the bucket with a simple tilt or require pounding, how much does this bucket weigh, can I lift this bucket if the content is water, what about if the same bucket is filled with sand? Over that crucial experimental stage, we develop a sense of weight and volume that will serve us to gauge the world we encounter. It connects us with matter and makes us able to assess materials and create expectations accordingly. Later, when we encounter a three-foot cube that looks made of stainless steel we won’t attempt to lift it; if the same volume looks inflated by air we may kick it gently and expect it to rise up; when certain surfaces don’t match our expectations of weight or depth we feel confused, or some of us, delighted. Architects – or sculptors; I argue here as an architect yet I understand this as common turf – manage expectations of volume and weight at every turn. Manipulating these expectations carefully and calibrating them to spatial effects is the key to tectonic beauty.
With digitalization and industrial production, the manipulation of architectural materials has achieved a greater range. Stone can be cut ultra thin, a superfine coat of impervious plastic can be applied as a shield to almost any leather or wood, the fibers of paper and glass can be layered to create a flexible material of great strength. One can shave marble so thinly that a high-rolling room in Las Vegas can seem superficially similar to an ancient Roman marble temple – same size, same surface, yet a fraction of the marble used. The material appears the same, the surface may look the same, it may photograph equally well – yet it is not the same. The joints, depth, and weight, when accessible to examination, tell a different story for each.
Over time, we have developed material groupings and techniques of assemblages that perform certain functions and deliver specific effects. Masonry is the oldest tectonic grouping. The oldest discovered bricks, made from shaped mud, dating to before 7,500 BC, were found in the upper Tigris region and in southeast Anatolia. Other more recent findings, dated between 7,000 and 6,395 BC, come from Jericho, Catal Hüyük, and the ancient Indus Valley. Over 10,000 years we have developed an acute and varied ability to pile bricks and stone on top of one another. These techniques vary throughout the world, yet it is a common and transnational tectonic language that we architects have learned to deploy.
Material groupings engender their own details, their own traces. Like many of the architects I admire, I believe that the materials one uses, the techniques one employs, the details one assembles, determine the architectural form one realizes. There is a way of building with bricks true to their physical properties and history of implementation; I refer to this as the “right way”; and a wrong way of merely pretending to use them, using them as image or artifice.
Proportions
At Dia:Beacon, there are two equal doors, not one, leading into a masonry enclosure. The doors are narrow for a museum entrance, just 36 inches each and separated by a 12 by 12 inch concrete square column in between them. The sunlight from the north-facing skylights hits you after a short walk and at this point a look of confusion often settles upon the face of the first-time visitor. They are presented with two equally enormous rooms, empty except for 12 sets of almost identical stainless steel circles and square pairs of profiles set on the floor: Walter De Maria’s Equal Areas, 1977 (Figure 6.1).
This piece features a progression of equal area pairs of a square and a circle. Each pair is an inch longer than the next, ranging from 6 feet to 7 feet, and the area of each circle matches the area of the square sitting next to it. Walter De Maria presents the clearest – if dry – phenomenological event in the museum. It is a mathematical proposition. Many feel “it does not feel like art,” “it lacks sensuality”; many are not fans of the work. Equal Area was shown first at an abandoned grocery store at 19 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village in 1977.
FIGURE 6.1 Dia:Beacon entrance, with Walter De Maria’s Equal Areas, 1977. Stainless steel on ground, 2003
Source: David Joseph.
Then Thomas B. Hess wrote:
The closeness of the dimensions sharpens your eye for distinctions, just as a long rest in music alerts you to the faintest sounds. Once you grasp De Maria’s serial theme, you can try to visualize the 6-foot square nesting with machine precision inside the 6-foot 10-inch one. When this most obvious of interrelationships is clarified, your eye scans the floor for more subtle ones. You begin to watch circles being squared – the dream of Pythagoras. You approach the mystery of pi, eternally uneven standard that somehow finds resolution among de Maria’s steel propositions … There’s a hint of fatality – of inevitabilities.
Of course proportions can be understood as visual relations yet the De Maria floor piece asserts that the body in its totality can more fully assess proportions as it relates time and space.