Desert Islands
GSD 1305, Fall 2008

First, it is true that from the deserted island it is not creation but re-creation, not the beginning, but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin. From it everything begins anew. The island is the necessary minimum for this re-beginning, the material that survives the first origin, the radiating seed or egg that must be sufficient to re-produce everything.
— Deleuze

Studio Format/Discourse:
(Re-)Constructivism: Technologically-driven Formalism + Social Utopia

This studio is an open laboratory experiment in search of new architectural models. The goal is to rethink the architectural avant-garde — in particular Constructivism — as a strategy for developing the intersection between the technological/material/formal and the social/cultural. Like most studios, the propositional tense will be the somewhat-near-future of imaginary buildings.

Our current architectural paradigms are winding down. The two-sided spectacle of gestural Bling-bling-formalism and positivistic form making is exhausting itself. At the end of a century-long trajectory of the avant-garde, this duality performs with less and less conviction. We are left wondering whether it is possible to propose another Architectural Revolution in its place. If Constructivism's naive optimism successfully tapped into a subconscious desire for the utopia of industrialization and Socialist equality at the beginning of the twentieth century, we should now ask, What is it that we can be naively optimistic about today? Today, everything appears in relative increments or trade-offs. There is no plausible alternative to Capitalism, only the question of how much we should attempt to regulate it, or adapt ourselves to the forces of the market. Industrialization continues to raise our quality of life, while decimating our environment. Advanced architecture simply claims that if you're clever, given the appropriate sources, technologies and methods, the right compromises can be made. How unsatisfying! Therefore we are faced with a two-fold question: whether Revolution is still possible and, if so, what will it look like. In other words, what will we take with us to our desert island?

Part of the work of the studio is to develop and strengthen individual attitudes and positions regarding this line/type of questioning as part of an ongoing inter-studio discussion. Upon entering this never-ending rabbit hole of self-consciousness, however, our discussions are structured by a series of invited guests. Speculative projects require conversations between interested like-minded people, and the intent is to use the studio atmosphere to provide a discursive alternative that includes small group conversations and interviews with invited guests. Also, they're more fun than lectures. These interactions are filmed and archived. In doing so, the studio develops a set of references for an interdisciplinary framework that help situate all of our questions and proposals. Within this micro-culture, however, what remains critical is the production of the architectural artifact. The conversations should provide some agency towards production, but we are also interested in the inevitable distance between our conversations and design inasmuch as architecture exists both within and outside of discourse.

Studio Problem:
Cinema Complex and Park, Denver, CO

"It's as though before entering the theater, the prerequisites for hypnosis were met: a feeling of emptiness, idleness, inactivity: we dream, not by viewing the film or by the effect of its content, rather, we dream, unwittingly before becoming its spectator. There exists a "cinematic condition" and this condition is prehypnotic.

... But there is another way of going to the cinema (other than going armed with the discourse of counter-ideology); it is by letting myself be twice fascinated by the image and by its surroundings, as if I had two bodies at once; a narcissistic body which is looking, lost in gazing into the nearby mirror, and a perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image, but precisely that which exceeds it: the sound's grain, the theater, the obscure mass of other bodies, the rays of light, the entrance, the exit; in short in order to distance myself, to "take off," I complicate a "relationship" with a "situation." What I make use of to take my distance with respect to the image is what, in final analysis fascinates: I am hypnotized by a distance, and this distance is not an intellectual one. It is, so to speak, an amorous distance..."
— Roland Barthes, Upon Leaving the Theater

The studio project is the design of an urban cinema complex with a public park and municipal parking in Denver, Colorado.

Architecture and the Cinema have developed a complex and paradigmatic relationship during the 20th century. Building upon the emergence of the theater as a distinct typology during the 16th century, the Cinema became a key reference point for Constructivism/early Modernism, utopian desire, and the architectural avant-garde. Therefore, it should serve as a test case in rethinking the architectural avant-garde, to begin again with whatever fragments can be salvaged from this particularly important architectural legacy. We will have to ask, can we still do a cinema? If so, under what new conditions? Historically, Cinema has offered architecture an almost psychological paradigm, providing a distinct subjectivity/social space and a very particular relationship between technology and architecture. Our studio will take part in this history of architectural performance while expanding upon it, rethinking the role of Cinema within our contemporary visual regime, one in which the construction of collective visual experience seems to be less important than the creation of discrete micro-environments enabled by new technologies for ever more personal levels entertainment.

In the spirit of conflating "a relationship with a situation," the situation/site for the studio is an undeveloped strip of land in downtown Denver, the mile high city. We will pay particular attention to the specific environment of the site, its semi-arid climate, the politics of the site's contingencies or, perhaps, its noticeable lack of contingency. It is a strip of land for us to experiment upon, operating simultaneously at completely different scales, moving as quickly as possible through our own hang-ups, while employing all of the tools available to us from history so that we might speculate on what it is, actually, that we will want to claim for our prototypical architecture.

The trip to Colorado is fully funded for the studio.

Studio Techniques and Representation: Digital skills, Parametric modeling, scripting is strongly suggested, but not required. Animations and video are a representational requirement for all proposals, and we provide additional workshops if necessary. Architects once looked towards movies, montage and animation for inspiration. Now we can actually make them.