The Fall 2024 Public Programs series at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) launched this month with the opening of Farshid Moussavi’s exhibition, “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art.” The show features construction coordination drawings: visual instructions architects use throughout the building process. More than 75 studios and practitioners submitted examples of these drawings, and Moussavi invited several of the participants to speak about their contributions for the opening event at the GSD.
Moussavi contextualized the exhibition with the history of art, drawing connections between the practice of architecture and the work of Conceptual artists like Sol Lewitt. Early in his career, Lewitt worked as a graphic designer in architect I.M. Pei’s office. As Moussavi noted, “it is there that [Lewitt] drew inspiration from the architectural process and started to explore the notion that art could be a concept for creation.”
Because architects create instructions for the often hundreds of laborers, engineers, and other construction experts who will make the building, their authorship—like Lewitt’s in the conceptual drawings—rests “in their instructions and their drawings, and not in the actual physical building itself.” While Lewitt was interested in leaving space for interpretation, Moussavi notes that architects have a “moral and legal responsibility” to ensure that instructions are meticulously followed: “Every line in a drawing carries consequence.” Because of this level of precision and the complexity of the design and construction process, she argues that architecture is “perhaps the grandest form of instruction-based art.”
Moussavi defines her methodology in her most recent book, Architecture & Micropolitics (2022), which engages with Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of assemblages and rhizomatic systems. With no beginning and no end, and the ability to grow from any section rather than a central root, the rhizomatic design process creates many examples of micropolitics at work. As in experimental literature, Moussavi argues in the book, assemblages, rather than hierarchical architecture, open opportunities for the design to change as the piece is created, and for users to alter the space to suit their needs. The complexity of construction coordination drawings, with each layer communicating a different aspect of a building, attests to the many specialists who contribute to a work of architecture. As Moussavi writes in the exhibition text, “the architecture of a building is a product of assemblage, or the way physical elements—forms, materials, textures, colors—are combined to create enclosed and open spaces that have a distinctive presence.”
Conversations throughout the event reflected back on the ways in which users were part of the design process, the level of control an architect maintains, and how mechanical systems could be rendered visible or hidden. Grace La, GSD Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Department of Architecture, noted that the exhibition offers the opportunity to cluster different sets of images together to “theorize a way in which the ‘instruction-based-ness’ of the architect’s project is part and parcel with a kind of design thinking.”
One of the most resonant notes of the evening was a rallying call from Moussavi to “claim our work as art. I cannot imagine any other practice that is more complex than the work of the architect. You have to be artful in the way you see, think, negotiate, and manage all the unpredictability thrown at you. How can anything be more exciting than architecture?”
In this spirit of instruction-based art and Moussavi’s assemblages, what follows is a nonlinear glimpse of the evening’s conversation, in images and excerpts from the speakers’ presentations, which have been edited for clarity and length.
Toyo Ito
The structure looks like thick columns consisting of slabs extending upwards from below, while the area where light that falls from above are tubes extending upwards from the slabs. As you see, the structure of this architecture is a combination of these two types of tubes and is very complex. Initially, this structure was created by interlacing two gridded panels with stretching fabric, forming three dimensional curved structures. This drawing was created to explain this structure more clearly for the contractor. Although floor plans for each floor were prepared, they were not sufficient on their own, so this colored drawing was added to distinguish between tubes growing upward and those extending downward. This is intended to clearly illustrate the directions of the interwoven tubes.
Angela Pang
This drawing looks absolutely oversaturated with information. In fact, it is—it’s an explosion of layers of coordinates and information that, along with the hundreds of people involved—structural engineers, building services engineers, landscape architects—enable us to decipher how the building comes together and should be built. In a city like Hong Kong that is all about verticality, it’s very unusual to push for flatness. But that’s what we’ve done here. The project is 150 meters long, or about 500 feet. Every inch of space was used. The drawing reveals the intensity that is required to create a very simple space.
Our concept for this drawing is to frame it like a human body. There’s a spine, out of which various components emerge. Headroom is very limited. We had to scrutinize every cross-section and every pipe and duct. A drawing like this speaks to the complexity and intensity that lie behind the scenes.
Pang is an assistant professor in practice of architecture at the GSD.
Sean Canty
The process of the project is developed through three layers: the landscape and plinth plan, the reflected ceiling plan, and the roof plan. The idea of the house and the yard, and the park’s reflection of that, was determined in workshops with community stakeholders. It was important to come up with a design that could withstand all the rounds of value engineering. It went through many different structural systems, but the formal conceit stayed the same. In some ways, the choice of project for the exhibition is interesting. I decided to choose two large-scale pavilions because the three layers that are turned on will be co-present in reality, after they’re constructed. That kind of coherence in the structural systems, the limited mechanical systems, are all present in the drawings—and they’re not hidden away in reality. So, when [Farshid Moussavi] gave the prompt, I went to find the least complex building, to show something with instructions that said: “Nothing is hidden.”
Canty is an assistant professor of architecture at the GSD.
Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam
The building is conceived as six levels of distinctive cascading forms. If you look on the right-hand side of the drawing, there’s a long list of dates in the upper right-hand corner, indicating the number of times this drawing was issued—first in September of 2002, and last in April of 2005. That’s 30 months of construction. The drawing was reissued to the contractor on average once a month. I can’t emphasize enough the intensity this client exhibited throughout the project in terms of their dedication to the education of these young women, and the idea that they were going to build something called a center for the campus—that was a huge change in something that they believe in fully, the idea that these young women should never think of themselves as centered, but always de-centered and always challenged by the things that they hold dear in their life. It was the most amazing three years of talking about their expectations for this project and what architecture can do.
Scogin is Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture, Emeritus, at the GSD.
Philip Schmerbeck
The drawing that we selected for this presentation is, in a way, a limiting of information. We’ve extracted everything but the mechanical systems—the hidden, technical layers in our projects. By focusing only on these systems, we find clues to the instructions and the technical requirements that were handed to us by a whole constellation of technical know-how that had to be integrated into the core program, to generate a 2,100-seat concert hall at the center of this extruded trapezoid. Let’s call it the ghost of the concert hall, because we’re only seeing the large ductwork wrapping around the concert hall itself. By seeing the mechanical system, you also get a sense of what is invisible to the public from the outside. There was a choice not to make a building that was the formal embodiment of a concert hall. The mechanical system is the lens through which to understand all the complexities of that goal. The ductwork had to be acoustically isolated from the adjacent program, so the mechanical plant is positioned at the top of the hall where it can lend vertical presence volumetrically as seen from the harbor. The hall is a shell within a shell, serviced in-between by this octopus of low-velocity, high-volume air, all emanating from that very large plant at the top of the building.
Christian Kerez
The landscape and the topography lines are crucial for the understanding of the constant height changes within the slabs. The plans highlight the position of the connections between slabs given that, in reality, one should not be able to differentiate where they start and end. The project required 20 different scales of scaffolding towers in order to redraw the changing levels as close as possible; larger scaffolding towers were used for less inclined areas, while the smaller towers were assembled around the biggest changes in levels. While the floor plan is the key plan for understanding the overview and relationship between all elements within the slab, the sections were crucial for retracing the project on site. The sections were cut and drawn every 50 centimeters totaling more than 40,000 sections. They indicated the height of the towers and, more importantly, the small formwork beams which were customized on-site to achieve the different curvatures. All the drawings were developed on-site by Brazilian architect Caio Barboza, who studied at Harvard, and was the project manager with the local construction company.
Farshid Moussavi
These visualizations were made for the Ismaili Center Houston. One of the foundational layers of the drawing is a grid, which we have used to develop two key concepts for the building: simplicity and openness. Simplicity through repetition is inspired by Islamic and minimalist art. It’s about creating harmony and unity. This grid spans across the whole site. One of the main functions of the grid is to bring together the sacred and the profane, or the everyday aspects of the project. The sacred is to do with qibla, the orientation towards the Kaaba, which is significant for the Ismaili community. The other everyday aspects of the site have to do with the north-south orientation, the topography, and the floodplain.
As you see, the grid helps integrate the building with its garden and creates a sense of openness, which is vital for the Ismaili Center because it is meant to be not just for the Ismaili community, but for other communities in Houston and beyond. We’ve used the grid to create a form that opens out in all four cardinal directions—north, south, east, and west—so it is highly accessible from all its sides and integrated with its surroundings. This has also allowed us to introduce three verandas to the building, reinforcing our concept of openness. Inside, we used the triangular grid, together with the long span structure to create three atriums inside the building, which abut the verandas. This coupling of the atriums and the verandas connect the interior with the exterior, enhancing the sense of openness. To keep the prayer hall as a quiet, contemplative space, we’ve added a two-layer perforated aluminum suspended ceiling, which is shown in pink on the drawing, with a layer of diffused light underneath. This assembly of elements not only hides the M&E elements, but also creates a soft, infinite ceiling effect that will contribute to the serenity of the space. Without these carefully designed ceilings, we would see all of the ducts, pipes, and cables. By concealing them, we maintain a sense of lightness and serenity, which supports the building’s spiritual and contemplative atmosphere.
Moussavi is a professor in practice of architecture at the GSD.