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sellperm
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Art investigates the objective truth.
Art explores the essential nature of reality.
Art embraces a deep aesthetic culture that values truth and beauty.
Art is a catalyst.
Art is restricted by the infrastructures that guarantee its circulation and
display.
pg 0/Art:
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Just as monumental train stations were built as
heroic last efforts to resuscitate an antiquated
idea, an edic complex has captured the spirit
of the art world despite a diconnect between
these icons and the needs of artists and the
public at large. We have come to accept a broken
throughline between artists, curators and thepublic as the paradigm for the display of art.
The world insists upon conict. Curators, in
response to the Bilbao Effect, are demanding
global, iconic museums. Contemporary artists
desire large warehouse formats, former factory
spaces, and purely utilitarian structures.
Ever-changing urban environments need
infrastructures that can respond to evolving
needs.
There is positive potential in conict. It is the
responsibiliy of designers not to compromise,
but to incorporate and integrate differenes,
culminating in an inclusive whole that is greater
than a sum of parts.
The current recession has provided us with a
unique and eeting opportunity to pause, step
back from pure production, and take a critical
look at the infrastructures of which we are
a part. Realizing a critical juncture, we must
reimagine the possibility of how we experience
art critically in the 21st century.
pg 2/Art in the 21st century:
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As architects, designers, and artists, it is our
responsibility to ensure that our cities dont
force us to merely adapt outdated leftovers from
the past, but to reimagine the possibility of new
environments.
To design the museum of the future is
senseless. Of the future quickly becomes
anachronistic. Instead, it is about designing a
lexicon, a script from which a multiplicity of
critical interventions can unfold.
pg 4/Dening the experience:
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Parallel to the shift away from a sense of self
dependent upon a stable physical place to a
sense of self cultivated through a multiplicity
of experience, art, as a virtual place, is no
longer characterized by rootedness but by
responsiveness and interconnectivity. This shift
calls for an infrastructure that supports analteration of stillness and motion, stability and
change, place and space.
In its inclusiveness, art is better suited to
the constantly morphing, impermanent,
and aesthetically driven needs and desires of
modern society than the nite, permanent, and
utilitarian tradition of architecture. This calls
for an open and exible system that is responsive
to both the needs of societyand the needs of the
environment, which encompasses an ecological,
systems-based, and socially responsible
intervention.
pg 6/Ephemerality:
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There is a deep-seated sense that the grounds for
art are shifting beyond the territory ordinarily
prescribed for art, likely for reasons more
pragmatic than romantic. Historically, especially
during periods of economic recession, similar
moves have been made by artists. In the past,
attempts were made to initiate dialogue witheasily distributed mediums such as photography
and video, as well as through un-distributable
ones, such as happenings or earthworks. The
former attempted to engage the popular culture,
while the latter sought to exclude it; though both
sought to reveal the hidden agendas of popular
media. Today, however, the nature of popular
media is participatory, shifting the focus from
the reveal to engagement.
Art is by necessity a response to a highly
specic set of individual, temporal, spatial and
theoretical cues. The honesty of the response
strengthens the possibility for engagement, and
by extension for the work to serve as a catalyst
in the urban environment and as a model for
future critical engagements and interventions.
pg 8/Engage your audience:
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Encouraging the intersection of thought and
use of any media lets go of determinist ideas
of the nite, the permanent, and the utilitarian
and is suggestive of artifacts and environments
that are constantly adapting.
This is not architecture.
pg 10/The interdisciplinarian:
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What do I want to know? What is going to help me
continue to grow personally and professinoally?
Be curious, study and explore. People are most
productive and interesting when they are happy
with what they are doing.
pg 12/Self-serving prophecies:
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pg 14/The Fantastical:
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A rapper walks down the street, passing a
neglected lot, a dead space in the life of the
street. Seizing positive opportunity, she feels
in her pocket for the meson, graps its smooth
pill-form, and skips it over the chain-link fence
surrounding the litter and overgrowth. The
meson, a sub-atomic particle that senses theelectro-magnetic eld of the environment, uses
its inherent intelligence to grow around the
existing frameworks of the lot. A beautiful,
open, and exible architecture without walls
emerges.
People are drawn to the site, inspired to further
the dialogue with their own works of visual
art, music, performance, and spectacle. Locals
who have never experienced anything like it,
are inspired by the art. Outsiders, unfamiliar
with the vacant lot, are inspired by the self-
determination of the neighborhood. The
intervention runs its course, and over time the
sun and rain begin to break down the material,
returning the site back to its original form, butforever altering its trajectory. The latent energy
of the site is activated.
pg 16/Artscientisturbanpoetect
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The work responds to the environment, indistin-
guishable from its context, yet it is an autono-
mous form. An artwork based in theoretical sci-
ence.
There are multiple, simple, elegant, beautiful in-
terventions backed by a rich and complex script.The discussion is about the meta-narrative, the
structure of the interventions, and the common-
alities of intent. It is about addressing prob-
lematic paradigms in urban environments and
creating new, sustainable, ecological, systems-
based, and socially responsible interventions. It
is about inclusive design that incorporates and
integrates, constantly critiqueing itself.
Each intervention has the potential to produce
an urban ripple effect. The long term value is
not in the intervention itself, but in the dialogue
it engenders with a dynamic conception of infra-
structure, not rooted in time or place, but in ideas
and experiences. The intervention responds and
challenges, while the dialogue endures.
In its role as an investigation of the objective
truth, exploration of reality, embrace of deep
aesthetic culture and as a catalyst, the interven-
tion is art in ways that architecture has never
been before: an object able to stand alone and
whose meaning or purpose is open to innite in-
terpretation.
pg 18/The proposal:
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pg 20/The concrete:
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pg 22/Gilles Deleuze: the role of other thinkersThe history of philosophy has always been
the agent of power in philosophy, and even in
thought. It has played the repressors role: how
can you think without having read Plato, Des-
cartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-sos book
about them? A formidable school of intimidation
which manufactures specialists in thought - butwhich also makes those who stay outside conform
all the more to this specialism which they despise.
An image of thought called philosophy has been
formed historically and it effectively stops people
from thinking. (Dialogues, 1977. p 13)
Like philosophy, the knowledge, true experi-
ence and understanding of art is thought to
be held by the elite few, the art historian, the
curator, the artist, and in this sense keeps art
at a distance from the masses, conform under
the pretense I just dont get it. For Deleuze,
understanding the history of philosophy em-
braces a much more open, active, constructive
sense. Each reading of a philosopher, an artist,
a writer should be undertaken, Deleuze tells us,in order to provide an impetus for creating new
concepts that do not pre-exist (Differene and
Repetition, 1968 pg vii). In the true Deluezen
sense, one can use his critique to challenge es-
tablished ideas in the eld of art to incorporate
those who are outside.
What we should in fact do, is stop allowing
philosophers to refect on things. The philoso-pher creates, he doesnt refect(Negotiations, pg
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pg 24/Olafur Eliasson: The Weather ProjectOlafur Eliasson chose the subject of weather be-
cause it is one of the few fundamental encoun-
ters with nature that can still be experienced in
the city; its importance shown in its ability to
shape the content of most peoples small talk.
In The Weather Project, Eliasson explores howmuseums mediate the reception of art, from the
macro-branding level throughout the city, to mi-
cro-cues that the cultivate the experience within
museum-walls. Eliasson observes a discrepancy
between the experience of seeing and the knowl-
edge of expectation. For the exhibition, he cre-
ated his own cadre of marketing materials that
included simple questions or statements about
the weather. Eliasson also wished to explore
how the public understood the experience as a
construction. In the Tates Turbine Hall, you
were able to walk behind the sun and view the
wiring, see the equipments that was producing
the ne mist throughout.
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pg 26/Alice In Wonderland: Curiouser and curiouserAlice falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy world
populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic
creatures. The fantastical tale plays with logic in
ways that have given the story lasting popularity
with both adults and children. It is considered
to be one of the most characteristic examples of
the genre of literary nonsense.
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pg 28/Jaime Learner: Moveable InfrastructuresLerner is a longtime proponent of what might
be called blitz urbanism: the rapid, workable
improvement that does an end run on bureaucrats
and doubters
-Justin Davidson, Newsday
As mayor of Curitiba, Jaime Lerner transformeda gridlocked commercial artery into a spacious
pedestrian mall over a long weekend, before
skeptical merchants had time to nish reading
their Monday papers.
Since then hes become a hero not only to his
fellow Brazilians, but also to the growing ranks
of municipal planners seeking greener, more
sustainable cities. He has inspired a number of
his unique solutions to urban problems, including
sheltered boarding tubes to improve speed of bus
transit; a garbage-for-food program allowing
Curitibans to exchange bags of trash for bags of
groceries; and trimming parkland grasses with
herds of sheep. (From TED)
His latest ventures are temporary, responsive
urban infrastructures, including libraries and
museums, that can be plopped down anywhere
in the city, and moved as needed.
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pg 30 /Downtown Alliance: Re:ConstructionRe:Construction is a public art program
produced by the Downtown Alliance. This
initiative channels the energy of New York Citys
rebuilding process by recasting construction
sites as canvasses for innovative public art
and architecture. Each project uses standard
construction barriers to embrace the ongoingnature of Downtowns redevelopment with
original and whimsical design. The Downtown
Alliance works closely with public and private
developers to produce each installation.
http://www.downtownny.com/reconstruction
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pg 32/BiothingFeatured in an exhibition that blurs the boundaries
between art, architecture and theoretical science
in Vienna entitled Transitory Objects are two
models from Alisa Andrasek/BIOTHING. The
models are a part of a design project called
Mesonic Emission and were created using
an open-source algorithm that is based on thebehaviors of electro-magnetic elds allowing for
scripting sophisticated enough to respond to the
shape of the environment and to grow around
obstructing objects.
h t t p : / / w w w . b i o t h i n g . o r g / w i k i / d o k u .
php?id=home
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pg 34/David Edwards: ArtscientistDavid Edwards founded Le Laboratoire, an
experimental art and design center where artists
and scientists collaborate in central Paris.
Le Laboratoires experiments are backed up by
public meetings between artists and scientists.
These evening events, known as Synapses, offerdebates, discussions and sometimes experiments
with the public, on themes specically connected
with Le Laboratoires current activities.
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pg 36/B.I.G.: Yes is MoreB.I.G.s mission is to nd a way to incorporate and
integrate differences, not through compromise
or by choosing but by an inclusive rather than
inclusive architecture. B.I.G. sees their works
as the midwives of a continuous birth of
architectural species shaped by the countless
criteria of multiple interests.
Their monograph, Yes is More searches for a
playful, comic media in which they can decribe
the energy and ideas behind their work. This
format arose from a visit to their ofce by Bruce
Mau. The team showed Bruce their projects,
and later, at his request, sent him information
on the designs that they discussed. Bruce was
perplexed by the work that was sent his way;
he saw a strong disconnect between the energy,
action and intellect in the ofce and the dull,
straightforward character of the architectural
drawings. Yes is More is an attempt to
encapsulate the intelligence and vigor behind
each of B.I.G.s projects.
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pg 38/Tommaso Marinetti: The Italian FuturistsThis year we celebrate the 100th anniversay of
the Futurist Manifesto, written by Tommaso
Marinetti in 1909. The manifesto was precursor
in cultural branding as Marinetti blanketed the
front pages of papers across Europe.
The Manifesto called for the demolition ofmuseums and libraries, contempt for women
and the glorication of war, the worlds only
hygiene. It promoted the beautiful ideas
which kill and claimed that beauty exists only
in struggle. Marinetti set the template for the
proliferation of manifestos to come, including
shock tactics, declamation, and bulleted l ists.
Love of danger
Energy and fearlessness
Courage, audacity and revolt
Aggressive action
Love of speed
Splendour and generosity
The beauty of struggle
The glory of war
Scorn for women
Destruction of museums and libraries
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pg 40/Jonathan Hill: Illegal Architect
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pg 42 /Herzog + de Meuron: The Surface
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pg 44 /Alfredo Jaar: It is Difcult
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pg 46/Practical Idealism:
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A specic site, Waterview Tower, has been chosen
as the lens of focus with the understanding that
there is the potential for a dynamic network of
interventions in stalled building projects, inactive
sites, and underutilized spaces thoughout
Chicago, the country, and the world, each with
a specic dialogue producing a multiplicity of
reactions, responding to unique opportunities
and within the greater critique.
The site sat underutilized as a parking lot for
30 years prior to the ground-breaking on Feb
22, 2006. Waterview Tower, LLC self-nanced
the ground-breaking , condent that funding
would come later. Credit markets froze up, and
construction ofcially came to a halt on Jan 27,
2008. Financing may eventually come through
but rumors suggest that the existing 26 oors
may be converted to apartments or a parking
ramp.
The future of the site is uncertain.
pg 48/Grounded:
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pg 50/Grounded:
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Waterview Tower was designed to be the 5th
tallest building in the Chicago skyline, a 90-
story condominium and hotel on Wacker Drive,
designed by Teng & Associates Inc. The concrete
building was to be clad in glass, granite and
aluminum to convey a prismatic look. Inside,
233 condiminiums and penthouse residences,
with an average price of $800 per square foot,sit atop the 222-unit Shangri-La hotel .
Parking for guest and residents comprises
oors 2-11. Floors of 11-28 were reserved for
the 222-unit Shangri-La Hotel. A setback at
oor 29 was designated as a rooftop garden and
amenities level for guests and residents. Per one
of the citys approval conditions to include an
outdoor garden, a terrace was to spread over
approximately 8,000 sq ft featuring landscaping,
water elements, sun deck, and pet recreation
area. Floors 30-88 held the 233 condominiums
and penthouses.
pg 54/Grounded:
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Parking for guest and residents comprises
oors 2-11. Floors of 11-28 were reserved for
the 222-unit Shangri-La Hotel. A setback at
oor 29 was designated as a rooftop garden and
amenities level for guests and residents. Per one
of the citys approval conditions to include an
outdoor garden, a terrace was to spread over
approximately 8,000 sq ft featuring landscaping,water elements, sun deck, and pet recreation
area. Floors 30-88 held the 233 condominiums
and penthouses.
pg 56/Grounded:
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Parametrics
Rhino 3x Scripting...woo woo
working with Tuan
pg 58/Scripted:
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Working with Bruce Mau design on a fantastical
video conception of the project.
pg 60/Video/animation