SYNAESTHESIA NOTES

I would like to post Jeffrey's booklet comments. I dont think he has said anything here that wouldnt be said in the classroom discussions. I think it is valuable for us all to read the comments as we continue to critique another. I hope you are still trying to meet on your own as well...

SYNAESTHESIA NOTES
Jeffrey Hogrefe
jhogrefe@pratt.edu
In general the students struggle with the agency of architecture. How memory can lead to architecture is often unclear in the propositions. Ends up becoming diagrammatic about an idea of memory that could as easily be rendered in a novel or a poem.

I have responded independently to Stanley.

Alex: Your research is really sound. The question at this stage is: What is the relationship between on the one hand, the establishment of an urban narrative that relates to a structure of memory and a site for the investigation of a thesis project? What is the site of spatial investigation for your thesis project? Is this the appropriate site for your memory maps? We could imagine you investigating this within a novel. How would it be applied to a site and a program? House, mediation of the city and event—you don’t say how you are going to work your way into program. You could reduce your narrative to a concept, a dialectic or a taxonomy of terms which could then be transposed through the use of diagrams to drawings.

Bryan: Your research is in need of a focus. You have selected a site which offers a range of sensory experiences that you have decided to focus on sound, which is well and good. But how this sound will become architecture is still not clear. “I will be recording brief phrases of sound…They will be transcribed into sheet music and mapped into a palimpsest.” This statement of intent could be in a précis statement that then begins to explore your ideas more fully. As it is they are scattered and unfocused, however appealing and promising.

Brian: Writes well but doesn’t align itself with the catergories of the booklet. Precis is not a précis. You are solely in the realm of the conceptual vocabulary but don’t apply it quickly or sufficiently to a material object of investigation. Has a sensitivity for what you are examining. If your insight could be directed to something you are investigating it could be great architecture. It is all true and well put. Doesn’t relate
Study of a bench is great. Addition and subtraction could be a dialectic to move into diagrams and drawings which would test your ideas on the level of architecture.

Matthew: In the précis you makes patently true and obvious statements regarding children and sensations that are in many ways outside of the realm of the architect. You would be wise to focus his investigation to the evocation of the contemporary paradoxes of an orphanage, on the one hand an institution for the control of the child and on the other hand a place of opportunity for new ideas about childhood development. Questions relating to state’s intervening institutions could also be posed. Aldo Van Eyck’s orphanage is the most relevant and could be in the genealogy and it could even be the test place for the degree project. Ideas seem generic and naïve. There are many Van Eyck playgrounds. Herman Herzberger a contemporary Dutch architect also rhetorically discusses his architect in terms of place creation and inhabitability, thresholds and boundaries. You should look at his writings. Brutialism has a proposition about the Smithson and other Team Ten members and they have a body of work that tries to test what they talk about. Herzberger’s housing complex in Berlin.
Your site is also well developed. Could be another level of critical interpretation of Van Eyck and how your new site could offer the potential to cluster groups peripheral horizontal map building is the precedent and your site offers a new potential. What has happened in the past fifty years since Van Eyck’s orphanage that you can bring to a a re-reading of his architecture?


Carrie Chang: Your concept of the scaffold as a support structure for a building could become an architectural degree project in the sense that a scaffold is a temporary structure which contains the memory of a building. However you may not be leading in that direction at all. How can the screen and scaffolding be seen as culturally relevant, why evoke the screen and scaffolding in a degree project in architecture? Without a set of motivated questions which correspond to your architectural proposition you will have a difficult time connecting your poetic investigations with an architecture of inhabitation. Although your conceptualized fictive program of the conditions of the house could be provocative you will want to situate your degree project on a firmer foundation. Brings together poetic texts admirably.
In the best sense it is impicit rather than explicit in the way that Bachelard combines readings across numbers of texts in same way could be divided into mundane objects and foreground objects. How do you intend to work with your program? Still mysterious.

Delal: The relationship between boundaries established both explicitly and implicitly by the veil and the male gaze that you present in your booklet could become a provocative degree project. However you have not laid out a set of questions which could move this theoretical ground into architecture or examined the research critically in terms of architectural precedent, so it is difficult to imagine your proposition as architecture. I would suggest that you research the precedents for your proposition in the architecture of Elizabeth Diller, and that you examine your terms more closely. Strangely enough you seem to have reduced your analysis to some potentially productive sets of terms without the exhaustive amount of research we have seen in other booklets. This is both a strength and a weakness. For now the best way is to capitalize on your strengths is to carefully define your terms.

Namtip: You have made a simple and easy to imagine proposition for an architecture which could have an acquired complexity that will be worked out in studio. The main problem at this stage is in criticality and focus. I don’t see the ways in which you are presenting a culturally relevant critique of existing architectural practices in your proposition. Your proposition, although admirably straightforward, lacks cohesion, which could dog you in the design studio.