i see this building as a pile of rocks that has voids within it shaped by the surrounding lay of boulders and stones… it is as much the space left over amongst the aggregated program as it is the character, physiognomy, and origin of the rocks that coalesces to describe the building.

bringing to the table some of the most necro materials ever presented to th.wrk.grp, i would like to illustrate some points i have mused this evening. these are some thoughts culled from the earlier design rapid fires. on the notion of archetypal wayfinding i posit a hierarchical volumetric approach. volumes are complex and built up, not subtracted, so that their surfaces are rough with program. (see sketch) a component within a volume that helps define it would have the ability to, outside of the wayfinding or volumetric statement, speak of its use and individuality within that cavernous space. volumes should be considered as sequences with the ability to see from one to another or recall one from another being a design focus.

frames of reference come in scales and help to supplement and serve as beacons or communicative devices to navigate the building. the large scale would be the reference to external elements to orient and direct from within the building. i would also posit the use of buouys or totems to ground external references that may be ephemeral (buildings, bridges, axes). this scale gives the building position in a broader context and also identifies interior spaces by the external reference. the middle scale would be the hierarchical volumetrics of above. the smallest scale frame of reference would be related to use and might be the context of a sculpture studio next to a broad open space or the cafe next to an apartment, it is not about where the use is but how to use it.

sensory suites also are communicative toward wayfinding and use but also enrich the experience at a base level. suites should be composed programmatically as bodies yet bleed onto aprons that drape and run through the crevasses of the heap. a poetic or automatic association drives these cultivations, pure aesthetics and film setpiece references.

low physical effort is acheived at one level by the diverse distribution and elemental incrementalization of the complex. it can also be accommodated by the fluidity of surface that flows over the aggregate. (see sketch)

the skeletons of the past sometimes allow more solid futures before they disintegrate.

here is an entrance [zip] into the planometric diagram that may prove useful to all. it can be overlayed onto the large-ass file found in this post. the names of the programs blocked out in the file can be found in the pshop layer names. also, like the diagram, this overlay represents the proposed spatial layering through the following conventions: dots=below, lines=grade, dashes=above. elevational notations are also provided in the layer names for your ease of use. i will post below some small scale images taken from this overlay.

please note that the solids rendered on this overlay are merely zones that the programmatic elements occupy. these fills are not meant to detail the physiognomy of the elemnts; that information can be found in the draughted plan diagram, the conducting bodies 1, 2, and the sections. the fills can be interpreted, ignored, or developed.

please affix these images to your working medium. you should adjust scale, contrast, print medium, cropping, and content as req’d.

† continue reading graphic antecedents

last night i taped this drawing back to my desk. i did not want to. not because i am not passionate about its goals, but because i feel that it cannot be shared. i would like to discuss with the groupe some ways that our work can recapture the open spirit that it had in the early days. the capacity for pollution must exist! i do not aim to peel the drawing up, and it is 2006 for fuck’s sake, must we fedex had drawings back and forth. what sort of representational methods, file sharing, scabbing, and transplanting might occur to help multiple parties divert the trajectory of a first mark made hundreds of miles away. is there some way that the drawings could continue real time in multiple locations? there are digital design platforms that allow such actions by establishing permissions for parties to work in particular sections of a file but not others. is there a potential to get on a cycle of scanning whereby the electronic document of the manual piece is useful for others. perhaps fragments of a drawing could be scanned and then printed remotely scabbed into the piece that a groupie is working on manually or digitally. there would be multiple parallel yet different versions of similar investigations occuring. i am looking for ways that we can acheive the cross pollination of the early work without sacrificing the craft of fine hand-worked pieces. of course this is all contingent on whether you would be interested in continuing this piece of work. i am still interested in bringing it to a realised state (building). this drawing was always a spatial choose-your-own-adventure recipe that established the beach heads for programmatic and formal moments in the terrain. a couple of things i would like to do to it next are to begin to root it in the altered landscape that you developed, and to find relationships to the archaeological issues that you dusted off. also, you had proposed some interesting things earlier about ambiguous objects or icons in the building, like a glowing hot ingot that when the waters from the river flowed in was able to cool and become an altar of some sort (maybe that is what you said?). i think a parallel overlay of these disparate projects could prove fruitful. thoughts?

i have uploaded a large file for your detailed inspection. if you happen to have the dialogue related to the plans that transpired in email a couple of days ago might you post it (re: archaeology, conducting bodies, and fragments v. aprons of synaesthetic material suites).

if you happened to be in nyc this weekend and missed the opening of the ‘from ruin to rejuvenation’ show at the center for architecture, consider yourself lucky. it was an effing nightmare, too many people and too many of the same entry plastered all over the wall. i feel like someone’s mom saying they cant tell the difference between paysage d’hiver and ildjarn when i say i couldnt tell the difference between the winner and about thirty other foreign office architects clones, i guess that means i know more about black metal than architecture.

† continue reading everybody’s wrk.grp for the weekend!

Congratulations, the Emerging New York Architects Competition Coordinators have chosen your submission to be included in the Awards Exhibition @ the Center for Architecture in New York City! We felt your submission excelled in the criteria of: Innovation and Delight

Only 8 out of nearly 250 non-jury selected submissions were chosen to be included.

As part of the exhibition, we are asking you to submit additional information about yourself that will be included with your board. We need this information no later than *March 13, 2006*. If we do not receive any additional information, we will exhibit your board with your team (or individual) name and location as listed on your registration form.

currently: listening to carpathian forest and draughting the theatre complex.

Hello All, Thank you for your hard work and efforts for the 2006 ENYA Biennial International Ideas Competition, Southpoint: from Ruin to Rejuvenation! After 750+ registrants, 300+ submissions, and a very long day of jury deliberations, we have our winners. If you have not been contacted already, we are sorry to inform you that you have not been selected. The winners will be announced at our Awards Reception, March 31st (time TBA) at the Center for Architecture in New York City. The publication will be available at the opening and online by the end of March. Also, we will be posting the announcement online to coincide with the exhibition opening. We hope that you will be able to attend our ceremony to celebrate the hard work that was put into all of the projects. For the reception, every entry will be projected onto a wall, so your entry will be displayed even if it will not remain for the duration of the exhibition. We will be displaying all of the entries in our online gallery as well (which will be posted at the end of March). ENYA has already begun work on the 3rd Biennial Competition, so keep an eye out for it in the coming year. Thank you again for your hard work and making this year’s competition so successful, ENYA Competition Coordinators

as you know, i care very much about the endeavours of the wrk.grp and i want it to persist and grow and become more fruitful. i would like to initiate a discussion through the lens of roosevelt, which is not complete yet, about why the first phase of this project failed, which it clearly did, and how our working methods, our communications, and our expectations of one another can be tailored to make our productions satisfying to us and productive to the community we are seeking to contribute a different voice to. i know you all have both concerns and goals, share them.

on these bound blue lines, with such clear definitions, on this stack of cards i will write, in words, what could not be writ in the haphazard lines and shades of the draughtsman’s pencil, the cad jockey’s click, at least not by fragments of people, barely speaking, and not over the months that eclipse into earlier darkness, when they arrive home to their desks in darkness to cough out shapes, not so quickly as those craven predetermined rote forms, i wanted to see architecture itself, as a practice, ruined, and what it wrought ruined, and i wanted it to slide onto the paper in such a way as to belie its infancy, i wanted it immediately ancient, with us erased, so that the ruinous history given to the people all at once could be immediately claimed by them, broken down, individuated, owned by anybody but me, i wanted this nightly sacrifice of my own time, my sleepless hours, my self worth to be pushed toward so much nothing that i could not be blamed for it, all of these years working out backwards why i should not have the power to put something before you, but done in the only way i know how, through perpetual creation that now continues in these cards where i sift through the ruins of an aspiration that never got to the point where it could be broken down again, by time, and by someone other than me, i give myself two weeks.

jt: what are your current goals on ruseveldt?
† continue reading immediate goals of ruseveldt

rapid fire conflation of prepositional sequences. will develop more precise relationships over this construct.

conducting bodies, con’t:

this drawing takes various formal icons culled from the conducting bodies drawings and begans to strew them across the site, overlapping and interspersing diverse functions and giving initial prepositional strings to thread them into one another. this one is specious in its consistency and grounding to previous discussed principles, but i just wanted to take a first stab at something, to ‘work through some things,’ and i will try to be less fast and loose in the future.

also might be interesting to drum up a discussion about the role or position of the renwick ruins in the project.

considering the notion of ‘ruins’ and casual mention of ‘traces’, both by visitors and the river, these maps display an interest in affecting the landscape of the island over time. taking advantage of the tidal motion of the ‘river’, alluvium is accreted around groynes, cables, nets, rip rap, etc, terraforming new features on southpoint gradually. i don’t foresee attemping to scuplt the island to such a degree that navigation on the river is blocked; the scale would be such that visitors would notice changes over time, and may take part in the sculpture. folks can place items/bouys which will be stirred/carried by the moving water/earth; the traces made by and upon these artifacts would reflect the marks of time on the ruins. as new areas appear and sink, folks will discover new vistas towards the u.n., landings for a dinghy, or a place to cup some east river water to their lips. i hope to peep into this w/ some sections (not to scale), to follow in this page later this week.

i am starting a drawing right now that is what i am referring to as ‘a non euclidean stroll amongst conducting bodies’, it is a series of perspectival views that pick out synecdochic components of the spaces (eg. a private box for the theater, a materials storage locker for the studio) and place them in relationships through which they blend into one another, as in a pictorial cognitive map, and are then given spatial potential by a series of punctuations and prepositions.

i am starting by just composing sketch thumbnail views and then constructing them on a single sheet and developing their relationships. i see these moments as anchor points of not only the space they describe but also a series of stations in the building that can be seen from pertinent other bodies and linked spatially, visually, materially, etc. these points are also where synaesthetic suites coalesce. each sketch i put up will have the prompt and qualitative description of the space i was trying to approach.

i have been preparing a base drawing that deals with a couple of issues: † continue reading global frames of reference

navicon torture technologies, blank paper.

Please find photos in the following location

http://www.sisyphean.com/projekts/images/roosevelt/site_photos

i feel like a cog for using the terminology but perhaps there is some insight into structuring an argument by which the priniciples in the previous post can be put towards the goals enumerated in this article [pdf].

re: goals of universal design
The first step in developing universal design guidelines is to identify critical success factors (CSFs) that play a key role in any planning and assessment of facilities. CSFs are analyzed according to five major phases of facility planning: Strategic planning, acquisition or lease of real estate, base building planning, interior planning, and maintenance and operation. Each CSF is followed by the description of its objective, the needs of users, and three levels of criteria that include exemplars to achieve the CSF objective.

the following are a series of phrases or prompts that may articulate an entrance into some issues we are being asked to investigate. they may also be seen as some action brackets that can create a procedural entrance to working on the project at large while addressing these issues.

from the universal design brief:
PRINCIPLE ONE: Equitable Use
The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
cultural / historical smoothing
a process through which historical and cultural backgrounds and reactions to space and form are reconciled across a diverse constituency while mainting the situational specifics of space, context, program, and access

PRINCIPLE TWO: Flexibility in Use
The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
democratic delimitation
spaces and moments are bound implicitly by the capabilities of their occupants, the occupants draw the space with their individuated voices and actions

PRINCIPLE THREE: Simple and Intuitive Use
Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
archetypal wayfinding (stranger’s path, jb jackson)
self-guided tourism
spatial and programmatic orientation that seeks to construct a ‘safe’ sequence or procession upon first use that also allows further knowledge of space to be acquired for further interactions, seen as a spatial/architectural concept rather than graphic

PRINCIPLE FOUR: Perceptible Information
The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
sensory redundancy
synaesthetic meter
sensory suites
spatial character and effect are communicated to all senses, correlative components are sought to blend into a condition that functions similarly as each sense drops away

PRINCIPLE FIVE: Tolerance for Error
The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
childproofing, lunatic / prison furniture
enmargin’d acts
ADA * 1.5, exaggeration of buffer zones

PRINCIPLE SIX: Low Physical Effort
The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
occupation in transit (cube, cube 2: hypercube)
pathways of uniform plurality
spaces gain mobility and shift within the space, not for flexibilty but for ease of access, diverse and multiplicitous non-hierarchical (or as ms says, non-hiarchial) access methods for all spaces, stairs, ramps, elevators, ladders, poles, hatches, etc., extreme effort may come in different forms for different folks

PRINCIPLE SEVEN: Size and Space for Approach and Use
Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user’s body size, posture, or mobility.
gaseous ergonomics
human factors tailoring
how does the sphere of influence of the body expand and contract at different scales, what is the ideal performance of a cavernous space vis-a-vis a shrimpy little body

• john ruskin, albert speer, critical plagiarism
• occupying ruins, ruins occupying
• disenfranchised/discriminated: ghosts, wampyrs, small pox, louis kahn
• “culturally pluristic representation of society”: phes, minorities, mobile elderly, people who read whilst walking
• ahistorical, speaks through character and type over form
• friendly residential face? art is explication of lore, not moderation of tradition
• “water related transportation infrastructure”, dangerous supplement?
• castelvecchio v. interior/museumized digs
• “bldg constrct’d materials from island quarry by inmates”: sustainable and eerie
• a.w.n. pugin, renwick, adaptive revival
• include kahn’s memorial
• this is for the people, cannot take a park away from the people
• “quarantine”, burial at sea
• “19th c gothic romance”, wuthering heights, castle of otranto
• “charity cases in wards on lower flrs and a series of prvt rooms upper stories for paying patients”: not universal design, counter the classist history
• grey gneiss, pointed arches, crenellated cupola
• “garden fabrics”, not a folly, somewhere between useful and curiousity
• 13th century tintern abbey in monmouthshire, palazzo braschi in frascati (setting for la notti del terrore)
• sleeve’d crumbling walls, decay is a form of articulation
• no dogs are allowed on the island, read: only cats
• “1/100 people who died in nyc in 1854 died at renwick”
• 1839: octagon tower at lunatic asylum, designed by ajackson 1982: octagon tower is torched 1999: labor day fire ravages octagon pavilion
• fireworks viewing platform, large theater walls disappear, ruins roof has disappeared

until i get the 100 clams to register next week let this be the post in which documents regarding the competition and program be deposited.

please find the competition website here.

Innovation and delight
Does the entry attempt the unexpected and redefine boundaries?

Preservation/ Adaptive Reuse (Critical for the Historic Preservation Award)
Does the submission address the physical constraints of the ruin, while providing novel or inventive ways to retain or integrate elements of the building into the design?

Program
Is implementation of the program and fulfillment of the target audience integral and evident in the building form?

Site
Does the proposal maximize the unique setting and location of the building, addressing the intangible lore and history of Roosevelt Island, while dealing with immediate concerns of transportation and the potential for enhanced transportation infrastructure?

Universal design
Has the entry tackled the universal design agenda in a holistic, yet innovative, manner?