So after an exhausting but fun day of walking around the Javits Center staring at the overwhelming amount of furniture at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), I stopped by Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation’s End of Year Show. After loading up on obligatory ‘pigs in a blanket’ and crackers & cheese, I took a look at what the school had been up to for the last year.
The work was diverse and chaotic. The clear digital direction the school had taken during the 90’s and early 00’s seems have dissipated in favor of a pluralist approach. Students are given a menu of studios to pick and choose from, each with its own conceptually approach. This kind of didactic approach left the End of Year Show with a bit of schizophrenia in its personality; a description of the state of the school that I suspect Mark Wigley, the Dean of GSAPP, would embrace with it implications of creative intensity and ever changing critical outlook. I personally found the show to be largely just noise, though that is certainly the trend in architecture in general. As often happens at the end of year show, many of the displays were more frantic design that were trying to be their own piece of art than actually made to display and explain the work that the students produced.
Still through all the noise, a few trends became clear. Architectural social critiques were definitely on the rise. These are studio’s trying to instigate social change or at least make a point through design or just plain analysis. Though always good, I found the predominance of the critique’s were largely incomprehensible, though I must admit the end of year show is hardly a good place to study such things. Another interesting trend was that Fabrication, as in digital fabrication, seemed less self consciously prominent than it has the last few years when it was all the rage. Instead, the use of the water jet cutter, CNC mill and other fabrication tools seemed more integrated and taken for granted int he student’s work, much like laser cutters have become in many schools around the country. Instead of exploring these tools for their form making capabilities, the students just seemed to be using them to get out their ideas. I find this a positive step, because for the last few years students have been making work that used these tools without thought for the necessary increase of scale that goes along with building a full scale construction. There were a lot of highly tectonic, differentiated, modular designs being produced in the last few years that once scaled to a full construction would never work. Though usually, that wouldn’t be a problem, most of the talk around these projects were how these tools would make it possible for them to actually be built, thus in my mind creating the a crisis. Still they were valuable lessons in how to think about these tools. The work this year seemed to drop those notions and instead treated the digital fabrication machines more like any other tool in the service of designing. Though losing some of its criticality, I think it makes up for it by its more ubiquitous use.
As I said earlier, the purely digital studios seemed largely silent and almost minimalist compared to the other studios; quite a feat considering the history of digital design at GSAPP. Karl Chu’s studio stuck out for me with its simply display of the student’s work on a large plasma screen television mounted to a black painted wall. Next to the TV was a printed description of the studio’s premise and a seductive tower like 3D print of one of the student’s work. Chu’s studio was focusing on the conception of space as both Discrete and Continuous, a topic dear to my own heart. The studio explored the work through use of L-system’s, a kind of algorithm that uses substitution of symbols to “grow” forms. As always, the work was fluid and inhabitable, but undeniable in its aesthetic appeal. This it is questionable whether such work can every produce anything other than sexy images as was show by Hernan Diaz-Alonso’s studio on Catherdal’s Speciation which produces the same types of amazing images year after year, without ever really taking a new step to further the work.
Overall, the show was interesting and fun to go to. The energy and excitement of Columbia is a bit infectious, but I found the noisy and confusing array of work suffering from the faults of the schools poly-vocal approach as much as the benefits. The work though, I suspect well thought through did not show the strong leadership and vision that Columbia once had. For better or worse, Columbia is a school of mad manic focus, spreading itself amongst as many ideas and concepts as it can while maintaining a strict density of action and work. Time will only tell what will come out of it all.
Filed under: Architecture by Arthur McGoey
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Incorporated (the company) is similar to incorporated (the word) in that its constituent parts can be shifted in order to express something new, different, and unexpected.
