On Assemblage

This is something of an untimely post, I started writing it months after the PS1 2009 season had already closed but at the time the 2010 competition was heating up and I found myself defending MOS' Afterparty quite a bit. I think it's actually a project with significant lessons beyond its short-lived exhibition status, and it highlights a characteristic of MOS' work I've enjoyed for awhile, which is never being as dumb as it looks (1).

Afterparty. Photo by Trevor Patt

First of all, and with apologies to Jason Payne and Heather Roberge, Afterparty marks the first time hair has been convincingly employed in architecture. Not merely a simple novelty, the hairiness of the pavilion is distinctly unique enough to represent an entirely new category of material possibility. Instantly giving the impression of biomorphic or organic metaphors (despite the project's avoidance of any animal iconography) neither the tectonics nor texture of hair can be reduced to anything in the architectural precedent. Hair has its own formal and aggregative problems and significantly the material used – ijuk, an Indonesian palm thatch - was not divided into strips, shingles, or panels but applied with respect for it's wavy, all-over nondirectionality. The inherent material properties of hair will contribute to the final two points as well.

Afterparty. Photo by Trevor Patt

Second, the project does an amazing job of responding to the brief with a minimum of elements and a fully-rounded architectural solution. That is, the pavilion, in spite of its poverty, provides interiors and exteriors, space and enclosure, thresholds, apertures, material layers and depth, exceeding a simple canopy or furniture solution. Probably the last project to offer such a breadth of architectural solutions was SHoP's Dunescape, the inaugural winner. I've written before about a particular kind of space entirely continuous and continuously heterogeneous. Afterparty also falls into this category, its ground plan is defined by a few point connections and nothing more; without walls, doors or dead ends. It is, if anything, simply a series of interconnected conics careful whenever possible not to disturb the horizontal plane.

Afterparty. Photo by Trevor Patt

Competing with the horizontal continuity, the individuality of each cell delimits room-like enclosures. This is reinforced by the emphatic vertical direction of the forms, an uncommon element which dominates the interior experience. The set of architecture spaces with such a prominent z-axis –the Pantheon, the side aisles of St. Peters, Guarini's SS. Sindone, Sir John Soane's Lincoln Field's Inn, Wright's Guggenheim, James Turrell's Sky Spaces, vertiginous Portman lobbies, come to mind—are dominated by an otherwise small list of projects which feature oculi.

Afterparty. Photo by Trevor Patt

In this sense Afterparty can be compared to the Soane House in that it sets out a nonlinear sequence of verticals without hierarchical order (2). The cones twist and lean and even when staring directly up through the oculus (the character of light call to mind Turrell's Sky Spaces – the optical trick of the circle of sky appearing in front of the oculus) and imply dynamism more than stasis, a neat trick for such a centralizing element.

Afterparty. Photo by Trevor Patt

The exterior appearance of a heavy, dark (some have said itchy-looking) construction belies the lightness and freedom of the interior. The material contrast of the shiny, metallic mesh is not the only cause, from the interior one can see that the thatch is not so thick afterall, but is thin enough to allow light to pass right through. More significantly, the seamlessly amorphous exterior is contrasted to the literal delineation of the form on the interior.

The real contribution of Afterparty is that it forces the discourse to acknowledge the false opposition of 'Parametric' and 'Projective' as they've maybe been called, or as Robert Somol terms them (3) digital intricacy and graphic expediency. Over and against the assumed tenents of parametric design (4), the project does not shy away from simple Platonic primitives, nor is it interested in hyper-articulation of systems, discretization, or accentuation the variety of constructions, but buries them all under a blanket of ijuk. Effectively, it takes the strategies of making “the disparate indifferent” (3) that is germane to the graphic logo. In fact one could check off all of the points mentioned in Somol's Green Dots 101: proliferate one thing, eliminate scalar coding, develop a precise but vague silhouette, saturate with a monotone, cut holes.Yet underneath it all and at the heart of the formal language is indisputably a parametric model.


Image copyright mos-office.net

Video copyright mos-office.net and velluminous

Returning to the hairiness, the use of ijuk was an inspired choice that created the possibility of entirely erasing the joints between the conic sections and eliminating the reliance on discretization techniques, but without the expense of reducing the entire design to a logo. Similarly the parametric model was constructed in such a way that it was not reliant on notational articulation but was able to maintain its specificities even as the pavilion seems to forget where they came from.

Afterparty. Photo by Trevor Patt

Perhaps these seem like minor points, but I think they go to the heart of the current debates of representation by providing concrete counterexamples that parametric design is not beholden to any particular style, nor is post-critical design compelled to reject parametric strategies on account of their indexical inclination. On the whole, I find that I agree with the basic aims of the 'projective' model of architecture but feel like the methods have been selected prematurely (more on this to come). Afterparty then involves the deployment of technological solutions in the service of their own indifference. Far from a negative quality, this prevents the overliteral translation that is the unproductive legacy of indexicality, and provides a spacing for new collective actions (or actors) to occur.

This resistance to literalization is also apparent in MOS' Intermission Videos for the Venice Biennale. As the title suggests these are not the usual glossy fly-through renderings; they are not the 'feature' presentation, but neither are they addenda. They are not epilogues or footnotes, but located right at the middle of the feature, even interrupting it. Watching the videos, one cannot help but notice the extent to which designs that would typically be read as systems, unitary in their execution and orientation (the Ordos House, Ballroom Marfa Drive-In, Transformation of a Necklace Dome), are composed of components, actions, and narratives that are irreducible to the final architectural product.

Transformation of a Necklace Dome. Photo by Ryan Culligan

Transformation of a Necklace Dome (5) makes this shockingly explicit; the narration leads from a Richard-Serra-like 'verb list' of instructions--"place, hold, bend, rotate, bend..."--into the statement: "You will be working closely with others. You are no longer alienated." These are Somol's speech acts (3), suddenly constituting the formation of a collective of people, computer, and aluminum, yet without destroying or devaluing the singular 'you' to which the instructions are directed. Neither are the aluminum rods subsumed by the systems, subassemblies, and repetitions that are enacted on them.

Deleuze wrote about the self, "We are habits, nothing but habits--the habit of saying 'I.'" (6) In a similar way the expectation of the primacy of form or structure one brings as a critic is revealed to be little more than a habit, and a silly, reductive one at that. How else to respond when Ordos 100 Lot 6 tells us "this is X watching TV. Feeling guilty, X decides to take a swim. X imagines having to take an important phone call during his swim. How out of breath he will be" (7). The house is quickly implicated in media, recreation, business, economic, social, and cardiopulmonary networks while we look furtively for the evidence.

What is noteworthy in the films is not only that architecture does not actively respond to its poetic occupants, but the extent to which this indifference succeeds in focusing our close attention on the architecture itself.

Ballroom Marfa Drive-In. Image copyright mos-office.net

I want to stress here that I am not particularly interested in the creation of narratives or the projection of a fictional lifespan, but the use of co-incidental actors and activities, to create a new attention within architecture. This is not a negation of formalism, in fact all of the above examples are heavily dependent on their specific forms. In this I see parallels to the visionary architecture of the 60s and 70, not the technical particularity of Archigram, but the more generic futures envisioned by Archizoom and Superstudio. In these designs, it was the ubiquitous embedding of the diagram (No-Stop City) and technology (Continuous Monument) which enabled the singular formations and the hypothesizing of their habitation.(8)

Archizoom. No-Stop City, 1968
Superstudio. Continuous Monument, 1971-73



1. At first blush this might sound like faint praise, but its immensely better than not being as smart as it looks. See Michael Meredith “Complex / MoMA P.S.1:Young Architects” in PRAXIS no7, 2005.
2. In contrast to the centralizing Pantheon or the linear hierarchy of St. Peter's this is the rarer case. Apart from Afterparty and Lincoln's Inn, I can only call to mind the Puebloan kivas as another possible example.
3. R.E. Somol “Green Dots 101” Hunch 11. p31-32,35
4. Patrik Shumacher “Parametricism: A new global style for architecture and urban design” AD v79 no4 p16-17
5. in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I worked on a possibility for this installation that was not realized and more successfully, MOS' Desert Island No2 for the Matters of Sensation exhibit.
6. Gilles Deleuze “Empiricism and Subjectivity” x
Levi Bryant's argument for the mutability of the subject as “the microstructures of assemblages, how they are disassembled and reassembled through interactions among agents” is relevant here.
7. It's worth pointing out in a footnote that all of the activities narrated in the Ordos 100 Lot 6 video are habits - eating breakfast, reading the paper, exercising - but the narrative is not treated as the passive, kind of calcified habits that are typically used to discuss program - this is where ... is done. X and Y are not reduced to habits assumed by the architecture.
8. I'm not trying to equate the politics of Archizoom and Superstudio with those of MOS, only for the moment, to note a similar detachment/complicated-involvement of form and its collective audience.
On this point see also Iñaki Abalos and Juan Herreros "Tower and Office"