Precarious Structures: Composition/Anti-Composition

3 units

This design seminar will explore the construction of architectural compositions as time-based events using motion graphics, physics engines and scale models. Design exercises will be supplemented by readings and lectures that track intersections between abstract painting, color theory, choreography, video game physics, and architectural space. The suite of digital videos and models generated during the course of the workshop will make an argument for animation software as an architectural-form-generation technique. This workshop is designed as a visual-studies-focused exploration of material assemblages. In his recent text entitled Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, theorist Hal Foster analyzes contemporary visual artists like Thomas Hirschhorn and suggests the term precarity to describe one of the major emerging themes in post-2001 art; this is a meta-category that he puts forward alongside the abject, mimetic, archival and postcritical. These terms, Foster suggests, might replace the postmodernist overprivileging of images and language. Following the work Foster highlights in his text, we will engage with what sculptor Robert Morris calls anti-form: the material and optical territory of the formless (all that is horizontal, unconstructed, and otherwise base). It is without doubt that the specters of postminimalism -- Alice Aycock, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse and Mary Miss, for example -- loom large in contemporary aesthetic research. This pervasive (if underarticulated) interest in base materialism, elemental tectonics, and provisional structures owes much to the antiformal revisions of minimalism that these artists celebrate in their work (so many piles, ruins, stacks, stick-frame forts, huts, and shelters). Can architecture revitalize these types and add elements (spatial, economic, political and technological complexity) to the sculptural articulation of precarity? Can we design with formal provisionality at the forefront? Requirements: Beginners with no background in the following platforms are welcome. However, some familiarity with Rhino 3D, the Maya platform, and processing will be helpful.