ruins

A Game

Produced By Isabelle Clemence Angieri

Part I : the lamest weirdo

introduction

graphic and extragraphic

guide

the lamest weirdo

a fire works

ruin body

competitor alignment

body to body

closing

game plan

Part II : drawing ruins

introduction

composition

guide

death

closing

decomposition

inkis dry and t h earchitectureis already apartEverything decomposes and is involved in the thorough and unforgiving process of ruin - the pull of entropy and the stubborn act of fighting it. That architecture acts in this way is a certainty. Drawings are a sort of ruin. The images we create are an ever shifting landscape of the broken, abused, refuted, comical, irrelevant, irreverent, and ignored. The ruin is ubiquitous. Rather than lament this fact, it becomes an argument for specificity. The thesis deals with the illustrated ruin, rather than the ruin itself. This thesis is a game, whose working title is The Lamest Weirdo.

If The Lamest Weirdo were a gameshow, contestants would compete to create the most real graphic representation. This form of creation, one in which entropy plays a stubborn role, would be the highest form of accomplishment and would receive much praise. When the judges would be unnable to declare a victor, the competitor with the most real extragraphic explanations would win.

The protagonist in The Lamest Weirdo, is the lamest wierdo, a competitor whose drawings are ever the most enigmatic graphic obfuscations accompanied by ever the most cryptic extragraphic explanations. Tlw’s competitors include, tlw’s foil, and two others whose works stands in for accepted graphic standards. Without willing participants, I, the arbiter of The

Lamest Weirdo, have the option to recruit unwilling participants, or to benefit from the multiplicity of mind-bodies that I can provide. By mind-bodies, I mean characters. The Lamest Weirdo cannot exist without characters. Or character, for that matter.

The Lamest Weirdo also requires a thematic prompt and a ruin body from which to extract the most real graphics. The original thesis A Fire Works serves as the ruin body for this, the first installment of The Lamest Weirdo.

In the following section, I will explain, as clearly as possible, the original thesis A Fire Works. If entropy is to have its way, we shall at least let it start from a position of utter blankness.

lwa guidelamest weirdo

goal

action

external conflict

Our protagonist is commited to making strange things. It is its own fringe community, party of one.

Often creating obtuse or meaningless graphic and extragraphic work, the lamest weirdo does sometimes come by a breakthrough, usually closely followed by intense stagnation.

The action begins with the challenge to represent the thesis A Fire Works. Tlw competes with three other contestants to prove that it’s representation is the real simulacra of the thesis, the real real.

Tlw must fully transcend the foil. Tlw struggles to prove its reality while still competing with the other characters, and struggles with internal problem, “am I real, or trying to prove I am real? Is it possible that I am not, and if so, when I prove that I am, what does that mean?”

In competition with three other contestants, tlw must also contend with A Fire Works itself. You see, tlw is not content to simply be the real simulacra, but strives to be the real real, which everyone assumes A Fire Works to be. Also, one of the contestants, the foil, is practically identical to tlw, which further undermines tlw’s identity.

lwa guideobstaclesThe representation styles of the other competitors are all different accepted standards.

Each competitors claims to be the real thing.

Tlw’s goal to be the real real distracts it from the competition at hand.

conclusionTlw ejects itself from the competition. In order to truly win, to become the real real, tlw realizes it must break fundamental graphic standards. Still, tlw in the end is unable to transcend its context: it is granted the victory over the other competitors.

problemThe other characters and the competition initially distract tlw and are a constant reminder of tlw’s struggle to define and represent creatively and with a singular vision. Ironically, tlw must resolve this problem by manipulating and distorting the very source of the struggle: the graphics of the other competitors.

growthThe influences of the other drawings will temper tlw’s work, allowing it to transform and distort A Fire Works work simultaneously.

end

Tlw is disqualified.

bodyThis is A Fire Works.

FIRE

GEOMETRY

MYTHOLOGY

WARMTH

HEARTH

FOOD

NEW LIFE

LIGHT

PROTECTION

ASSAULT

DARKNESS

DESTRUCTION

ASH

PYRE

BURN

RITUAL

CULTURE

FORGE

FUEL

bodyThis diagram explains the logic of A Fire Works.

ABSTRACT

Fires of the suns; ancients; wars; wilderness; plains; old homes in the mountains, and new ones on the

hill; battles; zealots; revolutions; earthquakes; burnings; volcanoes; forges; hearths; storms; ordeals; pyres;

artifices; natures; destructions; news; walkings; makings; worships; eternal flames; altars; dances; rituals;

sacrifices; magics; temples; assaults; sermons; myths; kings; waters; bonfires; feasts; cults; darknesses;

festivals; blessings; halloweens; wheels; and other flames will burn it all and everything to ashes on the

ground.

At the intersection of mythology and geometry, this text looks to address the nature of fire as a force which flows along and penetrates media in a cycle of destruction, transformation, and regeneration. The sacred, as Mircea Eliade writes, is a continuing element spattered throughout contemporary life, bleeding from points to flows which frame human experience. Roland Barthes’ Mythologies gather lines of cultural criticism around a point: the sacred in the profane. My interest in mythology is in the vein of Eliade and Barthes: it is to comment upon and question the quotidian through the interrogation of fires, passions. The interrogation will find a geometry of its own, a packing together and explosion of elements which define an order. Such are the relationship between mythology, geometry, and fire.

Through the implementation of and synthesis of existing methods of defining, controlling, and representing fire through the medium of wood, the thesis merges the myth of fire and its cultural practice with contemporary methods of fabrication.

This aesthetic, cultural, and geometric investigation seeks to transform the landscape through fire and fabrication. A Fire-Works, if you will. The thesis grapples with the idea of fire as a force to be controlled and responded to in a symbiotic way through built interventions.

bodyThis abstract explains the thesis of A Fire Works.

BIBLIOGRAPHYMythologyBarthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Print.Eliade, Mircea. The sacred and the profane. Vol. 11. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959.Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1st edition. New York: Picador, 2001. Print.Kostof, Spiro. “A history of architecture: settings and rituals.” New York (1995).Mostafavi, Mohsen. On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time. MIT Press, 1993. Print.

RepresentationBarthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. Hilland Wang, 1982. Print.---. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Print.---. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. Reissue edition. New York: Hill andWang, 1975. Print.Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. United States:CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010. Print.Grunenberg, Christoph, and Sheila Kennedy. KVA: Material Misuse. ArchitecturalAssociation, 2001. Print.Robinson, Howard M. “Prime Matter in Aristotle.” Phronesis (1974): 168-188.

FireBlackman, Winifred S. “The Magical and Ceremonial Uses of Fire.” Folklore 27.4 (1916):352–377. Print.Boodle, L. A. “The Nature of Charred Wood.” Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information(Royal Gardens, Kew) 1917.9/10 (1917): 306–308. JSTOR. Web. 2 Oct. 2014.Bowman, David MJS, et al. “Fire in the Earth system.” science 324.5926 (2009): 481-484.

Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs. Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture.MIT Press, 2014. Print.Caple, Chris, and Will Murray. “Characterization of a Waterlogged Charred Wood andDevelopment of a Conservation Treatment.” Studies in Conservation 39.1 (1994):28–38. JSTOR. Web. 2 Oct. 2014.HOAGLAND, EDWARD. “Fire.” The American Scholar 69.4 (2000): 57–60. Print.“Information about the Fire Triangle/Tetrahedron and Combustion.” N.p., n.d. Web. 1Oct. 2014.Irigaray, Luce. “The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger.” (1999).Kelley, Francis Clement. Charred Wood. Chicago: Extension Press, 1917.oskicat.berkeley.edu Library Catalog. Web. 2 Oct. 2014.

HistoryPyne, Stephen J. Fire: A Brief History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.Print.Strohmaier, David. “Threescore and Ten: Fire, Place, and Loss in the West.” Ethics andthe Environment 8.2 (2003): 31–41. Print.

bodyThe next five images explain the precedent for A Fire Works.

M e r r y C o m p a n y b y P i e t e r A e r t s e n

A l c h e m i c a l S y m b o l f o r F i r e

V u l c a n b y P e t e r P a u l R u b e n s

Tr a d i t i o n a l J a p a n e s e Yu g a s a k i b y Te r u n o b u F u j i m o r i

C h a r r e d W h i s k e y B a r r e l b y G l e n M o r a y

bodyThe next ten images explain the architecture of A Fire Works.

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

P r o b e b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

tobody

Each competitor comes with a unique personality and set of concerns regarding the representation of space. Their profiles in the following pages not only describe the perspectives they bring to the lamest wierdo, but the quality of the dimensions by which they operate and understand space.

body 1: the lamest wierdoOur protagonist is commited to making strange things that it either doesn’t care to or can’t explain.

i love technology is as predictably disruptive as they are innovative.

back 2 basics is a traditionalist in the traditional sense of the word.

Their are two kinds of people: those that believe they make up reality, and those that believe they accept it.

body 3 : back 2 basics

body 2 : i love technology

body 4 : tilting at windmills

lamestwierdoThe protagonist in The Lamest Weirdo, is the lamest wierdo, a competitor whose drawings are ever the most enigmatic graphic obfuscations accompanied by ever the most cryptic extragraphic explanations.

They believe content is a value in and of itself which operates outside of context: it is a universal known that is ever in the repetitive process of becoming uknown. The process itself is valuable, yet tlw neither documents their processes, nor attempts to recreate them. Essentially, tlw believes themself to operate chaotically. They expect outsiders to contextualize and derive order from their work, and for that effort to continually fail.

tlw’s greatest struggle is to be incomprehensible, and therefore they shield themself from understanding their own work, not wishing to give themself away.

lovetechnologyi love technology is as predictably disruptive as they are innovative.

Disruptive as they are, they rely on out of the box solutions, for problems in the box, and in the box solutions for out of the box problems. The most exciting problem for i love technology is how to disrupt the box itself. “How many boxes are there? What if a box isn’t a box at all, but a sphere? If a box is open, can I disrupt by closing it?” The only thing i love technology loves more than disrupting problems, is disrupting solutions to problems. i love technology is most interested in process and context, and believes content takes care of itself.

This line of innovative questioning figures into i love technology’s approach to disrupting, i mean representing, the ruin body “a fire works”.

tobasicsback 2 basics is a traditionalist in the traditional sense of the word. They start every project by constructing a site model, followed by ten rough formal massings which fit into the site.

Prior to entering the competition, back 2 basics believed the competition to be a traditional architectural competition. Although they would never have entered the competition had they known it was unconventional, back 2 basics stoically continues to work toward a winning project, hoping that the recent trend toward nostalgic and antique aesthetics will prove advantageous to their entry.

More than anything, back 2 basics is commited to the things they start, believing that ‘any publicity is good publicity’, hoping to ‘really break out’ into winning career by beating out their competitors.

atwindmillsTheir are two kinds of people: those that believe they make up reality, and those that believe they accept it.

tilting at windmills are excruciatingly of the former persuasion. they speak in aphorisms. Those who accept their words do so unequivocally. Speaking of pure art, unmitigated by others and with uncompromising rigidity, they rule with sacharine pride and collective individuality over the crowd-sourced, the democratic, the remixed, and the stagnating group. The relationship between the degradation and the virality of tilting at windmills work is inverse: as their work degrades, its virality increases, and vice versa.

they resolve to prove the superiority of their work, no matter its actual value to anyone, suffering the content creators, declaring their dominion via bombardments of virality.

planThe Lamest Weirdo depends not only on stability and systematic thinking to work, but flexibility and openness. The resulting third order is difficult to describe without falling back on cliche extragraphic explanations. It is an uknown, and the work of this thesis is to strive, with fervor and gumption, to create while constantly on the brink of uncertainty.

So it goes, on The Lamest Weirdo.

A r t i f a c t b y F r a n c e s c o B o r r o m i n i

The ink is not dry and the architecture is already falling apart. I have doubted everything. I have stared into the abyss of formalism, one toe over the edge.What is architecture? Where is the Academy taking us with its wheels spinning so furiously? This thesis is founded in doubts about architecture. In the face of doubt, I have always looked for certainty.

The closest thing to certainty is entropy: reality and metaphor. Why is entropy so certain? And what does it have to do with reality and metaphor? The answer to the former question can be found in the most uncertain of likely places, and the most unlikely of certain places: wikipedia. The answer to the latter question is a bit more convoluted. If in reality, entropy is certain, then realistically, just about everything - including architecture - is in a constant state of ruin, and that reality may be interpreted in metaphorical terms. To be plain:

The heat death of the Universe is a historically suggested ultimate fate of the universe in which the Universe has diminished to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and therefore can no longer sustain processes that consume energy, including computation and life.

Everything decomposes and is involved in the thorough and unforgiving process of ruin - the pull of entropy and the stubborn act of fighting it. That Architecture exists in this way is a certainty. Architecture ruins. It reduces to a state of decay, collapse, and disintegration. Drawings are a sort of ruin. The images we create are an ever shifting landscape of the broken,

A r t i f a c t b y M I c h a e l H i l l

abused, refuted, comical, irrelevant, irreverent, and ignored. The ruin is ubiquitous. Even the myth, the legend, the hero, is susceptible to ruin, and particularly so. The myth is the most despised and ridiculed of ruins, falling from so high above us to ruin and shame. Fact is finite. In fiction there is no end to the love you can get, and by the same virtue, no end to the hate. Rather than lament this fact, it becomes an argument for specificity. This thesis considers the ruin of the myth most integral to the architectural academy: the drawing.

What is it to draw? What is the goal of architectural drawing? Storytelling? Art? Instruction? If we hold that storytelling in architecture may be a means of communicating information of or relating to space, then storytelling is architecture. If we hold that art in architecture may be a means of communicating information of or relating to space, then art is architecture. The common denominator between storytelling and art, the communication of information of or relating to space, remains constant. If the communication of information of or relating to space is architecture, then is drawing really the architect’s most essential tool? Or is it simply a means, such as storytelling or art, which imparts a certain flavor and set of constraints, to an end?

This thesis contends that while drawing, like art and storytelling, is an artifact of architecture, the communication of information of or relating to space, its limitations as a medium are increasingly debilitating to the academy and the profession.

I present the representational artifacts, the ruins, of information I am trying to convey to you of or relating to space. These are ruins of a generative computational geometry. These are honest representations, yet at once superficial disguises. These are the body snatchers: their control over Architecture instigates its demise. This thesis is a dramatic reenactment - the body snatchers’ work has long ago been set in motion, and the ruin of the drawing is imminent, if not already extant.

A r t i f a c t b y F r a n c e s c o B o r r o m i n i

Is drawing dead? Is geometry the only means to articulate spatial boundaries?

The year is 1634. Francesco Borromini, the young neurotic geometry enthusiast and lover of Antiquity receives his first major independent commission to design the church, cloister and monastic buildings of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. His mind and hands are immediately engrossed in transcribing his longing through the descriptive geometry of interlocking geometric configurations, tenderly manipulating the Classical architectural forms he feels so deeply, refining a symbolic rational that speaks through the one he loves best, his beautiful, articulate, ardor, his drawings. Of this I am sure, out of all of us, he had passion for them most. Dead before the birth of the offspring of their joy, the building also known as San Carlino, and despite the ruin of their corporeal, and now digital, bodies, Borromini and his drawings live on in our collective imagination.

As we look to the past for answers, our gaze is brought back to the present condition, to the death of drawing, and our constant struggle to keep it alive, if not in its corporeal form, then in spirit. In the descriptive geometry of Borromini, we find the seed of drawings’ obsolescence, computation. When the act of drawing is founded in computation, it is computation that generates form. The mind is the architect, and computation itself is the medium, the living being. The offspring of their joy is the drawing. The old ways and lines become artifacts tenderly manipulated by the mind. The hand is lost. the hand

grieves, yet the mind rejoices, generating living logic with an ease the hand never knew with drawing.

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y M I c h a e l H i l l

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y M I c h a e l H i l l

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y M I c h a e l H i l l

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y M I c h a e l H i l l

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y M I c h a e l H i l l

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

Here together now, we bear witness to these artifacts of generative computational geometry. This work defies geometry as the sole articulator of spatial boundaries. Drawing where the exacerbation of geometry is the single truth. The optics of geometry on geometry confound expected boundaries and scales, producing ephemera, energy, events in time.

Working with the artifacts of optics through different ways of zooming into spaces, highly dependent on geometry itself, be it through 16th century large scale lenses, 20th century cinematographic mechanical shifting lenses, or 21st century nano and micro lenses. Please take a few minutes now to see and experience these artifacts, using compounded geometries over geometries as a means of questioning their veracity.

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i

A r t i f a c t b y I s a b e l l e C l e m e n c e A n g i e r i