The Church Of Perpetual Experimentation Film (full version)

Thanks to youtube's new up-to-15min allowance Im following up the posting of Objectification with the full version of the Church of Perpetual Experimentation, which I had only posted previously either in chunks, or as a reduced and sped-up version which sounded like it was being read out by a breathless helium-addict.
Further images and drawings can be seen here in a previous post. The blurb from the youtube page below...
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A sprawling new church in the southern Roman suburb of EUR, set within the fictitious context of a new pontificate that is devoted to the massive restructuring and expansion of the church, its liturgies and its architecture. The site in EUR is set aside by the new pope as a field of experimentation, where the doctrinal and liturgical innovations being developed over the Tiber in the Vatican are immediately put to test and trial with the practising -- and non-practising -- public. All development in the work is structured around the theme of Assemblage, so that all scales, from structural unit, through to the composition of those units into spaces, and then the arrangement of those spaces themselves, are governed by a logic of assemblage, aggregation, and eventually in time (the project evolves over many postulated years) recombination. The eventual recombination being made possible by each type of space being constructed out of discrete units which themselves are durable and easy to re-use.

The project achieved High-Pass in Technical studies and involved the fabrication of numerous models that were at once structural and aesthetic experimentations, as well as technical drawings, and large drawings that describe the spaces involved, their development, and their implicit narratives, and this video that pulls the drawings, models and narrative together into one complete, architectural story.

SUPERFICE 01

A piece that I made in response to a call by TBC collective for new work responding to the theme "Hybrid", and which was published in the fourth issue of the online Journal 12Pages (edited by Beverley Bennett). It is a heavily made-up self-portrait vignette that is at the same time an architectural capriccio and a rather histrionic still-life tableau. The scene is made out of paper models, whose textures were drawn on computer.
The scene was then photographed, which in turn was then reworked in photoshop, and drawn on to create an altar-like appearance, fitting the composition of the objects in the scene.

I've included the paper cut-out templates, above of the Horrified Peacock Spoon (the standard ikea tea-spoon slotting in at the base), below of the Facebox and below that of the SharpRoom.

And an image of the set below, which is around 400 by 400mm

OBJECTIFICATION

This was easily the video that I had the most fun making in the past five years, and now that I can upload it in one piece to youtube I can present it here for easy viewing. Its a fictional architectural tale (from 2007) about the forces of tourism and consumption. About how they transform locations of historical significance, setting up tense but productive relationships between a place's factual past, its current economic imperatives, and the private engagement of both visitors and inhabitants with their own version of its importance. The parable is told through the journey of one character who brings to life, and weaves together the issues explored in the work, eventually turning into a sort of contemporary architectural ruin factory. The full film below:

The explanation film below runs through all the concepts and ideas that fed into and structured both the film, and the architectural explorations around it. The previous year I had gotten rather wound up by some of Baudrillard's writing (oddly enough, Im reading a new edition of America right now), and this work was something of a reaction to his gloomy paradoxes about contemporary culture... i had wanted to approach the kitsch of tourism with an appreciative eye. Even though overall it maybe a somewhat despairing tale about the misapprehension of substantive relationships between form and meaning, it does locate points of interest within that ubiquitous way of approaching places and things, which eventually led in more propositional forms to the following project, the Church of Perpetual Experimentation, and subsequent investigations.

These are some of the models, and one drawing (more here) from the work's development.

Souvenir Architecture: cardiff vertical studio 2011

SOUVENIR ARCHITECTURE

make a place worth remembering

Adam Nathaniel Furman and Marco Ginex

^Printed paper model of Howl's Moving Castle

“After a tumultuous night traversing strange lands full of wondrous halls, bedecked both with maidens and vaults in equal profusion, as well as terrifying precipices crisscrossed by folding bridges and twisted towers, David awoke to the sight of the ancient and inscrutable map he kept across from his bed, and about which he had always wondered as to its referents, realising that once again he must have been speculating in his sleep as to the worlds contained therein, until as he rolled over to sleep again, he found a strange object under his sheets which had not been there before, a polychromous confection of forms that could only have come from where he had just awakened.” 

Extract from Madam’s Miscellanea

CONCEPT

Souvenirs mark the boundaries between the real and the imagined, and concretize their interdependence. They are small, surreal, yet physical and real. As direct outcomes of globalization they are themselves ubiquitous from Machu Pichu to Cebu, and yet they operate counter to that seriality, paradoxically using every new technology and mode of production available to be popularly evocative, and operate within the scope of collective and individual illusions. As a type they act as gateways into less uniform, more tranquil, more spectacular, or even, more futuristic times.

Souvenir Architecture marks the rupture between real space and all the potentialities of the architectural imagination, acting as physical proof that what you see around you is definitely not all there needs to be to it. Souvenir Architecture proposes and suggests, integrating itself into the weft of everyday life, broadening the scope of potential futures by weaving questions and dreams into the fabric of the quotidian. What is the difference between what you are working on at your desk at Foster’s during the day, and those tumultuous, ecstatic places you escape to when you sleep at night? It is the sum of the two that precisely delineates the form of souvenir architecture.

^Nikolai Sutyagin's House in Arkhangelsk

FRAMEWORK

Souvenir Architecture will be our way to design an alluring and allusive tectonic, which will develop by expanding on four formal and representational principles taken from the world of the souvenir.

Through Miniaturization we will individualise the monumental, privatise time, and by creating allusive tableaus bring supposedly lost “thens” into the now, the once exotic “theres” over here, and utopic “futures” back into the present.

Through Pop and Partiality we will unite the universal and the unique, the popular and the private by speaking doubly, in both a universal pictorial language of immediate communicability -a figural Esperanto understood by all- and in a complementary syntax of complex partialities, that opens up the possibility of being supplemented and completed by narrative discourse.

Through Saturation and Detail we will depart from the abstract and anonymous language of architectural representation by swapping quantitative verisimilitude for qualitative effect, employing the over-saturation of affective signs and intelligible detail in order to elicit a giddy and explicit engagement.

Through Context and Alter-Contexts we will sever any links to a specific origin, instead residing in the dual space between the room the model is in, and the range of alternative contexts designed from the precise intermingling of universal archetypes, from the playful image of childhood, to the mythic allure of the antique, the distant excitement of the exotic, the hopeful ideals of future utopias, and comforting dreams of the pastoral.

PROGRAM

The course will be structured around two short mini briefs, which will help us to understand the precise ways in which souvenirs are constructed, and how to use those techniques as a method to build up a blend of tightly related formal and narrative explorations, followed by a longer brief aimed at the development of final models and sets of drawings.

1.1 Analysis

The first brief will be to deconstruct and analyse a given commercial souvenir into its component parts, into those deliberate choices which have made it not an exact architectural representation, but an allusive and storied object that refers to, but goes far beyond, the original.

1.2 Object

The second mini brief will be to instrumentalise the qualities and techniques located in the studied souvenir, and use them to transform an un-built building, its history, its architect and its formal characteristics, into a portable object-souvenir. This will be a miniaturized, pop-partialised, highly saturated, and alter-contextualised tableau that inversely pumps more analysis and content into what it reduces and reconfigures.

1.3 Architecture

The main thrust of the work will revolve around the building of one, ever evolving, obsessively explored and documented Model, a self-generating architectural history, a souvenir of souvenirs, which will be documented in one set of equally layered architectural drawings which will evolve in parallel to the model. Through the twinning of model and drawing, we will delve in and out of the students’ miniature worlds as they grow, elaborating framed moments from their interiors, expanding them into sequential chapters in a complex form of architectural production, representation and narration. The set of drawings will evolve in parallel to the main model, and will collect and contain concepts, research, narrative explorations and digressions in both images and text, as well as theoretical research.

OUTPUT

So as the course ends, and we step back –dazed- out into the world of Tesco and Value Engineering, we will be left with strange and complete souvenirs, chunks of fantastic floating castles in the air that have broken off, and fallen to the Cardiff ground, large, indiscrete constructions and layered drawings that ask to be explored, peeled back and uncovered, to reveal the stories hidden within.

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This will be Madam's second academic brief exploring this topic, following its unit at the AA Tel Aviv summer program 2010.

Exquisite Souvenirs: Madam Studio at AA Tel Aviv Visiting School 2010

Marco Ginex and I taught a unit at this year's Architectural Association Visiting School at Tel Aviv university -a 10day workshop- with a brief whose starting point was a found drawing -a large ice-flow survey map of Alexander Island in Antarctica- which was cut into a grid of smaller maps for the students to use as a starting point for their projects. The students were not told what the map was representing, but its rich layers of information necessarily implied the presence of some sort of organising legend, and they were invited to invent their own, but of a twofold kind: first a mythic legend that described a scenario, at a given scale, in the place they imagined to be defined by the various lines on the drawing, and only secondly a quantitative legend that elaborated the form and delineations of that places contents. A process of manual and digital collaging and layering, together with story-writing helped them to enrich their given square in their own way, as well as developing techniques that were immediately taken up in 3d models and larger drawings, culminating in their final, conclusive Souvenirs. 

The Intro to the brief is below.

^ before and after the "storm" by Dori Sagan

EXQUISITE SOUVENIRS: GATEWAYS TO THE PLACES BEHIND THE MAPS

“After a tumultuous night traversing strange lands full of wondrous halls, bedecked both with maidens and vaults in equal profusion, as well as terrifying precipices criss‐crossed by folding bridges and twisted towers, David awoke to the sight of the ancient and inscrutable map he kept across from his bed, and about which he had always wondered as to its referents, realising that once again he must have been speculating in his sleep as to the worlds contained therein, until as he rolled over to sleep again, he found a strange object under his sheets which had not been there before, a white confection of forms that could only have come from where he had just awakened. ”

Maps, scientific surveys, even the most pedestrian ones, contain legends and myths. It is in their perfect abstract clarity, their utter extraction of detail and digression that they stimulate our instinct to embellish, elaborate, imagine. And so as contemporary archaeologists of the map, the story, and the machine, we will construct architectural souvenirs of the worlds that we see existing in the interstices of representational abstraction. We will create strange physical artefacts that summarise an imagined hinterland, and which together act as a gateway to a lost/just‐discovered world.

Above are Dori's three stages. The colourful model was his interpretive stage, leading to the black and white drawing that became the map of his storm-space, a detritus laden landscape watched over by huge rusting watch-towers, of indeterminate occupancy, that was drawn up in the two first drawings (and others not shown that depict a full sequence), and modeled through the folded and laser-cut model above.

Noga Smerkowitz's project, which is also the purple-and-yellow model at the bottom, repeated a set of motifs, including a rotated oval, extruded sine and cosine waves, and the curvilenear profiles of topography, across three scales simultaneously: that of the ritual cultic object, that of a building, and that of the landscape. So that her legend was defined by intermingling and cross-referencing objects like the one above which was both a religious object, as well as a vast architectural intervention (purple and yellow model below), and the shape of the ground on which all of these sit.

This colourful beast is Yasmin Schmidt's psychedelic cavern of lurid melancholy, which she navigated through by creating a comic strip that follows the journey of a prototypical subject of this over saturated enviroment, who begins high up surveying the lay of the land, but who unfortunately ends up tumbling helplessly, and endlessly, through the fractal-like fronds of yellow perspex.

Nitzan Sharon produced one piece of a larger game that he was designing on his computer, a three dimensional puzzle garden consisting of grottoes, waterfalls, follies, avenues, and paddocks contained within various cubes whose sides rotate to match up with the sides of their adjacent element, becoming something different depending on which way up they are.

The six images above are of Noa Kedar's exploration of how images and models can simultaneously be seen to be of a vast scale, whilst also being apparently tiny, a bit like the strange scenes one sometimes sees under the microscope where it is not only palpable that there are whole worlds within the head of a pin, but that they look very similar to lunar landscapes, forests, cities...

Below is the intermediate scale of Noga's rotated oval, where the landscale penetrates the interior of what was once able to fit in the plam of a hand, and creates a cascade of iconographic terraces.

A big thank you to all the students, to Chris Pierce for organising the programme, Chris Matthews and Aaron Sprecher for their support, Ruth Kedar and Arthur Mamou-Mani for being so much fun and such inspirations, and to Eran Neuman for bringing the AA in.

Teasing Tastes: Vertical Studio at Cardiff University

This summer term Amita Kulkarni (director of Studio Amita Vikrant) and I (invited by Sergio Pineda and Sam Clark) taught a Vertical Studio during which students were asked to fill a box with a series of scale models. The architectural scenes had to start from found objects, building up imagined scenarios revolving around the articles of daily life, hopefully opening up small ruptures in the students' ways of seeing everyday environments. The boxes themselves, using lighting, and a copious profusion of surface treatments, had to create explicit atmospheres, and eloquently imply intriguing narratives, which could be further clarified -opening up a world of stories and events- upon inspection of the respective student's book, which is used to catalogue the imagined breadth of the world frozen in the architectural representation of the box (one of which can be seen here in pdf form). After a couple of test runs, all the boxes rapidly evolved into theatrical story-telling sets.

Hopefully, in a small way, allowing students to use their imagination to explore alternative narratives of the present, of everyday life and its strangeness, of how to question what is and isn't real, and how architecture can stretch accepted narratives to physically contain some of the freedoms and alternate realities so freely available in theatre and literature, we introduced a little of what Salman Rushdie described in his reading of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, later maybe also to creep into their later work: "This idea -the opposition of art to politics- is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power. And I suggest that the true location of Brazil is the other great tradition in art, the one in which techniques of comedy, metaphor, heightened imagery, fantasy and so on are used to break down our conventional, habit-dulled certainties about what the world is and has to be. Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that is may subsequently be reconstructed."

Venturing furthest into the realm of an entirely constructed fictional universe, the photo above and the four photos below are of Phin Harper's project in which he slays a God on behalf of a fictional race of miniature people -here in the form of a dying pigeon he found and pinned to a cross in his box- and together with a cute stuffed toy he found, and soft shapes he made which variously defy their hidden serrated edges and dangerous sinister hearts with the outward signs of friendliness, he created a buried world of crossed signals, a hidden series of vaults where the old God of the race of little white people had carefully arranged -and kept away from the unsuspecting people- all spaces in the cosmos that contradicted themselves, that were not what they seemed to be, that beckoned people in with warm colours and soft forms whilst hacking them to death upon entry. He had tidied up the universe, but just as Phin sacrificed the pigeon, so they killed their God and aeons later they have rediscovered the catalogue of rooms, and are digging them out, studying them, puzzling over them, re-finding their plethora of contradictions, taming them.

See here for a fragment of Phin's text. Everything white and at the scale of the little white men are interventions by them, passageways, bridges, study rooms, visitor centres and archives that chart their movement of discovery through the subterranean world of the old God's monstrous catalogue.

Below is the box by Jihui Cao, a 3dimensional board game of twisting perspectival grids, in which the Joker has taken control of a pack of cards, and is busily engaged in the process of rewriting the rules of play through his own particularly acidic sense of humour.    

The photo above and the six below are of Zoe Spittle's box, which is both a journey through her morning, as felt by her in her half awake state, and also a fascinating layered space, chock full of allusive imagery and overlapping spatialised stories rendered in planes of delicately marked paper; and it switches between these two states via the addition or removal of a screen she built for the front of the scene (seen above lit up from outside, and below from inside) which has numbered 'viewing canons' that frame very precisely each moment from waking to eating to showering, taking you through them sequentially and separating them in space as well as time. When the screen is taken off the discrete scenes all bleed into one another, existing simultaneously in the same space, both creating a compound and rich atmosphere, whilst also allowing one to meander through the various elements, stringing stories and links between them at will.

Zoe was the student who kept most closely to very specific real, quotidian experiences, using a clear and simple technique of simile overlaid onto everyday routines, giving them the magical quality that things acquire when they are associated with unrelated phenomena and integrated visually, as with the best children's book illustrations which essentially make the fantastical immediately intimate.

For an early version of her text, which actually came somewhere in the middle of her development of the scenes and their arrangement, see here.

The two photos below are of Lingyan Kong's box, a digital-analogue Manga inspired space in which an Android boy has created a whole range of flora and fauna that vary in degree between the mechanical, the biological, digital and analogue, and flat and 3dimensional. This is the boy's petri dish where he dreams his Pinocchio dream of being a real boy, whilst actively experimenting to make it happen. See more here.

And last, but definitely not least is the miniature epic by Matt Smith that all began when an apple got shot by a toy soldier (or rather the apple had a bite taken out of it, and got positioned next to the toy soldier so that it looked very much as if that is what had happened), and the General from an old comic-book which Matt found in a car-boot sale took up where the toy soldier had left off, mobilising many others just like him to take part in a fight to the death with all Apples, all happening in the space between the floorboards of an innocuous bedroom (the territory of the apples), and the world beneath them (the home-ground of the toy soldiers). The box is rendered after-the-event, with clear traces of all the major moments in the history of the war carefully laid out, and through which the jury was expertly taken through during the presentation by Matt (accompanied by 'Ride of the Valkyries' that punctuated the presentation), and which is beautifully preserved in his Book, which can be seen here in PDF format. I would put more photographs up of his box, and others, but unfortunately the Flash card of my camera which had all my photos on it was accidentally wiped.

A big thank you to all the students who chose Teasing Tastes for their 2010 Vertical Studio:

Andra Antone
Sidha Mogha
Phineas Harper
Katherine Hart
Christina Ntetsika
Matthew Smith
Jihui Cao
Zoe Spittle
Lingyan Kong