2017 SOM Prize for Architecture, Design, and Urban Design
Indexical Architecture / A Synthesis of Subtleties

The nature of an index lies in the qualities of things. “Indexical Architecture” frames architecture as a set of latent qualities, revealed only by the proportions and senses of the body. “A Synthesis of Subtleties” dives deeper into the nature of an architectural index understood as a series of subtle spatial qualities that structure experience: a sense of place, the interplay of light and shadow, layering of space, material details, varying thickness of transparency, and surface texture.

These subtle conditions have an immediate engagement with the body, invoking memory, emotion, and visceral sensation. Understanding places through a process of phenomenal subtleties allows an architecture that communicates with the body, crafted to hold memories and structure identity.

Architectur(al)

I spent four months learning how to feel architecture while studying in Vicenza, Italy. Questions of site, culture, time, and memory collided with overwhelming force. It was during this time that I began to see architecture as fragments of architectural qualities. I found the liquid streets of Venezia providing a new sense of depth, the clouded Venetian plaster simultaneously measure and reflect the body, and Piazzas preserving culture within their shapeless space. I began to understand architectural projects for their qualities of the body. Documented through a fixed 50 mm. camera lens, the tool itself would not allow for wide-angle composition, but instead a focus on light, materials, joints, spatial intersections, people, textures, details, shadows, movements, atmospheres…

The collection of these fragmented views proved more accurate to the memory of the experience. Instead of trying to understand the project as an architectural object, I was able to process the project as a series of fragmented architectural experiences that could be re-organized, re-understood, and re-collected to choreograph a memory. I had learned to feel a space.

Un-Looking

The sense of vision has dominated our world with the advent of digital technologies and cultural transparencies. From increasing popularity in public viewpoints and open-plans to sheets of glass that transcend human proportions, the sense of vision is influencing the built environment. Recognizing architectural qualities beyond the realm of vision prioritizes the acoustic and haptic dimensions within a space. This prioritization of the non-visual sense acts as a veil concealing prejudice of the eye, allowing a more reflective and spiritual relationship to place.

My research seeks to contend that in order to perceive the atmosphere of place, the rhythm of light, and the weight of shadows, one must not look but learn to feel a space with the entirety of the body through a synthesis of architectural subtleties.

Between Ground and Sky

We occupy a thin line along the surface of the earth. Between ground and sky we socialize, think, develop, and dwell. To mark the ground of this place requires a reflection of the delicacy of our situation and creates the responsibility of imagining a place that will reflect our necessity to dwell. My inquiry into site proposes questions of site perceptions. Just as basic perceptual givens of gravity, up, down, light, texture, and balance apply to body in physical space; horizon, surface, ground, sky, weather, and atmosphere are perceptual givens at the scale of the site.

I look towards Robert Smithson’s 1968 essay “A Provisional Theory for Non-Sites,” where Smithson defines a non-site as a three-dimensional representation of an actual site. The non-site, experienced inside a traditional gallery, is composed of fragments and artifacts from the actual site re-understood in the non-site. I am interested in the interstitial space between the site and non-site—the interstitial space for thoughts, dreams, and emotions. Indexical fragments of drawings, models, surveys, photographs, rubbings, materials, and recordings compose a non-site in that they are materials of the site but not the site actual. The travel between site and non-site becomes a metaphoric in-between that connects memory, indexical fragments of experience, and spatial reality.

“An architectural work is not experienced as a collection of isolated visual pictures, but in its fully embodied material and spiritual presence.” [1] An authentic experience of architecture exists in the interstitial space of visiting a work (site) and recording the work (non-site). I intend to provoke the idea of non-site by developing indexical fragments from each project visited, creating a dialogue between material and memory.

Indexical Architecture

Subtleties in architecture are delicate gestures to the body. Gestures are a form of communication—a subtle gesture with the eyes can inform a world of emotion. The presence of gestures in language, music, painting, walking, and sexuality are only a few instances from the human day. Continually changing, human relationships are a collection of fragmented gestures that form the permanently incomplete perception of who we are. The communication between architecture and the body is the same—architectural subtleties form incomplete perceptions of spatial experience and our perceptions of space continually change as new fragmented experiences reform into memory.

Italo Calvino states that “in trying to account for the density of the world around us, language is exposed as lacunose, fragmentary; it always says something less than the sum of what can be experienced.” [2] Often times, what we are trying to say is beyond the ability of language to capture it and we are required to understand each other beyond language. We are able to do this through our constructed experiences—the collection of fragmented subtleties that allows us to communicate perceptions.

I contend that the architectural subtleties of place, light/shadow, layers, detail, transparency, and texture are inherent subtleties within any spatial circumstance and therefore serve as initial points of departure for my research. Through collected memories of site and fragmented recordings of non-site, these subtleties become a part of our sensual perceptions and shape the gestural relationship between body and earth.

Cultivating Internal Landscapes

I understand architecture as a way of communicating culture and emotion; it offers the opportunity to communicate and understand our relationship to earth, ourselves, and each other beyond the barriers of language. The function of architecture is to make space that enables an experience for the body, recognizing the vast and subtle qualities that structure individuality.

The SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship provided the opportunity to discover, reflect, and interrogate meaningful spatial works through methods of subtlety. By visiting multiple regions, scales, and programs, I cultivated an architectural process that prioritizes sensory curiosity between person (body) and place (site). I recognize that our thoughts, our dreams, and our emotions dwell inside the body; we must understand architecture in terms of the bodies’ subtleties.

The thoughtful reflection of atmosphere woven with the complexities of site provides a collection of subtleties that structure an indexical architecture, a continually changing self-reflective collection of the bodies’ enigmatic relationship to place.

Notes

[1] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of The Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2005), 49.

[2] Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Geoffrey Brock (New York: Mariner Books, 2016), 91.

Reflections

Reflecting on the past year of travel I have had the privilege to visit over fifty cities in fifteen countries. I immersed myself in remote landscapes juxtaposed by the density of urban culture shortly after. Most importantly, I have had the opportunity to spend time within spaces to understand how architecture communicates with the body and cultivates memory.

The travel fellowship has provided time: time to draw, time to write, time to reflect, time to speculate, and time to listen.

My intentions with the travel fellowship were to understand the subtle qualities of architecture, how they affect our nervous system, our emotion, and our physical senses. The nature of the fellowship has allowed me to let those qualities sink into the body, letting my eyes wander, and recognize the subtle qualities of light between each space or feel the small marks of craft from the local building methods.

Unlike other forms of travel, I had the opportunity to visit multiple places with a specific focus. Transcending the tourist expectation of visiting a place, I began to recognize a common thread between vastly different landscapes and spaces, creating new relationships between experiences. While my intentions were to silo architectural qualities to understand their effects, I realized throughout the travel that the space between is also crucial to understanding the subtle differences between phenomena.

In an effort to probe architectural experience, my attempts to silo architectural qualities into their own categories was only an exercise in analysis. Through travel and discussions with professionals, I realize that experience is a separate reality from the physical world we occupy. In this sense, “Indexical Architecture” acts as a toolkit to understand the components of a memory but not actually create new memories: one does not directly affect the other. The nature of experience resolves to a different reality which is influenced by the entanglements of individual identity and cultural characteristics. Our experience is rooted in the metaphoric in-between between our identity (non-site) and the phenomena of our physical world we occupy (site-actual).

Our embodied experience lives within the relationship between our external landscapes and our internal landscapes. Architecture, as an object, is not the experience, but rather, an opportunity to bring meaningfulness to our identities and emotions.

While the travel is completed, the questioning continues. The time spent fulfilling the SOM Prize for Architecture has critically shaped the way that I understand space in relation to the body and will continue to be a crucial reference for prioritizing sensory curiosity between person and place.

France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom

United States

Colombia and Mexico

Norway

Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, and Sweden