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This project uses the
architectural design of a contemporary teaching museum as a vehicle to explore the
conceptual and formal possibilities of infrastructure as a "third term". It
investigates the spatial implications of electrical and digital technologies, and explores
one of its most familiar, but often least understood, byproducts: "artificial
light", which Reyner Banham has termed "the light from within" the building
in distinction from the "natural" light from outside. It explores how
electrification and its effects -- artificial illumination, the electric conditioning and
circulation of air, and the co-relations of light/heat and color, as exemplified in the
infra-red, ultra-violet and x-ray scanning techniques used by conservators to treat
artworks -- might transform the spatial organization and public character of a
contemporary museum. These technologies provide effects of artificial light/color/heat,
which can be liberated from their distributary body/container to participate with
architecture to create space. The project draws upon precedent research and critical
readings, to explore the architectural consequences of this emancipation and develop
speculative new typologies for the museum which rethink the public presence and spatial
organization of the museum program.
The Contemporary Teaching Museum is designed for a site near the Fens in Boston and houses
modern artworks from The Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The transient media and avant-garde
techniques of these modern artworks (paintings by Pollack, charcoal and oil sketches by Mondrian, objects by Cornell and Calder) now make the work very sensitive to light and
air, and difficult to exhibit. These technical issues pose interesting questions to the
modern distinctions between the exhibition, work, and study components of the museum
program. Modernism's address of technology often operated as a formal inquiry into the
aesthetics of the machine, understood either in its singular status as object or in its
repeated entity as serially reproduced industrial artifact. This project begins with the
premise that electrical infrastructure, as an internally embedded system of supply,
represents a fundamentally different paradigm, one that has only recently become available
to critical thought. As a spatial idea and as a conceptual construct of relations between
things, the architectural consequences of infrastructure are far reaching and can provide
a critical re-assignment of modernism, one which may suggest alternative relations between
programmatic, spatial and technical agendas.
The architectural problem of the
contemporary museum, becomes one of how to accommodate darkness; how to introduce and
organize with respect to the building's mass, a number of darkened volumes required by the
conservation, exhibition and study components of the teaching museum and how to provide
for and maintain the thermal and luminous conditions they require. Unlike the Modern
atelier, the site of art work production, the darkened volumes of the galleries, study and
the conservation spaces, with their light generating electrical equipment, are primarily
illuminated with "artificial" light, and so must have a mediated relation to the
building's perimeter. This condition poses questions as to how the "façade" may
be considered, and how to imagine a critical program of "artificial" light.
The project focuses on the organization
and distribution strategies of infrastructure, as exemplified in the architectural
development of selected moments of interior space. Advances in "services"
technology (rather than merely "serving" already known spaces) can lead to new
ways to conceive of enclosure, boundaries and the definition of interior and exterior
space. This project considers how walls, floors, and ceilings might be differently
conceived and transformed by virtue of the fact that they now both subdivide and contain
space, the hollow "fleshy" hidden space of building services. Can the
consideration of the multivalent condition of walls as architectural surface and container
of infrastructure provoke new forms, typologies, or program arrangements? At the urban
scale, if electrical infrastructure can be argued not only to maintain but also to
construct the spatial order of the institution, can the organization and distribution of
electrification suggest more discursive relations between "figure" and
"poché", or "served" and "servant" space in the
institution? Given the unprecedented contiguity of infrastructure, how might we relations
be thought of and constructed between spaces once held to be categorically distinct --
between inside and outside, public and private, natural and artificial and between the
various scales of body, building and city? Important in this process is the radical
re-invention of architectural elements -- the raised floor, the dropped ceiling, the
partition, the hung façade and the hollow chase wall -- that make up the familiar
landscape of the contemporary institution.
As concepts about the representation of
light are inextricably linked to the technical media of their production, this project
works with photographic techniques to represent the effects or electrification on space
and use in the museum. It draws upon the implications of Modernist black-and-white
photographic media through the work of Piero Bottini, Maholy Nage, Man Ray, and
Etienne-Jules Marrey, and explore the introduction of color film and the contemporary
co-relation of light/heat/color scanning technologies through study of work of James
Turell, Dan Flavin, and Thomas Ruff and the cinematography of Kryszstof Kieslowsky, James
Cameron, Michael Mann and others. Operative terms and concepts that are explored in this
project include: the figuration of artificial light/color, the potentials of what we may
term contemporary poché, the electrification of the free plan and the Modern
preoccupation with mobility, and the urbanism of electricity -- the public presence of
light as a byproduct. The Modern tradition of built-in "operable" furniture,
with its integration of architectural surfaces, partitions, furniture and equipment,
offers an inventory of prototypes and strategies to explore new ways of organizing the
given requirements of the museum program. Through work with techniques of photography and
color emulsion, this project develops speculative drawings and models to represent the
organizational schemas of infrastructure and its effects on space and use in the museum.
As concepts about the representation of light are inextricably linked to the technology
and media of their production. |