Disheveled Geometries

Last year, the focus of this course was on digitally re-inventing the analogue technique of “kitbashing” to, as a class, produce a single large-format 3d-printed prototype that illustrated potentially new territories for architectural form. Kitbashing originally emerged from the hobby of plastic model building, and involved using pieces from multiple model kits, glued together in unexpected arrangements in order to produce objects that seemed strange and otherworldly. This technique was adopted heavily by designers of 1970’s science fiction films such as Alien, Star Wars, Blade Runner and numerous other films that predated the emergence of digital special effects. The 2014 Disheveled Geometries seminar relied on existing forms that were radically recombined in novel and creative ways. For this seminar we will be building on this research, but directing it in more nuanced formal and theoretical directions involving slippages of perception between forms and figures, and figures and content.

Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment outlines how decisions involving aesthetics are conducted separately from decisions involving intellection. The 19th century art scholar Konrad Fiedler extends this observation and notes that aesthetic judgments occur, in fact, in the brief moment of time prior to a form being recognized and namable linguistically (in Kantian terms “subsumed under concept”). What these philosophically significant observations rely upon is the fact that there is a moment in human perception where a form shifts from being unrecognizable to being recognized as a complete entity, or in aesthetic terms, as a figure. This moment prior to recognition is where aesthetic judgment, for many, is thought to take place—and that once a form is recognized (subsumen), it is then beyond the reach of purely aesthetic judgment— as it has then been tainted by individual ideas about context, linguistics, functions, relationships and expectations. That is to say that you judge a blue vase to be beautiful or not before you linguistically identify it in your mind as a “blue vase,” and understand that its function is to hold flowers. If a form can exist in two states in the human mind- unrecognized and recognized/completed, or in other terms, alien or familiar, then this course assumes that this moment of perceptual shift can be elongated and confused. Given the immense progress in the control of form enabled through computation, we will work under the assumption that architects can now access the flickering zones between these binary opposites in an attempt to produce new languages of the uncomfortably unfamiliar.

This course will enlist readings from a wide range of sources including the history of Aesthetics, Object Oriented Ontology, Deleuzian formalism, Deconstruction, linguistics and art history. While the background will be theoretical the output will be physical. Accordingly, this course will build on the techniques discovered in the Kitbashing seminar and re-invent them towards stranger, recombinant, and partially figuratl ends. For assistance we will enlist the work of artists and designers from a vast wealth of disciplines to help identify and move forward the techniques that produce these figures that exist on the faultline between the figured and unfigured, recognizable and unrecognizable, familiar and alien. As the course is a continuation of the Autodesk-funded “Kitbashing” research, students will each have a 3d printing budget of, at a minimum, $500 each. As with previous Disheveled Geometries courses, there is the possibility that one student may be sent to Garfagnana, Italy for a one-month workshop to CNC mill, in solid marble, a selected project from the course. This will be dependent on funding which has yet to be determined with Autodesk. Course limited to ten students.