Architecture and Field/Work

Suzanne Ewing, Jeremie Michael McGowan, Chris Speed, Victoria Clare Bernie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136884665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Identifying and critically discussing the key terms, techniques, methodologies and habits that comprise our understanding of fieldwork in architectural education, research and practice, this book collates contributions by established and emerging international scholars. It will be of interest to critical practitioners, researchers, scholars and students of architecture.

A selection of critical historiographies, theoretical strategies and reflective design practices challenge us to think seriously about our knowledge, experience and application of fieldwork in architecture.

Field/work techniques

Introduction

Victoria Clare Bernie

The chapters which constitute ‘Field/work techniques’ are concerned with the perceived gap between architectural representation and construction, between the office and the building site, the conventions of notation and the seemingly infinite blur of the late modern city. Throughout this section there is a prevailing sense of loss in the face of this disjunction. In that loss, there is a requirement to remember, borrow and invent, to identify techniques and strategies in order to regain ground and restore significance to the embodied experience of the architect in the site. And the site in question has expanded far beyond its more recent classification, as the footprint or the building plot, to comprise the myriad concerns of lived experience: spatial, temporal, historical, cultural and environmental. It is a field of material and immaterial influences and the role of the architect is increasingly acknowledged as that of navigation over construction.

Navigation of the field, fieldwork, is not a recognised discipline within the formal structures of an architectural education. The site itself is deemed to be contingent and, as Mhairi McVicar observes in her chapter ‘Contested Fields: perfection and compromise at Caruso St John’s Museum of Childhood’, the architect is conventionally required to limit any designation of design intention to the documents and notations of formal contracts, finished drawings and design specifications. Being in the site, acting on the ground and in time, the domain of the earliest architectural practitioners, is lost to the late modern architect. Fieldwork as navigation is primarily the preserve of other disciplines, of science and social science. It is here that the discourses of the researcher and the field are fully developed and the disciplinary paradigms of notation, transcription and translation, observation and participation, documentation and invention may serve to provide a critical resource for the more recent convert to field working.

For architecture, the notion of disciplinary borrowing, the practice of gleaning, is an established methodology. To undertake a second harvest from the practices of others is deemed resourceful, wily in the Greek sense of metis, and culturally self-conscious. In recent years this practice has lost much of its critical edge, favouring instead a careless formal borrowing of images and ideas with little recourse to their cultural significance and disciplinary origins. ‘Field/Work Techniques’ is a sampling from recent fieldwork investigations as a critical response to the hermeneutic, anthropological, ethnographic, archaeological, geographic and artistic impulses that now inform much of the most interesting work undertaken in architectural design and theory. ‘Field/Work Techniques’ is an attempt to describe an alternative terrain where the nascent tools of architectural field/working are considered in the context of their intellectual and practical origins and celebrated for their generative power.

Arguing for representation as an act of participation, Paul Emmons deploys a hermeneutic leap to a point of potential fracture in the architectural discipline; the advent of paper and the genealogy of the drawing board in fifteenth-century Europe. For Emmons, the maintenance of an analogical relationship is vital. The connection between the action of the architect on the ground and at the drawing board being maintained in the familial link between the levelling of the site and the preparation of a fine cotton paper laid out upon the responsive surface of a soft wood drawing board. Here, the actions of the field – orientation and marking up, inhabitation and invention – are mirrored on the ground and in the image, serving as exemplars for the reconnection of architect and site through the critical act of drawing.

Borrowing from strategies of ethnography, the participant observer and the fieldnote, Carolyn Butterworth and Prue Chiles reconfigure the professional document, the site diary and the finished drawing in the context of an active engagement with the building process. Recognising the disciplinary identification of drawings and notes as the resource for finite decisions and contractual agreements, Butterworth and Chiles describe an alternative model of documentation and engagement. ‘Site notes, scratch notes and head notes’ recount the immediate, contingent and generative qualities of the site as re-drawings, adaptations, conversions and conversations on the building site with the craftsmen-builders. Here, the autonomous project of constructing a home, of designing in the expanded field of memory, neighbourhood and family, creates a field for participation and observation in the process of design.

The architect’s specification, the primary communication between the designed intention and the site is, of necessity, a point of departure for construction. Writing in relation to a lost detail in Caruso St John’s addition to the Museum of Child-hood in Bethnal Green, London, Mhairi McVicar describes a professional trajectory away from the evolution of the design in the site, to the prevailing logic of design in the studio and construction on the site. It is here that the ambiguity of the site, the thousand unnamed actions of a negotiated building site, are recognised as contributory factors in the evolution of a design beyond the office. The aspiration of perfection and resolution written into the contractual document and the finite drawing is acknowledged as a beginning, an invocation. The site of the design is refigured as the intention of the office and the experience of the site, the precision of the document and the engagement of the craftsman.

Where the opening chapters of this part borrow extensively from the intellectual ground of history and ethnography to reconfigure the discipline and the site, the later chapters refer specifically to a technical harvest of materials and strategies. Ways of working initially derived from the logics of optical technology and archaeology and subsequently reformed by the practices of film-making and visual art.

Recognising the implications for architectural convention faced with the global city of speed and blur, Krystallia Kamvasinou offers an alternative mode of engagement, of registration, representation and invention, in the form of video technology. Writing in the context of two experimental video works, Kamvasinou describes a finite and an infinite project: a prescribed account of the Stansted Airport train journey as a linear record and a non-linear edit, and an anecdotal sequence of wildshots and outtakes from a documentary study undertaken in Mumbai. Here, a self-conscious borrowing from visual anthropology, documentary film, ethnographic film and video art aspires to a hybrid methodology where video footage might be directed to operate as record, participant, catalyst and generator. In this way, video is deployed as a form of drawing, an embodied experience and a mediated account. It becomes a critical device, able to operate creatively in the field, identifying and acknowledging objects and events lost to the naked eye, and in the studio, as a resource for the spatial and narrative reconfiguration of a recently designated urban condition.

In ‘Blighted’, an account of a singular project in an apparently empty lot in North St Louis, Igor Marjanovi

and Lindsey Stouffer describe an archaeology of the present as a critical unpacking of the seemingly degraded ground of a post-industrial city. Documenting, digging, collecting and collating, borrowing from the formal logics of archaeology, forensic science and conceptual art, the site is reconfigured as a field of objects, of finds, initially deemed to be unrelated but over time, through examination, re-housing, casting and recovery, recognised as vitally connected. Divorced from the site of origin, isolated, cast and drawn, the objects of the site are locked into the familiar logic of the nineteenth-century taxonomy, only to fall victim to the early-twentieth-century fate of collage. The artistic practice of cut and paste creating the ground for invention, for the realisation of architectural forms able to recognise the memory of the site beyond its formal limits; to acknowledge the often silent histories of the urban development project.

Drawing sites : : Site drawings

Paul Emmons

The beginning of modern architectural practice is often traced to the fifteenth century when, following the introduction of paper to the west, architects left the construction site to work at drawing boards remote from building activity (Frascari 2007). In this book’s title, the virgule slashing between ‘field’ and ‘work’ exemplifies the bifurcated condition between field construction and design work (Parkes 1993). This cleaving, which both joins and separates, is the chiasmus that occurs between the constructions of an architect at a drawing board and those at the building site. Current practice assumes that architectural drawings are created with marks conveying information by arbitrary conventions. However, examining the origins of site drawings shows them to be an index of construction, which allows architects to use drawing to imaginatively project themselves into building. This study reveals three levels of the relationship between field/work and site/drawing: the literal drawing on the site, the analogical site on the drawing and the anagogical drawing beyond the site (Gadamer 1989).

Drawing on site

Plots and plans

Since early in the ancient world, plans of buildings were meaningfully inscribed on the earth through stretching cords and driving pegs into the ground (Rossi 2004). The construction of sacred altars following these practices in India has been identified as the ‘ritual origin of Greek geometry’ (Seidenberg 1963). The architect worked on site so that drawings of design, full-scale details, layouts on site and the marking of stones for carving were all closely interconnected activities (Wu 2002).

Vitruvius’s first-century BCE use of the word ichnographia for plans – literally ‘foot-marks’ – emphasizes that this earlier notion of plan is not the current Cartesian idea of a horizontal section, rather a weighty footprint that is impressed into the earth (Vitruvius 1999: I.II.1). While uncertain, many believe Vitruvius was describing the full-scale marking of the earth on the construction site with the word ichnographia. Cesare Cesariano, Milanese architect and the first to prepare a translation and commentary of Vitruvius published in 1521, equates ichnographia with the Latin word vestigium or ‘vestige’ – a word Vitruvius uses to describe the footprints of philosopher Aristippus and the geometrical tracings he found on the sandy beach of Rhodes after a shipwreck (Cesariano 1521: I.XIIIv). In this way, the footprint is joined with the geometrical drawing, both of which provide a sign of human presence. Cesariano clearly included site marking as part of his understanding of ichnographia, describing the practice of laying out the site by using stakes and ropes, drawing on site in dirt and plaster and walking a snowy site to mark out the future building’s plan (Krinsky 1965: 100).

Heaven-sent plans

Cesariano’s description of plans as footprints in the snow directly recalls the foundation legend of Santa Maria Maggiore, known as the ‘Miracle of the Snow’. Reportedly, during the August heat in Rome in the fourth century, one night the Virgin Mary visited the Pope in a dream asking him to build a church for her where the snow falls. The next morning, upon finding the miraculous snow, Pope Liberious used a hoe to inscribe the plan of the future church into the ground (Strehlke 1987). Masolino’s painting of the event (c.1428–1432) shows Mary with Christ reaching down, out of the circular clipeus of heaven, to explain divine action in casting snow down to earth. Otherwise painted in tempera, the snow is in oil, used perhaps for the first time south of the Alps, with bold strokes thickly applying the pigment to render a soft, luminous layer of snow with an otherworldly presence (Bellucci 2002: 60).

Numerous medieval religious structures have foundation legends of miraculously outlined plans in snow or frost, often by the footprints of a large beast such as a deer, bear or bull, as proof of the divine origin of the plan (Remensnyder 1995). This circumambulation to describe a plan parallels the ritual consecration of shrines, and defines it as an area set off from the mundane world (Durand 2007: 62). One divinely directed plan was said to be created by an angel drawing a reed through the dew on the ground. An eleventh-century miniature shows the angel’s staff extending down from heaven to draw out the ground plan with the future building pictured beyond (Carty 1999: 50). Like architectural drawings, miraculous plans begin to make present an immaterial image, as a meeting place between the visible and the invisible.

Drawing in dirt

Stories of divinely drawn plans probably reflect the actual practices of inscribing fullscale plans on construction sites. For example, th...

Table of contents

• CRITIQUES: Critical studies in architectural humanities
• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Field/work practice
• Field/work and site
• Field/work techniques
• Bibliography
• Index