Well, its over. Believe me when I say it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. But anyway, here it is.

Critics included Mark Morris, Vince Mulcahy, Arthur Ovaska, Alex Mergold, Richard Rosa, Michael Kubo, Kent Kleinman (dean of AAP).

    



The thesis dealt with ruination - how to act on existing ruins, and how new architecture might become ruin. On the coast of San Francisco, a set of desolate concrete gun batteries, machines made for the measuring of man's sphere of influence out into the ocean, are added upon by a different set of instruments - a series of insertions whose temporary function of a providing meeting spaces for a peace exposition hides a dormant program of a more phenomonal nature - the measuring of time, space, the elements, the human body, and its own material decay.



The more interesting comments included : 

Should one try to choreograph how a building becomes a ruin? Or does one simply leave behind some thing or some kind of trace that is projected for future use without assigning it a particular fate?  I think the argument was really based between the condition of ruin vs. the process of transformation - both require the same thing, but is there an end game? The project is caught between two poles - acting upon existing ruins and thus giving them new life, while planning out its own ruination and eventual demise. Surely the army corps of engineers would never have guessed what would have resulted from their work, and yet, the project seems to claim that all things will still be the same in the end - a ruin. While some of the critics were trying to push (trap) me to choose one, the dichotomy was eventually brought up as a key part of the project. Perhaps not dichotomy, I wonder, but in fact one and the same.



What intention rests in the act of making something of lasting endurance or importance? Kent said that one way we continue to live after death is to make things that are bigger than we are. Perhaps it is exactly the corrosion of this intention by nature in architecture that fascinates me - even our grandest buildings, the collosseum, were at some point overgrown with weeds and plants, will at some point become nothing but dust.

Maybe the project is trying to say something about continuation and shared fate - everything is made of that which came from the earth, and everything will return to it some day. Everything dies, and only difference between man and architecture is time.

So what is "ruin" then, and how does it fit into all of this? The idea of ruin is interesting and tricky in that it is more of a sentiment than a condition. I was asked, I think to define very clearly what ruin is to me, what value is in it. To Piranesi, for example as witnessed in his painting of the funeral chambers (no coincidence!) of the collosseum, it is the poetic expression of this corossion through time, depicting this oneness of being - man and his building, both reclaimed by the earth.

Maybe it is in fact an embrace of death that some critics have trouble with? Vince said, everything you make, as soon as you make it, will someday become a ruin - time corrupts all things. The conscious act of creating a kind of ruin - and how that ruin interacts with the landscape is maybe a bit problematic in its irony - like planning for your own death - no matter how you do it, the result is the same. But perhaps the repercussions are not - how one is remembered determines how one is infused within the landscape of history and I guess that is where the thesis is ultimately concerned. What do we leave behind? This is in a sense far more optimistic than pessimistic - the need, or will to leave something behind that is bigger than ourselves includes within it the vision of future generations who might appreciate our work - have we really reached that point where we are only concerned about our own existence? The end times are near, I suppose? 

Did we need the temporary program at all? Would it be strange if the army corps of engineers had designed those bunkers, foreseeing their obsolescence, to transform into a series of viewing platforms along the side of that mountain? No, I think that would be amazingly elegant and brave. Architecture is bold elegance. I need some time to think about this...

  

Another interesting thing that was mentioned was about the architectural language employed, which was surprisingly not talked about very much - later decided to be nearly irrelevant. The project is - not my words -  like a condensation of architectural history, with clear influences from Hadrian, Vitruvius, Kahn, Scarpa, yet without running into much contradiction - this observation made me think twice about the way I was going about researching, form-finding and how it actually ties into the thesis' ideas about continuation. Instead of thinking about "my" architecture vs "Frank Lloyd Wright's" architecture vs. "Louis Kahn's" architecture, I wanted to negate this idea of needing to define a totally new expression and instead saw all of history, all of those guys who had given their lives to this craft  as leaving behind through their form a kind of wisdom. Not knowledge, wisdom. And I thought of that not as this forbidden fruit that must not be eaten, but instead as my inheritance from them. And I think this is the way I will continue to work until maybe something more will appear, not a conglomerate but something greater than the sum of its influences.

Anyway, I'm tired so here are some model photos :





 



   




Michael Kubo and a view of (half of) the setup


Defend, defend!

Complete Flickr album here. 

A web version of the final book, including the research, will be available (hopefully) in the near future. 

-out!