The Diffused Fortress II: Diagram

Posted by

1

Map_of_Geneva_in_1841

[ Part I ]

The significance of Viollet-le-Duc’s analysis is that he describes the problem of fortification as a morphogenetic flux. The fortress is not an immutable architectural type, but a pattern which forms and then dissipates in a reciprocal relationship with various generative pressures (here primarily the increasing range of artillery and speed of infantry movement). In Viollet-le-Duc’s thinking, things are typically seen to begin from some rudimentary point and develop towards complexity and refinement. In the case of the fortress, however, he encounters a force which tends towards dissipation. In this respect the dispersal of the fortress is an uncharacteristic problem for Viollet-le-Duc, and marks its importance as a schismatic architectural event. According to Viollet-le-Duc, there had been a general unwillingness “to realise exactly the new state of things produced by artillery of long range” (1876: 367).

It is now taken as a commonplace that military strategies based on front lines are obsolete. Paul Virilio, in his Speed and Politics (1977) cites von Metch’s assertion: “In total war, everything is a front!” (Virilio, 2006: 96). Virilio, advances the argument that warfare is no longer a limited engagement between clearly defined armies, but is essentially a logistical conflict. Vauban is not simply a designer of fortresses, according to Virilio, but a logistician who believes “that the basis of war is geo-political and universal, that human geography should depend not on chance but on organisational techniques able to control vast spaces” (Virilio, 2006: 42). Virilio describes Vauban’s approach as the construction of a “topological universe” comprised of mechanisms which receive, transform, and return the shock of attack. This is exactly how Viollet-le-Duc’s account should be understood: the point is not to construct a line of enclosure and defense, but to administer an entire territory, polarising it, activating it as a strategic domain, and mapping it through the careful application of geometry. The efficacy of the fortress relies on the space it projects, rather than the space it contains.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, Viollet-le-Duc is describing a deterritorialisation of the fortress wall. In their seminal account of the smooth space of the war machine, Deleuze and Guattari, drawing heavily on Virilio, write: “one longer goes from one point to another, but rather holds space beginning from any point: instead of striating space, one occupies it with a vector of deterritorialisation in perpetual motion.” (1987: 387). Viollet-le-Duc describes the goal in congruous terms: “The important point is to possess an accurate acquaintance with the ground to be defended…  an army ought to be able to fortify itself everwhere, and take advantage of every position” (1876: 374). The wall of the fortress is distributed into open space, its functions transferred to the territory itself. The true power of Viollet-le-Duc’s observation is, as Deleuze and Guattari observe, not that the army can be fortified anywhere, but that it is fortified everywhere.

One of the symptoms of this transfer is the move from planning individual fortresses to the maintenance of a diagram. It is no accident that Viollet-le-Duc, who is fascinated by tectonic detail and fills his books with sections and engravings of joints, employs the logistical device of the diagram here. The fortress is no longer an edifice, but a set of logistical and geometric relations governed by speed of movement, range of artillery, landform, facility of communication, angles of fire. Virilio notes the alliance between diagrammatic thinking and the problem of the fortress, remarking that one of the earliest flowcharts is Charles de Fourcroy’s ‘Sketch for a poleometric table’ (1782). What counts under this new logistical regime is the ability to maintain the cohesion of a diagram. Benjamin Bratton describes Virilio’s attitude to two of the archetypal spaces of modernity: the bunker and the camp: “Both are hygenic, defensive… both spaces, even as they are often architecturally identical, are in their way zones of pure logistics. They are sites where the only compulsion is the execution of governance on a raw mass, mobilizing it, diagramming it.” (in Virilio, 2006: 19).

Distraction

Posted by

0

Thomas Demand, <em>Klause V</em>, 2006

Thomas Demand, Klause V, 2006

For Benjamin, architecture was experienced in a state of distraction.

A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented  the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.

Against works of art which demand specifically directed attention (the dominant tradition of art, according to Benjamin), architecture epitomises the art of distraction. There is a frontality implicit in the gallery situation: we are confronted with a work. The belief that art should provoke aligns with this, as do more traditional ideas of art that emphasise expression or presentation. In each case, art is assigned a frontal, even facial role. Film ‘meets this mode of reception halfway’. Although the audience are placed ‘in the position of the critic’, no attention is demanded of them. Architecture, however, in comparison to its ubiquity, is rarely looked at. It is used, but it rarely becomes the subject of an explicit, directed attention. Even when it does suddenly intrude on our awareness, it often does so in part: it is the doorframe, or the reflection off a window, or the shakiness of a handrail, rather than any cohesive architectural unity that arrests us. Architecture occupies the peripheral vision. It is also noteworthy that architecture does not present itself to the individual, but to the mass: architecture as a shared peripheral experience.

Junya Ishigami, Balloon (2008)

Posted by

2

ishigami balloon 2

This angular, helium-filled balloon was produced for atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo by Junya Ishigami (who is too cool to have a website), for an exhibition entitled Space for Your Future. It uses an aluminium truss frame and thin reflective alumnium panels (they look almost like foil, but I think they are a bit thicker than that). Apparently it weighs about a ton! Images are from Japan Architect 72. A couple of flickr images here.

ishigami balloon

Gas

Posted by

0

Poison_gas_attack

Early in the third volume of his Spheres trilogy, Foams, Sloterdijk says that to understand the twentieth century, you need to understand terrorism, industrial design and the concept of the environment. These three things come together in a crucial scene early in the century: at 6pm on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, 150 tonnes of chlorine gas were released into a north-north-easterly breeze by a newly formed German gas regiment. The efficacy of this attack is still debated: the Germans claimed that 5 000 had died, and many more had been injured, while French officals insisted that while 625 had been injured, only three had died. Gas warfare was to become a major element of the battlefields of World War I. A range of toxic gases were employed on both sides of the trenches. For Sloterdijk, this event marks a crucial innovation; instead of attacking the bodies of its enemies, the war machine could now attack their environment, their very conditions of life. The weaponisation of the landscape (see previously: The Diffused Fortress) had given way to the weaponisation of the atmosphere.

The decisive element was rather that the techniques of Modernity pierced, by means of gaseous terrorism, the horizon of a non-objective design – which imposed the explicitation of latent themes like the physical qualities of the air, artifical atmospheric supplements, and other factors of climate creation in sites of human occupation. Humanism and terrorism are chained to one another by progressivist explicitation. [dodgy translation via French mine]

British_infantry_advancing_at_Loos_25_September_1915

Explicitation is Sloterdijk’s term for the process by which something becomes a subject of intention or operation (well, it has a more nuanced sense than that, I think, but I’m still working it out, and that will do for now). He follows the way that this explicitation of the atmospheric conditions of life leads on to later examples of gas chambers used to exterminate humans, either one at a time, as in the USA, or en masse, as in Germany. The explicitation of the atmospheric conditions of life can also be traced in the development of air-conditioning. Reyner Banham’s Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (see previously: Chilling) gives an historical account of the modern development of architecture as the maintenance of a certain climatic condition. (There is also a good chapter ‘Air Conditioning’ by Sze Tsung Leong in The Harvard Design Guide to Shopping ). The implication is that architecture is a form of life-support system.

blur 1blur 2

Diller+Scofidio’s Blur building (2002) explicitated architectural atmosphere in a new way. The solid matter of architecture is diminished to an apparatus for generating an atmospheric state. The project marks the end of a period of emphasis on how architecture produces meaning or content, and inaugurates an era of affect: the question is longer ‘what does it signify?’ but ‘what effects does it produce?’ In the context of Sloterdijk’s observations on the explicitation of the atmosphere brought about by gas warfare, interest in a dematerialised architecture of atmospheric effect takes on a troubling cast. Sloterdijk does not propose that atmospheric design be rejected as tainted by its military origins. But he does require us to recognise that humanist and terrorist aims are not separated by much. The apparently humanist idea of constructing sensory experience rather than abstract form is not at all far from the terroristic idea of using the environment as a means of manipulating another’s body.

blur nozzle

A Brief Exchange Regarding Infinity

Posted by

0

J.T. Nimoy, The color of art is #A79F94, 2009

J.T. Nimoy, The color of art is #A79F94, 2009

A: “Since then, in the infinite course of the universe, the world is fleeting, we must regard it as precious. This world, its lives and deaths, its towering glories and spectacular failures, and we ourselves, must be regarded as merely a local glimmering of significance in a meaningless universe. But this is no cause for fear or sorrow: it is a great liberation. Our only duty is to burn as brightly as we can in the short time the universe permits.”

Z: “But you have failed to recognise the monumental indifference and claustrophobia of infinity. Your thought is shot through with aesthetic desire. You speak of the world as a glorious flash, like a firework, or the life of a butterfly: fragile, short, beautiful and therefore precious. But all these things unfold in time: you are actually delighting in quickness, lightness and intensity. In a truly infinite universe, neither the momentary nor the epochal count for anything. Infinity is not the the infinite possibility of value, but the end of all value. Conversely, to imagine the universe’s origins, ends and branches: all of this is motivated by an aesthetic desire for the sublime: the desire to be dwarfed by something unspeakably huge. But eternity does not follow hugeness. On the contrary, the eternal universe would be the triumph of mundanity: it would be neither a cruel master against which we strive for survival, nor a glorious blossoming. Contemplation of this universe is neither fearful, nor wonderful: in doing so, you are neither a hero, nor a poet. The eternal universe would be like the sickly grey plastic of this keyboard; the slight headache produced by flickering strip-lights. It would be the casual death of slavery. It is a wonder you can keep from groaning as infinity pours through your letterbox in the form of real-estate magazines. We must hope desperately for the destruction of the universe, which is long overdue.”


Invisible Liquid Topographies

Posted by

2

lagrangian coherent structures

This article in the NYT (previously noticed by mammoth and jargon etc) reports on studies of large-scale fluid-dynamics at Monterey Bay in California. Scientists using a land-based network of high-frequency radar sensors have made detailed maps of flows and currents, revealing a ‘hidden skeleton’ of hydronamic structures that determine their movements. Across the mouth of the bay, for example, is a line of turbulence, ‘like the filaments created by stirring milk into cold coffee’. This line forms a barrier: a floating object on one side will drift out to sea, while on the other it will not escape the bay. The structure is not fixed in place, but although it drifts, it doesn’t disperse.

“The structures are invisible because they often exist only as dividing lines between parts of a flow that are moving at different speeds and in different directions… ‘They aren’t something you can walk up to and touch… but they are not purely mathematical constructions, either’… The line is not a fence or a road, but it still marks a physical barrier.”

The article refers to these as Lagrangian coherent structures, and points out that they exist in water currents, turbulent airflow, and blood circulation. A more general term for these regularities in dynamic systems is singularity. Singularities can be static (the rest state of a system for example), or periodic (an oscillating equilibrium like a pendulum or orbital path). The collection of singularities that determine the behaviour of a system forms an invariant manifold. Manuel Delanda describes them this way:

“Singularities may influence behaviour by acting as attractors for the trajectories. What this means is that a large number of different trajectories, starting their evolution at very different places in the manifold, may end up in exactly the same final state (the attractor), as long as all of them begin somewhere within the ‘sphere of influence’ of the attractor (the basin of attraction)…  singularities are said to represent the inherent or intrinsic long-term tendencies of a system.”

It is fascinating to consider the possibilites of specifying matter not through its static positions, or as a series of temporal frames, but in terms of the singularities which form it: an invisible topography. The currently ubiquitous arch-school procedure of analysing a dynamic condition and then using it to generate static form barely scratches the surface of this way of specifying matter and its behaviour.

monterey bay radar sensors

Three Curious Singularities

The behaviour of two masses orbiting each other can be accurately modelled using the equations of classical mechanics; but as soon as a third is added to the scenario it becomes irreducibly complex. This is the famous three-body problem. However, in the complex phase-space of a three-body system, there are five stable points – called Lagrange points – in this system, at which one object will remain stationary relative to the others. From a spaceship at a Lagrange point, the sun and earth would appear fixed.

Above the Catatumbo River in Venezuela, there is a lightning storm that has been there at least since the sixteenth century. On each of about 150 nights per year there are over 200 lightning strikes. The storm, which was first described by Francis Drake in 1595 complaining that the lightning gave away the position of his soldiers waiting to capture the city of Maracaibo, is fed by anomalies of atmospheric composition, and is a major source of the world’s ozone.

Solitons are stable waves which form in turbulent conditions. Rogue waves, spontaneously generated mountains of water, are believed to be phenomena of this kind, as is the Morning Glory Cloud, which forms over the Gulf of Carpenteria in North Australia. In studies of traffic flows, the term ‘jamiton‘ has been proposed (I’m not sure if that’s serious or not).


Polar Transformation of the Villa Rotonda

Posted by

0

The Villa Rotonda (1550, completed 1591) is a representation of an anthropomorphic world.

“If we consider this beautiful machine of the world, with how many wonderful ornaments it is filled, and how the heavens, by their continual revolutions, change the seasons according as nature requires, and their motion preserves itself by the sweetest harmony of temperature; we cannot doubt but that the little temples we make, ought to resemble this very great one, which, by his immense goodness, was perfectly compleated with one word of his.” (Palladio, 1570, in Norberg-Schiulz, 1980: 127)

The circular space at the centre, which Palladio derived from the Pantheon, figures completeness and order. All the rooms of the house refer back to this stable centre. Another way to look at this is that the central space doubles the outer world in miniature. What happens if, rather than echoing the world in a rationalised way, we make the representation of the world and the world itself coincide, like they do in the legend of the 1:1 map.

By subjecting the plan of the Villa Rotonda to a polar transformation, we can effectively unroll it.  The static closure of the circle is replaced by open-ended linearity. The house becomes a demarcating line: the porches face one way, and all the passages lead through to an infinite interior. What happens to your fancy Renaissance humanism now, Andrea? Huh?

rotonda plan

rotonda plan polar

The result is different if the plan is rotated 45º : before / after

Biggering

Posted by

1

Read this hilariously ignorant editorial from the Herald. The writer, who appears to have absolutely no grasp of the issues involved in contemporary city development, complains that ‘Green thinking’ has been too prominent at the Auckland Regional Council, and that the ARC’s transport plan is unrealistic.

The ARC’s plan aims to “support and contribute to a compact and contained urban form consisting of centres, corridors and rural settlements” – which the Herald’s writer calls a ‘fundamental mistake’. Auckland’s “environment and terrain invite sprawl” apparently.  The writer also laments the Council’s prioritising of rail projects over new roads. It is the writer’s hope that once the Super City is established, the council will be too busy to worry about this environmental nonsense, and let it fall through the cracks, so the city can get on with making more roads and biggering and biggering.

Sustainability and good environmental management are not just about climate change and peak oil, as the writer seems to think (having apparently mastered only a couple of keywords from decades of environmental science, planning, and design). They are about very concrete issues that directly affect the lives of people in the city: the quality of the water at the beach, noise and air pollution, access to community resources, the cost of getting around, the physical health of the city’s occupants, the time spent commuting… Environmental concerns don’t ‘compete’ with economic and social equity concerns, as the writer says; environmental concerns are economic and social concerns. The economics of externalities is outdated.

The writer claims that “Auckland’s roads are of national interest in a way that its public transport is not”, unaware that proper public transport is an essential part of allowing the roads to function properly. All the world’s major cities invest substantially in public transport. It is an embarrassment that someone arriving at the Auckland International Airport can’t catch a train into town.

The Herald’s editor also plays the seedy trick of implying that policies you don’t like must reflect a problem of governance: that only bumbling politicans acting out of bad faith could support policies like this, and that there must be a systemic problem.

The ARC is not being held hostage by garden gnomes. It is doing it’s job: thinking over the long term, and managing the city environment. What did the editor think the ARC was supposed to be doing?

[ crossposted to aaa.org.nz ]


Contingency

Posted by

0

In lieu of spitting on the carpet in the doorway, Vek nodded politely and left the Risk Manager’s office. He waited until he was around the corner before muttering angrily at such a preposterous waste of his time. It was obscene to be managed like this. Vek resented the insinuation that the way he had been managing his department for seventeen years was suddenly risky. And what made him irate was that it didn’t seem like the Risk Manager actually thought this. He had been apologetic, the ridiculous little crab, as if it wasn’t really him asking for thirty-odd pages of forms and boilerplate. He had even rolled his eyes at one point, which Vek took to be implying that the two men were in the same boat really, driven by managerial whims. That it was the system, the institution, that somehow required Vek to stop working for the three days it would take him to fill in enough rectangles to quell its anxieties. As if he, the Risk Manager, wasn’t the institution! As if somehow writing things in a rectangle on a form made them comprehensible and controllable! Planes fell out of the sky some days!

Unwilling to go back to the workshop after his meeting, Vek slunk off home. Stopping on the corner close to his rented flat, he pushed through the grubby glass door of a questionable-looking eating establishment and searched his pockets to see what he could afford for dinner. Not finding much, he settled for a pie and a drink taken at random from the fridge. In the back corner, where it was warm, he settled on a bench: the pie was ok, but the drink tasted terrible. He squinted at the label trying to find a description in English of its contents, but when this proved futile he drank the rest anyway. Reaching into his bag, he took out a piece of paper and a pencil. Exhausted by consistency, he leaned over the page and began to draw the plan of the apartment he would build one day.

Enric Miralles, <em>Apartment Calle Mercaders</em> (1995)

Enric Miralles, Apartment Calle Mercaders (1995)

Gunnar Asplund, Villa Snellman (1917-18)

Posted by

3

I am in awe of this plan! Just look at it. In overview its not that complicated: a two-storey main block with a single-storey wing meeting it at a slight angle in the corner. Rectangular rooms off a couple of corridors. But look more closely: everything is tweaked. Look at the shape of the upstairs corridor! That circular room isn’t actually a circle or an ellipse—it’s amorphous—and look at the shape of the the entry to the room on the left of it! Good grief, is that another stair squeezed in to the sliver of space left over from the corridor? Notice the thickening of the walls where the two wings meet downstairs. Look at the three doors in the first room of the smaller wing—they’re all different sizes. And look how the window spacings slip out of alignment in the garden elevation! The walls enclosing the bath upstairs!

Villa Snellman, Djursholm (near Stockholm), Erik Gunnar Asplund, 1917-18.

[ Pictures of the house on flickr ]


snellman djursholm plan

snellman djursholm elevations

Rangitoto

Posted by

0

Someone at some point decided that Auckland was the ‘City of Sails’ — a moniker that reflects a fairly privileged view of the city. We don’t all have the means to go messing about in boats, and the boats plebs like me do get to go on tend to be of the noisy seagoing lounge type. But even those are ok if you can get up on the roof. Clearly Gummer or Ford or someone involved with the Auckland War Memorial Museum was of a nautical bent, because the museum never makes more sense than when it is viewed from the harbour.

Auckland War Memorial Museum from the water [ photo M. Russell ]

Auckland War Memorial Museum from the water ( photo M. Russell )

According to Richard Toy’s vision of Auckland as a water-city (currently undergoing a revival of interest), the crucial space of the city is the water’s edge. One of the most interesting things about this is that with your feet in the water, the dominance of visual perception is weakened, giving way to a more haptic mode.

On Rangitoto Island, the youngest of Auckland’s fifty-whatever volcanoes, the water’s edge is a fascinating place: mangroves grow on lava, and alpine lichens are found at sea level (I like reading information signs). Fresh water runs off the island so precipitously that it forms a lens of less salinated water visible from the air. The little necklace of baches strung along the shoreline seem precarious. In some places the lava still appears viscous, as if it barely stopped flowing.

Rangitoto - 28

In this context, close to the wharf where the aforesaid seagoing lounge moors, is a small salt-water pool, built by convict labour between 1926 and 1933, along with a hall at Islington Bay and the coastal road (I can think of worse places to do your PD). The slightly cambered walls of the pool are made from the island’s black scoria. The angles of the pool in plan are particularly nice, I think. It isn’t deep, and usually when I go, the tide isn’t high enough to fill the pool, so it’s just a concrete and scoria hollow.

Rangitoto - 27Rangitoto - 32Rangitoto - 39

From in the pool, the view of the volcanic cone above you is lost, as is any view of the city across the water. Your horizon is limited, closed in. But you hear the birds in the overhanging trees, and the wash of the waves just outside. And you feel the coastal flux: the slight sediment in the water against your skin, the temperature of the sun, the water trickling in and out, something eating, someone on the gravel.

Ocean pools are great.

Literary Advice

Posted by

0

If you were to write a novel on human vanity, and in this novel, you imagined the sheik of a wealthy desert kingdom who conceived of a plan to recreate in miniature the entire world, so that every country would become a private island, and every island hold a palace surrounded by pools and gardens, and every palace host one of the most extravagantly wealthy of the globe’s inhabitants; and if in your novel the sheik commanded all his slaves to pour sand into the ocean for nearly ten years; and if at last, abandoned by his fairweather friends, at the end of his resources and humiliated, he was forced to abandon his work, leaving it a clumsy image of the world, as if a child had drawn it; and a single house, the sheik’s own, was left amidst the sun-baked sandbanks; then I would be put in an uncomfortable position. Even if the writing was irreproachable, as I’m certain it would be, I would be forced to find a way of telling you that this kind of sublime romanticism was best left to Shelley or Borges; that the symbolism was crass and obvious and that you had best try again, exercising more subtlety.

[ Credit crunch signals the end of The World for Dubai’s multi-billion dollar property deal. ]

Black Maria: References

Posted by

0

[ Part I ]

[ Part II ]

[ Part III ]

A non-exhaustive reference list for works by Hiroshi Nakao, including Black Maria:

(2004)10×10, Haig Beck & Jackie Cooper ed. (Black Maria, Bird Cage)

(2001) XS: Big Ideas, Small Buildings, Phyllis Richardson ed. (Black Maria, Gisant/Transi)

(2001) Lotus. n111, 2001 (Black Maria, Observation Tower, Dark Box Bird Cage)

(2001) Detail. v41, n8 (Dec), pp1496-98 (Black Maria)

(2000) quaderns. n226 (Jul), pp56-65 (‘Creating a Hollow’; ‘Not to be at Home’)

(1999) GA Houses. n59 (Feb), pp144-145 (House with Gallery)

(1997) ume. n5, pp16-23 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1997) AA Files. n33 (Summer), pp72-76 (Dark House Bird Cage, Studio for Flower Artist)

(1997) Domus. n794 (Jun), pp18-25 (Studio for Flower Artist)

(1996) Japan Architect. n24 (Winter), pp210-213 (House for Flower Artist)

(1995) GA Japan Environmental Design. n17 (Nov-Dec), pp94-96 (Summer House)

(1995) GA Houses. n47 (Oct), pp68-73 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1995) World Architecture. n32, pp88-93: (‘Second Trend in Japanes Architecture; Poetics of HN’)

(1995) GA Houses. n45 (Mar), pp150-151 (Penthouse, Black Maria)

(1993) Architecture d’aujourd’hui. n289 (Oct), pp74-79 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1993) Japan Architect. n9 (Spring), pp228-229 (Dark Box Bird Cage)

(1993) Japan Architect. n11 (Autumn), pp194-203 (‘Black Indoors White Yard’)

(1993) Space Design. n5(344) (May), pp88-89, (‘Report on Ando Exhibit’)

(1992) Japan Architect. n6 (Spring), pp38-53, (‘Creating hollows’, Chairs for a Photographer, Dark Box Bird Cage)

The Worker’s Dollhouse I

Posted by

2

Although dollhouses and their close relatives model railroads appear to be objects of play, they are in fact about work. Dollhouses are expressions of bourgeois value. They are conservative and nostalgic; sites for the rehearsal of conventions of domesticity, gender roles, and social relations.

The dollhouse comes to prominence in Europe at the same time that the private dwelling becomes understood as opposed to the workplace. Benjamin writes that against the uncomfortable realities of the workplace, the individual ‘needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions’. The house becomes a servant space for the capitalist system, a void compelling consumption. Work is a distasteful necessity. In nineteenth-century Europe, individual identity comes from consumption and leisure. This is the world that the dollhouse models and supports.

Edwin Lutyens, <em><a=href "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Mary%27s_dollhouse">Queen Mary's Dollhouse</a></em>, 1924

Edwin Lutyens, Queen Mary's Dollhouse, 1924

The studio I am currently running seeks to reinvent the dollhouse as a critical device for thinking about work, particularly the work of making things. What does it mean to exist primarily as a maker, not a consumer? In this studio the dollhouse is to become an active implement not a narcotic, a trivial decoration, or the training wheels of bourgeouis housewifery.

The project is proceeding through a series of Prototypes and developed surface drawings. Below are a few images of Prototype 2. I’ll discuss some of these separately when I get a chance.

Bookbinder's Dollhouse, Anna Harder

Bookbinder's Dollhouse, Anna Harder

Collapsible Dollhouse, Nicole Taylor

Collapsible Dollhouse, Nicole Taylor

Wearable Landscape, Alison Taua

Wearable Landscape, Alison Taua

Dollhouse for Illicit Manufacture, Johanna Calis

Dollhouse for Illicit Manufacture, Johanna Calis