july 2015

Critiques

A symposium with speakers Orit Halpern, Andrés Jaque, Hod Lipson and Michael Sorkin. Organized by Esteban de Backer, David Isaac Hecht, Alejandro Stein and Che-Wei Yeh. Moderated by Janette Kim, Diana Martinez, Leah Meisterlin and Susanne Schindler.

How does architectural research work?

The Performance of Form

by Brendan Moran

A cunning demonstation.

Under Electric Eyes

by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt

The futility of a home that serves nobody and needs no one.

Domestic Homelessness

by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco

New York’s shelter system, to the letter of the law.

Menged Merkato

by Emanuel Admassu

A story of adaptable agency.

To the Street

by Tanya Gershon

Passbooks, permits and the art of public life.

july 2015

Projects

How Do Geographic Objects Perform?

by Neyran Turan

Toward a new materialism.

A Folly for the Anthropocene

by Chris Perry

Not for ‘us’ alone.

The Subjects of Performance

by Neeraj Bhatia

Architecture and the open work.

A Catalog of Devices

by Patrick Joseph Craine

Adaptation through specificity.

Another Efficiency

by Esteban de Backer

The architecture of Pragmatism.

Efficiency As Design

A conversation with Juan Herreros

An instrument to simplify the world.

Efficiency As Integration

A conversation with Mahadev Raman

Triple bottom line.

Efficiency As Behavior

A conversation with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto

Within limitations.

Efficiency As Productivity

A conversation with Craig Schwitter

Actually, we have extra.

Efficiency As Necessity

A conversation with Kersten Geers

An economy of means.

By Default

by Forrest Meggers

Behind the modern curtain wall, and beyond the central stack.

Cloud Theater

by Wolfgang Kessling and Christian Oberdorf, Transsolar

Don’t let performance kill the poetry.

Choreographing Contingency

by Gabriel Fries-Briggs, Brendan Shea and Nicholas Pajerski of Reimaging

How to improvise with robots.

Organic Algorithm, Organic Urbanism

by Travis Jared Marmarellis Bunt and Mathew Staudt, with Tat Lam and Timmie King Hong Tsang

Re-processing Beijing’s hutong villages.

Performance

Performance is enhanced, targeted, tested, specified, reviewed and applauded. In each case, the design of performance is the orchestration of results. Architects might guarantee water resistance, for example, and calibrate this objective against cost, labor or the desire for exposure. Performance frames decision-making by metrics of efficiency, optimization and sacrifice (or yes, satisficing). In this familiar logic of technocratic governance, criteria are also codified in legal terms and challenged by architects who exceed lax building codes or undermine excessive ones. Beyond the technological, as argued in Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance, engineered performance generates productive friction with that of corporate management and art practice. Employee reviews of workplace efficacy and theatrical events alike alter behavior, just as a building’s program might train or untrain well-worn habits. Issue 03, ‘Performance,’ asks how criteria are established and enforced in architectural research practice. How do designers and researchers define, evaluate and communicate performance and its attendant value system? To what degree can we determine or guarantee performance? How do we acknowledge image and perception as a function of effectiveness? Who is performing? In a ‘demo or die’ culture, how and where is performance tested? cover image: Cedric Price, Fun Palace: typical plan, 1963. Image courtesy of Cedric Price fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.