10.14.2006

Purple Gold


I have been thinking about program / site and here is what I have come up with (i hope it isn't jumping the gun):

The entire North American continent was “found” by Europeans who were seeking gold. When gold was not found on coastal settlements, many settlers continued to search for it inland. The promise of gold in America was not fulfilled until John A. Sutter was building a sawmill in Coloma, California. What was first considered “Sutter’s folly” grew into a full-scale national mania of gold seekers. Upon arriving in California, the miners first used simple techniques of mining gold, such as panning. Greed created more efficient technologies of extraction—namely using mercury to increase the amount of gold recovered. Ten to thirty percent of the mercury used was lost, entering the water supply and severely polluting the land to this day. The old mining sites, which litter the Sierra Nevada Mountains, are the physical manifestation of the American dream.

In 1998, a New Zealand Earth Scientist Christopher Anderson discovered that by treating the soil of these sites gold could be made soluable and then could be absorbed by plants. Proposing a model of farming, both gold and the contaminates could be picked up by the leaves of the agricultural plants, such as corn and canola. The plants, whose leaves turned purple from the presence of gold (gold is purple when it is in nano particles), are harvested not for food, but for gold they contain—yielding up to 14 ounces per acre. The process is called phyto-remediation. Since the gold is in nano-particulate form—a difficult state to reproduce artificially--it has direct applicability to the technology industry.

In the context of the American landscape, this represents a new attitude towards the environment. Sustainability is [re]considered not as self-satisfied building technologies (more efficient mechanical systems and increased energy efficiency) but as the revelation of what has not been sustainable, and how natural processes can fundamentally shift our attitudes.

I am proposing a new “gold mine” typology in the hills of the Sierra Nevadas. Taking the form of a resort, ecotourism and agritourism use architecture as a vehicle for remediating our relationship with the environment. Both exposing the scars of the past as well as creating better potentials for the future, the a new attitude towards the landscape and American’s role within it is revealed. Building is no longer object, but is embedded within the processes of reconciliation. The processes of the building are not discreet from the landscape; they are inextricably tied together to introduce a new way of experiencing our [un]natural landscape.

10.12.2006

narratives of incarceration_1_



"All right, he has now put me in my cell. My name is John Mills, 21, black male, prison...
I wanted to be a police officer, you know what I'm saying?

When I was smaller, I used to think about that all the time, be a police officer.

All the sirens and loud noises and blue lights and stuff....

I know my life just took a big turn somewhere. I just don't know where.

...and I started getting in trouble, kicked off the bus, kicked out of school...

And then when I turned 15, I robbed a store.


Yeah, I'm — I don't think I'm fully recuperated... don't know.

I mean, I look at it like this: I'll always be someone able to rob you...

shoot your house up, take your car, cash a check.

You know, I'll always be that person, I believe.

Can't nothing change this.

It'll always be a memory.

Sometimes I can still remember my first night in prison. I cried like a baby, man.

That's all I did, walk around in circles and cry in my room.

I felt like I was in a cage. You know, I couldn't get out.

Once they turned out the lights, it's pitch black and there's so much yelling going on,

it made me feel I was just sick, I was real sick.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten — that's ten months. I got five years left.

Being in prison, I mean, it's like playing a tape back or something, the same thing over and over again. Nothing changes, nothing at all.

Making Space for Art in Architecture


I don’t believe the architect is an artist. I believe I am an artist and that one day I might like to be an architect. A building can be a work of art in its own right, but we should never strive for this above making a great piece of architecture. Rather than seeking a one to one relationship, these two ways of making can and should have a reciprocal effect on each other. An artwork can affect a space just as a building can shape the space in which we perceive or create an artwork. This reciprocity can also be decisive in the process of the creator. Le Corbusier developed a shared language between his architecture and his paintings that was instrumental in his understanding of form, line, and process. In the abstract paintings of modernist painters like Mondrian, Malevich or Matta, the built environment guided a tectonic approach whose aim was not to simulate or represent, but to achieve similar qualities of rhythm, space, and form. In neither case was this critical link a matter of pulling forms from one world into the next, but rather a deeply felt understanding of how these mediums shape the world around us.
I have two principal creative interests, in my personal and academic life they intertwine. I enjoy painting for its own sake, without any responsibility to the world or to the people around me. But because of this my artwork does not have the power or potential to effect a change at the scale that I aspire to. Architecture can do more. An architecture at the service of art. Not subservient, mind you. Not a functional machine for painting, but rather a space that recognizes the needs of artists and is able to support them, materially, economically, spatially. Above all, an artist needs space. A space to work, a space to learn, a space to call his own and a space to share with the community are all essential for any creative person to be truly engaged in his work. The working environment shapes who we are and what we make as much we, as designers, try to shape the spaces around us. This project will be informed by the practice and process of a painter, but will not attempt to create architecture out of painting or vice versa. Instead it will strive to discover deeper links between the two means of expression, to know their own limitations and to allow them to aid each other without ever letting them interfere. The artist and the art itself are not the subject but the client of this project which aims at creating a better working environment for the creative people of all stripes in the East Bay.

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10.09.2006

Le Corbusier on Plans

Robby--you seem to be grappling with some of the same issues I am facing in trying to inhabit Barcelona’s richness and I agree completely with the urge toward un-convention. However, I disagree on the inadequacy of architectural drawings to capture what you are referring to as soul. I think Le Corbusier captures the sentiment in Towards a New Architecture when he talks about plans:

Without plan there can be neither grandeur of aim and expression, nor rhythm, nor mass, nor coherence. Without plan we have the sensation, so insupportable to man, of shapelessness, of poverty, of disorder, of willfulness. A plan calls for the most active imagination. It calls for the most severe discipline also. The plan is what determines everything; it is the decisive moment. A plan is not a pretty thing to be drawn, like a Madonna face; it is an austere abstraction; it is nothing more than an algebrization and a dry-looking thing. The work of the mathematician remains none the less one of the highest activities of the human spirit.

Take Back Wurster


A school exists first and foremost to support its students, not the other way around. This is particularly essential when the place of instruction also serves as the primary workspace. For students of art, architecture and design, the studio becomes a home away from home, if not the primary residence. We may not require all the amenities of a house, but what we do require above any material needs is the freedom to craft our work in our own way, to discuss our work and ideas openly and to learn on our own terms. Currently, however, there is a move within the administration of the CED to take the control of the studio space out of the hands of those who labor there. A system of rules for use of the Wurster facilities has been instituted which not only offends the principles of free speech that once defined Berkeley, but that shows a complete lack of understanding of why and how we inhabit the studio space. Attempts to impose an artificial order on this space will do nothing but stifle the creative energy of the students. Why are they trying to silence us? The voice of the students is what a school of architecture thrives on. Creative people cannot conform to spatial constraints set by bureaucratic policies. They will always subvert the space, in an effort to make it their own, and to take control of the conditions in which they create. We do not work in an office, yet, and we create in order to learn and to experience the joy of making, not to satisfy requirements or to please the higher-ups. The mess, noise, graffiti, music, conversation, sex, drugs, trash, booze and politics that fills our studios are not bad habits or unwanted by-products of our hectic and stressful lifestyles. They are essential companions, without which we wouldn’t be the designers and artists that we are today. Taking these things away from the students, or forcing them outside the studios is a misguided effort to exert control by the administration. It bears disturbing similarities to the current political situation in our country. For years the student body has been placated, largely by the mind-numbing intensity of studio work and by the general sense of well-being that is promoted among the denizens of Wurster. Despite some small disruptions and irregularities, CED students are astonishingly calm, polite, friendly and obedient. However, we will not stand by and watch the values that they believe in and that this school once stood for be trampled upon in the name of a protocol power grab. It is time to Take Back Wurster.

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