faucet

Underground, days are made from watch-hands.  Late morning ticking into early afternoon ticking into late afternoon with us walking tunnels, upping and downing ladders, shining our torches over wide flat dark spaces with low ceilings, kicking our way through old newspapers and empty cans and thrown-away things.  Places and spaces came and went.  Service corridors, access chutes, flood drains, an old basement factory floor where our torchbeams found the rusted necks of over-sized sewing and winding machines and cast Jurassic shadows up across the brickwork we passed through—history sinks downward—and then on through underground car parks, abandoned archives and vaults, storage bays.  Us squeezing through gaps, climbing rubble, descending PERSONNEL ONLY concrete stairwalls into the roots of abandoned and still-living buildings.

(from The Raw Shark Texts)

(Received: 1st May)

Letter #206

Dear Eric,

Q)  What is un-space?

    A) It is the labelless car parks, crawl tunnels, disused attics and cellars, bunkers, maintenance corridors, derelict industrial estates, boarded-up houses, smashed-windowed condemned factories, offlined powerplants, underground facilities, storerooms, abandoned hospitals, fire escapes, rooftops, vaults, crumbling churches with dangerous spires, gutted mills, Victorian sewers, dark tunnels, passageways, ventilation systems, stairwells, lifts, the dingy winding corridors behind shop changing rooms, the pockets of no-name-place under manhole covers and behind the overgrow of railway sidings.

   Q) Who are the Un-Space Exploration Committee?

   A) They map and chart and explore and research un-space.

    I’m sorry for the format.  Today is a bad day.  All my structure is gone.

    Regret and also hope,

    Eric

(from The Raw Shark Texts)

Since I don’t have access to an architecture library at the moment, I’ve had to improvise.  Old theses are available online as PDFs, so I’ve been searching for ones that seem related to what mine might be, and seeing who they cite.

So far, Kevin Lynch, Aldo Rossi, Alan Berger, and Alois Riegl stand out as being cited by multiple people.  A good place to start once I get back to school.

Bit the bullet! To what have I just committed myself?

What I sent to Prof-in-Charge:

(working) Title:  Unnamed Spaces & Clandestine Construction
Brief Summary: An examination of abandoned and unused spaces, borrowing the idea of “un-space” from the novel Raw Shark Texts—dark tunnels, stairwells, old boarded-up houses, various underground infrastructures.  Touching upon ideas of adaptive reuse and historic preservation, collage and spolia, ruin theory and memory.

Vague enough that I can make it work, I think (hope).

A conversation immediately following my post from last night:

jonesy: what about like, aggressive repurposing of existing space?

jonesy: like you take over the apartment upstairs, and knock down a wall to the building next door

me: what in the what!  this exact idea was in my dream last night!

jonesy: a secret urban labyrinth!!!  that you walk right by every day and never notice

me: an apartment carved out of multiple buildings

jonesy: a bookstore would be better

jonesy: claustrophobic teetering shelves and the smell of old paper

me: and that’s in a book I’ve read!  The Raw Shark Texts!

First, about my dream 2 nights ago.  It was quite elaborate, as I slept in Sunday, allowing more time to dream.  Part involved going to this apartment that was on the second floor of a house, which was built behind an apartment building, and another house was inexplicably built between those two.  It was a convoluted path from the street to this apartment.  And the detail was incredible: on the back side was a door to a roof terrace, and I noted that on the floor below, there was a similar door, but it was plastered over, from the inside.  The door had glazing and a side light, and you could see the plaster backing beyond.  There is so much more that I can still see, I wish I was a better artist, and was able to quickly capture what I can see in my head.

In another part of the dream, I passed a number of row houses and apartment buildings, and I could perceive that there was an apartment built through them, hidden inside, spanning multiple buildings: precisely what Jonesy suggested the following evening!

The Raw Shark Texts is a rather unusual novel.  It is noteworthy for its typography/layout alone (with passages of the text formatted into sharks, etc.) but the ideas within are fascinating too.  Relevant here, is un-space, which I have defined previously.  Part of the novel takes place in a structure in un-space, which is made entirely out of books.  It is labyrinthine, dangerous, and beautiful.

I feel I should also mention my favorite novel of all time, Remainder.  Read a good, succinct synopsis here.  This is book is a part of me; it is critical to the understanding of me as a person.

I once read a short story about a king who became obsessed with maps.  He wanted an exceptionally accurate map of his kingdom, and the maps he orders become more and more elaborate, eventually becoming models, while also increasing in scale.  At the end of the story, he orders the creation of a 1-to-1 scale model (an exact duplicate of his kingdom!). 

The closest I’ve come to relating anything above to existing architectural texts is in linking “un-space” to Rem Koolhaas’s “Junkspace” (read the article in a PDF here), but his Junkspace is truly something very different, and only connects if forced.  This is why I don’t have a “thesis project”—I don’t know how to connect my thoughts to established architectural literature.

I would like to make a map of unspace.  I would go door-to-door, and investigate every house for unspace.  I could also pick a number of well known architectural works, and study their construction documents for unspace, and diagram it.

To follow, thoughts/ramblings about architecture and thesis and life, as I think this stuff through:

The latest BLDGBlog post is very relevant to me: Indefinite in Number, But of Certain Fixed Shapes  It also relates to a quote I posted a while back…  how do the toys we play with as children affect our world as adults?  Specifically, architects and the building toys of their youth (but generally speaking too—our understanding of the world is different than our parents, as theirs was from their parents; but how and why?  What are the mechanics of this process?)

It is difficult for me to answer questions like “why are you studying architecture?” (I say something about how I “used to” play with LEGO…)  It is less that I have a reason, more that it just is who I am.  I’m fascinated by how the world is built, how things fit together.  If I could build a scale model of everything ever, I would.  “Architecture” is really a collection of all sorts of things—art, history, physics, sociology—and I like it because I get to study many different aspects, which aids in an overall understanding of the world.  I want to be able to stand in the street, and look around me and understand how everything I see is made, how it works, why it is the way it is, how it got there.  I want to visualize it in 3D exploded view, every part, every component, and understand everything there is to understand about each one.  I want to zoom in and “see” the electrons whipping around; I want to zoom out and see the stars and galaxies.  And for all of it, I want to wind forward and back in time. 

I want to trace a single atom through all time, expanding outward from a singular point, whirling around in a proto-star system, compressed into a higher element, exploding outward only to be whirled up into another proto-system, this time solar, pulled out of the earth, floating around, traveling through a daffodil, inhaled by Abraham Lincoln…

I want to be able to write something like the Futurist Manifesto—but less jingoistic, misogynistic, etc.—but to do so I need what I’d call a “persistent worldview,” a holistic understanding of our times, the zeitgeist.  What does it mean to be a “millennial;” what, precisely, is our “pop” culture; who am I and what am I supposed to do with my life?

I enjoyed the movie Inception, in part by its idea about architects being uniquely suited to dream up worlds.  I am fascinated by my own dreams, which can vary from so real that I’ll be confused later whether it actually happened to fantastic stories which don’t involve me at all, worthy of being short stories; vividly detailed locations which recur, as if all of my dreams take place in a single world, like ours but different.

And, I want to pull something out of all this that become a thesis topic.

Uh-oh, it’s time to choose “Thesis Chairs” aka the people that will help/judge me on my thesis project. 

I need to figure out what me thesis is going to be!!

Exciting news, everyone!  Today in my dreadful morning class I came up with a great idea, for thesis.

It sort of relates to my original idea, but I was never sold on the urban housing angle in that.  Instead, I want to design the opposite of monuments.  That is, instead of things that are of the past, things that are for the future.

A simple example:  imagine an aqueduct built in some cold frozen part of Canada.  It doesn’t work right now.  But in X-hundred years, given predicted global climate change, water will flow, and the aqueduct can be put to use by future generations.

The idea is that things may change/deteriorate such that future generations do not have the capacity to construct such a thing, but would benefit from clean water.  So we build them now, knowing they’ll be needed in the future.

The most apt precedent I can think of is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.  Related, methods of disposing of nuclear waste in “This is Not a Place of Honor,” The Long Now, ruin value theory, The World Without Us, and how Roman infrastructure was used during the Dark Ages.