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Hello, everyone.
Thank you for coming.
It's great to have you in this day,
that the school is almost empty.
We have Megan Panzano today in this talk,
and I just want to make a brief intro-- and also, many of you
know her.
Megan is a Design Critic in Architecture
at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
She currently coordinates and teaches
the first core, the studio and undergraduate programs.
First Core Studio is one of the most
difficult and sophisticated firms we have,
and it takes a lot, and I'm very grateful of the work you're
doing.
She has received a Bachelor from Yale and her Master
from the GSD.
She graduated with honors, distinction
and numerous prizes, including the James Templeton Kelley
Thesis Prize.
She has made recently an exhibition
in this school, Living Anatomy, that probably you
remember well.
In addition to teaching at the school,
Megan practices in Boston, where she is the founder of studioPM,
a design practice invested in research and production
at multiple scales.
The name of the studio-- last time, I also
talked about the name of this studio.
It seems that this is a key part of the young generation.
This studio itself aims to be operating on the edge,
exhibiting dual behaviors, and inviting
multiple interpretations.
There is a traditional reading of the studio's name, PM,
Panzano Megan-- but the studio website
suggests some alternative interpretations--
a studio of polymath pursuits, a studio
in search of paradoxical matter, or a studio
that works late in the PM.
This isn't very common, as well.
Well, I think that the studio aspires
to define itself at the same time with all
these descriptions.
Let me just add a little bit, that Megan's practice
is representative of a larger set of young practitioners
who are establishing edge cases for architecture
that are simply American.
These are practices which value balance self definitions.
They work on similarly ambiguous objects,
and in similarly indeterminate situations.
Their instinct is to move towards abberant issues,
in search of inducing forms which maintain
the potential to surprise, to evolve
or to show that they have contained more content
than you had once supposed.
I think that today will make a kind of demo
of what I have-- I hope that I have explained here
in this brief introduction.
Let's say hello to Megan.
Thank you, Inaki, for that introduction.
I hope to meet that bar, that's the aim for today.
And thank you all-- also Inaki, thank you
for the opportunity to contribute
to the Innovate Lecture Series.
It's been a lot of fun to attend and watch
past colleagues of mine make these presentations,
and I'm honored to be a part of the group.
I want to thank all of you for coming and joining
this afternoon.
I know it's a very busy time of year,
but it's nice to see so many familiar faces in the room.
OK, today I'm going to present completed
and ongoing work, produced through
my independent practice, studioPM, which I
began in 2013, three years ago.
I've curated three projects, with one short cameo appearance
of another, that explore a topic of perpetual interest to me.
And I think you can find echoes of this
across my expanded set of past and present architectural work,
The Edge.
I've selected this talk title for a few reasons.
First, I'm framing The Edge as a conceptual seat that
enables control over contingencies, which
I'm defining as conditional occurrences that
carry a degree of instability with them.
I imagine this as occupying the line between things,
a series of if-thenisms subject to variable pressures,
with time as a dominant factor.
Second, the contingencies specific to each project
that I'm going to present are rescued from what
may be considered the periphery of architecture,
an edge of another sort, and are centralized
in each project as a primary architectural engine.
Each tests the generative capacity
of this newly essential variable.
Lastly, all the projects that you'll
see today hail from The Edge, occupying as yet
undefined space at the margins.
And all should be seen as experiments
in bringing some edge to The Edge,
and establishing spatial identity where
it is not yet found.
My approach to designing in this way,
incorporating the uncertainty of the real,
draws vitality from the work of a pair of contemporary artists.
Barry Le Va, whose work explores the intersection of outcomes,
or inconsistent outcomes at the intersection of action
and material, as is in the case in this project, Cleaved Wall,
and Disentangle.
And Mark Dion, who's very artistic medium
is unpredictable found material mined
from institutional archives, or coastal archeological digs,
as it's in the case in this project off the coast of Maine.
He takes these objects, and imbues them
with new value based on and associations
within the space of a collected and displayed set.
And I'm arguing that both artists deal
in time, the process-based work of [? le va ?],
and the durations of expeditional digging for Dion,
and also both operate at the edge of control.
The first of my projects that extends these concepts into
built form is a completed exhibition on the Khumb Mela.
The show is the globe-trotting space invader
that has been traveling internationally
to 10 different sites since its opening here at Harvard
this time last year.
US locations, in addition to a few
already under it's belt here in Boston,
include New York and San Francisco,
with global spots in Delhi, Mumbai, Basel, Switzerland,
where it's currently installed-- and it'll
be back here at the MFA in May, and move on to Santiago, Chile
later this year.
The very great team at the Harvard South Asia Institute
hired me to design the exhibit to cohere content collected
by various schools documenting the event of the Khumb Mela,
a Hindu pilgrimage that occurs once every 12 years
and all about India at the confluence of the Ghanges
and the Yamauna Rivers.
Bathing in the sacred river at this time
is believed to cleanse one of all sins,
so there's an enormous impetus to attend.
The event draws up to 70 million people
over three sacred months, generating
an enormous temporary city to house and serve these crowds.
Every 12 years, the alluvial plain left behind changes,
and new ground appears as host to successive events.
This necessitates an adaptable planning grid
for the development of each successive pop-up mega city.
The flexible grid was extended into my work
on the exhibition as a tool for designing
through reconfiguration.
Anticipating an array of host sites
that were very radically in size axial and circulatory lighting
and structural conditions.
Through three host sites known at the outset,
as you can see diagram then the series of plans that right
a large, medium, and a small-- Boston, Chile and Basel,
respectively.
We developed a base and fixed set of panel dimensions
that would invade these spaces in interesting ways,
slipping within and nesting new space into existing
architectural containers.
32 self-structural panels of three different widths
are all seven feet high, large enough to make their own space,
but not entirely vanquish their hosts.
These panels cross-register research
on the Kumbh Mela by topics organized into four arms.
And this is one version of the large instantiation
was actually installed on Harvard's campus in April
of last year.
These four arms are linked at a central space,
an aquatic atmosphere which is animated by water.
Two videos of the bathing ritual with sound
were both front and rear projected
onto the panels of the exhibition,
and immersive imagery populated this space
as well-- scaled to such a size that it was intended to draw
the viewer into the event.
The four topic arms can spatially
reconfigure, combine, and extend,
as is the case in this medium format example--
or atrophy to a set of core panels around the aqua
atmosphere as site extremes necessitate.
And all of the content of the show
is laid out on panels with a system
of very consistent datums to enable
all of this sort of variable configuration, as need be.
The show's international itinerary
is also enabled through material specificity.
All of its space is created through light weights, printed
scrim screen panels, affixed like stretched canvases
to hollow, light gauge anodized aluminum
frames, that can conceal LED lighting within for self
illumination.
Every component disassembles and flat-packs
into crate size for shipping efficiency.
After a series of prototypes the two fabrics
were selected for their ephemeral light emitting
qualities, but also for their precision and their ability
to withstand iterative install and deinstall processes.
The entire exhibit can be deployed and install completed
by a crew of two, in as little as two hours, which
several event deadlines have necessitated already.
This is one example of our prototyping,
I think our third round, from unpacking materials
to setting up a panel.
The panel size allows for slippage our rounding
through existing spaces.
Their particular transparency enables
them to be conditioned by variations
in each environment-- creating rooms within rooms,
and passages within passages.
The slippage of exhibit space and site
produces each time something new,
as these two variables work in contingent concert.
The exhibit is as much about iteratively redefining
the narrative of its own content in relation to each site,
as it is a series of experiments in redefining each containing
space, recoding existing patterns of use and experience
through its temporal presence.
And you can see the aluminum frame carcass of sorts
at disassembly here, ready to flat pack
into its crate and freight away.
So I'm going to now land us in a very different project, whose
construction is imminent, called The Stowaway
House, and this time, in a fixed location.
The project is located at the southernmost point
of New Jersey, very near the shore--
but not the Jersey Shore that you all might be thinking of,
popularized by our very good friend Snooki and company.
Rather this, a town brimming with early Victorian
craftsman-era buildings, the West Cape May Historic
District, a national historic landmark,
is one of the nation's earliest resort towns.
As such, the project that I'm working on
was required to smoothly syncopate
with its context, a stealthy gable with a twist.
But conceals a more dynamic hyper-articulated interior.
And these three images allow kind of peek into its peak.
This dualism of a smooth exterior
with a differentiated interior foregrounds other dualities
that play out in the design.
So the site is just blocks from the beach,
and my project actually replaces an existing carriage
house on the property that has seen better days.
It's design addresses a pair of dueling needs and occupancies.
Seasonally, it must toggle between serving
as a souped-up guest suite, and also providing
storage space for beach gear for owners of the main house.
So the small space that you see in gray
must swerve between identities of autonomy and appendage.
The two sets of dueling occupants
that would share this interior are here
measured in scale with each other,
the array of vacation gear and the four guests that
would co-occupy the space.
The gable roof is pulled in the diagonal along its ridge,
to produce twin peaks that legislate exposure
to neighbors on two opposing edges, the main house
at the Northwest-- the kind of upper left right here--
and an adjacent guest house of the neighboring property
at the southeast corner, down here.
The lower portion which you see here cunning plan
is thick enclose the surfaces of variable depth containing space
for both gear and guests.
With wall tapering calibrated to a precise but odd beach mat
storage meets sitting bench dimension, at its narrowest
edge here, for example-- and deepening
to an equally precise but strange surfboard
closet-meets-kitchenette counter depth of the opposite end here.
Tall points on each peak land midway over a private sleeping
loft-- here's one of those peaks in the other.
And these lofts are sort of retreating
under the geometry of the roof line
to avoid exposure to those two neighboring properties.
Adjacent to these private sleeping
lofts, a skylight slots in volumes of natural light
adjacent, which eliminate the sectional depth of the house.
The cyclic presence and absence of gear
is celebrated in the lower portion.
This flux projected into the interior
through lockable cabinet doors of translucent white tempered
glass.
The space stripped of its conventional cues of use,
and something else is layered.
The legibility of the animate and inanimate
introduces temporal variation into the interior
that it would not otherwise have.
In contrast, the pair of upper sleeping lofts
are contained within a thinned exterior,
producing a pair of spaces of escape
for lounging by day or star gazing by night.
These dualisms play out within a singular interior volume,
bound by standard 16 inch on center spaced wood frame
structural bands.
Each of these express continuity from the tapered thinner rafter
at roof, down to the thickened super stud containing space
below.
The goal being that when you're within one,
you can never fully evade the other condition.
There's a kind of equal presence of the thick
within the thin, and vice versa.
In this way, the hope is that the wood frame
becomes a stable foil for some of the instabilities playing
out inside.
And this model depicts the singular void
of the interior, the subject slash object
space, constrained by the regular rhythm of the framing
bands, the structural bands, which you see here
in negative relief.
I think of this as the kind of structural Spanx
model of sorts, constraining this burgeoning interior.
The larger site for this project is
typified by properties with similarly coupled mean
and auxiliary structures.
And you can see that the secondary structures that
dot those lots are highlit here in this larger site plan.
And my work in West Cape May is occurring during a time
when guest rental demand is just exceeding supply,
so this is also my plan to expand
my own temporal engagement with the beach,
and hopefully work on a series of projects like this.
In addition to pointing forward, this project
also points back and extends into
built form research trajectories I began here
in my design thesis of 2010, a project entitled A Living
Archive, in which I was working on the development
of a new type, a part house, part museum,
part storage-- that investigated the architectural implications
of reappropriating archiving as a personal enterprise.
In this project, I was working on exploring a design that
would enable ambiguities of surface in space and inside
and out to play out through the adaptation of Klein bottle
geometry, as the kind of geometry
of the base unit, in which containment would be negotiated
through toggled reading of surface and depth,
and concealment and reveal.
In the project, the single surface of the form
was thickened and thinned at varying rates
to house both object and subject simultaneously.
You can see here a kind of composite multiview drawing
three plan drawings of the unit that I developed
with unfolded interior elevations adjacent,
and calibrated to the spaces in the plan
with a scaled-up section combined in one drawing.
Circulation through the interior would
reveal boundaries and thresholds that
were continuously unfolding, negotiating
for primacy with the spaces that they enclose.
So these views would be equally animated by one circulation
through the interior, as they would
be through the cycles of accumulation and dissipation
of objects that would be encrypted
on their thickened surfaces.
These original bower leaf drawings
in addition to others as part of the full set,
along with representations of the beach house
are both currently on display library in the interior matters
exhibition, so you should check them out.
I like them-- I'm happier with them
in their physical, real form than I
am in their projected secondary presence here, so take a look.
Lastly, this current and in-process project
for Save That Stuff negotiates cycles
of accumulated matter with the volume turned up just slightly.
Save That Stuff is located along the industrial waterfront
in nearby Charlestown, Massachusetts,
and they are a wonderful, incredible and
independently-owned company-- a major materials recycling
facility here in the Boston area,
located specifically just at the base of the Tobin Bridge South,
with a 60,000 square foot plant on just over four acres
of land.
And here they process and prepare
250 tons of recyclable material per day, three system assisting
bailing that turns out textures like this constantly
a kind of defamililarization of the familiar
that I'm always seduced by.
This processing requires over 100 trucks
deliver and pick up on their site daily.
And this incessant trafficking of trucks and stuff
results in this, which I affectionately
call a cluster truck.
Which is a byproduct of two things-- first,
they're a great success, they have a lot of clients
right now, which is a wonderful thing.
But also a byproduct of the off geometry and disconnection
on their existing site.
So this is an existing site plan,
you can see the kind of wedge shape
at bottom here, which is called the front yard,
disconnected from the rest of the property
at top, by the main plant building through which trucks
must actually circulate to connect these two spaces.
So in order to resolve the cluster truck patterns
on a site so intensely charged with varying quantities
of moving matter, existing corridor and boundary
conditions were measured and assessed
to prioritize vehicular flow on site,
and develop a site design plan that would enable the company
to grow in three phases, lining these truck pads.
The first, at the southernmost point,
sort of infiltrating that wedge space
of the front yard, an outdoor meeting event
space for the company.
The second, a new scale manager's
office, just inside the wall of the main plant building,
and the third, a pair of new buildings in the rear yard,
a new organics, and a new single stream recycling center.
And we'll be tackling the design and construction
of these in sequence over the next few years.
This, along with the ambition to cohere the fragmented
halves of the site to one another,
and through these new architectural additions.
We developed a super graphic of wayfinding
striping in two hues and rhythms, one for people--
the more densified pattern that you see at bottom,
and one for trucks, the more attenuated pattern.
And the thought is that the architectural pieces
would become a kind of built volumetric extension
of these two patterns.
Influenced by the linear textural array
of build matter flowing through this base constantly,
and mining corollaries in various existing
industrial materials on site, the project
has evolved into a study in oscillating registrations
of a striated field, toggled readings between 2D surface
and 3D volume.
The goal being, at times, logics of interiority and exteriority,
and the indices that distinguish horizontal from vertical planes
are erased, and a closed flatness
is registered, as is the case in the two images at left.
And at other times, these same fields
reveal the array of spatial volumes they contain,
as seen in the image at right.
We're aspiring to retain a seemingly seamless perception
of the striated banding, in either of these two instances.
And you can see the fold lines of that continuous surface
added to these diagrams here.
These at times oscillations between surface and volume
are currently being explored through a choreographed series
of vantage points as one arrive on site,
and traverses from front to query our divide
this system of wayfinding striping,
which we plan to paint on the ground in traction
epoxy imprint impregnated asphalt paint.
And you can see that this series depicts that root,
and the kind of the choreography of the relationship of these
striated surfaces from entry gate through front yard
through plan building and rear yard in 11 moments in time.
I'm also working through snapping materials and seams
of the architectural projects to align with these painted
super stripes, and extend the striated field
into the third dimension.
Equally interested in the capacity
of a single striated surface to flicker between readings
of flat and volumetric.
This is a diagrammatic study of the rear wall
of the scale manager's office, which we're calling the Baylor
wall, to be composed of two layers of translucent poly
carbonate with a grain oriented vertically that would contain
within it end cuts of baled material, in this case,
print matter, that could flicker and reflect light
in different ways as traffic movement behind it
would vary lighting conditions that would be allowed to filter
through.
This summer, we'll be tackling the first of these-- the site
striping, and the first of the architectural projects.
For this first outdoor parklette for staff and events,
we'll be tapping into a kind of readily available resource,
an accumulation in excess of wood shipping pallets on site,
which we plan to take apart and organize
into a series of design platforms
that, like tangrams, can be easily reconfigured to enable
a variety of events on site.
And this is an example of a kind of every day
linear arrangement, which would enable impromptu meeting
and lunch break space.
These platforms could be remixed to host company and community
events.
Save That Stuff collaborates with a bunch of community
initiatives, and they threw really great parties,
so we needed something to formalize this and ensure
its endurance on site.
Or these platforms could be broken down further,
to provide much-needed privacy islands for staff on site.
Important to me as I work through this,
is the intentional reorientation of decking grain
on parts of the platform.
So even when the geometry aligns,
these misalignments in pattern always
overtly point to other possibilities.
A tracery of something else is always present,
a point to contingencies are the specific conditional
occurrences that would activate change over time.
And that is what I have on The Edge.
[applause]
Thank you.
We have Jennifer and John [inaudible]
with Sophia [inaudible] and Justin.
Can you go to the table and
[inaudible]
As you all know, the idea is that some students
of the school and some instructors
respond to the presentation, and then we
open a little bit to the public, for some minutes, OK?
So, you stay here.
I got it.
I'm here.
You suffer here.
That's fine.
So please, who would like to be the first to--
Yeah, sure, I'll go.
I have a-- Megan, thank you for the presentation.
It's really great to see the work together.
I've seen the-- separately before.
My question for you-- actually, I was reminded of-- my question
is about time, the temporal aspect of your work
relative to what you're calling The Edge.
And also about the spatial properties of what
you claim to be an edge.
And a question about how thick or thin The Edge really is--
I like this question.
--and how much you need to rely on a short amount of time,
or a long duration of time relative to thickness
and thinness in each case.
Yeah, OK.
That's a really good question.
I think my interest in this-- obviously, well, all
of these projects deal with kind of interrogating architecture
in its objecthood.
They look at ways to fold in pressures from a larger field.
Sort of as a means of getting architecture out
of the kind of status as a static, fixed, frozen entity,
let's say.
And I think that that brings time into it
when I am trying to always sort of, through that enterprise,
find ways to register that in real materials of architecture.
And it gets into the concept of medium specificity.
So exactly what constituent elements might
we claim as being ours to work with in a given art form.
In this case, in architecture, it's
a Clement Greenberg term from the 1950s.
But an argument could be made that a certain limited set
of constituent elements have been played out,
and we've exhausted what they can provide to us.
And that we're in a time now of kind of postmedium,
having to deal with-- grapple with a kind of definition
of an expanded set of constituent elements.
I would add time to that expanded set,
and this has been taken up recently
by Sylvia Lavin, who talks about a kind of supermedium
as being an answer to a kind of postmedium
specificity, in which she defines
a supermedium as incorporating the kind of component of time.
In her case, she thinks about it through finding avenues
to incorporate digital technology,
or digital projection into architecture.
And thereby engage time, surfaces thickened with time,
through that element in the mix.
In all of these projects, I'm taking that up,
I think, the idea of a supermedium,
and riffing on it, with time as the central element I can use.
I think it may be more obvious how
it is working in the later two projects, maybe.
In the exhibition, thinking about thickening surfaces
is a really important part of that project.
So, when my work designing the exhibit
ended, and it was up and installed,
that was really the beginning of the project for me.
So in no way do I think the medium of architecture stops
at the thinness of any of those panels,
the screen stretched over the frames.
It's actually through the panel, through the space
of every containing space, that that exhibit sort of lands in.
All the way to the edges of those containing spaces.
And that has a time component within it,
because those sites change constantly.
All of the kind of variables that come with that
is what I-- that's a thickened medium, my version
of a supermedium, with a new animated agent that
has site to do with it.
But also time to do it in the mix.
That is like a two-year duration,
to answer your question about duration of time.
So the project is like a two-year project.
That's where it's at, for me, is the interaction
of the exhibition with those host sites,
and all the variation that comes with that.
In the others, I think it's a seasonal cycle, let's say,
in the beach house.
So it's a kind of-- a couple cycles
of time throughout the year that may change
one's experience in that space.
In the way that I'm thinking about the recycling center
working, it's a kind of duration of time
that moves from entry to rear of the space.
And the series of almost anamorphic perspectives
that would reorient your relationship
to the striated fields that are a part of that project.
So, that's my answer to the different durations.
But time is definitely a part of it all.
Yeah, we'll get into it more.
OK.
So, Megan, I was trying to come up with the question.
Because you know you're respondent,
and you're sitting on the front row.
And I found myself kind of moving all over my page,
so this might sound a little messy.
But I wanted to kind of make a reading of what I saw,
and some things that I didn't see,
but I know that are in your work that you're
doing in your practice.
So when I was thinking about this morning,
prior to walking in this room, about the work you're taking on
at studioPM, I'm reminded of a quote
that Pedro Gadanho, the former curator at the MOMA
said when he first kind of came into office in 2012.
When he said, "Curating is the new criticism."
And he left, MOMA last year.
But I do want to pause on that for a moment,
because it seems like there's a group of architects
who are curating other people's work, or other material,
or other disciplines in the case of that first exhibit
that you showed.
And I'm thinking about Andrew Holder's work
at Michigan, where he was tasked with kind
of curating a rare books thing.
So these are-- and it just seems like there's
a collection of people working on this,
and I think what you have to do when tasked with these things,
is you have to make a critical reading of content.
But then I believe you're also working
through architectural problems at the same time.
And so you're sifting through content,
you're sifting through the flexible in that first exhibit,
the super thin wall.
And yeah, if you could just talk on any of these themes,
and if you think that there's relevancy to this.
Because you didn't spend a lot of time talking
about your thesis, but we know archiving, curating,
collecting is something you're kind of obsessed with.
Yeah.
I'm a meta-collector, right?
I collect collecting, that's definitely the case.
I have a lot of experience doing exhibition design, which always
brings in-- even from the design standpoint,
I think it brings in curation, you can't avoid it-- and have
co-curated shows as well.
So that's a part of all this.
I think it's a kind of narrative,
or at least producing a kind of experience.
And I'm trying to play that out spatially
through architectural means in these projects.
But I think I'm trying to draw threads from my own obsession,
with kind of collection and curation,
now through these projects.
I think also, there's a certain--
these aren't-- when I'm dealing with contingencies,
it's not an infinite open-ended system.
I mean, in all these cases, it requires curation,
deciding how you're bracketing the variables at play,
and the kind of animated agent that I'm working with in each
of these, and finding a way for those
to register architecturally.
And in my case, it's also a choice
of kind of where your authorship lies,
when you're dealing with things that are
slightly out of your control.
So it's a kind of curation of what you're
bringing in, but also how you're dealing
with it, that is definitely a part of all of this work.
In my case with the dynamic agents here,
I'm making a very conscious choice not to have a kind of--
or not to explore a kind of formal illusion
to the dynamism in some way.
Or to have these projects like, kinetically transformer
in front of you as a way of addressing those variables.
But what I find interesting about working
with the instabilities of this specific set of contingencies
that I've curated, so to speak, in each of these,
is that through the instability in each project
I'm developing a kind of stable component
that becomes an element that helps to both control
that animated agent, but also find a kind of traction
in architecture.
Like, it develops a very specific architectural language
in each project.
The panel size, and the translucency of the fabric,
as an example, in the exhibit.
I'd say the regular rhythm of the structural wood frame
in the beach house, though it's depth varies, that's
something that becomes almost a metric of being able to measure
that variability against.
Thank you so much, it was great to see you present.
I think that one thing in your work that I've
seen over the past few years is also an interest in the poche,
and when you present this as The Edge,
I think of the poche and sort of an edge.
But it in these series of projects,
they have a sidedness to them.
So I was wondering if you could talk more about that sidedness
from the aspect of the exhibition that
seems to definitely have a back side to it.
Or the house, which has this familiar outside, but then
a different interior.
Yeah, I think I didn't make clear,
but the exhibition can also-- it can exhibit content
on both sides, in anticipation of also
being a kind of manager of space, the remnants space that
surrounds the exhibition.
Not just what happens within, but without as well.
So that is a kind of dual-sided scenario.
I also I mean I think it gets back to thickness.
The thinness of a screen, in the case through the exhibition,
It's particular translucency was really important.
Because it always then brought in these kind
of temporal other conditions.
You know, the aspects of those panels
would be high lit by elements in the environment
where it was exhibited, and that varies based
on those different host sites.
So that was really important to have that kind of aspect
be a part of it.
I think in the case of the beach house,
it's an interest I've always had in this kind of surprise
factor.
Or the-- maybe being a little bit more
nuanced with how you encounter these more variable,
or unstable elements in these projects, that what you see
is not what you get.
I mean, from the outside it looks pretty smooth.
That's-- my students are going, oh,
now we know why we hear that all the time when she's dealing
with hidden room.
But-- or why I say that that will echo beyond.
But I think that there's a kind of more nuanced way
to encounter the kind of strange hybridities
that some of these projects are bringing up.
And I have always liked that kind of reveal, or the hook.
I'm looking for the hook, a way to draw people through.
Thanks.
Is this on?
Yeah.
Yeah, so my-- for everyone that doesn't know-- I
took Megan's studio first year when I was here.
And I've also TAed for her, so my--
when I'm looking at this project,
it's always tinted by the-- sort of, my understanding of you
as an instructor.
So my question--
Sorry.
No, it's great.
But that's why I'm just prefacing
that, because my question is sort of about pedagogy,
I guess.
And the way-- I mean, contingency and The Edge,
to me, it's always about sort of like,
an uncertainty of always oscillating
between what's on one side of the edge
than the other, between two states, or multiple states.
And I just wonder if you think that's at odds
with the first year studio and undergrad studio,
in the sense of being fundamental.
Like, they have to be fundamental studios, so how
do you-- how does that translate to pedagogy?
The idea of fundamentals as being
something that is foundational, and not an edge, in some sense?
Or is it always an edge?
That's a really good question.
I'm not sure I'm going to have an answer off the cuff for you
on that today, but I think a lot of the-- I mean,
I just brought up kind of concepts
that we talk about through Hidden Room in reference
to one of these projects.
I think those concepts are still--
I'm still grappling with them, even from my time as a student
here, now like six years.
That's getting pretty long.
But I think they really do.
I firmly believe that the types of projects that we run,
say in first semester-- they may not, at present,
enable the same type of experimentation
with edge in the literal sense that I'm exploring,
and in these projects, and also others that I didn't present
today because of privacy issues and the status of where
they were.
But I do think the concepts speak and sort of echo
far longer, they cast a much longer shadow.
And there are things I'm still thinking about in this work,
definitely.
Yeah, that's a good one.
That's good, that's-- good job, Justin.
You taught me well.
I'm going to chew on that one.
And we'll-- I see you all the time, very fortunate,
so we'll talk about that one more.
Do you want to add some other questions or comments?
Yeah, I guess I'll go back to a little bit
about the curatorial aspect of the work, and in a sense,
back to this aspect of time, and what needs to change,
I guess, in each case for you?
There's an aspect of change in each project, whether it's
content, or even movement across-- around surfaces,
or elements, that give you a kind of perception of 2D
versus 3D.
Or that the content itself changes, the storage.
And so is it OK for you that there are multiple factors that
change when you're dealing with setting up
certain stable conditions for the variable
that we talk about, to be more active?
Can it be the user, and the content, and on and on and on?
Or is it certain things that you're
in control of the change?
I am the aspiring to the latter, that there
are certain things that I'm in control of in these projects.
I think if anything goes, it becomes an indeterminate soup
of sorts.
But in my process, my working with these sort of animated,
or the instabilities of these contingent agents
that I've framed in the work-- what I do with that,
is I really draw from a close reading of what
that change is like.
The development of a stable component
that I think is responsive to it, and is the kind of-- you
know, that's where the kind of supermedium discussion
comes in again.
Because it isn't that the architecture
becomes this kind of neutral backdrop,
where all that variation can play out.
It's something that actually, I think, in the way
that I work with it, at least, analyzing
what it is that's the variable.
I really do work hard to develop a kind of architectural element
that is a hybrid of those things.
The maybe more normative constituent element
that we see all the time, like wood framing.
It's not anything new, but the way
that the depth of those frames work,
in kind of sequence with each other,
their depth being very precise to house
another kind of variable agent.
I think there's a certain anticipation, or hybridity--
a merger of these things, the animated with the inanimate,
that I'm hoping to register and give architectural traction to,
through the development of that component.
This is a moment where you can take comments,
questions, critique her.
Talk about [inaudible].
Thank you so much for sharing with us, Megan.
And I want-- to use the microphone.
And I want to continue this discussion that you brought up
with postmedium.
And ask a question related to your use
of oblique perspective, because I
will admit I am not convinced yet
that animate and kind of indeterminacy
carries enough information to generate
a new kind of specificity.
And I wonder if you can connect this idea of the things
that you're adding to what we typically consider
the agency of architects, to your very
precise use of oblique perspectives and drawing?
I don't know if I can address it through oblique perspective,
per se.
I think the last project-- my work at Save
That Stuff is a kind of choreography of perspective,
obviously-- where you're first encountering
a kind of flatness, and then it reveals a third dimension--
a kind of volumetric dimension as you move through that, so
your perspective changes.
I do think, in response to the first part of your question,
what I'm getting into, kind of my riff on supermedium,
Lavin's idea of supermedium.
I blew right through, also, medium specificity, postmedium.
And so you guys should research that.
I mean, there's a lot written on it,
but in the interest of time, I'm really kind of-- I'm
going quickly through it.
You know, what I was just mentioning to John
about developing a component that actually carries
with it a kind of hybridity, where
it may be somewhat familiar, somewhat recognizable,
but is adopted by the presence of this kind
of new animated agent-- that's my means towards addressing
that.
Your concern, or your critique of not getting
enough information in these kind of animate variables
to induce change.
I'm working on that as a kind of architectural project.
Megan, I want to also say thank you.
It's always illuminating to hear you speak.
And I just wanted to encourage you to make good
on the phrase you've used several times
today, which is traction, which I think is terribly
important to your thesis.
And from the small part, describing
this kind of grid-impregnated paint to create stripes.
So the idea of gaining traction on your project,
and at the same time describing the geometry in it
is fascinating.
But also, toward the thesis of edge,
and this goes back to John [inaudible] comment
about time basis.
Because over time, edges lose their edge-- that's
the registration of them.
I would encourage you to look at treatises on [inaudible],
or knife sharpening, because the hybrid condition you're talking
about is precisely when the configuration--
the geometry of the edge-- comes into contact with
an [inaudible], there you are, I'm sorry--
Sorry, I'm illustrating as you're talking.
--comes into contact with a particular say, a whetstone,
or a strop, which kind of creates condition for the edge,
as it were.
And that, to me, is a terribly interesting premise that's
coming out through your work.
Thank you.
I could go-- we could-- I mean, keep going.
The edge can be a favorable margin, discuss.
Now I'm tossing it back.
I just want you to elaborate a little bit
on what Justin has begun to say, and we
are discussing, with how much of your own agenda
can be incorporated in the program in such
a difficult process as the first core.
How do you think there's a kind of way
to enclose the relationship among your work
and what you teach?
That's tough.
I mean, that's tough because I'm committed
to what those projects offer.
I mean, I really do think there's a timelessness to them
that, I mean again, I don't see what I'm working on now--
and this is Le Va's work, but-- I
don't see what I'm working on now as a departure
away from those things, it's folding into other things.
I think it's thinking about maybe expanding
one's definition of-- that's really hard for me
to answer on the spot.
I'll think about it.
I need to chew on it, yeah.
I'm going to escape that one.
Oh, time's up.
John Watt's going to answer instead.
Yeah, John, what do you think, John?
I heard time was up.
I mean, I'd love to inject some of this into-- I mean,
I'm really committed to these ideas.
So finding a way would be-- yeah,
that'll be-- now that this is over,
that's my project right now.
I think it's a wonderful point and because you
have a clear agenda, you have ways to represent,
to talk about many issues matter by and all that that.
And these things are still as we still
have a kind of protection individuality
and if it's a for that but I think that is comprehensible.
Part of the system, and I'm part of the responsiveness
of this kind of behavior.
But at the same time I'm discussing with you,
and with other coordinators, how can we
go beyond what we have now?
I don't want you to respond now, because it's
a very difficult issue, but I think it's also
a wonderful topic to discuss.
Well, I definitely think-- I mean,
I'm looking forward to having conversations
with the first semester core faculty about what
we can do to sort of enliven the first semester
core with our own agendas.
I suppose that process in and of itself folds in time, right?
And a kind of animation, we'll have to talk through that,
and work that out.
But you know, I think you mentioned something just now.
The kind of means of representation, too,
that I'm working through.
That's a challenge with these types of projects.
I mean, and one that I do battle with all the time.
This idea of, how to even-- I mean, I have clients,
I have-- it's really difficult to represent
all of the multiples and the kind of variation
that I-- the animation of these projects in a way
that makes sense.
And gives them a kind of architectural definition,
so people can understand them even when they're in process.
So I did-- I'm working through seriality all the time,
or I'm working through animated--
I did kind of analog movies for you all today,
but it's a challenge in and of itself,
how to represent some of these aspects.
We could find room for that.
OK, fine.
I just want to say thank you to everyone, all of you
in the table asking questions.
Obviously, Megan, and all of you having been here.
We haven't finished, still, the end of the talks.
In April, we have another one.
[inaudible] Lee talking about a new generation
of Chinese architects that are, I
would say, running out of the box
and making surprising things that you will enjoy a lot.
And with this, we will be finished.
But I want to say that this term has been especially
attractive for me, because we had the opportunity
to hear a lot of the youngest voices
that we have in the department, and enjoy wonderful lectures
by Andrew, John, Jennifer, Megan.
Also, Sergio Lopez was here with a wonderful lecture.
And it's one of the main purposes
of these Innovate talks, lunch talks,
is precisely to give the voice and to-- so give them
the opportunity, that gives us the opportunity to really
understand what they are doing.
And to be able to close the relationship among what
we teach, and what we do, which is very important.
So thank you, everyone.
Thanks.