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"Skins & Screens, the graduate-level elective studio offered at the University of Pennsylvania, posits the building surface as a dynamic condition, simultaneously real and illusory, opaque and evanescent. Termed sheer opacity, this quality of enclosure provides an investigative focus for the consideration of surface as a dynamic perceptual ?eld, a site for the mediation of physical and perceptual phenomena. Close analysis of selected work of the West Coast art movement Light and Spaceand that of contemporary installation artists inspired projects that used sheer opacity to examine the possibility of transforming space through the design of the building surface. Projects were developed through a series of “layers” in which students made installations, material constructs, digital simulations, and large-scale detail studies of their proposals."


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"Property seems to be the most real thing there is, which is probably why the grounded manifestation of it is called "real estate." But there's also something unreal—not all there—about property, and we don't need the relative newness of digital commerce to perceive that property has always been a kind of "coinage of the brain." Marx, the seeming consummate materialist, appreciated the supernatural unruliness of property when he talked of chairs charmed by sorcerers, ghosts stomping through Europe, and the ethereal nature of Capital. But we are perhaps at the beginning of another stage of civilization as a sky, annealed by meaning, is crossed by lines, vectors, and channels; as new ethers replace the scud of yesterday's clouds. The creation of real estate in the ether, through electromagnetic spectrum allocation and the proliferation of networks, is the most dramatic transvaluation that the world has recently undergone—though not without precedent. From the early days of radio, ethereal "irrational exuberance" and democratic feeling would formulaically give way to increased privatization of the airwaves, mapping it for the purposes of commerce and security. McKenzie Wark says of this vanilla sky, "It is private property in a purer form, detached from tangible, sensible, material substance—property without properties. It is private property all the easier to privatize because it lacks substantial natural or machine-made form."1 This etherealization of Marx's capitalist ether-net transforms social relations between things to a relation between nothings."


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dotcommunist manifesto



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the most phallic building in the world



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Jersey City House(s)
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Dan Graham : New York is slowly becoming suburbanized. Besides the large city-operated parks, I have been fascinated over the years by the corporate make-overs of open public spaces, such as the botanical garden inside the Chemical Bank headquarters on Park Avenue or the IBM Building atrium on Madison Avenue and 57th Street. This was the very beginning of the suburbanization of New York. The gardens and atriums these corporations built, as part of larger complexes, were an attempt to have a controlled, semipublic green space, to keep people in the city.



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Formless : A User's Guide, Excerpt

The Organic Grid

The Grid of Time



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miami house no. 10


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miami house no. 9


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miami house no. 8


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miami house no. 7




miami house no. 6


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miami house no. 5


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kit-built



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These are 18 bitmap format design studies for house/sculptures configured from 20' and 40' commercial shipping containers. The interiors range in square feet from just under 160 sf for the single twenty footer to just under 2,080 sf for the quadruple unit fashioned from six twenty footers and seven forty footers. Each design may be increased two fold in size by the double-widing (coupling identical units could provide unlimited depth in design) of the design. The door/window features are two panel sliding glass door sections approx. 4' x 8' per panel. Access to the upper floors is via spiral steel stair cases with the option of internal or external installation. They are offered as on/off grid shelters.


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miami house no. 4


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miami house no. 3


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miami house no. 2


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miami house no. 1


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For Hillbillies, Rednecks, Crackers and Gringos, all roads lead to Scottland

"The origin of this American nickname for mountain folk in the Ozarks and in Appalachia comes from Ulster. Ulster-Scottish (The often incorrectly labeled “Scots-Irish”) settlers in the hill-country of Appalachia brought their traditional music with them to the new world, and many of their songs and ballads dealt with William, Prince of Orange, who defeated the Catholic King James II of the Stuart family at the Battle of the Boyne, Ireland in 1690. Supporters of King William were known as “Orangemen” and "Billy Boys" and their North American counterparts were soon referred to as "hill-billies". It is interesting to note that a traditional song of the Glasgow Rangers football club today begins with the line, "Hurrah! Hurrah! We are the Billy Boys!" and shares its tune with the famous American Civil War song, "Marching Through Georgia".  There are many reports of Southern National Gaurd units being serenaded with this tune, much to their chagrin, upon arriving in the British Isles during the First and Second World Wars, as the tune is very popular with British and Commonwealth military bands!"


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junk for code



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The Temporary Path Station at The World Trade Center



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THE SOCIAL AND ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY TENEMENT HOUSES

"The peculiar evils of the tenement-house system of the upper part of New York are not due to the limited size or narrow width of the island on which New York is built, as  is generally supposed, nor are they due to overcrowding, but to the inflexible depth of 100 feet each of the uptown lots [which] is much larger than persons of moderate means can afford to build onÖBy consequence, only very deep houses are built, in which only the rich can afford to live with comfort; in which people of moderate means cannot live with economy; and which, for the very poor, and even for mechanics and artisans, become tenement-houses of a sort which can be lived in with neither comfort, true economy, nor decency."

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The Architecture & Social Structure of the Haight



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anti-scrape

"At the core of Morris' philosophy which was heavily influenced by his friend and mentor, John Ruskin, is the belief that old buildings should look old, and that historic fabrics should be respected and preserved, even where it survives in a weak or damaged state. For Ruskin and Morris, the essence of historic fabric lay in the wear and tear displayed by its antiquity and the spirit of the craftsman who created it, and not in its original perfection."


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