E-Day reviews, and couple of other things...

Ok, so I still haven't mentioned last weeks' readings on semiotics, but it has been pretty busy preparing for interim reviews of our design work, with Peter Eisenman as visiting tutor.

Eisenman got very interested in one group's title of Marseille Archipelago, referring primarily to Ungers' Berlin as green archipelago. Thanks to my friends at Raumbureau, I know a little about it, through their exploration of the idea in Pilzen. However, Tom and I do not understand Marseille in the same way - in what we have seen, we think that there is far too much overlap of different communities and architectures to be able to draw out separate islands. So when faced with the question, 'what urban idea do we follow?', I am at the moment inclined to return to Lefebvre's heterotopias, or differential space. Looking at Cours Julien (model below), we see an area where many different cultures overlap, something that we were even able to identify from a distance by looking at the distribution of different types of musical performance across the city.

A theme that came out in reviews, and more so in Eisenman's lecture was one of architectural grammar. The key question he asked us was around what it means to design in Marseille; what about our projects reflect the grammar of Marseille? In his lecture, he argued that currently we have a new rhetoric, but not an architectural grammar to deal with it. This reminded me a lot of Eco's essay, in particular his description of the anthropological approach, in which the architect must first understand the codes around which a society works, in order to develop an architectural response that is aware of its meaning in the society. Part of what Tom and I have been looking at in Cours Julien tries to gain an understanding of what certain things mean in that context; in particular, void and casing.

Whilst drawing to get ready for the reviews I've been listening to Kafka's The Trial. One line in particular reminded me of the previous week's readings on the surveillance society. Whilst talking to the painter, K is interrupted by a group of young girls, trying to listen in on their conversation. The painter then explains to K that 'these girls too belong to the court.' In other words, everyone around him is involved in the mechanisms of discipline and control within the city. Kafka's writing often seems to predict a world of bureaucracy and power which is becoming more prevalent today.

Again, preceding the update on semiotics, I came across this project in China, based around the piano. If I ever produce anything like this, then please stop me!! To use Jenck's terms, it is not an enigmatic signifier, but a definite one-liner. Its lack of appeal perhaps comes from its instant comprehension and dismissal as something very trivial, the idea too obviously translated into built form. Its overcoding makes it liable to become redundant very easily.

Strangely, Eisenman heard that someone in the class was interested in Liszt, and without hearing any more detail, described the terrible city that he imagined this student to be designing based on music translated directly into architecture via some strange computer algorithm... I was very tempted to point out that this particular student had no inclination to do that whatsoever. Or perhaps even more tempted to play along with the idea to see what would happen...