Your blog comments will be due on Wednesday, August 7th at 10:00 am. You may draw from these questions for your posts, or develop
your own response to the readings.
1) Even though Robertson presents her readers with a “manifesto”
on Soft Architecture, the exact definition of this term remains elusive,
perhaps intentionally so. Trace
Robertson’s references to “Soft Architecture” in this book and define in your
own words how you perceive the concept.
Make sure to quote from the text to support your analysis of this term.
2) Robertson’s prose engages a great deal in the idea
of the city, specifically her native city Vancouver. What are some of the ways in which she
engages in issues dealing with the city in her prose? Consider the ways in which Robertson explores
ideas of memory, nostalgia, surfaces, globalization, urban decay, and
renewal. Make sure to quote from the text
support your analysis.
3)Robertson explores several themes that echo many
texts we have read in this course:
utopias, memory, the suburbs, the city, ideology, capitalism,
imagination—just to name a few themes.
Find a quote from Robertson’s text and draw relationships between her
ideas and that of an author we have previously read in this course. Make sure to quote both authors directly in
your analysis.
“Soft Architects believe that [lot 26] demonstrates the best possible use of origin: Change its name repeatedly. Burn it down. From the rubble confect a prosthetic pleasureground; with fluent obliviousness, picnic there” (Robertson 41). I believe this chaos is best reflected in the fountain chapter of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Robertson states, “Aquatic architecture alleviate[s] our cares so that we may begin to annotate what our bodies can do with time” (51). I perceive this quote as a constant breaking of the box, opening us up to the potential for greater things. The concept of the fountains reflects this because it is consistently different in each situation that one places a fountain; whether it is a monument or a “liquid-filled decorative paperweight” (Robertson 52).
ReplyDeleteThis brings me to my definition of soft architecture. Soft Architecture is an always changing entity, as described with lot 26. Lot 26 had seen virtually every type of architecture, and one can compare this chaos to the chaos that occurs in water. Resonance in water is chaotic and never predictable. This theory is how I perceive “soft architecture” in this text.
I think you've encapsulated some of the concepts behind Soft Architecture very well here. By using the example of water we arrive at a clearer definition of the term as something that is ever-changing, even "chaotic" in its lack of predictability. You might consider other sorts of "materials" that architects might draw from to produce the same sort of effect such as light, earth, stone, and so forth. Yet, such "soft architecture" can exhibit problems as the structure ages. I think of the house at Taliesin where a large pine tree's roots are disturbing the foundation. Are we willing to accept the cracks in the walls and ceilings? Are they an extension of soft architecture?
DeleteLisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks for the Office for Soft Architecture flows through a number of pieces of singular art, installations, histories, spaces, and studies followed by various memories and experiences made textual. Robertson’s organization of the book supports the argument, itself, of soft architecture’s definition. Soft Architecture is formed and founded on connections. Not the miserable networking push that every business school stumbles over promoting, but the meaningful interactions between spaces, lines, points, and planes. I believe the occasional work that displays this description the most thoroughly is The Value Village Lyric whose text takes you on a quick meander around consumerism, through a second hand clothing store, and finalizes with this thought, “In the tedium of failure we glimpse the new. It is neither a style nor a content, but a stance...it drifts and plays and enunciates and returns, unheroic.” (pg 187). The exploration of photos that proceed the document are truly architectural, the first photo exemplifies three types of texture produced from a single type of material: thread. The varying patterns, textures, thicknesses, elasticity, cuts, shapes are all intriguing in their variety and depth but when one sees the third image (pg 180) soft architecture is made visual. Held within the connections--the seams--is the power that makes the photograph transcend a piece of cloth or clothing. If Architects learned to manipulate, control, adjust, and combine various structural materials the way woodworkers have been able to accomplish a relationship with their craft and trade, architecture would progress into something soft and successful. And so now I will return to comment about the structure and organization of the book. The book merges two perspectives: one of creation and the other, reflection. This is reiterated on the cover of the book; sixty percent is covered by a photograph of work and the remaining forty, in reflective text. One must gain understanding by way of exploration in the form of work, respond to the work with reflection, create work based on those reflections, and on goes the process. These process smooths the seams. It drifts and plays and enunciates and returns all with a firm stance, that is Soft Architecture.
ReplyDeleteI also thought How to Color (pg 117) and Introduction to the Weather (pg 57) were stronger examples of Soft Architecture. “The wether is a stretchy, elaborate, delicate trapeze, an abstract and intact conveyance to the genuine future, which is also now.” (pg 60).
I really like the attention that you paid to the photograph on page 180 and the concept of seaming (seeming?). Within these discarded clothes, Robertson brings our attention to a complex system of gathering together to manipulate form and style. You say, "If Architects learned to manipulate, control, adjust, and combine various structural materials the way woodworkers have been able to accomplish a relationship with their craft and trade, architecture would progress into something soft and successful." I would have liked to have seen you define "success" here. I'm wondering if "success" means not just thinking of the "end goal," the "grand vision," but actually communing with one's materials,thinking of design as a process, learning to adapt and focus on the actual "seams" that hold a structure together. I wonder what such a structure would look like and if you could think of some examples where the "seams" of a structure become its focal point.
DeleteLisa Robertson’s prose regarding Vancouver is prompted by social history, urban geography, and visual art. Throughout her compellation of poems she illustrates space as inhabitations of time, infused with artifacts shaping our ideas and experiences rather than mere space. Within her poem Soft Architecture: A Manifesto, she describes memory’s architecture as being “neither palatial nor theatrical, but soft” (Robertson 19). Soft Architecture is in which the human mind connotes sensation within a particular space whether it’s memories of the past, the vivaciousness of the present as well as the uncertainty of the future.
ReplyDeleteRobertson describes the decay of the subterranean Vancouver environment: “Under the pavement, pavement. Hoaxes, failures, porches, archaeological strata spread out on a continuous thin plane; softness and speed, echoes, spores, tropes, fonts; not identity but incident and the accumulation of air miles; unmarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment, indexical euphorias, the unraveling of laughter; a brief history of escalators; memory manifest, brindled, loosening; a crumpling of automotive glass; the pornographic, the wrapped; Helvetica's black dust: All doctrine is foreign to us” (Robertson 20).
Architecture is not concrete, like the world which we inhabit it is inconstant motion and flux, always manifesting, affected by people and their interactions within a space. Every space or moment that is shaped affects and becomes affected. Architecture is impermanence and is therefore soft in nature.
I like your focus on memory in this post. It makes me wonder if in some ways architecture, in the traditional sense, is a form of forgetting--forgetting past landscapes, past structures, ruins, ideologies, belief systems, echoes, memories--in order to put up something NEW, bigger, better, etc. What would an architecture look like that took into account these ruins and echoes of the past? How could an architect make evident "strata," history, memory--all these things that "new" buildings seek to erase?
Delete“Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture” by Lisa Robertson is book that discuss Architecture from a writer perspective. The author acknowledges in her book that contemporary architecture is in bad shape and struggling. She decided to tackle issues related to architecture because she cares and also concerns about it. In the book, she in fact “applaud the mercurial Miss Reich, who said “ one of my hearts is in building (Robertson 21)”.
ReplyDeleteRobertson believes that Soft Architecture is the answer to the struggle current architecture is going through.
According to Robertson, Contemporary architecture is a mirage of softness and this is one of the reasons why architecture is struggling. The author believes that Architecture is misrepresented and lack of honesty. She states, “The bare ruin of Bauhaus and the long autopsy of concepts serve as emblems of Soft Architecture’s demise (Robertson 19)”. The Bauhaus architecture is also referred as the Modernist architecture. Modernist architecture is defined as an architecture that focuses on function and it is not concerned about nature. Modernist architecture was connected to the rise of industrialization. Robertson criticizes this particular style stating; “We see it like a raw encampment at the edge of the rocks, a camp for a navy vying to return to a place that has disappeared. So the camp is a permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents- tents of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper and various claddings- tents rising and falling in the glittering rhythm, which is null rhythm, which is the flux of modern careers. At the centre of the tent encampment, the density of the temporary in a tantrum of action; on peripheries over silent grass of playing fields the fizzy mauveness of seed-fringe hovering (Robertson 19).” In other words, she sees this type of architecture as not permanent. To her, this architecture is lasting only a short time; it is in fact in a transitory phase. For instance, the author states,“ all the polished black marble’s stripped from the abandoned modernist newspaper building. For a few days it’s a gothic ruin, the dark steel structure visible, concrete dangling in gangrenous chunks from the knotted fists of defunct wiring. In the long succession of follies a condo named Portico will soon rise from reusable site. The daily newspapers have relocated to the suburbs (Robertson28). There is a feeling that Architecture world is confused and does not know what direction to take.
That is why Robertson is proposing Soft Architecture as a solution. According to her, Soft Architecture would provide buildings that would last. Soft Architecture would act as a bridge between hypothesis and fiction. Hypothesis is defined as idea that are capable to be true whereas fiction idea that may or may not be true. Robertson ends her Soft Architecture manifesto statement with what she thinks is the true answer. She argues, “ What if there is no ‘space,’ only a permanent, slow-motion mystic takeover, an implausibly careening awning? Nothing is utopian. Everything wants to be. Everything wants to be. Soft Architects face the reaching middle. I agree with her on all her thoughts expect when she said that there is no need for utopia. I believe utopia, which is synonym to vision and hope, is necessary and important. Utopian ideas are used to provoke thoughts, stimulate comments, and clarify ideas. This is how hope and vision are created and developed. Then faith makes it happen. There is no faith anywhere in the world without hope.
Thank you,
Edgar Irakiza
I think this is one of your strongest posts to date, Edgar. I can see how you're really analyzing Soft Architecture as an alternative to traditional means and methods of design. You might want to explore in more depth how we might produce an architecture that embraces impermanence as an ideology. What would such structures look like?
Delete