Windows Without Buildings Notes, 3
1. Some things
1.1. Can a drawing that is not of a building create or lead to a building?
1.2. Must a drawing or document be read and translated or enacted using its hermeneutic specificity in order to manifest the intention of the document, i.e. are there external systems or rationales that can create the desired outcome?
1.2.1. Must there be a desired outcome?
1.3. Are the litigious and onerous platforms of responsibility in place to move from a drawing/document to a building an insurmountable obstacle to the aspirations of the above two thoughts (if answered in the affirmative)?
1.4. Is an intermediate iteration of documentation required (with regard to the A/E’s aspirations) in order to confirm that the realization of the seed documents is intact, a draft translation, or does this disrupt the power of the metabolic document?
1.5. If architecture is the construction of relationships, at which point in the process must the specificity lay? The specificity must lay somewhere, it must have intent or it is not constructed.
1.5.1. The intent to construct
1.5.2. The study or documentation
1.5.3. The manifestation
1.5.3.1. This might seem then that the relationships are staged or stagnant, but the relationships constructed might themselves be the substructure or catalyst for a more happenstance and lifelike action or communication
1.5.3.2. There also might not be a negative connotation to the notion that the relationships are staged or stagnant as some stability is required for the function of such relationships as grammar, symbolism, programmed activity, and hierarchies, whether human (social) or content (visual function (the narrative hierarchy of time)
1.6. Why does everyone on a maintenance staff look like they commute home to some outer borough of NYC?
2. PK’s drawings do not have the goal of deferring intent, I believe they show incredible control, so at their core they are like architectural drawings in their level of control and exactitude, however in the gallery setting, because they do not allow entrance through proper use of graphic convention (more like analytique) nor do they provide a Rosetta Stone or ‘door’, they must, in this state, defer intent by requiring normally unrestrained interpretation, however, in that way they are closer to buildings than they are to architectural drawings (closer to art?)
2.1. They are windows
2.2. Although they behave this way in this forum, it is not their goal, either of the conception or of the display, but the interspersing of other projects whose modes of representation approach the conventional through orthographic projection or perspectival projection do a few things to the reception of the field drawings
2.2.1. They stress the difference between the modes of communication between the pictorial (only in a sense of convention) control over relationships and the pure existence of relationships or the conversational (muttering) unearthing or construction of relationships
2.2.1.1. Is this taking the stance that the architectural drawings are not architecture? And that only what they strive to produce would be architecture? No, I don’t think so, however, the field drawings need more help in establishing their status as architectural drawings, they feel more like architectural conditions, actual fragments of built space.
2.2.1.2. So what is the issue I am trying to resolve, am I making a case for PK’s drawings as architecture, do they need that assistance, or am I defending their divergence from the conventional approach of building or a building, are am I trying to locate them in a perceptual context, less as vehicles than as moments of experience.
2.2.1.3. So yes architecture involves a process because it is contingent on construction, on ‘something’ being built.
2.3. PK calls these “strategic plots”, are they analogous to other kinds of strategic graphic formations such as battle plans or football diagrams? Possibly, in that their application can or must be subject to the unpredictabilities of implementation in the field, but it seems that PK’s plots carry more information of a tailored but often baffling scope, it is imbedded, either symbolically, pictorially, or indexically, or it exists by egress through reference, so it is, in that sense, already ‘alive’ with its own potential and possibility (smart, ala Revit)
2.3.1. Would ‘building’ it kill that expansiveness of aspirations, perhaps, within the thematic arena established by PK, but not in the infinity of other realities
3. What is something that draws or describes one thing but produces another?
4. Windows, the term landscapes is bandied about, and it is used by PK himself, esp. in regard to his serial productions on trace paper, but the drawings in the gallery functioned as landscapes more in the painterly fashion than in projective or ‘Cornerly’ fabrication, they are more vistas, and if you look at them in this way, which you do without knowing it (because the information is a haze, atmospheric perspective, the hortulan veil of a foreign printed language), they are forced out of their mode of reference/construction, and separated from it into a world of the present and utterance and they are occupied rather than looked at, they are looked into.
