Espaces de processus/Espaces d'analyse. Description graphique de mécanismes géométriques compositionnels et représentationnels. Los Angeles dans les années 1980 : morceaux choisis
English title:
Design Space/Analysis Space - Graphic Description of Compositional and Representational Devices. Chosen Pieces of Californian Postmodernity.
Supervisors: Jean-Louis Genard (†,ULB) & Axel Fisher (ULB)
Submitted on November 2017 - Public defense on January 2018
Jury members: Judith Le Maire (ULB), Eric Van Essche (ULB), Bernard Kormoss (Ulg), David Vanderburgh (UCL), Daniel Estevez (ENSA-Toulouse)
Abstract:
This doctoral thesis focuses on four unbuilt projects from the Los Angeles based architects Morphosis. Those four projects exist mainly through models and drawings representing them, but also through conceptual artifacts. They demonstrate a paroxysm of geometrical complexity as well as refinement in graphic production: two distinctive features which will grant to Morphosis international recognition by the end of the 1980s. Those four projects – Malibu, 6th Street, Reno & Was Houses – became iconic as a result of the important media coverage they received at that time, however Morphosis presented them without – or with very little – explanation. Therefore, the goal of this research is to decipher the compositional mechanisms and the graphic contrivances involved in those projects and in those conceptual artifacts, as they are complex and enigmatic. The resulting intention of such investigation is to disclose the principles at stake for the generation of Morphosis' sophisticated architecture. To do so, this research temporarily relieves Morphosis from its authorship status; it appropriates the objects of the corpus of study in order to interpret them, in order to extract some architectural principles that those projects could convey, but that Morphosis never made explicit. The means of inquiry of this research are mainly operational and based on the conventional tools of the architectural discipline: the projective systems, but augmented with contemporary graphic devices. Therefore, this research will describe unbuilt projects existing only in graphic representation, precisely by the use of graphic representation. The two main objectives are monographic and methodological. Regarding the monographic objectives, this research aims at making accessible and didactic some compositional processes based on systemic and ostentatious complexity that became the trademark of Morphosis. Such observations should allow an understanding of how those projects from the end of the 1980s, designed with traditional tools, anticipate the digital trend that will arise in the 1990s. Regarding the methodological objectives, this research aims at developing an investigation process which transposes the operational tools of architectural design to an analytical context. That investigation process is made of recurrent iterations borrowing some of the intuitive thinking of the architect-designer, but in an a retrospective approach, rigorous and based on referenced sources in order to build a new body of knowledge.
