Morphosis Drawings and Models in the Mid 1980s: Graphic Description of Graphic Thinking
Contribution to the 2016 Design Communication Association Conference (DCA): Communicating Speculative and Creative Thinking, Montana State University, Bozeman MT, October 2016.
Abstract:
Thom Mayne (1944) and Michael Rotondi (1949), the founding partners of the California studio Morphosis, have set out the principles of generative design processes through graphic representation so as to create a coherent, recurrent formal vocabulary and compositional grammar. They generated extremely complex objects, creating a global and abstract realm of architectural geometry rather than a specific and potential built reality. The usefulness had moved back for symbols, fiction had replaced function, the architectural object was now referring to its design process and to its associated graphic objects. Every project was described by a set of figurative documents – plans and models – and by several conceptual documents. Those documents, even if intended to represent a single aspect of a project, conveyed symbols referring to a poetical wholeness, surpassing the architectural object they were likely to describe. This architectural speculative thought, existing mainly by means of graphic representation, became an end in itself, an autonomous mode of existence of architecture. This essay explores the characteristics of the Morphosis architectural realm through the examination of a corpus of conceptual documents related to four projects (Fig. 1): Malibu House (1986), 6th Street House (1987), Reno House (1987), and Was House (1988). Those projects are some of the last of the pre-computer era. They were still engendered by conventional graphic means, even if those means were transgressed and used in an unconventional manner. Methodologically, in this essay the original graphic representations of the corpus are analyzed precisely by graphic means; after being deconstructed, the representations are reconstructed following an analytical point of view, within another medium or within a combination of medias. The transcription of the geometry embedded in the original artifacts into new graphic spaces (linked to contemporary graphic devices like digital 3D modeling, laser cutting, and 3D printing) helps enlighten the projects, making explicit some of their complex geometrical mechanisms. However, this transcription necessarily prompts interpretation, especially because it blurs the boundaries between media. This interpretation stresses the generative potential of architectural analysis. It creates new graphic objects that describe the project they refer to, but it also creates new documents that diverge from the object they represent, even if they come from the same architectural principles.
