September 17, 1:15pm
Transcription Lighty Edited
There is a heroic quality that peaks in 1960s Chicago; this quality stems from the post war economy with the talent and institutions being built around them that would be perpetuated. With this sense of optimism buildings are built under that rubric that they would be part of a greater lineage continuing forward. A perfect example would be here at UIC art and architecture building where only one quarter of what is now a midsize architecture school nationally, would be built with the assumption that the other 3/4 of the building will come later with more students, more talent with more money. This leaves a very particular condition in the building, a façade understood not as design but as a material queue. The exterior is finished like an interior, raw concrete CMU block on the interior of the wall. The interior finished block tiles, which would be in the future the same material used as the exterior.
The campus also is well known to have formally had a second elevated pathway connecting the schools. The ground floor has always been imagined as a secondary space back entrance in the 1980tktk when it didn’t make sense anymore to maintain proposed security and cost reasons the bridges connecting buildings the majority of them were destroyed, and a new master plan grounded in circulation, literally back onto the grass. The new entrances are the back of house, and a handful of stairways and alteration exceptions were made to gain access to the second level, which was formally the grand entrances of the buildings.
Inevitably as an occupant of UIC, you come to face the fact that the ground is a secondary class of circulation. This façade represents the fact that we live in a moment of failed optimism. This is not to say we are pessimistic, but to say that there was a project that was undertaken, and never finished or partially destroyed, so now we live with the artifacts of optimism. This artifact proves to be extremely exciting to show how architecture in this current moment finds meeting in the manipulation of the built fabric. The fabric itself, both in need of maintenance and in need of being used (for reasons of housing, the expansion of ideas and for carbon sink). I am fixated on proving a form of authorship embedded in this moment of stalled optimism registering as an architectural non-place. Not in the sense of Smithson, but in the sense of it’s really not having been on purpose. It is an accident to its form. Accident maybe too strong a word it is a breath in the process of building a building. But as the larger building never survived we remain with breath held for what comes next. We can either anticipate the fall or prepare for sprint.
The question of how authorship interplay with this dynamic is a particular interest. First of all we have to have found this site as the entrance to the architecture building, but also we need to recapture to some degree in the way of a reconstruction like Rem did with Casa Palestra, the moment historically, in which the feeling of the future was present in the construction of the building. Now that we occupy that future anticipated by this CMU wall, we have to look back and reinscribe a narrative misunderstood by those who made it and so it is an authored aprinalysis of that historical moment, recapturing the design process, but with the future we now live in. For our moment we to see the future anticipated in the same way that Walter did, but we will be wrong too.The differences how can we make meaningful work that spans these 50 year gaps in time past present future