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For rE-ordering architecture, four researchers establish new column styles with 3D-printed clay

A New Order

For rE-ordering architecture, four researchers establish new column styles with 3D-printed clay

Hosted by the Sou Fujimoto–designed cafe-bookstore-gallery, UsagiNY, rE-ordering architecture features four new columns that each explore the emerging field of 3D-printed clay in their own expressions. (Frank Melendez)

RE-ordering architecture
UsagiNY
163 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, New York
Through May 25

Like so many, the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns, as defined by Vitruvius in the first century BC, hold my very first memories of learning about the history of architecture. Centuries later, during the Renaissance, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola would famously add the Tuscan and Composite orders to the mix. Whichever you prefer—Greek trio or Italian five—the orders have occupied Western imagination as the archetype of a logic and language imposed upon the act of building.

An exhibition in Dumbo, Brooklyn led by four researchers, questions the historic understanding architecture takes toward columnar ordering. Hosted by the Sou Fujimoto–designed cafe-bookstore-gallery, UsagiNY, rE-ordering architecture features four new columns that each explore the emerging field of 3D-printed clay in their own expressions.

(Frank Melendez)

Jonathan A. Scelsa, associate professor at Pratt Institute and partner of op.Architecture + Landscape, with Gregory Sheward, also from Pratt, contributed their piece titled Gadrooned Reeds. Formed by a circular array of tear-dropped shaped depositions and glazed with black india ink, the standout feature of Scelsa and Sheward’s piece is the robotic section cuts which create nooks and crevices in the poche of the column for “life, water flow, and possible vegetation.”

Entangled Grounds, an ombre deposition of clays from across the United States, was led by Kelley Van Dyck Murphy from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Multiple moire effects provide intricate visual texture and the most earthen-looking order, as the colors of the clay mix and striate with varying, garment-like loops.

A squiggly, craggly host for lichen growth called Symbiont Substrate was submitted by Frank Melendez, associate professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture at City College of New York, and Nancy Diniz, a course leader at the University of the Arts London, who are both partners at bioMATTERS. A growth-algorithm aesthetic is readily apparent in the oozing undulation of layers both in plan and elevation, and the medium and development of the lichen adds a colorful noise effect to the column.

The final order, Riparian Flux, features a mesmerizing oxidized copper chevron pattern by Shelby Doyle of Iowa State University’s College of Design. Morphing from relatively straight flutes to dramatic zig-zags, the bronze clay is glazed with a thick, mossy coating that collects in the layers and crevices of the clay.

(Frank Melendez)

Taken together, it’s fair to wonder if the exhibit would be more accurately titled “un-ordering architecture.” Perhaps it’s a semantic argument, but as Scelsa points out in the description of his piece, the historical orders were exactly that: a language for imposing order upon and anthropomorphizing nature, extracting its motifs and ideals for a totalizing human-made aesthetic construct. This humanist attitude—man being the measure and end of all things—which through this inherently extractive period neoliberal capitalism, has led us to the climate crisis we find ourselves in.

The approach of the designers in this show, however, is not so much about reinvigorating a new totalizing aesthetic in a new time, but in calling completely into question the idea of an antrocentric order at all. Each piece, though united in its general diameter, height, materiality, and fabrication method, is surprisingly distinct upon close examination. And while this distinction could tempt a claim of establishing four new orders for contemporary architecture, it’s clear a canonical absolute is not the intention.

In their own ways, each column deals with ideas and tactics for designing for non-human life, in addition to boasting very obvious sustainability benefits as conventionally understood (clay is a reusable, low-carbon material; lichen sequesters carbon). They propose a different approach to designing in light of climate change, one which is less concerned with filling out LEED spreadsheets and more about rejecting the anthropomorphic character of architecture, creating moments of delight for algae, bugs, birds, and plants. They’re less concerned with totalization than their computational predecessors or even the classicists, who considered what the columnar ordering would mean in relation to the entire building. Instead, there is a generative or emergent quality that happens at the scale of the column which is completely un-orderly; despite the precision of the machine, clay resists, clumps, drags, and causes imperfections. How this language applies to a beam, or a window, or a roof isn’t really the point. There is no perfect aesthetic as prescribed by the human, nor does architecture have to be presented in a “finished,” sterile form. There is, instead, a kind of conversation between designer, technology, and material described by the organizers as “making machine and material kin.” Maybe this kinship renders foolish the possibility of a human-centered order at all.

(Jonathan Scelsa)

RE-ordering architecture is on view at UsagiNY through May 25 as part of the 2023 NYCxDesign festival. A closing reception will be held that evening from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Davis Richardson is an architect at REX and has taught at NJIT and the Architectural Association.

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