calls for articles:
On Site review 31
On Site review 32
on the transmission of information through image rather than text
Weak form: form without clear links to meaning, appropriate to the times – the late 20th century when Eisenmann wrote about this – whereby buildings can be thought of as media carrying lots of messages and meaning to lots of diverse constituencies. Any meaning that accrues to form is both relative and ambiguous. Weak form is purposely zelig-like: it can be many things to many people. It can also be as nothing-like as media itself, physical form irrelevant, a strange reality found in the processes of consumption rather than in the bricks and mortar of traditional strong-form architecture. This curiously autonomous architecture is threaded into a web of all architecture, part of an array of things that act together to produce ever-mutable meaning. Weak systems: this is a term that could cover most construction: thin components, weak and insignificant in themselves, threaded into a system that makes them opaque and enveloping. This ranges from tensegrity systems to thin skins. The assemblage of component parts make a whole quite different from any one part; again, an array of things act together to produce an infinite variety of form. Weak urbanism: informal housing and settlement. The rules are arcane, intimate and tribal, rather than legal, bureaucratic or democratic. Using weak materials, built without code, limited by money or lack of it, nonetheless informal settlements are resilient, adaptable, motile, opportunistic. There is much to be learned from their very provisionality.
1 On Site review we have always had a phobia about architectural photography – those wide-angle shots that make buildings look impossibly dynamic, all thrust and soar, so we ask our contributors to take their own photos of whatever they are talking about, presenting the world as they find it as designers. Canadian Architect covers from the 1960s were all drawn and the inside pages were mostly drawings and diagrams. Now, in architectural magazines, you mostly see photographs; drawing is a CAD file and the hand is absent. When architects publish their pencil and watercolour travel sketches, there is the sense that photography is not as trusted as the drawing, yet there have never been more photographic images in circulation. Now that everyone has a camera in their pocket, everything is potentially a photo-documentary. With issues about representation, about authenticity, about instrumentality, are photographers gatekeepers, interpreters or simply recording instruments? Is there such a thing as raw data; should there be such a thing? 2 Maps have always been particularly coded descriptions of the world: who owns it, who claims it, who names it, what is important to know about it. Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning , published in 1989, was a revelation: one cannot trust that maps have anything to do with ‘truth’ but instead are drawings of world views. Since then, the term ‘mapping’ has come to describe almost any kind of information array. Because architects and urbanists have long used drawings as the texts of their trade, we would like to look at maps in a very wide sense: we can read a plan and section as we read a map: a diagram of a set of relationships, sometimes structural, sometimes geographic, sometimes social. And city plans, although they bear a resemblance to maps, are often merely diagrams of intention, loosely laid onto a topography. Should we give up the term drawing and replace it with mapping? Are they the same?
In this Fall 2014 issue of On Site review , we would like to look at fragile, weak, unfinished, mutable, hopeful against-all- odds architecture, urbanism, landscapes, infrastructure and construction.
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Proposals due 15 June 2014 Finished articles 1 August 2014
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