I first encountered Bag Pile, a curious outlier among the finalists of MoMA’s PSI Young Architects Program, when it was shown at Rome’s MAXXI museum in 2011. Formlessfinder, the architects, had exhibited a dusty model of fabric arches filled with pebbles and Styrofoam kernels – a literal scale version of larger geotextiles, bigger stones and industrial-sized polystyrene cubes. Although looking like an excavation site could be seen as Bag Pile ’s weakness in the competition (it didn’t win), its disaffinity with existing architectural styles was also its unique strength. This un-photogenic proposal subverted contemporary architecture’s festishisation of the image, while it simultaneously articulated and pushed the formless into the foreground of an architectural conversation. Why do I find Bag Pile an exciting proposition? Going through the process of becoming a licensed architect – a rite of passage emphasising intergenerational knowledge transfer – I am struck by the originality achieved by re-examining materials, redefining the terms of sustainability and sharing control with gravitational and human forces at play.
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temporary structure | precarious form by jennifer davis
Formlessfinder consists of Julian Rose and Garrett Ricciardi, and is located in Brooklyn. Rose and Ricciardi’s collaborative 2010 Princeton University thesis drew attention to formlessness in architectural history and developed it as a contemporary design methodology. The formless is a carefully framed critique and subversion of current approaches, locating Formlessfinder in a radically incongruous position within their own generation of architects. They are critical of several tendencies that haunt architecture today, especially the trend to hybridise disciplines, pulling architecture away from its fundamentals — material, space and experience. These qualities could be recovered if the tyranny of form in architecture could be subverted. They see architectural history as essentially the story of a succession of architectural styles that exert control and convey symbolic authority. The generally unquestioned enthusiasm for digital tools is a seamless and insidious continuation of this history, a championing of the formal image over materiality, and a disservice to the end users usually found sprinkled about the renderings as ‘accessories to architecture’.
formlessfinder
Formlessfinder have an historical ally in Georges Bataille who, in his 1929 collection of essays, Critical Dictionary , defined architecture as form: a metaphor or a symbol standing in for the body, the state and/or the institution that exercises the will to control. Bataille advocated for the formless, a philosophical construct that praises the formless qualities of space, focuses on the physical and is grounded in a discourse of base materiality. While Bataille locks himself in a form/formless dialectic, Formlessfinder brings the formless into architecture through a ‘loose control’ approach. Instead of strong-arming materials into a set vision, Rose and Ricciardi engage them in an intimate conversation to develop a compendium of operations that can be applied to raw matter. This design approach generates outcomes that otherwise could not be conceived.
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