In the early 1980s Frank Stella stopped painting large geometric, striped canvases and began to construct large assemblies, hung on the wall, of patterned, painted steel set squares, protractors and french curves, scraps of off-cut steel, metal lath, foil. They were very shallow sculptures, but as they came out of a tradition of wall hung painting, can be seen as very think paintings. Paint marks became physical objects wedged, tacked, welded and hooked together to make a dense, woven set of layers enclosing space within its visually planar dimensions. Textiles have two sides. They are more than flat pattern and composition, they are woven according to a procedure to make something with a simultaneous and connected front and back.
Bruce Mau is a typographer, a graphic designer; he works with letters and fonts rather than words and sentences. Reading between the lines has always been a sort of weave, reading between the fonts is what Mau gives us to do. His ‘Immodest Proposal’ for an architecture magazine puts three voices, in three fonts, on the page covering the foreground, background and middle ground of the subject. Called a weave, the magazine is three simultaneous spaces laid out on the two-dimensional page. Thus the subject is both apparent and immanent, dimensioned by at least three layers. Thus the information about a subject becomes very thick.
Diagram of Mau’s strategy for an architecture magazine that interweaves three different voices, grounds, temporalities. See Life Style . pages 534-537.
Kastura, 5.5, two views. (1979). Mixed media on aluminum, metal tubing and wire mesh, 292 x 233.5 x 76.2 cm. see William Rubin. Frank Stella 1970-1987 . New York: MOMA, 1987. pp 90-91
Life Style , the book: a box full of dense, interwoven material.
Thick description is familiar to readers of new anthropology. Rather than eliminating, refining, focussing and paring down to get an elegant theoretical equation, the subject is located deep within the tragic complexity of the world. Weave, thick and studded with stray colours and twigs like a rough highland tweed, supplanting the surface patterns of collage, asks for a more dense fabric of architecture. In a collage the blue Rizla package next to the found bus ticket remains itself with all its references intact. A weave slices the pieces, breaks them down and knits them into a new object. Conversation is not between objects, but within objects. The implications for the production of architecture turns attention completely away from the outside of the building, its shape, form, surface and the facades which enclose space, to the building as a solid, in the world as a solid, dense with material.
Mau builds books. We must consider his books as speech, the form of the book as the vehicle for speech. He speaks in three fonts: Life Theories, Life Projects, Life Stories. These occur throughout, following their own internal logics. One of the projects, Laboratorium, took place at the Antwerp Museum of Photography in 1999. It was a book machine: a procedure, some templates, some masks and an unlimited supply of information laid out in two-page spreads. The making of a book becomes a performative act; pages are posted on the walls for all to read. In theory, anyone can do a book. The form, flexible but with certain rules and restraints such as the content is on a paper page of specific dimensions, folds information, images, text into a nice, dense package. The 625 pages of Life Style are such a package. Very thick with information only loosely clustered and not by narrative conventions, but by graphic form.
We build buildings. They are vast enterprises of communication with hundreds of people, materials from all over the world installed by builders from all over the world, of all ages, with families, histories, stories, loves and hates, politics and beliefs — all this is woven into each building. If we had the eyes to see and the vocabulary to describe, we would develop tools to make this dense atmosphere of human endeavour apparent. Parallel to the performative democracy of the book machine where the weft of individual observation is wrapped around the warp of the form and process, architecture is posted in the environment for all to see. We live in an information-hungry society: we want it all, then we can, ourselves, select what we need to know, rather than having it pre-selected for us. This is a real sea-change in how we think about the making of architecture.
», les dimensions d’une revue se répartissent sur au moins trois couches. Le sujet est, d’emblée, évi- dent et immanent, et l’information devient très épaisse. Une épaisse description est familière aux yeux des lecteurs d’une nouvelle anthro- pologie. Plutôt que d’éliminer, de redéfinir, de faire la mise au point et d’éplucher le sujet pour en obtenir une équation théorique élégante, le
sujet est plutôt gardé dans la complexité tragique du monde. Les implications ayant trait à la production de l’architecture viennent complètement tourner l’attention de l’espace de pourtour de l’extérieur de l’immeuble, à l’immeuble comme un solide, dans un monde dense de matériel. Les immeu- bles sont de vastes entreprises
nous élaborerions des outils pour mettre en évidence cette atmo- sphère dense d’efforts humains.
de communication comptant des centaines de personnes, des matériaux de partout à travers le monde installés par des con- structeurs de tous âges, ayant des familles, des antécédents, des his- toires, des amours et des haines, des politiques et des croyances. Si seulement nous avions les yeux pour voir et un vocabulaire qui nous permette de décrire,
S ewing
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