Conference Home Page

Register for Day 1.

Introductions
10:00AM to 10:30AM

Mark Wigley, Dean, GSAPP, Columbia University
Christian Meyer, Chair and Professor
Michael Bell, Introduction to Conference

--

Panel 1
Ductility: Metals as material history and futures
10:30AM to 12:00PM

By their nature, metals have differing limits of ductility, but they all inevitably recover more easily and with greater limits than other major building materials such as glass or concrete. Is ductility still an issue in your work and if so how does the nature of material limits affect design? What aspects of your work exceed the nature of material limits or determine how you see material value as affecting your work.  Is there an aspect that is essential to metals that is added qualities such as ductility in your work today? Stanford Anderson, in his writing on Peter Behren's AEG Turbine Factory of 1908 speaks of limiting concrete's structural role in an attempt to reveal the capabilities of steel. What replaces structural performance or what quality in metals does your work rely on, extend or demonstrate when performance at an immediate level is not the singular goal. How do you work with material limits and with aspects of material behavior?

--

Panel 2
Discrete Structure: Steel Frame
1:30PM to 3:00PM

If metals have conceptualized architectural and economic metaphors of material strength and ductility, of factory strife and economic destiny, of unions and city economies, they also signify all manner of labor and legal aspects of equity.  Yet it is the architectural metaphors and the facts of frame and enclosure--steel as structural frame and metals as surface enclosure and curtain wall--which have been predominant in architectural schools, and that to a large degree have been presented as free from wider constituencies. Frame and enclosure sustain their own autonomy--despite their cultural histories--within a wide swath of architectural education. The frame here is usually segregate and neutral within social actions.

In the United States steel's architectural history is often geographically substantiated in Chicago architectural history--the late 19th Century "Chicago Frame"-- but the true separation of surface and structure as pedagogically efficient and segregate has also suppressed the wider discussion of metals in the very economy that produced new office buildings, new curtain walls, and new forms of assembly. The formation and subsequent rise of corollary economic machines prior to and during World War II re-distributed metals on a global scale and introduced them to an indexical financial value that architectural histories have rarely dealt with. The material aspects of engineering and architecture, and in particular the ductile and static properties of metals, offers a discrete and workable repose against the wider distributed nature of finance and aspects of construction indexed in buildings, cities, automobiles, cities, etc.. Measuring these matrices--the history of architecture and its local histories against the mobility of materials and monies establishes territorial relations--and in some sense exacerbates attempts to see construction in discrete terms. From the outset of steel's rapid rise in the 1940's, elastic limits were created  being set for metals within markets but also for labor and a deep investment in the value and sourcing of material against new financial territories and new methods of construction.

--

Panel 3
Surface Constraints: Expansion and then Contraction of Structure and Space
3:15 PM to 5:00PM

The structural frame--the speed and organization of construction--were modeled either for end-use or against benchmarks of production; there were overt needs to build fast, and to build expansive spaces. If this new sense of scale was enough to fascinate architects and engineers it also caused trepidation in other realms. In the wake of its realization a counter movement of tighter enclosure, and a more finite scale was desired. Space needed to be constrained and in that regard the expansive limits of steel and metals became less thrilling.

The antidote to endlessness and modern expanse was sought in a procedure of boundaries and edges. A post-ductile era attempted to delimit the formerly liberated expanses of free-span structures, particularly in offices, museums, schools, and public buildings. The material and structural design limits that fascinated an earlier generation were now supplanted by a set of limits found in social goals. The ductility of materials and their applications in engineering and architecture were no longer key determinants in the possibility of new spaces--instead new forms of architecture and social life emerged from preliminary analysis of social space. However, in this regard material and the expansion of space are far from extinct and may indeed have flourished more fully then ever imagined even as they were counter-acted with new models of privacy, intimacy, and interiority.

Architectural and engineering efficiencies have been to a large degree predicated in construction techniques. The nomenclatures of structural frame, curtain wall, enclosure, detail and connection have maintained a professional perimeter that keeps aspects of material science or a wider productive territory from unwinding the relative closure and efficacy of these terms. A parallel analysis of the social and political aspects of the architectural or urban results of new forms of construction, however, was inaugurated as a virtually concurrent project to modernization in architecture and engineering. Yet these were left in large part to the realms of sociology and the behavioral sciences. How do we discuss the degree to which social critiques were related to constructed materials (made material) or to the modes of construction that the new spaces originated within? Does a steel structural frame play an overtly different social role than a concrete frame, or does the spanning and the use of extended spaces become the primary locus of criticism--of social intervention? Could the frame itself be separate from the social use?

Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/avery.html