WEDNESDAY SEPTEMEBER 30

REGISTER FOR KEYNOTE

• Introduction to Conference:
  6:30PM-6:50PM

  Mark Wigley, Dean, GSAPP, Columbia University

• Gary Higbee,  Director of Industrial Development
  The Steel Institute of New York and the Ornamental
  Metal Institute of New York
   
  Louis Geschwinder, Vice President, Special Projects
  American Institute of Steel Construction
   

• Keynote Lecture:
  6:50PM-8:00PM

  José Rafael Moneo, Architect, Madrid / Professor, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

THURSDAY OCTOBER 1

REGISTER FOR DAY 1

• Introductions
  10:00AM to 10:30AM

  Mark Wigley, Dean, GSAPP, Columbia University
  Christian Meyer, Chair and Professor
  Michael Bell, Professor of Architecture, Conference Chair

• Panel 1

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

• Moderator: Ana Miljacki

• Speakers: Keith Kaseman, David Benjamin, John Fernandez, Hilary Sample

  Metals, as surface or structure—as structural generators of space—play a role in nearly every strain of modernization in architecture, but they are also benchmark commodities that are central to labor and employment contexts before and after World War II. Metals define complete geographies of work, production and political life (Bethlehem Steel and Allentown for example). Non-architectural metals delivered in automobiles, and hard goods (from AEG to General Electric to General Motors) in the United States and worldwide have all been sourced as the engines of the sprawling late twentieth century city in all of its registrations and forms. But in the received aspects of architectural history, metals, and in particular steel, remain something more segregate and less diluted; they are presented as intrinsic to key terms of the profession. Metals as a material precede architectural concepts—they are instigators and carriers of architectural meaning.  
   
  The divide between what metals are as commodities and what they signify architecturally seems to be immense, but this imaginary is rapidly changing. As all materials are increasingly seen as a component in a delivery and control chain they are situated within a deeper set of organized techniques and seen less as an origin then as a conductor. Does the process replaces the material s centrality in architecture and engineering, or diminishes the components significance as it replaces this with forms of production and performance?  
   
  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? 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? How does the material life cycle affect its meaning today?

• 1.5 AIA CES

• Break: 12:00pm - 1:30pm

• Panel 2

   Discrete Structure: Steel Frame

  1:30PM to 3:00PM

• Moderator: Phillip Anzalone

• Speakers: Heiko Trumpf, Rory McGowan, Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto, Christoph a. Kumpusch
  

  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.

• 1.5 AIA CES

• Panel 3

  Structure and Space: Clear-Span / Long-Span
  3:15 PM to 5:00PM

• Moderator: Toshiko Mori

• Speakers: Ronald Mayes, Galia Solomonoff, Laurie Hawkinson Lise-Anne Couture

  In clear-span or long-span structures varying degrees of integration between framing and enclosure means that volume, mass and structure are often unified and undivided. Structural engineering, in this realm, takes on social aspects of what could only incrementally be called architectural space. In long-span or clear-span structures a threshold is passed that indicates that space is fundamentally derived from engineering as much or more then architecture. Its social meaning is derived or understood within the tributaries of both fields but at a scale that was often virtually infrastructural. Within the evolution of metals and in particular of steel framing, the nature of a clear or long-span structure has also been a continually evolving project in which spanning capacities reveal new functional potentials; new spaces that preceded use.

   Is structure’s relation to expansive forms of space and use still a driving factor in design today?

   As either a pragmatic foundation, or a conceptual device, the structural frame segregate from and as a datum or foundation for space—not as closure, or volume but as its matrix—has often maintained a tight perimeter that keeps social aspects of use apart from overtly structural or material concerns. In the normative modern structural paradigm the structural frame holds the building up as non-load bearing walls, and subsequent programming, affect social life and use. The stability of structure assures a datum for a segregate organization of social life—in this realm a concrete office building essentially functions as a steel office building would. As a subset of structure the social aspects of architectural space could occur as a concurrent or parallel project. In clear span structures, or spaces where structure and space are synonymous, however, the degree to which social aspects of occupation were related to the very means of construction—to overt use of materials— meant that structure was a social entity. It was capable of instigating use. In other words, the social was overtly tied to material and to engineering, even as space was often cast wide-open and made to seem a-material in its newfound expansiveness. Quasi-endless interiors made by clear-span systems fascinated architects and engineers, but also engendered counter movements and caused trepidation in other realms where the freedom became a source of anxiety.

  To what degree have we often seen counter-acting tendencies to the capacities of spatial and structural extension—towards new models of privacy, intimacy, and interiority as antidotes to the tendencies expansiveness of clear span experiments? Are examples such as the cellular nature of space in the Whitney Museum galleries by Richard Gluckman (that created permanent rooms in former office space in the otherwise open plan of the building) or a wide range of aedicular spaces common in the Post-Modernism, or even within new forms of networked communities and communication? What are the technical aspects of clear-span today; what aspects of spatial specificity vs. universality affect its organization today?

• 1.5 AIA CES

FRIDAY OCTOBER 2

REGISTER FOR DAY 2

• Panel 1

  Environments, Air, Oxidation: Final Finish
  9:30AM to 11:00AM 

• Moderator: Felicity Scott

• Speakers: Jorge Otero-Pailos, George Wheeler, Mark Malekshahi, Anna Dyson
  

  The oxidation of metal occurs when the material loses electrons: the atoms of the metal move from a neutral state and become positively charged. The result is the formation of what we commonly call rust and what is routinely addressed as a fact of maintenance. The concept of decay in metals dramatically changed during the rise of Core Ten and other metals that controlled oxidation as a protective final finish. The visual result was a dulled surface—a darkened, rough patina. Core Ten allowed the temporal affects of weather to merge with the universal or timeless aspects of material in Modernism. Coupled with landscape orientations in design by Roche-Dinkeloo, Core Ten was part of a naturalization of the modern office, and an invocation of weather in material maintenance. 

  Compared to architectural metals that were highly polished, or finished in work by Mies van der Rohe and others, Core Ten was a radical shift. In Mies’ work, aspects of material, light and optics deeply affect the work’s complex presence; the metals bridged retinal aspects of work in the visual arts by Man Ray and others where reflective materials were critical. Is it a mistake to see aspects of polished and highly reflective or refracting metals as contrary to the opacity of Core Ten’s controlled oxidation? Rosalind Krauss describes a kind of opacity in the work of Duchamp as an “arrêt à la rétine”—a stopping of analytical process at the retina. The production of meaning is found in the interactions between the subject’s nerve endings—the retinal aspects of the art instigate what is ultimately a physiological production of meaning. The optic aspects of reflectivity in the art are experienced as coordinated innervations of the retina; what Krauss called a “self-sufficient or autonomous realm of activity.” Was Core Ten’s matt, but still complex finish relate-able to theories of surface and opacity in art—was its chemical work a kind of optic work and far more intertwined with art then we have often imagined.

   How are building’s environmentally understood today? Is there a visual affect to our contemporary capacities to control or manage thermal and environmental aspects of metals?

• 1.5 AIA CES

• Panel 2 

  Infrastructure or Architecture: Structural Performance and its Visual Qualities

  11:15AM to 12:30PM
•  
• Moderator: Christian Meyer
• Speakers: Hans Schober, Marwan Nader, Kenneth Frampton, Steven Holl
  
•  
• New aspects engineering in the structural design of bridges has led to new crossover works and a new architectural aesthetics of infrastructure. Coupled with recently developed computational tools that have allowed high levels of customization in structural design without compromising essential requirements of serviceability and economy, we are seeing a wide range of new forms of infrastructure as new forms of quasi-architecture. The professions of engineering and architecture merge in unique ways as new means of structural analysis open new visual and aesthetic forms.

• A case to consider is that of the cable-stayed bridge: the delicacy of the balance and the linear/planar control of forces reflect a mechanical invention that creates new forms of structure, but also new forms of visual monumentality. Unprecedented levels of precision in the routing of forces enable reductions in material weight in cable-stayed bridges: while the towers or pylons carry primarily compression loads the cables are arrayed in a way that essentially cantilevers the deck surfaces. The deck’s ability to resist the horizontal components of the cable forces has the consequence of eliminating the need for heavy buttresses or anchorages. There are un-canny visual results as the historically expected visual mass of the suspension bridge’s massive anchorage is absent: the structure resolves itself internally. The concrete deck acts as a pre-stressed element and the structural composition becomes a visual matrix of linear and planar elements. It is visually light—the taught cables replace the parabolic form taken in the suspension bridge.

  Does your work on structure engage design in ways; does your work in architecture engage structure in new ways, and are we seeing a new moment in the bridge-like structures that opens new social or cultural potentials?

• 1.5 AIA CES

• Break: 12:30pm - 2:00pm

• Panel 3

  New Metals equal New Space
  2:00PM to 3:15PM

• Moderator: Michael Bell

• Speakers: Craig Schwitter, Sanford Kwinter, Theodore Prudon, Werner Sobek
  

  In the case of metals, what are the concepts that serve to outline the material for our work today? Is metal now simply one material among many in a leveled field; does it hold a central position as it might have with the work of Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe (as frame or curtain wall), or in work by Renzo Piano (as infrastructural scale / as cast components) or even Frank Gehry (as spline-based skin/shingle).

  Aspects of high modernism often are received as a story of rationalized or discrete production yet the steel and glass towers of this early period were never isolated from wider parameters. Political or social action could not be separated from material even as new forms of urban, social and financial life emerged that increasingly relied on dispersed and bucolic forms of suburbia and media-based modes of social life—forms of private life that insulated subjects from overt forms of production. Yet, production is by many accounts infused in post-war suburban sprawl as fully as it is the pre war city.

  Prior to the end of World War II, the goal of full employment in a post-war United States was understood to require a dramatic rise in manufacturing and material exports. Metals were key to this equation at the heart of the expansion of the US economy and its territorial expansion. At the Detroit Economic Club in1944, then Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau pledged that the formation of the International Monetary Fund, as part of the Bretton-Woods Treaty, would secure for Detroit the needed exports to secure full employment after the war. Producing automobiles to meet that goal could only occur against a stable exchange rate between the U.S. and Europe. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, set into motion by the Bretton-Woods Treaty signed by forty-four nations, fueled a new urban landscape worldwide. Driven by dual mechanisms of production and finance, material commodities were never to be as discretely understood again as they found their way into buildings as much as automobiles and airplanes, and into consumer products worldwide.

   Where in this explosion of growth are the known terms for our fields? The post-war city and its wildly expansive and often predicted collapse has usually been presented as having humiliated the local aspects of building, and material craft or control, but in this new moment of material logics, do we return to the real or imagined aspects of architectural and engineering history of engagement?

•  1.5 AIA CES
  

• Panel 4

  Precious Metals: Abstraction and Rationalization
  3:30PM to 5:00PM

• Moderator: Mabel Wilson

• Speakers: Juan Herreros, Sylvia Lavin, Paola Antonelli, Matthias Schuler

  Metals have been both the epitome of the rational and pragmatic aspects of building as well as the denominator of modern architecture’s more rarefied or a-material aspirations. The imagined terms of production and its broader territories and their impact on architecture during first half of the twentieth century frequently linked issues of rationalization with parallel themes of abstraction or programming and use. By seeking forms of structural and material rationalization that were simultaneously carriers of social change, or transcendental experience, the boundary that separated empirical work and less quantifiable imagined aspirations did not present a divide; indeed it was a constituent aspect of much of what still forms core educational values in architecture programs today. Is abstraction an aspect of modern conceptions of materials that seem less valued in the emerging aspects of material today; for example, in relation to contemporary digital controls, or the modeling and choreography of project delivery?

  The simultaneity of empirical work and transcendent aspirations allowed and perhaps even perpetuated a divide between what architecture and engineering may be capable of versus what its aspirations were during the Bauhaus era. Today it seems we have entered a new realm of technical work in architecture and engineering that is decidedly less abstract in how it relates to broader issues of economy and money—of its place in the spectrum of building. Issues of speed in realization, not as leitmotif or zeitgeist of cultural experience, but as a denominator of management of monies, time and ultimately profits is common in architectural discourse today.

  How have we constructed the imaginary and literal aspects of our work, and how does this revise what we have come to expect as standard appreciations and procedures for the role of materials in practice? From what basis do we engage materials today and how is our thinking still affected by the social and technical aspects of the previous centuries’ origins—from all its vantages, whether quasi-religious, secular, mystical, technically based or socially driven.

  In the writings of Mies van der Rohe, the drive towards the factual aspects of building was parallel with a renunciation of forms of mysticism; the search for a renewed form of the building arts in Mies’ work was founded in an “enthusiasm for the immediately real.” Yet Mies’ work was based in an “understanding of life” as having “become more profound.” Mies’ iconic nickel-plated cruciform column and its optical qualities under light stand as both the figural and empirical signifier of a rationalized world yet it of course was famously abstract and even a-material. The column was demonstratively “real” even as its visual qualities and color gave it a saturated sense of flow. Nickel is both hard and highly ductile—that hardness was evident as the sense of flow was palpable.

  How is the relation between abstraction or rationalization constructed today—or have these arguments been displaced by new relations between material and production—between function and use, between image and…?

• 1.5 AIA CES

• Concluding Remarks

  Architectural Surface and Structure Today
  5-6PM

• Speakers: Mark Wigley with Werner Sobek, Steven Holl and Matthias Schuler

  Are new terms possible that would conflate surface and structure or materials and industry again and that give material aspects of social life—and the debate of its terms and conditions.