During his many years in France, the American sculptor George Grey Barnard acquired a large number of Gothic and Romanesque architectural elements from decayed villages in the countryside. Columns, arches, doors, rooms, and whole buildings made up his growing lot. In 1930, during one of Barnard’s financial crisis, he sold his collection to John D. Rockefeller Jr. The notorious American tycoon, in one of his many philanthropic initiatives, decided to move the collection to the USA and integrate it into the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a sort of sub-division dedicated to Medieval art: the Met Cloisters Museum. From 1934 to 1939, the cloisters of Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefort, and Trie were dismantled and transported to Fort Tyron Park in upper Manhattan. The architect of the new museum, Charles Collens, was given the task of reconstructing the cloisters using only the architectural elements contained within the collection. Through the processes of appropriation and rejection of specific parts of the four cloisters, the assimilation of meanings and constructive principles, and the final conciliation of each piece, Collens created a new model for the cloister, an eclectic assemblage representing an entire European typology.

Beyond any criticism regarding the context and ethics of the Met Cloisters, what we wish to focus on is the intention it represents of building a new identity by making use of previously existing elements. The project by Charles Collens seems to corroborate the possibility of making a seemingly direct analogy between the sociological theories of Lacan—among others—regarding the building of one’s own identity solely through the interaction with pre-existing traces and conditions. It also raises questions regarding the role of the architect in the project’s process: is Collens the author of the Met Cloisters?

This fifth and final issue of the CARTHA on Building Identity cycle approaches the questions posed in the four previous issues, each addressing a specific “identity process”—Appropriation, Assimilation, Denial and Conciliation—through a different medium and focusing on projectual answers sourced from an international group of architects.

The practices Made In, Sam Jacob, Monadnock, Bruther, Bureau Spectacular, Conen Sigl and Muoto have been invited to take on a projectual task similar to the one Collens undertook. The aforementioned identity building processes acted as guidelines for the design process, challenging the architects to design a new dwelling (house, apartment, manor, hut, etc), drawing from projects inserted in their own conceptual, social, and physical contexts but not designed by them.

Alongside the projects, a commentary by Kenneth Frampton on the relation between identity and architecture widens the scope, questioning which role could architecture play in the current global political situation, and proposing a new lenses through which one can look back at the whole cycle.

The departing questions for this cycle are not only addressed but also answered in this last issue. The results of the speculative design exercise, beyond featuring a richness of references and depth of understanding of the meaning of previously built projects, promote a reflection on the contexts and situations the invited architects face. Interests in the current notions of social interaction, ideas of property, drastic shifts in environmental conditions and conceptions of history and future are brought forth in critical, seductive ways. The virtuosity displayed in the projects thus allows us to answer the question of authorship, for the creation of new meanings is indeed the emergence of a new identity, therefore of an independent person, a self. Furthermore, when facing the projects featured in this issue, alongside the visual and text essays published throughout the cycle, identity does seem to be able to promote a positive complexity in architecture, even when addressing the most common, most essential of typologies.

Nevertheless, it is not our intention to present an approach to architecture through identity as a definitive path, rather to propose it as an enriching complementary analysis and project methodology. The notion of identity, as proposed by this cycle, forces one to adopt a critical position towards a context. It promotes a deep understanding of what the now is by asking why it is so, what has been rejected if this has been appropriated, what has been lost in the constant processes of assimilation, and what the outcome of a more conciliatory approach might be.

With a career that spans through the last 5 decades, Kenneth Frampton has been a fundamental figure in architecture critique. Through teaching, writing, editing, and curating, his work has become key in the understanding of modern and contemporary architecture. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” (Among many of his writings) remains a pivotal and highly influential essay, which had already in 1982 advocated for an alternative to modernism, suitable for a postmodern society that would go beyond an aesthetic discourse.

In the current context of global neoliberalism, architecture is increasingly instrumentalized as a political tool, an apparatus that constructs and produces identity. CARTHA asks how architects today can question anew the tenants of Modernism through a series of identity-building process—Assimilation, Appropriation, Rejection and Conciliation—in order to reimagine how architecture can achieve a new agency within contemporary social, economic, and political structures.

Addressing this topic, CARTHA posited a series of interrogations through the 2018 Building Identity cycle that Professor Frampton has reformulated into a single essential question and response:

“What can be the role of architecture in an age totally overrun by neoliberal, globalized capitalism?”

One could say that the historical failure of social democracy has left the society bereft of any agency for its self-realization that is not compromised by the market and rampant consumerism. Generally speaking, right wing political parties in the Anglo American world have no vision whatsoever for the future of the society other than enabling the super-rich to escape reasonable taxation, make even more money and worsen the already unacceptable maldistribution of wealth.

Where functioning welfare states still prevail, as in Scandinavia, the possibilities for maintaining social security, national health, free education and public transit which are paid for by taxation, the architectural profession still has a basis on which it can contribute to the identity of the society. It may also be argued that where the city-state still survives in Italy or Spain, the profession may contribute both to the social well being and the identity of the local community. Given the Dark Neoliberal Age in which we live the role of architecture in the formation of social identity is extremely curtailed. Your questions seem to anticipate nothing about the future of climate change and the latent capacity of maximizing techno-science to pollute an entire planet. One notes that Europe has played a resistant role in this regard.

I cited Alvar Aalto as an exemplary figure because while he remained committed to the modern project he did so in a way that was always attentive to climate and topography. Moreover, he employed a language which was was accessible as opposed to current spectacular displays of instrumental form, totally indifferent to the psychological well being of the user.

In response, CARTHA maintains that building identity is intrinsically linked to place: the climates, ecologies, topographies, and socio-political structures that contextualize architecture are fundamental to its formulation and understanding. Critiquing Modernism’s desire to reject architecture’s histories and restructure the city through the appropriation of new ideological frameworks, this cycle is a response to that legacy of detachment. It postulates the impossibility of the tabula rasa, placing social, cultural, and geographical contexts at the center of any design process.

By reframing architecture through the processes of building identity, the essays and design speculations contained in CARTHA’s current cycle offer a point of resistance to the universalizing tendencies of globalization.

Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where he has taught since 1972. He was trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London and has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian and critic. In addition to Columbia, Frampton has taught at a number of leading institutions including the Royal College of Art in London, the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, EPFL in Lausanne and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio.

Kenneth Frampton is the author of Modern Architecture and the Critical Present(1980), Studies in Tectonic Culture (1995), American Masterworks (1995), Le Corbusier (2001), Labour, Work & Architecture (2005), and most recently, L’Altro Movimento Moderno (2015) and A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (2015). He is currently at work on an expanded fifth edition of Modern Architecture: A Critical History.

Frampton teaching was the subject of the 2017 exhibition Educating Architects: Four Courses by Kenneth Frampton at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where his archive is held. Metropolis Magazine named him a Gamechanger in January 2018. Frampton was recognized with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2018 Venice Biennale for Architecture.

The desire of communicating identity is all over suburban United States: why else would humans pepper their yards with decorative gnomes, Christmas ornaments, Halloween accoutrements, or other culturally specific imageries that help form a source of identity? By extension, the aesthetic qualities of architecture itself performs a similar role. The  suburban United States is both a condition of a declaration of a public self, as well as a security of the private self. Whereas the front of the house is an opportunity to conform through the decorations, the backyard is a location to retreat.

In the backyards of suburban Los Angeles, private properties are often physically defined by fences, hedges, or walls. Within the suburban blocks, slivers of lines are drawn to accentuate the “privatize everything” sensibility from the 1980s. Unlike the Barcelona block where the notions of private and public are blurred, the backyards of Los Angeles suburban houses are as black and white as the Nolli Plan – nothing is shared, and an ideological border cuts cleanly who is or is not welcomed.

In our 2018 “Yes to ADU” competition entry, we (Bureau Spectacular) proposed an alternative to this urban condition. The purpose of the ADU (Accessory Dwelling Units) is to combat the shortage of housing stock by supplementing it with additional backyard homes. However, as opposed to perpetuating the notion of the absolutely private backyards for people to retreat, we think ADUs can help erode the rigidity of the property lines between neighbors. If we consider these ADUs to be micro versions of “housing-plus” projects, the “plus” can be added infrastructural functions benefiting the entire block, rather than the individual property only. For example, an ADU can dual function as solar power collectors, water processing systems, or collective fermentation stations – infrastructures for the full block. By benefiting the full block, the backyards of the LA suburban block has a chance to transform from individual properties into a space for something collective. It allows the typical LA block to dilute the strength of individual boundaries to become a permeable courtyard condition.

The House Between Properties (2018-2019) is a version of such a backyard infrastructure – it is a shared ADU between several neighbors. This collective backyard house is a box that hovers over several legal property lines, and are structurally supported by the infrastructural components that help distribute added quality of life across the suburban block. These infrastructural components attached to the box are sampled from various works of architecture – each surgically removed and programmatically transformed to have a new function parallel the suggestions left behind by the previous works of architecture.

Although the plan of the House Between Properties permeate across property lines, the section and elevation function not so dissimilar from the aforementioned gnomes or decorative flamingos – it is a place where a mash-up of collective identities in a backyard may become possible – and, in doing so, the individual private backyards may become a collective courtyard.

Bureau Spectacular is an operation of cultural affairs established since 2008. It is located in Los Angeles.

Bureau Spectacular imagines other worlds and engages the design of architecture through telling stories. Beautiful stories about character development, relationships, curiosities and attitudes; absurd stories about impossible realities that invite enticing possibilities. The stories conflate design, representation, theory, criticism, history and taste into cartoon pages. These cartoon narratives swerve into the physical world through architectural installations, models and buildings.

Bureau Spectacular is a group of individuals who engage culture through the contemplation of art, architecture, history, politics, sociology, linguistics, mathematics, graphic design, technology, and graphic novels. We often find ourselves at the crossroads of all disciplines, yet comfortably embracing the healthy intersections between the many human discourses.

JIMENEZ LAI works in the world of art, culture, and education. Early in his career, Jimenez Lai lived and worked in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Before founding Bureau Spectacular, Lai worked for various international offices, including MOS and OMA. Lai is widely exhibited and published around the world, including the MoMA-collected White Elephant. His first book, Citizens of No Place, was published by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation. Draft II of this book has been archived at the New Museum as a part of the show Younger Than Jesus. Lai has won various awards, including the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Debut Award at the Lisbon Triennale, and the 2017 Designer of the Future Award at Art Basel / Design Miami. In 2014, Lai represented Taiwan at the 14th Venice Architectural Biennale. In 2015, Lai organized the Treatise exhibition and publication series at the Graham Foundation.  Alongside MoMA, Lai’s work has been collected by SFMOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, and LACMA. Currently, Lai is a visiting faculty at Columbia University, and heads a Supra Studio at UCLA.

This is the tale of a strange house once imagined for a house collector. Mister Collector, as we may call him, used to live in five glass houses. He had bought these five houses over the years, not by necessity, but as a way to fulfil his love of glass architecture (he had German origins). Due to his eccentric and intense character, he could not stay more than a few days in a single place, and his life was about to travel from one house to another. And always in the same order. Once he had visited them all, he would simply go back to the first one, visit all the others again. Just like Howard Hughes, the famous aviator who used to live in a series of strictly identical apartments spread around the world, his life was about experiencing speed. The speed he was seeking was not yet the same speed as that of a bullet train or a sport car. Rather, it was a kind of inertia. A speed so absolute that it would become like static. Having bought these five beautiful glass houses, he had managed to combine his contradictory desires of speed and architecture.

One day, he thought he had become to old to keep moving from one house to another, and decided he would gather all his collection in a single place, so as to live in all his houses at once. No more travelling ! No more moving from one house to another. The houses had to move to him. He called his architect who suggested to deconstruct all five houses and reconstruct them in the same place, arguing that glass houses were particularly suited for deconstruction and reconstruction. Mister Collector enthusiastically accepted. His houses were then unbuilt and rebuilt on the same plot. But not just one next to the other, but really intertwined with each other, so as to make one house out of five. The result was a kind weird space-time compression. A house with five bathrooms and his five kitchens. A labyrinth of crisscrossing glass panels, steel structures, flat and slopped roofs, stone and wooden floors, decorated with an eclectic set of original pieces of furniture, carpets and vintage appliances. Mister collector could then live in all his five glass houses at once. Trapped in his own crystal castle, he found what he had always looking for: enjoy his entire collection and feel like waking up in a new glass house everyday.

Philip Johnson, Glass house, 1949.
Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth house, 1951.
Paul Rudolph, Walker Guest house, 1953.
Pierre Koenig, Stahl house, 1959.
Charles W. Moore, Orinda House, 1962