Atelier Olschinsky, Barozzi / Veiga, Marlon Blackwell, Marija Brdarski, John Capen Brough, Roberto de Leon, Britt Eversole, Yvonne Farrell & Shelley McNamara (Grafton Architects), Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Seher Erdogan Ford, Jerome Haferd, Joyce Hwang (Ants of the Prairie), Gavin Keeney, Parsa Khalili, Tina Lechner, Keith Mitnick, Soltani+LeClercq, and SPBR Arquitetos (Angelo Bucci).

Refreshments will be served and issues of Project will be available for sale.

Atelier Olschinsky, Barozzi / Veiga, Marlon Blackwell, Marija Brdarski, John Capen Brough, Roberto de Leon, Britt Eversole, Yvonne Farrell & Shelley McNamara (Grafton Architects), Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Seher Erdogan Ford, Jerome Haferd, Joyce Hwang (Ants of the Prairie), Gavin Keeney, Parsa Khalili, Tina Lechner, Keith Mitnick, Soltani+LeClercq, and SPBR Arquitetos (Angelo Bucci).

Refreshments will be served and issues of Project will be available for sale.

One-Night Stand takes place this Saturday, May 14th, from 6pm to late, at the . Refreshments will be served and issues of the journal will be available for sale.

“Mark’s House,” by the firm Two Islands, is the winning entry in the Flint, Michigan Flat Lot Competition. The architects’ submission included seductive renderings of the proposed design: a mirrored, floating abstraction of a Tudor house. Then the project was built and, sadly, the reality was far from the glossy beauty portrayed in the initial representation. Many have discussed the unfortunate results on blogs and other websites, and some local residents have expressed their disapproval (see and , for example). This prompts the question of who is to blame: the designers, for proposing something unrealizable, especially considering budgetary constraints? The competition judges or organizers, for selecting an unrealizable project or setting the budget so low in the first place? Additionally, what does this mean to the residents of Flint, who encounter this object in their daily lives?

And yet the image above presents photographic “evidence” of a successful execution of Mark’s House, an image of a built reality that approximates the effect shown in competition renderings. This image, however, is a heavily doctored photograph of the built project. It is fiction posing as fact, designed to bolster the project by showing a satisfying realization of the design intent. The most interesting aspect of this image is that it represents a reversal in the typical chronology of a project, in which rendering precedes photography. Instead of the rendering serving as only as a predictive visualization, the rendering assumes authority over the photograph. The rendering becomes the prototype not just for the project itself, but for the photographic image of the built work. If the built realization of such a project falls as far short as Mark’s House does, post-production may be used to actually re-render the project, allowing a more favorable comparison between initial rendering and documentary photograph.

These representations of Mark’s House indicate the priority of the image in architecture today. Which audience for the project is larger: the residents and visitors of Flint, Michigan, or the networked crowd of the blogosphere? Clearly it is the second group; their consumption is therefore prioritized. The potential success of this photograph-turned-rendering is only plausible because most viewers of this image will never encounter the built project. This image was factitiously created. It was designed to fool, to hide the truth of the crinkled aluminum foil. It is not the little white lie told by many images manipulated using Photoshop. It is instead a full blown fiction intended to hide the ugly truth that these temporary pavilion competitions often yield less than satisfactory results.

Not only does this image attempt to mask the failure of this project’s construction, it also represents a failure of rendering itself. Problematically, the photorealistic rendering provides an image that is both too believable and too ideal for reality to ever satisfy. While a concept diagram suggests what a project might be, the rendering promises an exact representation of what the built project will look like. How can anything we build live up to the rainbow-filled world of floating buildings made of seamless, shimmering mirrored surfaces? Of course the realized project falls short of the rendered promise. In the case of such extreme dissonance, re-rendering is the only way to bridge the gap between illustration and reality. This project can only end up as a representational snake eating its own tail.

Gabrielle Patawaran

What type of “reading” is appropriate for this type of image, encountered on the website , nearly devoid of context? Cursory formal analysis yields minimal results: a tower made of casually stacked, differently skinned blocks, each covered by a green roof. But the image is too flippant to be taken straightforwardly. It seems to be a jab at “greenwashing,” a joke about the amount of work required for a form to appear to be informal. It’s just a stack of extrusions with texture maps, after all. Only an architect would appreciate it, either for its form or for the joke.

But not just any architect. A certain sensibility is immediately evident, and this sensibility is squarely at odds with whatever meaning we can gather from the project’s few contextual cues. “Proposal for a Museum” appears aesthetically similar to the will-against-the-world sensibility of Pier Vittorio Aureli’s (possibility of an) absolute architecture, but to understand what that’s all about we need the context behind so-called “absolute architecture.” So how are we to understand a project that appears to align itself with that same sensibility, but with neither author nor political context in sight?

“Proposal for a Museum” is not strictly authorless, of course, but it is encountered as an almost free floating image on Tumblr, that quasi-anonymous machine for de-contextualizing images. In that light, the project is best understood as an essay in defamiliarization. “Proposal for a Museum” exposes the incompatibility between two contemporary situations: the status of images in the digital world and the rigor of architectural form. To understand why this might be important, we might consult Claire Bishop on how artists have failed to thematize the digital: “While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?” Not many, she says. And she’s not alone in her characterization of the problem at the core of our experience of the digital; the editors at address this problem more precisely, in terms of content: “What’s most interesting—and perhaps troubling—is the way in which the subject matter (the actual ‘content’) is changing in response to the means of presentation.”

We can identify at least three different types of changes in content. First, there are plenty of projects that are “made for the internet” (that is, projects conceptualized around alluring, stand-alone images). These projects have occasioned countless impassioned attempts by architects and critics to distance themselves from digital “vomit” (in the case of ) and what ultimately amounts to the same thing, “overly iconic buildings made for magazines” (according to ). This suggests the second change in content brought about by the digital: projects that are made to not look good on the internet, and are therefore meant to demand an authentic first-person experience or deeper engagement of some kind. In a certain way these architects implicitly thematize the digital, albeit negatively.

The third type of project, exemplified by “Proposal for a Museum,” is about the incommensurability between “vomit” and “architecture.” On the one hand it takes part in the incessant production of cheap, disposable images, the new digital vernacular. On the other, it is the essence of aesthetic judgment, deftly placing itself within architecture culture. The utopian promise of the internet has been to bridge the gap between high and low, instant and deliberate. With “Proposal for a Museum” this promise—this myth—has been made into architecture.

Matthew Allen