Systems Flow Diagram

This term I am in a studio taught by David Cook, a principal in the German firm Behnisch Architeckten. David has been named the 2010 Belluschi Visiting Professor (more on this later). This past Monday we had a pin-up presentation and group discussion about our assignment. The assignment was to create a systems flow diagram representing the research we had done over the first week (research that was broken down into eight categories with respect to urban environments: water, transportation, solar, waste, food, education, trade and health). For my presentation I drew inspiration from a team of architects out of Russia named Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. Together they established a reputation for conceptual architectural presentations and beautifully detailed, allegorical etchings commenting on the life of cities.

From "Forum de mille veritatis", 1987

I spent one afternoon completely engrossed by their monograph for two reasons; first because of their use of text. As I mentioned in my post about communication in architecture, the written word is an often undervalued component of our education. When text is used effectively to tell an architectural story, or even poetically as in Brodsky and Utkin's work, it adds a lot to a presentation. As noted in the preface by Lois Nesbitt,

"Text is everywhere present in Brodsky and Utkin's etchings, drawing on the convention of labeling architectural drawings and of applying captions to storybook illustrations, and thus reflecting the hybrid architectural narrative nature of their production. Moreover, the pair plays with the idea that such texts explain or at least identify images".

The second reason I was captivated by this work was the effectiveness of storytelling in order to represent or diagram architectural ideas. Their use of text and selection of images effectively introduce entire fictional universes, armatures for the audience to participate with their own agendas, personal persuasions and imaginations. The work, a response to "the bleak architectural scene in the Soviet Union", seemed applicable to our task at hand; creating a model for the intervention of urban agriculture in American cities,

"an escape into the realm of the imagination that ended as a visual commentary on what was wrong with social and physical reality and how its ills might be remedied. It was a fortunate historical accident that the work was created on the eve of radical revisions of Soviet policy toward, among other things, cultural expression."

I wanted to write a story to help me filter the overwhelming mass of information our class had presented the week before. If I could figure out the characters of the story and create a narrative for those characters, maybe I could diagram the system in which they participated more effectively and in turn understand it myself. To do this I collaged components from three of their etchings, a project from Lebbeus Woods, two illustrations from Peter Sis and one from the cartoonist Heath Robinson.

There is a building downtown. it is one of many buildings. it stands unremarkable from the street.

Inside this building live people in dwellings furnished with everything necessary for life. most of the dwellings are oriented side-by-side, centered around a void. the void runs down the building, deep into the surface of the earth. every resident spends his time working on a task. the tasks vary from person to person. they vary in scope, size, concern, difficulty and gratification to the resident. sometimes the tasks overlap, sometimes they are repeated by others, sometimes they result in the production of objects and sometimes those objects go to good use. when one task is complete, another is waiting.

There is a resident in this building who continually performs one task. he is in charge of taking care of the other residents in the building. he picks up and discards superfluous objects, he distributes new tasks upon the completion of old ones. he lives inside a unique dwelling above the rest.

This building is a fine place to live. all the residents are content, happy to perform their tasks, indifferent to their isolation, likely unaware of'anything else.

And as a result of the story, this agenda was formed to prepare for the remainder of the term:

Credits for original work by:

Lebbeus Woods "High Houses"

Brodsky and Utkin "Columbarium Habitabile"

"Bridge"

"Villa Nautilus"

Peter Sis, "Starry Messenger" and Heath Robinson.