Remote Practices: Architecture at a Distance

By Matthew Mindrup and Lilian Chee

As advancements in transportation and technology continue to close the gap between architect, client, builder and site, critique, and place, this book considers how architects, designers, theorists, and critics design, describe, and critique future and past constructions in absentia. This book engages with remote practice, providing students, academics, and professionals with the understanding and tools they need to rethink the role of the distant and disconnected in making, thinking, and writing architecture—a skill which is becoming increasingly important in contemporary education and practice. Bringing together a collection of 16 essays and creative works from a diverse and respected group of scholars and designers, this book reflects upon the challenges and opportunities which remote practices occasion in architecture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Jan 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781848226470

Book preview

Front Cover of Remote PracticesBook Title of Remote Practices

First published in 2022 by Lund Humphries

Lund Humphries

Office 3, Book House

261A City Road

London EC1V 1JX

UK

www.lundhumphries.com

Remote Practices: Architecture at a Distance

© Matthew Mindrup and Lilian Chee, 2022

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978–1–84822–531–2

A Cataloguing-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and publishers. Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce the images in this book. Any omissions are entirely unintentional, and details should be addressed to the publishers.

Matthew Mindrup and Lilian Chee have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this Work.

Cover: Antony Gormley, Blind Light, 2007

Photograph: Stephen White & Co., London

Copyedited by Pamela Bertram

Designed by Jacqui Cornish

Proofread by Patrick Cole

Cover design by Paul Arnot

Set in Arnhem Pro and ABC Favorit Mono

Printed in Estonia

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Editor’s Note: In Praise of the Remote

Matthew Mindrup

PART I PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGY

Introduction

Matthew Mindrup

1 Toward a Political Ecology of Architecture

Joan Ockman

2 Greater Horizons: Origins of Remote and Global Architectural Practices

Paul Emmons

3 On the Remoteness of CAD’s Gesture

Jason Crow

4 Extreme Interiority

Nerma Cridge

5 Winging it (with Alberti): Learning from Distance

Lisa Landrum

6 You’ve Got Mail: Historical Precedents and Contemporary Relevance of Epistolary Architecture

Noémie Despland-Lichtert and Brendan Sullivan Shea

7 Architectural Education in the First Person: ‘Professionalism’ and Care in a Pandemic Year

Naomi Stead

8 Fresh Eyes: The Practice of the Remote at the Bauhaus

Matthew Mindrup and Jodi LaCoe

PART II CRITIQUE AND PERFORMATIVITY

Introduction

Lilian Chee

9 Seven Studies for ‘A Holding’ (23 March – 31 May 2020)

Jane Rendell

10 Critical Proximities: In Bed with Architecture

Chris L. Smith

11 Experiences, Everywhere: The Making of Informated Space

Ioanna Sotiriou

12 An Emotional Critique of Remote Practices

Philip Ursprung

13 Drawing in: Bodies in Motion

Belinda Mitchell

14 A Digital Table: To Eat (Critically) Together

Gabriela Aquije Zegarra

15 12/13/18/19: The Making of Blind Spot Film Place Collective

16 Amidst … : Afterimage, Affect, Architecture

Lilian Chee

In the Shadow of … A Tentative Conclusion

Lilian Chee with Tan Yi-Ern Samuel

Notes

Illustration Credits

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gabriela Aquije Zegarra is a Peruvian architect (École Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Toulouse (ENSAT) France 2012 and Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) 2015) and a design researcher, currently based in Germany. In 2020, she obtained her MSc Design Research as part of the COOP academic partnership between the Bauhaus Stiftung, Hochschule Anhalt, and Universität Humboldt zu Berlin. Her work includes landscape architecture projects, curatorial research, and exhibition design, in partnership with diverse designers and collectives across North and South America and Europe. As a Future Architecture 2021 fellow, she is currently focused on the link between bioregional food systems, gastro-politics, and critical design. Gabriela is also part of the core team of the international digital project, ‘Visualizing the Virus’, led by Dr Sria Chatterjee and supported by the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU), the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), Basel and the Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University.

Lilian Chee is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore (NUS), where she co-leads the Research by Design cluster. Her research connects embodied experience and affective evidence with architectural representation, affect theory, feminist politics, and creative practice methods. The award-winning essay film collaboration 03-FLATS (2014), which she conceptualised and researched, has been screened in major cities and is used in numerous university curricula. Her monograph, Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces theorizes affect at the intersections of architectural discourse and encounter. She is co-directing a series of short films Objects for Thriving (2022) looking at elderly occupants through their objects, domestic spaces, and structures of feeling. Her current funded research project explores home-based work practices through an affective-feminist perspective.

Nerma Prnjavorac Cridge is an academic and author, currently teaching at the Architectural Association, Greenwich and Regent’s Universities and also directing Drawing Agency, London. Her first monograph, Drawing the Unbuildable, on the Soviet avant-garde, was published in 2015. Recent publications include ‘Printing the Familiar’, in Re:Print (2018), edited by Véronique Chance and Duncan Ganley, and ‘Restless: Drawn by Zaha Hadid’, in The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture (2021), edited by Anna Sokolina. At present, Nerma is working on her second monograph, entitled The Politics of Abstraction, on monuments and secrets from the former Yugoslavia.

Jason Crow is a senior lecturer at Monash University and a licensed architect in the state of Pennsylvania. His research explores how technological changes impact material ontology and artisanal epistemology. He was a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and an Arthur C. Tagge fellow at McGill University, where he completed his PhD dissertation examining the influence of material culture on the origins of Gothic architecture. He is the author of ‘Approaching a Material History of Architecture’, in Performative Materials in Architecture and Design (2013), edited by Rashida Ng and Sneha Patel, and of ‘Fear and Bernard of Clairvaux’s Living Stones’, in Room One Thousand, the University of California at Berkeley’s interdisciplinary journal on architectural history.

Noémie Despland-Lichtert is an educator, urban historian, and independent curator. Currently teaching at Texas Tech University, she holds a BFA from Concordia University, a post-professional Master of Architecture from McGill University, and a Master’s in Curatorial Studies from the University of Southern California.

Paul Emmons is a registered architect and the Patrick and Nancy Lathrop Professor of Architecture at Virginia Tech, where he serves as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies for the College of Architecture and Urban Studies. He is based at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center where he is also Coordinator of the PhD in Architecture and Design Research Program. He earned a PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Architecture from the University of Minnesota. His research on design practices focusing on architectural drawing has been presented and published at venues around the world. His book, Drawing Imagining Building: Embodiment in Architectural Design Practices, was published in 2020, along with his co-edited volume, Ceilings and Dreams: The Architecture of Levity.

Film Place Collective is Sander Hölsgens, Rebecca Loewen, Thi Phuong-Trâm Nguyen, Hannah Paveck, and Anna Viola Sborgi. We are filmmakers, architects, and thinkers discussing and exploring the material of film as it mediates place through image, sound, and movement. In the 2010s, we gathered on a biweekly basis at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, organising reading groups, events, and exhibitions to discuss the intersection of architecture and film. Scattered across the globe, the collective now embraces remote practices as modes of engaging with our surroundings.

Jodi LaCoe is a faculty member in the School of Architecture at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She earned a PhD in Architecture and Design Research from the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of the Virginia Polytechnic and State University, a Master of Architecture in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests bridge the art and science of historical visualisations of space – the connections, interactions, and inspirations informing the relationship between the architectural imagination and cultural histories.

Lisa Landrum is Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton University and a post-professional Master’s and PhD in Architectural History and Theory from McGill University. Her research on architectural agency, performance, philosophy, and democracy is published in several recent books, including Reading Architecture (2019); Confabulations (2017); Architecture’s Appeal (2015); Architecture as a Performing Art (2013); Architecture and Justice (2013); and the Montreal Architectural Review (2019/2015).

Matthew Mindrup is Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Sydney and currently its Director of Undergraduate Programs in Architecture Design and Planning. Originally trained as an architect, he is also a historian, with books on the material imagination in architectural practice and the first comprehensive history of the different uses for architectural models since antiquity until the present. His forthcoming books treat the art of forgetting in architecture and reflect on the architectural imagination in the evolution of the practice.

Belinda Mitchell is a senior lecturer in Interior Design at the University of Portsmouth, School of Architecture where she is a director for a set of interdisciplinary Master’s programmes and Course Leader for the MA in Interior Architecture. She also has a visual arts practice which takes place through collaborative processes and explores the representation of emotion and affect in architectural practice. Recent works include the articles, ‘Matter of the Manor’ (2018) for the Journal of Interior Design (Wiley), and ‘Thresholds of the Future’ (2019) for Interior Futures (Crucible Press).

Joan Ockman is an architectural historian and critic. She teaches at the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Distinguished Senior Lecturer, and at Yale School of Architecture, where she is the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History. She previously taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, where she served for 14 years as director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She began her career in the mid-1970s at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where she edited Oppositions journal and the Oppositions Books series. Her book publications include Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (2012); The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (2000); and Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (1993).

Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she co-initiated the MA Situated Practice and supervises MA and PhD projects. Jane has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through her authored books The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). Her co-edited collections include Reactivating the Social Condenser (2017), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999), and Strangely Familiar (1995). With Dr David Roberts, she leads the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission, and with Dr Yael Padan, ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, for KNOW (Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality).

Chris L. Smith is the Professor of Architectural Theory in the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Chris’s research, over the last 18 years, has focused on the nexus of architecture and the body. He locates this nexus between architectural theory, philosophy, and the biosciences. He has published on architectural theory and its dynamic relation with body theory, poststructural philosophy (particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and technologies of the body. Chris has also published on the complex intersections of architecture, the biosciences, and medical humanities. He is the co-editor of Architecture in the Space of Flows (Routledge, 2012), Laboratory Lifestyles: The Construction of Scientific Fictions (MIT Press, 2018); the author of Bare Architecture: A Schizoanalysis (Bloomsbury, 2017); and the coauthor of LabOratory: Speaking of the Science and its Architecture (MIT Press, 2019).

Ioanna Sotiriou studies the impact of information systems and digital culture on architectural thinking and production. Her work, ranging from speculative architectural scenarios and critical writing to short films and interactive narratives, has been published and awarded internationally. Parallel to her research, Ioanna is the COO of a tech startup in Silicon Valley, working in the field of spatial data mining, and the co-founder of studio MIWI. She holds an MArch from UC Berkeley, and a Diploma in Architectural Engineering from the University of Thessaly.

Naomi Stead is a Professor of Architecture at Monash University. She is a past President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand. Her research interests lie in architecture’s cultures of re/production, mediation, and reception. She is an award-winning architecture critic, having written more than 50 commissioned feature and review articles in professional magazines, and is presently the architecture critic for the Australian national newspaper The Saturday Paper, as well as writing for the US-based online journal Places. She was the leader of the Australian Research Council Linkage project ‘Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architecture Profession: Women, Work and Leadership’, which led to the co-founding (with Justine Clark and others) of Parlour, an activist group advocating for greater gender equity in architecture. She is currently working on a new ARC project, addressing the work-related wellbeing of architects and architecture students.

Brendan Sullivan Shea is a designer whose work spans architecture, technology, and collaborative practice. Currently teaching at Texas Tech University and the University of Southern California, he holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University.

Tan Yi-Ern Samuel is a research associate at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. Through simultaneous modes of design and traditional scholarship, he studies the intersections of architectural representation, discourses of body, and the technics of architectural making, especially as they pertain to non-building practices – most recently in his Master’s thesis, The Cancer Homunculus.

Philip Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Dean. He earned his PhD in Art History at Freie Universität Berlin after studying in Geneva, Vienna, and Berlin. He taught at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, Columbia University, New York, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture, the University of Zurich, and Cornell University, and researched at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. He is editor of Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (Montreal 2002) and Caruso St John: Almost Everything (Barcelona, 2008); he is the author of Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (Berkeley, 2013). His most recent book is Representation of Labor/Performative Historiography (Santiago de Chile, 2018).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Formulating a book like this takes a huge village of kind and giving people. This book originated in the support and fascinating perspectives of many speakers and six fascinating keynotes from the 2020 Remote Practices Symposium. In formulating this event during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic there were many challenges: the barriers of distance, inhibitive time zone separations, risks of technical difficulties, and an all-round sense of Zoom fatigue. Yet, the real-time delivery, the conversations which unfolded organically, and particularly the generosity of time and commitment of all the participants created an atmosphere of collegiality that helped make this book what it is.

So first and foremost, we thank the speakers and keynotes of the original symposium. We also thank CJ Lim whose chapter we miss in this volume. We also thank our many colleagues who agreed to read the early abstracts. In addition, we would like to particularly acknowledge the offices of Global Engagement at the University of Sydney and the Office of the Deputy President (Research and Technology) at the National University of Singapore who provided the financial backing through the University of Sydney–National University of Singapore Partnership Collaboration Awards 2020, to make the Remote Practices symposium and book publication possible. Most of all, we are grateful to Val Rose at Lund Humphries who commissioned this volume, and Rochelle Roberts for her assistance throughout the preparation of the manuscript.

Matthew thanks the School of Architecture Design and Planning at the University of Sydney and in particular his Dean, Robyn Dowling, and Head of Discipline, Dagmar Reinhardt, for their support and encouragement. Also, a special shout-out to the administrative staff at the University of Sydney including Steven Burns, Taylor Musa, Catherine Murray, and J.J. Marsh.

For Lilian, she is grateful to the Head of the National University of Singapore’s Department of Architecture (DoA), Ho Puay Peng, and the Dean of the National University of Singapore’s School of Design and Environment, Lam Khee Poh, for their support of the grant application and for giving her time away to do the work that needed to be undertaken for these projects. Heartfelt thanks to the DoA RxD (Research by Design) team, Wong Zi Hao, Ian Mun, and Fawwaz Azhar – without their efforts, that across-all-time-zones symposium would not have been possible.

Her sincere thanks to DoA colleagues: faculty members Erik L’Heureux, Lee Kah-Wee, Ong Ker-Shing, Ruzica Bozovic Stamenovic, Tsuto Sakamoto, Thomas Kong, and Chang Jiat-Hwee, and the administrative staff Lim Hwee-Lee, Cecelia Chan, Olivia Tiong, and Sally Teng for their gift of time, contributions, and support during the event. Of special note, Lilian thanks two graduates from the National University of Singapore: Tan Yi-Ern Samuel and Lin Derong. Sam assisted with the preparation of the manuscript; his care, intellect, and wit were greatly helpful, particularly in times of stress. And Derong, in whose capable and creative hands we entrusted the designs for the Remote Practices website and publicity collaterals; these were unparalleled in their relevance to the project we imagined. Lilian is ever grateful to Peter, Joan, George, Ailian, Cecil, Mojo, Horatio, and Luna for their proximity.

EDITOR’S NOTE: IN PRAISE OF THE REMOTE

Matthew Mindrup

So geographers, in Afric maps,

With savage pictures fill their gaps,

And o’er unhabitable downs

Place elephants for want of towns.

Jonathan Swift, On Poetry, 1733¹

In the above cited excerpt from Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century literary work, he describes how a cartographer places elephants on early maps of Africa to denote unknown locations. The illustration of such creatures, including dragons, lions, and other monstrous beasts, belongs to a medieval practice of identifying remote areas of the globe where potential dangers were thought to exist reflecting distrust of the other. The most common phrase referring to these locations is the Latin ‘HIC SVNT DRACONES’ (Here be dragons) found prominently inscribed on the eastern coast of Asia upon the Hunt–Lenox Globe, dating from 1504.² Today, there are no such markings on Google Earth or Apple Maps to indicate the limits of cartographical knowledge, nor is it common practice to include such representations on an architectural drawing. Rather, this lack of familiarity about a distant place in architectural practice is demonstrated by monstrous constructions: hybrids of local and remote building materials and methods of construction. Despite their differences, the remote was never simply other, but an opportunity to look at the local and familiar anew.

The primordial urge to explore and expand one’s domain of knowledge has spurred countless journeys and travels to remote and unfamiliar physical and metaphysical territories. In narratology and comparative mythology, the journey to the distant and unknown is referred to as the hero’s journey, or monomyth, and is the common template of stories that involve an individual who goes on an adventure, undergoes an ordeal, obtains a boon or souvenir, and is transformed. This was also the aim of the European grand tour for young upper-class European nobility and aspiring architects during the 17th century.³ Therein a traveller would embark on a tour around the Mediterranean to perfect their language skills, visit ancient ruins, and meet with local artists and dealers to acquire souvenirs of their journey – things unavailable at home, lending an air of accomplishment and prestige to the traveller including books, works of art, scientific instruments, cultural artefacts, measured drawings, and cork models of architecture.⁴ At home, these souvenirs were displayed in libraries, cabinets, and purpose-built galleries known as Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosity). The authenticity of a souvenir was determined by its uniqueness as a didactic tool for retelling a unique experience and expanding the audience’s understanding of the world.

Architects still travel today. Indeed, a staple of an architect’s education is the opportunity to study in a foreign culture to encounter the different ways a group of people have organised the local climate and building materials into places for habitation. In his seminal text, Ways of Wordmaking, Nelson Goodman describes the artifacts, systems of organisation, and meanings created by a group of people at any one time or place as a ‘world’.⁵ Similarly, Martin Heidegger argues in his essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ how the formation of a structure and spaces in architecture plays a significant role in the creation of and contribution to a world.⁶ Before the immediacy of digital photography, architects would sketch places, recording their experiences of building forms and the organisation of spaces. These records are not souvenirs for storytelling and display but didactic activities for developing embodied memories in the same method used to design their own constructions. As we shift from physical to digital modes of design, these practices are beginning to disappear. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a young architect sitting before the Pantheon in Rome, or in the courtyard of Carlo Scarpa’s Querini Stampalia in Venice, modelling the space on a digital tablet using SketchUp when photos and plans are readily available on the same device or a smartphone.

Indeed, over the past 25 years the internet has brought remote buildings and design practices close to hand. In an age of globalisation, it is difficult to travel anywhere and find something that is foreign or strange. With the development of brand architecture during the 1980s and 1990s, one can now walk into a Starbucks in Milan and encounter the same furniture, flooring, and products that one would find at a Starbucks in Tokyo or Los Angeles. In recent years, the education and practice of architecture has experienced a similar globalisation. Students enrol in the study of architecture at institutions across the planet and employ the same tools of production and information technology. These tools now permit unhindered communications and document transfer from architect to architect and builder to builder, regardless of distance or language, widening the global dissemination of ideas but also opportunities for practice. In this way, globalisation is easily discerned through the uniformity of architectural forms, materials, and building methods in the culturally and climatically diverse