書摘
ENIGMA: DEFAMILIARIZING THE FAMILIAR
In his 1965 untitled work, sculptor and theorist Robert Morris presents a simple series of four three-foot by 3-foot by 2-foot cubes made of fiberglass. Perfectly situated equally and evenly on the floor of a New York gallery, these cubes are seen as four primitives simply set beside one another and appear quite familiar. Morris refers to it as a Gestalt—each single cube appearing part of the whole.
What appears unfamiliar is the forced, distorted, if unreal, perspective of each of the cubes individually and in unity. The familiar object, the primitive, has been defamiliarized through a careful distortion that challenges the viewer to reassess not only the cubic form but the way in which we see in perspective. It is an enigma.
Morris refers to this enigma as a “visual frustration” that challenges our expectations. post-minimalist art of the 1960s aimed to rethink paradigms of minimalist art, pushing toward new ideas in perception, abstraction, figuration, and representation through careful disfiguration of part-to-whole relationships.
Whereas Morris’ postmodern work turned towards the post-minimal, Patrick Tighe’s contemporary work moves towards the post-digital. Digital architecture of the 1990s to 2000s focused on generating innovative continuous complex-curvilinear forms of tessellated multiplicity through primitive geometries. It posed very disciplinespecific, inner-referential, object-oriented designs of pure abstraction. Post-digital architecture, however, has brought a return to the real in an attempt to rethink the language and practice of architecture. It is not a move away from the digital but a hyperdetailed analytical investigation of digital forms and their practices.
Tighe’s Tigertail house, for example, rethinks folded topological geometries. Employed ad infinitum since the 1990s by late-deconstructivist architects, folded geometric planes move from ground, to wall, to roof unifying buildings in holistic continuity. For Tighe, the familiar here becomes defamiliar in the over-exaggerated cantilevered roof form that draws our attention toward these folded planes of the house. The hyper-cantilevered roof separates from the overall design, proving an enigma. It is a gesture that challenges our perceptions, creating a looming presence that brings into question the concept of a folded plane. Yet it draws our attention to the site conditions and circulation of the house from the entry, toward the courtyard, and to the centralized pool at the back. For Tighe, the ground becomes a wall, then a roof that gestures toward the sky. The exaggerated roof plane becomes the telltale figure of the Tigertail house, visually legible and rhetorically meaningful. Defamiliarization here reveals the concept/idea of the design. It poses the place where one is to look to understand Tighe’s architecture.
We see this same form of disfiguration in Tighe’s Jacobs Subterranean house design, where the “up and down” staircase performs a similarly familiar postmodern trope. Robert Venturi, back in 1964, originally rethought the paradigm of a “stair” by questioning the limits, if not the very notion, of what a stair was and could be. This was posited through an uncomfortable, if not awkward, shift in the rise, run, and path of a stair. Tighe here designs a similarly challenging stair that rises and falls, and goes up and goes down, rethinking the history of the grand overtly symmetrical redundancy of the Beaux-Arts stair. The added shift in the wall plane of the Jacobs Subterranean house is reminiscent of the interior spaces of Robert Weine’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, alongside the elongated stair treads of architect Alvar Aalto’s famous stair in the Villa Mairea House.
Tighe engages in a discourse of familiarity: the proverbial Beaux-Arts stair, the expressionist stair, the modernist stair, the postmodernist stair, as wells as the deconstructivist stair, all at once. This historic discourse helps us to rethink the very notion of a stair. Through a few playful gestures and moves of distortion, disfigurement, and deconstruction, it brings to attention the habitual familiarity of the stair and how a stair may be used.
This playful disfiguring and reconfiguring of a familiar trope in architecture—whether it is a stair in the Jacobs Subterranean house, the corner façade treatment of the La Brea Housing design, the guard rail of the Sierra Bonita Mixed-Use Affordable Housing project, or in the stair at one of his most accomplished designs, the Montee Karp residence—are linguistic signs that point toward valued meaning within Tighe’s projects. They are specific tectonic elements that become separated from the overall design visually and architecturally through enigmatic juxtapositions. They draw our attention to specific design elements that, upon close analysis, reveal cultural engagement with modern and contemporary design discourses, as well as ideas about site, program, and linguistic practices in architecture.
The Montee Karp house is a terrific example of Tighe’s expertise. Presented as a white, pristine crystalline form, the house takes on the familiar image of a pitched-roof house (which it was before the remodel), alongside very contemporary formal strategies that disfigure primitive monolithic geometries. This is not a unique practice but a very familiar one. Of interest to contemporary post-digital artists and architects alike during the past decade—primitive vocabularies, entirely embedded in the software we use (Maya/ Rhino), can be employed through additive and subtractive box-modeling Boolean techniques to generate innovative form. Unlike complex curvilinear surfaces generated through Nurbs-modeling techniques, box modeling can provide us with an architecture of developable surfaces that, if dynamic and computer-generated, are also quite easy to fabricate and build. Primitive geometric forms are at once monolithic, generating a complete whole, while at the same time readily disfigured.
Box modeling in architecture has become quite familiar. Disruptions, breaks, awkward gestures, and discontinuous moments within such vocabularies produce unfamiliar territories: the distorted pivoting door, the thin-perspectival-corner-strip window, the shallow-monolithic-chamfered sink, the hovering-garage portico. These elements that stand out from the overall monolithic abstract Gestalt figure are important signs. Similar to what Roland Barthes argues in his famous essay “The Third Meaning.” These disfiguring elements call our attention, suggesting that the viewer imagine new forms of meaning—for example, the way the new roof of the addition to the Montee Karp house pitches to form part of a solid that wraps around the original house. At once, it unifies with the original house, forming a Gestalt between old and new, but then separates from it with distorted angularity. It suggests the rethinking of the original house itself.
