Architecture that Challenges your Concept of Reality | Mark Foster Gage | TEDxMidAtlantic

Typically, when architects are invited to speak in front of audiences, there is an expectation that we are going to talk about new things, some cool new 3D printing technology or the solution to climate change. I will not do anything. About that, I'm going to talk about something old and boring, which is philosophy, my life happens at the intersection of

architecture

, technology and philosophy, and

architecture

is what I do, technology is how I do it, but Philosophy is the reason I do it. and I think it's often overlooked in favor of the newness and novelty of the olog technology or the work itself.

The particular background I have in philosophy is aesthetic philosophy, which is the philosophy of how you relate to the world and how you relate to appearances. and how you relate to the realities behind them, so in order to share with you this particularly useful idea of ​​aesthetic theory that I'm going to talk about, I need to start by telling you a story, so I'm going to take you back to 1980, if you find it difficult Imagine

your

self in 1980, you just had less money and more hair, so it was right after the Star Wars movies and I desperately wanted to be C3PO and, if you don't know who C3PO is uh, you need to get slapped uh, it's a gold robot in case you don't know um, but we were a military family and we didn't have a lot of extra money lying around so my family couldn't afford the official one. mask that was plastic, but my mom offered to make a set, so she went to the store, bought a bunch of gold fabric, bought me some, made some custom gold pants, a gold shirt, some kind of gold hood, a little round thing and then she cut the eyes out of the hood and cut out a square mouth like C3PO and I put the hood on and I was ready to go out with my friends and I realized I couldn't see anything, she had cut the eye out. holes in a different place than my eyes, so I got it right, she thinks very fast and decided to cut the whole face off of her.

She sent me on my way and it worked. I'm walking down the street, people like Hello. It's C3PO until we get to this house and this woman comes to the door, we say trick or treat and she looks at me and says "oh, you're adorable, you're corn, so it hurts, it still hurts, but I'm going to do it." Use that story to tell you a little bit about aesthetic philosophy and the story is that there is you, there is the world of appearances and then there is

your

assumption of the

reality

behind those appearances, so the woman and I saw the appearances, which is a little boy in a gold suit, but we had different assumptions of

reality

behind those appearances and I'm going to give you a kind of aesthetic philosophical view of the human condition right here, when people have different assumptions of reality and they are more or less close. when there are slips, it's almost always humorous, so most comedies are based on things like, oh, I finished that beef stew that was the dog's food, you know, some stupid misalignments of little realities and it's a joy , that's why we have things. like Ted, this is the human condition where we have different perspectives, but it becomes problematic as your assumptions from reality get a little further away, you get things like intolerance when these people here have one assumption from reality and I don't want to associate with people here who have a different assumption of reality, when they move further away things like war arise, these people's assumption of reality is in direct conflict with these people's assumption of reality and war It's when one group tries to impose their Assumption of reality on the other so this more or less defines the Human Condition.

There aren't many things we do outside of humor and that's why what interests me in my work and in my uh writing is thinking about realities that are bigger than that distance, what happens when you expose people to a reality that is here? Another way to describe that is to say, if there are two people arguing, one says you deleted emails, you take naps, you know you know the political, you know what that looks like lately, but imagine one person here and one person here and They are arguing, but suddenly you put them close to an aspect of reality that is much larger than their small definitions of what is happening in that larger context, their differences seem minor and that is a social idea, but it is an idea. social that comes from Aesthetics, which is unusual, so there is a really great quote that I would like to read to you: we live in a universe. whose age we can't calculate surrounded by stars whose distances we don't fully know filled with matter we can't identify operating in accordance with physical laws whose properties we don't really understand is a quote from Bill Bryson and it's hard You have an argument about who didn't leave the seat from the toilet after reading that should put you in some sort of wow moment, right.

I think architecture has historically had this idea that form follows function, have you heard of it? where the building is supposed to be seen what does my interest is that architecture should be the form follow this form follow the immensity architecture should be an ethical reminder of the things that are bigger than us and in doing so make our differences seem less obvious. I am not saying that it is a solution for all problems, but I am saying that it is a step in a discipline and that it is combined with other steps in all its disciplines, that is how the differences are

mark

ed and I will show you some very modest examples of this . in my work, for example, a store where we wanted to dematerialize the store and in this sense I want architecture to become a perspective change machine, so we wanted to change people's attitudes about what a store would be or what it would be retail and we did it in facets. structure that we cover with mirrors and this is actually a terrible photograph.

The Vogue magazine photographer spent three hours in the store and said it was the most beautiful retail environment he had ever seen, but he couldn't take a single photo because The reflection was great, so I'm pretty sure I'll move on to history by designing Instagram's first test room. If any of you want to lock his kids in it, we've done it with retail products, uh, instead. doing this is so a fashion company would hire us to design this store instead of designing clothing racks, we put them on trees, if you look at the orange shirt on the back, we scanned the piece of that shirt, we enlarged the pattern and we made this little Al Cove on the right where you could walk into this Al Cove and see the pattern on a larger scale, then you could put on the Oculus Rift headset and we had a 3D scan of the fabric or you could walk with AC crossing the fabric like a microorganism , so you're looking at fashion at three different scales, at the trees, at the pattern level, at the bacteria level, and that's trying to make something as mundane as a shirt mysterious again.

We try to do that with found objects regularly. We are probably one of the holders of the world's largest digital library of normal objects and we try to recombine them in such a way that they become strange once again, so we start making these configuration figurations of this language that we call Kit. Attack, which It involves using not just a couple of languages ​​to design, but masses and masses of objects, so this was our competition proposal that didn't win, didn't win, so don't worry, it won't be built, but it's the Guggenheim Museum. in Helsinki and to do this we use a large number of figures in very high resolution and the idea is that there are millions of different ways to read this building.

You can see different objects than your wife sees and create a completely different Nar narrative. It's a video that just shows that raised platform and shows how you can recognize some of these objects, how some of them are obscured, but the point is to create not an answer, I'm not telling you that this building represents a bird, but a mystery, a mystery that We are allowed to delve deeper, we also want to do these things, so part of my job is research and this is a little bit of technology for you, but in my work at Yale I also teach some of these techniques for attacking kits and I sent two of my students to central Italy to study with master robotic Italian stone carvers and they programmed this robot on the left to carve out of a solid block of marble this bash language kit on the right and you can see a little minion there. because we literally took random objects that we could find to create these types of structures, we don't want to code the architecture with something that you're supposed to read, we want to give you the opportunity, we want to give you an invitation to curiosity.

We did that again with this building that the press called kisi after Game of Thrones. It's a little darker than C3PO, so no slaps this time, but it was a building on Central Park South that aims to give something back to the city. of a tall building which is a tall, abstract construction, as seen in the background, this was intended to provide people again with this kind of mystery in the sky that allows them to see things in a different way, asks them to understand things in a different way. way allows them to dismantle their assumptions about what architecture is or even what objects are, so this building is unusual in that every piece of the building is made from something we found online.

Of course you will recognize the W, the wings, but some of the things are much harder to recognize and in that sense it becomes a bit of a puzzle and my assumption now is that you are looking at things trying to figure out what it is that you recognise. and what is not. Some collaborations with Patrick FW, who is a

concept

design artist, to create the interior perspectives of these, so you see the image of the entrance on the left, the large lobby in the middle and the sky lobby that has restaurants leading up to those large rear spaces. balconies on the right this trickles down to some of our smaller projects, like a hotel on the left that uses the same language but uses it to appear almost like a cloud floating over the city or a residential building on the right that uses this object language. embossed, which of course is less expensive, but still allows you to read different ideas and the last project that I'm going to show has to do with fractals, one of the things we've been experimenting with in the office is trying to find something that we can use that has as much information as possible and fractals are recursive and dense and require incredible amounts of computer power, so we had to design this fractal sponge on a computer and then we had to use the medical MRI technique. scan it and then put it into our architecture software, so what you see here are scans that are these different layers and then we take aspects of these layers and use them to design, for example, this building that is our The National Center for Innovation and Science in Lithuania was our design for that and out of 144 entries, ours was the only American entry that was a finalist or an honorable mention.

We got the guy, so it won't be built on the web, but uh. you should um uh, so you can see the fractal language, these things, these pieces move supported by the Earth, you see that the skin has this other level of detail and we approach the main entrance, you see that it is hidden, it is removed. He intends to hold the Mysteries from him and ask you to enter the door. You see the doorway here is very thin and when you look over the doorway you see a little bit of detail and when you get closer to that detail you see another level of detail. and it keeps drawing you in more and more, making you question your scale relative to this, making you question the assumptions of how you occupy the world.

The last image is of the atrium that you experience when you enter and uses this phrasal language in still. another way that stretches and pulls you and involves senses of movement and aspects of science that are not literal but that somehow again invite a type of curiosity that wants to make you learn more, wants to destabilize your assumptions of reality now. You guys have been very patient and very good and I know you wanted to see a lot of really cool 3D prints and stuff, and I made you listen to philosophy, but I'm going to offer you all one thing to hopefully make up for it a little bit.

A little if any of you would like to go as corn for Halloween, my mom is there in the sixth row and she brought her sewing supplies, thank you.