Influences
This is the half of the work that cannot be checked, and the half I am least willing to give up. Below are the people I measure against, and notes from going to see things. None of them are architects. That is deliberate.
i
Presence over depiction
A hundred boxes in mill aluminum, all the same outside, none the same within, in two artillery sheds he rebuilt so the light would move across them all day. Judd refused the word "sculpture," called them "specific objects," and built institutions so the work could stay in the room it was made for. He also wrote as precisely as he built. The rarer discipline.
Takesproportion is an argument, and permanence is an ethical position.
ii
What a system costs the work
"Doctor Faustus" is the novel about exactly the question in front of our profession: Adrian Leverkühn adopts a rigorous, rule-governed compositional method, twelve-tone composition, worked out with Adorno's counsel. The book asks whether art produced by system is still art, or a bargain with something. Mann wrote it in Pacific Palisades, across town from my desk, in a house he commissioned in 1941 from the modernist J.R. Davidson. A man who chose to write that book in that architecture is worth paying attention to. The house survived demolition in 2016 and is now a residency for precisely this kind of argument.
Takesthe question was never whether a method can produce the work. It is what the method quietly asks you to hand over in exchange.
iii
Perception as the medium
Trained in perceptual psychology before he made anything, and has spent fifty years reshaping a volcanic cinder cone so that a person inside it will notice their own act of seeing. There is no image in a Turrell. The material is light and the subject is you.
Takesthe most architectural question is not what a space looks like but what it does to the person standing in it. And that a photograph of it is not evidence.
iv
Scale that requires a body
He published an essay in 1948 called "The Sublime Is Now," and then made paintings that reproduction simply fails. Sized so that you have to stand close enough for the field to exceed your peripheral vision and the vertical band to unsettle your sense of place. He got a spatial effect out of a flat surface.
Takesany architect should be humbled by that, and should ask why our buildings so often don't manage it with three dimensions and a budget.
v
Authorship through the machine
She makes work by way of machine learning, and what makes it hers is not the output but the authorship exercised through the process: selection, iteration, a hand trained on a system rather than a surface. She is not being served by the model; she is arguing with it.
Takestreat these tools as a material with a grain, not a vending machine. Every architect already knows how to work that way. It is our entire relationship with concrete.
A list of artists is a position taken once. A note written after standing in a room is the position being tested. These are the rooms I intend to write from.
The Thomas Mann House, 1550 San Remo Drive
A novel about what a formal system costs the art it produces, written in a house its author commissioned from a modernist in 1941. It survived demolition in 2016 and is now a residency for exactly this argument. Twenty minutes from my desk.
Chinati, and the second visit
The hundred works in mill aluminum, seen again after writing about them. Whether the argument I built on that room survives standing in it a second time is the only test of the argument that matters.
The common thread
None of it can be checked. That is not a weakness in the work. It is the reason the work exists, and the reason a building needs someone willing to argue for the unjustifiable.
I follow that argument further in Judd’s Objection, which is the counterweight to my own case for tighter feedback loops.