T4T
LAB
Stitching Immanence
Invited Distinguished Professor:
Nate Hume.
Gabriel Esquivel, Studio Professor
Texas A&M University
Team: Paul Germaine McCoy, Grant Parker, Daniel Enyon.
We think that reality and truth are not separate, and while they are not the same, they engage selectively.
Our project operates, in reality, as a research and development center for the Texas A&M Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences with a focus on algae biofuels and aquaponics. The project started from the simple notion of the line as an object and evolved in our process. When we projected these lines onto our ensemble, a series of immanent figures created slippages between the ensemble and the site, resulting in a difficult whole. Through a series of soap casts and color studies, the project became saturated with a texture that referenced familiar notions of material. Yet, while these things all serve to estrange canonical architectural materials and forms, the truth of our project is that there still lies a deeper issue of correlationism.
The distortion between reality and truth is due to the innate perspective of the human. Thus, the state most informed by the truth within this perspective is reality. As a result of the distortion, we adopted the method of stitching things together to further explore the issue of correlationism in a clear way. The stitch brings together various views of the object to reconstruct a reality based on the epistemology and ontology of the object. This reconstruction occurs in the manner that knowledge of the real and the being of the truth are weighted equally. Weighing these as equal and stitching them together shows the disparity between them when considered on their own. To allow clarity in this stitching, the drawings, and the model only give selective sets of information, furthering our argument by letting the drawings and model act unknowable and false, yet be operatively real and true. The clarity that occurs in this process lets all the information be questioned in a detective like game, where the viewer, is given multiple sets of information and has to sort through where they connect and then wrestle with what is correct.
We put forward the notion that it doesn’t matter so much in the traditional sense that the drawings are “correct” or consistent, but rather that the most important discussion to have is of how we view things. As a result, we have coined the term “immanent drawings”. These appropriate the idea that there is manifested, yet unused data in drawings and their traditional formats, and then proceeds to use that previously untapped data by stitching it into another data set. The model also acts accordingly, through stitching scales.
Some of the effects of this increase in data are:
1. An increase in the sense of depth in the drawings emerges as it is stitched from the perspectives into the orthographic views.
2. The drawings also gain the advantage of the orthographic precision in describing geometry moving into the perspective.
3. Another way these drawings present themselves is that they become much more complex in terms of scale and foreground and background as both the perspective and orthographic begin to negotiate the depth of objects between themselves.
The importance of these connections between the knowing and being is to inform in a new kind of way, by showing instances where they engage, disengage, and re-engage in without distortion. Searching for and creating these kinds of moments of stitching allow for a different understanding of the engagement of truth and reality, and grants us as architects more agency to provide more comprehensive and detailed information to the viewer, specifically through this reframing of how we view things.