1st Edition
Assembly Matter, Lineament, and Aggregated Systems in Architectural Production
Part to part relationships and the approach to governing their sensibilities is at the root of all architecture. The need for engaging a dialogue around these systems is essential to contemporary architectural discourse and practice. Assembly builds on and extends the investigations of materials and representation techniques in the editors’ previous books Matter and Lineament. This book uses a collection of detailed case studies, explained by first person authors about experimental and innovative takes on assembling architecture. Bridging theory and practice, seventeen projects and their principled approaches each demonstrate an important vein of inquiry within the topic. Essays probe issues such as latent and overt geometry, fabrication and technology, part to part elements, joinery and representation, material vernacular geometries, labor and place based contextual assemblies, detailing, and pedagogical examinations.
This text articulates the traditions and trends of material as the defining premise in the contemporary making of architecture. Its outcomes are applicable to beginning students of architecture and advanced practitioners alike.
INTRODUCTION: Assembly: the third state
Gail Peter Borden FAIA and Michael Meredith
Interview 1: Kevin Daley
Interview 2: Jan De Vylder
Interview 3: Thomas Phifer
Part 1: Latent and Overt Geometry
1. Elementals, Components and Tectonics
Gail Peter Borden
2. Duchamp’s Shotgun House
Anna Neimark and Andrew Atwood, First Office
3. Ways to build / assemble the Galería AAF
César Guerrero & Ana Cecilia Garza, Studio S-AR
4. Slippery Units
Troy Schaum, SCHAUM/SHIEH
Part 2: Material Module and Processes:
5. There is Room: Working with Embedded Tectonics
Lap Chi Kwong and Alison Von Glinow, Kwong Von Glinow
6. A Permeable Curtain Wall
Adamo Faiden
7. The Four Roof House
TW Ryan
Part 3: Part to Part: Elements, Joinery, Connection, Assembly and Detail
8. The Value of Diminishing Returns
Blair Satterfield and Marc Swackhammer, HOUMIN
9. Material Pathways: House of Cores
Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic, HANNAH
10. Out of Context: Three Particular Alterations
Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley, Norman Kelley
Part 4: Material + Assembly to Precedent:
11. An Assembly of Passersby
Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, Atelier Lanza
12. CONVIVIAL GROUND
Alexander Romer, ConstructLab
13. Mesocosms: Medium Worlds, Worlding Mediums
Daniel Jacobs and Brittany Utting, HOME-OFFICE
14. Assembly: Construction, Empathy, and the Light-Framed Box
Andrew Holder and Claus Benjamin Freyinger, LADG
Part 5: Digital and Environmental Assemblies, Media and Making:
15. From Megaliths to Machines: A Journey Through Time and Assembly
Brandon Clifford, Matter Design
16. Serial Killer: The Biological Paradigm in Architectural Production
Marshall Prado
17. Sorry Mr. Morris
Rafael Beneytez-Duran and Ophelia Mantz, Z4Z4
18. MORE-THAN-HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: Transspecies, Transscalar, And Transsmaterial Design
Andres Jaque, Office for Political Innovation
Biography
Gail Peter Borden is the Director of Graduate Programs in addition to holding a tenured position as a professor at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston. As principal of Borden Partnership since 2002, his design work has won numerous recognitions including: the Architectural League Prize; the AIA Young Architect Award; Building Design and Construction magazine’s “40 Under 40” award; and numerous AIA, ACSA, and RADA awards. Borden received artist-in-residence awards from the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; the Atlantic Center for the Arts; the Borchard Fellowship; and the MacDowell Colony. He was named the youngest Fellow of the AIA in the history of California. As an architect designer, artist, theoretician, and practitioner, Professor Borden’s research and practice focuses on the role of materiality and architecture in contemporary culture.
Michael Meredith is an architect, co-founder of MOS, and Professor of Architecture at Princeton University School of Architecture. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Log, Perspecta, Praxis, Domus, and Harvard Design Magazine. Together with his partner Hilary Sample, Meredith is the recipient of the Arnold W. Brunner/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize Fellows in Architecture (2023); the United States Artists Award in Architecture (2020); the Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Design Museum National Design Award in Architecture (2015); the Global Holcim Award in Sustainable Architecture (2015); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and the New York Architectural League Emerging Voices (2010).
