Matthew Zbawiony
ARCH 916 Special Topics
Professor Pries
24 October 2011
Revised 12 November 2011
Reading and Writing Assignments
Although the work of NaJa and deOstos involves the shaping of spaces based on a programmatic narrative, similarities between it and traditional considerations in architectural design such as “shelter for people, aesthetic enjoyment, an armature for dialogue between people in a particular community” or “to enhance the existing mode of living, foster progress, or in any other way improve the human condition.” 1 end there. As Woods notes, “The generators of their projects are site-specific narratives that weave together a bevy of oppositions: fact/fiction, objective/subjective, technological/natural, rational/magical.” 2 These combinations of ideas that are opposed to one another are implemented with composure that they call ambiguity. The unpredictable nature of these objective realities creates architecture Woods calls, “consequential” and “deeply ethical”. 3
Their architecture is “designed to speculate—on the unexpected strangeness, the otherworldliness of how human beings have already transformed their world through infrastructural modernization.” 4 They take a commonplace part of modern life and bring an imaginative expression of to how complex infrastructure is and the consequences this imposed organization brings on the environment it interfaces with. 5 Their particular focus is on the alien non-space created as a result of these infrastructures. Their methodology seems through atmospheric drawings, models, diagrams, and written texts, “all of which blend together into a special kind of architectural narrative or storytelling.” 6 Their work reintroduces the idea of architecture as cultural speculation. 7
The Tucurui Reservoir System in Para, Brazil is the site of The Pregnant Island.
A disused military base originally for experimental atomic weapons in southern England is the site of Nuclear Breeding.
Contribution toward my conceptual focus:
In Beyoglu along the Golden Horn, there is a clear distinction between the long established edge of the shoreline and the additional infill later added to accommodate a green area along the waterfront. My concept emphasizes the contrast between the original and present-day shorelines in the area along the fish market. It pulls back toward the original shoreline, reinforces that edge with orderly program, and adds a layer of ambiguity beyond reaching out toward the water to mirror the fragmentation of the present shoreline. Relating to Ambiguous Spaces, a layer of infrastructure was introduced that changed the relationship people had with the waterfront.
1. Ricardo O.C. de Ostos, and Nannette Jackowski, Pamphlet Architecture 29 | Ambiguous Spaces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, 7.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, 9.
7. Ibid.
Works Cited:
de Ostos, Ricardo O.C., and Nannette Jackowski. Pamphlet Architecture 29 | Ambiguous Spaces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.