About Practice
“Order is more than organization. Organization is the determination of function. Order however imparts meaning. If we would give to each thing what intrinsically belongs to it, then all things would easily fall into their proper place”
– Mies van der Rohe
My teacher, John Hejduk, said that developing a critical practice was crucial to the work of a Professional, that the Architect’s embrace of programs and methods not be afforded solely by commercial practice. In this practice resistance is a way to challenge the repetition of a built world uninvolved with the social contract. Here, noncommercial proposals are developed, figured, and potentially figured out, despite the marginalization of this type of shadow work within the professional life.
Three components continue to order my work: the development of site as a ontological construct; the quotidian overlay of path through inhabitation and barrier; and drawing opposing figures as diagrams of architectonic constructs. I see plans as romantic diagrams, the points of view here are the birds’ eyes, and herein are ruins, relics, and an idealized memory of [maternal] shelter. Coming up against that “inarticulate narrative” that poet Octavio Paz defines as the condition of the architect, my work employs description towards a widening of the drawing process as design.
In my recent work, I use the conventional architectural illustrative idea of the site diagram and the cutaway model. The site diagram imparts order and thus meaning. The cutaway model is able to highlight simultaneous conditions within closed systems. Here, both adjacencies and displaced parts, those elements previously hidden from view, are brought into a present focus.