Glacial Erratic

This Essay was originally published in PLAT 11: Soft, Rice University School of Architecture's student journal.

In the winter of 2017, the Yellow Pumpkin still idled lazily on its pier[1], gazing out to sea. Paradise still conjured in our minds a place of lush respite[2], and social and distancing were still an unlikely word pairing[3]. In our 2022 hindsight, that was a comparatively idyllic time; still, we had known already then for decades that rapid changes would be coming[4], or that have already arrived yet unseen.

Our practice was conceived timidly within this moment of uneasy anticipation, amidst the simultaneous overturning of a generation of disciplinary dogmas[5]. In this uncertainty we found ourselves often instinctively reacting to unexpected contingencies, and so the work itself began emerging as quiet reflections of the latent harshness of our environments.

[1] Yayoi Kusama’s Yellow Pumpkin washed out to sea in 2021 during Typhoon Lupit

[2] Fire ravaged town of Paradise, CA, and changed the connotation of the word for Californians

[3] New social norms as a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic

[4] Global consensus building at the Toronto Conference on the Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security, in 1988

[5] Disciplinary mal-content that reached a watershed moment alongside social and environmental protests in 2020, resulting in student and faculty-led proposals for radical change in pedagogy and curriculum, as observed by us at UC Berkeley, and colleagues at other institutions.

If we unknowingly wanted to practice softly, then Sea Gate subconsciously tested the grounds of this sensibility for the first time.The pavilion wanted to be beach neighbors with the Pumpkin, but in reality it could have inhabited any seashore. Regardless, the siting of the project was nonsensical—architecture should be built on stable ground! Why ruin a perfectly good beachfront! What happens to it during a storm!

Nonetheless we were naively intent on inhabiting the uncertain ground of the shore, where tides and weather produce a continuous territorial redrawing. What if the ground ceased to be something that simply bore the weight of what we built, and became the subject of fascination? What if we approached the ground as something volatile and animated, not geotechnically speaking but as something experientially essential? What if environmental mindfulness isn’t a clear separation of the built from the landscape but an interactive confrontation with it? Yes there is a view afar at the end of the procession, but the more provocative framing is the horizontal surface of the ground itself, a scene of sea and sand swirling between space and spectator. Here the space offers not a static scene of the picturesque, but rather encapsulates a continuous transformation of an unpredictable, often turbulent boundary.

Sea Gate’s wood structure is modest and reductive in its tectonic articulation. Its walls minimally define a series of bounded rooms that one moves linearly through—the roof is the sky, the floor is the seashore. We often ask ourselves what is the least amount of architecture necessary to convey something meaningful? Absence then becomes a form of economy. To build a little less is to build a little more softly.

If Sea Gate could only exist as speculative ideation, then Veil Craft was a first (terrifying) opportunity to make an idea real, tangible, and exposed—to passersby and the scrutiny of critical eyes. The site of course couldn’t be more different—a trapezoidal courtyard[6] nestled between two buildings on Los Angeles’s Museum Row bustling with the construction of the Purple Line and the new LACMA[7]. It was as if this chaotic collage of urban materials and forms imprinted upon our own thoughts, resulting in a medley of pre-occupations that had to be wrestled into coherence.

Architectural installations have always seemed to be a venue for radical formal and material exploration, but have simultaneously relied heavily on its creators to make up the gap between available resources and lofty design ambitions[8]. It was no different for us in this case. We began the project with one of our ongoing obsessions[9]: how to maximize architectural volume-per-price, in order to produce an urban scale intervention that can be in dialogue with its 30-feet tall neighboring buildings. Because often we have to make the most with what is available, some of the first conversations are inevitably about material modesty.

[6] Courtyard of Craft Contemporary

[7] On Wilshire Blvd, one can see ongoing construction of LA Metro’s new Purple Line subway that will connect Downtown to the Westside, and of Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new building, designed by Peter Zumthor

[8] Perhaps one of the questionable legacies of PS1/MoMA Warmup, Biennale(s), and other institutionally organized installations and exhibitions

[9] This line of inquiry also led to our proposal for the 2018 Ragdale Ring, Supporting Act, in which geofoam’s volume-to-cost ratio was an important consideration for the very limited budget we were allocated

Construction debris netting became such a remarkable protagonist for the project not necessarily because of its economy, but because its pliability in allowing the project to be read through a kaleidoscope of conceptual interests at multiple scales. Its easy scalability allowed the project to appear as a phantom building alongside its neighbors, yet simultaneously the ubiquity of the green textile allowed the project to mask its presence in plain sight. The material opened the possibility of playing with its effortless familiarity in architectural terms—the upturned streetwall into a shaded porch, the exterior vertical standing seams, and pleats of domestic drapery—becoming a performance conflated across typological associations and material techniques, all rendered through the same rugged utilitarian textile.

This choice of material and its resistance to simulation inadvertently led to a complex negotiation with imprecision. The smallest models were forced to abstract the various properties of the textile such as its opacity, elasticity, or behavior under wind and self loading. Whereas at the final scale of the installation we confronted construction tolerances and the minutiae of existing conditions that weren’t always fully captured digitally. Building imprecisely became an exercise of couture, where our team measured, cut, stitched, tucked, ziptied a sort of adhoc garment around the intertwined bodies of the scaffolding and courtyard. In an era that champions a certain ruthless accuracy, building imprecisely dissolves the clear boundary between documentation and execution, between those who dictate and those who labor in construction—for once, we were able to relish that even in the final installation, we were still just building another study model.

In the final days of the installation we found tar bubbling up from the ground of the courtyard, churned up from the depths of the Earth ceaselessly across the street10. It seemed like a sign that Earth didn’t care much for our attempts to build here. We surrounded this growing puddle of tar with a ring of potted plants, so at least spectators wouldn’t step in it. It’s a comically sobering reflection of our impotence in the wake of planetary rumbings outside of our control. All we could do was acknowledge through our work what is already present, in a small way.

September, 2022

[10] The La Brea Tar Pits are directly across the street from the Craft Contemporary courtyard