PUSH PLUS PULL recalling a future memory

Michael S. LeeBachlelor of Architecture 2011

Thesis ProjectCornell University

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for my Mother, Father, and Brother, to those who I owe my complete current self

and everything I have done and will do.

and an immeasurable debt of inspiration to Werner Goether and Arthur Ovaska

my Professors, Advisors, and Mentors

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table of contents

1 In These Things We Are

An Interest in the Drawn Place pg 10

2 Die Brandmauer

Eine relative Gestalt pg

3 These Are Always A Ways Away

Defining a Simultaneous Past pg

4 Things Will Be More Than Their Present An Exploration of the Emphatic Nature

pg

5 It Wants To Be So

Drawing the Inherence of Drawing pg

6 Ziehen gegen Drücken, und die Folgen The Applications of Design and Context

pg

7 Mein Spiel und/and My Spiel

The Translations of Preconceptions and Expectation pg

8 From These We Go and Come From

A Summation of Ideas pg

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In These Things We Are An Interest in the Drawn Place

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Here are cities that come from themselves, from their own specific systems and aesthetics. They are infinite and implosive, elaborating a negligible subconscious gesture from the existing world and creating for itself its own complete place.

Here Is Our Built. 3’ x 3’

one in a series of fourLa Citta’ Che Non C’’e.

2.1m x 1.0mParco Meda Gallery

may 2010

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This Is What Ours Is. each 12” x 18”

From the mundane, the trite we build ourselves an empire worth advertising, worth summarizing. With the development of satellite mapping, the need to represent a place, a city, or any human settlement is seemingly obsolete. The strive towards the precise, the accureate, and the mappable is of utmost importance to scientific ethics. However, such mapping only highlights the impossibility to pinpoint a people, a “place” and its boundaries. In the spirit of renaissance pride, I reformulate the vernacular into a frontal image of an empire, a place that may not be of technical representation but nontheless holds within it an infinite connection to all who inhabit both it and tangible versions.

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I experiment with the proliferation of an image and the ease in which it can be disseminated. Inspired by the simplicity of application of political advertisements and billboard ads, here I take an image of a place and create a simple apparatus, one designed to the extent that any layman can take such a device and spread his/our/my vision of where we each reside. It can be applied to anything at any scale, whether it is a small scale intervention on an object or a large print on blank walls.

Empire Down. 10’ x 11’

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Die Brandmauer Eine relative Gestalt

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Die Brandmauer mistakenly offers a concealed condition, attributed with a range of possibilities. Due to the extensive destruction of the city in the past century, over 50% of the built was taken down or damaged beyond restoration and repair. Through the advent of war, another face of our built environment was shown to us, a regretful luxury not offered to most urban situations. The face of the revealed wall has its own material, aesthetic, and dimensional properties, something very different to the faces of the designed interfaces on all other sides. Its physical and visual status is a mistake, an inadvertant showing which was fully determined by interactions beyond the control and after the intervention of the architect.

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This Mauer condition in Hackescher Markt lends itself to be seen as a newly hollowed void. The adjacent constructs give a perfect semblance to what was there previously, offering a catalogue of materials, aesthetics, and all objective qualities. The void is a thick section. Now all that borders this space in the line of Mietskaserne are mirrored walls. This particular space is most suggestive of past developments as the emptiness was once defined at all times by the extrusion of the side volumes. Everything this place used to be was affected by the processes of what still stands, whether its funtional and materialistic or as aesthetic whim of the neighbors. Through excavation on various plateaus of history, the void can be filled with numerous interpretations.

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The “solution” to any intervention is a Spiel with the thickness of the place, of the built and the void. To take from what is there, the activities which exist now and had existed, and make some print, some drawing in this void of any dimension. Thickness can be of any depth and even be of intangible nature- processes and Zeitgeister. We can take and add onto this thickness, both implosively and adjunctly.

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These Are Always A Ways Away Defining a Simultaneous Past

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Things Break In For Us.narrative three

Here Comes the Big. narrative two

It’s Our Whim. narrative one

This absent place has had many before. From these we can move forward from the back and before. These are stages in past of this void, things that used to exist and interact. From the existing proportions and signatures of the adjacent structures, there is recreation of what was before.

The Infinite Is In One Place.

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We Can Build Up, Down, and In.

The combination of the frontal axon with a worm’s eye view promotes the ambigituity of preception. Archetypes and unwavering standards of structural representation are subverted in this forward/backward juxtaposition. One fails to continuously recognize the point of view and which elements are being observed. Floorplates, ceiling tiles, and vertical surfaces translate from sides of a cube into its own language of falling proportions, one feeding seemlessly into another.

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The continuous drawn of the axon systematizes itself into a mental collage of falling proportions. With each distinct narrative there is different ethic in drawing methodology. Having the historic program in mind with each move, reconstruction of each move is directly informed by the previous and what there is to come.

c. Make It and Each Our Own.

b. A Stronger, Clearer, One.

a. A Change In Taste.

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There Can Be WeEach 11” x 15”

With any attempt at the infinite, there is seemingly a need to pursue the hermetic. To suggest a visual language extends far beyond the immediate plane and perspective, it must establish its own set of linguistic components. Points, lines, and geometries are seen as a mechanical system and the creation of the novel is done by reoriented combinations of all. If the dynamism is suggestive enough, its gestation will manifest itself in the viewer’s mind. In this way the qualities of the visual structure dissolve into usuable components, able to be reconstructed anew again and again by the individual.

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Things We Cannot Push.

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The residues of hand memory trickle into an incentive for an always expanding narrative. The agglomeration of a place and its components requires an analysis of parts at all scales. House moves on to city, city to landscape, landscape to all else and so on. For the aesthetic to sustain each must feed into another, metamorphosizing upon every scale change but with the same language. The landscape is the residue of the city, city the residue of the house, the house a residue of all else and so on.

There Is This Inner.

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There is This Between.

We Make This In.

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Things We Strive to Reach.

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There Is The Connect. each 18” x 24”

A place comes from points of departure. Points can be dots, structures, even complete formations. Constructing a somewhere is always done in a complex linear fashion. Development is always sequential, possibly overlapping but always successive. One comes from another and here the parts of these places come from all others from and out of all trajectories.

Bring Us Together Here.

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Meet From the Back and Forth.

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Converge In Bits.

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Things Will Be More Than Their Present An Exploration of the Emphatic Nature

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Empathy is used to objectify trajectories of things, making tangible the very pre and post processes. Objects, no matter how inanimate in mechanisms, never exist as untouchable noumena. A thing is the result of the motions of previous construtions and latter processes of degradation to come.

The Choices in Which We Reside.

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Things Built In and Up.

These Things Persist.

A Place Out Own.

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Where They Meet.

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Michael Bahktin analyzes the work of Dostoevsky in categories of external and internal multiplicity.

1. Polyphony allows the definition of a character or object with multiple, definable separations. The described conscious of an individual cannot be summed up in a singular moral standing or grouping of intentions. Instead one holds in his head unwillingly the dialectics of opposing, contradictory voices- an incessant dialog. Dostoevsky makes physical these divisions in the form of numerous charachters, all contemplating in separate ways a set of ideals.

2. Unfinalizibility admits that a person’s definition is never static, instead a constant metamorphorsis. One is never wholesome and even more seldomely revealed in a completeness to the public world. At times the only attempt at self-definition can only be done by external juxtaposition to the figures, movements, and futures of both already established around you.

That Exists There.

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Things Become Itself.

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Things Only Seen At Once.

This Goes Deeper In Between.

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Once and One Define All Things.

Where All Become.

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Everything is composed of the interactions between all its systemizations- old, new, and all about to be. Johann Friederich Herbart makes use of subconscious tendencies in the method of aggregation. The existing is the natural consequence of inexplicable inclinations. From this reformations can be catalogued in the order of the new. In this process the innumerable being is digested into tool for future development. A piece will renumerate into a pattern. Patterns move themselves into spatial trajectories. Trajectories rotate to mark new realms. Then they all cross and talk.

It Becoming Cannot Be Helped.

It Works Along It.

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This Becomes From This.This Becomes From This.

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This Can Be All.

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There is effort to achieve the hermetic collage. An amalgamation made with its own pieces. Collage of things and experiences is usually done with external influences, the layering of different, even contradicting items to draw a novel one. With the empathetic attitude of trajectories, es gibt die Möglichkeit, to layer within itself. To use an object and all its wantings to produce something higher while still being hermetic.

Things Took Place Together.

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Coming From Where They Feel Origin.

By The Companions They Exist Within.

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It Can Always Reach Us.

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It Spills Upon Itself, Within Itself.

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How They Work On Each Other.

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It Wants To Be So Drawing the Inherence of Drawing

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There is a density,existing on another plateau, achieved by the processes on one plane. Here the processes reach off and under the page of intervention, informing the existing by things unseen and working within themselves on an alien plane. One made by many, the many which are complex in their own right and only imagined. C

A Density of Innumerable Things.

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A Depth Unachieved.

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The Bild becomes something on various scales, taking all representations in a static image. This thing wants to be hanged, applied, and excavated all at once. Its scale is determined by context, by complete relation rather than anything else.

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It Wants to Be Applied and Taken.

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This Is Our Flatness Subverted.

Things Come Down To Us To Be.

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Ziehen gegen Drücken, und die Folgen The Applications of Design and Context

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The Sixth Facade has the opportunity to bring the hidden, programmatic section to the public realm. Beyond the four faces and the overhead roof garden, the inadvertent exposure of the firewall presents the chance to display some form history, construed or not. Each firewall has its own set of inherent qualities and what it chooses to show-- floorplate sections, beam cuts, interior remnants, and so forth. A consciousness of this allows all presented visual to be interpreted as existing programmatically at some point in the past. Whether its artistic intervention or a remnant of lifestyle and existing building structure, all mesh and discuss on the plane of this last facade.

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The gesture is the complete form in itself, going from moment to moment in direct translation. Limited to arc of the wrist, the medium of the pen works in an implosive manner, detailing detail and moving inwards. The very distance between maker and medium is foreshortened to the point where scope moves from patch to patch as patch informs each bordering patch on every axis.

A Bit of the Inside, Out.3’-6” x 7’

mixed media

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There is an effort to maintain “das Gesamtbild” as complete strides spark all subsequent detailing. Here one stands back to see the all. To tackle the composition through composition at all moments in its entirety is the unique approach of this medium. One stroke affects another, those already placed and even ones in their conception. Detail bewcomes secondary to the grand gesture, stemming from absolute nuances of greater forms.

There Makes That and Here. 3’-6” x 7’

mixed media

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Patterns on a plane revitalize themselves in all dimensions with their own tangents and moves. The representation of 2-Dimensional forms, namely patterns, can reorient themselves with their level of “dazzle” in mind, distorting our perception of plane. The relationships grow more intensive when latter levels of detailing nudge the accustomed distances between things and them to you.

These Things Become to Be a Bit Skewed. 3’-6” x 7’

mixed media

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There is the further ambiguity of what is pressed and what is pulled by the final techniques applied. Here is the culmination, my personal interpretation of the set of works. given to myself from me. We finally drücken onto this plane. Here is a remnant of the silhouette, a moment of print from a history of processes. Here is the mark a bear leaves on a mauled object, an indication of strength, movement, size, material, and texture.

3’-6” x 7’

mixed media

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Mein Spiel und/and My Spiel The Translations of Preconceptions and Expectations

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History is not linear, it is cross-informative and croos-referential. Everything is each other. These pieces are hanged not in “order.” There is the opportunity now to compare drawing ethics to inform the next step. This was a rarity to see the numerous things made at once simultaneously.

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From These We Go and Come From A Summation of Ideas

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A development of the hermetic requires a period of residency, of inhabitation within the self-created. Ultimately the ambiguity of the depth of these figures still exist on a single plane. The allusion in the act of dazzling engenders too much of a numbness to the seen richness, hovering in a cloud of relations. The creative intent is still restricted within the 2-Dimensional. There is the opportunity now to see in the drawn in the terms of 3-Dimensional interventions. Instead of seeing a composition as blank vs. figure or a series of mere juxtapositions, we can give them more dramatic, kinetic interpretations, i.e. cracking, splitting, tearing, patching, extracting, and any other action that requires a third party moving on a literal third axis.

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Cataloguing should be treated the same way history is, in non-linear correlation to inform. Technique development may be seen as linear, as style and series, but the ethic of each should inform each other and allow the group stimulation of the next.

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Simultaneous hand memory, literally collaged onto a single crop over a series of working periods. Things come together, working in cooperation to bring ethics together to produce a new hierarchy of experience.-

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Rework the drawings at different scales, allowing inhabitation as well as ornamentation. In these things we can be and with these things we can decorate. Each has a series of processes that lends itself on any range of intervention.

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