SPAN-"ISH"
fall 2019
Kent CAED | 4A Design Studio
"dirty realism" studio | exercise 02
prof. Jean Jaminet
lockhart, texas
program: courthouse
style: spanish colonial revival (1915-1940)
the studio _ The design studio reclaims architectural styles as a legitimate source of disciplinary inquiry. Within the discourse, the material richness of architectural styles has been mostly abandoned and in many cases is considered taboo. However, despite their prohibition, architectural styles quietly proliferate throughout our culture, absorbed into the domain of the decorative arts, and appropriated by the real estate industry. Within our built environment architectural styles are both familiar and ubiquitous, they quietly exist in the background, and each has an inherent set of rules. An algorithmic and combinatorial makeup, suggesting that they can be manipulated in much the same way as a computer can manipulate a digital image. Similar to the artist Anastasia Savinova's collages of facade fragments; the "image quality" of these facades are "poor" in the way they disobey the architectural syntax, yet still, simulate coherence through the erasing of seams. Or creating new ones through unexpected connections between disparate elements. Architect Jesus Vassallo has coined the term "Dirty Realism" for the extreme vernacularism this studio exhibits, and specifically, this project explores the relationships between physical context and the cultural landscape through the means of formal, spatial, and material manipulations.
model photographs | photo credit: Zelig Fok
the project _ Located within the main square of Lockhart, Texas (the subject of Colin Rowe and John Hejduk's 1957 article for the architectural record), Span-"ish" seeks to augment the "Spanish Colonial Revival" style as found in the southwestern United States. After thorough research into the style and the architects who proliferated it (such as Addison Mizner, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and Wallace Neff) its qualities were narrowed into 3 distinct features. 1.] a large stucco mass into which windows, doors, and other architectural features are places onto, exhibiting similar plasticity to a form modeled from clay. 2.]a flat, pitched, or barrel-vaulted clay terra cotta roof; either in its natural brownish red color or glazed. 3.] hand-painted glazed Spanish tile, acting either as wall decoration (in the case of Azulejos, large tile wall murals) or floor surfaces. With these rules in mind, the form of the project began with the shaping of the mass, it was designed as a thick, heavy "molded" form intertwined by plunging surfaces of tiles seeking to erase the seams created between the meeting of roof and ground. The tile pattern disobeying its typical use as a flooring material begins to infect the walls and ceiling crawling its way up through the mass, eventually acting as the underlying face below the pink stucco. Becoming exposed where parts appear to have cracked and fallen away. Moving on to the interior, augmented in relation to the exterior, exhibits the thickness and mass implied by the outside walls. Cave-like rooms are carved away from the mass creating points of compression and expansion throughout the building.
