Proposal of Color

Above is the color palette to be used for our pages.

The two relatively "clean" colors on the right are not good as gradients. We should use these two sparingly, as they are not very Wes Jones like. However, there are understandably times when a relatively cleaner red or yellow is absolutely necessary, and that is what these two are for.

---

12/09/11

Posted by: Mark Wang

Primitive Huts Throughout History

It is always interesting to study how the social and physical needs of our daily lives are met in buildings. While researching On Adam’s House in Paradise by Joseph Rywert, I found different opinions on how the role of fire shaped the primitive hut. The concept of a primitive hut has been linked to growth in technology and the formation of community through communication. Traditionally, primitive people were thought to be ones who salvaged and lived in the wilderness. Fire would have been the most advanced piece of technology that the primitive people would use. Hence, huts would be designed around the use of fire.

Around 15 BC, Vitruvius was the first to describe the primitive hut in detail in “The Origin of the Dwelling House” in Book Two of the Ten Books of Architecture. In his account, he describes the origin of both architecture and communication using information based on circumstantial evidence. He noted that “men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare”. According to Vitruvius, the first primitive person lived in the wilderness until fire was discovered when trees rubbed their branches against each other and people because terrified when they caught fire. After the flames died down, the primitive people became comfortable around it and drew near it for warmth. A community was formed as people tended the fire together and gathered more people around. Eventually the house was formed through communication and the desire to protect the fire. Vitruvius describes the fire as the first act of communication and spatial expression.

During the Renaissance, the primitive hut was seen more as a shelter for people rather than for the fire. Alberti argued that the primitive hut was initially intended to be a roof to shelter from the sun and rain. As a result, loadbearing walls were built to support to roof. Then windows and doors were built to allow entry and social gathering; let in sunlight and breezes; and let out moisture and vapour. The house was built as a response to sheltering human needs, as opposed to the fire.

In 1735, Abbe Laugier published Essai sur l’Architecture and proposed that the primitive hut was not only the origin, but also the personification of all that was right in architecture. He depicted the primitive man as one with nature. The primitive man salvaged fresh water from the stream, food from the fields and trees to provide his shelter. His house was formed directly from nature, without using clay or stone, and was an extension of forested glade. The hut was built from “column-like tree trunks” with branches for a roof.

Towards the end of the 18^th century, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand argued that the primitive hut was used to escape nature. Contrary to Laugier, Durand believed that the primitive man sought shelter under trees and in caves to escape weather conditions.

In 1923, Le Corbusier published Towards a new Architecture and represented his version of the primitive hut as a sanctuary turned into a dwelling. He describes the primitive man as one who was riding in the woods on a chariot and stopped to set up a tent to rest.

In 1986, Nell Denari applied the ideas of a primitive hut into a design. He was invited to design a structure for public housing based on Corbusier’s primitive hut and Rywert’s work. The project, named Adam’s House (in Paradise); New York City No. 8407, would be placed on a hypothetical garden between Stanton and Rivington Streets and facing Eldridge Street in the South East side of New York. Its purpose was to “provide a maximum number of low-cost housing units while preserving” the park. Similar to Corbusier’s idea of a sanctuary, Denari also proposed that Adam’s House should be a monastery in the city, a place of home and sanctuary. The house combined features from New York apartment buildings and modernist residences. Its structure was perched on pilotis and it had a roofscape garden dedicated to “witnessing nature’s productivity”.

---

Bibliography:

Ostwald, Michael, and John Moore. Architecture Australia, "Adam's House in Cyberia." Last modified 2011. Accessed November 12, 2011. http://www.architecturemedia.com/aa/aaissue.php?issueid=199703&article=13&typeon=3.

---

12/09/11

Posted by:Joanne Yau

Origin of Architecture

In the '80s, Wes Jones (Paul Holt, Marc Hinshaw, Peter Pfau) attempted to reconsider the futile search for the origin of architecture. The four men claimed the "concept of the origin is the fulcrum on which architecture teeters." The impossibility of the search frequently returns architecture to the battleground of precedence. Without precedence, which confers the "status of origin," architecture constantly returns to the pursuit of mediocrity. They saw two meanings to their purpose. (1) To elevate the machine and its role as dwelling to the status of architecture (an extension of the modernist project) and (2) to subvert conventional architectural and urban form. In their project The Origins Of Architecture, they simultaneously question the validity of the mythical origins of architecture in the primitive hut and undermine the spatial structure of suburbia. They claimed that:

The beginning of architecture is complicated by architecture's simultaneous existence as abstract institution and physical fact. Both claim the origin for themselves; many stories have been told to promote one over the other. The primitive hut story suggests, for example, that building preceded architecture-that there was a hut which became architecture-but the story betrays a prior sense of architecturality by which the hut is recognized. Which came first: the hut or the idea? We recognize that the story is a myth, retro-figured into the history of architecture to provide an origin from which the present condition could be logically, scientifically derived–Holt Hinshaw Pfau Jones.

Holt Hinshaw Pfau Jones attempted to challenge suburbia by reinterpreting the mythical origins of architecture. They have described this process as akin to "souping-up" a hot rod ('Soup/s up-' in Bill Lacy and Susan de Menil's Angels And Franciscans: Innovative Architecture From Los Angeles And San Francisco, Rizzoli, 1992, and 'Origin Verses Existence And Language' in McCarter's Building Machines, 1987).

The architects suggest that this strategy of "interventive reuse" is "critical" but "carries none of the negative sense that we expect from critique." The architects do not propose to attack suburbia, but instead consider a fresh way to manage the sprawl. An attempt to ‘soup up’ must include foraging the required items form the surrounding area (scavaging) and completely revitalizing the outer body. "In this way, many otherwise forgotten vehicles" and works of architecture "have achieved a classic status." The process of souping-up is only successful if the object is a commonplace commodity"... with expectations encouraged by lowest-common-denominator marketing and realised through the universalisation of mass production." The aim of souping up is to take the essentially meaningless and repetitive and to make a statement about the "importance of the individual in contrast to the anonymous conformity of the assembly line."

In The Origins Of Architecture, Jones Holt Hinshaw Pfau reassessed suburbia and concluded that Adams primitive hut should be removed from paradise. Furthermore the hut should be souped-up to lead architecture out of the fugue state engineered by its association with suburbia. They claimed that the future of architecture is in technology and the machine-the "primitive hut should not be celebrated as a link to nature but as a step to man; as the first building, not the last tree." In their transformation, the primitive hut is no longer the "font of nature but of artifice; it is not a natural spring but an electric water-cooler."

---

Bibliography

http://www.architecturemedia.com/aa/aaissue.php?issueid=199703&article=13&typeon=3&highlight=architect

---

12/08/11

posted by: Alex Martin

Industrial Structures

Crane Structure

Beams :

H-Beam

I-Beam

Industrial Handrail

Counterweights:

---

12/08/11

Posted by : Alexandra Martin

Urban Scavengers Under Las Vegas

---

12/08/11

Posted by: Julia Morrissey

A Particularly Jonesian Slum Dwelling, Mumbai

---

12/08/11

Posted by: Julia Morrissey

The New Primitive

The name "Primitive Huts" conjures images of simple dwellings made from sticks and mud, perhaps in the woods. By 1986, when Pfau and Jones presented their version of the primitive hut, nearly 75% of the population of the United States lived in urban areas. Their models reflect the new primitive, the houses that could be built by scavengers living off of the city instead of nature. We have only to look at the vast expanses of slums that lie on the edge of cities to realize the urban scavenger is real and not just a concept introduced by Pfau and Jones in 1986.

Pfau and Jones' idea has only become more relevant two and a half decades later. In 2008, for the first time the world's population was split 50/ 50 between rural and urban dwellers. One billion people now live in slums, and that number is expected to double by 2030. In 2007 Matt O'Brien published a book titled Beneath the Neon describing the lives of hundreds of people dwelling in makeshift homes in the underground tunnels below las vegas. Their homes of crates and milk cartons are yet another version of the primitive hut realized.

---

12/08/11

Posted by: Julia Morrissey