100% Authorship
We will make a dozen books. 500 Pages ea.
10/24
Carsten Goertz
Neo-Metabolism
Learning to Love the Standard Run, The Real Review 2025
Post-Collapse
The Open Archive
Books
10/31
Book Formats Due
Alain Resnais, Toute la Memoire du Monde
This Will Kill That, Victor Hugo
Umberto Eco, Essay
Vowels Showroom
11/07
Book Analysis Due
11/14
Book Reader Due
The Plateau of the Anti Author
Michael Cohen, Editor Architecture and Abstraction
Architecture and Abstraction, Chapter 6, Pier Vittorio Aureli
Precis of the Lectures on Architecture, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. Introduction, 77.
11/21
Book Content Due
12/05
Book Proof Due
100% Authorship Notes
What happened to Chicago heroism? Why did lineage of excellence taper off slowly? What changed financially? What changed aesthetically? Is the failure of the city a result of? This project is animating a ghost, but there is no interest in hallucinating.
How size works:
Scale (19th century)
The industrial revolution capitalized on miniaturized cities, networks, technology.
Density (21st century)
The massive shifts happening currently are not large or small, they are everywhere. Density of those elements (technology, crisis, inequality) are what matters.
Restate the task: we are trapped seeing incorrectly as mediums and formats are becoming stale or self-aware. The aim of this class is to look to analyze objects through authorship. Collapse the distance between object of analysis and viewer by seeing that distance as the plane of authorship.
The interview (the third memory): Restate the story from subjective lens
The reference: Use references as actual materials for design rather than suggestive
Surveyorship: Construct new surveil tools
Metonymy: Replace an idea with an object that represents it.
September 19, 2025
Guest Lecture Luigi Alberto Cippini
No pictorial theory
“Oliver twist syndrome” every time he’s about to change, he falls asleep
Velasquez the servent
Taylor Swift A+U
All Architecture is The Same
September 17, 1:15pm
Transcription Lighty Edited
There is a heroic quality that peaks in 1960s Chicago; this quality stems from the post war economy with the talent and institutions being built around them that would be perpetuated. With this sense of optimism buildings are built under that rubric that they would be part of a greater lineage continuing forward. A perfect example would be here at UIC art and architecture building where only one quarter of what is now a midsize architecture school nationally, would be built with the assumption that the other 3/4 of the building will come later with more students, more talent with more money. This leaves a very particular condition in the building, a façade understood not as design but as a material queue. The exterior is finished like an interior, raw concrete CMU block on the interior of the wall. The interior finished block tiles, which would be in the future the same material used as the exterior.
The campus also is well known to have formally had a second elevated pathway connecting the schools. The ground floor has always been imagined as a secondary space back entrance in the 1980tktk when it didn’t make sense anymore to maintain proposed security and cost reasons the bridges connecting buildings the majority of them were destroyed, and a new master plan grounded in circulation, literally back onto the grass. The new entrances are the back of house, and a handful of stairways and alteration exceptions were made to gain access to the second level, which was formally the grand entrances of the buildings.
Inevitably as an occupant of UIC, you come to face the fact that the ground is a secondary class of circulation. This façade represents the fact that we live in a moment of failed optimism. This is not to say we are pessimistic, but to say that there was a project that was undertaken, and never finished or partially destroyed, so now we live with the artifacts of optimism. This artifact proves to be extremely exciting to show how architecture in this current moment finds meeting in the manipulation of the built fabric. The fabric itself, both in need of maintenance and in need of being used (for reasons of housing, the expansion of ideas and for carbon sink). I am fixated on proving a form of authorship embedded in this moment of stalled optimism registering as an architectural non-place. Not in the sense of Smithson, but in the sense of it’s really not having been on purpose. It is an accident to its form. Accident maybe too strong a word it is a breath in the process of building a building. But as the larger building never survived we remain with breath held for what comes next. We can either anticipate the fall or prepare for sprint.
The question of how authorship interplay with this dynamic is a particular interest. First of all we have to have found this site as the entrance to the architecture building, but also we need to recapture to some degree in the way of a reconstruction like Rem did with Casa Palestra, the moment historically, in which the feeling of the future was present in the construction of the building. Now that we occupy that future anticipated by this CMU wall, we have to look back and reinscribe a narrative misunderstood by those who made it and so it is an authored aprinalysis of that historical moment, recapturing the design process, but with the future we now live in. For our moment we to see the future anticipated in the same way that Walter did, but we will be wrong too.The differences how can we make meaningful work that spans these 50 year gaps in time past present future
September 5, 2025 4:24pm
100% Authorship
Authoring a project through a new enactment of it. The third memory, narrated by the protagonist of a memory, directing other actors in his own experience, filmed by the artist. It's clear that even something that is true, is altered by a reauthoring of it. It reminds me of a Prix de Rome in the 19th century Ecole des Beaux Arts - a talented author would be tasked with a survey of a historic piece of architecture, and in the case of Henri Labrouste (and many others) inscribed it with his own authorship. Stacking subjectivities. Alienating fickle objective truth, but imposing immediacy onto it.
September 2, 2025 6:20pm
100% Authorship Notes
Format Problems (WHAT FORMAT IS MEANINGFUL)
Charm of the Egg (MONOFIXATION)
IntentIons Release (HOW TO LOOK AT THE WORLD WITHOUT AUTHORS)
01 Crisis Formalism Introduction.
Crisis Formalism, Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg
02 Staring At Crisis (Afterimages)
Nothing but the End to Come? Extinction Fragments. Ben Ware
Hauntology
03 Collapse and Repair
Cyprien Gaillard interview Humpty/Dumpty
Scaling Collapse: David Eskenazi
04 Authorship v. Illegibility
Introduction. Luigi Cippino C-Span Volume 01 (Buy)
Writing Degree Zero. Roland Barthes.
05 Noise
Architecture and Abstraction. Pier Vittorio Aureli
….. TBD
Fall 2025 - University of Illinois Chicago
2025–26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow
August 20, 2025 9:12am
Two Paths
The aim of this studio is to monofixate on the Farnsworth House, its site as a legal boundary, its site as a hydrological territory, its structure as a 501c(3) non-profit, its registration as a national historic landmark, its situation in a local and international economy. The complexity of the site is typical. There are overlapping and paradoxical structures and requirements that make it both bureaucratic and a typical design brief. The primary difference for architects is that at its core this site is a piece of architecture that is both relevant and canonized. Its form has transcended into a tome, a meme, or an image torturing architects (see treacherous transparencies by Herzog and de Mueron).
In this studio we will redesig the site to be relevant: floods will increase, economies will change, bureaucracy and non-profit structures will falter. But first a new form of masterplanning needs to happen, one that understands how things fail as well as how things grow. Amateurplanning or failplanning might be more appropriate. But something like resilienceplanning is wrong(a bigger wall preserves too kindly.) Techniques like Managed Retreat might be more interesting and something that the Edith Farnsworth House has examined. But there is a theoretical basis for all of this, Crisis Formalism, which situates itself within the flows of crisis, adopting crisis’ fluid and illegible structures.
We take two paths, the first is to fearlessly masterplan the site by adopting optimism and pessimism without hierarchy. The second path is to develop architecture that recognizes this new site, a out of it flows a piece of architecture suitable for this moment.
Syllabus
Reading 01 Crisis Formalism, Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg
Reading 02 Unfolding Structure, Detlef Mertins
Realities
Stating it plainly would claim that this studio is to develop a masterplan for the museum-house and grounds of the historically important Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois. The house and grounds are in turmoil with a very unique funding mechanism and requirements. But the program is to allow the house and grounds to be continually preserved, but also to increase its capacity for meaning and relevancy. To make a new building that serves the neighborhood and community that supports the building. There are currently 6 buildings on the site that each have particularities that can be discussed, but as a whole the site, its ownership and its future are all being planned in coordination with its own balance sheet positioned in an ever evolving non-profit governmental framework.
We will travel to the Farnsworth House and do workshops with its leadership and teams to survey the needs and conditions. Help build priorities. Open paths to alternative means of development and futures. As architects we understand the meaning of the house as an object of history, media and aesthetics, but to understand how those functions operate in the context of a rural museum-house and its management already begins to destabilize the house as a piece of iconography.
Claude (AI Assistant). “Technical Summary of Fox River Geographic Facts, Environmental Issues, and Economic Benefits.” Generated summary incorporating geographic data, water quality research, and recreational/economic impact studies for the Fox River watershed through Plano, Illinois. August 18, 2025.
The Fox River flows northeasterly through Plano, Illinois (Kendall County) as part of a 202-mile waterway that drains 2,570 square miles across northeastern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin before joining the Illinois River system. Located approximately 50 miles southwest of Chicago, the river maintains a gentle gradient through the glaciated prairie landscape with relatively shallow valley banks characteristic of Midwestern agricultural watersheds. While the river faces significant environmental challenges including water quality problems from mercury, PCBs, fecal bacteria, sediment, and pesticides that have led to Illinois EPA impairment designations, along with safety hazards and ecological fragmentation caused by aging dams, it also provides substantial economic and recreational benefits. The river generates millions in tourism revenue, supports the 158-mile Fabulous Fox Water Trail designated by the National Park Service, serves as a drinking water source for over 330,000 people in cities like Elgin and Aurora, and offers diverse recreational opportunities including paddling, fishing, camping, and wildlife observation that connect communities and support local economies throughout the watershed.
Crisis Formalism Notes for EFH
Stating it complexly, this is a studio to develop a formal language based on developing architecture in a thick atmosphere of crisis. Crisis Formalism. The immediacy of an apocalypse mindset is easy to see and hold onto. But while it’s very present, there is also no obvious outcome, no vector that feels isolated enough to examine. Crisis Formalism claims that if architecture is to be meaningful, it must be situated within the flows of crisis rather than trying to resist it. How can architecture maintain order within the scale and complexity of the Polycrisis? Architecture that generates responses to visible crises does not contain the disintegrated and fluid qualities that the polycrisis is built from. The proposal is to examine the conceptual, structural and aesthetic qualities in confronting this issue. What if form can be generated by the flows of the polycrisis? Forces large enough to reduce architecture to a plaything. To make form through harnessing these forces, rather than resilience concepts or complexity mindset, is an architecture of the collapse, of the tangent, of the illegible.