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copyright 2006 The Comment
Graduate Student Magazine of Boston University's College of Communication
TITLE: Austerity, Material, and Mass: A Visionary Architect Works To Reflect the Imminent Digital Mind
As he prepares to give a lecture on his work to a group of architects in downtown Boston, Mark Goulthorpe looks bullish. He has a Manchester soccer fan's thickness about him and the northern-English accent to match. His paleness, however, suggests serious academic living. Fluorescent lights turn his skin blue. And now his laptop's processor is too slow. He fixes his translucent eyes on the computer, breathes staccato curses while punching the keyboard with his index fingers, quitting program after program until all that's left on the screen is the generic Windows desktop. The architects in attendance wait patiently; computers misbehave even for the savviest designers.
Restored, Goulthorpe starts anew. The overhead lights dim and a sensuous image, like the inside of a warmed lava lamp, moves soundlessly across a screen at the front of the room. When his computer works, Goulthorpe's speech better reveals what's going on inside his head: the phrasing is endless, fluid, multisyllabic, formless, delivered in a mind-boggling monotone. Likewise, his art is smooth and scale-less.
Image follows image: An elaborate bird-in-flight steel construction in a grassy field-not the bird itself, but the swooping lines that describe its wing's path; a sculpture that is unmistakably a fifteen-foot-high eye screw in solid wood; a standard brick-and-glass condo building in London on the top of which he has proposed a three-story predatory snail. This imagery provokes some respectful titters from the attendant architects, but they're soon silenced by Goulthorpe's theoretical explanations, which come like a well-timed bullet train.
“It's fine to arrive at something and then try to look for the rules to parameterize it,” he says, “but difficult to turn that around to being a generative conceptual tool.” The aesthetic exercise of design is mundane, he proclaims. His aspirations are loftier.
And here is why everyone wants a piece of this forty-three-year-old MIT professor, why he's more familiar with the interior of a Boeing 747 than his Cambridge apartment: what he hopes to prove is that technology can create a “fundamental cognitive shift” in architecture and in humanity. In other words, he asks, can the computer change how we design and how we think about space? This is not only Mark Goulthorpe's theory; it is now the prevailing notion among academics. Our minds are evolving to work in virtual space, most notably with the Internet. New technology has fostered a digital imagination or a mindset, one that is non-referential and highly developed to work with floating points of information in a vast matrix. Goulthorpe is hot because he is in a race against time to discover the architecture that will best reflect the imminent digital mind.
Architecture-speak is heavily coded; common words have different weight and meaning. The word “construct,” for example, is a noun rather than a verb. And terms go in and out of style. To the tuned ear, a vocabulary reveals the precise year and school from which an architect graduated, affectionately called the “genre”.
By graduation, some architects can design, and some can talk about design. The most promising excel at both. In school, Goulthorpe mastered the spoken language but probably wasn't considered a design prodigy. He was a student in the eighties when mainstream architecture was very, very pointy. Professors ordered students to chuck their circle templates and French curves. Their use was an act of serious rebellion, the architectural version of telling an academic to fuck off. But Goulthorpe's work had a pungently academic quality that was hard to ignore. This is why his past is littered with degrees, mostly unfinished, from prestigious architecture schools (the Architectural Association in London and the University of Liverpool among them). He says he was “kicked out,” but that's hard to believe. Mark Goulthorpe is an architect-by definition, someone who creates his own world.
Turning his back on unenlightened institutions, Goulthorpe followed his wife-Yee Pin Tan, a Malaysian power architect who designed luxury hotels for a high-end firm-from Great Britain to Paris in 1991. At age twenty-seven, considered an architect's infancy, he opened his own shop. His strategy for success was simple: win international competitions. If he could win one or two, he surmised, he would be able to cover his overhead, and then “kick a door in, and get a commission.”
He won as many competitions as he lost, an impressive record for an office of one, although winning was a dubious distinction. Rarely was there an actual project on the other end. Other, more opportunistic winners figured out how to leverage their fifteen minutes of fame, but 100-hour work weeks hunched over a computer left Goulthorpe little time to strategize a victory. The other problem: his language was abstruse, even for an architect. His Web site defined his work as “speculative architecture” in which he could pursue “entirely new possibilities of practice that . . . rapid technical change seemed to offer.” The name of his firm, dECOI, the site informed its readers, was “a sort of enigmatic leitmotif which identifies whilst maintaining anonymity-itself serves to interrogate the signature-effect, suggesting much lighter and looser modes of practice which are opening.”
In relative isolation, meanwhile, Goulthorpe inadvertently mastered “blobitecture,” an architecture that looked like nothing yet built, though it was brewing on computer screens everywhere. More lumpy, plastic, amorphous mass than building, the aesthetic would become pandemic in design schools by the turn of the millennium-but that was all to come. Today's best-known blobitect, Frank Gehry, architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum (1997) in Spain and Disney Symphony Hall (2003) in Los Angeles, was still designing strip malls.
Eventually, Goulthorpe's ease with the aesthetic, his thickly theoretical explanations, and his overall skill with academic-speak caught the attention of the dean of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. Since assuming the deanship in 1992, William J. Mitchell had transformed the school into a technology-driven research haven, hiring visionaries like Goulthorpe who sought to integrate the computer into the architectural imagination. In the summer of 2000, Mitchell invited Goulthorpe to join the faculty. In doing so, Mitchell designated him a prophet of sorts, in the hopes that he would be able to accurately proclaim what future architecture would look like. “[Goulthorpe] is one of the leading members of a generation of young architects who have thought deeply and critically about both the technical and cultural possibilities of new digital technologies,” he says. “He has developed a sequence of beautiful projects that begins to disclose these possibilities in fresh and compelling ways.”
Though renowned for his vision, Goulthorpe's patrons have been slow to call. He's not alone. The acclaimed architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) designed his buildings for a faceless human figure he called Le Modular, who, according to his maker, embodied the qualities of true modern man, one lacking any sympathies with the nineteenth century. Images of Le Modular appeared regularly throughout Le Corbusier's work, reminding the architect of the unsentimental modern men who would eventually appreciate his buildings. In fact, Le Corbusier knew few actual moderns in his lifetime, just as Goulthorpe has yet to meet true products of the digital age, people who at the moment are still in diapers. But both Le Corbusier and Goulthorpe understand a building as a predictive model-the only art form that will get regular use decades after its creation. Unfortunately, fifty years later, many of Le Corbusier's ideas have proved unlivable-too dense and inhospitable. American housing projects modeled after his ideas now lie in landfills, and some blame his high-rise architecture for the recent riots in France. Even so, he's still revered as the father of modern architecture, and if Goulthorpe can get his own works built, then future civilians can decide whether to canonize him or tear the stuff down.
One sticking point: the ability to image such structures far outpaces the construction industry. Which is to say, Goulthorpe's forms are almost impossible to build. Many architects will spend their lives figuring out how to construct curvy forms using a hybrid of computerized and hand technologies. A sink basin designed entirely in virtual space, for example, looked simple enough on the screen to be cast in bronze. Goulthorpe determined that the plaster molds would be made using a computer-controlled laser cutting system, but a casting artist, brought in as a consultant to help fabricate the sink for a Paris luxury apartment, took one look at the proposed design and laughed. “That's impossible,” he announced. The sink's interior spaces had too many convex lips. The molten bronze would not fill the crevices, and even if it could, the plaster would crack. The design team ultimately divvied up the fabrication between machined formwork and hand-crafted finishing.
That all of Goulthorpe's projects end up hybridized in construction-some computer, and lots of hand-frustrates the hell out of him. It is an obvious betrayal of his hypothesis about twenty-first-century architecture. Hence a new mission: to seize MIT's resources to develop a computer program capable of realizing his designs. He began by gathering a team of computer scientists, engineers and students from around the globe. Then he sketched out a plan. A curve in construction is rarely a true curve; instead it's usually a faceted interpretation. The smoothness of the curve is determined by how small the facets are. Goulthorpe chose to work with triangles. Thus, his program breaks down complex surfaces into a triangular mesh. The user can adjust the variables-for a finer curve, the computer divides the surfaces into smaller and smaller triangles until the designer is satisfied with the appearance.
This same program also makes construction drawings. After faceting the curves, the computer can convert each shape into a three-dimensional panel with flanges, even calculating the location of bolt holes so that the whole thing can then be fastened together. The program has been tinkered with considerably and now works well, but Goulthorpe has yet to determine what these precisely machined panels are made of. Indicative of his single-mindedness, the program was the goal; now that it's nearly done, he can spend the next five years finding a material that fits his mission.
That determination notwithstanding, his MIT colleagues seem more taken with other aspects of the work. “Mark Goulthorpe's design research is unique in that he brings together ambitions for advanced computation and geometry with in-depth historical and theoretical knowledge of the discipline,” says J. Meejin Yoon, an associate professor of architecture at the university. “His design intelligence merges poetics and technology. He is not interested in the techno-rational but the plausible fictions that engender a new imagination of architectural possibilities.”
It isn't easy being a prophet. Goulthorpe says he will always remember the nineties as the decade in which “I suffered poverty through following my own intellect.” There were emotional casualties as well. To accept MIT's offer, he left his wife and child in Paris. One interview with this reporter took place with Goulthorpe's five-year-old son, Ion, in tow. While Goulthorpe explained a bold vision of the future in which real distance was collapsed by virtual space, his son, fresh from Paris, climbed on a jungle gym nearby. Goulthorpe is no longer married, and Ion flies back and forth between his parents. When Goulthorpe spoke about his situation, all pretense dropped away. “There isn't acrimony,” he said. “Only sadness. A deep sadness.”
Perhaps in reaction to his inability to be everywhere at once, he is modeling in real time how the twenty-first-century architect will work. He believes that architects soon will become middlemen between technology and clients. “We are the last generation of signatory artists,” he explains, referring to architects' notorious need to be considered the primary designers. “It was really a preposterous way of working. But now everybody sees everything. There is no expertise anymore. Therefore, we need to disperse the creative act.” He argues that the computer removes that signature role from the architect because it “allows variance to be modeled.” Technology necessarily leads designers to new answers that they could not have developed on their own. Accordingly, they should acknowledge their true partners-computers-and even help their clients by giving them the tools to discover for themselves the happy accidents that generate so much contemporary architecture. Goulthorpe envisions a “networked practice [in which architects] will be the choreographers of specialists. Now we will be generalists, and must be very charming and seek the assistance of genuine experts.”
To prove his point, he often turns over critical design decisions to neophytes in his office. When he needed that sink designed for the Paris apartment, he approached a young intern. “I gave her the computer and software and I said, 'See how water moves and try to capture that.'” In a month she produced a three-dimensional model. “It turned out to be more of a spittoon than a sink,” Goulthorpe notes, “but it was perfect for the space.” Visionary, perhaps; architect, absolutely.
At the lecture in downtown Boston, Goulthorpe showed other images of the apartment in Paris, which he gutted and transformed into something utterly modern and surprisingly material. The concrete surfaces are careful, smooth and sensuous. He used a beautiful and rare wood for much of the cabinetry and, throughout, there are moments of unparalleled sophistication. There is nothing eerie, bird-like or strange- just excellent architecture. If all this reflects the inchoate digital mind, then future architecture will be worth the wait.
