Brian T. Rex

I first used LiDAR in 2004 to scan the unfinished Robert Smithson project, “Amarillo Ramp” where he died taking an aerial tour of the site. To be useful in design the data record of LiDAR has to be more readily graphical. Over the last year I’ve come back to LiDAR to test its practical viability in design and to challenge how point clouds directly register as readily graphical devices--communicative. LiDAR workflows require recording, registering, indexing, editing, optimizing, and outputting. LiDAR is data that graphically projects boundaries through pure intensity of painterly presence--clouds of points suggesting surfaces between them by intensity.

A pure spatial field of points is the antithesis of a line drawing. It resists and breaks down under the scrutiny of a picture plane or drawn surface. It becomes muddy. On the other hand, a point cloud converted into modeing surfaces is a neutered graphic. I’ve come to find ways to control the graphic in the act of scanning in the field, running scans more densely where there’s detail to be called out, dodging and burning data to graphical effect.

Two projects are show here, a composite scan model built to demonstrate the need for a connection between the Main Street and Courthouse and a snapshot of everyday life in the home at 1011 4th Street, both in Brookings, SD. The act of drawing with point cloud data is expressed in the field rather than in post-processing.

The Volga Corner is one of four projects that make up a larger inquiry into “Making Public Space Concrete”, a research initiative generously funded by the Precast Concrete Institute. In each of these studies we have folded a novel study of precast concrete processes into our collaborative designs of public spaces for less than metropolitan places.

Volga, a railroad town, is the Manhattan of South Dakota in that it is a landlocked island community, surrounded by water. The main street, Kasan Avenue, has a two block commercial core just south of the railroad tracks. 2nd & Kasan, the intersection at the center of the commercial district, is a hollowed out epicenter. The community thrives but the downtown is fallow. On the southwest corner of 2nd & Kasan is our site, the lot. There hasn’t been a building here since the hardware store burned in the late 1940s. Over the years the empty lot at the center became an informal public gathering place. If there is a latent, everyday public space in the fabric of Volga then it is this lot. Volga likes parades. Four parades a year turn the corner at 2nd & Kasan. This is where people gather to review parades, antique tractor competitions are judged, and the annual Ice Cream Social and Harvest Fest are held.

The project is a monument to the culture of community and events that make Volga what it is. The Volga Corner formalizes the public space already in practice at 2nd & Kasan and presents a structure in which new events can be realized.

For two years we worked to develop a persuasive scheme in dialog with the community and to present full scale simulations of the placemaking components. Iqra Abasi, a Pakistani exchange student came up with a perimeter defining colonnade of in-line, inclined concrete columns and Brian Lee pulled the legs of her inclined columns apart to reveal a range of seating and riser utilizations.

A facade of lanky concrete “vees” holding a space (a la Yamasaki) naturally begs the exploration of the material parameters that limit slender precast components. How little precast concrete can be manufactured to bound an urban corner to maximum spatial and functional effect? In simulated sections where we find more steel than concrete, components might rattle against each other through flexure. Slenderness, we found, raises expectations for precision that are difficult to reach.

We took the digital model apart and created three task sets:
Casting
a) Cast In Place Formwork in Wood
Survey, Excavation, Formwork, and Rebar set
Subterranean Base poured in Formwork in Excavation
Precasting
b) Precast Formwork in Wood
Precast Elements in Concrete
Vee Erection craned and welded onto Foundation
Steelwork
c) Beam and Sign Fabrication
 Beam and Sign Assembly
Beam and Sign Erection craned and bolted on Precast Concrete

The surface of the Hollywood Sign is about 38,000sq.ft. looking down on about 180,000 people in Hollywood. The surface of the Volga Sign is about 400sq.ft. looking down on about 1,600 people on Kasan Avenue. Both signs have about 6in. by 6in. of sign surface per citizen.

We find a strong resonance in our use of super text and its siting in the text driven paintings of Ed Ruscha, Steven Holl’s “Alphabet Buildings” in Pamphlet Architecture, and the super-text sign studies of Scott-Brown and Venturi. The cantilever pulls the structure out on the road and visible to passing US Highway 14. A super-text monument.

Wrigley Square is a 7,000 sq. ft. triangle of public space built at the base of Main Street. This new civic space was cut into a vast asphalt surface where they once dropped freight at the end of the line on the Milwaukee Road. Wrigley Square is a sight, a stage, and a sign.

Urbanistically, the new triangular square functions as a traffic control device that clarifies paths to unravel a dangerous and complicated pattern of vehicular flows. What makes the project possible in execution is that we mesh the power of material research and building.

One afternoon, while doing a study of the town, we invented Wrigley Square as a 1:1 chalked out stunt on the vast sheet of open asphalt that used to be the freight drop for the railroad. We showed our lines to the city council and municipal leaders. The town responded by opening up a triangle of ground and pouring curbs right where we had chalked it out. They called our bluff.

The square develops in four phases:

Phase 1 The Curb
Phase 2 The Wall of Frames
Phase 3 The Point
Phase 4 The Platform
Phase 5 The Bench

Each phase engages “sight, stage, and sign” in a different way. The curb makes the sign of a stage. The wall pulls sights beyond into the site. The point codifies the site as a stage for cruising activities. The platform transforms into the music venue for the annual “Sitting Bull Stampede”, the July the 4th celebration, and as a stage for the range of fishing and hunting tournaments that go on year round. The bench signs the function and place of the site. The shared effect is a set of discrete architectonic landscape elements. We went to Mobridge and drew a new public space at the end of the line.

In the Fall of 2010 I founded the Department of Architecture (DoArch) at South Dakota State University. I have engaged the development of DoArch as an act of cultural design and practical demonstration. Today, we are 150 students in two degrees and eight full-time faculty teaching an NAAB accredited professional curriculum with over one million dollars in research funding. There hasn’t been a new professional program between Milwaukee and Moscow, ID in over a century. Our state is a network of big towns bookended by two small cities. The largest professional office in SD has ten architects. How do we make a small professional program in a small place tailored to enhance regional small practices?

With my colleagues and students I have fashioned DoArch to fit this place using South Dakota’s needs and resources as our teaching and research opportunities. I recruited, hired, and trained a stable, diverse faculty of eight, none of whom have previous teaching experience. They have shaped DoArch by developing their scholarship and instruction. I designed six years of curriculum and we performed it into an architectural culture. DoArch channels our work through Building Arts and Public Works because they are relevant to the communities of this state and possible with this set of personnel at this university.

We had a shop before we had a studio. In the first two years we used milling machines and laser cutters as our primary digital media outputting devices. The shop gives us intellectual space to study by making. We’ve built Passive Houses, Lamella Arches, Dieste Walls, Precast Concrete Follies, Cross-Laminated Timber Beams; DoArch builds architecture. The palatte of our architectural education here at SDSU is the “Building Arts”.

Quality public space and urbanity is the professional measure of our aggregate building practices. The fabric of towns in SD are an under-served urbanism. They are urban but they are not metropoles. How one fashions public space at this scale in this society is an open question that is particularly exacerbated in the communities of SD. The towns of SD are eager to serve as our laboratory. This has become a focus of the curriculum in a set of protracted engagements that address the urban imperative of architecture. We profess that the aggregate effect of our practices are “Public Works”.

The underpinning of the professional program and our place as a core humanity in the university is that we don’t make buildings or cities. We make models and drawings of them. Architecture is the last great humanistic form of graphical inquiry. Contemporary representational technologies preference space-making through construction simulation, reinvigorating the fundamental material craft of architecture. We profess that the mediation of making buildings and cities is the foundation of our discipline.

To broaden the outreach and accessibility of the new program we set up multiple paths to professional graduation. The curriculum is two degrees; a pre-professional four year Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architecture and a professional Master of Architecture with an overlay for a three year second degree professional track. We graduate no more than 15 M.Arch candidates a year after an open enrollment that brings in high school grads, community college transfers, second discipline professionals, and international students.

The curriculum is divided into primary disciplinary tracks: practices of design and profession; humanities in history and theory; design, and building technology courses.. This was laid out in abstract without the faculty to teach it. The eventual faculty, in-fact, shaped the particulars of coursework and they’ve put a point to curricular tracks such as representational technology and the humanities by professing in the classroom their scholarship and expertise. We recruited a diverse faculty who have come together working in concert to shape and teach a highly directed and coordinated curriculum.

At the end of the first decade of the program we rolled out a significantly modified version of the curriculum that optimizes and economizes to best effect for the students and faculty--fewer total courses and more choice for all.

We set out to make a small program in a small university training students from small towns to work in small practices in a vast landscape with little connection to an architectural culture. We’ve worked to define the discipline of architecture to an institution eager to build up a design culture. We’ve making a place in the university for a professional program that is keenly connected to the humanities, design, and engineering. We took care to map, catalog, graph, and analyze the program’s siting and its developing organizational systems. After eleven years DoArch is a rising professional program situated in a place that traditionally lacked both a strong professional community and a sophisticated construction management and trades. We are fabricating a renewed culture of building, advocating for a culture of professionalism, and constructing a place on the campus among the humanities.

DRAFT is the yearbook of the Department of Architecture at SDState. It was produced under the direction of Associate Professor Federico Garcia Lammers and the publication artistry of Mahmoud Sadek. Here are some links to past issues of DRAFT:

2016-17 DoArch DRAFT

2017-18 DoArch DRAFT

2018-19 DoArch DRAFT

All models are at 1”=20’.

surface, sand, and the sandbox
Surface is a privileged condition of form that is intellectually flat, compressive, and planar while simultaneously being perceptually and tactilely voluptuous. It is both 2-D and 3-D. A surface is complete and understandable but it rarely is seen as a singular and ordered thing in the way that an object is. We began the project with a desire to keep away from problematizing “object-making” since each constituent discipline in visual literacy. Throughout the various disciplines the axiom “Surfaces are the visual manifestations of matter” holds relevance in a fairly universal way. So, we set about finding a way to teach how to see surface, how to describe surface, how to shape surface, how to record surface, and ideation in surface.

The surface is where the action is. -J.J. Gibson
The primary medium or interface in the project is a 20” by 20” by 10” half cube 2 by 12 lumber box that is filled half with sand and half with air. The sand in the box is a cubic, viscous form with only one surface “in play” for the student to work on. It disarms a beginning design student by using a very familiar and plastic medium: sand. Sand is a granular solid that is under the influences of gravity and its physical cohort--friction, cohesion, and angle of incidence. Its neutral state (condition of stasis) is a flat surfaced, level, five-inch deep granular and cubic pool in the box. Sand can seem as much liquid as does a solid. According to Avrum Stroll this interface, the surface between air and sand, is a privileged position in space. The surface is a shared extent of two materials. Surfaces are geometric, chemical, and ultimately visual manifestations of form. Critical questions addressed in the initial sand box pedagogy are: What is a surface? What is a two-dimensional description of a surface? How does one transform between 2-D and 3-D in a sophisticated and inventive way? In what ways can an element and a surface relate to each other? (part to whole relationships) What methods can be used to record a surface?

“Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”
So, is there public space in this urban model or has it been lost in this reconfiguration? Truly public space in the city is a physically demarcated space (a grounds) of open dialog and demonstration amongst people and between government and citizenry. Where in our Lubburb© is what Jurgen Habermas called the Public Sphere, the place where, “...something approaching public opinion can be formed”? We see in Lubbock a shift to the road as a city shaping armature- the 40mph space that, at first glance, is seemingly incompatible with public space. We are fascinated with resolving the incompatibility between these vehicular arteries and our expectations of public space. Potential design for public space in Lubbock must lie somewhere, somehow in its arterial roads.

Where is architecture in a city when its buildings are not its architecture? What makes civic space in a city when the ensemble of its buildings no longer resonate enough to situate a sense of public space? What design practices can project a civic sense in a city ‘freed’ from the historical expectation that its buildings will enable, hold, or generate spaces that are public and activated for the collective?

If we don’t want to get trapped, doubtful, and actionless at the co-merging of the clover leaves, we have to stop looking and listening around and get on the road. Architecture today cannot concern itself only with that one particular set of structures which happen to stand upright and be hollow “buildings” in the conventional sense.
—Victor Gruen, “Cityscape and Landscape”, Arts and Architecture, September 1955, p.18

Two Issues
a) Standardize & Simplify Traffic, Egress, & Parking
b) Rebuild the Edge Between Street & Business

Streetscape Elements
a) new street paving
b) new sidewalk
c) new curbs
d) new curb cuts
e) better lighting
f) bus kiosks
g) landscaping
h) pocket parks

Curtis, a small agricultural town in southwestern Nebraska, needs to programmatically reconnect Center Avenue, its Main Street, with its NE College of Technical Agriculture (NCTA). The town needs to put itself back on the map with the college students who come to study at NCTA; its life-long residents; and the outside world it wants to attract to bolster a falling population. Before the days of radio beacons and GPS pilots flew cross-country using the ground based guidance system provided by the National Air-Marking Program. From 1926 to the start of WWII a giant text based notation system was writ large in white paint across 13,000 prominent buildings and parks in small town America to, “Mark the Skyways Like the Highways” and to “Let the Air Know You Are There”, as a 1935 U.S. Bureau of Commerce pamphlet put it. 50ft. tall letters could be read from as high as 10,000 feet. Only air-marked towns were charted on aeronautical maps. All air-marks were “erased” by order of the Defense Department at the outset of WWII.

Each day more people can see Curtis today from 30,000 feet than are in the town. Curtis is below two major east-west airline routes. The most prominent location in town both from the air and between the College and the Main Street is the central park that sits at their crux. We propose to inscribe into the surface of the park interconnected pavilions constructed through successive mereologic, topographic, and tectonic procedures to make an air-mark visible to 30,000ft. comprised of programs intertwining collegial and civic activities such as an aquatics center, an amphitheater, a municipal hall, an ag ed hall, recreational lawns, and crop study fields. This will put Curtis back on the map.

SURFACES

A lawn

B grounds

C walk

D bosco

E fences

SPACES

1 pool

2 ag hall

3 mtg hall

4 theater

5 entrance

6 operations

7 wash/dress

8 store

-sometimes the most solid and memorable thing in this landscape is the wind

Efficiently and cheaply harnessing the wind to pump ground water to the surface is what made the Llano Estacado habitable 100 years ago. Now, a century later this region is once again translating its prodigious wind-power- this time into electrical energy. Texas Tech sits in the middle of this region’s wind power renaissance. It is, and rightly should be, a center for wind power research, innovation, and development.

-a didactic wind
At Texas Tech we pride ourselves on one of the largest land area university campuses in the world. Master plans encourage densification and a continuation of our Spanish Colonial style tradition as a way to tie the campus together but the campus needs something campus scale

- a grand gesture that helps us define who we are in this place.
Green campus initiatives are sprouting up. We think the campus needs an environmental signature. It needs something to tie it to the surrounding landscape spatially, ecologically, historically, and symbolically. We propose introducing a grand “Wind Line” in the campus by constructing a string of 17 evenly spaced wind turbines running along the dominant north-south central axis of the administration building and engineering key. A campus scale line of wind mills will frame and unify the discrete spaces from Stadium to Alum Center to Engineering Key, to Memorial Circle to Administration Building to the SUB to the Music Building to 19th Street and it will build into the surface of the campus a trace of the environmental conditions and responding technologies that have shaped this place.

-a campus infrastructure
Historical aerial photos of our campus show vast tracts of the land surface of Texas Technological College “in production”, so to speak. The western 3/4 of the campus was in cotton production. The mythology of free tuition for any young man who brought and tended a dairy cow at the barn was in effect. The barn and these working fields were icons of productivity in which the university grew. The campus presented itself in an efficiency of “making the land pay.” This project will bring some of that “pragmatic landscape” spirit back. By our calculations at its peak daily usage the campus can draw 50Megawatts of power from the grid. The Wind Line running through the campus will contain 17- 1.2MW turbines with hubs 180ft. above the ground. So, at peak operation the wind line could generate between 15 and 20Megawatts or up to 40% of the campus’ power needs. This wind line will build into the campus a connected sense of our wind and its environmental dynamic racing across the surface of the campus.

Where is architecture in a city when its buildings are not its architecture? What makes civic space in a city when the ensemble of its buildings no longer resonate enough to situate a sense of public space? What design practices can project a civic sense in a city ‘freed’ from the historical expectation that its buildings will enable, hold, or generate spaces that are public and activated for the collective?

The project is realized as an open theater of performance dedicated to the surrounding community & the tradition of the everyday spectacle of Coney. It builds on the ad hoc performance-based tectonics that make up Coney & its manic sense of self-activated spaces of daily architectonic performance. Coney is coolest where the construction moves- performing a shift in perception & questioning experience. The intention here is a construction somewhere between the broad notion of performative architecture, the serial specifics of Coney Island building traditions & the vast open-endedness of the Rieglelmann Boardwalk. The scheme inflects the existing site parameters & constructions to architectural effect rather than dropping a whole new paradigm on the Coney way of life. We dream of a program of continuous space made from the singular act of extending the fishing pier back inland & up to the ballpark & back some. The interstices of the fold configure the theater. We dream of the boxmen, a telescoping typology of mobile boxes (stages, concession stands, backdrops, and drop boxes) built to perform. We dream of the daily performances of the box men that takes them wherever the action is. This is a continuous space performing daily. The building performs. Catch a daily show. They’re continuing throughout the summer with just matinees on weekends in the winter months.

Introduction : L, M, S, XS
These are the days of “S, M, L, and, XL”. This project looks at the opposite end of the urban spectrum from the metropolitan condition. While the city continues to reinvent itself in grander and grander scales, towns across the country are developing in the opposite direction: they are shrinking and returning to landscape conditions. The most active ingredient in most small rural towns is decay, working as an agent of an entropic urbanism built on the irrelevance of the underlying plan and structure of the town. This project is about “L, M, S, and, XS” and possibilities in reconsidering the small town configuration and density.

Curtis, NE is a rural agrarian town on the Great Plains. It is a remote community of 750 residents. Like many towns across the Great Plains, it was conceived of as a way-station on a spur of the trans-continental railroad. Like many other towns in the west, it was laid out to be, “the great western metropolis” , on a limited scale it flourished as a community of approximately 2,000 through the 1920’s, and has seen a steady and gradual ex-migration of over 2/3 (66%) of its 1925 population since the end of World War II.

Charge : Entropic Design
The community challenged this office to consider the effects of and potentials in the physical attrition that ex-migration has brought to the town’s main street: Center Avenue. The functional reality of the project isn’t to revitalize and redensify the town back to its 1920’s heyday. There’s little possibility that Curtis, NE will ever see 2,000 residents again. Neither telecommuting nor concerted efforts to lure residents from the surrounding cities have presented the metropolitan sort of growth and expansion that planning touts as success. Curtis is contracting. This project explores whether that can be designed.

Process : Cultivating the Horizontal
The first “contractual” tendancy of the project is to emphasize the horizontal surface. Inherent in the logic of urban de-densification is an increased presence of the horizon. In this project traditional urban techniques are amalgamated with landscape practices so that landscape and urbanism are tied in four ways:
a) the horizontal surface of the avenue space itself is articulated into finer spatial precincts of activity. The street is narrowed. A new virtual façade made up of “streetscaping” is set up parallel to the avenue to assure the integrity, clarity, and primacy of the space of the avenue.
b) the present urban fabric is questioned and reconsidered as a more specific configuration than the original 400’ square Cartesian grid. A new, less dense pattern is overlaid as a template for future urbanism. The new pattern addresses the fact that more people see Curtis from an airliner each year than they do from the ground. Curtis is aligned along the initial descent into Denver from the East Coast. A distinct urban configuration provides the town an identity from the air.
c) the ongoing drop in building mass requires a reprogramming of the horizontal surfaces around Center Ave. not as property but as civic environments that are equally urban and landscape. Current attitudes in the community see the ground surrounding buildings as tied to the adjacent structures in a very un-civic and suburban sort of way. Reclamation of the space around buildings as public domain is an inherently urban condition. Programming it in a garden sort of way makes it landscape.
d) the avenue is projected into the landscape by engaging notions of terminus, axis, threshold, and vista- conditions of both the garden and the boulevard used to enframe a relationship between landscape and urban. The town sits on a bluff above the flood plain of the Medicine Valley. In this project Center Avenue is stretched out perpendicular to the valley floor so that it starts at the park above town, travels across the valley floor, and extends across the valley in a straight, Cartesian line.

Execution : Menu Strategies
Procedurally the project has been devised to service the community in a long term and sustained effort to refashion the fabric of their town. The work will be funded through an incremental local sales tax increase and will have to be completed in phases. In development and presentation as a plan of action for the community the project has been conceived as a menu of urban and landscape means to create the four effects already outlined. This project is no “gesamtkunstwerk” and is subject to the intense scrutiny of local politics. In fashioning the project as a menu of individually meritorious strategies and testing the notion that a well thought out urban and landscape whole is greater than the sum of the parts; the project is clear in intention but realistic in its outcome.

Conclusion:
This project makes no claim that it’s execution will increase the tax base, create new jobs, or increase business traffic. All that this work can do is clarify and enhance the experience and image of Curtis. There are relationships that were part of the original town plan that have been forgotten. Possible plans have been found in the pattern of everyday usage of the town. A menu or smorgasbord has been laid out for the town to select from as the years pass, elements of the project are carried out, and the requirements on the community from Center Avenue evolve. Execution of any of these means will enhance the horizontal surface of the town. Denver has grown to three times its 1950 size. Curtis has one third of its 1950 population. Curtis is contracting in the same relative scales that Denver is growing. This project proposes that the contractions of the rural town can be designed with methods and theories analogous to those employed in metropolitan architecture.

This is the second digital model I produced and the practice here is an investigation of whether one could work out of photoshop and into a solid modeler.

The project is a response to an ideas competition for an abandoned military prison island in Long Island Sound just off New Rochelle, NY. The UNHQ is under pressure to leave its site on the East side of Manhattan. Town and gown gets intense. We propose to move the UNHQ to this island, just a short ferry ride from Laguadia or the MTA New Haven line. Harnessing a tide that cycles across 13 vertical feet, the proposal turns the island into a tidal garden that puts the diplomats with one of the naturally occurring events shared by all nations and peoples, the tides.

Honorable Mention, “Davids Island” Ideas Competition

My first digital urban model produced in practice for a design competition. East Asian cultures have traditionally differentiated between “town” and “city” based on whether then settlement has walls. Kyoto was a great walled city in its glory. Its population and growth has far outstripped the old bounds. For this competition we came to the conclusion that the way to save Kyoto was to redefine what makes a wall in an urban fabric.

The longest standing paradigm for stadia, the Coliseum in Rome, is touted for its changeability of program. It's been a facility for naval battles, Christian martyrdom, gladiator clashes, a feline incubator, historical re-enactments, traffic circle, equestrian events, and tourist icon.

premises
What the stadium "is" is less important than how it can change to meet programatic varieties and magnitudes.
The stadium will facilitate a broad range of uses. Not just football.
In addition to its changeability, the stadium should be able to exchange sites as easily as the teams that play there do.
The maximum mutability will insure it's success.

tactics
Float the stadium
Make the stadium a set of highly changeable components

action
Set the stadium on the water to induce a fluid condition of siting.
Consider the stadium as a set of components rather than as a fixed object in a landscape.

components
A : Field Barges
Large and Large Combinations
Soccer
Track & Field
Landing Strips
Other Open Public Surface

Standard and Standard Combinations
Football
Concerts
Barge Surfaces
Turf
Grass
Asphalt
Earth

B : Seating Components
Bleachers
Upper deck only
Double deck
Bowl
Bowl (steep)
Triple deck

C : Display Components
Scoreboard

D : Connector Components
Ramps
Tubes

means & methods
The stadium structure itself will employ concrete shipbuilding technologies to create fields, surfaces, grandstands, boxes, compounds, light standards, sound standards, & headquarters.
Access to the stadium is divided into two types: free admissions & controlled entries. Free admissions are accomplished via a series of pontooned ramps & beached minimum draft barges. Controlled entry is accomplished through "jetway" type moveable gangways that begin at the Santa Monica Pier. Other controlled access is made by facilitating ferry docks within the project.
Although the individual concrete components of the project are fully seaworthy, the project takes advantage of the existing breakwater that serves the pier & the natural calm qualities of Santa Monica Harbor for stability.
A new field of underwater moorings set at 50' intervals facilitate the logistics of ordering the components between each other.
A team of 9 frogmen & 3 tugboat crews service the floating structure on 8 hour shifts.

Second Place, “BIGFOOT”, a 1998 international competition for a new stadium in Santa Monica, CA.

This is the third digital model I produced. It is aprés-BIM. I was convinced that one should slavishly build the model the way the building was built—a literal simulation rather than a modeled one. There is nothing parametric about this model. It is pure geometry. The model was built almost in real time. Painstakingly, I sequenced construction so that the specifics of each trade’s work became the site for the next and so on. It is my first simulation model.

The residence design is part of a series of home designs I produced in the mid and late 1990s. They were projections of my past and imagined futures. The sense was that the valuable components of the home would travel with the resident as they went from house to house—bath, kitchen, inglenook, nursery.

Limomachia wasn’t about much. Architecture here is reduced to its profile, nothing much. It was the first time my practice engaged digital modeling. The birth of art was in the profile, a most minimal and direct way to capture resemblance. The forms of the Met were produced as profile sweeps in classical convention. This reduction to nothing more than profile, just a knife of space, worked well for an era of 4mb of RAM. The place is a Silhouette Gallery at the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The gallery contains space where an artist captures silhouettes of passersby, space to display silhouettes, and space to store the silhouettes of the Met visitors.

Using 96 cast off two bulb fluorescent task lighting fixtures; for about two hours one Fall evening, Chuck MacBride and I created an accidental spectacle while meaning to protest. Our initial plan was to stack the lighting in the windows of the architecture building to demonstrate to the campus community the absurdity of replacing these still functional fixtures. As we went out into the landscape to view our creation we discovered that what we had made was bright enough to project scale across distance. We ended up on Flagstaff Mountain looking down into the campus and admiring the thing. Residents in the foothills overlooking Boulder, some a few miles away, reported a large scale anomaly in the lights of the town.