Endemic Structure reimagines the Victorian turret
Explore Endemic Architecture’s recent Oakland, California exhibition, Mind Your Mannerisms, at the Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles the existential importance behind San Francisco’s variant the Victorian Tower, which the company calls one of the many “architectural favorites” that populate our world.
For the company, “favorites” consist of fundamentally architectural symbols that convey universal meaning in their built form, such as the Pillar, gable or chimney. These “favorites” are the elements that are widely understood as words by laypeople used in the formal language of architecture and at the same time employed (or subverted) by Architects themselves say: “That is (still) architecture”.
In Mind Your Mannerisms the selected “darling” – turret – is pricked, pinched and warped in order not only to give its bizarre forms a sense of intellectual severity, but also to generate a new level of new meaning and understanding that results from the manipulation of its symbolic, anachronistic geometries.
(Courtesy Endemic Architecture)
The company uses collections contextual photography show the diverse manifestations the tower typology in San Francisco’s built environment as a starting point to generate generalized drawings of certain observed tendencies. The favorite is redefined from a custom-made object of discreet architecture Components of a collection of quasi-digital surfaces in which a series of formal maneuvers were applied to two different objects: the tower itself and the so-called “Victorian” building to which it is attached.
The company uses these guiding considerations to generate interventions that are conducted on a handful of existing and observed tower types, with an emphasis on these aspects of each individual type and the conditions that are found to be reinforced or deformed. These interventions are first through a series of beguiling, shaded line drawings, side by side comparisons of found and manipulated views in gold-colored frames. The turrets take on the formal ambiguities of MC Escher drawings, since cornices touch and sweep around rounded corners, conical roof forms loft to meet simply sloping and wall sections are deleted or extruded up and down in the shape. Shingles and siding are also included; they are scaled, alternated and shifted accordingly.
(Courtesy Endemic Architecture)
The drawings are then brought into three dimensions via three large, ambiguously scaled maquettes. Two of these objects are installed directly on the gallery walls, painted with the black silhouettes of generic Victorian designs. A third form is free-standing, its bulbous and crumpled masses hang together in an exaggerated belly in the style of Pablo Escobar. The towers are given scale-less distortion through the use of repurposed, true-to-scale tower windows salvaged from recently demolished structures in the models. The relic windows, one with punched panes, the other with a series of secondary, beveled interior surfaces located just inside the window frame, again obscure the true nature of these sculptural ones Objects. Is everyone really a turret-shaped building? Are they One-to-one models of diminutive Towers? It’s hard to say, but that’s partly the point. this Transformation of orthography Drawing on objects-in-the-round gives every tower contradicting, multiple meanings since the physical Properties of their material Components collide with each other. A wall-mounted tower is clad in wood veneer panels that are cut out and designed so that their ends roll up. The free-standing tower is topped with a faux fur tiara.
And if we can stop by the Seuss-ian Take shapes and look at the towers for what they are – geometric abstractions – something locks into place: Thenhaus and his team use the Tower of San Francisco as a learning tool. By imposing an order and then manipulating it and working on generating new shapes that still fit the agreed definition of a tower, the designers add some clarity that is otherwise shrouded in mystery. The question is: are the new creations still Victorian turrets?
(Courtesy Endemic Architecture)
It’s hard to tell because Victorian architectural forms juggle many Considerations at the same time: They are typically proportioned for light and air, are aggressively decorated, and excellently break down massive buildings into pleasant collections of cute things like cornicesWindows, porches and yes, turrets. Victorian architecture makes from the perspective of the rationalist, diagram-driven methodology of the contemporary Practice applied here to their formal existence.
By subsuming the The researchers show the peculiarities of the Victorian style ecosystem on the sparse lexical memory of their profession and the way in which building components, formerly discrete, measurable and observable objects, have been replaced by digital modeling processes in contemporary discourse and “if, then” reactions where collections of points, lines, and planes are swept, lofted, tweened, and booleanized to create a shape. In both cases, meaning arises from the processes of form formation and not, as in Victorian architecture, from the symbolic and physical properties of the forms themselves.
Viewed through this lens, the works presented in the exhibition can not only be seen as generative, architectural by-products that have arisen from an architecture-focused observation, but as an independent part of this conversation. That means, Endemics turrets with their enigmatic proportions, the gimmicky of the material and the lateral view of the playful formalism are at Endemics attempt
define the tower typology as the observed towers themselves.
