About

Incomplete Taxonomies is a 1st year design studio in the Master of Architecture program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.   Students in this studio are designing the Museum of the Arts of the Diaspora at 99 Bowery Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Janette Kim, studio critic. Spring 2010 Core 2 Studio.

One thing shared by many of the latest generation of African artists in the diaspora—those who have been successful on the art circuit—is that their work critiques the very burden of representation that is also the condition of their visibility.  Diaspora is the object of these artists’ art, the thing in question and the construction material, more than it is a stable subject position from which to speak about their perspective.  The space cleared through this new diasporan art is a questioning of space, a space where one may object to reductive concepts of identity.

- John Peffer, The Diaspora as Object

Contemporary art practices, released from the burden of representing any one ethnic identity, use the museum as a very active site to play out questions of migration, transnationalism, and art reception.  As John Peffer describes, these projects use the museum not just as a target of institutional critique, but as a site that is redefined through the work itself.  Familiar portraits of the museum describe a white box that gives value to art objects by displacing them from some context into the world of the fine arts.  But the museum is also many other things:  a studio, a school, a tourist trap, a glorified bookstore, a real estate venture, an archive, a symposium, a neighborhood magnet, and a publishing house.

This studio interrogates the museum as the very medium through which the notion of “arts of the diaspora” continuously takes shape.

We will frame our approach by focusing on a curatorial device embedded in art historical narratives, museum display techniques and designs of museum spaces: Taxonomy, or systems of classification.  Art historical taxonomies have famously attempted to project an overarching system of categorization onto the world from a single vantage point, labeling arts of the diaspora as non-western, primitive or ethnographic.  As problematic as they may be, taxonomies persist, releasing updated and provisional categories such as hybrid, transnational, and diasporan, and supporting the construction of museums dedicated to a single ethnic group.  Within the museum, these logics determine the installation and experience of exhibitions, through classification systems including geography, chronology, media, temperature and security requirements.  They become the very vehicle through which content is conveyed.  But where taxonomies often serve to over-determine meanings, the very boldness of these readings also brings about opportunities for misreadings, reclassification, new rationalist systems, or even absurdist logics.  These same systems of classification can tease out ambitious and adventurous definitions of museums and art practices alike.

At an architectural scale, these taxonomies are themselves embedded within a building’s programming, structure, events, sequences, and spatial arrangements.   By studying and inventing taxonomic systems in the museum, we gain the opportunity to simultaneously address issues and spaces of the museum.  We will work through a design process this semester that uses analytic drawing to explore the inventive potential of taxonomic logics.  We will then develop these ideas through a sequence of model tests with ever-increasing specificity, starting from abstract spatial models to large scale structural tests.  We will test the relationships between taxonomies, program diagrams and structural strategies including the large span structure, the waffle slab, and distributed point loads.  This studio calls for rigorous and inventive thinking, and is dedicated to the simultaneous cross-pollination of organizational strategies, critiques of the museum, and material exploration.

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OBJECTIVES AND CRITERIA

Process

You are asked to address the broader scope and challenges presented by the studio by following a rigorous, open-ended working process.  We will follow an iterative working process in which multiple possibilities are explored, executed, and then evaluated once they have been tested.  Design ideas will be evaluated by their ability to produce desired effects according to the project’s larger conceptual framework.

You are expected to take a high level of initiative in your work, process, and development of techniques.  In addition to responding to challenges offered by your critic, you are expected to connect your work to research, writing, projects, and other influences beyond the studio environment by exploring materials recommended below and through independent exploration.

It is expected that you will work in studio, with the exception of Project One.  All students must be present during the entirety of all reviews and pin-ups.

Architectural Design Strategies

Through the course of the semester students will develop a number of architectural strategies which are to be used systematically to realize the project’s larger agenda.  These strategies will be referenced to the project’s overall desired effects and logics.

Material
Enclosure
Structure
Program
Organization
Circulation
Experience
Site

Architectural Design Techniques

Students will generate experimental techniques of research, visual communication, and design.  It is a goal of this studio that students gain fluency with conventions of architectural drawing and model-making while approaching these same conventions with a critical eye and eagerness to reinvent, in order to best explore the concepts and effects of each project.  Different media, drawing types, and scales will be cross-referenced, mixed, and used to produce another.

Diagrams – Researchers
Diagrams – Analytic
Drawing – Bitmap
Drawing – Orthographic
Drawing – 3D
Drawing – Layout
Model – Physical
Model – Digital
Writing

It is crucial that students learn to produce both Quick and Slow work.  Quick work can be done in multiples, with each iteration providing a clear but limited intention (technique, activity, effect, etc.) to sketch ideas still in formation.  Slow work requires a greater level of precision and complexity, often synthesizing the broader scope of the project’s many intentions.

Incomplete Taxonomies is a 1st year design studio in the Master of Architecture program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.   Students in this studio are designing the Museum of the Arts of the Diaspora at 99 Bowery Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown.