Organization & Ruin

An approach to design

Twenty-four crystal lattice structures along with their reciprocal Wigner-Seitz cell types. The variations result from different ratios of governing lattice axes — cubic, rhombic, trigonal, so on — which thereby defines a distinct cell. Metals, snowflakes, diamonds, and salts. Crystals, like this, have highly ordered, periodic structures that repeat in all directions. This table reveals how few spatial models are actually needed to describe every known solid-state material in the universe.

Humankind has defined itself by the way it builds civilizations: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Industrial Age, and the Silicon Age. By all accounts, the Silicon Age is ending and we are now entering the Nano Age. History is marked by the quest to exert control over our world, today, extending down to the molecular level.

But if we’ve learned anything along the way it’s that increased order and control is met with, in equal measure, an escalated potential for uncertainty and destruction. Control is a double-edged sword.

Bali House, Bali, Indonesia, Aranda\Lasch, 2015

The most transformative cultural acts waver on the knife’s edge between coming together and falling apart.

Transmission electron microscope (TEM) image of GeTe crystals. Image by the Agarwal Group at the University of
Pennsylvania.

In the realm of materials, this new alchemy is referred to as self-assembly, a phenomenon that describes how, given the right conditions, molecules reorganize into new structures all by themselves.

Primitive Series, Aranda\Lasch, 2010

Creative control is handed over to matter itself in exchange for the possibility of altering the nature of the material world.

This wager radically transforms our life at the very source: the battery in your phone, the chip in your computer, the monitor you look at. These are all possible because of the reinvention of materials and the ways these materials guide energy.

Treasure Chest, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Aranda\Lasch, 2014

“We are moving out of the world of data classification and into the world of pattern recognition.” — Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Covered Walkway, Libreville, Gabon, Aranda\Lasch, 2013

New material potentials atomize the domain of design. Everything is designable, even at the smallest scale. This motto is the basis from which our culture is transforming; it has blurred the already fuzzy edges of the discipline of architecture with daunting possibility.

Another Circle, Columbus, IN, Aranda\Lasch, 2017

Another Circle, Columbus, IN, Aranda\Lasch, 2017

Henri Labrouste, Imaginary Reconstitution of an Ancient City, undated. Copyright Académie d’architecture, Paris, 255.1.

Architecture, too, is an inherently destructive act. It is the physical breakdown of materials into their constituent parts, like a brick for a house or a pipe for a bathroom, standardized and recomposed into new stable structures. Architecture is a codified material system of bits and pieces intended to build and rebuild.

Another Circle, Columbus, IN, Aranda\Lasch, 2017

Joseph Michael Gandy, Aerial cutaway view of the Bank of England from the south-east, 1830. Copyright Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.

Destruction with the promise of renewal. Architecture has been here before.

Primitive Series, Miami, FL, Aranda\Lasch, 2010

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Remains of the Temple of the God Canopus at Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, 1748; from Vedute di Roma (Rome: Bouchards and Gravier, 1750).

The greatest upheavals in industry occurred at a moment exhausted by orthodoxy and technology. This moment defined architectural culture at the end of the eighteenth century. In the midst of movement forward, many voices questioned tradition.

Grotto, New York, NY, Aranda\Lasch, 2005

But certain figures also remained fascinated by ruin, the soft foundation upon which to build the future.

nni Battista Piranesi, Via Appia and Via Ardeatina; from Le Antichita Romane (Rome: Stamperia Salomoni, 1756).

Giovanni Battista Piranesi formed vital new structures from the fragments of previous civilizations. Assembled from fragmented sources, he conjured wild new possibilities from the rocks found in the detritus of Rome and Pompeii. These whimsical and haunting drawings of ruins reproduced and imagined new possibilities for buildings that never existed.

Art Deco Project, Miami, FL, Aranda\Lasch, 2015

“Fax machines have provided architects with that final breakthrough for what they consider to be the ideal situation and that is if they’re known to be drawing they need never make their minds up.” — Cedric Price

Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1872; from William Blanchard Jerrold, London: a Pilgrimage (London: Grant and Co, 1872).

In Gustave Doré’s painting The New Zealander, the future is a ruin to learn from. An architect from the new world sits in the foreground, sketching the old world of London in ruin. Just as Britain was once a Roman territory and British architects drew from the ruins of Rome, now noblemen from new territories may learn from the glorious remains of London.

20 Bridges for Central Park, New York, NY, 2011

The sarcophagus of Seti I in the dome of Sir John Soane’s house; from
Illustrated London News, 1864.

How these early studies of ruination became a system of formation, and how they helped architects, like Sir John Soane, rescue the discipline from an overbearing classicism, is a lesson that architects today can carry into
the future.

Rules of Six, MoMA, Aranda\Lasch, 2008

Henri Labrouste, Gate and Walls of the Alatri Citadel, 1829; from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Prints, VZ-1030 (8) FOL.

Both the ruin and the nanostructure share a ragged edge of possibility. The most dynamic work lies at the fringe of order and disequilibria. The place where matter unfolds unpredictably, caught between its own internal rules and the new ones it’s introduced to.

Grotto, New York, NY, Aranda\Lasch, 2005

Perceiving ordered pattern is an evolutionary habit. But to push order just beyond the faculty of recognition, to introduce ruin, is a vital exercise. It is only on this ragged edge that, if you look in the right way, you may recognize the seemingly disordered structures for new formulations
of order.

Budidesa, Bali, Indonesia, Aranda\Lasch, 2015

“Trace elements” are minerals that exist in minute quantities necessary for the growth and development of cells. Exposure to excessive quantities is toxic, but without them our bodies would atrophy. They are the crystalline structures that support life. Over the past decade, Aranda\Lasch has focused obsessively on these structures as a form of both organization and expression for architecture. Their projects explore the interplay between rule-based systems and human ritual. In scale, this work lies somewhere between furniture and building, so that what is built, drawn, and projected gives human measure to procedural thinking.

Note:
This article is an excerpt from our book Trace Elements by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.