The Problem with the Corner Problem

Besler & Students

This project, Room 001 followed a specific and somewhat esoteric procedure to arrive at a plan. The conceptual development of Room 001 worked through the problem by considering the space to be defined by a singular and continuous folded surface - which when taken to its most reduced form could be described as a developed line.

(PAUSE)

So…The conceptual drawings detail the procedure of unrolling and refolding with the line as an analogy to the gypsum board and the thickened mark as an analogy to steel studs.

(SHOW ON THE DRAWINGS EITHER POINT TO THE WALL OR TELL THEM TO TURN TO A SHEET IN THEIR PACKETS)

So…Two marks on the paper that once shared the same location at the corner of a rectangle could be said to move away from each other in order to create a distance between things.

(SHOW ON THE DRAWINGS EITHER POINT TO THE WALL OR TELL THEM TO TURN TO A SHEET IN THEIR PACKETS)

As a focus, the project takes up a critical consideration of the terms interior and exterior. Room 001 hesitates as it moves between interior and exterior, complicating, confusing, and resisting the dichotomy.

(PAUSE)

Conventionally, interior is that space which is fully enclosed. Given this association could it be said then that this project is fully exterior?

(PAUSE)

It could ALSO be said that interiority is something that doesn’t require enclosure, but is rather signified by some specific corner situations… If enclosure is not considered to be the limiting factor, then we might look to situations of concavity and convexity generated by the folding of the surface plane.

(SHOW ON THE DRAWINGS EITHER POINT TO THE WALL OR TELL THEM TO TURN TO A SHEET IN THEIR PACKETS)

In this sense, interior can be defined by conceptual enclosure, meaning that concave corner situations produce the perception of enclosure and interior.

WALK AND POINT TO (DON’T GO IN THE MOCKUP, POINT TO IT, AND ALSO USE DRAWINGS)

…Southwest corner of the project, then, could be said to flip interior and exterior…

(THE NEXT FEW THINGS SHOULD BE READ AS A LIST)

…just as the studs flip, the ceiling turns out, and the marks on the page are drawn on the inverted side of the developed line…

(LOOK UP)

…the folds, in this corner, are such that the convex condition is bent and inverted into the concave space, introducing a situation of exteriority into the interior. I should say that there is a distinction between what we might call the exterior object and the situation of exteriority.

This distinction returns to the proposition:

Exteriority may be a situation of an interior space and interiority may be a situation of an exterior space, but something more-or-less arises in the space between the two.

(PAUSE)

This project addresses the way in which the concepts interior and exterior might be implied. In his 1999 publication Diagram Diaries, Peter Eisenman wrote in a chapter called “Diagrams of Interiority” that a doubling of the structural system - for example, columns and shear walls - creates an architectural excess which allows one system to function as an index and not refer to its structural value. Room 001 uses studs as markers of exterior.

(PAUSE)

According to an understanding of the interior of architecture offered up by Preston Scott Cohen in dialogue with Eisenman, in a recent issue of Log… the interior as that which is completely inside and is not necessarily meant to be seen (steel stud systems, for example), the studs, because they have lost their second surface, reinforce Room 001’s situation as an exterior. On the other hand, this might also suggest that Room 001 has objects of the interior which encroach on the exterior.

(PAUSE)

The category of space might be more clearly defined by…

(THE NEXT FEW THINGS SHOULD BE READ AS A LIST)

…completely enclosing it, shutting it off from the room it sits inside of, creating a hermetic box, and rendering the project only accessible through its associated project documentation, text, and conversation…

…Following from the situation of  interior as enclosed space - this would render Room 001 completely interior. However, following from the second situation - which is based on the legibility of inflection or inversion in the corners, Room 001 could be understood as totally exterior…

…except for the concave space produced by the outer side of the Southwest corner. It could be said then that within the space between these two terms is a discussion surrounding questions of access and legibility.

(PAUSE)

Overall, considering the distinction between interior and interiority - one a physical thing, the other a situation based on concepts - Room 001 seems to be wholly exterior with conditions of interiority. Even though that the term ROOM has its origins in something refers to “open space”, it has been habituated to imply a space inside…

(PAUSE)

Despite this, and despite the fact that this project is inside Room 1209B inside Perloff Hall…

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…Room 001 can be thought of as exterior…

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…which presents an estrangement of this project from any naturalized understanding of a room.

What follows is a description of Room 002

(POINT TO ROOM 002)

…as it currently sits between Room 001

(POINT TO ROOM 001)

…and Room 003

(POINT TO ROOM 003)

…inside Room 1209B. Throughout, the project uses the specificities of some fairly mundane materials to destabilize the work from within - the thickness of a sheet of ultralight gypsum, the length of a 25 gauge steel stud, the tone of ultraspec white paint.   

To begin we should say that Room 002 mobilizes the corner problem to set up a discussion about the specificity of architectural surfaces in a form that depends on the confusion and blurring of their boundaries, both literally and conceptually. Where the corner could be said to mark the intersection of surfaces (floor and wall for example) implying a distinction between them, this project cuts corners, so to speak, and in doing so denies walls, floors, and ceilings the autonomy and distinction the discipline normally affords to them.   

An architectural Mock-up of an interior would seem to necessitate the distinction between Floor, Wall and Ceiling (the intersections of which have been the points of departure) at least for clarification within the associated construction set, as needed to standardize language, be it a floor plan, a wall section, or a reflected ceiling plan.

(REFER TO DRAWING SET)

Sheets A10.1 and 10.2 illustrate this traditional representation of non-traditional surfaces. In Room 002 there is confusion over what terms we might associate with these particular planar surfaces - Walls contain semi-Ceiling Components and Ceilings and Floors contain Semi-Wall Components.  In cutting corners the single becomes the multiple– for every one there are now three; the triangular shaped piece the by-product of a process of cutting.  

(CORI PASSES OUT FLIPBOOK)

At the origins of the terms cornice and skirting, as categories of moulding, we find the connections between wall and ceiling, and wall and floor – no less particular in their specificity than the surfaces upon which they are situated. The mouldings actually come from another set of surfaces, they have been projected onto the developed surface drawing of our splayed project, from the drawing of an unfolded box, as a way to orient the form.  Yet the mouldings are barely legible as such, and whatever familiarity or comfort that they offered has been taken away.  Mouldings slip into wall as quickly as wall slips into floor.  

In her 1968 essay “On Frontality” published in Art Forum, Rosalind Krauss– when speaking about Kenneth Noland’s painting “Bridge”– describes the production of the painting unfolding right alongside the viewing of it. It is made as it is perceived - and I quote - “elusive, illusory, oblique; a surface whose flatness was forever unattainable because forever splayed.”  

(PAUSE)

This project undercuts experience and occupancy of the corner. In a sense it is unattainable through any means other than perception, which puts it in conflict with the distinction of the Mock-up, whose otherness as a category of physical model relies on the fact that you can do more than just project yourself into it.   

If the origins of this project can be said to be located somewhere in the corner, the Corner (as it turns out) is the one thing you can’t ever really get to. Surfaces are missing, the triangular shaped things remain confused in their terminology and here the corner, which we might find comfort in as the marker separating this side from the other, even doubles as an opening, different from the De Stijl but similar still, as an uncertain threshold between spaces.

(PAUSE)

And so, the project consistently defeats itself long enough to destabilize and challenge preconceptions about architectural surface categories, the depth of flat materials, the physical occupancy of a conceptual marker, and also by negating any singular orientation, of either frontality or obliqueness. Perception is tangled up in conception. If this (air quotes) sense of obliqueness can do any more work, it is that it creates another point from which to view things, one through which these architectural surfaces reveal their depth and dissociate from the stud system that backs it. ///

Could we go so far as to say that it doesn’t necessarily make much sense to associate the term “frontal” with an interior wall? In order to understand it as an object you have to move around it, to the oblique. From within, the surfaces of the interior present themselves as two-dimensional, and at the same time whatever qualities we might now project onto them - depth, tone, and thickness - are still attached to them as free-standing architectural objects. Though still, whatever they grant us as concepts, and however much we might understand them as free standing objects, the surfaces of the interior and their associated intersections still present an essential problem: neither view can stand uniformly with material thickness, tolerances and accuracies, nor can either stand alone.

(START IN MOCK UP – WALK OUT AND BEGIN)

Underlying all of this work is a conceptual confrontation with material thickness.

While it might seem sensible in drawing, a line segment cannot bend without some consideration regarding the thickness of that line – where does the bending occur within that thickness? And is it aligned to the front side of the line, the backside of the line, or somewhere in between?

And whether or not the specific locations of the bending, let’s call them endpoints  – if you could please turn to Page 2 of the drawing packet - are represented with either a projecting cap, butt cap, miter joint, round joint, or a bevel joint. In our vector based software program these are known as “stroke settings,” and they deal with the way that lines are aligned…meaning to which side their thickness falls. . . and their miter limit--meaning the length or excess beyond which a miter joint would become a beveled square joint. . . and also the start and end shapes of each line segment.

So, it could be said that the primary focus of this project is on the specificities of endpoints and the joining of things, and that the articulation of the profiles are for all intents and purposes. . . merely copies with another character.  

(PASS OUT MOULDING BOOK)

This project immediately undercuts any habit or default concerning the way that we might draw a line. . . A bent and broken line for that matter, and how that line and its offsets might be constructed out of a system of 1/2” thick gypsum board, 3-5/8” steel studs, and chunks of foam. So this project works through layers of line segments and endpoint conditions at the mouldings and also around the frame of the surfaces that they outline.

The miter is quite simple but is generally thought to be quite weak. It could be strengthened with a spine, essentially an insertion made somewhere within the thickness of the line that describes the joint. If you turn to sheet A10 and A11, you can see the pieces that appear to be mitered can be found at the tops and bottoms of the vertical surfaces, and when seen together can be read as more of a chamfer with the material missing from the backside as you can see right here as well.

(POINT TO MITER ON WALL)

But instead, the actual miter joint where the two parts would come together is missing. They only touch at a point . . .and what we have left is a cut that outlines another space within the space towards some kind of gestalt. It should be noted that the front and back sides of these things are quantifiably different lengths, which is obvious, but more than that, the representation of an elevation of a mitered piece of moulding –  say on Page A24 –  is inconsistent with the amount of material necessary to achieve it, there is extra. . . it’s in excess.

(WALK OVER TO CHAIR IN CORNER)

The inside corners present another problem of interest and their result can be understood as an intersection produced by the inverted or negative profile, also seen in the profile projected through itself through the chair here—where the negative space becomes a sort of ottoman. Essentially in the process of its own fabrication, the unnecessary material of those pieces adjacent is cut away.

This project can be read through the treatment of its parts, though as a whole could be understood as a series of unfolded pilasters, with paneling pulled back into pilastric corner pieces exposing the conceptual surface underneath. Governed by the procedural system toward regular spacing, the pilasters become the surfacing theme of a structure through its interior configuration. Nonetheless, the meticulous system collapses at…

(POINT TO MOCK-UP)

…the endpoints!

In shoving the surface profiles into the corner, two adjacent flutings that would have never been in conflict are pushed through each other.  On Page 7 of the drawing packet in the tool-path drawing…this appears as a line passing across another line…

(MOVE TO PILASTER)

…but when projected through the material, that continuous and closed line cuts off the space between two flutes to create one large flute at the facing corner.

This project essentially consists of a series of pilastric walls. There is no ceiling, they hold nothing up, they are simply an application, a surface treatment made of surfaces, and in fact, require the help of the surrounding situation in order to simply stand up.

erinbesler.com