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Studio Works

Museum of Jurassic Technology Facade

Culver City

WRAPPER 40 possible city surfaces for the Museum of Jurassic Technology

Who needs architecture anyway?

The building is probably more intriguing than architecture; it is a building "built" more by the things it holds than by the walls that contain. At various times the building will contain a working motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch, a young woman's horn, a duck's breath cure, and the life and the work of the client/maker of the museum.

We were called in to remake the facade, one of the supporting surfaces, for this container building. It was suggested by the client that the work should lie somewhere between John Soane and Culver City.

On our first visit to the museum the sensation of the building as a container was overwhelming. If the "actual" architecture of the building feels like anything at all, it feels like a big wrapper for holding in the collection, and for making the collection separate from the Southern California sky. So while we could not be the architects called upon to make a little piece of this wrapper as a facade, we found ourselves moving back (or projecting ahead) towards versions of architecture born from the imitations of

containers-basketry, stone, ceramic, or hide pouches that held liquids, food, treasured and useful things, and us (clothing as an almost real architecture).

Back at the studio associations were made - Susan Stewart's On Longing (especially "The Miniature", "The Collection", and "The Gigantic"), Boulee, Ledoux, Piranesi, Durand (these along with Soane satiated the "real" architects in us), Hero of Alexandria's alchemical contraptions, etched in blueprints on the stone wall of the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, the temporal depth of surface in the facade of the Piazza of Santo Stefano in Bologna, the memory theater and other disconnected thoughts. We set to a task of "building" a reader to contain the associations and we wrote down many things.

We made a careful drawing of the facade from the seismic engineer's blueprints (the job came about in the first place because the front wall needed to be structured for earthquakes, not from any need for architecture) and some detail measurements were made. We scanned the drawings and printed a pile of blank slates. We trimmed these to a narrow proportion, and began to build drawn proposals. The drawings were produced from used and recycled samplings of things. This gave them a density above what we could give them on our own in a short time, and we wanted to work quickly to see what would come out of our (almost) first impressions (you have to catch them fast if you are going to catch them at all).

We numbered the drawings as we went along. As we turned the last drawing, we had hit number forty. We were pleased with the coincidence that returned us to number one, which was titled "Ark", and which was also the very first piece of the collection we had set eyes on in the first short visit. It was that piece of container architecture that was carrying all the remains of culture-animal and architecture-beyond the flood. The Ark left behind a grounded version of the container myth as a model for all future architecture. It was perhaps saying to us that if we stray too far again, the flood will come to clean the slate again, and cause another starting over. We were mostly pleased by the correlation between our forty pages and the period of days and nights that the Ark was afloat, moving between a past and a future.

The great difficulty of the architecture we were proposing lies in how we were enabling it to keep pace with the building. Somehow, in order to keep up, the new surface must be a new surface, an old surface, and a surface not yet made. As the surface is being constructed, we continue to work on this.