Peter Waldman, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture
Julie Bargmann, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture
Mario Schjetnan, Frank Talbot, Jr. Visiting Professor

Discussion on the north terrace, March 26th 6 pm, Mexico City/Venice Studios

Julie Bargmann (JB): We are confronted with a related thing, which is the use of water, which is radical.

Peter Waldman (PW): What happens when you gather it? How do you use and re-use it in the daily processes of everyday life? A Culinary Institute: cleaning food, growing food, and washing the threshold down at night.

J. Harding Dowell: All of this water used is piped in -- Not the water Venice is built on and in. It’s an interesting issue, the city intrinsically connected to water they can’t use.

PW: They use it, but as a spatial condition, and as a medium of circulation.

JB: When did the designer’s concern for water emerge?

PW: Water is a magical poetic and pragmatic concern we can use. When I mention light and water -- you can make all your projects out of it, building materials -- sand, stone and water become precious glass.

JB: I would agree that there is a resurgent interest in how things are made.

Mark Phemister: I see this as connected to a growth in interest in infrastructure as a landscape issue. Water is the most pure element of infrastructure, the most poetic.

Mario Schjetnan G.: The Basin of Mexico is volcanic. It developed for 20 million years, and started to be populated by 8000. When the Aztecs got there, it was already populated. The only place they could inhabit was an island in the center. So they developed a way of dwelling within the lake.

PW: Mario di Valmarana used to explain that there is no such thing as a Venetian. Venice began with a condition of many groups of people being displaced. It was a place of multiple, small centers. Incredible parallels of people dealing with frictional relationships with water.
JB: I can’t help but think that this obsession with water is linked to the need to renegotiate these relationships with water.

PW: At what scales do you do this? At the neighborhood? The desalinization of the East Coast? The reforestation of Mexico?

JB: Students are investigating which scales make sense in terms of the economy of means. They’re discovering that there are “water machines” that deal with water at different scales, and can be pragmatically and poetically employed.

PW: And then we have the machine in the garden, as waterworks in the contemporary projects of Barragan and Scarpa. Ambasz recounts in the MOMA Barragan exhibit of 1968 the architect’s effort to design a house to dwell in celebration of the routines of everyday life as well a garden to resist the finality of death. In the Brion Cemetery between Tomb and Chapel there are thresholds of still and active waters. Can there be strategies at the scale of the house and garden, which point to a larger strategy? We encountered a number of Scarpa works that do both water as genesis of the world while simultaneously providing us with a baptismal font in easy reach. Water is tangible and has to do with use if given a container. If you use a basin to wash vegetables and then use the same water to wash the dishes, and perhaps to water sparingly the rosemary bush, there is cycle with enduring life here and now. That’s why I like to imagine working in a culinary institute. These projects provoke the ramifications of using water.

JB: I like to think that’s where we’re getting at this school -- getting past the general idea -- we have to stay at the table with the engineers -- understand the size, volume. That has spatial ramifications. I think that’s where we have to advance this exploration.

PW: I think there is a very visceral dimension of architecture that engages biological processes.

JB: It is about introducing the everyday back into a city that’s losing its everyday.

PW: I use a phrase -- citizens and strangers simultaneously . . . we travel and learn from a different condition. It is the strange that is very valuable as well as looking at the familiar. The precondition of Mexico is the large lake and you are trying to build a city with an identity, a community. Venice is within the lagoon and I am cooking pasta in a pot of boiling water. I see, smell and consume one in the other. Where do you begin in the making of that identity? A unit, a surface, a sound? I am interested in where we begin at a certain essence. And I wonder if you are saying that is water: an oasis we all can share. Eden came before Jerusalem. Eden began only after the third day, when the earth was filled with water. There is a spatial condition of water. Maybe that’s why baptism is important in so many cultures, and birth, obviously.

JB: It’s the return to the Aztecs; the way you build a city is through water, not opposing it.

PW: Remembering when I was in Peru, Arequipa in 1967. I rented a house for $7.50 a month, no water facilities included. The first day I spent $10 to set up an outdoor basin. This one basin of water would be filled on Sunday morning, warmed by the sun. I would make my oatmeal, wash my dishes, and then my clothes. I used small drops of water to sprinkle my tiled floors before sweeping to keep the dust down. I would hang the wet clothes over my herbs and vegetables. There is an economy to this. The basin served as a beginning, the first day and every Sunday thereafter. Forty years later I make sure my hands get wet routinely in North Garden.

JB: There is relevance from the basin to the Basin.

 

 

me-andering footnotes and my-opic afterthoughts
by Peter Waldman

A Full Moon has come and gone since these preliminary musings on water as the genesis perhaps of our parallel projects. Perhaps afterthoughts should raise the ante now in the name of the frictions and fires possibly smoldering in these two adjacent studios ALAR 702 situated on the southeast corner of Campbell Hall. Immediately outside our uphill walls two distinct construction projects emerge from the same ground. One to the East is a singular monument, the other to the South is the cellular fabric of the surrogate city. Some in our corner of this world claim they are not new constructions at all, but the haunted houses of Venice and Mexico. Here and now, then and there, two studios side by side find themselves all wet and on fire. Like Water for Chocolate.

The Studio of the South Wall traveled South to Mexico, while those bound by the East Wall set our coordinates directly East to Venice. We arrived on a telltale Sunday morning in dense fog and then set up our routines in palatial quarters on opposing sides of the Grand Canal. It rained heavily that dark Sunday afternoon as we marched from the Academmia Bridge to Peggy Guggenheim’s place, onto San Marco soaked to the bone, and then disbanded. Some lingered for a Byzantine mass of incense, and golden robes, candles and golden mosaics, reverberating choirs and shivering cold wet feet.

The next day and for ten days thereafter the skies above Venice were crystal clear by day and full of the stars and the moon by night. We learned that traveling is different than visiting or touring. Traveling, we learned, comes from the French verb travail; that is, to work hard in a non-familiar place. It seems an essential requirement for citizens of this venerable North American cultural institution to get out of the familiar and to see the world as strangers. We were conscious indeed that our colleagues and compatriots from Campbell Hall were simultaneously on journeys to Barcelona as well as to Mexico. We intended to swap musings of the exotic, of far, far away and long, long ago as Homer inspired Marco Polo onto James Joyce and currently Thomas Pynchon in Mason Dixon, all who amuse us today.

It is rumored that The Mexicans climbed Temples to the Sun and the Moon and revisited these same benchmarks in the contemporary precincts of Barragan. The Venetians breathlessly compressed the space between sky and sea, surging routinely over the 256 bridges weaving through the labyrinths and campi of our Lagoon. We learned not only how to get lost, but finding our way out of the meander by turning the map upside down and inside out as we retraced our steps to find our way to Scarpa’s gate posts. Both warm hued pietra veronese accommodated step by step the shoe leather of our Venetian passage; and the ignition of candles every other day celebrated birthdays, all came to a pause in a lush palazzo garden on the other side of Canal with manteca di baccala, salame di cavallo, and the luminous bubbles of prosecco. Since then both the studios of the East and the South have found time to share mole and risotto for a late lunch in distinct yet sabrosa dialects. While it is good to be home, it is terrific to travel.