one page assignment

76 Penelope Dean

It does not matter if some oflhese coffee-pots look more like buildings than coffee-pots .. ALBERTO ALESSI (Tea & Coffee Piazza), 1983

This is a story of micro-architecture for the table, of micro-city-planning for apartments ..

ALESSANDRO MENDINI (Tea & Coffee Towers), 2:003

In 1980, the Italian manufacturing company Alessi launched an experimental

project that commissioned eleven international architects to design a Tea & Coffee Piazza. The timing of this commission coincided with the emergence of Postmodernism, the architectural style already anticipated in Italy by the

"Strada Novissima" of the 1980Venice Biennale. Exactly twenty years later,

Alessi repeated the project under the same terms, this time doublirig the number of invitees to 22, to design Tea and Coffee Towers. Alessi's experiment gave two generations of architects the opportunity to work at the scale of

product design under identical briefs, exposing emblematic episodes in the ·r mobile relationships between architecture and design, representation and

discipline.

While at first glance the deployment of scale as either "shrink~to-frt" or "blow-up" appears in both postmodernism-and the more recent moment, the two Alessi events are marked by a significant difference. In ihe Tea & Coffee

\ Piazzas, architectural techniques of disciplining appear across all scales via the ~ cultural order of postmodernism. In what might be understood as the "digital"

entries to the 2000 Tea & Coffee Towers, however, this ability to discipline through scale has apparently dissipated in a continuous milieu of design. This difference evinces the shift from the disciplinary aggrandizement of 1980's "architecture is everything," where the code of architecture authorizes other cultural and design forms, to the opportunistic abdication of 2000's "anything can become architecture," where the processes and forms of a more generalized design field begin to unde;He, condition, and redirect architecture.

Alberto Alessi and Alessandro Met1dini selected the Piazza architects under the unifying umbrella of historicist postmodernism. But the selection of their Tower architects was far more eclectic. Rather than first identifying an architectural movement (e.g., postmodernism) and then compiling a list of associated names, Alessi and Mendini performed the operation in reverse: first inviting signature names and later attempting to make sense of the ensemble

retroactively, a practice itself indicative of the larger shift from the possibilities \ of a movement (architecture's grand "isms") to signature (individual brand).

This shift in strategy points toward the role architecture was to play for the Alessi Company. In 1980, the power of architecture resided in its ability to bring "representation" to industrial products· through expression, style, and rhetoric. In 2000, the power of architecture was located, according to Mendini, in its ability to function as a disciplinary corrective for design.1 Rather than architects being invited by the company to upgrade product design's visibility

1 In his "design as architecture" text published in Alessi's rea & coffe~ rowers catalogue 12003), Mendini criticizes the panorama of design as having a "general refusal of depth. of a critical or soli-critical approach." He goes on to say "I feel that the twenty-one architects, theilllellectualswe selected and questioned, have expressed ideals, scenarios and suggestions, have emitted those critical signals [and] made those right moves.[ ... ] of are· acquired conscience .. Alessandro Mendini, "design as architecture" in Alessandro Mendini ed_, tea & coffee towers IMil~n· Mnnri•oinri Fleet•

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architects of the Tea & Coffee Towers were invited to bring discipline-through whatever representational means- back to a design situation that was now all- too-visible and pervasive.

The initial call for postmodern architects to bring "style" and "expression" to the tea and coffee pot- understood to be the architect's representational task- was linked to Alessi's image-building program. The company's agenda of limited edition {a deliberate move away from the constraints of mass production) and designer "signature" was a means to upgrade the products into luxury design items through architectural association. Alessi's ability to produce one-off "high" designs for museums, collectors, and clients, it appeared, required recognizable forms of representation, presumably understood as an architectural skill. The role of representation in 1980 thus served to elevate both the reputation of the Alessi Company and its products as design.

In contrast, the call for the architects of the Tea & Coffee Towers to return "discipline" to a generalized design practice saw several of the architects, paradoxically, bring logics external to architecture to product design. In general, the results of the 2000 experiment were quite diverse, making it nearly impossible to achieve any consensus on what was delivered, though

\ this diversity itself might already hint at architecture's absorption by a ~ new configuration of technology and market under the auspices of design.

Fig. l_Aido Rossi. San Carlone and other constructions, 1975.

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78 Penelope Dean

Nevertheless, perhaps the most paradoxical efforts came from those architects who filtered and re-introduced product design's own problematic of the

~ series-made design object- rather than imprinting the representational logic I of "architecture."This group of architects- including Massimiliano Fuksas,

Doriana 0. Mandrelli, Tom Kovac, Greg Lynn, and Unstudio -was explicitly concerned with explicating the design processes of material research, non-

standard production techniques, and mass-produced one-of-a-kinds. This orientation not only displaces the kind of logic brought to design, but also suspends the previous centrality or priority of architectural logic as a point of departure. The subsequent agenda of the digital architects marks a significant

l disciplinary revision: a shift away from architecture bestowing prestige on product design via representation, to architecture trying to learn from the design techniques of mass production.

This paradigmatic shift also points towards a revision in the disciplinary role of representation. While the outcomes of the Tea & Coffee Piazzas were varied, as a collection the sets were unified as architectural redux achieved through disciplinary history: form and typology. Architectural representation was formally applied to the tea and coffee pot elements (spouts, handles, bodies, lids) as a kit of parts. Accepting the product typology as a given, the architects simply applied an additive aesthetic where architectural "features" were superimposed onto functional parts: a product architecturalization achieved through quotation and motif. Through the logic of constituent parts, historical architectural elements were proportionally scaled down and grafted onto the product's parts, architecture,Qlaking its representational appearance as design through a shrink~to4it. The typological transplant resulted in the disciplinary \ cross-dressing of architecture as design, a Beaux Arts Ball for products. By 2000, however, several architects from the Towers' digital contingent, motivated by technological developments in fabrication techniques, installed a revised notion of representation, one reliant on the new possibilities from design's production processes: CNC (computer numerical control) tool path traces left on material surfaces, for example, at 1:1 scale. Rather than classically "adding" typological elements as the flostmodern architects had previously, several architects disposed of typology altogether- collapsing spouts, handles, and bodies into single "skinned" entities- as architectural representation becam~ ) identical to the marks of design fabrication. While in 1980 "architecture" was the measure for representation, by 2000 (particularly with the "digital" architects), it was the "micro-processes" of digital codes that began to deliver a new order, whether of representational production or productive representation.

With architecture as the preeminent cultural form under postmodernism, Alessi's Piazza architects proportionally reduced the discipline's scalar logic to enable transference from the scale of architecture to the scale of product design. Of the eleven invited architects, Aida Rossi's designs for the Tea & Coffee Piazza, along with his mass-produced coffee pots that followed- La Conica (1980-1983) and La Cupola (1984)- arguably constitute one of the clearest disciplinary reductions of architecture into product design through the scalar reduction of geometric primitives- cones, cylinders, pyramids. But by the time of Alessi's "digital" Towers, the postmodern hierarchy of architecture had been

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the centrality of architecture and oper·a1 proportion, formal outlia

abandoned by several participants and displaced by another set of rules: the digital g.ode. In 2000, rather than architecture acting as a datum from which to shrink (Oren large), the digital code came to act as the departure point from which an object now understood as a "genetic primitive" (indiscriminately as product, building, or city) could be grown. After the advent of the digital Towers, evidence of a reversed transference began to appear: the protocols of product design apparently enlarged, though perhaps more accurately cloned to become architecture through the spatial parameters of software. This is perhaps most evident in subsequent projects by Greg Lynn, whose Soci6Polis housing in Spain and Ark oftheWorld Museum in Costa Rica appear to have been evolved

from his Alessi products.

The concept of "blow-up" fmds an interesting and paradoxical predecessor in the product design enlargements of Aldo Rossi. While his Alessi commissions were architectural reductions, his coffee pot drawings demonstrate a parallel interest in the reverse process: the enlargement of product design into architecture. Rossi's technique of enlargement, however, was an architectural act, retaining the centrality of architecture and operating with disciplinary tactics: scalar proportion, formal outline, and articulation. While the centrality of architecture distinguishes a Rossi "blow-up" from that of a Lynn, Rossi's projects stand as an interesting precursor and point toward a certain conceptual indebtedness of the digital to the postmodern .

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AI do llossi, Tea & Cafffle Piazza, 1983.

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was an architectural act, retaining ling with disciplinary tactics: scalar

ne, and articulation.

80 Penelope Dean

Italian coffee pots were a longstanding interest of Rossi, who had already visualized them as "miniatures of the fantastic architectures."2This fascination can be seen as early as 1975 in a drawing labeled San Carlone and other constructions, showing a blue enameled coffeepot positioned alongside a colossal, green San Carlone statue and red articulated brick towers in a cropped city fragment. [Fig. 1] In this drawing, while the coffeepot lacks specific articulation beyond its outline, it has assumed the scale of a building, perhaps even the importance of a monument. Rather than being literally represented as "architecture,"· the coffeepot has been proportionally blown-up- enlarged to achieve the scale of architecture, the drawing hinting at the constructive possibility of product design becoming architecture, or perhaps equally, exposing a technique native to architecture that could only be declared by a

surrogate, the coffeepot.

Through the technique of~· Rossi delineates his coffeepots almost always in elevation, as either foreground or background in cropped city scenes. In a drawing that appears in one of his Blue Books, labeled by Officina Alessi simply as "variations on coffeeMmakers, Texas 1983/84,"3 a blue enameled coffeepot has been enlarged to fit perfectly behind the fragment of a classical brick tower whose brick cornices and slightly angled profile align exactly with the bands and profile of the coffeepot. [Fig. 2] In another example, a red enameled coffeepot and a blue La conica have been blown up larger than life to lurk behind what looks like Rossi's architecture. [Fig. 3] In both these drawings, Rossi outlines his enlarged coffeepots through the lens of architecture, to make the surrounding architecture visible.

Fig. 2.:.Aido Rossi, Variations on coffee- makers, Texas 1963/84.

2 Aldo Rossi quoted in Peter Am ell, Ted Bickford eds., A/do Rossi: Buildings and Projecrs,lNewVork: Rizwli, 1985): 249.

Fig.3_Aido Rossi, Variations on coffee- makers, Texas 1963/84.

3 A selection of these drawings were published in the Officina Alessi catalogue Aldo Rossi, "La conica· "La cupola~ e a/tre caffettiere Ill Edizione, (Crusinallo: Aldo Rossie Alessi s.p.a .• 19BB~ 42-49.

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Rossi's enlargements do not lead to a loss of resolution or increased vagueness as in the magnified photographs of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow- Up (coincidentally the same year as Rossi's Architecture and the City), but rather result in gained resolution as he adds more architectural information. This can be seen in perhaps the most bizarre drawing, where domesticity has been literally inserted into Rossi's La conica, now situated by the seaside and architecturalized through articulation: an added stone plinth, windows, interior lights, a parent waving from inside, children with a dog waving from outside. [Fig. 4] Here the coffeepot has finally become architecture, Rossi having not only enlarged the product to assume the scale of architecture, but, by adding architectural information- grafting typological elements- it has feasibly become inhabitable. Articulation, added to the pot through drawing, just as it had been applied to Rossi's Tea & Coffee Piazza through manufacture, serves as a demonstration of architecture's representational and disciplinary power.

Rossi's representations of coffeepots reveal product design conceived

first from the point of view of architecture, and secondly transformed into architecture's image; just as architecture promises to become the city, product design promises to become architecture. Notwithstanding Rossi's more well-known polemic Architecture and the City, where he relates architecture to the city as both the part that summarizes the city's form and the part that ~y extension becomes the city, Rossi's drawings deliver a complementary manifesto, a would-be Architecture and Product Design, with architecture

becoming product design, in a "great chain of being" centered on architecture -\\ and extending (through scalar enlargement or reduction) either to city or

product design.

Fig.4_Aido Rossi,

Vari~rions on coffee-

makers, Texas 1983/84.

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82 Penelope Dean

While Rossi's coffee pots in the city were really lessons about architecture -demonstrations of enlargement/reduction- Greg Lynn's Tea & Coffee Towers of.fer another lesson: the strategy of "grow-up," deployed through digital processes to make architecture appear as one phase in a continuous "gradient" of design. Operating with the tactics of complex geometric manipulation and fabrication processes, Lynn blows-up product design into the image of architecture. Where Rossi used the image of the product to reveal an operation

~ of architecture (enlargement), Lynn conversely uses the image of arChitecture to reveal the operations of design.

Lynn's Soci6Polis housing project in Valencia, Spain is described as having been designed "on the basis of the tension between two differentiated geometries: on the one hand, a cubic geometry with regular windows that correspond to the apartments and on the other hand, an irregular geometry formed by triangular polygons that correspond to ventilation shafts that open onto the fa9ade itself."4 Here "geometry" produces the buildings irregularly shaped voided interiors, spaces only experienced from within the apartments themselves. This architectural outcome bears striking similarity to Lynn's Tea & Coffee design product, whose curvilinear geometries have also produced a mysterious interior- one that is "orchid like"- and to be experienced only when the vessels are empty. The floor plans of Lynn's apartments reveal housing units clustered into separate quadrants much like the separate "cloves" of Lynn's Alessi pots configured as bundles, "each bundle [imagined as] a tiny room."5

In the Soci6Po!is housing it almost seems as though geometry, a tool of scale, has enabled Lynn's Alessi product to be indiscriminately grown-up as housing, the pots finally making their appearance as architecture through magnified distortion.

Unlike Rossi's proportional scaling down of architectural forms into design under a postmodern umbrella where architecture was central, Lynn offers a

Greg lynn FORM, Tea & Coffee Towers, 2003.

Greg Lyno, Soci6Polis Housing, Valencia, Spain.

4 www.sociopolis.net, 30 July 2006.

5 From the cover of the document "clove coffee love· held at the Alessi Archive, Museo Alessi Crusinallo, Italy. Folder: Lynn, no. 1196.

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By evolving the scale of design (vi~ a priori hierarchy of architecture)

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different trajectory, one that engenders objects from the diverse techniques and procedures of design and production. The importation of design technique~ from other fields (e.g., deregulated military technology) facilitates this \ operation and additionally becomes a way to rethink architecture's priorities. The design softwares bring design's geometries to architecture as can be seen

in the clustered pods of Lynn's recent Ark of the World Museum for San Jose, Costa Rica where organic and bio-morphic primitives ("cell" or "egg") now

supersede the platonic primitives of Rossi. As Lynn brings his products to life through fabrication technologies, he advances the visual residue of production processes as a new mode of default representation for architecture, the Alessi pot surfaces marked by "the fine scale detail of the machine tool." 5 By evolving the scale of design (via the cOntinuity of digital code as opposed to the a priori hierarchy of distinct architectural typology) Lynn facilitates the appearance of} architecture as a species of now pervasive design.

While Mendini and Alessi originally deployed architecture as a means to bring visibility to their product design in 1980, and later as the corrective to bring discipline to a more generalized design field in 2000, what Mendini and Alessi neglected to notice across the 20-year divide was that the disciplinary nature of architecture itself had changed. Architecture was no longer the "mother of the arts," nor design its faithful offspring. Unable to deliver the Alessi agenda, the digitally informed projects of 2000 demonstrate that architecture had rather come to advance itselfthrough design techniques and problematics, just as

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Greg lynn FORM, Ark of the World Museum San Jose, Costa Ri~a.

6 From the project description published in Alessandro Mendini ed., tea & coffee rowers (Milan: Mondadori Electa spa, 2003): 119.

success of postmodernism can be seen in the fact that its call for a global 1\ j it came to be absorbed by. a generalized design environment. The paradoxical \

and trans-disciplinary style initially opened under the disciplinary banner of architecture was ultimately realized by design. Consequently, the later Alessi architects found themselves compelled to attempt to return the logics of a now triumphant design to architecture. Here, postmodernism can be understood \ as the proto-theory of a now pervasive design culture where, in its realization, J architecture as it had been formally known had to disappear. In this context, Alessi's digital group comes to serve as an emblem for this transition. In this way, the representational agenda of postmodernism was ultimately rendered \ operational and effective. By contrast, the imagined operational ambition of the digital architects may, in the end, be understood as finally representational.

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d the digital code as opposed to the I Lynn facilitates the appearance of I

~1 of now pervasive design. I