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Surface/Subsurface,
by Marion Weiss & Michael Manfredi
Princeton Architectural Press, 2008
New York-based architects Weiss/Manfredi
are defined by the Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism description,
one that could be said to be embraced by many architects
today, by many who see these other realms as part of the
architect's purview. It's a tricky notion, where one hopes
that the apparent incorporation of landscape goes beyond
green roofs, and that urbanism is more than just bigness.
Each of these are not only separate disciplines with practitioners,
professors and unique viewpoints and working relationships,
but they are complex concepts that imply natural and social
processes, respectively. That being said, the practice of
Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi are one of the few that
understand these implications while also blurring the distinctions
between each, something that makes one question the distinctions
and the knowledge base that each uses to traditionally separate
itself as a discipline.
The project that best illustrates this synthesis is the
Seattle Art Museum's recent Olympic
Sculpture Park, an 8.5-acre former industrial site where
the architects stitched the city to the water via a continuous
constructed landscape. The blurring of distinctions between
architecture, landscape, and urbanism is abundantly clear
at only a
single glance, with the zigzagging lawn and paths physically
connecting areas previously separated by both a roadway
and train tracks. (If anything, the architectural component
of the project -- a small pavilion at the high point of
the site -- is downplayed in favor of the last two.) Even
though (and most likely because) the project's strengths
are clear, the design receives the most attention in this
monograph on 11 of the firm's recent built and unbuilt projects.
The coverage -- including the requisite sketches, renderings,
drawings, and photographs -- features diagrams, such as
a timeline, that help the reader further understand the
design but also explain the creative process. The timeline
shows how the architects see the Sculpture Park's current
state as part of a continuum, as a part of something larger
both in time and space. This is refreshing but not a surprise,
coming as it is from the architects of the geologically-inspired
Museum
of the Earth in Ithaca, New York, also featured in the
monograph.
The 11 projects are grouped into three sections (Recovering
Infrastructure, Inhabiting Topographies, Leveraging Movement)
that are each prefaced by interviews with Detlef Martins.
These informative sessions give great insight into the firm's
general attitudes towards sustainability, for example. The
three sections don't separate the different projects from
each so much as they articulate the larger concerns that
transcend the sometimes arbitrary, yet nevertheless entrenched,
distinctions between architecture, landscape, and urbanism.
Certain projects more clearly represent the different concerns,
hence the plaza and interior circulation of the Barnard
College Nexus fits into the section on movement. What
one probably notices is that the keywords of infrastructure,
topography, and movement veer slightly from the typical
formal concerns of architects, pointing to an emphasis on
those aspects that have the potential to unite the three
disparate fields. Ultimately it's about the output of the
firm, and the quality that arises from a practice geared
to cross-disciplinary work provides a good model for other
architects with the same interests.
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