Adam Gilbreath
It’s presently
About
Selected Works
2024
Tucson Section
Once There Was and Once There Wasn’t...
2023
4D
The Garden at the End of Time
White on White #6-8
Untitled #4
2022
Wash Monolith
Contact
Once There Was and Once there Wasn’t...
across seven rivers and seven basins,
where the water was being strewn and the sands poured,
in El Norte, in the days of old
when cacti still walked,
when cottonwoods still played in bathhouses
when Coyote still ran a small delicatessan on Alameda and Main,
and when I softly rocked my baby grandmother to sleep
in their creaking cradle...
Introduction
My paper, entitled “4D”, attempts to reconcile the language and models of thought from New Materialism; and the aesthetics of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). To accomplish this, I proposed one change to OOO’s framework which is to change the way in which time is addressed. OOO typically subscribes to what is called a “growing block theory” of time in which the present is at the forefront of time and grows forward generating more and more of the past. I argue instead that we should be viewing time through an eternalist lens by which all parts of the block exist simultaneously and the present is instead a single plane that is moving along the block. This makes it so that all objects exist equally at all points in time past, present, and future. So, then we can use New Materialism’s language for flows of matter energy but instead reference the flows of objects through time. Within this framework I also inserted three scales of objects I deemed important to the use of these theories within architecture. This also acted as a methodology for the structuring of the explorations during this project. Those scales are: Urban and Natural, the scale at which we look at the way the urban fabric and natural ecologies intersect; Mass and Void, the scale at which we perceive occupiable space and the gaps between objects; and Structure and Skin, the scale at which details of buildings exist as well as the scale of the senses and touch.
(Click on headings for larger images)
Drawing 1 and Drawing 2
The first object created after the paper, this drawing began as an exploration of the urban and natural scale through time, the first scale outlined in 4D. The drawing was made by tracing various historical mappings of Tucson then lining the 2D drawings up chronologically within 3D space. This would serve as the foundation for representing past 4D objects. At the time of drawing the intention was to at some point return to the drawing and add in the future of the object, this however will not come to fruition as we will see later.
The drawing begins to hint at the qualities of Tucson’s urban landscape and the way in which it relates to the natural landscape. We see exemplified within the drawings the slow choking of the river, as the urban fabric encroaches closer and closer to the floodplain of the river. Until its eventual channelization that resulted in the artificial creation of no flood plain, as well as the present lack of flow within the Santa Cruz River. You can also see the change in urban infrastructure, most prominent in the downtown area. This insight inspires the next drawing to be at a scale in which downtowns massing would be visible.
Drawing 3
Here we begin to assess a chunk of Tucson’s downtown but now closer to the scale of mass and void, where we begin to read the massing of the buildings. The urban corridor selected was from the presidio, down to the convention center. This was selected because it undergoes very radical changes over time.
It begins with the imposition of the presidio onto the natural landscape, looming on the mesa over the O’odham village of Tukson. Followed by Tucson as a walled city, Tucson as a sleepy Mexican village, then Tucson as an expanding Town, to the eventual razing of lower income neighborhoods to make way for US civic structures and the convention center. It is at this scale that we first begin to see hints of the cultures that are helping to shape Tucson. The continual subjugation of one culture by another. This drawing becomes the transition point from a scale that is more ecological and environmental to one that is more innately linked to our human experience.
Drawing 4
The presidio becomes the focal point of the seat of power within Tucson. This mapping goes down to the floor plans of all the buildings in the presidio’s footprint through time. The presidio was built directly over a group of pit houses. Once the presidio was torn down, one of Tucson’s church plazas was built on the spot, then the church was torn down to build a new town hall. Then the town hall and China town were torn down to make way for a bigger townhall, courthouses, and corporate offices. We see Tucson shift from an indigenous community, to being ruled by god and guns, to religion being the dominant power, to civic institutions, and finally to institutions of capitalism.
This drawing, beyond clearly demonstrating these shifts in Tucson’s history also begged the question of how to begin to represent these at the scale of structure and skin. How do we draw nostalgia? How do we draw Tucson’s shifting culture? In an attempt to answer this I didn’t, and instead tried to show it in a short film.
Future / Past Gap
The mappings up to this point have all been firmly situated in the past. This is effective in unearthing histories and events intrinsic to the objects however fails to address the other half of the object’s existence the future of the objects. The problem then becomes how do we depict the future of an object, we are able to easily represent the past which is hardline, and data driven easily represented via the tools an architect has. But the future lies in the realm of dreams. What is to come of all these past events?
The film is my attempt to represent the future of the objects. Up until this point all of the representations have been rooted in the past and nostalgia. These drawings then can be hard lined, based on data derived from past drawings representations and accounts. The future however we do not have access to and so we are left to the realm of educated guesswork.
The film attempts to explore this divide between the past and future, via collage, and with aspect ratios. By assigning past present and future their own aspect ratio we can begin to rationalize and assess the object. The past and the future relied heavily on collage and choice views of objects that look or are historical to convey the mood of the past.
The film I think was largely a success and conveyed something much more tactile than the drawings did. However, the film was still composed of present images of Tucson. It did not push far enough into the future and instead seemed to linger around the present. It also seemed to spoon fed the dream to much, there was far less room for the imagination to wander within the way it was edited and presented.
Drawing 5
The future axon I view more as process work to arrive at the final series of three renderings. I needed a hardline place to sketch the cultural, ecological, and political changes necessary to arrive at my own personal dream of Tucson. From this drawing I can then begin to represent aspects of that dream hopefully in a way that is vague enough to spark the dreams of others. This drawing is certainly home to my own biases, as dreams are inherently born of our own personal nostalgia, it is hoped that by dreaming myself in this way the next representation can feel rooted in Tucson, as it followed a set timeline from the present.
Drawings 6-8
Born from hypothetical locations within the future Tucson axon, the renderings attempt to depict a dream of the future. Trying to ride the line between dystopia and utopia, to provoke dreams in the viewer, the collages are hazy, ruins are overgrown but at the same time inhabited and teeming with life. The streets become washes and grasslands, you commute to work alongside the javelinas in the wash. Within the presidio plaza, a hole has been dug down to the now healthy aquafer where people recreate. The goal was to not spoon feed the viewer the exact nature of the future, but instead to spark their own mental wandering as to what the future could possibly be.
During the final review this apparently seemed effective, as the reviewers and the audience began to pitch their own beliefs as to what the future depicted entailed varying from, it being 6AM and no one is out yet, to it’s a dystopia and we are all dead.
Conclusion
The conclusion then is that there is not a conclusion, the future or dream is not hardline, but instead culturally constructed by individuals. Thus, there is no hardline representation of the dream instead, only presented images open to interpretation.
The act of dreaming is inherently cultural, political, and ecological. And as a byproduct of this so is the act of design. Every design is inherently political as it is a steppingstone towards the future of these objects. Every design plays an active role in the shaping of our collective future and thus our collective future dream. We are incapable of removing the future existence from the object, but we do play an active role in the dreams that generate it.
If we look at the final renderings from this capstone, there is a message instilled in them from my own dreams. But this is still interpreted by you the viewer and it is your own dreams for the future of Tucson that become a layer on the renderings that is equally as important if not more than the dream I intended.
This conclusion, I believe to be not so much a conclusion as an initial premise for future investigations. The initial jumping point for what could snowball into a lifetime of research into time, nostalgia, and dreams.