Posture Publication — Issue 2. The Dative.

posture.

2

3

The first issue of posture called for submissions dialectic in nature, considering Sic et Non. The second issue shifts focus from the sides, inwards and towards the singular or the linchpin.

The dative; indicating the indirect object.Within the sentence, the dative denotes a case of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives that indicate or identify the indirect object or recipient. Without the dative, the sentence will wait patiently, speaking to itself of other things. Without the sentence, the dative infers relation and reason, the tangible and the abstraction.

Pictures have been drawn, prose written, much scrawling, and a fair amount of conversing has ensued. Verbs and objects were chased around cups of coffee until they become lost amongst their descriptors or found by their recipients.

posture continues to be an excuse to do something; to adopt a pose; take a position; to behave with intent, be it to impress or mislead.

These are pages with good posture; a posture slowly modifying itself through new experiments and modification of details. They may not all stand straight, with shoulders squared and hips aligned, but to see how they stand is to see poses adopted and approaches taken; to see intentions.

This is an experiment; continued.And anything goes.So long as it has good posture.

pp.

4

Frog gifts a pinecone to Crab.

According to the laws of grammar, here Frog is the subject, the pinecone the object, and Crab the indirect object.

Walt Whitman epitomized a statement within the act of giving with “When I give I give myself ”. Taking this literally, for the receiver, the gift

becomes a tangible symbol of the giver.

This sets up a reversal of the above, where for the subject Crab, the object pinecone becomes symbolic of the indirect object Frog.

Thus Crab’s new gift, regardless of its particular aesthetic or formal worth (it’s a pinecone), gains a wonderful symbolic value to Frog and the

relationship they share. To amplify this value, Crab places the gift on a bust, replacing the position of the head, thus affirming the iconic significance

of the gift.

Crab places this bust proudly in his living room. To his visitors, Crab is clearly celebrating someone through this display, but who it may be is as

obscure as placing a pinecone on a bust.

6

Around 1929, in a room on the hills of Poissy, an architect proceeded to carefully fold a sheet of paper into the form of a paper ship. On completion, the paper ship was launched upon the surface of a puddle, forming in the centre of a room. The architect, having completed the launch, said “Au Revoir” and headed for the door.

By following nine steps, laid out by the ancient Japanese art of origami, it is possible to reconstruct the paper ship of 1929.

paper ship

Approximately 580km southwest of Poissy sixty-two years later, another architect, another ship “launch”. Despite the portholes, con�rming its character of nautical architecture, the Floating Box of Floirac and Neutra beam serve to form puddles upon which a �otilla of paper ships may be launched in the hills.

We are unsure whether it is the paper ship or the puddle that is the dative for the architecture at Floirac. But either way, we like them.

7

Around 1929, in a room on the hills of Poissy, an architect proceeded to carefully fold a sheet of paper into the form of a paper ship. On completion, the paper ship was launched upon the surface of a puddle, forming in the centre of a room. The architect, having completed the launch, said “Au Revoir” and headed for the door.

By following nine steps, laid out by the ancient Japanese art of origami, it is possible to reconstruct the paper ship of 1929.

paper ship

Approximately 580km southwest of Poissy sixty-two years later, another architect, another ship “launch”. Despite the portholes, con�rming its character of nautical architecture, the Floating Box of Floirac and Neutra beam serve to form puddles upon which a �otilla of paper ships may be launched in the hills.

We are unsure whether it is the paper ship or the puddle that is the dative for the architecture at Floirac. But either way, we like them.

8

An alfajor is a small cake, typical to Spain and Latin America, usually consisting of two round biscuits sandwiching a layer of dulce de leche or other filling.

A common English translation of the Spanish (Castilian) sentence “Me gusta la alfajor” would be “I like the alfajor”; but literally, this is not the case. In this instance the Spanish personal pronoun “me” means “to me” or “at me” and the verb “gustar” does not mean “to like” but “to be pleasing” or “to give pleasure”, thus, the literal translation (keeping in mind the reverse order of words) is: “The alfajor gives pleasure to me”.

Unlike the first English translation, in the Spanish sentence the small cake is the subject; the cake is the one doing the pleasing. The speaker is the indirect object, completely passive while, through no fault of their own, the cake is actively giving pleasure to them. Thus, the subtle switch in grammatical cases allows the speaker to take no responsibility whatsoever.

A date with cake

10

In Sanskrit the dative translates as an act of giving.

Full frontal?

If it ’s everything at once...

It’s just a window.

Porno / Peepshow. Peepshow.

11

or Something more?

If it takes you too long to get there.

If it ’s devious and beautiful,

If it’s a slow, selective, seduction

and you want more....

It’s probably architecture.

So the question then might be,what do you want your architecture to give you?

Porno / Peepshow. Peepshow.

“-a Shadow of a Doubt.”

Violet to Red

Then you turn againIn the confusionAnd after the darkIts left

Was something else?Filling up the roomFilling up the roomWhen only the walls Outnumbered us?

________________________

“-a Shadow of a Doubt.”

Violet to Red

Then you turn againIn the confusionAnd after the darkIts left

Was something else?Filling up the roomFilling up the roomWhen only the walls Outnumbered us?

________________________

14

Ever since the early nineties the contingency of the everyday has played

an increasing role within architecture, either as attempt to oust the banality of

the functionalist paradigm or dislocated reality of post-modern contextualism.

Under the creative directorship of Mel Dodd, the 2010 national conference set upon itself the admirable task of

“bringing architecture down to earth”. A task which it approached, not

through heavenly utopia, but rather an emphases on rejecting the detached gaze, the, by now default, attitude of ‘no big names in architecture’ and a

lexicon of embracing, initiating and innovation. An antidote against the

incessant abstraction of globalization, the quotation of the everyday, collated

under - People, Living, Things and Cites - and collected under the title of extra/

ordinary, promised to be, just that.

People Launching the initial session via

satellite, Liza Fior, despite the nine hour time difference, proceeded to unveil a range of projects undertaken by MUF,

illustrating the power of deep space exploration. Ousting the broad strokes of the historic master plan in favour of

mapping existing built and social fabric, Fior’s investigations underpinned the

increasing role of site specificity within an abstracted global arena.

Richard Goodwin’s following argument for a healthy architecture, despite being

persistently drawn upon parasitic

metaphors which have yet to do his work any favours, equally viewed deep

mapping and porosity as the antidote to the strictures of a surveillance society.

Excitingly, Goodwin’s explorations upon the public private interface of corporate

architecture, albeit disguised in an Armani suit, are slowly writing their

way into urban design policy.

London’s Sam Jacob from the art-architecture collaborative practice FAT,

upheld their reputation by commencing with the paradigm “Taste Not Space”,

spelt out on a slide full of spaghetti letters, as precipitating culture before

proceeding to unleash a Woody Allen fuelled “2000 Years of Non-Stop

Nostalgia” based on timber; culminating with a FAT designed font constructed

on Tudor symbolism.

Viewing narrative as a way to rethink function, Sam illustrated a “New

Pop Moralism” through an aray of architectural and design projects that

willfully and deliberately distort the narrative. Not even an accusation of

narrating “Toy Town” from the panel could rattle Jacob’s projects, rooted from their inception upon people who would

ultimately live in them.

Peter Corrigan rounded off the entertainment by unveiling a lifetimes

worth of theatrical works. Deploring any crossover between architecture and theatre, Corrigan proceeded to state the

theatres’ superiority both in etiquette and cultural tendency to imbibe and

fornicate, before leaving the audience

with a notion of dropping design in favour of creating from love.

Living The second theme kicked off with Chilean Alejandro Aravena giving

a Harvard sharpened analysis of deductive modelling applied to the

mass housing market. Arguing the square to outperform the rectangle,

Aravena, convincingly deployed a hyper rationalized approach to the largely

dismissed architectural potential of the mass market as a means to resolve the

increasing societal divisions of property ownership and equity in Latin America.

The conundrum of the masses was further unfolded, this time upon the

Australian landscape, by Richard Weller’s ‘Boomtown 2050’. Despite the customary

metabolic metaphors Weller was at his most atypical and convincing when he

outlined an argument in which suburban sprawl, not the densification of the

metropolitan masses, would save the day.

Frustratingly, neither speakers appeared interested in the richly antagonistic

irony latent within culture that Jacob’s uncovered a session earlier. Their

architectures proliferating only through demographics, unadulterated growth

and deductive power seeking to firmly suppress the plastic art within.

Urban Splashe’s Tom Broxham, delivered a polished presentation of an anything

but ordinary developer portfolio. Showcasing the retrofitting of industrial

Victoriana up and down country, to upside down town houses, and the

recladding of Britians’ post-war towered

landscape, Broxham gave an insightful glimpse into the role of developer as

curator of space.

The pitch reached fever point with their much acclaimed New Islington. Lauded

Britain’s worst housing estate, Urban Splash set about delivering a mixed use scheme in collaboration with residents

and well-known architects, Alsop and FAT included. Alsop, his usual willful

self, playing on the strength of place, delivered ‘Chips’, a residential building

playfully immersed in the culinary traditions of the Midlands. While FAT

constructed traditional terraced housing units complete with a riot of colored and

patterned facades in a scheme that makes new urbanist appear banal.

Things Standing in for absence of scheduled

African Diebedo Francis Kere, New Zealand’s Rewi Thompson’s filial piety

arguably lead to the architecture of his “difficult house”. Its all consuming

seriousness leaving scant room any of the playful narrative distortion of cultural

symbolism enjoyed in the previous two sessions. Perhaps the conference

pairing of People and Things, Living with Cities would have better facilitated the discussion of this at best difficult topic.

By the second half, distortion resurfaced

again with New York’s SYSTEMarchitect Jeremy Edmiston tracing a connection

between the Baroque profile and abstracted programmatic relations.

Proceeding to deliver a somewhat less than short history of the structural

properties of plywood, all the while affectionately referring to its modern

forefather, Buckminster Fuller, as Buckie, Edmiston finally managed to

argue for the future viability of the CNC milling of plywood as a means for mass-

customization; apply demonstrated through their prototype prefab house

at MoMA’s BURST 008.

Things concluded with PHOOEY Architects Peter Ho, despite admirable

ambitions of carbon neutrality, appeared bent on reinventing the kitsch

of pop via the off-cuts of construction.

CitiesTeddy Cruz, via satellite link from

New York, entered the Cities debate by exploring new strategies for the troubled San Diego-Tijuana border

zone. Cruz, initially charted the flow and subsequence inventive use of garbage flowing south through an

ambitiously large photographic project, proceeded to unfold a mapping of the

fine urban grain associated with the stream of cheap labour flowing north; facilitating the infiltration and critique

of banal North America zoning laws

Specificity within the generic was again reiterated through Kerstin Thompson’s thoughtful “miniature city” strategy for Melbournian police stations; rethinking the typically insipid architecture of civil

enforcement.

Martine Zoeteman, stepping in for the Netherlands Architecture Institutes

director Ole Bouman, delivered a final barrage of images entitled the

“Architecture of Consequence”. The apocalyptic world initially portrayed,

categorized under the seven deadly crashes, thankfully lifted to reveal the

Dutch typical tenants of monumentality and detailed refinement. Proposing

outlandish yet plausible solutions, Martine illustrated projects, such as AMO’s proposed Zeekracht; a renewable energy infrastructure

encompassing nothing short of the entire North Sea, far exceeding

standard piecemeal solutions to the issues of climate change.

Stupendous? Ironically, climate change appeared on

the conference radar thanks only to the best efforts of Iceland’s volcanic gods.

Unveiling the technically extraordinary dismissal of the digital age to deliver an

international lineup in the first instant.

The final resolution of the conference did however reveal other extraordinary

promising and exciting points of note. The deductive powers modelled by the American’s, collaborating with

creative appropriation, demonstrated that hyper rationalism need not lead to sterility. Or the eccentric whimsey

of the Pom’s, constructing playfully distorted narratives grounded upon the

specificity of revitalized communities.

With the increasing shift towards a bottom up, or “help grow it yourself”

approach, architecture, it seems, is best enjoyed with an extra helping of

ordinary fun.

extra/ordinaryin review: 2010 National Architecture Conference, Sydney

15

Ever since the early nineties the contingency of the everyday has played

an increasing role within architecture, either as attempt to oust the banality of

the functionalist paradigm or dislocated reality of post-modern contextualism.

Under the creative directorship of Mel Dodd, the 2010 national conference set upon itself the admirable task of

“bringing architecture down to earth”. A task which it approached, not

through heavenly utopia, but rather an emphases on rejecting the detached gaze, the, by now default, attitude of ‘no big names in architecture’ and a

lexicon of embracing, initiating and innovation. An antidote against the

incessant abstraction of globalization, the quotation of the everyday, collated

under - People, Living, Things and Cites - and collected under the title of extra/

ordinary, promised to be, just that.

People Launching the initial session via

satellite, Liza Fior, despite the nine hour time difference, proceeded to unveil a range of projects undertaken by MUF,

illustrating the power of deep space exploration. Ousting the broad strokes of the historic master plan in favour of

mapping existing built and social fabric, Fior’s investigations underpinned the

increasing role of site specificity within an abstracted global arena.

Richard Goodwin’s following argument for a healthy architecture, despite being

persistently drawn upon parasitic

metaphors which have yet to do his work any favours, equally viewed deep

mapping and porosity as the antidote to the strictures of a surveillance society.

Excitingly, Goodwin’s explorations upon the public private interface of corporate

architecture, albeit disguised in an Armani suit, are slowly writing their

way into urban design policy.

London’s Sam Jacob from the art-architecture collaborative practice FAT,

upheld their reputation by commencing with the paradigm “Taste Not Space”,

spelt out on a slide full of spaghetti letters, as precipitating culture before

proceeding to unleash a Woody Allen fuelled “2000 Years of Non-Stop

Nostalgia” based on timber; culminating with a FAT designed font constructed

on Tudor symbolism.

Viewing narrative as a way to rethink function, Sam illustrated a “New

Pop Moralism” through an aray of architectural and design projects that

willfully and deliberately distort the narrative. Not even an accusation of

narrating “Toy Town” from the panel could rattle Jacob’s projects, rooted from their inception upon people who would

ultimately live in them.

Peter Corrigan rounded off the entertainment by unveiling a lifetimes

worth of theatrical works. Deploring any crossover between architecture and theatre, Corrigan proceeded to state the

theatres’ superiority both in etiquette and cultural tendency to imbibe and

fornicate, before leaving the audience

with a notion of dropping design in favour of creating from love.

Living The second theme kicked off with Chilean Alejandro Aravena giving

a Harvard sharpened analysis of deductive modelling applied to the

mass housing market. Arguing the square to outperform the rectangle,

Aravena, convincingly deployed a hyper rationalized approach to the largely

dismissed architectural potential of the mass market as a means to resolve the

increasing societal divisions of property ownership and equity in Latin America.

The conundrum of the masses was further unfolded, this time upon the

Australian landscape, by Richard Weller’s ‘Boomtown 2050’. Despite the customary

metabolic metaphors Weller was at his most atypical and convincing when he

outlined an argument in which suburban sprawl, not the densification of the

metropolitan masses, would save the day.

Frustratingly, neither speakers appeared interested in the richly antagonistic

irony latent within culture that Jacob’s uncovered a session earlier. Their

architectures proliferating only through demographics, unadulterated growth

and deductive power seeking to firmly suppress the plastic art within.

Urban Splashe’s Tom Broxham, delivered a polished presentation of an anything

but ordinary developer portfolio. Showcasing the retrofitting of industrial

Victoriana up and down country, to upside down town houses, and the

recladding of Britians’ post-war towered

landscape, Broxham gave an insightful glimpse into the role of developer as

curator of space.

The pitch reached fever point with their much acclaimed New Islington. Lauded

Britain’s worst housing estate, Urban Splash set about delivering a mixed use scheme in collaboration with residents

and well-known architects, Alsop and FAT included. Alsop, his usual willful

self, playing on the strength of place, delivered ‘Chips’, a residential building

playfully immersed in the culinary traditions of the Midlands. While FAT

constructed traditional terraced housing units complete with a riot of colored and

patterned facades in a scheme that makes new urbanist appear banal.

Things Standing in for absence of scheduled

African Diebedo Francis Kere, New Zealand’s Rewi Thompson’s filial piety

arguably lead to the architecture of his “difficult house”. Its all consuming

seriousness leaving scant room any of the playful narrative distortion of cultural

symbolism enjoyed in the previous two sessions. Perhaps the conference

pairing of People and Things, Living with Cities would have better facilitated the discussion of this at best difficult topic.

By the second half, distortion resurfaced

again with New York’s SYSTEMarchitect Jeremy Edmiston tracing a connection

between the Baroque profile and abstracted programmatic relations.

Proceeding to deliver a somewhat less than short history of the structural

properties of plywood, all the while affectionately referring to its modern

forefather, Buckminster Fuller, as Buckie, Edmiston finally managed to

argue for the future viability of the CNC milling of plywood as a means for mass-

customization; apply demonstrated through their prototype prefab house

at MoMA’s BURST 008.

Things concluded with PHOOEY Architects Peter Ho, despite admirable

ambitions of carbon neutrality, appeared bent on reinventing the kitsch

of pop via the off-cuts of construction.

CitiesTeddy Cruz, via satellite link from

New York, entered the Cities debate by exploring new strategies for the troubled San Diego-Tijuana border

zone. Cruz, initially charted the flow and subsequence inventive use of garbage flowing south through an

ambitiously large photographic project, proceeded to unfold a mapping of the

fine urban grain associated with the stream of cheap labour flowing north; facilitating the infiltration and critique

of banal North America zoning laws

Specificity within the generic was again reiterated through Kerstin Thompson’s thoughtful “miniature city” strategy for Melbournian police stations; rethinking the typically insipid architecture of civil

enforcement.

Martine Zoeteman, stepping in for the Netherlands Architecture Institutes

director Ole Bouman, delivered a final barrage of images entitled the

“Architecture of Consequence”. The apocalyptic world initially portrayed,

categorized under the seven deadly crashes, thankfully lifted to reveal the

Dutch typical tenants of monumentality and detailed refinement. Proposing

outlandish yet plausible solutions, Martine illustrated projects, such as AMO’s proposed Zeekracht; a renewable energy infrastructure

encompassing nothing short of the entire North Sea, far exceeding

standard piecemeal solutions to the issues of climate change.

Stupendous? Ironically, climate change appeared on

the conference radar thanks only to the best efforts of Iceland’s volcanic gods.

Unveiling the technically extraordinary dismissal of the digital age to deliver an

international lineup in the first instant.

The final resolution of the conference did however reveal other extraordinary

promising and exciting points of note. The deductive powers modelled by the American’s, collaborating with

creative appropriation, demonstrated that hyper rationalism need not lead to sterility. Or the eccentric whimsey

of the Pom’s, constructing playfully distorted narratives grounded upon the

specificity of revitalized communities.

With the increasing shift towards a bottom up, or “help grow it yourself”

approach, architecture, it seems, is best enjoyed with an extra helping of

ordinary fun.

extra/ordinaryin review: 2010 National Architecture Conference, Sydney

16

As h

e spu

n on

his

chai

r to

retr

ieve

the p

enci

l he h

ad ab

sent

min

dedl

y left

on

the t

able

loca

ted

dire

ctly

beh

ind

him

he k

nock

ed o

ne o

f the

line

s. Th

is co

ncer

ned

him

. It w

as n

ot so

muc

h th

e disp

lace

men

t of t

he li

ne, b

ut

rath

er w

hat t

hat m

eant

for t

he o

ther

.

The o

ther

was

so re

liant

.

17

18

How I gave you¹

19

For the length of the twentieth century, an ideological war was fought among those in the crucial role of architectural intelligentsia (having reached this role in many cases through the catalyst route of being avant-garde). Those architects (and their admirers) began a century-long debate that continues to this day: that of the importance and direction of architectural STYLE. The ideas spread throughout that century and beyond have become the foundation of study at architecture schools and philosophical debate among architectural circles. The suggestion that we must pursue an ideal manifestation of STYLE has permeated through into the very depths of architectural criticism, technique, design, and intent. It seems that without a prescribed STYLE (or pursuit thereof ), an architect is devoid of purpose, idealist strategy, and forethought (READ: any architectural significance entirely.) This ridiculous stream of thought has become our basic framework from which we, as designers, subjectively decide what should be objective and how we can strive towards this paradoxical set of inane strategies.But what about space?Architecture can be described as the delineation of space to create new realities. When did the STYLE of that space become the subjugation of the result?

In many contemporary architecture schools, students are taught to be Howard Roark, but in a very literal and contradictory sense. We are encouraged to pursue an early modernist style that has long been over-thought, rehashed, dismissed, reexamined, dismissed again, and subsequently confused. We are taught that noteworthy architects of the last century became so after developing, adhering to, and perfecting a STYLE. But STYLE can limit us when it is perceived as the goal.This misdirection leads to placing architectural value on the extent to which a building reaches an idealistic manifestation of a STYLE. We seem to forget the contradiction that often occurs in the careers of architects who devote their lives to a STYLE and either realize or exemplify the faults of such pursuits. Le Corbusier’s contradiction from Villa Savoye to Ronchamp, Mies’ inclusion of ornamental steel beams on the Seagram Building, the commonly agreed failure of 1980s Postmodernism, and the self-serving creations of many contemporary “Starchitects”. Instead, can we not simply devote our pursuits to the creation of spaces that create intrigue, potential, inexistent realities, and make the user exalted over the architect…or STYLE?Let’s forget style, and let’s create space.

Zachary Meade

LET’S FORGET STYLE...

AND LET’S CREATE SPACE.

20

21

22

p10-11. Byron Kinnaird.“–A Shadow of a Doubt.” Drawing (graphite, digital text & chart, & layering). Melbourne. [email protected]

p3. c.v. postu[re]late. photographic montage+autocad+photoshop. Wellington. [email protected]

p4-5. Phil Mark. Paper ship. Illustrator. Wellington. [email protected] +64 [0] 21 0684123

p7. Frances Vessey. Four words to stand on. Ink & letraset. Wellington. [email protected]

p2. Andrew Just. Frog (pinecone) Crab. Christchurch. [email protected]

p6. Jack Delgado. A date with cake. Graphite & digital. Wellington. www.jackdelgado.com

p8-9. Meals Guise. porno/peepshow. Photoshop hackjob. Auckland.

p12-13. Phil Mark. extra/ordinary. 3 typefaces. Wellington. [email protected] +64 [0] 21 0684123

Contributors.

Art direction and editorial by Katherine Roberts.

For information and enquires, posture can be contacted at [email protected]

Cover image. Katherine Roberts. A camera and a pencil.

p14-15. Katherine Roberts. The other. Plaster, wire, rimu, a camera & a computer. Wellington. [email protected]

p16. Daniel Davis. Untitled. Processing and nine beds. Melbourne. nzarchitecture.com

p17. Pristereo. Let’s Forget Style... And Let’s Create Space. Australia for the moment. www.pristereo.com

p18-19. DKJP. an indirect reference to an object. Graphite & ink. Wellington. [email protected]

All with good posture.

posture would like to extend a kind word of thanks to the growing number of you supporting, and contributing to this, the second issue.posture is looking forward to making more new friends and conversing with you again soon.

65

The dative; indicating the indirect object.

Number 2.