Architecture's Ephemeral Practices

_______________________________________________THE COMPLETIST_________727 The Completist JOHN TREFRY, IV th.wrk.grp Your soles hit the sidewalk. You immediately completeness must occur extratextually, desire continuity, the potential of your footfall leaving no trace, through mental processes, as made infinite across the unfurled topography with riddles, or through interpretive of the city. Although you won't claim it all assimilation, as with art objects. Raymond through the physical trace, you desire the Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a sense of completeness underpinned by the permutative sonnet which, in its terminal belief that your potential to claim the physical state, consists of just 10 poems, is landscape is complete. Every twisting vector both terminally incomplete as a physical across the surface is open to your stroll. As a artifact, as it is completed through collector you perceive the total system as performance or reading, and extratextually complete. The obstruction of your potential incomplete, because the prescribed method of renders your desire unfulfillable. You are the reading the text requires 200,000,000 years of completist. Your claim in the landscape of continuous attention. Completeness, or the things is not consumption, but the desire to act of externally completing the text by pass through, to project lines through objects reading it is impossible. As with the city, the and ideas, allowing the qualitative experiences forfeiture of completeness to futility becomes a and impressions to collect on and in you.1 This structural void that shadows all interactions is life amongst objects, where the continuity of with the text like a nagging phantom. This the urban surface and the subjective impossibility renders the object of desire an interpretational minutiae of naming, language, impenetrable solid. and memory conflate. The completist is tormented by intrasystemic The urban completist roams and assimilates incompleteness: those points in a potential the continuous built surface into their spatial collection, a complete system, which, through repertoire, their spatial memory, their sense of one's inability to claim them, remain control over the internalized whole. As the impenetrable and exclusionary. A narrative unchecked reproduction of modern media and investigation, following the completist through collectible objects renders untenable the notion the landscape of disappointing terminal of the complete collection, so the repetitious objects, can be structured upon the growth of urban centers creates a complex and relationship of 'K.,' the 'land surveyor' of Franz frustrating system over which to lay claim. In Kafka's unfinished novel The Castle, to both this morass, the field of inquiry must be the bureaucracy and physicality of the titular reduced by developing a perception of construct. The Castle stands as an completeness that is external to the system intrasystemic solid within the text which is and is carried about as an interpretation or impenetrable to the reader and to K., both of memory.2 whom consequently fail at their respective tasks of assimilating the castle objectively and Although incompleteness, as the status of an accessing its spatial core, both perceived as a object, is the transferal of duty toward claiming of power, or completing. Although completion, there are conditions in which the thematically prominent in the text, “there is status of incompleteness is terminal. Any not textual evidence for the existence of the movement toward the perception of Castle as a building separate from the village... 728 FRESH AIR ______________________________________________________ (the Castle) only exists on its own terms.”3 In and Westin, possess this continuity of surface, a textual landscape which is based almost albeit convoluted and elusive, through which completely on archetypal settings such as inns, one can penetrate the constructed volume of hovels, schoolhouses, and taverns, the Castle the block. For those who seek it, this porosity is characterized by ambiguity and muteness. perpetuates the desire to experientially collect Consequently it is resistant to association and the continuous urban surface of the city, interpretation through the formal castle including all of its interior hollows and archetype. Therefore, through K., the Castle, passages (Fig. 1). as a key increment in the body of the text which is physically impenetrable, socially inaccessible, and interpretationally and associationally elusive, is incomplete within a landscape, a totality, that is, as a realm, complete. The narrative follows K.'s failures to assimilate the castle into its geographic and social context, his emboldened independence from the incomplete solid, and his recognition of and entrance into a complete or accessible system: the village and its social system.4 The Castle's archetypal landscape establishes support for unfettered penetrating interpretation and occupation of the text. The impetus for this personal movement starts, in a physical environment, with the recognition or construction of an underlying system. In the process of the pedestrian's actualization of the city, certain urban settings, due to the systematic quality of their geometry, allow the Fig. 1. Systemic Porosity, Intrasystemic Solidity in illusion of openness to perceptually extend downtown Atlanta, GA. beyond the actual area of inquiry.5 Downtown Atlanta, Georgia is parceled out in repeating Having helped to establish this somewhat blocks measuring 125mx125m, each housing specious, yet experientially legible system of an aggregation of structures of varying use. porosity, Mr. Portman is also responsible for its Philip Johnson's 191 Peachtree Street shares most dramatic intrasystemic disruptions: the its block with The Four Seasons hotel and a Apparel Mart, the Merchandise Mart, and the Hooter's. The Georgia Pacific Center by Inforum, a series of private, full block Skidmore, Owings & Merrill shares its block megastructures. These structures house with a subway station and a parking lot. John wholesale clothing showrooms, wholesale Portman's Marriott Marquis shares its block decorating showrooms, and conference with two office towers also designed by facilities respectively. Each structure is Portman. extruded from the property line and stands anywhere from 9 to 22 stories, with controlled Although it is a cause célèbre to condemn access points on the ground level, and the Portman for turning the architectural back of highly introverted aesthetic Mr. Portman's the city on the streetscape, his prototypes more public ventures have drawn criticism have played out and progenerated into a fabric for7: continuous expanses of mirrored glass or that is porous both on the grid of the street virtually windowless concrete megaliths. and in the continuous threads of public space These structures are often lauded for their that wind through the aggregated solid blocks concentration of private commercial functions of downtown.6 His Peachtree Center Mall, and their magnetic ability to bring people to occupying a block with a number of office Atlanta.8 Yet through their solidity, scale, and buildings, retracts downtown's main retail ambiguity, they stand as irritating center into the interior of a block with discontinuities in the accessible surface of securable entrance points and a continuous downtown. flow of the public way through an interior space. In addition, the keystone examples listed above, and Portman's Hyatt Regency, _______________________________________________THE COMPLETIST_________729 The manner in which the physical pushed first to the opposite sidewalk to characteristics of solidity and lack of glimpse the parapet, and even further still to articulation situate the Marts as see two corners at once. As with sculpture in intrasystemically incomplete objects in the the round, the viewer is kept roving about the pedestrian's city can be tracked parallel to an object, stalking it in an attempt to establish a examination of K.'s exclusion from the Castle frame of reference by surveying it against the as a rhetorical locus of power. For K., the spaces and bounding elements in the distance, Castle is socially impenetrable. Although a by remaining tenuously distant from it. This stranger to the village, K. persists in believing spatial reading of the object foregrounds its that he can assert his way through the primary architectural correlation as an obstacle bureaucracy which seals the Castle from even and cements its physical impenetrability. the villagers. The Castle stands as an agent of social stratification which the locals, who have More subtly and lastingly than their solidity accepted their exclusion for a lifetime, have no and scale, it is the ambiguity of their use in the interest in assisting K., the hapless parvenu, to face of conflicting echoes that renders the access. Nor does the Castle, which has bogged Marts impenetrable. A haze of civic down his case in impenetrable red tape and propaganda beclouds the presence and effect doublespeak. of the structures. Urban growth advocates trumpet the beneficial presence of the Marts The tenets of alienation and impenetrability and their role in concentrating powerful capital forwarded by the policies of the Marts are into downtown.10 As if seeking to verify these become a physically exclusive architecture in qualities of beneficence, one looks for depth service of social exclusion. The literal and invitation. In its place one finds only impenetrability of the Marts

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