Master of Architecture Thesis Rice University 

i. attention + distraction


[f1]
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (second version),” 40. Of the thousands of daily visitors to the Louvre, many are headed to see the Mona Lisa – swiftly passing artwork lining the walls full of equal detail and beauty. For most, the intention is not to analyze the painting itself, but rather to snap a photo proving they were in the painting’s presence for a quick moment. Those who want to see the detail in the painting will likely resort to documentation rather than attempt to fight through the crowd of tourists. 
[f2]
Ubiquitous Site, 1994 
Arakawa Gins
[f3]
Installation view of the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” 1972
Attentive and distracted — two states one will straddle between throughout life.  The degree of attentiveness and distraction will vary throughout one’s day, shifting as the activities an individual is doing change. Habitual actions often parallel distraction, while specific tasks or activities require attention. Walter Benjamin explains this concept in detail in his essay titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” first published in 1935. He explains the concept simply through discussion of viewing art in museums, and eventually states that, “Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction through the collective. The laws of architecture’s reception are highly instructive.”(1) One could argue that the most successful architecture is also the one experienced in the most distracted state. People, people being those who are not trained in design, often do not notice the parts of a building that work well. That is the expectation. The moments that bring attention are when something does not work “the way it should.” As designers, the intention shouldn’t be to design so beautifully that it disappears, but rather that it is recognized and provokes attentive states without being problem-prone.

Benjamin emphasizes the importance of understanding attentive and distracted states relative to architecture since it is an art form that has forever existed for humans. He states how buildings are digested in a binary, tactually and through observation. He pairs tactile interactions with behaviors resulting from habit and observation to attentive states. In addition to Benjamin’s behavioral pairings in architectural spaces, it is also important to note the factor of scale. Although this is not absolute, spaces and things smaller in scale may lend themselves to be experienced tactually, while those larger are only accessible visually through observation. As designers, the intention should be to draw out attentive states associated with distant observation to intentional moments of tactile interaction that typically go unnoticed through habit.

The interest of provoking attentive states through interacting with architectural spaces is not a new one. A collection of designers have experimented with the standards and widely accepted expectations of architecture through parallel stances, achieving various effects. In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, designers from Italy were quickly recognized internationally for their radical design movement. Designing objects for day-to-day uses that looked nothing like their mundane counterparts. Around the same time, Arakawa Gins started their experimental designs and continued until their last project in 2014. The couple was convinced that architecture could have a hand in resisting death, developed through their reversible destiny theory. A solo artist recognized as Absalon, who surfaced in the early 1990s, experimented with designs intentionally avoiding standards when it came to spatial dimensions. The nature of these works will be distilled along with Walter Benjamin’s conversation on attention and distraction.

(1) Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (second version),” 40. 
italian radical design movement l 1960s-1970s 

[f4]
Superonda Sofa 
by Andrea Brazini, Archizoom Associates, 1966
[f5]
Kar-a-sutra 
by Mario Bellini, 1972

An object in most people’s lives, a car, re-imagined by Bellini in a more playful and flexible manner.
[f6]
Exhibition guests are viewing the objects placed in the display boxed in the museum courtyard. Placing objects into display boxes requires the visitor to pause and look at what is inside, even if it were to seem mundane or uninteresting outside of the box. 
[f7]
Tube Chair 
by Joe Colombo, 1969-1970


While taking a seat is something people do every day, when approaching these obscure seats, the designers invite the user to think about an action as mundane as sitting. 

[f8] 
Pratone 
by Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, Riccardo Rossi, 1971

While taking a seat is something people do every day, when approaching these obscure seats, the designers invite the user to think about an action as mundane as sitting. 
Italy’s radical design movement took shape in 1966 and continued through the early 1970s as it disseminated internationally. A movement which started in Florence, where students under Leonardo Savioli’s guidance were encouraged to explore and redefine the ways of living. A movement that might not have come to light if a group of people were not encouraged to experiment with designing abnormal day-to-day objects. Although the duration in which new designs were surfacing lasted around a decade, the impact on design-thinking was strong and lasting.

The movement was defined by the development of Superarchitettura and their Radical Manifesto. Within the manifesto they state, “Superarchitettura is the architecture of superproduction, super consumption, superinduction to consume, the supermarket, the superman, super petrol.”(2) This initial group eventually split to create Archizoom and Superstudio. Abnormally designed objects surfacing and entering conversations was the initial layer, but the fabrication and mass production of these objects is what allowed for the breakthrough to happen. Companies such as Artemide, Zanotta, Danese, and perhaps the most significant, Poltronova, took on fabricating and working with the designers of this time. These companies still exist today while actively fabricating some of the designs that originally turned heads inciting excitement and confusion.

While Florence was the origin of influential individuals and ideas, the collection of ideas and designs quickly made its curated entry to the United States in 1972 through one of the most established contemporary art museums, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, under the exhibition named, “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape.”  An exhibition about domestic spaces and objects intrinsically asks the viewers to dance between attentive and distracted states. The objects displayed alternated between being extremely foreign, where it made sense for it to be showcased, to being so familiar with nuanced interventions that viewers questioned what they should be analyzing. Different parts of the exhibition allowed for varied degrees of interaction or required pure observation. For the sake of this exhibition, the range of permitted interaction seems successful. The objects are not all showcased the same, nor in the expected manner. The visitor maybe forgets they are in a museum, wanting to sit on and decide which couch is the comfiest. However, only some seating arrangements are allowed to be interacted with, while others are placed in rows of display boxes requiring the viewer to think about how they might sit. The display boxes highlight the individual object, taking away all other context it would be associated with.

The effects of the unique condition of displaying the domestic is a parallel to the thesis’s interest in provoking intentional attentive states and accompanies Benjamin’s discussion on the normative state of architecture being digested in a distractedly  

A literary preparation was compiled to ensure a holistic understanding for the exhibition viewers, one the distracted viewer might have overlooked. In this literary curation there is a collection of historical articles reflecting and summarizing the significant moments of Italy’s design history. Followed up by a collection of critical essays in which a group of Italian design critics were asked to analyze the exhibition’s contents in a specific context. One of the critics, Filberto Menna, titled his essay, “A Design for New Behaviors” and discusses the crisis situation of the design of objects for consumption. In a portion of his essay he discusses, “the imaginary object and the real object,” explaining the transmittance of ideas. Menna’s discussion of the imaginary and real reflect Benjamin’s thoughts on capturing attention. Menna illustrates an artist straddling between the imaginary and real, suspending their ideas somewhere in between in an effort to bring a beauty of their imagined world, into the widely accepted real world. He states, “Transitional moments include a whole series of experiences, such as play and artistic activity, which so to speak lie halfway between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.”(3)  This transitional state Menna describes is one that requires the contemplation of the viewer. If consumed in a distracted state, the idea would simply not be understood. Producing images suspended in between reality and imagination, is the artist’s attempt to capture attention and avoid dismissal. If the idea was presented in complete reality, it would lose too much of the artist’s vision and fall victim to being consumed distractedly. If the idea is presented in the complete imagination, the artist could fail to capture attention through understanding reality, and again fall victim to being consumed distractedly. A strong statement from Menna capturing his feelings on the significance of the imagination opposing the reality is as follows. “On the other hand, the perfect, harmonious universe glimpsed by the artist in his imagination and rendered tangible in his work does not consent to an acceptance of a separate, divided, unhappy life, but demands a radical change in real existence.”(4) In the context of this thesis, demand for radical change can be seen in the design. When a designed condition grabs the attention of a user before going through a habitual task, the designer has welcomed the user into their world of imagination while the user goes through their state of reality.

(2) “Superarchitettura,” Wikipedia, June 1, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superarchitettura.
(3) Filiberto Menna, “A Design for New Behaviors,” in Italy: the New Domestic Landscape; Achievements and Problems of Italian Design. Edited by Emilio Ambasz. (Distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn. 1972), 409.
(4) Ibid, 410.
arakawa gins l 1936-2010 l 1941-2014

[f9]
Screen-Valve 
Arakawa Gins, 1985-1987, 
graphite and acrylic on paper, 30”x22.5”
[f10]
Reversible Destiny Lofts
2005, Mitaka, Tokyo. 

Apartment complex consisting of nine units designed using the sphere, the cube, and a tube.
[f11]
Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa)
2008, East Hampton, New York. 

A single-family residence built as a addition to a pre-existing house.
[f12]
“Container of Perceiving” 
by Arakawa Gins, 1984, 
watercolor, graphite,  and acrylic on paper, 42.5”x72.75”.
Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa met in New York in 1962, and a year later they started their journey of attempting to visualize a more optimistic world through writing, art, painting, and eventually architecture. Both were born relative to World War Two, which naturally influenced their outlook on life. While Arakawa was studying at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, his interest and affiliation with Neo-Dadaist organizers took root. He moved to New York in 1961 and was developing diagrammatic paintings and drawings which aided in his expression and exploration of human perception. A year later, as Arakawa joined forces with Gins, they continued to research and diagram the expected behaviors of human senses and perception together through a variety of mediums. They were adamant on challenging the accepted norms of everyday life. Once they began to work architecturally in the 1980s, their work pivoted critically, activating a new dimension. Individuals could finally interact spatially and be physically affected by their work, aside from visual and psychological pondering. A true test and experimentation stage surfaced, allowing them to develop their mantra, reversible destiny.

Their concept of reversible destiny was defined through designing architectural spaces to help escape death, which was rooted in designing conditions that demanded the users’ attention. They played with bright colors, and unusual spatial conditions, claiming that if humans were constantly aware of their body, and the way they move about a space, there would be no sinking into habits and letting go. “Most people, in choosing a new home, look for comfort … Nonsense. People, particularly old people, shouldn’t relax and sit back to help them decline.” Gins also stated, “We don’t have to be passive. We can reverse the usual downhill course of things.”(5) Although there is no explicit proof of the partners taking inspiration from Benjamin’s discussion around attention and distraction, their architectural explorations are easily in conversation with Benjamin’s concern of the distracted digestion of architecture.

Their latest work is a permanent installation titled “Biotopological Scale - Juggling Escalator” in view at Dover Street Market New York since 2013.

Their largest building project is the Reversible Destiny Lofts-Mitaka built in Mitaka, Tokyo which they have dedicated in the memory of Helen Keller as they described her as someone who practiced ‘reversible destiny’ in her own lifetime. This project is designed through the philosophy of ‘procedural architecture’ as they define it to challenge and stimulate the senses.





(5) Ellen Peirson, “Arakawa (1936-2010) and Gins (1941-2014),” The Architectural Review, July 9, 2021
absalon l 1964-1993

[f13]
Prototypes 
by Absalon, 1990
[f14]
Cell No. 2 (third version),
1993, 9.7 square meters in area
[f15]
Cell No. 2 (first version), 
1991, 9.7 square meters in area 
Meir Eshel was an Israeli-French artist and sculptor who chose the name Absalon for his professional career. Absalon had developed a wide collection of work in his short life, all of which could find a place in the discussion of challenging norms and the abnormal eventually normalizing. However, only a specific series of his work will be discussed. The projects which he called “cells,” the homes he designed to house himself in, in six different cities: Paris, Zurich, Tokyo, Frankfurt, New York, and Tel Aviv. He explained these cells during a lecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in May of 1993. He described how he abided by no existing standards of design, stating that he is 15 cm taller than the average man and no averages reflect his body’s needs. He studied his own movements and desires to create a set of standards tailored specifically to himself. While ignoring societal standards, he is challenging himself to be attune with his body, his movements, and his lifestyle within these cells ranging from four to eight meters squared in footprint.

Although Absalon’s design exercise and experiment is restricted to himself, he went through an exercise of requiring full attention of himself to redefine dimensional standards. As he is describing his cell designed for Zurich he explains how he can only stand tall in two moments of the house, the rest he must move through while bending over. He states, “I will have to revise my notions of comfort in order to live here comfortably”(6) He describes a similar example of one’s body conforming to the irregularities around them. “I think it’s a bit like, if you have a cupboard that’s a bit too low down. The first time you open it, “ow!”, a terrible bang, then you do it again, and again, but with time and with use you develop a special movement for this cupboard.”(7) Absalon’s “Cells” project is a true test of recognizing one’s daily movements and the way one takes up space. Redefining his design standards through notions of comfort and challenging comfort was a strategy to push him out of a distracted state.

(6) Absalon, Susanne Pfeffer, and Kunst-Werke Berlin. Absalon. 258.
(7) Ibid.

Feyza Mutlu
Master of Architecture Thesis
Rice University School of Architecture linkedin.com/in/feyza-mutlu
fnmutlu1@gmail.com
@fnmutlu1