11th EAEA Envisioning Architecture: Design, Evaluation, Communication Conference in 2013

Track 3 | Conceptual Representation | Exploring the layout of the built environment

Transformation of typology over time: welcome to Albuquerque

ABSTRACT

The New Mexico license plate states that it is the “Land of Enchantment”. The open road, the automobile and the quest for individuality and adventure are all wrapped into an idea about the American dream that defines how and why Albuquerque has transformed. As a representational project, Welcome to Albuquerque examines the transmutation of the city from a collection of designed and built objects and infrastructures into an inhabited idea of “city”. Rather than using traditional site analysis techniques, this project experiments with a form of photographic abstraction that codifies time as layers to yield an alternate and multivalent reading. In this study, the real estate snapshot provides the point of departure.
Welcome to Albuquerque defines site via its reduction to fragments. (Fig. 1) Site can then read as a complex texture created over time and not as just property lines or real estate dollars. This reading is not fixed, frozen, or tied to a direct operational principle. Rather, this form of representation opens up play between isolated objects so as to allow outsiders (those not privy to witnessing change over the 40-50 years encapsulated in these real estate photos) a glimpse of the effects of time. The viewer is left to “fit” space back into a photograph that at once manifests a second of light (as time), comingling with space in real time to reveal an identity simultaneously fabricated of past, present and future. Welcome to Albuquerque is not only a graphic analysis of the suburb, but also an analysis of regionalism and simulacra. This paper makes a pretense towards a complex space seen through time by layering and codification. This project proposes a representational spatiality that goes beyond a prose/poetic diatribe and begins to visually grasp the complexities of the identity of the city as something against architecture of objects.

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AUTHORS

Genevieve Baudoin

Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, Planning and Design, Kansas State University, Manhattan, USA

Genevieve Baudoin is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University and a Registered Architect in New Mexico. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MArch from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She has worked professionally with both Foster + Partners and Antoine Predock Architect. She has taught previously at the University of New Mexico and the University of Kansas, before taking her position at K-State. Her research interests are in the changing tectonic relationship of site and structure in architecture, and in developing representational tools and strategies to understand and promote these complexities.

Bruce Johnson

Department of Architecture, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

Bruce A. Johnson received his Undergraduate Degree in Architecture from Kansas State University where he was awarded the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Bachelor of Architecture Traveling Fellowship, which afforded the study of sacred architecture in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. In 1994 he received the Lowenfisch Memorial Prize for his Split Level Sod House while completing his Graduate Degree in Architecture at Columbia University. He has practiced with Stanley Tigerman and is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Kansas where his research focuses on direct fabrication and systems integration within the space frame structural typology.

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