Figures and Logics (FigLog) is a studio about an architecture of essentials. A studio that addresses typology, formal syntax, materiality and tectonics as a means to open up logics of gentle transgression, allowing one to move between figuration and abstraction, the sacred and the secular, the natural and the constructed, the ideal and the improvised, the local and the global. This transgressive shifting between oppositions is not to resolve them but to create a resonance with each. This local response belies the underlying global diktats, influences and ideas transmuted from elsewhere. Rather than ‘local versus global’, a glocal condition that is the result of a productive tension between the two is the operative reality of the world. Beyond sheltering, signifying, or entertaining— architecture affords a uniquely human sense of heightened transcendence by setting up a destabilizing relationship with the familiar world - a strangeness that forces a reconfiguration of reality as it was. This is an ephemeral condition that reveals itself to us as part of the architectural engagement, moments that resonate between the mind, body and the world. Do we not come across these experiences equally in the colonnades of the mosque at Cordoba and a forlorn walk deep in the woods?
“To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can’t be said so well with words.”
- David Lynch
Our focus is on designing actual buildings on specific sites through a process of formal and typological transformation and of archetypal hybridization. Our search is for “immanent form,” or place-specific architecture. This is in effect also a search for the ‘architecture of architecture’ – an architectural language. The current discourse in much of what constitutes the contemporary language of architecture is largely defined by a nearly seamless relationship between interior and exterior, evenly lit interiors, structural expression, with exterior articulation reduced to a glass box or a translucent screen. This is the architecture of the ‘thin, fast, and explicit’. Our intention is to provide an alternative model, one that operates through tonal space (space defined with more shadow than light) to challenge overtly transparent space – the modern paradigm. This ‘thick, slow, and implicit’ architecture affords a variable and continuous dialogue between light and dark to describe more complex spaces, suited to the use and desire of experience.
This alternate approach also asserts that architectural significance is largely the result of critically resolute elements - columns, windows, doors, stairs, walls - at the exterior and interiors and the in-between, uncovering universal characteristics of singular elements that in turn are spatially generative. The element is a figure with internal and external logics, and we will study how they, as a singular elements, can generate place out of space and into the figural. In this way, there may be great distinction between the exteriority and interiority of an architectural work.
In our goal to broaden our understanding of architectural space, we will develop a tactile interiority through the confluence of material surfaces (worked, patterned, textured, etc.) tonal space, and zenithal light (light primarily from above). The use of zenithal light provides for a ‘distant reality’ for space that is illuminated from openings above with few (if any) openings in walls. Here illumination is primary, variable and takes precedence over the contemplation of a view.
“No more is it a question of speaking of space and light; the question is to make space and light speak to us.”
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Our studio is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a truly unique place in American cultural and historical memory— especially as a crucible of music, migration, and civil rights. Widely recognized as one of the foundational homes of Delta blues music, a genre that shaped rock, soul, and jazz, Clarksdale was home to legendary musicians like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and Sam Cooke. Beyond its musical legacy, Clarksdale was a major departure point for African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South during the ‘Great Migration’ and played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement. Clarksdale isn’t just a town—it’s a living archive of American struggle, creativity, and transformation. Most recently home to the acclaimed hit movie ‘Sinners’, Clarksdale is emblematic of the present-day Delta and, like many small towns in America, is depressed but is trying desperately to make a future out of its past.
Clarksdale truly is making a future for itself, from the innovative Travelers Hotel by Office Jonathan Tate to Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club, to the Clarksdale Mural Tour, there is a spirit of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship that is alive and well. Building on the city’s powerful past, these new places - along with a number of outstanding new restaurants and entertainment venues - are making Clarksdale a destination for authentic Southern arts, cuisine, and culture that are making national news.
Our field trip will be immersive, first flying to Northwest Arkansas, home to the fabled Ozarks and increasingly recognized as a center for architecture and design, especially in recent years because of the Walton Family Foundation’s Design Excellence Program but also because of the legendary and foundational work of E. Fay Jones and other ‘Ozark Modernists’. Modeled after a similar program in Columbus, Indiana, the Design Excellence Program promotes the highest level of design in the development of public buildings and spaces, identifying top design professionals and funding the design of select projects including Ross Barney Architects, Duvall Decker Architects, Marvel Architects, Trahan Architects, de Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop, LTL Architects, and more.
After exploring the architecture and landscape of Northwest Arkansas, we will embark on a road trip from the Ozark plateau to the Arkansas River Valley and on to the Mississippi River Delta – to Memphis, the quintessential river city and on to Clarksdale, Mississippi, deep in the heart of Mississippi Delta - a true American road trip. Along the way we will explore back roads and small towns that are rich in culture and history, interacting with local citizens and influential architects alike as we look back and forth in time. Visits to important museums and cultural sites such as the Emmett Till Museum, Sun Studios, the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, and the Museum of the Blues, among others will help to frame our understanding of the region, its powerful history, and its potential.
For this trip and the studio project, we are looking for people with a sense of adventure, eager for a traverse crossing landscapes, moving through space, and figuratively moving through period of times and experiences. In our studio project, powerful architecture, sweeping landscapes, and stirring histories will meld and merge into a cultural destination as a means of economic revitalization, building on the past in the design of entirely new buildings so architecture becomes a key player in the city and region’s culture as much as it has in Northwest Arkansas and Columbus, Indiana.
The cultural landscape surrounding Clarksdale will provide a real-time immersion into a myriad of tangible constraints and intangible possibilities in this mecca of blues music, civil rights history, arts, and southern cuisine. Students will be given an opportunity to individually research and define a program based in the arts, music, and hospitality as three-dimensional real estate within the particularities of the region’s cultural and economic revitalization. We imagine a studied relationship between the surrounding extensive agriculture fields and the fragile urban fabric – an open site – betwixt and between - where there is more space than form.
“But there has to be that interval of neglect, there has to be discontinuity: it is religiously and artistically essential.
That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for ruins: ruins provide incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins. There has to be (in our new concept of history) an interim of death and rejection before there can be renewal and reform…That is how we reproduce the cosmic scheme and correct history.”
- J.B. Jackson, ‘The Necessity of Ruins’
Figures and Logicsis a studio that promotes analogous thinking (the comparison of similar things) and analog making (iterative physical models and hand drawing). Digital representational techniques (digital crafted collage, hyperreal render images) and drawings conventions (line-drawing) will be critical to the process and product of the studio.
As such, the semester is organized as a series of drawing, modeling, and analytical exercises, serving as specific benchmarks for design development. There will be an emphasis on the disciplined seeing of the qualities and characteristics of the objects of study, and on intelligent and compelling responses or inventions. What is learned or understood from these observations is interpreted and recorded - drawn, modeled, and transformed - providing the basis for individual invention, intervention, and a synthesis of the spatial, formal, tectonic, and conceptual aspects of architecture. As a point of departure, each student will use a randomly selected, digitally-crafted, wonderfully strange, speculative façade from the Bildbauten series of 32 images by Swiss architect and artist Philipp Schaerer. These façade images will initiate a process of transformation and the configuring of form, space, and material into a singular abstract figure – a holistic and impactful work of architecture enhanced by relationships with the surrounding context. The strict composition of Schaerer’s images serves as a powerful counterpoint to the condition on the ground in Clarksdale, which is largely (but not exclusively) one of erasure and decay. By immersing ourselves in the oppositions of the ideal and the real – each of which can be inspiring or unsettling – we aspire not to necessarily to resolve them, but to create a resonance between them. By working holistically and fluidly, insights and ideas carry over from one phase or medium of inquiry to the next, informing details as much as form and space while documentation of local materials and textures influence plan-making and openings as much as surfaces.
“This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.”
- Douglas R. Hofstadter
Schaerer’s images owe a certain debt to the documentary and frontal nature of the iconic typological photographs of Berndt and Hilla Becher, a pioneering German artist duo whose work reshaped the landscape of 20th-century photography. Beginning in the late 1950s, they devoted their careers to documenting the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America—structures like water towers, blast furnaces, coal bunkers, and gas tanks.
“Type is often linked to …two terms; to function through types based on use, and to tectonics through types based on structural systems. Typology can also be seen as a catalog of general solutions to problems of architectural arrangement, idealized to the most diagrammatic level. Considered this way, perhaps type constitutes what Derrida has called “the architecture of architecture,” or the equivalent of deep structure in language.” - Kate Nesbitt
Rather than focusing specifically on what architects and artists do, we wish to look at what they look toward when seeking inspiration - in this case to the power of anonymous structures that grow from a respect for the simple physical conditions of places and cultures, much like the structures documented by the Bechers. In Clarksdale and the surrounding agricultural (now more agri-industrial) landscape, an array of intersections exists between figural elements – silos, ducts, chutes, bins, etc. – with direct vernacular buildings – barns, warehouses, factories, etc. The intersection of these figures and the buildings that embrace is rich territory for inspiration for form, materiality, tectonics, structure, and the interplay of light and shadow. We hope for something in between, combining iconic figures and iconic experiences, brought together and manifest as part of the joy and opportunity found in recreating strangeness.
In Clarksdale, undeniably a place and a culture, we will establish essential connections between precedent, speculation, and transformation in order to identify, produce, and develop a series of tectonically rich structures and spatially expressive abstract figures that offer praise and reverence for the past and hallelujahs for the future in this landscape of unholy unions…