Browsing by Author "Goffi, Federica"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Fiendish Dreams - Reverse Engineering Modern Architecture
    Heinrich, Linda Kay (Virginia Tech, 2024-02-07)
    Winsor McCay drew delightful drawings about the dreams of a Welsh rarebit fiend, 'rare bits' inspired by an overindulgence in cheese. Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend was a Saturday cartoon that appeared in the New York Evening Telegram from 1904 to 1911, psychic twin to Little Nemo in Slumberland that appeared concurrently in the Sunday Funnies of the New York Herald from 1905-1911. 'Slumberland' was a Neo-classical fantasy that closely resembled the idealized White City of the Chicago World's Fair (1893), that inspired the architecture of Coney Island's Dreamland (1905-1911), which beckoned to McCay as he drew from his house just across Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. The capricious side of this Architecture emerged in McCay's cartoons. A self-taught illustrator, McCay began his career in Detroit working in dime museums, worlds of wonder—filled with monsters—dioramas and sideshow performers whose livelihood depended on their ability to amaze an audience. Just this sort of rare and gifted fellow, McCay parlayed his entertaining lampoonery of Slumberland into some of the world's first animations on vaudeville. As with the Rarebit Fiend, Little Nemo's dreams were brought on by overindulgence, in his case of too many donuts or Huckleberry Pie. But, this was merely a pretense for McCay's fantastical 'dream' mode of thinking, a potentially useful body of knowledge that was simultaneously explored by Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust, who linked the mechanisms employed by the unconscious in dreaming to those at play in wit. Architectural drawing—seen through McCay's cartoons and early animations—has a kind of 'gastronomical' alchemy that inadvertently became a treatise on the architectural imagination. Fiend and Little Nemo affected the psychic mood of early modern Architecture—its 'childhood' in the milieu of White Cities—that was both added to and commented on by Winsor McCay's pen. His cartoons portray the hidden 'flavors' of the buildings springing up a century ago. This 'other'—surreal—aspect of the White Cities, seasoned with whirling iron Ferris wheels and Flip-Flop rides, newly invented elevators and electric lights—and even fun house mirrors that made buildings suddenly seem very tall—were the ingredients that caused the fiend and Nemo to wake up, which ultimately became the culinary school of modern Architecture. McCay's 'fiendish' depictions show us that the right blend of humor and awe is a recipe for happiness.
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    Hagia Sophia as a Facture: Originality through Appropriations
    Akinci Yalt, Sevgi Tugce (Virginia Tech, 2021-07-13)
    This dissertation aims to investigate the hybrid facture of one of the most influential buildings of architectural history, Hagia Sophia, which has been a source of wonder and awe since its construction in the sixth century. Since the first temple erected on that site; old-new, future-past, forgetting-remembering are all intertwined in the imaginative act of initiating and its continuous making as re-makings that manifest the building as a palimpsest-in-the-becoming. Its originality lies not any of its chronological beginnings but its diachronic facture of interweaved historical, mythical and architectural strata of its remakings through appropriation. The conquest of Constantinople, a central moment in Hagia Sophia's macro-history, marked the beginning of the diachronic appropriation of the site and building elements that are of Byzantine origin. By employing the south turret as the site of the minaret, the appropriation became a twofold strategy of preservation and innovation that ensured sacredness and continuity. An intertwined narrative was factured by complementing the material appropriation with deliberately constructed mythopoeic and visual re-makings of Byzantine texts and representations. Evliya Celebi's tale in which an Ottoman architect was said to have laid the foundations of a minaret preceding the conquest and the Dusseldorf manuscript, an idiosyncratic version of Buondelmonti's Liber Insularum Archipelagi are the two accounts through which this study aims to open-up a multi-directional dialogue to explore the appropriation program of Hagia Sophia. Within this framework, a critical revisiting of the concepts of facture, making, palimpsest, original, spolia and their respective relationships will provide clues to tackle the transformation process the building is going through currently. In a way, its hybrid facture will act as a paradigmatic model for the future undertakings.
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    The Sempiternal Nature of Architectural-Conservation and the Unfinished Building and Drawing
    Goffi, Federica (Virginia Tech, 2010-02-02)
    Conservation is today often interpreted as the preservation of a still-shot, an understanding informed by the belief that by displaying photographic memory of the past, it is possible to gain access to it. Naturalistic representation is unequivocal and presents the onlooker with a single meaning. The dominance of the photorealistic image as model for memory, should be challenged by undermining the notion that architectural representation is a portrayal of likeness, restoring its full potential as an iconic representation of presence. A micro-historical study of the Renaissance concept of restoration, focused on Tiberio Alfarano's 1571 ichnography of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, offers an alternative paradigm in order to inform, critically, contemporary theory and the practice of the renewal of mnemic buildings. The hybrid drawing (1571) extends beyond the opera of graphic architecture, realizing a real effigy. Alfarano factured a track-drawing, providing memory traces on the drawing-site, which, acting like a veil, bear marks of the building's presence within time. The ichnography makes visible a "hallowed configuration", conceived as a substratum for the imagination of conservation. This defines a collective daydreaming strategy, from which multiple authors can imagine possible futures. Ambiguity and polysemy inform the drawing, generating an equivocal space where unforeseeable inventions occur by the process of future predictions by recollecting memories. This invites merging multiple stories. Grasping the significance of Alfarano's drawing, one begins to comprehend the mistaken belief in the primacy of photo rendering to access a building and conserve its essence. Any essence cannot be achieved through exact visual reconstruction, rather through a chiasmus of past and present form, expressing allegoric significance. The retrospective and prospective character of the architectural-conservation process can be experienced through the intermediacy of hybrid-drawings directing the gaze simultaneously in two directions; a pre-existent condition engages in dialogue with future design. This is a condition absent from today's practice, where measured drawings and design drawings are often kept separate. Seen this way, architectural drawings could rejoin these two temporal conditions, through metaphoric or literal transparency, and allow for a real transformation within continuity of identity.
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    Well-Tempered Building: Michelangelo's full-scale template drawings at San Lorenzo
    Foote, Jonathan D. (Virginia Tech, 2014-02-18)
    This work questions the present migration toward prescriptive building procedures through a micro-historical reading of Michelangelo's use of architectural template drawings. Examining the artist's ten surviving paper templates (called "modani") from the facade of San Lorenzo (1516-1520), the Medici Chapel (1519-1525), and the Laurentian Library (1524-1527), Michelangelo's template-making practices are mined for possible ways to reorient current thinking toward a dynamic worksite that embraces, rather than shuns, in-progress alterations. Taking the common word origin of 'template' and 'temper' as a starting clue, the relationship between Michelangelo's template drawings and the building site are theorized as a process of tempering, a 15th and 16th century term investigated through key sources such as Ficino's writings on health ("De vita"), the commentaries on Vitruvius by Barbaro and Cesariano, and Biringuccio's treatise on metallurgy ("De la pirotechnia"). From this, key connections emerge between Michelangelo's template-making and contemporaneous practices of tempering, where dynamic, in-situ material adjustments achieve great effect through tiny alterations. Whether in the health of the body, music, or material techniques, tempering offers a method of in-progress commensuration between axiomatic proportions and those of material, sensibly present harmonies. The tempering power of templates is investigated in three parts that follow the transmutation of Michelangelo's templates between paper, tin, and stone. The investigation begins with paper and, following a close examination of the extant drawings, discredits the common conclusion that Michelangelo's templates were drawn free-hand. Rather, it is shown that the extant templates are actually a small fragment of a once robust collection of parent and offspring templates related through tracing. Next, parallel practices in bell-casting and column profiling are discussed in terms of template materials, particularly tin, and how small adjustments may be leveraged to great narrative and conceptual effect in the emerging work. The final part examines the San Lorenzo building site through assembling the body of architecture, where templates are seen as surrogate building stones in the conception and adjustment of the in-progress work. The dissertation concludes with an assertion that Michelangelo's use of templates as instruments for micro-interventions amidst an unstable building site serves as a marvelous exemplar for tempering as a method for materializing the poetic image through disciplined practice.