In an interview with Ellen Lupton in 1994,¹ Michael Rock said something about meaning coming from “the forms of design itself”, and mentioned that the aesthetics of letterpress having class identity encoded within. I assume by “the forms of design”, he was referring to the relationship between process and meaning, rite?

Similarly, my drafting critic last fall in the BEB said that each drawing methodology (orthographic, isometric, perspective et cetera) can tell a story, and by privledging different viewpoints, you change the story. Seems obvious when I write that point down here, but it was quite an illuminating notion for me to hear, at the time.

Figure 1. Perspective view of Geometric Confusion.²

Figure 2. Planometric projection view of Geometric Confusion.²²²

But so this weekend, I was having a drink with Laura on the roof of the Gansevoort Hotel, kicking off a >48h bender of idiotic decadence and intoxication, and I was amused that I could see some brilliantly clean examples from the typology described in Steven Holl’s Pamphlet Architecture number 5, The Alphabetical City.³ I’ve always been sort of a fan of this book⁴, probably just because it addresses urbanism in terms of type, however formally.

Figure 3. T-shaped airshaft in some building in the meatpacking district.

I could only see this shit, however, cuz I was on the roof of a pricey hotel, many stories above the buildings in question. Generally this is the case with any sort of planometric design: you have to be relatively quite high up in order to have a viewpoint that tells you what is planometrically what — unless you yourself are the architect.

Figure 4. The cover of the book in question.

My mom used to be the head of the dance department at Wellesley College, where she worked for almost 20 years. I grew up playing around on its campus, which really is quite elysian and gorgeous. I was always struck, specifically, by the distinctly non-elysian science center.⁵ As a kid, I was drawn to its labyrinthine Alice-in-Wonderlandishness. I would amuse and occasionally confound my mother by getting purposefully lost in there, because it was deliciously disorienting.

I revisited the Wellesley science center when I was in college, and I was amazed at how completely incoherent it seemed to my newly designophilic eye. Bridgelike pathways went everywhere,⁶ the signage was kind of nuts, and you couldn’t get to where you thought you could get when you looked around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really, but hey.

My friend, one of my mom’s students, knew how to get up onto the roof, tho, so we did that in short order. When you looked down into the building through the one of the skylights, it suddenly made a great deal more sense, visually. The crazy bridges were actually radially arranged around a central core. Programmatically separate areas were deliniated cleanly. And so forth.

(At this point in my life I had much to learn of bullshit design language, it should be noted, so I didn’t say anything about programmatically separate areas or radial fuckshit. I probably blurted, “oh so now it makes sense” or somesuch.)

So yeah, you could say that planocentrism (a word I just made up just now) is a class thing, no? And a problem, I think. The idea that a program diagram can become a plan is so tempting, given the nature of drafting technique (including, of course, the methodology enforced by contemporary CAD systems). But people end up looking up at buildings way more often than they look down on them, cuz of gravity and whatnot… one could postulate a class gradient that follows elevation from sea level linearly,⁷ as well.

Indeed. As I ranted about two or so years ago,⁸ these starchitects enjoy their helicopter rides.⁹ At that level, one can free-associate with elaborate metaphor, and talk about a monstrous idea like a city as if it was a painting. Such thinking is constrained by the viewpoint, and makes little sense outside of the narrow socioeconomic strata the thinker is operating in. The upshot, then, is that we get coffeetable books filled with baroque but useless theory, and designers who earnestly believe that they are operating somewhere outside their own navel.

Not like I’m any better, of course; I was up at the rooftop bar having an overpriced mojito with the rest of ‘em. I’m just sayin’.

Figure 5. Rooftop mojito example (not in new york).