hello everybody and welcome to the 11th lecture in histories of the future uh skeletons and glass and in this lecture we are going to focus on or begin from the departure point of the tectonic one of the elements of the histories of the future Matrix and um to begin let's look at this diagram it's a diagram by the uh late German architect and engineer fry Otto and if we read it beginning at the bottom left hand corner you see that it's a diagram which is oriented around materialities tectonic materials materials that are used in construction so we have Stein stone halts wood um Lem like Earth bamboos and raw uh bamboo and tubes and from these origin points fry Otto makes moves from raw materiality in the case of stones to amount to a tower from a tower to a basic post and lintel span across a void from the tower from into the block from the Block into pyramids into arches which are made of uh you know bricks composite blocks to larger span Bridge structures domes Dooms into uh four-part vaults and then thinking of stone in the new form of aggregate aggregate into concrete concrete into cast columns thin shell concrete and long spanning Bridges or you take wood starts with uh something like a wigwam where the wood is leaning to on itself into a different kind of Technology this could be a pagoda form where wood is being used both as a compressive post and beam and rafters which transmutes into more complicated uh roof structures like Eaves which are triangular in form become more 3D movement frames and it keeps going through various different kinds of these materials through the bamboo into um Huts that might remind us of some of the uh nomadic shelters that we looked at in earlier weeks combined then with textiles like the Bedouin tents that we've also seen and there's this line of continuity that's linking together materialities with structural forms and also it's moving through space and time so we're seeing examples from different Architectural Traditions and also different historical periods in that sense uh we could refer to this diagram as a trans-historical and trans-cultural tectonic world and this is a great way for us to begin thinking about the tectonic uh in the context of histories of the future for two reasons one because it's trans-historical meaning it covers architectural projects traditions from many different eras so it's linking together history with future but it's also trans-cultural and this is a theme of a lot of the work that we've been um investigating that it comes from a variety of traditions and sees interconnections between the two so this is the basis on which we're going to approach an exploration of the tectonic the idea of the tectonic um in architecture uh today and just to um kind of recall within the Matrix the tectonic is a really key in uh component we're also going to be thinking intersectionally um meaning how does the tectonic intersect with other kinds of discourse or debates or history whether that has to do with the ecological or the embodied or the technical the tectonic will be approaching from an intersectional point of view a trans-cultural point of view and a trans-historical point of view uh so to um to kind of underscore a bit more with a bit more specificity the fundamentality of the tectonic and of structure let's consult the readings that we looked at today or two of the readings that we looked at today to reinforce a bit more the basis or the rationale for tweeting the idea of the tectonic um as uh as a fundamental concern so this is let's just look at Kenneth brampton's Rappel Allah order the case for the tectonic um in which you know he lays down some uh uh some kind of fundamental and grounding ideas so starting with the idea that architecture must of necessity be embodied in structural and constructional form it's kind of obvious but it's worth um restating that this is uh the simple basis on which the tectonic uh is kind of relevant to architecture because of architecture's structural and constructed nature in Frampton reinforces that by saying that the structural unit can be considered as the irreducible essence of architectural form so structure as opposed to meaning or significance or context or social function um it's the structure which is the unit of irreducible essence in architectural form this is I mean we want may want to debate some of these terms but for now let's um put these forwards as like a basis from which at least to uh proceed uh developing from this idea Frampton states that uh the structure can have a potentially poetic manifestation of structure so this is something different this is something Beyond as it were mere practicality um uh there's a poetry about structure um and Frampton defines poetry or poasis as an act of making and revealing so the important Point here about structural Poetics is not just that they're there not just that there is a structural system but that system manifests itself it's explicit um it makes and reveals itself it's conveying uh its own nature and this is um this is yeah well Frampton and we can refer to as the uh Poetics of construction and I think that's the question uh that we can ask of ourselves of any project that we're analyzing not just how it's constructed but what are the Poetics of this construction how does it reveal itself so if that's uh Frampton's point of view we can just add a couple of things from Adrian 40. uh here who draws on another idea of necessity saying the M every member of architecture uh every member meaning every kind of separate piece of the structure is the result of a necessity as in the vegetable and Animal Kingdom there is not a form or a process that is not produced by the necessity of the organism and this makes an important connection between architectural structures architectural forms and organisms and that sets up a link between architecture and the natural world which is going to be uh important in many of the contexts that we're going to explore today um in another place 40 rights that are what he's quoting here a German writer Schuler that in art as in nature an organism is an assemblage of interdependent parts of which the structure is determined by the function and of which the form is an expression of the structure so again is dealing with an interdependence of Parts a structures made of this assemblage of interdetependent Parts which is determined by function and that function gets expressed in the form so the idea of an organism of assembled parts that are bound together by a function that is another layout that we can place on the idea of the tectonic right so that gives you I think an idea of the grounding fundamentality of tectonics as um a way of approaching and analyzing architecture so let's go into that and look at it with some specific uh examples and I just want to I guess see here that part of this mode of looking of the tectonic is to bring into play some of our engineering or structural knowledge but it's also at the same time to think about cultural history to think about tectonics as a cultural history and holding these two things together means thinking intersectionally thinking how we can relate pure structure organic interdependence of parts and how forces are distributed in a building with the specific cultural context and histories in which that structure emerges and asking ourselves how do these things intersect how might they express and relate to one another so uh we'll look at that with a couple of examples just one further thing to say is another rationale for thinking about the tectonic in the particular period that we're working in is that during this period the idea of the tectonic itself first becomes rigorously theorized and for the first time authors begin Architects and thinkers and writers on architect start using the tectonic as the basis for constructing histories it's not that the tectonic hadn't been referred to at all in the past in architectural history but it was never quite centralized and used in such a determining fashion as it began to be used particularly in the 19th century and um it's a kind of long complicated uh historiographic story we'll just touch on a part of it to bring out some of its um problematics um so we're going to intervene in this way of thinking about structure and let's pick up uh at the site that we've mentioned a couple of times before which is the 1851 Crystal Palace in London as you will remember it was the building that was rapidly assembled from a kit of parts this is the plan of it as a massive exhibition space for the exhibit of various kinds of Imperial or Colonial culture merchandise Machinery art um in this huge um this huge volume and um you know if we look at it from the point of view of structure and tectonics like Frampton or 40 were proposing we can see that um for sure it's a building that reveals its structure we can read its constructedness through these quite beautiful photographs from the 1850s Crystal Palace of course one of the first buildings to be documented uh photographically through its process of construction deconstruction and reconstruction Acts a second site and so let's try and apply something of our Structural Engineering knowledge just to identify that this is a metal frame building uh it's made out of wrought iron and cast iron and it's based on a system of column supports which take the compressive load the thin because metal is strong in compression and in tension they flare out at the tops in order to carry better the load that they're supporting and then between the columns there's this network of trusses trust beams that have a certain depth that depth helps them to resist the bending movement that develops in a structural frame and the shear forces coming from side to side and that shape of that trust in the cross bracing that helps contain those forces and there are other elements of cross bracing you see these cable tires which are helping stabilize the frame from moving side to side so that if the frame lurches to one side that Force gets resisted by the uh the tension that develops in those cable ties and this is all extremely visible it's not hidden behind walls and in fact I wonder if we can see in some of the color images um you get a sense of it here but that frame was also painted and um that's the whole history that we won't go into completely now but there was a the kind of structural color theory uh developed by Owen Jones who collaborated on this project um to use color to use paint as a way of marking and differentiating different structural units so uh that's how the frame of the Crystal Palace was developed and this pure engineering solution has its own Aesthetics and I think that's the question to sort of evaluate and test how do you read what the Aesthetics are there's clearly a sense of seriality of repetition of individual units that gives a sense of order rationalization measurability which is defined by the Rhythm or syntax of repeating elements separated by voids also read vertically the frame has uh larger stories separated by these bands or straps of balustrades and trusses so a structural solution also provides a kind of Poetics I think one could talk about the skeletal Poetics of iron and glass uh in the Crystal Palace itself um excuse me the construction drawings that accompany that project they also give you a sense of the layering and interconnection between different structural elements made of different materials performing different taking different forms performing different functions so you see here clearly the um the roof arches in wrought iron the cable tie backs and then the herringbone glazing pattern of course within a frame system a frame construction system the joints between things take on particular significance because it's the rigidity of the joint which helps the frame carry Force transmits the gravity loads between the differently assembled elements and just like an organism as 40 was thinking of architecture as an assemblage of interdependent parts it's the joint which articulates and knits together this organism this architectural organism so you see here these quite beautiful um detailed drawings of the uh the in this case the cable tie joints um of the of the frame there now when approached from the point of view of the tectonic there are further layers and resonances of history and cultural social history that go along with any history of engineering or structure or uh technology we looked briefly before at the Palm House at Q um as a as a greenhouse typology and we saw how there was uh an important relationship an important ecological structural relationship between the design of the ribbed domes and uh things like water lilies specimens which were housed in greenhouses which also provided inspiration for biomorphic structural innovation if we just look a little bit more attentively uh at the details of this Construction um the important kind of questions or Avenues begin to end up just looking at the overall system of construction uh in the dome here we can observe that is constituted by these major beams which are the primary structural supports interconnected by um minor struts which also form the lattice work in which the glazing is housed well we know that or hopefully we know that um these beams are structurally optimized we can tell that because they're very thin the thinner and the lighter they are the more economic obviously but the geometry the structural dimensioning betrays their functions so they have this depth and again it's that depth of the beam which gives it a good cross section which can resist bending moments but you also see that it's flanged so it's wider at the top than it is at the bottom and that width provides the structural support on which this lattice work can be bolted or riveted uh but it doesn't need that flange at the bottom so it's like a a t cross section uh now all right I guess we may notice that because we how we was a bit Architects them because we put our structural uh goggles on but although that may seem a kind of simple unremarkable observation thinking historically and knowing that this building is uh was it here 1844 very early we can extrapolate from this um a deeper history about the origin of this structural element this is one of the first uses of a building element the effectively the the I-beam which is now you know one of the widest uh most commonly circulated used pieces of um Structural Engineering well that has a history um and in fact that history is one which connects uh architectural structures like the Palm House at Q with a world like adjacent to architecture which is the world of um Maritime technology and boot design because it was really in the development of uh boots and Maritime craft that many of these engineering Innovations were first made one of the first major wrought iron ships was made just a couple of years before the queue um Palm House and it was made by the engineer Isabel Kingdom Bruno the SS Great Britain it was made in Bristol in Britain and it was actually more or less the same size as the bomb house just over 300 feet long and you see here this is a cross section um of that ship and you know even the very idea of the beam like this ordinary common word that we use all the time in architecture that actually comes uh from nautical terminology because the beam is the width of a ship and that's the word beam kind of originates first of all in that context and refers to this structural member which is uh the beam that stiffens the hull of the ship and it was through advances in ship design as well as Railway design which is another oh this is another story that the the thing that we now know is the I-beam first emerged and you can see in the 1840s 1850s these were the first experiments with this kind of a structural element and it wasn't first of all strictly an I-beam I mean there were all kinds of different um profiles and uh initially they were multi-beam assemblages so you see here in these drawings um this element represents a rivet so they were multiple components assembled together and riveted into these um composite structural elements until the I-beam was settled upon as the optimum solution and all of these Structural Engineering advances they had consequences for uh the space of labor for technological Laboratories for the experimentation and development of optimized um engineering elements and this is really a development that's particular to the historical period that we're talking about is the emergence especially in the 19th century of a technologized architectural construction industry in which new forms of industrial Labor practice emerged to support and develop this Innovation and production so here you see a um a scene taking place where workers are coordinated in a hierarchical manner to affect the uh rolling of in this case a c channel of wrought iron uh from this press and you know we don't have the time and I'm perhaps I'm not uh expert enough to explain in absolute detail the construction processes here but it is important to just establish uh the advance that was being made at this time from cast iron to wrought iron wrought meaning worked iron iron that had undergone some kind of working process such as being pressed or worked through um rollers like this that work uh increased the strength and the toughness of the iron the cast iron tended to be brittle and easier to produce but subject to catastrophic failure um and you see here a diagram of how Iron could be pressed and rolled through different channels or grooves in order to produce different profiles and there was a great deal of experimentation uh in what was the optimum shape until standardized forms started to emerge so now when we look back at the Palm House at Q you can see that these elements this architecture originated within a nautical industrial complex um that implied specific forms of organized labor and construction technology and you can see again we looked at this before the dramatization here of the whole idea of work and labor as part of the manufacturing um uh process and I think that's one of the layers that we need to keep in mind and bear in mind as we look through this kind of architecture now in the 1850s when the Crystal Palace was on display um the German architect and theorist uh got feed semper visited as he was working on what became a kind of monumental multi-volume work on Style in the technical and tectonic Arts and uh you know I introduced this here because as I said at the beginning we need to think of the tectonic in two ways one is simply the entire set of architectural projects that we can look at and observe and describe accurately their tectonic properties but also in a second um sense the tectonic is an idea it's an idea about architecture that emerges at a certain time under certain uh contexts and forms an epistemology like a whole way of thinking about um what architecture is what its history is which has many cultural consequences is a massive subject with a lot of complexity but we can introduce it here to show the inevitable intersection between something like tectonics and broader cultural uh histories what's fascinating about as simple as work is that he refers I mean there are many things one could say about it but in the context of the Crystal Palace semper actually refers to the Crystal Palace because he had visited it during the writing of this text and intriguingly he wrote about and Illustrated this structure which is now known as the so-called Caribbean Hut and uh for semper this was a ideally reduced expression of structural framework because for sempa one of the tasks was to try and make an overall defining system of the history of architecture and he did that tectonically tectonics was the means by which he tried to construct the history of all architecture everywhere and um two of the main categories that he used to define and describe architecture was the tectonics of the frame which was emblematized by this Caribbean Hut and uh the idea of stereotomics which was rather instead of Frameworks was um these massive piles of brick rock stone masonry that were thick chunky generally dealt only in a compressive forces and had this thick Massey roughness to them these are some of the examples that semper illustrates in his own text to show us so there were two fundamental forms of tectonic one the frame and the other the stereotomic we're going to focus more on the frame today and for semper this Caribbean Hut seemed to represent the reduced essence of what a frame is it also exhibited the basic characteristics that semper thought to find all architecture which was it had a hearth this is signified by the this black dot a kind of a social moral center around which um a shelter uh arises which is enclosed with the roof and filled in with this lattice work so for example this contained in a very simple visible way um half enclosure envelope and lattice work wrapping so it was like a simplified reduced essential expression of what architecture was but at the same time sempa had um a pretty ambivalent attitude to it because he also um wrote about it as being uh primitive about having no development he went you know went in so if I was to say this the whole has nothing in common with architecture as an art and so simple was pretty judgmental about um this hot the so-called uh Hut and used it to show in essence but then also dismiss it as not being uh as not being as civilized or as developed as other forms of um architecture well for semper um what did embody His Highest idea of what architecture should or could be was Greek architecture so he wrote elaborately about Greek temples um and it was really because of the way that they used ornament um and decoration this was what for semper elevated architecture to some kind of an art form because it was through ornament uh and decoration that a building could not just serve the Practical function of shelter but it could reveal its Poetics and so you see examples of structural ornamentation that semper referred to in his writings and lectures to indicate what for him was the more advanced form of architecture which was not to structure but this encrustation of symbolic ornamentation which spoke to some kind of language about how a society understood itself recently this kind of approach has been subject to significant critique and are referring here to the work of Charles Davis um an excerpt of which is available for us to read this week and you know Charles Davis makes a really sophisticated well-informed researched academic uh argument which I just Briefly summarize here which is uh he effectively says that semper's approach was to uh was comparative and it was defined by a wish to systematize and hierarchives to put into a hierarchy different Architectural Traditions in order to produce value judgments to say that some things are more advanced or more compelling than others and so for semper the Greek World represented the highest achievements of architecture and the Caribbean Hut a kind of reduced simplified version interestingly in fact semper also dismissed the Crystal Palace and uh and argued that it didn't conform to him to any idea of architecture um you know how wrong he turned out to be uh if one thinks of the evolution of where architecture went in the 20th century but what uh Charles Davis claims is that simple's um obsession with classification and hierarchy was effectively uh connected to other kinds of racialized discourse in which people like Petra's camper developed theories of physionomy or phrenology um which is the study of anatomical physiological characteristics um as indicators of uh moral character or level of civilization um a pseudoscience a quack science that turned out of course to have no evidentiary basis whatsoever but it was very influential in all manner of spheres including architecture so you end up with in the late 19th century people like banister Fletcher coming up with these images of the tree of architecture showing that architecture grows out of the roots of History social and political issues religion climate geology geography and these feed different National racialized styles Peruvian Egyptian the Syrian Chinese Japanese Indian Greek Mexican and then moving up through uh this sort of symbolic uh schematic tree one gets to Romanesque Italian French German English Spanish blah blah blah of course the point is that this this figure this diagram is very hierarchical and is a very it privileges this Central trunk of architectural development which is Greek Roman European and you notice that all the other offshoots the Peruvian the Mexican the Indian the Chinese and the Japanese um nothing comes out of them from bannister's point of view they were dead ends and so it's obvious how these kinds of classificatory systems were completely biased so semper's whole idea of a history of architecture based on the tectonic whilst it appears to connect with structure organism assemblage of interdependent parts and Poetics in a kind of universal essential way it's Laden still with value judgments um and that's something that uh we always have to be aware of and critical about when we're looking at our historical documents uh I want to say that fry otters diagram is much more porous much more horizontal and fluid displaying um uh I don't want to say it's free of bias I think nothing we're all biased in everything that we do but it it has us an openness more uh historical and cultural openness to the interconnection of um different traditions and this approach to a trans-historical and a trans-cultural attitude towards um architectural comparisons or linkages is a basis that we can explore further and we can do that by following um comparisons like this what happens if you take um Greek architecture which is uh exhibits one form of techno tectonic and compare it to the wooden Frameworks say of Buddhist shrines and this is just one example of that kind of trans-cultural comparison from us particularly from a structural point of view where you can see how the different architectural elements are broken down into their constituent Parts in order to calculate their resistance to um in this case overturning the motion well if um the Crystal Palace and the Palmer House at Q we were looking at those as examples of framework tectonics what about if we follow this logic and look from a different set of traditions and another approach to framing Technologies and look at something like the Easter jingu shine in issei in Japan a building which has a very long history but fits within you're going right back to 685 but which fits within our time period of uh 1492-1918 and because of the remarkable fact that there is the uh Shrine is systematically deconstructed relocated and reconstructed um on a uh on a temporal cycle it remains in place for a certain number of years is then taken down and reconstructed a feature which of course to some extent parallels the Crystal Palace because the Crystal Palace was built and set up in one location it was there occupied that site for a short period of time and then was deconstructed and reassembled so we're talking trans-culturally about two reassemble uh buildings and you see that they um that processual nature that process uh it involves people here the workers at the Crystal Palace and here uh documentary footage from recent uh building and reassembling projects of the ISE shrine um where you see the workers here manipulating um uh the parts as well as being involved in this case in a ritualized ceremonial process that carries the parts of the construction um from site to site and you see in the plan of the usage Shrine that the building is erected in one side of the site and then it's switched to the other site on the according to the the temporal cycle these are images of that procession of building materials um the wood the thatching material and the stones which provide the ground um are all carried in uh possession so this tectonic history is also also has an embodied ceremonial um social history it's intersectional in that way and this form of wooden framework has its own tectonics it's in a gabled form so instead of arches we have a triangular Gable which I think you can see is immediately uh expressive of its structural Poetics this elongation of the cheeky which extend the eaves they give it a very distinctive profile and they also reveal the amazing tectonic complexity of the joint uh the exposed ends of the interconnecting framework elements are adorned and finished with collars and Metal Finishing points partly to protect from erosion but also to develop and emphasize or punctuate the very strong rhythmic sensibility that develops in most framework buildings the uh the site itself where are we um is a series of inclusions frames within frames and uh the precinct overall um is demarcated by framework entryways and these Tory like gateways um the abstract a single element of the frame to be used as a Gateway as a framing device and thinking of the Poetics the structural Poetics of the frame um this uh this idea of the picture frame function of the frame of a um a squaring and a binding of a void is part of the dramatization of the space and this in the form of Japanese Tori this is a very important function within many um shrines and uh complexes here um in the uh itsukushima Shrine which is partly built over water frame Gateway provides an enclosure through which the water moves the landscape is framed it's a space of appearance and disappearance that um emphasizes the uh the arrival and the departure of the water uh or in this case of devotees who arrive to pay their respects um at the the shrine so the frame is structural but it's also poetically expressive um and uh alive and activated by the um the function uh that it says within the building the art of joinery uh is taken to extraordinary levels of tectonic complexity within um Japanese architecture and this is really just a brief uh glimpse into the extraordinary expertise that's developed within that tradition in order to fix the interdependent parts of a framework in place the um the joints themselves as we saw in the Crystal Palace they become sites of invention um where the joining together framing nature of a building is achieved in Practical terms but also expressed as an art and this is something which has a deep history within Japanese architecture but then even further back into Chinese architecture which was the basis for so much of Japanese cultural development so you see in a work well before our time period of the Ying Zhao fasi a um a very very early architectural manual which details the tectonics of joint Construction um those joints could become extremely elaborate and three-dimensional in the form of um connections between the elements carrying compressive loads in the form of the columns and roof structures and so uh you see these Dal gong bracket systems um described in these beautiful oblique graphic drawings um within this literature uh and here in a modern version to see the amazing complexity that was developed Within These Traditions to affect the transfer of the gravitational load and also to exhibit that to make a point of making and revealing the way that a load is distributed and I mean this returns really to what Frampton was saying about Poetics is establishing not just what is the structural system of the architecture that you may be looking at it but uh how does that structure get revealed how does it get foregrounded how does it become part of the way that one experiences um architecture and the way uh that it takes on social meaning well um shifting to a slightly different typology within the same uh Traditions that of the pagoda one can um start to see perhaps with even more clarity the significance of the frame from a structural point of view as you may know these are oh Pagoda forms just like the shrines they often have extremely long and protracted histories of building rebuilding um and sometimes relocation so the toji Pagoda in Kyoto first began Construction in 1796 way sorry it's 796 way before our time period but was undergoing um reworking and rebuilding well into our period reaching its present form in 1643 and of course the major structural problem which the Pagoda typology faces is how do you stabilize um what is effectively a cantilever a tower form where the structure is rising um straight up from the ground and therefore subject a massive um lateral loading whether that's from uh from just its shared dead weight or wind forces but also in Japan seismic forces which are some of the most complex ones to analyze because they move in multiple directions it's well known that um Pagoda structures such as this have an extraordinary resistance to seismic loading because they're able to bend and uh you know you may recognize some of these diagrams from your structure classes about what happens to a framework when it's subject to lateral loading and how it bends and deforms out of shape and is able to resist uh catastrophic failure to the extent that it's able to absorb and accommodate um these bending Moments by shifting and when you look at sexual representations of pagoda Frameworks you see that the framework has been taken to this um you know organismic degree of complexity these start to look like skeletons like animals like species that have been the subject of um uh centuries of structural innovation which is also not hidden it's revealed on the surface it's made into the profile the Contour the elevation of the structure becomes highly expressive of these massively engineered Timber joint framing systems and this you know from a tectonic point of view we want to say that this is what gives identity to architecture the way that it manifests and reveals its Structural Engineering on the surface not only as out of practical necessity but um as an expression of care of art of invention so this uh analytic of the tectonic just to cycle back gives us a road map a network of interconnection that allows or affords the basis of transcultural and trans-historical um comparisons that we can take something like the Crystal Palace and thinking of it as a framework system connected to a different kind of framework system that shares some similarities but Alters in terms of its components and the way its framework is fitted together and the cultural histories of which it's apart these uh interconnections if we return to friarities diagram again they don't need to be singular just comparing one thing to another it's much more about building relevant networks of interconnection between um uh structurally comparable or analogous systems so this work could continue uh further beyond the comparison between Frameworks in the Crystal Palace and Frameworks in the issei shrine or the toji pagoda what if we looked further and more broadly at the nature of um a wooden joining systems particularly ones which deal with structural play or movement or flexibility as a tectonic advantage well we could look at the architecture of fry Auto himself who worked with wooden joint systems in multiple projects but particularly in this extraordinary uh building from 1975 the Mannheim multi-hull multi-haul um and yeah in an in some ways this is like uh a second Crystal Palace it was a well it was supposed to be a temporary Exhibition Center just like the Crystal Palace it is in fact and thankfully um still standing and it takes the form of a dire grid framework so still a framework still dealing with Poetics and an Aesthetics of the grid of regularity of repetition seriality kind of syntax but in this time a different variation of the structural framework tectonic here you see that it's a double lattice in words to lattice layers connected to one another uh with this flexible with a with a pin that means uh that they are free to shift and rotate and that's absolutely necessary because you can see here in this uh construction photo that the lattice is laid out on the ground uh horizontally and then lift it up twist it up uh into its 3D shape and you know these guys could be on the Crystal Palace uh photograph from the 1970s showing how the uh cross bracing cables and um our glasswork are being applied to the diagram frame and you see what we see here is really a a radical transformation of architecture as a framing device because of the development of um of complex curvature in multiple dimensions and you see here an analysis of the lattice work overlaid with a glazing grid are supported by these trust beams at ground level to hold and bind everything together this is the amazing plan that gets developed out of that and what becomes a kind of new and special intervent innovation of fry Otto and a few other Architects working in the same mood around the same time is um the how the framework starts to become activated at the model stage of design and in order to model the complexity of the structural engineering that was happening in the Mannheim multi-haul uh fry otter would make these hanging models in which the structure was determined upside down by laying out the boundary condition with rigid elements and then hanging a jewelry like flexible net from that support in order to let the physics of nature take care of the optimization process and then these flexible hanging models would be structurally fixed and determined by an amazing complex laboratory-like setup this is actually a photo of a model from a different project from the um the slightly earlier Munich Olympic Stadium which has these extraordinary spider web-like diagram forms and that model is created at scale and then through a really Advanced system of photographic analysis all of the points in this web are measured and determined and that makes it possible to develop construction drawings and materialize um the work so the framing tectonic has has shifted now into a laboratory context of uh engineering experimentation which was really I mean we're looking at it at the 19 in the 1970s here but maybe the missing link although it wasn't working strictly in um in Frameworks was the work of Antonio Gaudi um which we won't look at in much detail because we're coming to the end now but just to show you know it was sangrada Familia the great unfinished cathedral in in Barcelona made stereotomically out of brick and stone but it's complexity as an archetectonic system was calculated through the modeling procedure by a hanging model an upside down model if you can tilt your head and see this upside down the um the distinctive profile of the cathedral and these slender conical forms was determined by our hanging fabric from cables and then waiting that fabric with these little pouches of lead or something in order in exactly the same way as here to allow nature to produce these perfect experimental shapes and then that was then recorded flipped upside down and the radical and materialized in the final uh building here and what this um what this transition uh really starts to show is that architecture is now understood as a play of dynamic forces that the framework is understood to be alive a light alive with the life of an organism and uh those forces are the ones which become active in the design uh the design process and Fry Otto you know he really returned and picked up this tradition of um biomorphic engineering of looking at the uh kind of the life force manifest in nature as the pattern we saw before that the the lily pad and the Crystal Palace had a relationship and these are just some pages from some of fry otters research with looking at um sea creatures shells webs um tree bronze structures root structures um broccoli or flowers Wing shapes this ecological Archive of optimized uh form work became the blueprint and the basis for structural analysis and new framework Technologies to develop in fried otters kind of engineering and you know this uh this could go in further uh directions um we only would need to look back uh at our week on nomadic architecture to see that um they're already examples of exactly this kind of uh framework being produced and engineered um in multiple cultural and historical contexts so this chain um this network of framework tectonics is uh incomplete and open-ended um but I hope it's enough for us to see that following this networked diagrammatic attitude uh to architecture and history based on the idea of the possibility for Trans cultural connections between different projects that exhibit similar structural interventions as well as trans-historical connections across time this is a method and a program for situating ourselves at the Nexus of multiple traditions and I just want to finish with a kind of reminder that of the embodied nature of these research engineering construction practices there is always a human Network that surrounds the uh the tectonic um whether that's frioto and his fellow engineers in the lab whether it's the uh the builders and the efficients in the ceremonial construction deconstruction and reconstruction of the Isley Shrine um whether it's the laborers and the workers in the Iron Works of the 18th and 19th century or whether it's the cabro women who are reconstructing the bridal and family tents um that we've seen in in previous Network in previous uh sessions the tectonic provides us a way of um conceiving of architecture as fundamentally structural and constructed and this Universal basis for architecture is also the means by which we can think about its Poetics how it manifests and expresses that structure EX on its exterior and how that tectonic system relates to the social world of Labor and habitation that belongs to each of these Frameworks so I think in concluding our natural um kind of uh departure point is going to be uh for us to ask ourselves um in respect of the the buildings and sites that we're studying what does this diagram look like for us what are the trans-cultural comparisons that you can make between your site and other adjacent sites and what are the trans-historical connections that you can make what does your tectonic Network look like that's the question um that we are going to end on for this week so um keep that in your minds and um let's unpack those possibilities uh when we meet be well in the meantime thanks for staying