Foreword by Nader Tehrani

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The work of Patricia and John Patkau needs no introduction; indeed, they have been a central part of the critical culture of Canadian architecture for many years, and in turn they have earned an international presence through their many pedagogical stints in various institutions. With a young practice that was launched via small, experimental houses, grew to include medium-scaled institutional projects, and then won the Montreal Library competition, their trajectory is marked by a classic incremental ascent. The work has always maintained a deep commitment to the development of a “tectonic culture,” using construction elements not only for the fabrication of buildings, but indeed to transcend the “merely material” and create artful and poetic assemblies that dematerialize the conventions with which common construction is oft associated.

Yet with the maturity of seasoned architects, at the moment of public recognition they discovered something that would alter the course of their practice altogether: a renewed need for critical introspection of the very means by which they work, which would in turn issue a challenge to the discipline at large. By way of a series of small installations, they set out to discover material behavior through systemic operations, experiment on assembly processes, and effectively think through their translation toward larger-scale formal and spatial architectural implications. If this seems like a withdrawal from practice, it is nothing of the kind. It is instead the development of a critical retreat—a sanctuary for speculation and study of things at a detailed tectonic level. Though it is not a retraction from the prior investments at a larger scale, it is a challenge to the very methodologies from which they have learned in the past, with an emphasis on how certain speculative ways of working may unleash new inventive possibilities.

The excesses of contemporary media—the surplus of images, the immediacy of social communication, and the hyper-commodification of architecture as icon—have overwhelmed our collective sense of architectural disciplines. The appeal to disciplinary techniques is a way of rethinking the relevance of architectural practices within a world that is more effectively impacted by other media. The Patkaus’ diversion is, thus, an intellectual recalibration, a turn to rethinking the discipline in its most foundational aspirations. Theirs is a questioning of the irreducible elements of architectural speculation, a reconnection with research as the basis for experimentation, and a focus on the production of new forms of knowledge—if only to underline the agency of architecture as a practice. Where the successes of professionalism in their earlier years led to targeted advances within tectonic culture (what the discipline lacked at the time), the promises of rethinking disciplinary roots has more recently offered a respite from both the excesses of popular culture today and from the casual appropriation of architecture’s techniques into commercial culture.

Architecture as Media

If there is no lack of proof in the refinement and inventiveness of their tectonic research of the last thirty years, then the rechanneling of their recent efforts in material explorations is, yet again, something new—an indication that the discipline as they had cast it in the past had become part of the status quo. The more recent research, then, is an attempt to speak more effectively on the revolutions of technology, media, and communication that have characterized recent years, many of which have upstaged architecture as a medium. As such, the new work also seeks to examine the agency of the discipline’s techniques and their ability to engage pressing questions of the present.

They have not been shy to turn work away, if only to imagine a new form of relevance to the architect’s agency. The Patkaus’ comfort with unpredictability, their rediscovery of foundational techniques, and their readiness for strategic improvisation have been necessary for their invention. As such, despite all their experience, their depth of built work, and their exquisite detailing, this new research is, in some way, a critical revision of their own trajectory.

It is no coincidence that this turn of direction is occurring at a time when the Internet, information technology, and the digital age are inundating us with more images on a daily basis. In part, this could be explained as a success for architecture: the idea that the Internet has made an otherwise cryptic practice more democratic. However, this accessibility has also produced a laissez-faire mentality with the abandonment of much of the friction that makes the complexity of the architectural project so difficult. In this process, images of architecture are more popular than ever, and somehow the complexities of architectural protocols seem to fade away in the gloss of the streaming images. The Patkaus are very much aware of this fact, and this new phase of practice does not shy away from the power of the image. What it does do, however, is emphasize process in the creation of architectural artifacts and declare that form needs to be earned—an ethic that has been lost in many new traditions. The Patkaus’ moment of retooling seems to capture the commitment to the very processes that underlie all these images, not so much denying us of the power of the icon, but rather deferring it, releasing it slowly and producing conditions that can only permit you to enter the work with the same curiosity that is the cause of their own research. Their new work goes back, not so much in time, but to the irreducible aspects of materiality, geometry, and structure, such that the spaces and programs they serve are allowed to imagine a future that is wholly unrehearsed.

The Ethic of Unlearning

This bold about-face is, in fact, part of a radical tradition of “unlearning” that is, coincidentally, a central part of the ethos I have inherited at Cooper Union, where the prospect of incertitude, insecurity, and doubt is embraced as a key ingredient for the possibility of discovery. This ethic has been a critical part of the Patkaus’ trajectory throughout the years, and yet this time, their shift from tectonic elaboration to the curatorial reduction of material surfaces has forced them, despite the continuity of intellectual sensibilities, to become students of their own making.

Within the process of unlearning, the first step is the ability to suspend disbelief, to reject that which one thinks one knows and challenge the very conventions that have been proven time and time again—if only to liberate oneself from the safety of conventions. What the Patkaus seem to offer is a way to formulate procedures out of uncertainty—not a recipe, nor a method, but a loose framework of critical ingredients by which disciplines may be measured as part of a process of inquiry. If my words do not already display a certain bias, then I will simply confess a deep sense of shared affinities, something that, no doubt, dates back to my days as a student witnessing their emergence.

Engaging Contemporary Debates, Discovering One’s Own Methods

The Patkau models of yesteryear are legendary, and they form a critical part of my own education, as I was inspired by their exhibition at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1990. Often composed as sectional models, these investigations were analytical in nature, foregrounding the tectonic makeup of the framing, the relation between structure and skin, or the elaboration of part-to-whole relationships. Often they were built after the design was complete, if only to reveal things that bias intellectual exposure. Yet, in accord with the most common platform of that time, these representations were formed around a classical understanding of the motivation of architectural pedagogy: that drawings and models are instruments depicting a world to be, an illustration of things to come, a picture of a potentiality.

Faithful to its time, architectural pedagogy was lodged in a platform of representation, harking back centuries, linking drawings and models to visions, still more pictorial than methodological. And yet, even within that regime, their work was a highly self-conscious critique of the a-tectonic architecture of that historical moment—on the one hand, biases toward tropes of unbuilt postmodern typologies, and on the other, the dismantled language of architectural elements in the hands of post-structural and deconstructive thought.. Their Semperian elaboration of the models—replete with stereotomic concrete bases, wooden structural struts, and articulated skins—would indicate a research that was wholly absent at the time: an architecture that invested in “building” ideas through their materiality.

Since that era, much has evolved in architectural debates, but maybe one of the most poignant discussions has been the evolution of discourse on single-surface buildings by way of minimal surfaces or topological geometries, often forcing continuities of surface to overcome their normative assignments as floor, wall, or ceiling. Within this context, architects such as Zaha Hadid, Preston Scott Cohen, and Neil Denari all advanced certain ideas about the nature of spatial and formal investigations, but without construction as part and parcel of its intellectual investment. This was for obvious reasons: the inevitable difficulties and rigors that comes with building reciprocity between form and construction.

The Patkaus had no specific investment in single-surface buildings as an end product, but rather in the architectural potentials that could be earned if rule-based investigations of sheet materials, for instance, could advance alternative methodological ideas about the way that spaces and forms could be generated altogether. Thus, their more recent work is the result of a procedural shift in thinking: the idea that there are no a priori visions as such, but that architecture is as much about the invention of processes and the instruments needed to reimagine the seeing, building, and conceiving of environments.

The shift of emphasis from representation to methodology can also be seen to extend a perpetual process of unlearning in their work, slaloming back and forth between product and process, inherited knowledge and empirical research, among other things. What remains constant in their ethos is a willingness to remain students of a process rather than settle into mere mastery of a craft.

Rethinking Protocols

In their hands, the act of design is part and parcel of material agency. Engaging the grain of wood for the Skating Shelters is a way of understanding how its fibers may inform the possibility of spatial and formal pliancy. In contradistinction to classical modes of composition, where the figurative and compositional aspects of design are assumed, this suggests a bottom-up approach: discovering through empirical tinkering. By extension, their requisite play with plywood acknowledges the dual directionality of plywood laminates, the overlay of which offers a structural composite that defies that very natural grain to work at a modular scale of industrial production. The 4 x 8 sheet here becomes a unit of production that helps not only to extend seamless surfaces, but also to create the very joints that make its tectonic ethic an irreducible part of its inventive expression. Sheet construction also helps define geometric limits, creating a direct link between a developable surface as the basis for figuration; thus, its bends and arcs are all part of conical distortions, delicately teasing out the structural yield point of each sheet in forming the spatial enclosures that embrace the body. Thus, material behavior, the aggregation of material units, and the discipline of geometry conspire to create a sense of inevitability in what otherwise seem to be arcane and indescribable totems.

Adopting and Inventing New Means and Methods

The patterning of plywood sheets for the Skating Shelters, of course, borrows from an old sartorial trade and is deeply ingrained in well-documented protocols of making from two-dimensional surfaces. Adopting darts as an operative device, the forms are not so much a “will to form,” but rather a negotiation with the multiple disciplines impacted by geometry, material sciences, and methods of patterning. “Darting” recalls other kindred operations such as bending, folding, and wrapping, among a range of other actions, all of which may have a profound impact on architectural forms, spaces, and even detailing. These actions suggest ways of thinking that offer not only new generative protocols but also an entirely new control over the means and methods of exacting an architectural project—creating precise relationships between the parts and the whole, while also beginning conceptually at an endpoint, and working toward the beginning.

When these operations are successful, as in the case of the Rift project, they escape the very limits of their technical description by transcending the terms of their construction.

It is perhaps harder to describe the sublime, the phenomenal, or the awesome; they belong to categories that are often associated with the natural and that which transcends the manmade. And yet these strange artifacts are very much the result of what is described through architectural means and methods: a careful projection of circumstances and their testing through modeling. That architects would revisit the means and methods of construction in this day and age is potentially the most potent part of the Patkau experiment. Appropriating the political terrain that has long been overtaken by the construction field, they take back what might rightfully be the key ingredient of the architectural right to form a synthetic relationship between design intent and construction ethic. To this end, the invention of machines could be said to be the most important part of their architectural inventions. The One Fold project is the result of such thinking. Objects that defy the immediacy of intellectual grasp are, in fact, the result of simple jigs and machines; their actions coerce spatial and formal potentials that are at once as simple as the very machine that serves as its index and as indescribable as the fluidity of the metal surface that undulates beyond recognition.

Scaling Up: The Part-to-Whole Equation

As the speculative explorations of the Patkaus scale up to the realm of architectural complexity, once again we witness the challenges of integrative thinking. For this reason, the plans and sections of Daegu Gosan Library defy the kind of legibility that classical training offers. Here, the Patkaus’ muscle memory in areas of typology, spatial configuration, and the architectural promenade recede in the background of the composition as quiescent intelligence; instead, what shows itself as the dominant organizing force of the oeuvre is the simplicity of certain rule-based decisions that unleash the wealth of complexity that the program of this project requires. The aggregation of dovetailed timber members form the tectonic unit that defines the limits of spatial and formal malleability. Translated from the scale of the architectural installation to that of an urban institution, the “stacking” of members offers both the discipline of constraint and parametric pliancy. In turn, the aggregate sum of these members assures a shell that results in a surface-active structure—a vaulted space that has already anticipated the cultural baggage that comes with the imperatives of a library’s functional attributes. From the collective space of the reading room to the smaller breakout spaces of individuated study areas, the ruled surface of the outer membrane is broken down in a variety of scales, from the monumental, to the incremental space of the study group, and further to the scale of the structural member. At once a fully formed iconic figure, the building’s main vault is also deftly raised above the ground plane, enabling the breakdown of urban address on its many facets. Entries, offices, and breakout spaces gain the luxury of extending the landscape into the building while still maintaining an allegiance to the morphological rigors of the tectonic makeup of the building’s logic. Part alien and curiously recognizable, the library’s enigmatic profile lurks in our memories, somewhere between that which we yearn for and that which we have already internalized.

Looking Back at Precedents and Forward to the Primitive

Pondering these extraordinary inventions, I return back to the evolution of Patricia and John Patkau’s work, from the elaborations of tectonic thinking to the newly formed emphasis on surface-based morphologies. I recall when the Patkaus and I shared remote stages for the Fabrications exhibit some twenty years ago, between NYC’s MOMA and Columbus’s Wexner Center for the Arts, where their installation was set. Their wooden pavilion, La Petite Maison du Weekend, was conceived as a meticulous piece of joinery, with a clear articulation of structure, infill, and all the other associated architectural attributes that an architectural miniature could absorb. The beauty of that piece was, in great part, the thoughtful rereading of a primitive hut as architectural archetype, reinterpreted through modern practices of craft. As I revisit the work of the Patkaus, now twenty years later, the new body of work undoes the very pristine effectiveness of the Fabrications pavilion; the more recent work relies not only on the craft of making itself, but also on the intellectual craft that adopts detail as precondition of an architecture of larger consequences. No longer tethered to the certainty of craft, the joint now regains its value as intellectual currency and the smart DNA of a cell set to transform the various scales upon which it is unleashed.

This new work regains the uncanny rawness of the primitive, no longer adopting the crutch of reference as its alibi but the brute intelligence of architectural agency as its matter. Each new experiment releases associations, functions, and ergonomic affiliations that can only be attained with a deep sense of cultural and historical awareness, and yet the work operates self-consciously to disassociate itself from the very icons, types, and conventions by which it is marked. The new work rides on a thin line, between the alien and that which is so intimately known. The salient technique of this new work is its stubborn ethic of reduction, erasure, and adherence to constraints, creating the most elaborate of artifacts out of such limited means. The tension within the work, then, emerges from the apparent contradiction between this dual sensibility, operating with a baroque elaboration of geometry but also with the resolute austerity of primitive materiality, the manner of the “figure” confronting the silence of raw matter.