Ennead, Biomedical Science Research Building at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2006
Reverse engineering forensically extracts, inspects, improves or contests 'design blueprints' embedded in manmade systems. Cryptome reverse-engineers the technics and codes hardwired into panoptical information and communications technologies as a way of examining their diagrams of power. This 'revolt against the gaze' is our tactic in the Eyeball Series when flipping the technology of national security vision back onto itself through reversals of geospatial imagery. Or reversing top-down geopolitical maps through countercartographies that favor micro-historical method. It's also Crytome's general approach to the everyday, incremental construction of a public domain library around the inchoate classification of so-called banned documents.
Deborah Natsios + John Young in Nicholas Korody, “The Whistleblower Architects,” 2016
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Traditionally and habitually the engineer approaches with some temerity the question of beauty. I think it could be established that the ugliest factories, not to say other buildings, are to be found amongst those where beauty has been consciously courted. I count as priggishness the conscious attempt to achieve beauty – much as though a man set out to be a beautiful character, instead of an honest man. ... To build factories and other buildings, we must be the humble, if articulate, servants of materials and things, and if we must be masters, then be masters of ourselves.
Owen Williams, “On Engineering Beauty,” 1927
MG Architecture, Wood Innovation and Design Centre, Prince George, Canada, 2015
I do not like ducts, I do not like pipes. I hate them really thoroughly, but because I hate them so thoroughly, I feel that they have to be given their place. If I just hated them and took no care, I think that they would invade the building and completely destroy it.
Louis Kahn, World Architecture, 1964
Ravetllat Ribas Arquitectos, Pasarela Peatonal Sobre el Río Segre, Lleida, Spain, 2003
Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, “The Atlanta Pavilion” for the Centennial Olympic Games, Atlanta, GA, 1996