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TIMELESS
ISSUE FIVE
THOUSAND
THE COURT COULD BE DESCRIBED AS
“TIMELESS NOT BECAUSE ITS GENERIC
AND CODIFIED FORM IS INDIFFERENT
TO TIME, BUT BECAUSE THAT
HISTORICALLY-DERIVED FORM HAS
PROVEN ROBUST ENOUGH TO
ENDURE CHANGES IN PLACE,
MATERIAL, AND TIME. AARON
GOLDSTEIN
“THE BUILDINGS IN QUERÉTAROʼ S
HISTORIC CENTER ARE NOT
ʻDECORATED SHEDSʼ, BUT RATHER
ʻMYSTIFIED SHEDSʼ. BY MASKING THE
CONTRADICTION OF PRESERVATION
AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE
CITY, THE FAÇADE MYSTIFIES, AND
THEREBY CONTRIBUTES TO A CRISIS OF
REPRESENTATION. AARON
WELLER
POETICAL IRONY ... IS THE DEEP
PERSONAL EMBRACE AND
FRAGMENTARY INCORPORATION OF
EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF SOURCE
MATERIAL, NO MATTER HOW
IRRECONCILABLE ... IT EMBRACES ITS
SUBJECT, AND LIVES IT, LOOKING FOR
BEAUTY IN THE MESS, VIGOUR IN
OPPOSITIONS, AND POETRY IN
AMBIGUITY.
ADAM NATHANIEL FURMAN
IF ARCHITECTURE IS REAL AND IMMERSED
IN TIME, HOW COULD IT ALSO BE
TIMELESS? ALTA SCUOLA POLITECNICA
OPEN BUILDING RESEARCH GROUP
I WANT TO RE-MAKE HISTORYʼS TROVE
OF THINGS AND OCCASIONALLY
I WANT TO USE HISTORY AS A SITE.
I HAVE NO INTEREST IN QUOTATION,
NO INTEREST IN COPIES. ANDREW
HOLDER
ALL WALLS MUST BE UNIQUE AND
BEAUTIFUL. ANDREW
KOVACS
THERE IS PERHAPS NOTHING MORE
TIMELESS THAN ARCHITECTUREʼS
OBSESSION WITH APPEARANCE.
BAIRBALLIET
THE BIOLOGICAL END OF LIFE IS NO
LONGER THE END OF YOUR EXISTENCE.
COMMONACCOUNTS
ARCHITECTS SHOULD BE DIRTIER,
BUILDERS SHOULD BE CLEANER.
CORALAUTZE
COOPERROGERS
IN ARGUING FOR A NEW AND
UNIVERSALIZING PARADIGM FOR DESIGN,
A PATTERN LANGUAGEʼS AUTHORS
ULTIMATELY AIM TO KEEP THE OBJECTIVE
EXPERTISE OF THE DESIGNER INTACT. ERIC
PETERSON
WE CAN NEVER COMPLETELY HAVE IT
AND EVEN IF WE DO WE PROBABLY
WOULD NOT KNOW. EMMA
LUBBERS
CULTIVATE NATURE UNTIL IT BECOMES
ARCHITECTURE. FILIP
TEJCHMAN
COPY-PASTE IS AN INSTANT
REPRODUCTION THAT TAKES NO TIME.
RATHER, IT IS A TIMELESS
REPRODUCTION.
JI SHI & IVY FENG
WEʼVE ALL LOST TRACK OF TIME. ITʼS
NOT AS IMPORTANT AS IT USED TO BE.
JOHN
STOUGHTON
THE DISCIPLINE OF ARCHITECTURE IS
CONSTANTLY REVITALIZED BY THE
RECURRENT COLLUSION BETWEEN
HISTORY AND DESIGN, AND BETWEEN
ANALYSIS AND PROJECTION. KYLE
MILLER
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR US TO HOLD
ON TO THE PHYSICAL? TO HOLD ON TO
BUILDINGS AS OBJECTS,
DESTINATIONS, COLLECTIONS OF
EXPERIENCES? LEVON
FOX
ITS DEFNITION BENDS AND CHANGES
ACCORDING TO THOSE WHO USE IT.
LUCASALMÁSSY
... AXIALITY IS TIMELESS
ANONYMOUS
... TIMELESSNESS ... HAS A LOT LESS TO
DO WITH THE CAPACITY OF
ARCHITECTURE TO DEFY TIME AND
CHANGE BUT RATHER WITH THE
CAPACITY TO ABSORB TIME.
NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
... IN A SENSE, IT IS THE AUTHORITY
THAT IS TIMELESS. AMINA
ALKANDARI
...THE LAS VEGAS SIGN, TO ME, IS
TIMELESS. CARMEN
CHANG
... TIMELESSNESS IS A REALLY
SUBJECTIVE THING. LIEYAH
DAGAN
ARCHITECTURE THAT IS NOT AN
EXPRESSION OF ITS TIME MEANS IT IS
NOT GREAT, BUT TIME-LESS.
KRISTEN
TOO
...TIME AND TIMELESS MAY BE IN A
DIALECTICAL RELATIONSHIP, AND
PERHAPS A PARADOXICAL ONE. WE
NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT OUR
CULTUREʼS CONCEPT OF TIME IS AND
WHY IT INVENTED ITS PARTICULAR
BRAND OF TIMELESSNESS. ANDREW
SHANKEN
THE AIM WAS NOT TO SIMPLY
REPLICATE AND REINSTATE VARIOUS
HISTORICAL TECHNIQUES [...BUT] TO
AUGMENT A SERIES OF FRAGMENTED
HISTORICAL ARCHITECTURAL ELEMENTS
AND COMBINE THEM INTO THE
CONTEXTUAL PRESENT. MATTHEW
KERNAN
ANXIETY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND
TRANSPARENCY IN MODERN DESIGN
WORK IN THE MEDIATING SPACE
BETWEEN THE TIMELESS AND THE
TIMELY, THE SPACE OF TRANSLATION
AND, CRUCIALLY, OF
MISTRANSLATION. MICHELLE
RADA
BY IMPLOSION, I MEAN A NUANCED
SUPERIMPOSITION OF MULTIPLE TIMES
AND VANTAGE POINTS EMBEDDED IN
THE NEAR-PLAUSIBLE DEPICTION OF
REALITY. NEYRAN
TURAN
ARCHITECTS AND FASHION DESIGNERS
PROLIFERATING THE WORKING-CLASS
AESTHETIC IS THE VEHICLE IN WHICH
THE ʻTIMELESSʼ IS CREATED AND
SUSTAINED. PAUL
HUMPHRIES
PORTO IS A CITY IN ARCHITECTURAL
CRISIS, WHERE HISTORIC FACADES
HIDE ABSENT STRUCTURES AND
DERELICT BUILDINGS ABOUND. PETER
KORN
THE PURPOSE IS TO REDESIGN THE
ORIGIN FOR ARCHITECTURE. ROBERT
CRABTREE
MEMORY HAS NO PAST. THE
MEMORY
SEMINAR
...I AM SEARCHING FOR A
CONNECTION TO HUMANITYʼS
COLLECTIVE CREATIVE PAST, FOR AN
ANACHRONISTIC SYMPATHY... SIGVE
KNUTSON
EACH OF US WOULD LIKE TO BE A
FULCRUM BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE
FUTURE IN SOME WAY, LARGE OR
SMALL.
THOMAS GORDON
SMITH
SOON, ALL THAT REMAINED WAS
PETRIFIED INTO A SOLID TONE OF
TAUPE. TIMOTHY
WAI
CEDRIC PRICE WAS PREOCCUPIED WITH
TIME, BUT NOT WITH BEING TIMELESS.
WHITNEY
MOON
ROOM ONE THOUSAND ISSUE 5
ROOM ONE THOUSAND.COM COPYRIGHT 2017
TIMELESS
ISSN: 2328-4161 PRINT
R
W
1005
R
W
1000
Editors Adam Miller & Alex Spa tzier
Graphics Editor Soo Ok Han
Production Editor Betsy Clifton
Editorial Assistants Lucas Almassy, Neal
Andrew Barber, Kevin Block, Daniel
Haidermota, Jonah Merris, John
Paraskevopoulos and Mark Warren
Production Benjamin Good, Keenan
Gravier, Lawrence Lazarides, Cooper
Rogers, James Skarzenski, Kei Takanami
and Kristen Too
Web Jonah Merris
Advisory Board Greg Castillo, Richard
Hindle, Ramona Naddaff and John
Parman
Cover by Soo Ok Han
Printed by
Mercurio Brothers Printing
in Berkeley, CA.
Ty p es e t i n P a la t i n o a n d Futura.
© 2017 Selection and Editorial,
Room One Thousand;
Individual essays, the authors.
Published by University of California, Berkeley,
Department of Architecture.
Unless otherwise noted,
all images by respective authors.
ISSN 2328-4161 PRINT
FUNDING PROVIDED BY
Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley.
The College of Environmental Design
Office of the Dean, UC Berkeley.
The Arcus Chair for Gender, Sexuality, and the
Built Environment, CED.
The Townsend Center for the Humanities
with special funding from
HGA Architects and Engineers San Francisco
envelope A+D
Guthrie+Buresh Architects
and The Friends of Room One Thousand.
Consider becoming a memeber of The
Friends of Room One Thousand at our
website RoomOneThousand.com
TIMELESS
5
ISSUE FIVE
ROOM ONE
THOUSAND
1
3 Adam Miller & Alex Spatzier / A Timeless Introduction
7 Christopher Alexander & Peter Eisenman / In Debate
33 Eric Peterson / A P att er n L ang ua ge & the Timelessness of the Architectural Manifesto
41 Robert Crabtree / Various Abstract Thoughts
53 Memory Seminar / Remember This!
57 Andrew Holder In Conversation / So, Picture This
69 John Stoughton / Bored Victims and Friendly Avengers
79 Emma Lubbers / Timeless Timelessness
87 Aaron Weller / The Contradiction of Preservation and The Mystied Shed
107 Peter Korn / Confronting Fachadismo
117 Tim Wai / 100 Sheep
119 Thomas Gordon Smith In Conversation with John Parman /
The Classical Imagination
133 Matthew Kernan / Fragmenting Nostalgia: Economy Housing in Aarhus
147 Paul Humphries / The Paradox of Style
157 Sigve Knutson / Intuition and Spontaneity
169 Michelle Rada / The Eternal Return of The Contemporary
187 Neyran Turan / Can Images Implode?
199 Aaron Goldstein / Architectural Recreation
213 Andrew Kovacs / 20 Steps for Creating Beautiful Floor Plans Made of Walls
219 Kyle Miller / The Plan is The Generator
225 Adam Nathaniel Furman In Conversation / Vibrance Matters
237 BairBalliet / Architecture’s Ploys
243 Ji Shi & Ivy Feng / C, V
253 Marco Gola, Andrea Brambilla, Stefano Capolongo / Open Room: Flexibility as a
Tool for Timeless Healthcare Facilities
265 Filip Tejchman Motivational Rock
277 Cora Lautze and Cooper Rogers / A Timeless Competition
287 Whitney Moon / Cedric Price is Timeless
303 Levon Fox / Post-Virtual Reality
311 Common Accounts, Bragado & Gertler / Playback Forever
323 Lucas Almássy / On Timeless – Berkeley In Conversation
339 Author / Biographies
This issue, Room 1005 and our fth
year as a publication mark the
continuation of changes we began with
our fourth issue to include a diverse
set of formats, while also representing
a range of disciplines. This year we
began two new programs: an invited
lecture and a design competition. Both
programs will continue with our next
issue.
The Room One Thousand organization
and our fth issue would not have
been possible without the generous
support of the following UC Berkeley
organizations: The Department
of Architecture, all of its sta and
Chair Tom Buresh; The College of
Environmental Design’s Dean’s Oce
and Dean Jennifer Wolch; The UCB
Townsend Center; and the Arcus Chair
for Gender, Sexuality, and the Built
Environment, CED. Additionally, we
received special funding from HGA
Architects and Engineers San Francisco
oce and their Vice-President Kevin
Day (UCB M.Arch ‘95), envelope A+D
in Berkeley, Guthrie+Buresh Architects
in San Francisco, and donations from
The Friends of Room One Thousand.
Prof. Greg Castillo, Prof. Ramona
Nadda, and John Parman, alongside
our newest member Prof. Richard
Hindle, continue to serve on our
advisory board and provide invaluable
advice as the journal progresses.
Former Editors Kevin Block and Padma
Maitland are now alumni advisors
to the journal who both continue to
provide support and wisdom.
Our next issue will be released in April
2018 and its theme will be chosen by an
open call for themes announced in May
2017. Room 1006’s call for submissions
will be promulgated in June 2017
alongside our editorial team for the
coming year.
Room One Thousand is a 501(c)(3)
non-prot organization run by students
and recent alumni of UC Berkeley. Our
sta of undergraduates, professional
students, PhD students, and alumni
donate their valuable time and
expertise to realize this journal, and the
various events we produce throughout
the year. To that end we highly value
the nancial support of readers and
patrons provided through The Friends
of Room One Thousand. We strive to
balance the cost of each issue against
our desire to produce high quality
printed matter, as such all proceeds
of each issue go toward funding the
production of the next issue.
Room One Thousand exists due to
the generous support of our readers.
Consider becoming a member of The
Friends of Room One Thousand at
roomonethousand.com where you can
also learn about our upcoming events,
contact us, and read all issues past,
present and future of the journal.
CONTENTS
EDITORS’ NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
REMEMBER THIS! THE MEMORY MANIFESTO
53 54
Remember This!
A Memory Manifesto, for Architects.
The Memory Seminar: Alexander Benjamin Craghead, Stathis
Gerostathopoulos, Valentina Rozas-Krause, Andrew M. Shanken,
Desirée Valadares, Santiago Vales, Mark Warren.
I. What Memory Is and Why It Is Important
Memory is primitive, popular, personal, partisan, folkish, authentic, subjective,
oral, circular, informal, ctional, nostalgic, and all those characteristics that have
pitted it in a hackneyed binary against sober, institutional, archival, peer-reviewed,
objective, written, factual, formal, linear, empirical, history. Whereas history has
been represented as contingent, bounded, relative, by contrast memory has been
represented—like the peasant or pre-modern soul—as timeless, tracing back
to some misty, perhaps even Paleolithic origin. Memory and history have two
dierent time signatures. History took place in the past, but it belongs to the
modern, rational soul. Memory has no past. Memory goes by many names: counter-
forgetting, counter-amnesia, amnes(t)ic (amnesty), non-history, anti-history. Like
new paint, it o-gasses. Its qualities and ways of working are many. It is:
Arbitrary Authentic Changeful Displaced En-plotted Evanescent Fragmentary
Immaterial Involuntary Mediated Mundane Mysterious (workings) Durable
Palimpsestic Repressed Romantic Traumatic
Studying memory historicizes timelessness. Memory and timelessness trace a
tangent that never meets; an innity grows in their near convergence, down to the
subatomic level. If timelessness is a mythic construct forged by consciousness of
modern time (see Google Ngram: it’s barely in usage before 1900!), memory is the
thing between them. Time swings on memory’s hinge.
In a post-post-post-post-postmodern world, wherein time passes inconsistently
across the globe and history fades from authority, the perfume of memory becomes
truth. Memory, not history, is the spirit of cyclical temporality. Memory is not
merely a form of resistance against a progressive view of history: It is the future of
history, simultaneously its ancestor and heir.
II. What Memory Is and Why It Is Not Important
Memory is futile. It slips away with anxiety and lack of sleep. Tick, tick, tick, tick,
time went, each mechanical ick a reminder of what I had to do, of my endless
list. Deep into the night, each tick subtracting from my sleep. 3,600 ticks an hour, I
thought, 28,800 in a night’s sleep. About 20,000 left tonight. How would I be able to
work, think, remember tomorrow?
As soon as the work of cleansing and sweeping time out of its bourgeois cage
is done, memory will be emancipated. Think irrationally! We must demand an
unrelenting subjectivity; this is the mother of memory. Happy the land that has no
clocks! Unhappy America! Time the arrow is barbed. It pierces, inicting serious
injury on our health. Smash them! Smash the clocks and sprinkle the gears on your
morning cereal, not to become a Picabian mechanomorph, but to digest time anew,
to put it in your gut and erase it from your mind.
Your gut! Yes, only the base and profane is actually enduring. A stone toilet will
never be outdated, and could form the sole enduring component of a dwelling unit
or, en masse, as the eternal core of a neighborhood or entire community; in many
Roman ruins this is precisely the case. The towns themselves, in which people lived,
may as well have been made of papier-mache.
Memory is immaterial; the actual experience gone, it tricks us into thinking that it still
exists when it has actually turned to dust. It can thus be reactionary, nostalgic, false, a
path towards self-delusion, destruction, and chaos that is masked by a sense of truth.
It is partisan, rigid, and selective, an adulterated and mutable quality, not only in its
ability to be changed, but in that it can actually be muted, silenced at will.
Burdened with too much stu (as well as too many useless memories), we embrace
the possibilities opened by forgetting. This frees us on a personal and psychological
level from an overabundance of memory.
REMEMBER THIS! THE MEMORY MANIFESTOMEMORY SEMINAR
55 56
1.
Search for images of “column” on Google. Juxtapose the rst fty entries with the
rst fty columns you see around you. Then close your eyes and think about a
column. At that point, it will probably hit you in the forehead, right between your
eyes. Sketch the column.
2.
Forget about the column, think about 9/11. Consider the void of the towers,
incessantly being lled with water, a bottomless pit of need. Imagine walking
among the debris a few days after the attack. You don’t need a visual aid, but if
you must, look up one of the iconic photos included in the second part of Marita
Sturken’s Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma City
to Ground Zero. While you’re at it, ponder “tourism” and “history.” Naturally, you
have veered away from architecture too much and you may need to jump back on
the design train (fuelled by late-capitalist cosmopolitanism) by looking up images
of Santiago Calatrava’s fantastical-ant-transportation-hub-roof on site in 2016. Now,
imagine this building, too, as debris. It’s white, like powder, or snow, and might
nally ll the aforementioned voids.
3.
Read the chapter on the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial (“A Stern-Faced, Twenty-
Eight- Foot-Tall Black Man”) in Dell Upton’s What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race,
Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South. Extrude and spatialize the
memory of hope from the form, with no reference to the gure or words themselves.
Hope becomes the column. Draw the letters of the word memory around the base
and incorporate dandelions and xeriscaping or bronze wreaths. Press save.
4.
Imagine yourself as a gender not your own, and embrace it through display.
Repeat steps 1 through 3, but instead of designing a column, randomly select a new
architectural element and repeat. Ad innitum.
III: How to Design (our/for/with) Memory
Memory is lived, and inescapable; to this degree, it remains an architectural
problem. Commemoration is memory’s social practice; architecture gives it shape,
armature, place. We therefore lay out instructions for designing memory. As with
the seasons, there are four:
1.Experience / Remember
2. Forget
3. Design
4. Repeat / De-story / Destroy
For example, this is how one would build a commemorative column:
Screenshot of Google Books Ngram viewer tracking the relative usage of the word “time-
lessness” from 1800 to 2000 in English langauge books Google has scanned.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
A Stern-Faced, Twenty-Eight-Foot-Tall Black Man") in Dell Upton's What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South. Extrude and spatialize the memory of hope from the form
  • Martin Luther King
Read the chapter on the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial ("A Stern-Faced, Twenty-Eight-Foot-Tall Black Man") in Dell Upton's What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South. Extrude and spatialize the memory of hope from the form, with no reference to the figure or words themselves.