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John McMorrough OSU critic 1  The historically descriptive answer and the one I would imagine would be closest to how Andy Zago would himself describe the studio would be as an investigation of a specific relation between a continuity of exterior skin and interior subdivisions a relationship mostly understood in section The context of the studio is a long standing interest of Zago’s in the articulation of free standing interiorized volumes most clearly manifested and perhaps precipitated in his reading with sometime collaborator Jeffrey Kipnis of the Tokyo Opera house competition entry by Jean Nouvel and Philippe Sta

ck from 1985 In that design the open volume of the building moves around the discretely articulated volumes of major program groupings the effect of which was to make the space “buoyant” 2  The situational answer as to what the studio was about the one that describes how the formal interest of Zago plays out in this particular studio has to do with the context of instruction that is Chicago and UIC Within the context of Chicago the selection of a site which is both adjacent and similar to the Monadnock building John Wellborn Root 1893 draws an allusion between the work of the studio and the existing building In both cases the program is relatively generic office space with the architectural issue or challenge being to introduce “qualities” to such an unexceptional circumstance Both instances highlight the deployment of poché real in the case of the Monadnock virtual in the case of the Zago studio as architectural device Within the context of UIC this interest in the modeling effects produced by an insertion of a virtual poché as opposed to “real” poché represents a broad shift within the curriculum overall from a focus on architectures made from the ubiquitous exceptionality of tectonic attentions to those composed by the strategic deployment of performative technique Ryan Johnson UIC student 1  The studio was about an intent to investigate a new form of monumentality in architecture Precedent examples Tokyo Opera House by Jean Novell and Philippe Starck and Signal Box by Herzog and de Meuron This new form of monumentality and opaqueness is clearly represented throughout the Monadnock building The intent of the studio was to produce an understanding of what it means to make a contemporary monolith within the city Secondly knowing that contemporary architecture cannot be an opaque mass the studio was also interested in expressing a nature of the interior on the exterior So the issue is topology something that is very different from topography It is important that we know the difference between the two  We wanted to create a topological inversion of the reading of these buildings where the question now becomes “is the building a ship in the bottle or does the ship become the bottle”  This is something very different than the Buddha in a cave or the Corbusian object in the landscape What we were actually interested in was getting the topological diagram of the building correct so we see the building as a series of inversions folding in on itself 2  Being a participant in this studio it is of my best interest to believe what I just wrote as well as sparing myself to be redundant  Nonetheless I would say this studio is simply about creating a contemporary Monadnock This has many hidden meanings in it but really the issue is how do we contemporize monumentality and monoliths in architecture  A great example of this is Mies’ Federal Center This becomes truly interesting as a contemporary phenomenon at the point where transparency can become an opaque mass This may be a somewhat dated idea and issue but is a good example of what the studio was responding to Bob Somol UIC director On the surface the studio was concerned with a number of architectural persistencies that have preoccupied Andrew for some time the sectional object the activation of poche and the residual in architecture the production of indifferent monuments or monoliths that avoid the issues of either meaning or critique of meaning and thus the production of objects that simply do not care to speak or are in my sense “cool”  More generally and perhaps more importantly for the school or all schools at his moment is Andrew’s attempt to advance an architectural agenda of “post ironic authenticity ” to steer clear at once of both traditional tectonic authenticity as well as the ironic postmodern critique of such authenticity  In part this means embracing the artifice of the day as Dave Hickey suggests of Siegfried and Roy somewhere beneath all that fake tinsel is real tinsel  Today we are awash in a new cult of “sloppy earnestness ” the sense that as long as one’s intentions are good that is all that matters for design  But without technique without rigor without expertise no amount of good intentions can do anything but make things worse  What Andrew’s studio provides as an antidote and what I could embrace as a general platform against the ethical cliches that surround us is a disciplinary call for a “perverse precision” the insanely unreasonably precise the hallucinatory effects that can only come from the pursuit of suspect demands Expertise without the need for expression demonstration without pleading accomplishment without legible complexity  And the pleasures of real tinsel