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Buildings Per Se was an ad-hoc pamphlet that worked in correspondence with the Convivium discussion series. In collaboration with Kyle Jenkins, Jeremy Alain Siegel, Matt Eshleman.

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Informality, which was first categorized and described in the 1970s, is now pervasive — across cities, in the places we live, work, and move through the everyday. For many, the informal is no longer a discrete sector appended to the workings of the “formal” city, but an integral effect of the structuring of cities and landscapes by contemporary economic, political, and technological change. Self-built architectures and urban agglomerations, ambivalent landscapes, nomadic and temporal spatial manifestations of informalized are situationally specific, but globally ubiquitous. Design Tactics and the Informalized City symposium brings a discussion of this reality to disciplines that work on the city in material and spatial terms: architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, engineering, media and product design. Charged with shaping and managing living environments, usually on behalf of instituted powers, these disciplines confront significant questions in encountering the informalized city. Working practices and ways of representing urban phenomena, the appropriate medium and matter of design, even conceptions of agency, constituency and purpose, all come to the fore as matters for critical and creative inquiry. The symposium brings together international practitioners from diverse design fields to explore these questions through discussions of recent, compelling work.

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Event coordination for 2012 Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium, “Design Tactics and the Informalized City”.

CONTACT

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melissa.constantine@gmail.com

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Mobile Art Platform Berlin is a work exploring the urban effects of informal artistic exhibition in Berlin. It considers the ways in which the making public/publicizing of creative work can become a catalyst for urban activation through exploiting specific sites in the city. By playing with curatorial and architectural techniques of showing, projecting, looking, and reading against modular, performative, and site-specific follies, the project works as social and spatial catalyst and allows for a re-reading of Berlin. Ultimately the project speaks to issues of siting and sequencing, materiality and mediation, and locates itself at a crossing of curatorial, artistic, and architectural practices.

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Images show installation of 1/4 scale follies with projected images of Berlin sites. This project satisfied the requirements of a Masters of Architecture thesis.

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This design tests variations in point, line, plane, volume.

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Architecture studio with Professor Jim Williamson.

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The Center for Urban Inquiry seeks to advance contemporary thinking on cities and conditions of urban proliferation. These investigations require collaboration between students, practitioners, and thinkers, and participation in various modes of discourse. The design considers reuse of industrial typology in New York’s Meatpacking District to serve diverse forms of physical, intellectual, and cultural labors.

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Architecture studio with Susie Rodriquez (partner) and Brian Masuda of Ennead Architects.

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Convivium is an informal discussion group that interrogates epistemologies and practices of architecture, urbanism, and cultural production. Initiated and ran monthly series of discussions from 2008 – 2010; the program is continuing under the organization of a new group of students.

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CC: is a serialized publication in correspondence with the Convivium discussion series at Cornell University Department of Architecture. The publication experiments with documenting ephemeral discourses as a productive and contiguous act of translation.

In collaboration with Sophie Hochhausl and supported by a grant from the Cornell Council of the Arts. Anticipated publication Fall 2012.

CURRICULUM VITAE

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What is that bird? Closer we can see its body, and even further its feathers, then anatomy, bones and organs, tissues, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, space. This, however, is only a physical decomposition of the subject. M engages primarily in a dissolution of the metaphysical concept of the bird. What is this bird? This bird is the near-darkness which gives cause for its silhouette; it is co-incidence, it is refracted light, it is several small, technical movements, it is the tree it is in, the velocity of the wind, all of this. Inasmuch as a bird is never bones and blood, a bird is never a bird. A bird is really an amalgamation of other variant components in motion: a bird is a vector composition made cohesive by energy. We now understand the subject to be a vector composition, its determinates being infinite. This exchange between subjects is also a vector. For example, not only are M and the bird vector clusters, but their coming together is also a vector; likewise, the merging of M and the bird and the nearby tree and the velocity of the wind, and the distance (existence?) of Darling are all vectors. Since a subject can simultaneously have an exchange with many different objects at once, there is a multiplicity of vectors that exist, that coincide at any one time. There are an infinite number of vector compositions on infinite scales. Essentially, then, there is vector within vector within vector within vector, to infinitely large and infinitely small degrees. What we have, then, is motion, all around.

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This work served as BA thesis project at Hampshire College, 2003.

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This is Not a Building was an ad-hoc pocket-sized publication in correspondence with the Convivium discussion series. This publication became an experiment in translating ephemeral discussions into a personal document that would allow for continued contemplation of ideas and questions, and could segue again into public conversation.

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ABOUT

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Melissa Constantine lives and works in Ithaca, New York.

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Second annual Hans and Roger Strauch Symposium on Sustainability. The accelerating transformation of the natural environment by humans suggests that the built environment is now becoming the context for ecosystems. It may no longer be possible to consider the built environment as merely asserting negative impact on the natural environment; instead, built and natural environments need to be equally considered as habitats for biodiversity. It now seems necessary to shift toward a non-anthropocentric model that favors the interaction of species with the built environment. On an urban scale, such efforts have long taken shape in the interdisciplinary work of urban ecology, yet on a building scale new methods are not yet clear. In light of shifts in ecological thinking, how can architecture develop to include the necessary insights, knowledge, concepts, and working methods? This symposium looked to further discussion about this changed culture of environment.

This symposium was organized jointly by the Cornell University Department of Architecture and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design Research Center for Architecture and Tectonics.

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Event coordination and production for the second annual Hans and Roger Strauch Symposium on Sustainability, “Sustaining Sustainability: Alternative Approaches in Urban Ecology and Architecture” at Cornell University Department of Architecture.

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This symposium, “Shaping Architects, Shaping Architecture” planned by Dagmar Richter and Chris Otto, drew on the experiences and insights of a core group of educators and addressed a matrix of critical issues including ideologies of foundational programs in architecture, how techniques and theory determine design processes, and discourses internal and external to the discipline.

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Event coordination and production for 2010 Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium, “Shaping Architects, Shaping Architecture” at Cornell University Department of Architecture.

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Lecture for Twin Cities event Give & Take (produced by the artist-led public design studio Works Progress). The lecture invited audience members to respond to a questionnaire about the ways in which they come to know. Each response corresponded to a color of yarn, and as audience members selected their answers, they passed yarn back and forth in order to create a spatial visualization that represented their epistemological orientations.

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This project imagines Parkour-ist as urban activist as machine, navigating and invading abandoned London. Infiltrating vacant buildings that might otherwise be available as public resources, our interventions lay the buildings open to the streetscape and leave a physical mark of breached territory. The two-part machine process eats through building elements and uses the pulverized material to create a surface trace. These event-objects formalize routes of access and exit, producing public space and a means of exposé. In collaboration with Jerry Lai.

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Studio with Francois Roche of r&sei(n) and Caroline O’Donnell.

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Line Magazine was a newsprint magazine for arts criticism in the Twin Cities. Initiated the paper and served as editor. Graphic design in collaboration with Ethan Buller. Published by Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis.

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* RE has two major uses: (1) meaning with regard to, as the preposition in contexts such as re: your letter; and (2) as the prefix indicating return to a previous condition, as in review, reiterate, resume, reimagine, react, redo, and so on. Both uses suggest dialogue, criticism, feedback, and testing of an existing condition: a text, a building, a methodology.

At the heart of issue 8: RE is the understanding that the creative act itself is reiterative; that in rethinking, recombining, reshuffling, recycling, and reimagining aspects of the world around us, we produce work that both belongs to the current moment and establishes new future trajectories.

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Participated in generating concept, curating material, and editing CJOA issue 8. Editor in charge of articles by Ila Berman, Mark Morris, Keller Easterling. Editor and interviewer for “OMA re: OMU”, a conversation with Rem Koolhaas on the subject of his collaborator and mentor Oswald Mathias Ungers.

Graphic design of publication by Dexter Sinister.

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In The Factory We Produce A Public By Publicizing It worked to spatialize the process of the production of knowledge. We transformed a gallery space into a factory where text became a generative material. Visitors were invited to participate in networked, analogue, and embodied writing exercises, and in so doing, transformed the physical and virtual spaces of the gallery. This was an effort to tease out social, analytical, and phenomenological ways of knowing. The process was perpetuated through further reading, writing, and discussion, and effectively produced a public through the process of publication. In collaboration with Edith Fikes.

Programming associated with this event included a discussion with Serge Rompza of Berlin-Oslo design studio NODE about the participation of the public within different modalities of publication.

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Interview with Rem Koolhaas on the subject of his mentor and collaborator Oswald Mathias Ungers. In collaboration with Jeremy Alain Siegel, Matt Eshleman, and Steven Zambrano Cascante. Featured in Cornell Journal of Architecture Issue 8, 2011.

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Poster designed in conjunction with work on a forthcoming publication Giraffes, Telegraphs, and Hero of Alexandria by Berlin-based architecture/urbanism/research firm SMAQ. Served as conceptual consultant and writer. Publication forthcoming September 2012. Graphic design by Katja Gretzinger.