cities are amalgamations of ever-altering forms, composed
of primary elements, monuments, embedded artifacts,
and the present urban fabric. it is the very complexity
of this structure of cities that calls on the tasks of
examining architecture’s processes and of demanding a
comprehensible experience of the city.
a particular and perhaps uncertain condition presents itself
between buffalo’s silo city, a dense cluster of concrete
grain elevators situated along the waterfront and the tightly
knit working class residents of buffalo’s old first ward
neighbourhood. the boundaries of the city, here, is one
where residential and industrial areas co-exist, interlaced
and revealing the innate characteristics of this place and
time. any sensible architectural proposition, then, must
not fill, fix, or romanticize these sites but serve to author a
strategy for potential new inhabitations and the license to
invent within these boundary conditions.
the agenda of becoming/unbecoming an other form will
thus begin to locate its rationale and manifestations
internally, in the patterns of the city, to stress a critical
position for the continuity of history and forms. the
architecture of the city will firmly derive from typology and
the city itself; buffalo’s old first ward and silo city, matched
together, will be broken down as urban artifacts, that will
be types, that will be recomposed, that will generate an
other meaning from this reassembling of the city. finally,
becoming/unbecoming an other form will be a pursuit
of that which undoes (as well as what makes) and will
embrace the fracturing and opening up of the past and the
present, to what will bring forth an other.