We would like to remind you about the upcoming Call for Proposals deadline for the 6th Frascari Symposium: Finishing: The Ends of Architecture, for which Dr. Paul Emmons and Dr. Marcia Feuerstein serve as co-curators. The initial Call for Proposals was sent out in June. As we have extended the deadline for the abstract submission, we kindly encourage participants to submit their works by Friday, September 9th at 11:59 EST at Frascarisymposiumvi@gmail.com. Please specify in your email and your abstract whether you prefer to participate online or in-person.
The symposium will take place from March 31st - April 1st, 2023, in a hybrid format at Virginia Tech's Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, Virginia, USA.
The labor of finishing precedes itself and never comes to an end.
David Leatherbarrow, Building Time: Architecture, Event, and Experience (2020) 10.
The Tower of Babel, perhaps the original architectural fable, foretells the impossibility of
architecture’s completion. The utopic final state dreamed by architects is such that its end
never arrives, and may never be finished. This has precipitated lamentations of
architecture’s seemingly permanent existential crisis, like a store continuously “going out
of business.” Edward Said’s On Late Style identifies finishing as an awareness of coming
to an end, yet without actually arriving there. Nonetheless finishing as a topic evokes the
tendency to close down, to terminate, to desist, while remaining stubbornly undertheorized. Help us, then, expand the conceptualization of finishing and explain the
practices of finishing in architecture along three currents: the surface, the project, and
most broadly, architectural time itself.
Finishing up, finishing off, crossing the finish line. Is finishing the endpoint, or itself a
process, a concluding stage? Architectural constructing and construing, not limited to the
proverbial drawing board, defines a project, defines a building, but also spans an
architect’s entire career, her oeuvre. Poetic acts can initiate and sustain architectural
conversations when edifices exist in the public sphere, despite Winckelmann’s
proclamation of the births and deaths of styles. For something to be complete (full or
final), therefore, it need not necessarily be finished (ended), and vice versa.
Finishing also connotes perfecting – applying the finishing touches. Is the end, then, the
completion of a design, checking off the punch-list at the end of construction, or does it
continue through a building’s lifetime, perhaps even extending to its ruined state and
beyond as spoils? Michelangelo’s work often embodies “the poetic of the non-finito,”
demonstrating that an unfinished edifice may find “an elegant but incomplete” existence
well past the point of being considered a work-in-progress. Unlike the unfinished, Marco
Frascari (2015) posits that the non-finito exists outside of time.
This symposium proposes an agenda for theorizing finishing by asking participants to
explore the topic through one or more of these three currents:
1) Surfaces: Finishing as Polishing
The flow of this current leads to questions of Detail via: Material, Tactility and Craft.
2) Projects: Finishing as Completing
The flow of this current leads to questions of Building via: Concept, Completion and
Reception.
3) Times: Finishing as Ending
The flow of this current leads to questions of Architecture via: Performance, Teleology
and Oeuvre.
Current I - SURFACES
Finishing as Polishing Detail: Material – Tactility – Craft
I shall treat of polished finishings and the methods of giving them both beauty and
durability.
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture. VII. Preface. Morgan, 201.
As the final treatment of a building’s physical surfaces, finish provides what Adrian Stokes
terms “the smooth and the rough.” Finishing can be a physical act, a labor of love, where
materials are polished, sanded, painted, drilled, installed, smoothed or roughened with
the tools of skilled workers. Building surfaces are sometimes judged superficially, but they
remain the tangibly present skin available to the tactile explorations of a building’s
inhabitants. Despite being the subject of the entirety of Book VII of Vitruvius’s Ten Books
on Architecture, finishing receives relatively limited scholarly attention.
In the practice of architecture, a satisfactory or “good” surface that completes or
concludes the act of making is characterized as a “standard finish.” How much of the good
of the finish is the desired end state, and what criteria are occluded in evaluating its
performance? To what degree is a finish achieved or realized by a mixture of intentional
(human) and unintentional forces (like weathering)?
In dialogue with these concerns, to what degree is the external surface finish of a building
inherent to its value, use, or reception? Can ostentatious finishing blind us to design
flaws? How is finishing present in the drawings of the architect? What semantic or
ontological shifts, if any, take place when a surface is refurbished or refinished? Is it
fundamentally changed, or just superficially adjusted, renovated? When we casually talk
about surface-level changes, are we being disingenuous? To what degree should we
conceive of the tactility of building as a central concern for the architect; more generally,
how are finishes related to the embodied experience of space?
Why do craft workers such as stonemasons or painters often receive less credit than
patrons or architects? Is a finish regarded more highly when it is “hand-made” as opposed
to mechanically produced? Does a focus on finish inevitably lead to Venturi and Scott
Brown’s “decorated shed” or can it be a site of resistance?
Current II - PROJECTS
Finishing as Completing Building: Concept – Completion – Reception
Finishing ends construction, weathering constructs finishes.
Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (1991) 5.
Finishing in architecture can be the completing of a drawn design for a project, the
construction of an edifice, or its later reception and ongoing life. Is finishing pertaining to
an architectural project the idea of reaching an endpoint or state of completion? If a design
is the final statement of the architect, including unbuilt projects that contribute to and
appear in built projects, then why are architects’ design adjustments during construction
providing the “finishing touches” essential to a building’s attribution?
Even the widespread notion of finishing a project with the end of construction overlooks
the life or many lives of a building through its subsequent renovations, additions, and
revisions. Are buildings only finished when they are in ruins, or beyond that, demolished?
Even then, what of the surviving spolia? Or, like the Ise Shrine(s), what of re-construction,
re-creation? A building may be physically complete while a project still evolves in the
minds of the architects, inhabitants, or historians. It may also evolve through use, through
repurposing, through cultural, social, and historical change. This is especially true when
considering architecture within the framework of a circular economy of a sustainable
society. How are we to read later changes, perhaps unintended by the original architect,
builder or patron? Are they part of an ongoing narrative? Do they represent new chapters?
What is continuous among the discontinuities of edifices spawning new stories and new
values with each generation, or even with each individual?
Should a work be interpreted differently when damning information comes to light about
its origins or its creators? To what degree is a finished building connected to an individual
architect, especially for structures in the public domain? Can protest legitimately target a
finished building or statue, even if it bears no direct connection to the perpetrators? How
does graffiti or vandalism interact with a once-finished piece, and its ongoing narratives?
Can “canceling” a physical construction be a just end to a narrative of oppression, or can
it be reclaimed as a site for reflection, education, reparation? Is something that is finished,
therefore, irretrievably judged or normalized; its sometimes dark history forgotten? How
can we, and when should we, engage in processes of architectural revisionism? For what
purposes, and at whose instigation?
Current III - TIMES
Finishing as Ending Architecture: Performance – Teleology – Oeuvre
God alone can finish.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters (1856) III. 117.
Finishing an architectural project is one sort of ending – a conclusion of designing and
building; a conclusion of all that has preceded it. On the project level, architectural
correctness is evaluated by rules and data – codes, regulations, standards, legal
contracts, and statistics. However, endings also define a time-based aspect of
architecture: the notion of a final scene provides a performative framework for the
interpretation of buildings and their legacies, their afterlives. Tim Ingold (2021) explores
continuity as inherent to life itself, a continuous flow, “a movement of opening, not of
closure.”
Viewing a building as a performance thus describes not only the objective material
conditions of finishing, but also the theatricality of finishes and flourishes at the final
curtain call. However, unlike an ephemeral theatrical production, finished buildings often
continue in time well beyond their creators, their zeitgeists. With this in mind, to what
degree should one evaluate architecture in a teleological manner; are we to determine its
ending by the degree to which it succeeded in performing the intentions (or ends) of its
original creators? Where does this leave us when buildings are repurposed, renovated,
reoccupied? Does a building have a denouement? An epilogue, an after-story, a sequel
… a re-boot? Or should the performance be read (narrowly or otherwise) as the ongoing
work of the architect, in different spaces and locales, with each finish merely an interlude,
an entr'acte, a pause for breath?
More broadly, to what degree is time in architecture relevant to the notion of its finishing,
or completion? Are buildings finished when they receive acknowledged classical status,
or only when they lie in ruins (or even post-ruin dust, legend, oblivion)? What is the role
of the restorer, even the archaeologist, in revivifying and “un-finishing” a building? Is each
encounter with a structure a unique and discrete performance with its own narrative, its
own beginning, middle, and end? With parallel narratives, and coterminous architectural
experiences, have endings been commoditized and reproduced, as in other artforms?
Such considerations, therefore, beg the question: what are the ends of architecture? Are
architectural ethics adequately ensured merely by codes and regulations? How do the
ends, purposes or destinations of a building exist separately from the conditions and
biases of its designers? Moreover, how do architectural drawings explicitly and implicitly
suggest their criteria for evaluation? What are the greater social, cultural and aesthetic
purposes toward which architecture directs itself? In light of movements around social
justice, representation and sustainability, it is perhaps useful to consider who finishes
buildings, how such narratives are accepted, denied, reimagined and reinforced, and of
course, to what ends. With changing social ethics and narratives, how can different ends
be served by contemporary architectural performances; even when buildings are bloodied
by their histories, how does everyday life, social and environmental justice, occupy and
maintain a lived and joyful presence in edifices?
