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‘Seeking the Fundamental Questions: A Survey of Legibility from Point to Place’ – my best effort in titling this past year’s study at the AA. By ‘fundamental’ questions, as scripted, I strive less-so, by denotation, in pinpointing the ‘principal’ inquiries of spatial investigation, and more-so the ‘elementary’. Perhaps beginning my research at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (entitled ‘Fundamentals’) on my Unit Trip was the calculated accident that directed my train of thought toward this particular track of analysis. But rather than locating the 15 archetypal elements of a universal and timeless architectural ‘corpus’ via examination, as Rem Koolhaas does in curating the Biennale, I have since personally arrived at considering that this ‘corpus’ of architecture is rooted via a single seed or element: the point. Seeing architectural ‘place’, as De Certeau would define it, as the amassing ultimatum, per se, of mnemonically coded points – points calculated as a function of extrusion (point, line, plane, solid) – I look back on my journey this year and observe at each destination or ‘place’ – the object, the surface, the volume, the site, the route, and the cityscape – an ensemble of fragments or, quite simply, ‘points’. The process of ‘Seeking the Fundamental Questions’ then must derive from first asking how elemental points might be coded and amassed to legibly form a place.
