MIES.

zip : Compressed Constructions

ACSA Design Submission - Pavilion
2018 ACSA Fall Conference | PLAY with the Rules

Architecture has always had to deal with the problem of information transfer and data compression. Buildings are
big — they are complex material assemblies that have to negotiate the enormity of their scale with the management of
spatial configuration, systems of construction, and structural necessity. Over time, architects have developed an evolving
range of abstraction techniques to convey as much information as possible using the most efficient means — the
mediation of the act of construction through the architectural drawing. These necessarily incomplete and fragmentary
documents allow for the expansion of an architecture from the abstract and immaterial towards the material fact of the
building through the manipulation of scale, notational convention, use of the “typical” detail, and even the operations of
repetition and symmetry in the early design phase of the building.

The pavilion has lost many of the cultural and disciplinary drivers that established it as the locus architectural
experimentation.1 As a counter-point to the ubiquitous contemporary pavilion, we are proposing a new category of
architectural production: the .zip construction. Rather than starting with the abstract, immaterial, and/or ideal and moving
towards the reality of construction, we are starting with and compressing the building itself, diminishing its size while
maintaining its scale. Thus, analogous to the operation of digital compression but applied in the material realm, the
compressed or .zip construction contains all of the actual materiality, methods of assembly, and the construction details
of the original referent building while redistributing and negating the original proportional relationships, plastic properties,
and spatial qualities of the building. In this particular compression, the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe was
used as a point of departure, with all spans and extrusions reduced to 3” when possible, negotiating and magnifying
idiosyncrasies produced by the use of full-scale material members, construction details, and hardware.
(Other forms of compression/information loss are possible - such a the reduction of repetitive members and details.) The
result is a construction that references yet is autonomous to the building, an estranged and hyper-articulated totem that
contains all the DNA of the larger construction; it is all detail.

This pavilion was selected as the winning submission for the 2018 ACSA Fall Conference, “PLAY with the Rules” in
Milwaukee. Supported by an NEA grant, the pavilion will be built in the courtyard of the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, School of Architecture & Urban Planning and will be on display for a year starting October 11, 2018. The Play
Pavilion is titled: MIES.zip: Compressed Constructions and is designed by Lowder + Murata / Natures, Objects, Practices
(LMNOP).

Architects:
Lowder + Murata /Natures, Objects, Practices (LMNOP):
Team: James Lowder, Misako Murata, Owen (Xie) Hong, Jeremy Son, Anna Korneeva, Naeem Shahrestani

Builders:
Anderson Ashton Design / Build: Matthew Mehring, Jordan Nelson, Steve Wagner, Jim Filer
A&A Erecting: Nadine Love-Filer, Jeff Piskula, Oscar Bravo, Brandon Shea

Fabricators: Anderson Ashton with welder Joe Swessel

1. In her essay “Vanishing Point: The Contemporary Pavilion”, Sylvia Lavin states, “the architectural pavilion now has an
identifiable market and hence constitutes its own niche within (rather than outside, posed critically against) professional
practice. The result is that while firms specializing in hospital or stadium design would once have been understood to be
separated from pavilion architects by a vast ideological divide, today they increasingly operate in accordance with the
same values of efficiency, service, and art as added value.” See Lavin, Sylvia. “Vanishing Point: The Contemporary
Pavilion.” Artforum, 51, no. 2 (October 2012).