
Toward an Architecture of Suspension: Promiscuous Collisions of Transient Cartographies by Farzam Yazdanseta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
This thesis would not have been realized without the help of my great friend John W. Bryant
Acknowledgments:
I am grateful to the following individuals for their support and enthusiasm:
Filippo Caprioglio, KEA Distinguished Professor
Sarah Stein
Elizabeth “Libby” Babcock
Mercedes Afshar
Tannaz Alavi
Isaac Williams
Peter Noonan
Benjamin Callam
Nikki Finnemann
Carl Lostritto
Elizabeth Lacharite-Lostritto
Andrew Wade
and
Assistant Professor Sonja Duempelmann
for volunteering her time and her tremendous help throughout my thesis
Many political experts argue that we have tried too hard to fully resolve international and geopolitical conflicts by trying to negotiate full and lasting resolutions. International crises are dangerous episodes that are destabilizing not only to those directly involved but also to the entire international community. Long and exhaustive methods aimed at negotiating conflicts to end crisis have not been effective and have resulted in deaths and human suffering that may not have been necessary. What is evident is that international conflict is increasing and has rendered the world as a more dangerous place to live and has exposed future generations to greater peril. A growing number of experts in the United Nations diplomatic community contend that the best and the most expeditious way to end deadly violence in the world is to suspend conflict, to promote and extend a suspension of conflict, rather than seeking to overcome it. This thesis will investigate and explore the ways in which qualities of architecture can assist the suspension of deadly conflict. I am interested in discovering how architecture can help diminish the intensity and scale of conflict by creating a place where constructive talks between conflicting parties can be best carried out. How can architecture help to achieve a greater comfort between conflicted parties when searching for a less threatening ground? Can architecture foster greater empathy between adversaries?
my thesis committee
I am very fortunate to have the two most influential people in my life as my committee members. Without their mentorship and guidance I would not have graduated to this level today. I am grateful for all their efforts in shaping my education in the right direction. My committee chair Dean and Professor Garth Rockcastle and Professor Michael Ambrose.
introduction
“…Peace among men, it is important to note, is not the object of desire, not by any stretch of the historical, political, or sociological imagination. Nothing unites a community, with all the good fellowship and cooperation one can imagine, like the external threat of a common enemy. But the threat is originally internal; it is the violent threat of all against all. It is the annihilating threat of this internal difference, or difference, that we have rematerialized in the postwar, postmodern era; with the world itself at stake all differences would by definition be “internal” differences…war is a state of order, a classic state of lines and of columns, of maps and of strategies. It is a remedy to the violence of the furious, raging multitude…a society makes war to avoid at all costs a return to that state. Peace, then, is not the object of desire, but its by-product, the calm to which the deferred appropriation of the victim gives rise. It is a calm logically-that is, necessarily-attributed to the miraculous agency of the victim, thanks to whom for the first time something like a before (war) and after (peace), an outside (sacred) and inside (community), is marked-marked-, above all, as remarked, for its experience is necessarily mimetic and collective…” Andrew J, McKenna, Violence and Difference, Girard, Derrida and Deconstruction

Architecture can help suspend conflict. In order to do that it needs to be rarified and move beyond the normative expression employed in our typical surrounding world. This architecture needs to create a space and represent ideas to help compel us to act otherwise. Architecture of suspension can help critically awakens an otherwise passive and complacent public by stirring our imaginations and challenging our assumptions. It can thereby help us awaken empathy in other human beings and their circumstances or plights. It appears that 60 years of United Nations effort and agency has failed to resolve deadly global conflict. Conflict is a necessary byproduct of tensions and differences but conflict escalates to destructive levels when parties fail to see or accept differences in each other and come to abuse or transgress each other’s fundamental rights to exist. The ultimate goal for the new complementary United Nations Conflict Suspension Center on Roosevelt Island is not to try to eliminate conflict but to help suspend it. Architecture of suspension begins with a sharing of a presentation or choreography of the “others” strife. At first, in Isolation, adversaries need to learn more of the other, their pain, their dreams and their needs. They prepare to open themselves to others. My thesis takes the position that this best happens on an Island that even though removed, is not isolated for it exists in close visual and spatial proximity to Manhattan and Queens. This simultaneous separation and connection will be part of the architectural language of my thesis, a new United Nations Center. I am proposing that by the means of art, theatre and exhibitions prepare adversaries to better understand each other. Divergent cultural values and perspectives along with utilizing more abstract, less conventional images and spatial qualities will be embraced in this thesis to help me set alternative design parameters and discover new ideas for spaces that I believe can help bring the adversaries together. These will become spaces of sharing, healing and common ground. Spaces that facilitate building trust and empathy. In addition, housing, another component of the program, will be designed to help brings adversaries closer together.
The si(gh)te, Southpoint Park, with its mythical history is charged for hosting such an event. Southpoint has had a history of shifting. Over its various incarnations, the outline of the islands southern tip has expanded dramatically, mainly as a result of manmade efforts and human impacts on the earth. At the time of its construction, the Smallpox Hospital sat overlooking the edge of the island. 1975, the site had repositioned itself in such a manner that the building laid almost 900 feet from the islands southernmost edge. The island’s original boundaries are is now impossible to discern without a map. Design inspirations could be drawn from forces at work in and around the island, both visible and invisible. A fundamental question might be how is this “new ground” that is being added (and lost?) in the river corridor become an asset to the thesis? And how might the phenomena of that shifting ground become a part of the conceptual thinking about the project in this location? Some of these influences include the subway tunnel which transverses the island, the harsh tides of the East River with their diurnal swing in direction and sight lines to other natural and manmade New York phenomena.
“…The traditional sense of space is only produced in the very gesture of its subordination. To interfere with that gesture is to produce a very different sense of space, a sense that at once disturbs and produces the tradition. It is to mark this sense that Derrida uses the word “spacing” a word that carries some of the connotations that the tradition attaches to space in its attempt to dismiss it but also caries senses that cannot be recognized by the tradition. To disturb the tradition involves subverting its attempt to detach itself from space by identifying that attempt as a form of institutional resistance that attempts to conceal the convoluted structure of the tradition that makes it The exclusion and subordination of space produces an orderly façade, or, rather the façade of order, to mask an internal disorder. The traditional anxiety about space marks a forbidden desire that threatens to collapse the edifice of philosophy from within.”
Andrew J, McKenna, Violence and Difference, Girard, Derrida and Deconstruction
spacing
Traditional Modern architecture, the language used to signify the United Nations identity, on the edge of East River in New York, I believe is now showing its limits. A new and more rare architecture could disrupt and the boundaries of this tradition by the means of spacing. Spacing is not about literal space (a noun) but what Derrida describes as becoming space (a verb) or that which is meant to become without space (presence, speech, spirit, ideas, and so on). It is that which opens up a space, both in the sense of fissuring an established structure, dividing it or complicating its limits, but also in the sense of producing space itself as an opening in the tradition. Spacing is at once splintering and productive. As Derrida puts it, “spacing is a concept which also, but not exclusively, carries the meaning of a productive, positive, generative, force…it carries along with it a genetic motif: it is not only the interval, the space constituted between two things (which is the usual sense of spacing) but also spacing, the operation, or in any event, the movement of setting aside.” As an Iranian American, raised in Iran during the eight-year deadly conflict between Iran and Iraq, I am motivated to bring my personal emotions and recollections into this architectural language of this thesis project. For me architecture is a form of expression that helps me release my personal and emotional feelings about my surrounding world. Iran has been a prime subject of international politics and major party of numerous heightened conflicts since the creation of United Nations. Architecture of the United Nations Center seeks to foster greater empathy between adversaries in order to suspend deadly conflict. The success of projects like the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum Complex in Israel, by Moshie Safdie, the Memorial for Murdered Jews in Berlin, by Peter Eisenman, and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, by Daniel Libeskind lies in the fact that their designs were conceived and realized by architects sympathetic to the Holocaust issue. Libeskind, Safdie and Peter Eisenman are all Jewish, not to mention that Daniel Libeskind’s mother was a Holocaust survivor.
These architects have successfully created buildings and commemorative sites that have been very strident and evocative about an awakening process. These commemorative projects make us aware of the past, make us open ourselves to others and open the path for a better and peaceful future.
precedents
(de)sign)_strategy
Unfolding potentials
In most cases design challenges are approached started with existing contexts that are almost orthogonal and proportioned around basic and functional programmatic rules. Our cities and the built environment around us have gotten their performance and appearance through economical and practical factors.
In a lot of scenarios an inherent potential for a meaningful solution is replaced by a rational and common one.
This project seeks to move beyond the rationalistic ordering system. The potentials for these rational frameworks such as the human scale, clarity and versatility will be capitalized and used as design parameters in this process.
Using these frameworks, the design will unfold by activating geometries that are informed by political, social and environmental conditions.Orientation, religious iconographies that create biases, evolvement of site through natural and manmade violations of the earth and diurnal river flows of East River will be used as design parameters.As shown in figure X, Roosevelt Island’s south tip is unique due to the fact that a circle drawn on the globe will intersect Roosevelt Island at its southern tip, the World Trade Center site and Mecca is Saudi Arabia. This condition will be used as an orienting device in this design process.









Lean more about Chico Macmurtrie

"In recent history, the most graphic and politically important instance of deliberately manipulating the shape and symbolism of a table occurred in 1968 to 1969 peace negotiations between the United States and South Vietnam on one side, and North Vietnam and Vietcong on the other. North Vietnam was intent on establishing the equal status of the Vietcong even at the price of doing the same for South Vietnam, while South Vietnam vehemently opposed giving Vietcong any legitimacy, even at the price of merging its identity with the United States, so long as the two pairs of allies were clearly distinct from each other. Hence, North Vietnam and the Vietcong proposed a square table and the United States and South Vietnam a long rectangular one. Evidently each side was aware of the inherent formal properties and correlative political meaning of each shape and rejected the opponent’s proposal for precisely that reason. In their second proposal North Vietnam and the Vietcong were willing to talk around a circular table, thereby figuratively eliminating the identity of all participants. The Americans and South Vietnam still insisted on recognition of each pair of adversaries and therefore proposed, after many variations were rejected out of hand, two semicircles with a neutral zone in between. This was also rejected by the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong because it still did not express the equal status of the Vietcong either by articulation (square) or submersion (circle). After weeks of further haggling a compromise was designed: a solid circle with two secretarial circles opposite each other across the round table. Finally it got to be the matter of inches. Eighteen magical inches separating the circular table from its rectangular satellites brought the agreement to sit down.
What is clear in this example is that the parties never disagreed about the meaning of a given form, and that both recognized and cherished the political symbolism implied in form. The circle with its rectangular satellites eighteen inches removed was apparently the exact configuration, which accommodated the North Vietnamese/Vietcong intention of interpreting the circle as unbroken. At the same time the United States and South Vietnamese could claim, because of the rectangular table’ alignment and closeness to the round table, that there really existed two distinct areas divided by a middle zone marked by the side tables. In short, a dual interpretation was made possible by deliberately creating a multivalent form, allowing the coexistence of two fundamentally opposed political positions.
A table being the field on or across which untold human interactions take place-from a writer’s solitary ruminations to portentous political meetings-its shape, its intrinsic geometric properties, are crucial to its effective use, and thus it is a classic example of formal structure “at work”. The principles governing the formal structure of a table, expanded to encompass the space or room in which a table is placed, the relationships among spaces in a building, and a setting of a building itself will be applied in critiques in the following chapter."


