ARCHITECTURE

A Framework:

Extraction is a method for approaching architecture, and the treatment of site and program, that is less expansive than traditional architectural ideologies.  It is part of a notion that architecture is unable to effect change at the level that it has assumed in the past.  Instead, the proposition is that architecture can be an extension of existing conditions, offering incremental improvements grafted onto conventional structures or forms.  This extraction can occur in various ways.   For example, extraction can occur by looking to activities that occur on a site.  These activities can be drawn out, amplified, and modified.  Extraction can also occur from a spatial and formal standpoint.  Available space can be extruded, and unavailable space carved out.

Each of these forms of extraction encourages adaptation over time.  By extracting conditions from a site, the resultant programs, spaces and forms are adapting to the given context.  And while extrusion of site conditions are a form of imitation, they can also offer an additional measure of guidance.  Rather than absolute replication, adaptation can encourage adjustment without requiring a ‘tabula raza’. 

Such modification can occur over a protracted temporal period, or a compressed one. In the more challenging of the two, the response to a rapid degree of change requires architecture to become instantly adaptable.  An architecture that can change at such a rapid pace becomes simultaneously site-less and specific to a site condition that recurs.  That is, the element that connects is constant change, but it is also a similarity across multiple sites that provides a framework to fit into: level ground, overhead structures, and functional repetition.  However, within this framework the form is fluid, mutable.  In this respect it transcends traditional structures.

From ‘Zero Streets: Temporal Extractions and the Space of Erasure’