Perry Kulper

Perry Kulper: Surface Wanderings

‘Surface Wanderings’ will unpack the construction of a spatial and teaching practice through the lens of architectural representation, by sampling various kinds of produced surfaces—analog, digital and composite evidentiary fields. The talk will suggest that drawing, as one of many available mediums, can augment more dominant forms of visualization including parametric, computation and BIM logics, as an effective way to think visually. Comprised of influences, hunches, flat out shots in the dark and outcomes, ‘Surface Wanderings’ will build a gentle body of evidence that points to developing spatial, representational, cultural, and disciplinary participation.

It will touch key partners-in-crime including curiosity cabinets, Robert Venturi’s book, ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’, Wallace Stevens’ seminal poem ’Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, Jorge Luis Borges’ fictional taxonomy, ‘Celestial Emporium of Celestial Knowledge’, Baroque architecture, Matthew Barney’s ‘Drawing Restraints’, surrealist techniques, and interests in contingency and indeterminacy. Language prompts, analogous thinking, the ‘naming problem’, tailored visualizations, and inventive programmatic thinking will populate the margins. ‘Surface Wanderings’ will get under the metaphorical hood of an approximate practice, constructed by an amateur, that leverages various forms of visualization towards spatial speculations that aspire to enlarge what might be possible in the cultural imaginary. The participants will gain a broadened sense of how we can work on ideas and interests of architecture, augmenting the conventions of spatial representation and may experience a greater sense of freedom in terms of articulating their spatial imaginations.

Guests may be able to make slightly more effective, culturally based projects and lessons learned through this presentation will alleviate the 'crisis of reduction', or reducing things too quickly, common in most ways of working and producing architectural design. The talk will effectively 'grant' momentary freedoms from the strictures of conventional ways of working.

There will be a Q & A after the presentation.

Perry Kulper: Surface Wanderings is part of Lawrence Technological University's CoAD Lunch + Learn lecture series. LTU CoAD's Lunch + Learn lecture series is free and open to the public.

About Perry

Perry Kulper is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. In a prior life he was a SCI-Arc faculty member for 17 years and held visiting teaching positions at Penn and ASU during that time. Subsequent to graduate studies at Columbia University he worked in the offices of respected mentors Eisenman/ Robertson, Robert A.M. Stern and Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown before moving to Los Angeles. His primary interests include: the roles and generative potential of architectural drawing; the outrageously different spatial opportunities offered by using diverse design methods in design practices; and in broadening the conceptual range by which architecture contributes to our cultural imagination. He was the Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL 2018-19. In 2013 he published Pamphlet Architecture 34, ‘Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows’ with friend and collaborator Nat Chard. They are at work on a new book to be published by UCL Press. Recently he optimistically ventured into the world of the digital, attempting to get a handle on ‘cut + paste’ and ‘magic wand’ operations in Photoshop—as a result he has encountered one of his steeper learning curves. Even more recently he has also been snooping around under the hood of said digital realms. Fantastic beasts have also been on his mind.