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Built Work

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Civil Settlement

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			PRODUCTS
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE FABRIC WORKSHOP AND MUSEUM PHILA PA
as an Artist Resident in the Multiples Program
Produced a silkscreened linen tablecloth / series of 25			NAMI YAMAMOTO
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			NAMI + MARIANNE FRIEL

The Plans Caution

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		PRODUCTS
		MICHELLE TARANSKY











This book adjunct to P-Queue vol. 4 was made possible through the support of Steve McCaffrey, David Grey Chair of Poetry and Letters, Susan Howe, Samuel P. Cagen Chair of Poetry and Humanities, and The Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo.	DESIGN, CONCEPT, + PRODUCTION
To Order from P-QUEUE	ANDREW RIPPEON Poet

Sanctuary

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PROJECTS
Elements: seat, lamp table, vanity, rostrum, cellar door, ash, vent, mounded earth, ditch, door, path, train tracks, chimney

CV

RICHARD TARANSKY R.A.

701 Walnut Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19106 215. 888. 2012
rtaransky@verizon.net
PRACTICE
2002 - 08	Diagram / Richard Taransky Studio, Philadelphia PA
1984 - 99	Richard Taransky Architects, Haddonfield NJ
	Licensed Architect: New Jersey and Pennsylvania

EDUCATION
1973 -76	The Cooper Union, New York City, NY
1971 -73	llinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois

AWARDS
2006	Artist’s Residency, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA
2005	Chair, “John G. Williams Distinguished Professor”, University of Arkansas, School of Architecture
2000-01	The Rome Prize, Architecture, The American Academy in Rome
TEACHING
2007	The University of the Arts, School of Design, Philadelphia, PA
	Foundation, 3D Studio Yr 1
2005	University of Arkansas, School of Architecture, Fayetteville, AR
	Design Studio Yr 4
1997	Tyler School of Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
	Design studio Yr 1 + 2 Thesis Yr 5 Introductory Technology Advanced freehand architectural drawing
1994-96	Tyler School of Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
	Thesis Studio Yr 5
1993	University of the Arts, Architectural Studies, Philadelphia, PA
	Senior Studio Yr 4
1989-92	Tyler School of Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
	Design studio Yr 2
1987	The Cooper Union, School of Architecture, New York City, NY
	Thesis Studio Yr 5
1984	The University of the Arts, Architectural Studies, Philadelphia, PA
	Senior Studio Yr 4 Case Study, and Systems of Construction
1978	Illinois Institute of Technology, School of Architecture, Chicago, IL
	Life Drawing

Visiting Critic :	University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, University of California Berkeley, Columbia University, Pratt Institute, Harvard University, The Cooper Union, Lehigh University, Penn State University, University of Buffalo, British Columbia Institute of Technology, Arizona State University.
EXHIBITS : SOLO
2004	Long Hall Gallery, University Of Arkansas, “Selected Work 1976 - 01”, Fayetteville, AR
1999	FAARM, The Foundation for Art & Architectural Research, “Present Memorials : Houses of Passage”
SELECTED EXHIBITS : GROUP
2007	Janney Jaskey Gallery, "Vast Systems (Barely Holding Together)", Philadelphia, PA
2006	The Fabric Museum and Workshop, "Selections from the Collection", Philadelphia, PA
2006	Gallery 339, “In-Fill” with Qb3 and Plumbob, Philadelphia, PA
2001	The American Academy in Rome, "Fellow’s Exhibition", Rome, Italy
1998	Stephan Stux Gallery, “The House for the 21st Century”, New York City, NY
1997	Tyler School of Art, "Faculty Show”, Philadelphia, PA
1996	Lehigh University, “3 Philadelphia Architects”, The Contemporary Artists Series, Bethlehem, PA
1995	GSFA, University of Penn, “Figure, Frame, Shadow, and The Architectural Program”, with Wesley Wei FAIA
1985	Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, “Affects/Effects”, Faculty Show, Philadelphia, PA
1977	The Walker Center, “Townhouse Competition”, Minneapolis, MN
1977	The Graham Foundation, “Townhouse Competition”, Honorable Mention, Chicago, Illinois
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
2007	"Tenuous Universe", review of Vast Systems, Philadelphia Inquirer, Edith Newhall, Dec
2007	"The Plans Caution", collaboration with poet Michelle Taransky, P-Queque, SUNY
2006	“In-Fill” with Qb3 and Plumbob, Critical essays w/ Inga Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, PA
2005	"Mardi”, The Poetry Center of Chicago, broadside collaboration with poet Anselm Hollo
2004	Re: View, School of Architecture , University of Arkansas, Bio, Drawings, and Models
2003	"Landscape", Society of Fellows Journal, American Academy in Rome
2003	“Concerning the Design School Dilemma”, Metropolis Magazine, August
2001	“Fellows”, American Academy in Rome, Exhibition Catalog
1999	“Present Memorials : Houses of Passage”, Exhibition Catalog, FAARM
1998	"Civilization and Its Discontents : Architectural Dialogue One”, Parkett Magazine, No. 56
1998	“Intimate Space, Exhibit and Symposium", The Oculus, AIA Journal, NYC, Nov.
1987	“3 Philadelphia Architects”, Contemporary Artists Series Catalog, Lehigh University
1986	"Adding on to an Older House", Practical Home, Margolin Residence, Moorestown, NJ
1985	“Affects/ Effects”, Catalog , Faculty Show, UArts
1985	"Library for the Blind”, Education of an Architect II, Collected works, The Cooper Union, Thesis Project, Rizzolli
SELECTED LECTURES
2005	Penn State University, School of Architecture, “Mistaken Identity”
2005	The Fabric Workshop, " Selected Work"
2004	University of Arkansas, School of Architecture, “Mistaken Identity”
2002	Boston University, University Professors Program, “Translating Rome”
2002	Drexel University, School of Architecture, “A Critical Practice”
1999	West Jersey AIA, “A Critical Practice”
1997	Penn State University, School of Architecture, “Life Drawing”
1996	GSFA, University of Pennsylvania, “Devoured Sites”
1996	Lehigh University, “The Space of Touch”

Guestbook

DIAGRAM is a design studio developing and producing projects and collaborative work at all scales. Located in Philadelphia, PA. (about)


Drawings for a silk screened tablecoth “Civil Settlement“

Handout

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PROJECTS
Program: A back door meeting
I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, Lord. —Woody Guthrie

Memorials

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		PROJECTS

Block and Rail

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PROJECTS
Program: A house for a man and a house for his things

Collector

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PROJECT
Program: A House for a Collector

Crystal Land

Professor Donald Kunze
Penn State University

Architecture as inquiry is as old as architecture itself, where the primitive templum was also a speculation about the quadrilateral division of the universe. In the wealth of “architecture without architects,” we have evidence of plans and experiments, exchanges between myth and masonry, music and mud. In more recent times, the speculation has been carried out on paper as well. Piranesi’s Carceri engravings proposed a fantastic endless prison, a parody of the space created by Enlightenment facticity. LeCleu’s buildings shaped like animals and other figures inserted architecture between the lines of a text.Architecture has survived as a form of inquiry because it has always managed to live within the shadows of architecture-as-style. For such a visual art, architecture is dominated by the way it looks at first glance. Once “a look” is identified with a cultural ideal, the representational function dominates. If Neoplatonism engenders a century of white symmetry, Christianity in its turn ushers in gothic points and dark tracery. History tends to forget the utopian goal and remembers instead the temple-front or gothic cottage.It is not so much that the symmetry, points, and tracery then become signs rather than part of buildings, but that their composite nature - as a sign and signified, ideal and fact, reality and dream - is obscured. It is this composite nature that is reasserted by architecture-as-inquiry. It would be a mistake, in this process, to retreat from style itself, to counter style’s “look” with anonymity or cacophony. Architecture as inquiry need only reassert the law of history: style follows inquiry and, by following, shows where it has been.

Melancholy

In today’s medical opinion, melancholy is little more than an emotional disability with established links to chemical imbalances in the brain. In the longer memory of art, melancholy is the key to the nature of poetic genius. As early an authority as Aristotle puzzled why darkness should be coupled with intellectual brilliance, and as prominent an artist as Dürer documented its attributes visually and literally. All along, artists, musicians, authors, and architects have exploited melancholy’s dark but rich resources.It is interesting to talk of Taransky’s work in terms of melancholy. This is not to use melancholy as a characterization, not that this would be out of place given his themes of solitude, reflection, and the poetics of impasse. Taransky travels the painful landscape of suicide, genocide, isolation, physical handicap, and environmental degradation, using stage-set houses overflowing with narrative. This melancholia is not an expression of personal psychology but, rather, the statement of an important architectural problem: architecture’s relation to time. For example, the word tempo, in Italian, refers to both the weather and chronological time. This ambidexterity is present in the English use of “times” or “days” to speak of a period of time as an “age” with stable, enduring qualities. “In those days, life was simpler.” Philosophers as well as poets have noted that the eternity of bliss attributed to past ages is a drug of our own invention; that human life is conditioned by chronology, by history, by the constant loss of the present as well as the ever-looming specter of future death. That these two qualities, eternity and ephemerality, can be linked in a word is a sign that they are a part of the human mental molecule: our essence.Language can play out this antimony through theory or consolation. Architecture has a different resource at hand. It can pose the impossible by creating charged spaces that speak through emptiness and silence. With Taransky, such spaces are implicitly narrative. He poses his economical questions in a language of excavations, improbable apertures, dramatically posed figures, and paired elements, as if buildings and furniture were chess-pieces on a board. A landscape goes from woods to a bare paved lot; a family goes from a full to an empty nest; survivors escape from nightmare to self-built prisons. The narratives pose their own systems of opposition: a high and a low window; a full space and an empty one; functional walls and walls left bare.The architectural term “storey” evolved from the use of levels within cathedrals to tell the “stories” of the Old and New Testaments. It is just this kind of exchange between narrative content and the exigencies of practical delivery that drive Taransky’s work. Narrative resides in his work not so much as a program ordering individual elements as a wedge dividing each detail of form into a diploid of object materiality and sublime spirituality. “Story” becomes “storey,” “storey becomes “story.” Eternity becomes chronology and chronology eternal. The riddle of time is bundled with shadows and light.Drawing plays a profound role in Taransky’s work. The drawing condenses the question of time in art into a matter of projection. This is not simply the geometric projection of solid bodies onto two-dimensional surfaces, but the projection of the “future” of a building, as Marco Frascari has put it. In architecture as well as art, the future is a special form of the subjunctive tense. It is an “isn’t” that acquires a momentary glimmer of life that, within art’s prism, becomes more real than the dismembered past and fleeting present. Within projection the miracle of clarity becomes possible. One of the best descriptions of this in geometric terms can be found in Nabokov’s “poem” that forms the basis of his famous novel, Pale Fire.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

When Nabokov says “exactly stand,” we have a map of what happens when the imagination ventures beyond the bounds of normality’s imposed ideas of time and space. Nothing stands “exactly” in reality, but in the projection of art, which can join the false azure, the slain bird, the bit of fluff on the windowpane; which can join the dead waxwing with the poetic subspecies, who made it across and lived the broader life of the reflected sky; we are at last fully human, exactly human.

Poché

Architects have several choices for what materials might approximate Nabokov’s “false azure.” Taransky uses his skies judiciously, narrowing their promise to bands held at the horizon, accessible through several of his impossible apertures, crone-like bridges, catwalks, and diving-board tables. These moves are antinomous connections between inside and outside, and the clues may found in numerous “section” drawings, which make the viewer feel as if he/she were above and looking down, rather than even and looking horizontally. Interiors open to the outside only under certain conditions, which, like the symbolic assignments given to the openings of the body in every religion, cannot be transgressed without a prayer.Poché - concealed material interiors or the shadowed space always beyond the reach of perception or ordinary experience - is the dwelling-place of melancholia. Access to it is normally impossible and usually undesirable. But, the same forces that produce fear can induce desire and imagination. In the branch of esthetics known as the grotesque, forbidden spaces are the foci of desire. When Taransky’s high-placed openings lead out to the “other houses” that frequently tag along, we are invited to see architecture with the eyes of a zombie. This is meant to recall not The Night of the Living Dead but, rather, Calvino’s moving essay, “On Learning to be Dead,” where we find art within the perfect poise of indifference that we mortals can imagine only as death.Two related examples of poché come to mind. The first is John Cheever’s story, “The Enormous Radio.” A lonely housewife in New York of the 1950s is comforted by her husband’s gift of a large radio with the unusual ability to tune into other apartments in her building. Drawn increasingly to exploit this naughty 4th-dimensional feature, she is gradually devastated by the hidden tragedies of her neighbors.The second poché example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The hero is a New York photographer immobilized by a broken leg and voyeurized by a pair of high-powered binoculars and a telephoto lens. When the neighbor across his urban interior courtyard turns murderous, the space in between the two apartments becomes a mechanism for the voyeur’s own murder. Whether the conscious nosiness of Hitchcock’s invalid or the innocent curiosity of Cheever’s housewife, these stories suggest that our culture prefers to take in closets, back passageways, and other shadowed spaces in the same mental breath. The poché upon which Nabokov’s furniture might “exactly stand” is a place of death but also a place of the miraculous life of art.Bernard Tschumi once said that the only perfect architecture is the spectacle of fireworks. Within their festal glow, we see an order that is so much of chronology - the celebration of an event - and so little of duration that we see the identity between the two, stillness in movement. Like the gods of the Greeks, thrown into the sky as points of light, the architecture of fireworks both is and isn’t. This fact, which places architecture’s existence in extreme jeopardy, is at the same time a guarantee of divinity. Architecture, like the ancient gods, lives by finding a space and time between being and nothingness.

http://art3idea.ce.psu.edu/boundaries

[This essay is adopted from “Crystal Lands,” included in the catalog, 38th Annual American Contemporary Art Exhibition; Philadelphia Architects: Larry Mitnick, Wesley Wei, Richard Taransky; Drawings and Models (Bethlehem, Pennylvania: Lehigh University, 1994).]

Family Sections

Dan Hoffman, Architect
Arizona State University

Studio MA

Taransky positions himself both inside and outside of the family drama joining the tradition of artists who seek to construct a broader symbolic meaning out of the fabric of their own, everyday experience. The painter, Max Beckmann, is a relevant example here. Taransky openly cites his work as an influence noting how Beckmann depicts events in his personal life through the use of vigorously rendered icons and gestures set into mythic settings and narratives. The broad scope of this living tradition offers both a personal and accessible mode of interpretation enabling the artist to reflect upon the historic nature of his experience. In his paintings, “Family Portrait”, Beckmann reflects upon the growing tide of fascism in Germany contrasting quiet calm of the home with the claustrophobic horrors of the emerging Nazi regime.

As with Beckmann, the figure plays and important role in Taransky’s work, punctuating his sectional notations as well as organizing the intimate workings of his cabinet like details. Figures are used to animate and thematize these relationships giving the architecture a scale somewhere between that of a room and a piece of furniture. The resulting, dense proximity of the spaces and formal massing can also be compared to the figural choreography found in Beckmann’s paintings where the symbolism of a bodily gesture is used to elaborate a spatial and temporal narrative. Looking at one of Taranky’s models we can feel the full range of bodily expression as forms are delicately balanced upon each other. Like the acrobat at the circus, the compositions play upon our body’s ability to project itself into the object, feeling its lightness and weight and thrilling at our ability to avoid the danger of the fall. It could be said that this silent form of communication is the stuff of which architecture is made, an invitation for the body to project itself into the drama of space and time.

Taransky’s sectional musings offer us a glimpse of the mechanisms within his work, revealing the workings of the household and the vessel within which it is placed. This precarious perch between instinct and knowledge is represented in the delicate balance that holds the family together through all its trials and is also felt in the compositional structure of Taransky’s projects. Here the neoplastic vocabulary is charged by the careful placement of figures that thematize the structural and spatial relationships within each piece. Beams and walls not only support and define spaces but also work to establish a dynamic relationship between the inhabitants. As in the writings of Simone Weil, geometry assumes an ethical role in the reading of the composition. In Gravity and Grace, Weil describes the cross (or right angle) as a lever that mediates the descent of grace from above in order to balance the pull of evil from below. Through the symbol of the cross, geometry acts a cipher that connects bios with cosmos, bodily experience with the ethical framework of the Judeo-Christian tradition. A symbolic reading of geometric forms provides a rich soil of interpretation deepening our understanding of space through the integration temporal and ethical dimensions. Taransky transforms the simple equation of up/down, good/evil into a more complex mechanism representing the paradoxical relationships typical of family life. Within the familial orbit, good and evil are but shades in a complex emotional tableau. For example, one member of the family might see a particular act as a sacrifice for the good the good of the family while others might see the same act as a destructive threat.

$Jacob\'s Dream$

In the drawing entitled “Jacob’s Dream” the horizontal embrace of the two figures on the lower quadrant is juxtaposed to the seated figure above whose weight is resting upon a line that passes directly through the necks of the lower pair. The same figure is drawing upon a tablet, the support of which passes through a wall and into a bassinet attended by yet another figure. Is this to be read as a depiction of the daily life of the pair, sleeping at night in their conjugal bed and working during the day in the upper part of the dwelling? Or is this a picture of an illicit coupling occurring beneath the daily activities of the family?

Just as Beckmann’s paintings evoke a fervent vision of European culture between the wars, Taransky’s drawings and projects show us that the memory of home can no longer contain increasingly personalized view of the family that has emerged at the end of this century. No longer functioning within the parameters of a simply defined institution, the family must now be seen as a complex interplay of narratives, each with its own architectural expression.

Taransky views the promise (and danger) of modernism as the ability of an individual to enter into a dialogue with the flow of history through the artistic engagement of the mythic tradition. Inexpensive building techniques have offered architects the opportunity to extend this artistic possibility to the design of the single-family residence. Although professional journals are filled with such designs, one rarely feels that the architects have used their commissions to deepen the emotional and spiritual life of the inhabitants. The American Dream has become more complex. Like shepherds in the high meadow, architects like Taransky are following the dream wherever it leads. It is time that we begin to follow them.

Contact

To commision a project or to purchase work :
	RICHARD TARANSKY
	701 WALNUT STREET
	PHILADELPHIA PA 19106

	215.888.2012
	rtaransky @ verizon.net
To be added to the mailing list or to make a comment

Present Memorials : Houses of Passage

Tim McDonald, Onion Flats

FAARM / FOUNDATION FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH Philadelphia PA Founder and Curator
Richard Taransky’s Present Memorials/Houses of Passage begins a series of exhibitions at FAARM entitled Four Voices, which will continue into June of 2000. The series has no intention to create a venue of the ‘best and brightest’ in the city, rather it hopes to present an image of the diversity and breadth of four distinct and highly individualized approaches to the discipline of architecture in the Philadelphia area. It is through the diversity and rigor of these four practices that the dialogue concerning the role and responsibility of the contemporary architect may continue within the architectural community.
As the inaugural event of Four Voices, Richard Taransky’s Present Memorials/Houses of Passage appropriately initiates this series, for the tone that his work presents and the response that it illicit challenges most preconceived notions of the ‘function’ of any contemporary architectural practice. While most architects would agree that architecture is not simply a ’service-oriented’ profession, but one in which the responsibility to a client is equally balanced with its responsibility to a culture, a tradition and a critical discourse, few could actually offer such a position through their work. The tone of the ‘theoretical’ and ‘physical’ constructions, which fill the space of FAARM, is sure to confound both practitioner and theorist alike. It will confound because the content of the work is not easily consumed or digested. It requires participation on the part of the viewer, which is at times unsettling. It is unsettling precisely because we are presented with a series of constructs which take their form and function from archetypal images of man, images which link biblical parables to holocaust tragedy, ritualistic sacrifice to suburban home and funerary ashes to backyard grills. As Diane Lewis so apply notes, Taransky “grope(s) for an archaic sense of existence to permeate every element of a structure with meaning beyond the visible”. This ‘archaic sense of existence’ is the overriding tone of this architect’s work.
Taransky’s installation “A Proposal for a Clearing“, which accompanies the exhibition, is a series of meticulously humble and heavy ‘figures’ composed of steel and wood. Through these figures, however, through their joints and juxtapositions, through their gravity and suspension, through their physical presence, Taransky is telling us stories. He is also telling us that we need to tell stories. As one looks into the protagonists of Adam, Eve and Lilith, one finds other images of chairs/thrones, cradle/coffin/womb, oven, picket fence, telephone pole/ tree of life….and the plot begins to thicken. Taransky appears to be presenting us with not one story of the original ‘fall of man’, but many, layered in time and woven uncomfortably with equally archetypal images of our present. Taransky finds it necessary to not simply speak of a loss of a ’spiritual continuity’; he must construct an image of it. It is in this constructing that one begins to encounter the function of the work as mnemonic, “intended to assist in the memory”. It is as if this construction is somehow a re-construction, an archaic founding ritual, a reconstituting of a forgotten hallowed ground, an act of commemoration particular to this physical space and time and yet somehow timeless. The appropriate titling of this piece reminds us that in any constructing there is first a ‘clearing’ in which tale needs to be told.
FAARM is honored and privileged to exhibit the thoughts and work of an architect who tirelessly invokes a space of questioning which is larger than himself and the cynical time in which he lives. Our hope is that this exhibition will not simply contribute to the dialogue concerning a contemporary architectural practice. We expect it to raise the stakes.

Sketchbooks

While at the American Academy in Rome in 2000,
Rome to Istanbul, Barcelona, Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, and Tiberius’s Cave in Sperlonga

Mistaken Identity

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PROJECTS
TO TRAVEL SKETCHBOOK
Mistaken Identity : A Reconstruction of the Arch of Titus, Roman Forum, Rome , Italy
Work completed while The Mercedes Bass Fellow in Architecture at The American Academy in Rome 2000

Water Structures

Where Whitman Died

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Whit is a mixed use campus project that will create an anchor to an already damaged community threshold.
This campus will build upon the popularity of Whitman’s House as a destination within the ruins of South Camden toward the goal of reconstructing an innovative and sustainable community.
Diagram is the developing this project and is looking for community investment funds.

A Gentleman’s Agreement

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A Memorial to a Better Philadelphia
Program : A light well and wate