Papers by William T Willoughby
Public Interiority: Exploring Interiors in the Public Realm (London: Routledge, 2024), 2024
Studying is a practice with spatial and temporal dimensions of social importance. We can trace sp... more Studying is a practice with spatial and temporal dimensions of social importance. We can trace spaces of study back to monastic practices: small devotional spaces or “cells” set aside for religious inquiry and scholarship. Where and how is the habit of study practiced today? Is it reflected in our smartphone handset, our laptop, or our headphones? Is it present in a third place such as a coffee shop, subway commute, or other informal spaces where ubiquitous computing overlays space and a person can be solitary, yet in public, and simultaneously fall into a pocket of time for inquiry, reflection, learning, or expressing on a device? A person without a proper place to study cannot acquire the requisite skills for public life. This inquiry, conducted through making, played out during the 2022–2023 academic year, resulting in a series of surrealist assemblages that explore interiority and study across time—where history, memory, and contemporary conditions relate complexly.
Proceedings of "Architectural Research Addressing Societal Challenges," 2016: EAAE-ARCC 2016 International Conference, 2016
Weiss/Manfredi point their works to a set of essential indexical relationships to which architect... more Weiss/Manfredi point their works to a set of essential indexical relationships to which architecture aspires to exemplify and amplify. Through phenomenological inquiry into the design, documentation and construction of Weiss/Manfredi's new Center for Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) building, I exposit on this work of architecture designed for designers. Taken on the whole, Weiss/Manfredi's buildings respond to myriad circumstances that influence a design, but these can be reduced to eight experienced relations. These experienced relations include: connecting inside and outside through light and views, articulating the contact between spaces, choreographing connections between people within and around the building, centering the building within a community by forming an active "heart," unifying form and use in a performative relationship, braiding new circulatory flows to preexisting paths, mediating the gap between ground and roof gracefully, and sensitively applying new materials to existing contexts. The essay describes these relationships phenomenologically in the new CAED. Weiss/Manfredi has created an overall relational configuration shaped through space, movement, light, and materials. The building aspires to become an arranged universe of affective experiences offering agency to architectural education. Through perception and experience, space constitutes an affective bridge. By virtue of this insight, Weiss/Manfredi's work is not reducible to forms or images. Instead, it embodies a set of relationships that through phenomenological inquiry can be teased apart and isolated as phenomena best described through lived-experience. This essay uncovers the affect-relations that Weiss/Manfredi explore in their work. The new CAED building by Weiss/Manfredi propagates a set of relational interstices that support openness and creative exchange. Architecture takes shape through the thoughtful interplay of social, spatial, and material affects. Phenomenology, coupled with affect theory, is employed as a method for uncovering these experienced relations.
CONNECTION: The Architecture and Design Journal of the Young Architects Forum, 2015
The journal essay explores the uses of algorithms in architectural practice, outlining various ap... more The journal essay explores the uses of algorithms in architectural practice, outlining various approaches to algorithms in architecture and design. These approaches include: algorithm as an end (in itself), algorithm as a tool (for production), algorithm as a diagnostic design partner (that intakes data and outputs informed ideas).
Urban INFILL vol.7: Historic Preservation and Urban Change (Cleveland, Ohio: Kent State University CUDC, 2014), 2014
An inquiry into the role maintenance plays in the preservation and perpetuation of cities. What w... more An inquiry into the role maintenance plays in the preservation and perpetuation of cities. What we maintain, we value. What we neglect, we forget.
2013 ACSA Fall Conference, Florida Atlantic University, October 17-19, 2013 (Fort Lauderdale, Florida), 2013
Sustainability as an indexical metanarrative-with scorecards, ratings, and credentials-has finall... more Sustainability as an indexical metanarrative-with scorecards, ratings, and credentials-has finally run to an end. In this narrow view, sustainability standards have produced a static framework that ameliorates construction's negative impact on natural environments by improving efficiencies in the use of materials, energy, water, and transportation. However, these standards overlook the diverse ecological entanglements that exist throughout a building's territorial strata. Also, these rating systems tend to overlook the in-between-ness of buildings as they act on and are acted upon by other species, urban contexts, and climactic forces. In the commercial sphere of architectural production, we have relied on incentive-driven, human-centered approaches characterized by tables and checklists that do not offer, nor do they address fully, the interactions between emergent systems. Architectural production in an age of climatic change must arrive at approaches that address adaptive systems and biodiversity. We attempt to reframe the theories that support the inadequacies of today's sustainability guidelines. This paper explores emerging trends in posthuman theory and Speculative Realism, and considers their potential impact on sustainability as practiced commercially today. We attempt to offer a more fluid framework that avoids the pitfalls of linear systems and human exceptionalism by proposing affectivity, niche-driven diversification, and cohabitation in architecture. We do not address architectures that correlate human agency to the world of things. Instead, we advocate new architectural practices that consider buildings to be just one object in democratic arrangement with other environmental, technical, and biological systems. This democratized conception of nature aligns with what Bruno Latour calls "multinaturalism," which can lead to plurality and experimentation in approaches to sustainability. 2
Proceedings of “The Visibility of Research”, 2013: ARCC 2013 Research Conference; Charlotte, North Carolina, March 27-30, 2013, 2013
No matter how well built, architecture is consumed in time. The only remedy against a building's ... more No matter how well built, architecture is consumed in time. The only remedy against a building's degeneration is maintenance—fixing deterioration once it becomes visible. There are three human acts with physical consequences: to create, to destroy, and to maintain. Of these three, maintenance requires the greater vigilance, observational skill, and intimacy. Real buildings are unavoidably captive to time's transformations. Despite how hard architects try to reduce its effects, time refigures a building—which over its lifetime alternates between periods of shabbiness to moments of shine. Between a building's opening day and its demolition is the period of maintenance. Maintenance is seldom discussed by architectural theoreticians; perhaps because maintenance has long been associated with drudgery, menial tedium, and the non-heroic efforts of janitors, maids, and grounds keepers.
101st ACSA Annual Meeting entitled "New Constellations, New Ecologies," March 21-24, 2013 (San Francisco, California), 2013
The premise behind this paper is to extend Walter Benjamin’s 20th Century examination of artwork ... more The premise behind this paper is to extend Walter Benjamin’s 20th Century examination of artwork and mechanical reproduction into a discussion about architecture and network practices today. Secondarily, this essay reassesses the postmodern predicament forecasted by Jean-Francoise Lyotard, Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre. Lyotard distinguished the "postmodern era" as a time period when the status of knowledge has been altered through its acquisition, transmission, legitimization, and consumption in computerized societies. Within the simulated ecology of digital systems we have a new medium for exchange and referencing in architecture. Globally distributed systems of human exchange (social, political, economic, geographic, journalistic, and aesthetic) have become rather complicated and fraught with upheaval, leading to reversals of power, legitimacy, social status, popular taste, and knowledge creation.
2011 ACSA Fall Conference, Texas A&M University and Prairie View A&M University, October 6-8, 2011 (Houston, Texas), 2011
Global Fluidities, Local Presences: An Architectural Perspective on the Global-Local Problem in t... more Global Fluidities, Local Presences: An Architectural Perspective on the Global-Local Problem in the Works of Michel Serres
Batture: The LSU School of Architecture Journal; Vol. 6: Reciprocity (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU School of Architecture, 2010), 2010
A deep inquiry into the ways, reasons, and ethical mindset of architectural programs that engage ... more A deep inquiry into the ways, reasons, and ethical mindset of architectural programs that engage in community partnerships.
Flip Your Field, edited by Jayne Kelley (Chicago, IL.: UIC School of Architecture, 2010), 2010
An exploration of the relation between the practice of parkour and architecture.
ACSA Northeast Conference, University of Hartford, October 8-10, 2010 (Hartford, Connecticut), 2010
This essay inquires into the evolving method behind Benjamin Edwards' artistic work (benjaminedwa... more This essay inquires into the evolving method behind Benjamin Edwards' artistic work (benjaminedwards.org), looks retrospectively at his depictions of consumer capitalism, and considers the context of his work: urban, suburban, and sprawl conditions in the United States. Benjamin Edwards is among the most environmentally observant painters and visual artists practicing today; his work deserves to be presented, known, and spark scholarly discussion in the architectural community.
ACSA Southwest Meeting, University of New Mexico (with University of Texas at Arlington), October 15-17, 2009 (Albuquerque, New Mexico), 2009
Presented through the works and writings of Samuel Mockbee and Aldo van Eyck, this essay proposes... more Presented through the works and writings of Samuel Mockbee and Aldo van Eyck, this essay proposes that what really matters in architecture is people—not as abstract members of a demographic, but as they really are—inhabiting a particular place and identifying with a vernacular culture. For architects to truly make buildings that matter, we must engage the lives of the people for whom we build. This essay begins by comparing the words of these two architects: Aldo van Eyck's 1979 NJIT Commencement Address (first published by JAE in 1981) and Samuel Mockbee's summary of his beliefs at Auburn University entitled, "The Rural Studio" (Architectural Design Profile 134, 1998). Both conclude that buildings must include people first, and architecture should be identified with those it shelters. Architecture is a social art wherein people and place matter most. Mockbee said make it "warm, dry, and noble;" van Eyck learned from the Dogon to "Design Only Grace, Outstrip Need." Besides providing shelter, nobility and grace should be reflected in an architect's work. Both Mockbee and van Eyck address two crucial problems: first, housing the ever-increasing population and mitigating poverty; and second, addressing the interconnected issues of waste, pollution, environmental degradation, and the vastly uneven distribution of the globe's resources. This paper looks at the careers of Samuel Mockbee, Aldo van Eyck, and their respective collaborators as each strove to build architectures for people and address the dilemmas of increasing poverty, inequity, and environmental degradation.
ACSA Southwest Meeting, University of New Mexico (with University of Texas at Arlington), October 15-17, 2009 (Albuquerque, New Mexico), 2009
Imagining urban transformation over the last 200 years, we begin generally with visible influence... more Imagining urban transformation over the last 200 years, we begin generally with visible influences such as industrialization, population growth, destruction by war, pollution, resource extraction, or innovations in building construction and civic infrastructure. As makers of visible places, architects tend to overlook the ways invisible phenomena such as the electromagnetic spectrum has transformed our lives and landscapes.
An ever-increasing amount of our social life plays out on wires or gets transmitted along wireless frequencies. This paper discusses the implications that a wireless world has on architecture in the presence of globally prevalent wireless technologies. The essay speculates on how the social settings offered by buildings will change in response to ubiquitous, globally-distributed wireless networks accessible through integrated, high-bandwidth mobile devices.
We have created a future imagined by the Situationists, where any one place exists simultaneous with every place as a “rapid passage through varied ambiences.” [see Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” in Situationist International #2 (December 1958)]. This essay explores the “drift” of digital wireless and speculates on how evolution of wireless systems will challenge and transform the way humans occupy architectural places throughout the globe.
ACSA Southeast Meeting, Savannah College of Art and Design, October 8-10, 2009 (Savannah, Georgia), 2009
This essay takes portions of Erwin Straus' paper "The Upright Posture" and his later essay "Born ... more This essay takes portions of Erwin Straus' paper "The Upright Posture" and his later essay "Born to See, Bound to Behold: Reflections on the Upright Posture in the Esthetic Attitude" and advances a discussion about parallax—a singular sensory phenomenon that entwines body-based kinesis with materials deployed in space.
Parallax is a seldom discussed phenomenon central to architecture’s kinesthetic, material, and spatial presence. The mechanics of parallax is usually considered the province of physics and optics; but, parallax constitutes the foundation of basic ocular space-perception and therefore essential to the phenomenon of architecture. No separating line can be drawn between the self and the world that surrounds the body. The body inhabits a spatial world—and by extension, the self is an active part of spatial reality. The world we experience arises though the body—and the space that enwrap our senses, so to speak, exists as experience only in the presence of the living body. It is within the indistinct blur between the motion of the self and movement in the world that parallax links together in one concatenated phenomenon.
Our binocular vision affords targeted clarity and precise observation at great distances from our body. By the very nature of our binocular vision we combine two obverse images of the world into one. Our eyes move in miniature concert—triangulating these two images into a judgment of comparative distance and relative motion beyond the body’s reach. Between the two views differing slightly from eye to eye, parallax triangulates the marginal shift in reality, accomplishing focal depth in space and bringing about a visual sense of spatiality. This essay considers the condition of parallax phenomenologically and not mechanically. Parallax is a crucial but overlooked phenomenon in experiencing architecture.
ACSA West Central Meeting, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, October 23-26, 2008 (Urbana-Champaign, Illinois), 2008
Since the mid-19th Century, the scope of urbanization has precipitated in unprecedented populatio... more Since the mid-19th Century, the scope of urbanization has precipitated in unprecedented population growth and social change. In addition to the impact of such urban infrastructure as expressways, electrical grids, water treatment plants, sewage systems, and municipal landfills, an ever-increasing amount of human life plays out along wires or gets transmitted along wireless frequencies. These pages observe the implications on architecture in a wireless world as we edge toward and beyond globally prevalent third-generation digital wireless networks. These verses speculate on how physical places will change in response to unlimited, pervasive wireless networks accessible through integrated, high-bandwidth mobile devices.
ACSA West Meeting, University of Southern California, October 16-19, 2008 (Los Angeles, California), 2008
Bricks are among the most common of materials for building. Following flintknapping, stone carvin... more Bricks are among the most common of materials for building. Following flintknapping, stone carving, and the cultivation of soil, clay became our next encounter with earthen matter. Malleable and able to be shaped into practical forms, wet clay was pinched from the ground, shaped, dried, and fired into useable form. Terracotta transliterates into "baked earth." Clay pots could be made durable enough for cooking enclosures or light-walled enough for transporting goods. Ceramics served human life from the most humble of uses to the most sacral of ceremonies. Paul's letter to the Romans likens God's sovereignty over humanity to that of a potter over clay, "Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel noble, and another common?"
The phrase "brick whisperer" conjures the ludicrous image of a person leaning over with head cocked and hand cupped about their ear, conversing quietly with a brick—or a figure with lasso, taming a wildly disjointed brick wall. At the time, it appeared as though Cook meant to slander anyone caught clinging to a normative notion of architecture or found resisting the newest idea.
Other professions do not seem to wrestle with schizophrenic clashes between "avants" and "arrières." Why does architectural discourse divide between the advances of the avant-garde and the resistance of the arrière-garde? Both tactics are necessary to the integrity of the whole discipline. If we listen to the whispering of bricks, we better understand ourselves and our place in the world.
96th ACSA Annual Meeting, March 27-30, 2008 (Houston, Texas); published in Seeking the City: Visionaries on the Margins (Washington, DC: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2008), 2008
This essay explores elements of the mindset necessary for building communities through university... more This essay explores elements of the mindset necessary for building communities through university-run design assistance and built interventions. A three-sided relationship occurs that supports student learning though service to the community. The mindsets of professors, students, and community leaders reciprocate in a dynamic social array when conducting student-centered community service projects. After a seven-year track record, professors and students at the School of Architecture at Louisiana Tech University are readily sought after by community leaders for consultation and community involvement. This essay summarizes 14 characteristics of the service-learning mindset, gleaned from three distinct types of community design relationships in North Louisiana. These three types of design partnerships include: student-run master planning events conducted in consultation with city and university leaders; service-learning projects as community design assistance for buildings, towns and universities; and the community design and construction of various built projects.
ACSA Southeast Meeting, Catholic University of America, October 11-13, 2007 (Washington, DC), 2007
This essay explores why architects must reconnect their practice to metaphysically valid notions ... more This essay explores why architects must reconnect their practice to metaphysically valid notions of stewardship and compassion for the Earth. Belief in something more than survival is necessary for green architecture to reach deep into humanity’s essential convictions. What is needed is a transformation of the human psyche; by embracing the belief that our life comes from the delicate ecologic and divine forces that sustain the Earth, the practice of architecture will transform. This essay asserts that for a self-perpetuating stewardship to exist, green architecture must recover the spiritual traditions that were relevant in earlier times—and put these traditions into action for the future.
ACSA Northeast Regional Conference, Laval University, October 6-8, 2006 (Quebec, Canada), 2006
This essay introduces a collection of architects practicing in Louisiana who work in a growing co... more This essay introduces a collection of architects practicing in Louisiana who work in a growing context of franchised sprawl and struggle to make a relevant future from the remains of Louisiana’s vibrant regional culture. A small cross-section of talented architects have taken pre-engineered metal buildings, the trailer home, and off-the-shelf materials from Home Depot™ as overt emblems of ‘the new’ and merged these items with the vestiges of Louisiana’s rich architectural heritage. Their architecture is not nostalgic, but hopeful and forward-looking in gaze. This question is addressed: What makes this work representative of the future of Louisiana’s unique regional architecture?
2005 ACSA Southwest Regional Conference Proceedings, University of Louisiana Lafayette, 2005
This essay explores examples of cultural improvisations and ecological thinking in the work and w... more This essay explores examples of cultural improvisations and ecological thinking in the work and writing of Aldo van Eyck. Aldo van Eyck inspired change in architects’ attitudes toward environmental and social responsibility. This essay makes an in-depth appraisal of three associated works by Aldo van Eyck – a public address, a piece of writing, and a temporary installation. Aldo van Eyck never distinguished between cultural and environmental issues – he saw each as bound, mutually and systemically, to the other. A hallmark of Aldo van Eyck’s thinking was defining cultures as their interaction with natural environments--in other words, as ecological, thereby forming a relational unity between people and place. Aldo van Eyck adhered to Mondrian’s insight that the relations between things and among things are of greater importance than the things themselves. Attuned opposites, reversibility, in-between spaces, reciprocity, jazz improvisation, twin-phenomena (Dogon cosmology), and paradoxical inclusiveness are all terms that represent Aldo van Eyck’s mental ecology; his Heraclitian penchant for “labyrinthian clarity.” Aldo van Eyck linked opposite phenomena in an improvisational dialogue between constantly varying possibilities – at the fulcrum between opposites, a range of possibilities emerge whose surprising vastness matches the diversity of environments humanity inhabits
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Papers by William T Willoughby
An ever-increasing amount of our social life plays out on wires or gets transmitted along wireless frequencies. This paper discusses the implications that a wireless world has on architecture in the presence of globally prevalent wireless technologies. The essay speculates on how the social settings offered by buildings will change in response to ubiquitous, globally-distributed wireless networks accessible through integrated, high-bandwidth mobile devices.
We have created a future imagined by the Situationists, where any one place exists simultaneous with every place as a “rapid passage through varied ambiences.” [see Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” in Situationist International #2 (December 1958)]. This essay explores the “drift” of digital wireless and speculates on how evolution of wireless systems will challenge and transform the way humans occupy architectural places throughout the globe.
Parallax is a seldom discussed phenomenon central to architecture’s kinesthetic, material, and spatial presence. The mechanics of parallax is usually considered the province of physics and optics; but, parallax constitutes the foundation of basic ocular space-perception and therefore essential to the phenomenon of architecture. No separating line can be drawn between the self and the world that surrounds the body. The body inhabits a spatial world—and by extension, the self is an active part of spatial reality. The world we experience arises though the body—and the space that enwrap our senses, so to speak, exists as experience only in the presence of the living body. It is within the indistinct blur between the motion of the self and movement in the world that parallax links together in one concatenated phenomenon.
Our binocular vision affords targeted clarity and precise observation at great distances from our body. By the very nature of our binocular vision we combine two obverse images of the world into one. Our eyes move in miniature concert—triangulating these two images into a judgment of comparative distance and relative motion beyond the body’s reach. Between the two views differing slightly from eye to eye, parallax triangulates the marginal shift in reality, accomplishing focal depth in space and bringing about a visual sense of spatiality. This essay considers the condition of parallax phenomenologically and not mechanically. Parallax is a crucial but overlooked phenomenon in experiencing architecture.
The phrase "brick whisperer" conjures the ludicrous image of a person leaning over with head cocked and hand cupped about their ear, conversing quietly with a brick—or a figure with lasso, taming a wildly disjointed brick wall. At the time, it appeared as though Cook meant to slander anyone caught clinging to a normative notion of architecture or found resisting the newest idea.
Other professions do not seem to wrestle with schizophrenic clashes between "avants" and "arrières." Why does architectural discourse divide between the advances of the avant-garde and the resistance of the arrière-garde? Both tactics are necessary to the integrity of the whole discipline. If we listen to the whispering of bricks, we better understand ourselves and our place in the world.
An ever-increasing amount of our social life plays out on wires or gets transmitted along wireless frequencies. This paper discusses the implications that a wireless world has on architecture in the presence of globally prevalent wireless technologies. The essay speculates on how the social settings offered by buildings will change in response to ubiquitous, globally-distributed wireless networks accessible through integrated, high-bandwidth mobile devices.
We have created a future imagined by the Situationists, where any one place exists simultaneous with every place as a “rapid passage through varied ambiences.” [see Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” in Situationist International #2 (December 1958)]. This essay explores the “drift” of digital wireless and speculates on how evolution of wireless systems will challenge and transform the way humans occupy architectural places throughout the globe.
Parallax is a seldom discussed phenomenon central to architecture’s kinesthetic, material, and spatial presence. The mechanics of parallax is usually considered the province of physics and optics; but, parallax constitutes the foundation of basic ocular space-perception and therefore essential to the phenomenon of architecture. No separating line can be drawn between the self and the world that surrounds the body. The body inhabits a spatial world—and by extension, the self is an active part of spatial reality. The world we experience arises though the body—and the space that enwrap our senses, so to speak, exists as experience only in the presence of the living body. It is within the indistinct blur between the motion of the self and movement in the world that parallax links together in one concatenated phenomenon.
Our binocular vision affords targeted clarity and precise observation at great distances from our body. By the very nature of our binocular vision we combine two obverse images of the world into one. Our eyes move in miniature concert—triangulating these two images into a judgment of comparative distance and relative motion beyond the body’s reach. Between the two views differing slightly from eye to eye, parallax triangulates the marginal shift in reality, accomplishing focal depth in space and bringing about a visual sense of spatiality. This essay considers the condition of parallax phenomenologically and not mechanically. Parallax is a crucial but overlooked phenomenon in experiencing architecture.
The phrase "brick whisperer" conjures the ludicrous image of a person leaning over with head cocked and hand cupped about their ear, conversing quietly with a brick—or a figure with lasso, taming a wildly disjointed brick wall. At the time, it appeared as though Cook meant to slander anyone caught clinging to a normative notion of architecture or found resisting the newest idea.
Other professions do not seem to wrestle with schizophrenic clashes between "avants" and "arrières." Why does architectural discourse divide between the advances of the avant-garde and the resistance of the arrière-garde? Both tactics are necessary to the integrity of the whole discipline. If we listen to the whispering of bricks, we better understand ourselves and our place in the world.