Good architecture is far more
than mere bricks and mortar

To hear Michelle Fornabai express her vision, architects would do well to examine and experiment more with the purpose and use of a structure, using that knowledge to inspire the design of the built environment. This seems straightforward enough - even conservative, by some standards - but her own examination and experimentation stretches, if not bursts, the boundaries of current practice.

Fornabai addressed a sizeable audience of architects and architectural students on Mar. 19, continuing the winter and spring 2003 season of lectures at the University of Detroit-Mercy. The lectures are sponsored by the Great Lakes Fabricators & Erectors Association.

A graduate of Cornelle University, she achieved a masters in architecture from Princeton University in 1992. Currently she serves as an adjunct professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and is active

with Ambo.Infra Design, Boston, Mass. Previously she was associated with a collaborative practice known as Studio Matrix.

Fornabai is listed on the web site newenglandfilm.com as providing film production design, set design, construction drawings, and art direction for film makers. She has been involved in several films and video projects, and served as a film director for "Phobic Sited," an Urban Forum Film Project for the Whitney Museum/Rockefeller Foundation.

While she has designed some innovative architecture - including the low budget renovation of a 19th century brownstone townhouse in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood - much of her work has been experimental and academic. To break new ground, today's architects often must resort to models, computers, and shoestring budget installations, she observed, because clients with the money to fund experimentation on a large, bold scale are very few, and very far between. To experiment opens one up to the risk of failure. However noble one's motivation, no one wants to be saddled with an architectural expression that "didn't quite make it."

Yet good architecture shouldn't be a luxury item affordable only to clients with deep pockets. Fornabai said much of her research has been directed toward "methods to expand architects' means of production to extend the economic base and traditional practices to include low income, urban dwelling clients." In her mind, it is very possible to create uniquely built artifices that take advantage of the economic savings generated by industrial practices, including prefabrication. Her Roxbury townhouse renovation, for example, features an innovative use of acrylics in an interior staircase. A floor coating was also devised using an industrial epoxy placed over a layer of plywood and fiberglass, at a cost of a mere $2 per square foot. "It's using ready-made components in the interior landscape of the body formed by the built environment," as she put it.

She took a similar approach in the design of an interior architectural installation of a series of looped, clear acrylic strips, each six inches wide, that were mounted to create a series of screens. The screens play games with natural light, acting on occasion in manner similar to diffraction gratings when light beams strike them at certain angles. They generate an entertaining play of moiré, interference, and shadow patterns within the interior space. Fornabai suggested the screens were a form of performance architecture that intrigued as they entertained. They could be readily used in a building lobby.

Moving on to a project where she assisted in the design development of a ski lodge, she outlined a creative process that first centered on how the facility would be used. From that foundation she experimented with the design, examining such issues as the structure's relationship to its natural environment, including the air surrounding it, the rain that would fall on it and off of it, how the snow would affect it, and the changing climates generated by the seasons. She called this approach a "programmatic choreography that defines the landscape of the architectural product."

What appears to interest Fornabai is, as she put it, "examining the relationship between the body and an implied space for occupation." Architectural design traditionally has been grounded in structures. That doesn't mean it has ignored the functions of buildings, the patterns of traffic generated by the bodies moving within them, illumination and ventilation needs, and related factors. But to advance architectural practice, they should be paying more attention to "the fluid and softer stuff." They need to consider "the texture of the building, the air, the light, the sound within the built environment," she said, "as well as materials and technical conditions that merge with the body."

Another way of expressing this is to consider architecture and the built environment as a form of "structural skins that clothe the body," she said. "The body can then be seen to reflect the space that encloses it." To that end, she has been hard at work, studying clothing and fabric, inflating examples and watching how they can be draped, to inspire new methods of architectural design. The results of her work sometimes seem chaotic, a criticism applied to all artists at some point in their careers. She has also been developing what she called "a pattern book" that can be applied to modern architectural practice.

Pattern books, she explained, were commonly used in 19th century architectural practice. With a variety of illustrations they documented built architecture through the centuries that could inspire new designs - or, at least, perpetuate the already tried and true. What Fornabai seeks is a new volume based on her experimentation and the work of like minded architects that would provide strategies and templates for advancing the current state of the art.

The University of Detroit's Winter-Spring 2003 architectural lectures will conclude April 2 with a presentation by Thom Faulders, of Beige Design, Berkeley, Calif., Faulders won the 2002 Emerging Architect's Award from the Architecture League of New York. His work has been exhibited at such international venues as the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Centre d'Art d'Herblay in Paris.

The lecture will be held starting at 6 p.m. at the Genevieve Fisk Laranger Architecture Center within the UD-M's School of Architecture's Warren Laranger Building on its McNichols campus near the corner of Livernois and McNichols in Detroit. Further information can be obtained from the UD-M School of Architecture at (313) 993-1532.