Addition, Subtraction + Multiplication | PERRY KULPER

‘Addition, Subtraction + Multiplication’
Touching on a range of ways for visualizations to play varied roles in spatial developments, especially projective, maybe even speculative ones, ‘Addition, Subtraction + Multiplication’ will cite three areas for representational consideration. A handful of historic examples will lightly frame developments in the linear perspective, of the picture plane and ‘station point body’. And its impact on adding, amongst things, value and material to the world-let’s say, ‘Addition’. Three key areas will be tickled: architecture, and particularly the picture plane, and its relations to the history of ideas; parallel developments of the self, of the ‘I’, of a ‘point of view’; and the ‘inverted cone’ principle. Also using examples, ‘Subtraction’ will offer a different set of potentials, touching on erasure as representationally, and spatially possible, opening alternative conceptions, and maybe practices, for architecture. 5 Points of Erasure: double authorship; the voracious appetite; tabula rasa; monochrome; and animating processes of ‘emptying out’ will be act as a partial armature to open the possibilities-references will populate the margins. Referring to some examples of my work, ‘Multiplication’, might offer alternative ways to think about the roles, capacities and potential of spatial visualizations. ‘Addition, Subtraction + Multiplication’, hopes to build gentle backgrounds for different ways to conceptualize and realize spatial representation, perhaps reframing what we take for granted, towards increased cultural agency.
Perry Kulper is an architect and an associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He previously taught for 17 years at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and held visiting teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Arizona State University. Subsequent to his graduate studies at Columbia University, he worked for Eisenman/ Robertson; Robert A.M. Stern Architects; and Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown Architects before moving to Los Angeles. Kulper’s interests include the generative potential of architectural drawing, the different spatial opportunities of diverse design methods, and broadening the conceptual range by which architecture contributes to our cultural imagination. In 2013, he published Pamphlet Architecture 34, Fathoming the Unfathomable: Archival Ghosts and Paradoxical Shadows with Nat Chard. Kulper also is the co-author (with University College London Professor Nat Chard) of Contingent Practices.
He received his Bachelor of Science in architecture from California Polytechnic State University and his Master of Architecture (with honors) from Columbia University.