A Report on War and Peace: Notes from the Design Trenches

Abstract

Based on a series of courses, beginning with a studio at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), this essay explores the American fort as a precedent in design. It refers to fortifications as geometric abstractions of war. The argument traces the forts’ genealogy to tactics of projection, developed by French military engineers, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban and the marquis de Montalembert. Conflating projectiles of mortar with projections of line and CNC tool paths, the essay proposes a practice of design focused on tour de main techniques. This figurative term becomes an alternative to the tour de force monuments of the avant-garde’s compulsion for change. In these wars of abstraction, the rear-guard emerges from the design trenches as the harbinger of stasis.