Mark R. Bavoso


The primary goal of paleontology - paleo-ontology - is the construction of historical scientific objects through fossil and geochemical evidence.
This history is achieved through various modes of taxonomy, including classification and sequencing of speciation, and through tracing the origins and development common to organisms.
  Through this rigorously constructed scientific history, paleontologists uncover the flora and fauna of the past, analyze them relative to each other, and trace their development through time.
First, as a paleontological, historical object of study, the body is constructed primarily through operations on its tectonic evidence, its mineralized bones. Second, as a physiological and technical object, the body is understood as a site of complex interrelationships between bones, muscles, and skin. Third, as a subject, the body is conceived as the intersection of the physical with mastery, technique, discipline, and performance in space.
For paleontology, the reconstruction of remains is a conceptual one that reaches out into the distant past; its goal is data, knowledge about organisms long extinct. As such it holds the physical body only loosely together: its goal is not literal reconstruction (though in museums it is often represented this way) but conceptual, to the extent that analysis may be conducted and conclusions drawn.
 If paleontology constructs historical bodies, orthopaedics operates on mechanical bodies. 
From the historical body of paleontology, to the mechanical body of orthopaedics, we come to the development of the performative body in Martial Arts.
Common to each is a specific choreography of the body within space.
 For instance, not only do Tae Kwon Do movesets provide detailed instruction for how to transition one’s body into different blocks and attacks, they also delimit a figural boundary for how to occupy and defend a space.
Orthopedics, the corrective surgical manipulation of the body, comes from a double source, in the interest of healing both gruesome wartime injuries and birth defects.
While the hippocratic oath commands “first, do no harm,” the practice of orthopedics also implies a structural violence of returning deviant bodies towards the norm.

Cinders

Model Studies for a School of Paleontology, Orthopedics, and Martial Arts
Professors Mack Scogin & Helen Han
Harvard GSD, Fall 2020



 Reyner Banham described the essential parable of architecture as an unresolved decision between combustion and construction—between a metabolic body and a prosthetic one. These models aim to reclaim a cyclic, holistic ethic of disaster for building in Northern California by reconsidering the sculptural potential of what remains after wildfire.

Burning releases the latent tension in wood, leaving behind fragile contorted cinders. Wood members exhaustively processed into standardized units don’t quite disappear in a conflagration; instead, they warp, crumble, and deform in ways that express the release of both their inherent structural tensions and those imposed by construction. 

Though the scale and intensity of California’s present wildfires are unprecedented, historic wildfire documentation from at least the 1850’s reveals a pattern of destructive conflagrations. Much has been made in recent years of the potential benefits to a more regularized, controlled burn schedule as opposed to the state’s present prevention-at-all-costs policy, which is often correlated with native land stewardship and ecological cycles like Redwood germination.

Visit California’s North Coast and you will not intuitively sense these periodic dangers lurking in its receding history or in rapidly approaching potential futures. Nothing in the images of serene cattle grazing upon golden hills, fog gently rolling in over misty redwoods each evening, would suggest lurking rupture. The question of this project is how to construct an architectural vernacular, from shallow cultural foundations, that grapples with the particular context of long-period uncertainty and short-period consistency of West Marin and Northern California in general. 

For a site whose geological and environmental history dwarfs that of its built environment, one must reconsider architectural construction as a fundamentally durational process, one situated within concepts like labor, weathering, and season (“fire season”) rather than with the abstracted permanence of form.