Welcome To APELAB

Brian Ambroziak is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He received his Masters of Architecture degree from Princeton University and his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia. He teaches courses in drawing, digital representation and time-based digital media, fundamental design and analysis, and advanced topic studios. His publications include Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour (2005) and Infinite Perspectives: Two Thousand Years of Three Dimensional Mapmaking (1999) with Princeton Architectural Press. He and his partner Katherine Ambroziak have been finalists in design competitions that include the National World War II Memorial and a design for St. Mark’s Coptic Canadian Village.

Investigated through various media, his design work has developed into a unique framework for considering architecture, both in terms of its representation and its physical existence. His methods of representation rely heavily upon systems of two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional montage to provide a fragmented reading open to a greater degree of personal interpretation, the development of various time signatures from a single vantage point, the application of time-based media that allow for further transformation of the image and the application of sound, and a significant bias towards the act of writing and collage. His work has been lectured on and exhibited widely at venues that include the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2011), the University of Tennessee’s Ewing Gallery (2012), the Kibel Gallery at the University of Maryland (2012), the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (2014), the Second Marco Frascari Symposium at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (2014) and the Cal Poly University Art Gallery (2016). His drawings and writing have been included in numerous publications that include JAE 70:1, “Discursive Images” (March 2016), Collage and Architecture by Jennifer A.E. Shields (Routledge, 2013) and Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Ashgate, 2015). In 2014, he received an ACSA Faculty Design Award Honorable Mention for his theoretical project entitled Confabulatores Nocturni, was highly commended in the Yeats 2015 Competition, was a finalist in the 2010 SHIFTBoston Competition, and his proposal entitled Diderot’s Dreams was given an honorable mention in the Pamphlet Architecture 32: Resilience Competition by Princeton Architectural Press. His essay “Resurrection of Night” presented at the 2010 National Conference on the Beginning Design Student was selected as best conference paper and delivered at the ACSA 99th Annual Meeting in Montreal.

TABLEAUX VIVANT /// THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Everything is known, including that which is still unknown. The Paranoid-Critical Method (PCM) is both the product and the remedy against that anxiety: it promises that, through conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium, and that ever-new generations of false facts and fabricated evidences can be generated simply through the act of interpretation.

Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. Rem Koolhaas. 1978

PLANE OF NON-AGREEMENT

The Tableaux Vivant Series reflects upon the creative process and examines an alternative design methodology for the conception of spatial ideas. This pedagogical approach incorporates a series of steps that biases writing, embraces qualitative accident, and finally yields representational artifacts positioned somewhere between the written word and the physical construct. For this particular series, the beginning brought-together elements are placed into what Max Ernst referred to as his plane of non-agreement. The source material for this series, the worn consumed contents of the world, is language culled from issues of Vogue magazine that is by default a representation of contemporary culture. These fragments are then crafted into written prose with the underlying charge to challenge the perceived limitations inherent to conventional representational techniques. In many ways, this work is more closely related to the development of a screenplay where one’s ideas about what constitutes place are quickly inhabited by dripping gutters and coke bottles filled with sand. The process evolves with the translation of the prose into visual triptychs that expand upon newly discovered hallucinations and secret desires. Text is positioned on the middle panel. On the left, a diagram serves as a kind of construction manual that illustrates the organizational strategy of the prose. The right panel consists of images that draw heavily upon what the surrealist artist Salvador Dali, in describing his PCM, defined as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” These images are not meant to infringe upon the freedom of the reader but instead expand the potential visualization of their written prose and touch the viewer’s soul to some degree. As a new thesis begins to emerge, the project evolves into a series of drawings that continue to provide alternate readings and form the foundation of a time-based composition that incorporates sound and triggers interstitial readings. Ultimately, through this process of conceptual recycling, the worn, consumed contents of the world can be recharged or enriched like uranium.