Architectural Design - 2022 - Betsky - Fantastical Monsters The Persistent Memory of Machines

Aaron Betsky
Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design

Professor and renowned curator, critic and writer
Aaron Betsky investigates the machinic architectural
worlds of architect Bryan Cantley. Professor of
Design Theory at California State University, Fullerton,
Cantley has been developing a considerable and
starkly individual body of work since his MArch at the
University of California, Los Angeles in the early 1990s.
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THE PERSISTENT MEMORY OF MACHINES
MONSTERS
FANTASTICAL
Cantley’s work explores the enigmatic blurred boundary between

abstraction, notation, presence and absence. The choreography
of these nuances all conducted in a machinic idiom.
Syntaxonome SourceCode,
Bryan Cantley,
2020
We used to operate machines. Now we write memos out, ‘behind the Orange Curtain’. Traditionally, that
about how to write code to allow somebody to instruct has meant being in a space of non-events gliding by
a machine to run itself. That truism is open to challenge, on an invisible sea of finance, translated into former
but certainly the third industrial revolution has eliminated bean fields filled with single-family homes whose
a great deal of clanging and banging from our lives. By spread is interrupted by rivers of freeways and islands
the same token it has also removed inspiration from of shopping malls and office complexes disappearing
a certain class of artists and architects for whom the behind mirrored glass. Like the image of industry,
mechanisms of production and their heroic homes, that myth of Southern California’s wealthy miasma
the factories of first and second revolutions, were is – if it was ever correct, which is highly doubtful –
fitting objects not only of study and service, but also certainly a retrospective one. One of the most diverse
interpretation and even exaltation. Bryan Cantley, who for cultures in the US, this collection of cities, suburbs,
decades has been taking apart the remnants of machines institutions and attractions contains as much detritus
and buildings to turn them into fantastical monsters of of selective waves of development and abandonment,
mechanical might, similarly now writes memos about production and consumption, and modes of economic
those artefacts. Except that, through the paper and the coherence as many other places. Meanwhile, the
spreadsheets on which he scribbles his instructions for remnants of Southern California's foundational myth,
non-operation and his descriptions of dead tech, the which mixes dreams of suburban peace with Spanish
monsters still stretch and turn. If you listen closely, you Colonial aesthetics and a sun-drenched, mountainous
might even hear an occasional cling or clang. landscape rolling down to the sea covered in
Cantley inhabits an environment that further defines Mediterranean-like vegetation, give a particular flavour
his production: in Orange County or, as he has pointed to Cantley’s work.
Bryan Cantley,
Malleable Databases/Operable Con-versations,
2019
Highly skilled, heavily articulated and artful, Cantley’s drawings

suggest spaces and architectures evolving in a fecund melting
pot of line, plane and texture.
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Genealogies Bryan Cantley,
Field Shifts,
Nor is that all. Cantley is, after all, also a member of a 2020
particular discipline – architecture – that has, at least since
Playing at a much quieter end of the graphic spectrum,
its codification in France in the 17th century, teetered Cantley sometimes reduces a drawing almost to its
between a mechanical and an artistic, a practical and a construction lines, yet still maintaining and rejoicing in
its precision and suggestion.
theoretical, and a popular and an elitist character. He has
chosen the latter avenue of engaging in experimental
work. The results of this choice are largely drawings What, then, has he produced within this context? An
and models that are resolutely impractical, but instead astonishing set of drawings and models that together form
constitute a commentary on, or at least an articulation of, a drawn speculation on what remains of mechanical reality
current conditions that propose future forms. This also within the landscapes of Southern California. When he first
makes him part of a particular culture of experimentation. developed his experimental architectural practice, which he
Practised or pursued by architects and allied artists called Form:uLA, after moving to Los Angeles from North
throughout the world, the branch of such experimental Carolina in the summer of 1988, Cantley’s work was clearly
architecture of which Cantley is part has recently found mechano-morphic. It combined the language of mechanical
a small mode of coalescence around a group of ‘paper drawings with their overt systems of measurement and
architects’ from several generations, from Michael Webb attempts to unfold complex mechanisms, with a hobbyist’s
to Perry Kulper, whose work resonates clearly with what approach of laying out different parts for inspection. Then
this maker is producing. the experimenter went to work, slashing, slicing and
Behind these architects, however, one can see otherwise deforming the basic elements and building
arraigned more generations of experimenters who have machines out of the detritus. He sometimes assigned
obviously inspired Cantley. The most obvious lineage functions (a roving community centre, a ‘seeder’ or a
traces back through Neil Denari and Wes Jones, perhaps modern version of a Batmobile) to these parts, but they
to Thom Mayne, but certainly to Lebbeus Woods, the were, more than anything else, fractured architecture
New York-based instigator of the Research Institute of foregrounding the body parts that are usually hidden
Experimental Architecture. In a broader sense, however, behind walls and in mechanical risers, all of them
the fascination with industrial production and its artefacts deformed and set free to sail through what was shown
also puts this work in the lineage of Charles Sheeler, as a combination of a tourist-brochure vision of Southern
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Constant. California and a nightmare of human-built sameness.
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Over time, the work has Words and Twins
Over time, the work has flattened out, while also
flattened out, while also becoming more abstract. The language about the
images has changed in a similar manner. If the titles
becoming more abstract. were once clear, if somewhat odd when you matched
them with the results, Cantley now uses terms such as
The language about the ‘syntaxonometric’, by which he seems to mean a three-
images has changed in a dimensional drawn construction that has the quality of
a sentence, to describe them – although about what he
similar manner speaks is not completely clear. Perhaps it is the ‘fiducial
shifting’ or the ‘sampling’ he also mentions. Certainly
there is an attempt to bring a sense of financial and
economic structures into the drawings. But there are no
tables or even flow diagrams here. The only reference
to the flows of money are the spreadsheets on which
he draws, and the total abstraction some of the
drawings reduce themselves to.
In other images, Cantley speaks of ‘dizogotic
twins’, which is to say paired structures that are
simultaneously born out of the same genetic origin
Bryan Cantley,
but are still different. This appears to mean the
Mylaramifications 25:33, development of mechanical and building elements that
2019
arise from his interest in folded plates and camshafts
Some of the more complex work that dominated some of his earlier drawings, here
implies the manoeuvring of
families of forms drawn from the
combined, drawn apart and extruded or added onto
same graphic genetic code. with lines rather than with more equipment.
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There are a lot of references to shifts and flows, and Bryan Cantley,
Mylaryngitis 42:34,
to such popular writers as Baudrillard in these drawings. 2019
How such readings or language refer to the work itself
Forms waltz across the drawing on carpets of colour and
remains, however, enigmatic. This approach to a loose texture, combined with linear registrations, numerical
application of abstract, evocative words combined with figures and short sentences, all adding to their enigma.
references to larger issues as a web of implication over an

equally vague and yet seemingly precise and somehow
referential set of fragments also has a history, particularly
in the work of Michael Webb and Lebbeus Woods,
but also in the drawings of the contemporary German
architect Anton Markus Passig.
What is particularly interesting about the drawings
is the manner in which Cantley has moved away from
the more traditional focus on describing an object, even
if it is flayed out for our inspection, to an exploration
of certain relations and compositions that interest him
separately from what the object of inquiry might be. In
Myth-Appropriations 12 (2020), for instance, most of the
(virtual) surface of the drawing is blank, while the rest
What is particularly
consists of elements familiar from his previous work,
such as enlarged letters, elliptical lines that describe the
interesting about the
orbit or radius of a rotating object, the green graph-paper drawings is the manner
of which he is so fond, and a cylinder that might either
be something he abstracted from a motorcycle engine in which Cantley has
or could be a proposal for a spacecraft. The intensity of
the collage, combined with the white space on which it
moved away from the
drifts, gives the drawing the sense of setting out on a
quest towards some goal – whose nature is, as usual,
more traditional focus
completely obfuscated by the short accompanying text. on describing an object
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Bryan Cantley,
Myth-Appropriations [Bry-collage] 12,
2020
In recent years, Cantley has adopted a less-drawn and

more paper-collage technique due to a lack of access
to his studio during Covid-19 lockdown. The drawings
still show the delicacy of line and precise placement
and juxtaposition of textures that are key to his
recognisable creativity.
The Drawing Stripped Bare Bryan Cantley,

Palimpsestuous Relationship 08,
In other drawings, Cantley shows only construction lines, 2018
stripping his description of mechanisms and objects
above: The use of found architectural
down to the absolute minimum. He asks us to eschew drawings figure in Cantley’s work. He uses
any object of description and to instead enjoy the beauty such drawings as a base layer, which he then
détournes by inserting and overdrawing,
of the working drawing itself. Because not only the contrasting his own architectural tropes with
focus of such drawings, but also their scale and even those of previous eras.
orientation are so obscure, all we can do is examine the

patterns and grids and imagine what they might someday
produce. Even the chequerboard, which once evoked
the finish flag in the Formula One races his office title
referred to, are now heraldic patterns lost in a contour-
less map of unknowable territories.
Cantley actually calls some of these drawings
‘Emergent Device-ives’, almost confirming that he is
birthing not just twins, but whole broods of orders that Bryan Cantley,
Syntaxonome 01-02,
now also include ramps that emerge from the cams, 2020
photoshopped layers shifting through what were once
right: The lexicon of Cantley’s formal
meticulously drawn grids, and Spirograph-like doodles, articulations is one of air inlets,
but not quite. After all, what does that ‘ives’ mean bladders, conduits and armatures
perched on artificial ground planes –
and why does the text speak of ‘residual spaces’? Is metallic forms communing with each
Cantley instead uncovering more hidden aspects of the other across the drawing.
landscapes he inhabits and holding them up for our
inspection instead?
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Only rarely, as in his ‘Palimpsestuous Relationship’
series, does Cantley make an overt reference to the field
of architecture and to his work as a redrawing of that
particular context. Even more rarely, these days, does
he give us an object or a perspective that we can hold
onto. Instead, what he leaves us with are continual riffs,
developing from one drawing to the other, described in
equally drifting, evocative ways, that never go anywhere.
This self-sampling form of collage is without a doubt
purposeful for all its seeming improvisation. It produces
a body of work that as a whole has a clear subject matter,
style and mode of appearance. It is the architecture
of Bryan Cantley, freed from any purpose to which
it is oriented, any of the sources from which it arose
(although it is impossible, of course, to be completely
liberated from such generative fields) and a categorical
sense of organisation. What it does constitute, in
however an obtuse and obscure manner, is the drawing
out of the forms and shapes that float around our
human-made world, both real and virtual, as processed
by Cantley’s head and birthed by his hands. That these
elements seem like relics from a recent past that has, at
least in these drawings, not faded away, makes them all
the more haunting. 1
Text © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Bryan Cantley
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Aaron Betsky

Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design

Cantley’s work explores the enigmatic blurred boundary between

Highly skilled, heavily articulated and artful, Cantley’s drawings

references to larger issues as a web of implication over an

In recent years, Cantley has adopted a less-drawn and

The Drawing Stripped Bare Bryan Cantley,

orientation are so obscure, all we can do is examine the

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