TAILORING FORM:
A Brief Look at the Anonymous History of the Template
University of Toronto
Templates have been used in virtually every industry where translation from one medium to another is required as a process of fabrication. Yet, the role of the template in the ongoing discussion of the relationship between conception (drawing) and production (artifact), remains undeveloped. Tailoring Form attempts to establish a ‘manual’ prehistory for the contemporary virtual template affiliated with modes of digital production.
“…there is nothing you cannot dominate as easily as a flat surface of a few square meters; there is nothing hidden or convoluted, no shadows, when someone is said to master or to dominate a subject, you should normally look for a flat surface that enables that mastery- a map, a list, a file, a census. a card index…. “
Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: thinking with eyes and hands”
The template typically acts as an intermediary figure. As an instrument that translates concept into physical form, templates are, in historian David Turnbull’s phrase, a “representational technology.” In general a template can be a framework, a pattern, a form, a device or, more abstractly, a set of rules used to generate things or parts of things. A template can also be a device that separates form or structure from content – and this final variation, certainly debatable, suggests that the template has a neutrality and autonomy – functioning merely as a tool, central to a production process but with very little importance as a thing in itself. This notion of the template as a mediating device, in having an instrumental relationship to the object it produces, may account for the template’s lack of importance if not disappearance in the discourse of the various disciplines where the template has played a role. Yet, this tension between the centrality and anonymity of the template suggests that the template, more than a mere instrument, has a spatial value as a hybrid device, located at the intersection of conception and representation, model and drawing, artifact and instrument.
Up until the fifteenth century, the template was the primary instrument for conveying form in the construction of ships as well as large-scale buildings. Templates were intrinsic to the guild system of production, in effect acting as trade secrets for master builders. Moreover, as fragmentary, portable, and reusable figures, templates offered the possibility of recombination as well as standardization. Intrinsic to the standardization of the means of production, templates mark the transition from projective systems of geometry practiced by medieval craft guilds, to the codification of dimension and the promotion of efficiency in industrialization, to flexible systems of geometry in contemporary digital fabrication methods that allow for mass customization. Contemporary templates no longer require a physical form, having been supplanted by computer-generated algorithmic equations. The contemporary template as algorithmic equation demonstrates the paradox of the template - that it is both ephemeral and yet indispensable to a more efficient and standardized means of production. The now virtual template has given the material template a new status as a cultural artifact.
Research & Curation: Natalie Fizer, Glenn Forley
As a traveling exhibition, Tailoring Form has been installed at the following:
Donghia Study Center, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons New York 2008
SCE Exhibition Coordinator: Alan Bruton
Graphics: Meg Callery
Eric Arthur Gallery, John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto 2011
Director of Exhibitions: Laura Miller
Installation/Fabrication: Johnny Bui
Pinkcomma gallery, Boston 2011
Curators: Chris Grimley, Michael Kubo, Mark Pasnik
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Hallway Gallery, Cooper Union NY 2019