This arrangement of images from the design for the UCLA Chiller Plan with Cogeneration is a meditation on the legibility of purposefulness. Here “purposefulness” is distinguished from willfulness, intentionality, or even the most basic sense of artificiality that accompanies any perception of the man-made. In support of this distinction, care has been taken to avoid all gestural marks or personal flourishes that might be understood by the viewer as the intended point, focusing the attention instead on the thing depicted rather than on the depiction of the thing. Further, the legibility of the object has been laundered through the dense layering of otherwise unmanipulated images to explore the “feeling” of purposefulness apart from association with any recognizable functionality. Also involved is a consideration of how the difference between an engineered object and an architectural object might contribute to this understanding.

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