100419 - final

…seemingly random but structured patterns strike a resonance within us, for our ‘internalisations’ may be built on similar ideas – a kind of haunting, of interior space being made external, of buried archetype surfacing.  The whispers we hear will sharpen our intuition. 

- Cecil Balmond
Informal, The Chemnitz Solution

Your final review is Monday April 26, 1 - 6pm in the HHS 3rd floor hall.  Plan your time carefully and work efficiently during the next week.  Continue refining the material execution of concepts while developing final presentation materials.  Do not simply remake what you already know.

Final Requirements:

• dunescape images
• dunescape maps
• 5 unit models
• 1 cluster models
• material and system analysis drawings
• wood landscape with wiring
• sunlight study filmstrips
• sunlight filter
• tracking document
• 1/4” scale model of observatory
• 1/4” scale horizontal and vertical sections of observatory
• perspective views of observatory
• written thesis
• animation

All drawings, diagrams, text and images must be laid out in Illustrator and plotted on vertically oriented 36” x 72” or 18” x 72” sheets.  Mock up your entire presentation before printing.

ALL PLOTS MUST BE SENT BY 12 NOON ON SUNDAY.  Finish your drawings first and leave the completion of models and animations for Sunday afternoon and night.

Compose and rehearse your verbal presentation; it must be precise and concise.  Incorporate the animation into your presentation.  Trace a coherent line of thinking through the entire semester.  Presentations need not be chronological.  Focus on latest drawings and models while using earlier work to support the current position of the project.

Final Jury: 

Jeremy Carvalho, William Feuerman, Ed Keller, Jamie Kruse, Jason Lee, George Showman, John Szot, Filip Tejchman, Soo-in Yang

100413 - bodies in spaces

As you continue developing spatial experiences within your observatory, it is worth taking at look at this post on bldgblog.  Through the movie Die Hard and urban military movements, it explores the use of space in unconventional (or even illicit) ways.  This is not to say your project will be inhabited by crawling through elevator shafts or blowing holes in walls between apartments, but it does suggest that the way we conventionally think about relationships between bodies and spaces can be limiting.

100412 - positioning

A dynamic conception of architecture, which overcomes the traditional notion of buildings as a still, tectonic construct, allows us to think of space as practice. This involves incorporating the inhabitant of the space (or its intruder) into architecture, not simply marking and reproducing but reinventing, as film does, his or her various trajectories through space—that is, charting the narrative these navigations create.

- Giuliana Bruno
Atlas of Emotion, Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film

While the section drawings, animations, and perspective images you will be developing for the final review are representational, they are also operative. This work will continue to test ideas and position your project within a clear conceptual framework. Along with your written thesis, this work will support an argument for your project.

ANIMATION

Develop a new version of your animation. Track three noun-noun neologisms through the pre-midterm work (dunescape maps, unit/cluster development, landscape sunlight study, etc.), the light filter studies, the attachment / extension system, and the distinct spatial experiences of your observatory. Though the structure of the animation does not need to be linear, it does need to track a coherent line of thinking through the entire project.

Consider how the following filmic techniques can inform the animation:

• Speed: Is the camera moving fast or slow?
• Frames: What is being framed? Is there more than one image in the frame?
• Sequence: How might sequences play out separately or in juxtaposition? How are sequences manipulated by flashbacks, crosscuts, close-ups, and dissolves?
• Drawings: How are drawings panned, zoomed, and/or assembled?

Consider using short video clips combined with still images. Consider introducing sound. The camera is more than a tool to document space; it is a tool to shape space. 

SECTIONS - go here for examples of the final sections

Two 1/4” scale sections are required, one horizontal, one vertical. Sections must document as many different spatial experiences as possible. The vertical section must include shadows and scale figures. The vertical section may be drawn at different times of day or year to document changing lighting conditions. All sections must show deep space by calibrating line-weight and line-type.

vertical sections - Yokohama Ferry Terminal, Foreign Office Architects

horizontal sections - Bibliotheque de France, OMA / Rem Koolhaas

100408 - excavated spillbreach

Here is a video Mandi Fung (one of my students from spring last year) made as part of the writing workshop with Filip and Jeffery.  We're asking you to go much further this year in terms of how the animation becomes integral to the development of the project, but this is a good example to look at nonetheless.



Excavated Spillbreach from mandi fung on Vimeo.

100406 - observatory

Although architects generally make a clear distinction between what is given (context) and what is to be conceived (concept), the relationship is not so simple. Rather than a given, context is something defined by the observer, in the same way that a scientific fact is influenced by the observation of the scientist…Context is not fact; it is always a matter of interpretation.

- Bernard Tschumi
Event-Cities 3, Concept vs. Context vs. Content, 2004

An observatory is a device for monitoring celestial or terrestrial phenomena. An observatory is designed to gather data regarding a specific type of process or event, i.e. star formation, planetary movement, weather, earthquakes, etc. Observatories may gather data for empirical purposes (radio telescope), or for more experiential purposes (Roden Crater).

The two examples of observatories below, the Arecibo radio telescope and the Roden Crater are fully integrated into the landscape. They are organized by found terrains. Operations such as cutting, filling, extending, and slicing augment found terrains to give these observatories their final form.

Arecibo radio telescope 

Puerto Rico

James Turrell, Roden Crater – section and plan
Arizona

Your project will be to design a type of observatory, one that monitors movement of the sun and uses filtered sunlight to produce qualitatively different spatial experiences. The observatory must have at least three clearly differentiated spatial conditions qualified by scale and time:

• scale: small, medium, large
• time: morning, noon, afternoon or winter, equinox, summer

These qualifications may be combined in different ways: large/morning, small/noon, medium/afternoon; medium/winter, large/equinox, small/summer; etc. Your observatory will be organized around spatial gradients – do not segment discreet rooms; rather define zones that blend into one another.

Go here for examples of the final observatory models.

THESIS

Write a one-page thesis that expands on the generic qualifications above. The thesis must discuss relationships between the landscape and observatory, argue for a specific type of inhabitation (how do people use your spaces and why), and make use of neologisms (existing from midterm or new).

PERSPECTIVE VIEWS

Continue developing the Rhino model of your intervention. Produce three preliminary perspective views, one for each of the three different spatial experiences. Include scale figures performing relevant activities. The quality of renderings is less important than conceptual information conveyed by the image. Every image must focus on a particular idea.

100406 - atlas of novel tectonics

My notes from the Reiser and Umemoto reading:

2.  Difference in Kind / Difference in Degree – Meaning that is assigned and fixed (chess) vs. meaning that is acquired in context (go).

3.  The Unformed Generic:  Form Acquiring Content – Projecting content and scale into an unformed field.  The field implies no specific scale of content.  The stain is at once generic and specific.  It contains a wide range of variations.

4.  Similarity and Difference – Difference can emerge from similarity and similarity can emerge from difference.  Things that look the same may perform differently and things that look different may perform similarly.

5.  Variety (Difference) vs. Variation (Self-Similarity) – Intensive quantity generates a whole irreducible to the sum of its parts.  Differential repetition is a means of handling program.

7.  After Collage:  Two Conditions of the Generic – Transformation is a quality perceived through deployment of quantity.  Difference is a product of transformation.  The universal is understood a “progressive differentiation.”

10.  Selection vs. Classification – Typologies are important because they have range within limits.  Selection within this range is based on performance of program relative to type.

11. Intensive and Extensive – “The most important distinction in our changed notions of architectural design is the shift from geometry as an abstract regulator of the materials of construction to a notion that matter and material behavior must be implicated in geometry itself.”  Intensive = properties of matter with indivisible differences, gradient.  Extensive = properties of matter with divisible differences.  Potted plant, intensive proliferation, and extensive limit.

12.  Geometry and Matter – Extensive and intensive qualities (quantities) collaborate in the production of architecture.  Codes and other constraints can be considered extensive while material systems generate intensive characteristics.

13.  Folly of the Mean – The mean is expected, extremes are where there is potential to innovate.  The Aristotelian mean is justified in terms of human conduct and gets transferred to proportional systems.

21.  Exchanges among Systems – “The architect is, in effect, neither a passive observer of determined systems nor a determined manipulator of passive material, but rather, the manager of an unfolding process.”

24.  The Diagram – The diagram is not about the thing itself, but its relation to its context, milieu, or environment.  Relationships may change due to scale shifts or behaviors may move from one scale to another.  The diagram tracks performance (of relationships) as an abstract model of materiality.

34.  Systems Becoming Other Systems – Even received structural systems have the capacity to be transformed along a gradient.  New potentials emerge between the standards or norms.

38.  Operating under Surfeit of Information – The management of a material process (like cooking) occurs at a different level than scientific research (the minutia are not directly controlled nor are they necessarily understood).  This is acceptable because it is the larger scale effects that are important.

39.  Asignfying Signs – An asignfying sign is an indication of material quality and performance.  It is a locus for becoming, not a linguistic reading.  It promotes production of the unforeseen rather than representing the known.

100406 - informal

My notes from the Cecil Balmond reading:

Informal

The informal contains the unexpected or surprising.

Order is not necessarily hierarchical.

Answers begin at the local level, not the level of the generic whole.  Work proceeds outward toward a result.

Solutions stem from simple initial decisions.

Innovation, resisting the expected, requires risk.

Hybrid = one action overlapping another.

There is a difference between ambiguity and confusion.

The Chemnitz Solution

Solutions do not come from a picture of the outcome, but an analysis of the data, constraints or local conditions.

Solutions evolve and are calibrated by performance criteria.

Pose open questions rather than proposing closed answers.

A single design principle can be operative at multiple scales.

Rules that prescribe a simple set of operations can be calibrated to yield complex, unexpected results.

“Seemingly random but structured patterns strike a resonance within us, for our ‘internalisations’ may be built on similar ideas.” (p. 171)

100401 - envelope

The architect is, in effect, neither a passive observer of determined systems nor a determined manipulator of passive material, but rather the manager of an unfolding process. p. 104

An architecture that has to explain itself, or be explained, has failed to present its own qualities. It sets up a conventional relationship between material organization and reference. p. 173

- Reiser + Umemoto
Atlas of Novel Tectonics, 2006

As you begin developing envelopes in your projects, consider these two definitions of the term:

1. An envelope is a membrane continuously enfolding interiority and exteriority. This is more like the skin of a body with all its textures, curvatures, and folds than a normative architectural system of walls, floors, and ceilings.
2. An envelope is a set of performance limits, i.e. the performance envelope of an aircraft. The performance of envelopes in your project will be primarily measured in terms of sunlight control.

Close-up view of alligator skin

Future Cities Lab – Xeromax Envelop(e)

WIRE

Install wires in the large-scale landscape. Follow principles developed in wiring the small-scale landscape, but do not necessarily duplicate configurations. Adjustments to the wires must be made in response to the location of inhabitable surfaces and corresponding orientations of the light filter. Develop a basswood attachment component between foam and wire. This attachment component must allow wires to be easily installed / removed and prevent wires from directly touching foam.

LIGHT FILTER

The light filter will operate according to both definitions of envelope given above – it will be an enclosing membrane and it will perform by filtering light in a specific manner. Following principles developed in the gradient model, build bristol board light filtering apertures onto the wire structure. Make iterative adjustments to the light filter so that it begins to enclose and cast shadows upon inhabitable surfaces. The shadows it casts must work like those in the tracking document.

100402 - turning dunes into architecture

It's not directly related to the studio, but I think it's an interesting clip that is worth sharing with the studio.

Magnus Larsson: Turning dunes into architecture | Video on TED.com