Concept – Transformation, growth, forces and deformation

Architectural work- Embryological House by Greg Lynn

Click the link below for the video of the final presentation:

Thompson wrote On Growth and form in the maturity of a career that lay somewhat outside the mainstream of the biological sciences of his day. His writings were a large contribution for the study of morphology. On Growth and Form is essentially an attempt to establish a concept of organic form based upon the physical and mathematical laws governing the development and function of organisms. He demonstrates in this chapter that how organic forms once put in a Cartesian grid can change forms in the same species and how this method could be used to find missing parts in the series of relative species

During the debate in the class we found the book is more of a concept and basically starts with the theory of transformation and is solidly based upon the laws of Newtonian Physics. All the experiments D’Arcy conducted were in 2D and not in 3D and gives a mathematical approach to the biological forms. He tries to show how the relationship between similar species is still there but changing their coordinates and the position of the parts changes. It’s a form finding method found over 100 years ago and gives us an idea of multiplicity during that era. Topology has been explained as a concept here with no real results. It’s a relation of a part to a whole.

The Next part of the critical analysis was The Water Cube-Beijing National Aquatics Centre by ARUP. The structure is made up of the soap bubbles which symbolise the square in the Chinese culture. The beautiful geometry is based on Weaire Phalen foam structure with an array of soap bubbles where 75% of the cells have 14 faces and the other 12 faces. In spite of the complete regularity, the structure when viewed at different angle looks completely random and organic. The polyhedron structure works perfectly as an extremely energy efficient and possibly the most earthquake resistant building. The water cube is a steel space frame structure with 4000 ETFE bubbles, the material being 8 times thinner than even a penny, which are pumped in with a low pressure. The building captures 20% of the incident solar energy and requires 90% less potable water than an equivalent building and uses 55% less artificial lighting. The ETFE IS 1% of glass weight and acts as a thermal insulator. The whole structure weighs almost as much as the Eiffel tower.

Research line:

After reading On growth and form, I’m interested in studying and researching more about Topology in Architecture. Architectural topology is a mutation of form, structure, context and interwoven patterns and dynamic complexity in space. Topological space differs from Cartesian space within which it forms different forms. It’s a process of continuous deformation. There are differentiable dynamic systems in architecture like chaos theory and fractal geometry. Would like to research on the role of topology in architecture and which structure/buildings it can be applied to.

Image reference-http://futuresplus.net/tag/topology/

“Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references is erased, leaving only an optical white-out and the white-noise of pulsing nozzles. Blur is an anti-spectacle. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself.”

Diller Scofidio

Case study:                 Blur building, Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Critical reading:        G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, “Rhizome”, in a Thousand Plateaus, July 1980, pp. 3-25

The Blur is an unconventional building designed by DS+R, an American multidisciplinary firm that constantly swings from architecture to art.

The practice started its work setting temporary installations and at the beginning its attentions was closer to art and theory than to conventional buildings and constructions. This interest was carried on even after they started designing “real” buildings, so the practice has continued to investigate the art field developing media installations, sculptures, sets, and integrating these art researches in their projects, focusing on the consequences of architecture in the society.

The Blur is an installation designed for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel. It is an architecture of atmosphere, an ephemeral non-built construction that interacts with the users and the context, investigating the concept of evanescence. The pavilion was characterized by 31’500 high-pressure nozzles pumping the water from the lake to create a big cloud. A smart weather system was able to read the shifting climatic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, processing the data and modulating the cloud’s shape.

“Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references is erased, leaving only an optical white-out and the white-noise of pulsing nozzles. Blur is an anti-spectacle. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself.” (DS)

This building was a sensorial experience. In fact, within the cloud the public could feel and “drink” the architecture in a media installation that involved all the human senses. Moreover, the pavilion tried to interact with the users establishing new relations between “compatible” users, thanks to the raincoats (brain coats), that visitors were supposed to wear. Indeed, before entering to the pavilion visitors were invited to fill a questioner about their character profiles, then in the brain coats were loaded the personal character data. Therefore the coats were used as protection from the wet environment as well as personality data storage. Communicating with the cloud’s computer network and using tracking location technologies, each visitor’s position could be identified and the character profiles compared each other. When visitors passed one another, their coats could change colour indicating the degree of attraction or repulsion.

The pavilion represents a changeable form, a dynamic system that processes data and establishes relations based on personal information. Moreover, the Blur symbolizes the construction of a building dissolution. This dichotomy (built – unbuilt) is not the only one that can be observed in this project: this architecture is at the same time solid and temporary, stable and in-stable, static and dynamic.

If the architecture is thought to reflect the humankind, I read many analogies between the cloud and the current society. The building, as our society is a liquid mass without any straight hierarchies nor univocal interpretation or conventional limits.

In my opinion, designing a good public building means understand and interpret the human behaviour. Personally I consider fundamental for my profession the works of sociologists and anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss, Augé Latouche and Bauman. From this perspective I would be interested in analysing the Deleuze concept of rhizome and the idea of non-linear thinking, considering his works a key point for my personal and professional growth, as well as an interesting reflection on contemporary society and humans behaviours.

Image: Matteo Silverio

Termite mound

Maybe a lot of the neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more exploratory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives. They’re struggling amongst themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there’s competition going on between individual neurons. As soon as that happens, you have room for cooperation to create alliances, and I suspect that a more free-wheeling, anarchic organization is the secret of our greater capacities of creativity, imagination, thinking outside the box and all that, and the price we pay for it is our susceptibility to obsessions, mental illnesses, delusions and smaller problems.

          Daniel C. Dennet

During the last decades philosophers and scientists have been discussing about the human mind and what we named awareness, as the state to perceive, to feel, to be conscient and to recognize environmental and inner variations, though being able to choose between multiple possible future reactions. What generates problem between researchers are the achievements of neurosciences in studying neurons and brain connections. Suddenly, we were obliged to think us (our brain/mind) as an organism made of objective, automatic and unconscious elements (neurons) that, however, act like surviving animals, always addressed to the best and rational choice for their lives. In this scenario, it emerges that conscious and aware beings (or supposed to be that) can take shape from unconscious, unaware, electrical and always moving beings. The system is conceived as an infinite loop in which death and life continuously switch from one to the other in the same time and at the moment seems to be impossible to detect any kind of starting point, singularity or first energy injection.

The same logic of neurons can be found in machines and computers. One of the best examples of this process is the core of the register machine, that is the basis for the actual informatic and computational architecture. The idea is to construct a system with n numbered containers and m objects. After having randomly distributed the elements in the containers, we provide a simple set of rules (increment, decrement, clear to zero) according to the number of elements in each container and the machine will provide us the right result to our question. In this manner, with few and simple rules it is possible to create other scripts (multiplication, comparison, repositioning) and solve different problems without be obliged to generate different machines for different purposes. The scripts or softwares are able to simulate more analogic processes on the same virtual machine.

Digital tools discussion lead us to the change provided by technology in architecture and building processes. The relevant importance of new technologies and techniques has not to be located in the increase of production, rather in the vision of a world that is going to the pluralism of parts and that is able to compare itself with neutrons and scripts, all elements of the same reality. Steven Johnson told us about ants collective intelligence and its different and essential parameters to work: more is different, ignorance is useful, encourage random encounters, look for patterns in the signs, pay attention to your neighbours. This five sentences could be considered the minimum request to a living system to maintain its own dynamism. It looks foolish not to detect similarities with the human living system. In particular, we can argue to be involved in all of these rules, except for the last one, that is the only one liable to be controlled. In this sense, many architects and designers have been starting to conceive their works as flexible and adaptive systems that promote dynamism, energy flows and inner relations, thanks to the adoption of sets of rules instead of intentional design acts. As results we can include the Watercube in Beijing, the Yokohama Terminal and the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne. Clearly, though with the same logic of building the landscape, these programs have different purposes. While in the intervention of SAANA it is possible to detect the will of linking inside and outside along multiple vectors (even if the horizontal is the main one), in the FOA’s Terminal the site offers itself to be layered and to host different programs. In Beijing, this logic generates one component that, after being put in the system, is able to confer to the building an unusual energetic performance.

Swarm intelligence is the word that better represents the main feature of evolution and nature. Even human beings are within it, as we admit our superiority when linked in and between groups. But animals’ efficiency is really beyond ours and, looking at termites for example, the proportions are not the same, making them able to build more complex and functional organisms. In a certain way, machines and computers are going to move us toward the animals’ way of building: digital beings are now the channels to express the potential of our neurons, that are not able to be explicit with us, into a production process. We are trying to understand our minds using technologies and to translate it into reality. As we saw many times during the human growth, we are forcing our system to obtain operative information addressed to improve our surviving skills. In this direction, many attempts have been made, but still there are inexplicable influences, about how the building could react to the environment and, above all, how the people think at themselves within the environment.

]]> http://legacy.iaacblog.com/maa2014-2015-advanced-architecture-concepts/2014/11/740/feed/ 0 http://legacy.iaacblog.com/maa2014-2015-advanced-architecture-concepts/2014/11/blurred-spaces-of-sou-fujimoto-and-sean-lally/ http://legacy.iaacblog.com/maa2014-2015-advanced-architecture-concepts/2014/11/blurred-spaces-of-sou-fujimoto-and-sean-lally/#comments Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:17:13 +0000 Orion Gorrão Moreira Campos http://legacy.iaacblog.com/maa2014-2015-advanced-architecture-concepts/?p=467

Photo: Compass Table by Dunne and Raby (2001)

http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/books/90/0

The House N of Sou Fujimoto may appear only an example of minimalist architecture, but it encompass a richer discussion of the relationship of men and nature. It could be an example of how the japanese culture see their relation with nature, since the building is not making a total separation between nature and man, or public and private, but creating a gradient of values of nature&men and public&private.

In Sean Lally critic text, the architects of the future will not design the walls of the building, but instead of designing barriers, such as walls, due to advances in tecnology, architects would design spaces controling the climate and energy creating walls based on electromagnetic fields and chemicals.

Dunne and Raby made a piece of design/art with a similar approach to the perception of huge quantity of electronics that surround us. The Compass Table (2001) is a wooden table inset with magnetic compasses that allows us to see the effects of electromagnetic fields of typical objects, such as laptops or cellphones, in this way, the table shows the users the invisible fields that surround them.

In conclusion, both of them believe in a more blured relation between the outside and inside spaces of a house, and although Sou Fujimoto answer to this question on a more formal way, and Sean Lally prefer to go to a more expeculative area, primary based on technological advances, both the architects have similar aproaches to the protective aspect of what a building should have.

As a member of T1 group, in this session, I studied Studio House by F451, and Conditioned Outdoor Room by Bernard Rudofsky. Both of the text and the case are have the thinking of how to deal with the relationship of indoor space and outdoor space, and what can architect do when facing nature.

In the text Conditioned Outdoor Room, the author looked back the changing of American houses since New England settler started to build house in New world. Since the very beginning, human have been fighting to control the climate, but, as the author mentioned, climate cannot be conquered, and we are actually a part of climate. So although we can make our indoor room always comfortable, we still like good climate, good air, and good view, etc. However, American house gardens are not successful in dealing with outdoor and indoor spaces, because although there is big picture window, the garden ends up a decoration of indoor space instead of an outdoor living space. But actually people succeeded in controlling outdoor space. Pompeii house garden is a good example. Those gardens were real outdoor room, they were real living spaces of daily life. The big difference between American garden and Pompeii garden is that Pompeii garden was enclosed by wall, had artificial floor, with an absence of disorder, while American house garden is totally open, more public than private. But if we look into the big difference, it all started from a very simple movement: erecting a wall. The wall makes spaces different, distinguishes in and out, and draws a line between private and public. Also it changes the microclimate around it, provides shadow and shield. This simple movement actually achieved the dream human have for long: control the outdoor climate.

Studio House is also an interesting case. In this case, the architect tries to be in harmony with nature. The atelier has natural light form north, the green roof makes the building part of landscape. Also, from the entrance of the territory, people have to walk in the garden in order to get to house door. Besides, clear big windows also provide good view of garden from indoor room. Here, the house has a good interaction with the nature.

For me, these reading make me think again what we can do as an architect. It’s been a time that people think architect has the power and chance to change something, architect can do something great, like a skyscraper, a monument, even the Radiant City, in order to change society and the world. But now, actually, I started to think in a different way. Space, volume, form and order is till important, but if we want something new, we should look deep into relationship. The world is dynamic, nothing is isolated in vacuum, and everything is related with something else. According to my understanding, advanced architecture is no longer game with spaces, but reflection of different relationship. So, actually, a simple and small movement can do something, like a wall, a hole on the wall to let a branch go though, architecture doesn’t need to be always big.

I’m always interested in understanding our era, the era of information, so I’m really curious about what architecture, even city, would be like in this background. I would like to explore how architecture will interact wig information. As professor mentioned in lecture, architecture is always static, architecture is always build to stand for long. But information is dynamic, it keeps changing and has no shape. To me, the idea of studying how architecture interact with tree is interesting, for a tree keeps changing, although comparatively changing slowly. A tree can make architecture very different, when take into the consideration how to interact with the tree, so it is even more exciting to imaging when architecture interact with information, which is more dynamic, changing much faster. A tree let architecture have expression in time dimension, imaging where information can lead architecture go? It is a really interesting and exciting topic to me. Of course it is more complex than thinking about trees, but studying tree and architecture is a very good hint of how to study the relationship between architecture and information. So, maybe the first thing for me to do, is to understand “information” better.

picture: @dezeen   http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2013/02/dezeen_House-and-Atelier-for-Lara-Rios-by-F451-Arquitectura_4.jpg

Text Analysis-

The Conditioned Outdoor room

Bernard Rudofsky stresses on the need to merge with the nature and not isolate ourselves from nature. He imagines the future generation living hundred and thousands of feet below the ground without imparting their happiness. In the text he talks about the importance of gardens by giving examples from the Roman Garden, Garden of Pompeii and the Japanese gardens. Man can establish an “environmental relationship” with the outdoor gardens during the transition of various seasons by seeing it as an additional living space. He also talks about the “positional relationship” a wall creates by enclosing the garden within its space and the importance of the wall in climate control and maintaining a buffer between the indoor and the outdoor. Rudofsky also brings in a “metaphorical relationship” thought the relation between the man and the nature was resuming into economic advantages- man failed to produce anything revolutionary because he retreated into his house. This text dates back to the 1950’s where technology wasn’t a part of life as it is today. The question is “Is the garden an additional living space achievable in today’s world”

House Analysis-

Studio House by F451 Arquitectura

Rudofsky’s idea of “relationship between man and nature” in “The conditioned outdoor room” is quite evident in this house. The Studio house is a faceted house and a studio with emerge from the slope of the hill in Gijon, Spain. This house is hybridization of two typologies- the modern house and the industrial warehouse. The house develops a “positional relationship” with the slope of the site as the house does not sit on the ground, but in fact the relationship with the ground changes in conjunction with the plan. We can also observe a “metaphorical relationship” – the house tries to branch out from the foot of the hill with a green roof over the house and hence dividing the two storey residence into four sections, which include living quarters, a double-height atelier, a guesthouse and a car parking garage. The building is in an “environmental relationship” with its surrounding by its double orientation, juxtaposition and location of the north lighting

Conclusion

As a conclusion, we should try to incorporate the benefits of “The conditioned outdoor room” instead of being fixed on the idea of the “garden” and the “wall”. We need to find the perfect balance between human beings, technology and nature.

Research Topic

I would like to explore the balance which can be created between human and nature taking in consideration the technological advancement.

How the environmental relationship can affect the form of the structure and vice versa.

References:

The conditioned outdoor room- Bernard Rudofsky

Arcosanti post card, 1978, Arizona

Architecture is one of the disciplines that most requires to focus attention towards the relationships that exist between objects and contexts. While in art the actors analyze the context (if it exists) as basis of a process finalized to the creation of an object, often conceived as a representation, science, in the opposite way, puts too much emphasis on the relationships between objects and it is almost completely unaware of consequences in human lives.

After almost three hundred years of distance from the classic conception of architecture as made not only of designing processes, the Advanced Architecture, in different and adaptive ways, is trying to recover an holistic vision of planning and construction. In such a situation, relationships between subject, object and context are various and contribute to generate a more complex scenario than the one you can obtain only considering all variables as independent from each others.

Specialization is an evolutive phenomenon issued with a vital importance in our universe and permits to increment efficiency and productivity, but if not controlled it will transform the human being in a programmed machine that carries its task out. What we are making out is a future made of knowledge, sharing, continuous learning, experimentation and collaboration addressed to the constitution of active intervenes that possess “functional resonance”, that is the ability of a system element to develop, at the same time, multiple functions and to reach multiple goals. The logic with which relations could be created and linked with each others feels the effects of a natural complexity.

All parts of a project react to his surroundings according to different system (illation, analogy, interaction, correlation, alteration, energy) and to their relative relational logics (positional, metamorphical, atmospherical, intangible, disturbed, environmental). It seems clear how these categories simply are a first and general subdivision and representation of how Advanced Architecture operates. It is dutiful to remember that an unambiguous subdivision is not able to describe all the possible dispositions and that some of these logics can assume more resonance than others.

Energy and environment, for examples, have been taking for the last decades a huge relevance and they have to be considered as first system and logic. For this reason Diego Arraigada’s and Johnston Marklee’s Wall House assumes a shape and a material composition not really usual for a residential purpose, made of four different energetic layers and an external tent surface. In this concept natural energy flows are not interrupted but followed and architectural solutions go along them. This kind of approach, as Sean Lally writes in The Shape of Energy, allows us to create an “architecture built of material energies” that “produces a type of shape that is micro-vernacular, as each site creates a unique feedback relationship to the energy system deployed”.

Similarly to the idea of an architecture made of energy, the interaction between parts of systems is fundamental and has the first aim to generate an atmospherical relation (natural and artificial) with the territory and within the concept of atmosphere as “the envelop of gases surrounding the Earth or another planet” and “the air in any particular place” instead of “the pervading tone or mood of a place, situation or creative work” (Oxford Dictionaries). View House and N-House are examples of this logic but, as written above, each project feels the effects of different influences and distortions according to designer, builder and user. While Sou Fujimoto tries to subvert the natural perception we have of inside and outside, Arraigada and Marklee want to underline the natural environment and his visual potential. Both houses, nevertheless, instead of focusing in the interaction with their surroundings, tend to consider them as artificial features lacking of positive influence on the built up. What seems to be relevant to mark is the necessity of analyzing the ways in which architecture and its products operates in the nature rather than over the nature.

As we discussed, relationships categories and intervention strategies are subject to variation and it is theoretically possible (and maybe it has to be hoped) to detect other relational logics according to the amount of architectural topics and visions. We could have a logic of economic in a natural disaster situation, a logic of safety in another context and maybe more new logics generated by the mix or by the mutation of some of them. Taking in account the metamorphical relation between urban and natural, the actual emergency of cities, the constant population increase and the quality of life (sound, light, pollution, food) we can presume an explosion of the urban boundaries along a completed built (not urbanized) world. The solution could be to finally mix urban and natural in a unique organism, thinking to buildings and landscapes with natural appearances and functionalities. We are speaking about an environment that permits to go from your house to your office without never loosing the awareness of a world that is firstly natural, as all its parts.

Case study:                 Views House. Johnston Marklee and Diego Arraigada

Critical reading:          Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”, in Daidalos 68, July 1998, pp. 18-27

Both case study and critical text investigate the atmospherical interaction between buildings and nature.

Case study: the view house designed by Johnston Marklee and Diego Arraigada tries to establish a relation between the living experience and its surrounding landscape.

For this purpose the architects have introduced the time as dynamic variable developing an internal staircase which leads to a roof deck. This architectural element allows the users to enjoy the nearby views on all sides in a dynamic and changing spiralling path that would engage an interaction among users and nature.

Critical reading: the Wigley’s essay speculates about the concept of atmosphere, defining it as a theatrical effect, intangible and personal. According to the text, trying to capture and control the atmosphere, architects often deceive themselves drawing perfect environments and thinking that they -the environments- can be controlled.

A tangible problem of intangibility: The idea that architect and architecture can control the nature creating the exact atmosphere they conceived is an illusion, especially because atmosphere is imperceptible and really subjective. Moreover the environment evolution is frequently unpredictable and it could compromise the architects aim.

In the view house, for example, Johnston Marklee and Diego Arraigada try to create an interaction system between architecture and its surrounding. However the architects cannot control the environment and, as result,  now the windows frame the neighbourhood houses, compromising the owner privacy as well as the main project feature.

Wigley seem to believe that there is no way to learn how to create atmosphere. The intangible ambience cannot be designed or predicted. The writer finally assert that architects as special effect producers should learn that the drawing they produced and the atmosphere in architecture are distinct.

Nevertheless I believe that the introduction of new digital tools as well as the use of virtual and augmenter reality could help architects to better understand the natural environment in order to produce more controlled and accurate projects, well suited to the morphological and climatic environment conditions.

Personal research: Personally I am really interested investigating the relation between architecture and its surrounding environment. In particular I would like to analyze how the natural conditions could modify an architectural project and how the introduction of the technology are helping architects to design better buildings as well as cities, redefining the architectural process.

Image: © dezeen.com