Terrain Essay Draft (Reworked – sort of)
Van-Anh Nguyen 2108916A
Essay Question: “Leaping from an idea – Where do I go?”
Digital technology has made it possible for us to envision new forms, explore new geometry, and re-examine old assumptions about what we think constitutes as architecture. At the same time, new media has altered the way we learn, present, and think about design, particularly in the studio. How has this technology changed architecture and architectural education, and what do these changes mean? What challenges do new media present in terms of realising our ideas in built form, and how might the physical environment change to reflect the media images we can now create? What hybrids between architecture and media have begun to emerge?
IngerSays: you could talk about Massumi's "leaping puppies" analogy here, or Paul Minifie's "desperate acts" before entering into the rest of the discussion that follows
The act of making a "leap" from a visual concept to built form has been a problem that I have attempted to address in previous work. Under the name of ‘Realtime’ we explored some issues to do with architectural processes which utilised the combinative nature of various media to explore the wider concepts of time and real-time through mechanisms and interfaces within architectural design. These explorations were located in relation to contemporary design processes, visualisations technology and the design of architecture for the constructed environment. The desire to embrace the potentialities of digital media helped us to conceptualise new and challenging architectures. With such an agenda the overriding objective of the research was to give the student the ability to critically assess the role of digital media within contemporary design processes. The research was divided into two phases; the first design phase explored the idea of developing a nonlinear architectural mechanism that was capable of generating a thousand images. It was a process-based exploration of architectural issues. This phase emphasised “process over product”, and the development of conceptual ideas without the burdens of constructional programmatic concerns.
In this “process driven phase”, I examined the time and dynamics of geology, in particularly, the connection of time to change. There was an exploration of geological patterns based on the accumulation and reduction of materials that have been shaped and hardened by time. The idea that geology and the concept of time within it being generally thought to be unchanging; however, it is a dynamic body and its surface is continually evolving creating different spaces. Whilst working on this phase, certain questions were brought to light; “What sort of spaces are they? How do we relate to them? Immerse ourselves in them? How we relate to these spaces can be explained through the concept of “landing sites”. A “landing site is but neutral marker, a simple taking not of, nothing more”. “Defining features (perceptual landing sites), plus all the imaging that bounces off that which surrounds a person (imaging landing sites), plus guesses and judgments as to how elements of the surroundings are positioned (dimensionalising landing sites) fabricate a world or suffice to map one. Landing sites dissolve into each other, or abut, or overlap, or nest within one another”.
In Kwinter’s, “Architecture of Time”, he discusses the issue of time within nature, arguing that “nature itself is wild, indifference, and accidental; it is a ceaseless pullulation and unfolding, a dense evolutionary plasma of perpetual differentiation and innovation’. Nature consists of repeated dissolving cycles, that is, formations followed by periods of destruction and thus succeeded in turn by reformation. This exploration of surface textures was visualised and conceptualised using digital media by applying the principles of constructive processes and destructive forces found in nature. This idea was applied through a mapping exercise of the destruction of rock formations through time. By pinpointing certain moments in time where erosion occurred, a spatial quality was modelled on programs such as 3dVIS. Hence, a thousand images were produced, each trying to convey some sort of “landing site”.
How can the success of the use of digital technology and the leap made be measured though? To me, it seemed that most of the images looked like objects flying in space. Through the critique it was suggested that issues of transparency and opacity from political and social standpoints by looking closely at reflectivity, opacity and lighting as creators of spaces, as just changing opacity/transparency creates new spaces be explored. The images produced were representative of extracting or taking away the negative away from an object to create different surface qualities. Through the use of animation, the idea was to capture the dissolving of solids in actual form being translated in the creation of another. Animation was used as part of the development and representation of the idea. In this case, it was used as a device, therefore being part of an iterative design generation and also as an evaluation procedure. However, is there another way of showing this other than through animation? Would the essence of the dissolution be lost if just a single scene was taken away? After all, they are just a series of multiple images strung together to give the impression of movement. Then again, Rakatansky suggests that it is “not movement but the invocation of movement, not gesture but the invocation of gesture, not motivation but the invocation of motivation”. Therefore, by taking away an individual image from an animation all that is left is a single image. There will be no sense of what the object in the image was before or will be later. There is no sense of movement. Unanimated.
“Animation is a term that differs from, but is often confused with, motion. While motion implies movement and action, animation implies the evolution of a form and its shaping forces; it suggests animalism, animism, growth, actuation, vitality and virtuality.” Greg Lynn
In architecture itself, animation generally refers to the ability movement around and through the building. This is a relatively extreme process compared to the traditional physical models that place absolute reliance on our cognitive and interpretive skills. Greg Lynn pushes this idea further by using animation to ‘test’ his project in ‘House Prototype’. This project raises the question of the possibility of forming a connection between a concept of space and a design process. Does the space have to resemble the final building; can the space in the design process be dynamic and animated while the space of the final building is static?
In the discussion that followed one of the sessions at the ANYwise? conference in Seoul, South Korea 1996, Greg Lynn described his project ‘House Prototype’ as follows:
“In the simulation that ran on the analysis of the site, I put in over 100.000 particles, every one of which has more than a dozen parameters that can be set to define how they will interact with each other. Each particle has parameters that can be attached to any of the five fields. Each of the five fields has over 1.000 parameters for generating forces on the site. ... The internal complexity of the system and the fact that there is no one-to-one quantitative alignment with any aspect of the project make it a very creative process. ... We evaluate the process continuously. This is just a design method. I would never show this as a way of validating the house because I am involved in a completely unscientific enterprise.”
After this re-introduction to the project that he had just presented the discussion goes on: Jeffrey Kipnis: “… You stay at the level of dynamic animation, we could be fascinated by what we see, but because you do not resolve it as a fixed static object with materials, structure, and construction, at which point we see its real consequences, we’re left fetish zing the video rather than really understanding its design consequences. Is this true or not?”
Lynn: “I want to resist answering that question. In other situations in which I have shown material like this, the response has been ‘well, are you saying architecture has to move in order for this to be an interesting design approach?’ I would say no.”
Jeffrey Kipnis: “You say no, but you do not show us what happens when you take the motion away.” Therefore, can the ‘how it was done’ be separated from the ‘what was done’, in the way that Lynn tries to do by saying ‘it is just a design method. I would never show this as a way of validating the house’? How does the dynamic quality of the design method correspond to the static quality of the final building?
What seemed to provoke the Kipnis' comment was that Lynn’s project first of all seemed to replace the architect with an automatic process for generating form. But this process was designed by the architect, so Lynn operated at another level than traditional architects. One could argue that Lynn designed the space in which the process took place rather than the traditional objects of architecture. Secondly Kipnis’ remark showed that they presumed that the space of the design process equals the space of the real building. His thought was that if the design space was animated then the final building must be moving.
“The building may be static, but the architecture is never at rest.” Lars Spuybroek
One could say that rather than Lynn’s project being animated architecture it was an animated process. The aim was not that the architecture should move or be animated in the final manifestation as a real building, but rather that the process lead to architecture through the use of animation.
One approach could be to define the ‘virtual tectonics’ of the architecture – its parameters, its constraints, its dynamics – and not to define its final expression from the start but rather to activate the ‘virtual tectonics’ and work with the dynamic structure towards a manifestation as a building – Where the architect does not design the building itself but the relationship between its elements. To animate can be understood as the ability to give life to an internal possibility – as an emancipation – of architecture in a broad sense or new structural scenarios through a ‘virtual tectonic’.
“In other words, a building cannot move as a body moves, a building is not a body, needless to say. < QUALIFY THIS STATEMENT!! ARCHITECTURE IN OCCIDENTAL PRACTICE HAS BEEN PREDICATED ON THE BODY SINCE THE RENEISSANCE EVEN IN THE MODERN MOVEMENT THROUGH CORB'S MODULAR. A BUILDING IS NOT A BODY?? THEN WHAT IS IT?? WHAT IS IT'S ORIGIN, IT'S ARCHTECTURE? SURE ANTHROPOCENTRIC THINKING IN ARCHITECTURE HAS BEEN CHALLENGED IN THE LAST FEW DECADES, BUT YOU NEED TO WRITE ABOUT THIS AND QUALIFY WHY BUILDING IS NO LONGER TIED TO ANTHROPOMETRICS AND THE BODY AND FOLD OUT YOUR ARGUMENT FROM THAT> But needless to say, given how dull, how unanimated, most buildings are, whatever considerations it takes to get a building animated – or at the other extreme, to obdurately albeit futilely, attempt to resist any and all animation – could be worth the consideration.” Mark Rakatansky.
This now brings me to the second design phase, which was a collaborative design project. Through the generation of a thousand images, we were to draw our knowledge and create a combined cinematic and theatre space, which would be flexible and transformable to accommodate the differing needs of both disciplines. The project explored a ‘24/7’ approach to functionality and incorporated spaced for annual city events: eg. the Film, Fringe, or Fashion festivals. All said and done – this brief stumped us (well it stumped me). I was hit with the question of HOW? How were we going to combine all our different ideas into this one complex, this one building, this one structure? I believe it is a question that we, are all faced with. How is the leap from a conception to a built form made? What drives it? How did my design group make such a leap? To us, we took the ‘obvious’ approach of collage-ing a number of our different images from design phase one together in order to create images that showed interior spaces. By using collage were we able to construct ambiguous or even contradictory relationships through the adjacent placement of disconnected objects. Collage was a powerful and effective way that was capable of embracing and incorporating differences between the new and the old, the existing and the deviating. The result was a lot of dark and mysterious spaces that seem pretty intriguing to walk through. Hence, the ball started rolling. But was that a successful process – to start from the interior and work outwards? It was quite hard actually. We found hat once we became fixated on what the interior looked like, it was difficult to get our minds around the idea of the building as a whole.
From the use of computer media, we were able to realise our ideas in built form. Due to the fact that we did not really grasp the physical complex as a whole, using this technology we were able to ‘fudge’ the project to an extent. The architectural form and design is in fact banal in reality, because in studio computer renderings by using the different lighting affects, the images of the project look particularly stunning. Is this where architectural education is heading where students are fudging their projects in order for it to ‘look good’ without an understanding of form and structure? Is there too much of an emphasis of producing that ‘winning’ image that sells the project whether it is to the tutor, client or public? Is the real spirit of architecture lost in the use of computers?
< WHAT IS THE REAL SPIRIT OF ARCHITECTURE, IS THERE ONE???, A SUGGESTION WOULD BE PERHAPS TO REFOCUS AND REWRITE YOUR ESSAY PREMISED ON THIS QUESTION AND TO INVESTIGATE THIS QUESTION, TO PRIVILEGE IT'S THINKING THROUGH THE DISCUSSION OF DIGITAL MEDIA IN ARCH>
“One principle he learned is that believability is more important than realism” Mark. Rakatansky (Chuck Jones: A flurry of Drawings) As a sophisticated tool, the computer not only influences every particular aspect of social life, but above all it establishes a multitude of new relationships. Everything is in effect converted into a flow of data, an infinite interpolation of 0 and 1, which can be apparently exchanged and manipulated without difficulty. We live today in a space of flows where everything simply merges in a series of transformations whose beginning and end are impossible to situate. It is here that society produces its own delirium: “Everywhere it is machines, real one, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections”. Deleuze and Guattari
There is now a particular emphasis placed on the computer connecting distant users in the design process through integrated project models, creating seamless information linkages between designers and manufacturers, and blurring the boundaries between people, machines and architectural environments. Nowadays everything has become process and the world is adapting. For architecture and the software that has been developed for architectural design, the consequences of this evolution are obviously important. As Paul Virillo states in his essay on ‘The Mechanical Eye’, “…we are entering a paradoxical logic period where computer graphic (holographic) hologram, video gram take over our space.”
In ‘Machining Architecture’, Lars Spuybroek (NOX) writes, “Maya is the most integrative tool available today. Students can combine typical data analysis from programs like Excel (Microsoft Office) with image manipulations from stills or films from Adobe Photoshop or Premiere and the amazing surface modelling tools in Maya. The drill emphasised time-based tools like Inverse Kinematics (skeletons with bones and joints, generally used to bodies such as running dinosaurs), Particle Dynamics (generally used to rubber or jelly-like geometry interacting with other surfaces or force fields such as gravity, turbulence and vortex). Once cannot overestimate the effect of this type of software on the minds of architecture students.” Spuybroek is nevertheless one of the few to understand that these effects are the effects of machines, not metaphors.
Lars Spuybroek’s view is that the technological revolution ushered in by computers no longer allows people to say within the boundaries of a single discipline. The computer is not so much a simple representational tool as an instrument that blazes trails to another world, by cultivating linkage, superposition and interaction in data systems that it would have been impossible to put together before. He makes use of every kind of technique and technology and applies them both in the creative process and in the final product, which are inseparable. He focuses on the idea that information should not intervene at a particular moment of the design, but rather that it is part of a process that is permanently structuring the forces in question, within an interactive system.
By using this interactive system, the design process in producing this architecture enabled our group to further push our ideas. The ‘leap’ made in the ‘Realtime’ studio was perhaps successful as the essence of each our original concepts were intertwined within the project some more prominent than others. Blurred by the use of the digital media, it helped challenged the boundaries of design process that we were accustomed to.
“Architecture is born when actual phenomena and the idea that drives it intersect. Whether a rationality explicit statement or a subjective demonstration, a concept establishes an order, a field of inquiry, a limiting principle. The concept acts as a hidden thread connecting disparate parts with exact intention. Meanings show through at this intersection of concept and experience.” Stephen Holl