Terrain Essay
Van-Anh Nguyen 2108916A
Essay Question: ‘Machines making the leap?’
‘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.’
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 without difficulty. We live today in a ‘space of flows’, to borrow Manuel Castells’s expression within infinite networks, in which machines, men, desires and merchandise are linked to and converted into one another. Everything has become process and the world is adapting. How then has this technology impacted on architecture? What challenges do new media present in terms of realising 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?
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. The potential for formal experimentation soars exponentially with the computer’s capacity for numeric generation of form and direct three-dimensional modelling. There are no barriers to formal complexity: the representational bases for objects proliferate; intuition and random chance are dominant agents; the image becomes primary; concept drawings double as working drawings, specifying the coordinates for precision fabrication.
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). One 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. 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.
Digital forms created in cyberspace are particularly provocative because they are scaleless; they are not driven by tectonics; they have no grounding in materiality; and surfaces can be described independent of any prescriptions arising out of fabrication techniques. The computer plots voluptuous and sensuous forms. This is the substance of Greg Lynn’s architectural (and sculptural) investigations. He shares an interest in mapping as an impetus to form – a technique that Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid also pursue; to diagram the physical or virtual traces of phenomena such as circulation, use patterns, traffic flow, topographical features, historical fragments … These ‘criteria’ can all be plotted or mapped as a way of investigating other forces or determinates that can generate form.
In the Korean Presbyterian Church, Lynn combines ideas about the programme (a large assembly shed) and ideas about expressing circulation – traditional approaches to making architecture which he subjects to the formal opportunities of the computer. The form is arrived at through a series of mathematically-derived morphing strategies and subjected to the building. Lynn has explained on many occasions how the design was generated by means of diagrams. How in the computer different ‘meta blobs’ interacted according to their zones of gravitational force. How they grew and melted together into new forms until they achieved a state of equilibrium. How these meta blobs stood for different programmes, single rooms that merged into one big room with a single surface that incorporated the entire programme. Then he introduced a different strategy. A series of tubes was put on the roof of an existing building that had not be seen before, the old Knickbocker Laundry. The tubes grew and developed into a rib-like structure with an inner and outer skin. Tubes were added for access and circulation. In this phase the smoothness of the blobs was already partly replaced by a certain degree of segmentation. After that, there must have been a third phase in which the project was adapted to the building methods of the contractor. Constructions appeared and an industrial façade was introduced. In this phase, the project lost its initial smoothness. Today, it looks almost like a deconstruction of a blob. A question worth considering would be if there is a compromise to the overall scheme of the project by making this leap from digital form to built form? More importantly, must it?
Now, in itself this is not a problem, because as the building stands there it is in some ways maybe even more convincing than if it had been a smooth blob: that would have made a much more disturbing, science-fiction like effect. It would have appeared as if aliens or at least something from ‘out there’ had just landed. Of course, Lynn himself likes these references and he has referred to B-movie blobs on many occasions with a certain perverse pleasure. Because, however much disgust and queasiness they may inspire in movie audiences, they also seem to possess a high form of intelligence. ‘The tern “blob” connotes a thing which is neither singular nor multiple but an intelligence that behaves as if it were singular and networked, but in its form can become virtually infinitely multiplied and distributed’. This is an interesting metaphor for a building, because a building is never just one thing and is always caught up in a constantly changing complex web of relationships and stories.
My own suspicion of the enormous generative part played by digital technology in architecture stems from previous work that I partook in a particular studio. 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 explored the idea of developing a nonlinear architectural. It was a process-based exploration of architectural issues emphasising “process over product”, and the development of conceptual ideas without the burdens of constructional programmatic concerns.
Using Kwinter’s, “Architecture of Time”, as a major reference to this body of work, I examined the time and dynamics of geology, in particularly, the connection of time to change. 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’. This idea was applied through a mapping exercise of the destruction of rock formations through time by pinpointing certain moments where erosion occurred; hence, a spatial quality was modelled conveying a neutral marker, an idea of “landing site”. ‘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.’
Animation was used as part of the development and representation of the idea of capturing the dissolving of solids in actual form and being translated in the creation of another. In this case, it was used as a device, therefore being part of an interactive design generation and also as an evaluation procedure. What is interesting about this particular type on animation is that whether of not the essence of the dissolution would be lost if just a single scene was taken away? After all, it is 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 it’s 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
‘In other words, a building cannot move as a body moves, a building is not a body, needless to say. 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.
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.
An 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 cyberspace.
‘Cyberspace is architecture; cyberspace has an architecture; and cyberspace contains architecture’. This idea of new liquidity of the virtual was also illustrated by Marcos Novak’s attempts to create an algorithmically composed design which resulted in a family of architectures conditioned by one genotype-generating programme. Novak has been as deep into virtual space as any architect. Until recently, his work was well within the confines of the machine, an architecture on life-support incubated by digital oxygen. Coining and giving definition of the term ‘Transarchitectures’. In short, we conceive algorithmically (morphogenesis); we model numerically (rapid prototyping); we build robotically (new tectonics); we inhabit interactively (intelligent space); we telecommunicate instantly (panopticon); we are informed immersively (liquid architectures); we socialise nonlocally (nonlocal public domain); and we evert virtually (transachitectures).
Novak surfs on the ‘tsunami’ of technology, pushing the cyber envelope of the profession into the next century. Here, he considers the end of the Modernist project. ‘After modernity, virtuality: all that is solid melts into information. Between modernity and virtuality is transmodernity. As we all know, definition, disciplines, institutions have become unstable and inadequate, and everywhere there are revelations of the structures by which we comprehend the world. These changes are not formless. They are characterised by the aspects of metamorphic change clustered under the prefix “trans”: transmutation, transgression, etc. everywhere present, this kind of change is most evident in the structures of our quest for knowledge.’
Where has this quest for knowledge taken architecture? How has digital technology changed the way we communicate – diagram? As Spuybroek sees it, the computer is only a machine that reinforces communication between different diagrams. It is a diagram in and of themselves. For specific computer program are also diagrams in and of themselves. For Spuybroek, there is no difficulty in describing as ‘material computers’ the dynamic models borrowed from Antoni Gaudi and Frei Otto, which he uses in certain designs to determine his buildings’ form of construction. These are material diagrams because a change in one area influences the form of the overall project. The design process then comprises, in the end, a chain of different diagrams forming a design machine since they are coupled to one another and are continuously converted into one another. Even if the computer is an expression of a tendency to make everything smoother, more fluid, Spuybroek shows that there still exist couplings and connections that harbour within them possibilities of choice. The ‘space flows’ is not a fatality: we can still manipulate it in our own way.
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Presbyterian Church of New York. Queens, New York, USA. 1997-9 Garofalo Architects, Michael McInturf? Architects and Greg Lynn FORM
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disconnection + isolation/relocation + real/unreal + possible/impossible = illusion?
In connection with the experience of cinema: - what happens to the viewer? - relevance to "the real" vs "the unreal
IngerSays: Van - I'm a bit worried that nothing has appeared here for awhile....
Thoughts of how the leaps are made in architecture: particularly from a visual concept into a built form. This idea is particularly relevant to a previous studio I participated in called REALTIME.
Background Information about the studio:
Key Theme of ‘REALTIME’ Studio
REALTIME is a process driven studio. By utilising the combinative nature of various media this studio aims to explore the wider concepts of time – REALTIME, through mechanisms and interfaces within architectural design. These explorations will be located in relation to contemporary design processes, visualisations technologies, and the design of architecture for the constructed environment.
Three key texts (Virilio, Kwinter, Calvino) provide the initial basis and framework for this studio. As philosophical readings into time they present three distinct relationships of time to media, or mechanisms of time: images and cinematic, dynamic systems, and Zeno’s dilemma. These areas will be explored for their architectural potentials revelling issues pertaining to time in architecture. Issues of time and non-liberality are well established in music web deign, game design, programming, and film, and this studio wishes to explore these potentials within architecture.
Studio Objective
The aim of this studio is to promote the use of digital media in the design of architecture. The desire of this studio is to embrace the potentialities of digital media in the visualisation and conceptualisations of new and challenging architectures. With such an agenda the overriding objective of the studio is to give the student the ability to critically assess the role of digital media within contemporary design processes.
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Over the past three years the office of Greg Lynn FORM has produced projects that challenge traditional ideas about architectural design methods. The work has integrated the computer in its design process in an increasingly innovative manner. Used as a tool to investigate design decisions dynamically through animations and the moving section, and to represent the project both in 2D and 3D in Cabrini and Cardiff, the computer then plays a part in the generation of forms in response to programmatic exigencies in the Yokohama project. Finally, in the Port Authority competition, the most recent project, Lynn models forces on the site, using the advanced inverse kinematics capabilities of Alias Poweranimator. This charting of forces on the site then inflects the design.
The office views the incorporation of state of the art hardware and software - SGI Indigo and Indigo Extremes, running Alias - as a set of tools to investigate architectural performance within the framework of theories based on performance parameters that are only now being theorized in architecture. Greg, as perhaps the leading voice in the development of these theories, is informed by the work of Prigogine, Thom, Bateson, Deleuze, Thompson, Irigaray, Kwinter, et. al..
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MVRDV Design philosophy
MVRDV makes use of, and lays claim to, diversity. They proceed as a team, inviting different and at times unexpected disciplines to join forces with them, mixing disciplinary categories. MVRDV thus either makes its methods systematic, or undoes them in experimentation.
Turning the process of conception into spatial or organizational research, in which they involve, from the project’s premises onward, the greatest possible number of contributors and data. In every instance, the spatial consequences, and the limits and potential of a sweeping overview of situations, are examined and shown. The limits encountered are tested by a systematic intensification, so as to reveal the extremities. This constitutes a radicalization that helps to identify these limits, and makes the formulation of a discourse about them possible. The extreme diversity of these data thus finds a pragmatic transcription in a spatial matrix consisting of the superposition of the diagrams that distribute these data (datascapes).
At an early stage of the design process as many users and advisors as possible are involved. Reactions to the first designs can be processed quickly, creating a high degree of support for the design and encouraging the sort of new insights that can lead to specific innovative solutions. To allow a wide range of commissions to be handled, special design teams are put together for individual commissions. Advisors in the fields of building and installation technology, building sciences, building management and building costs assist a team. In this way MVRDV’s generalism and verve is linked with the specialization and thoroughness of the other team members.
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"We live in a world populated by structures – a complex mixture of geological, biological, social and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical constructions that surround us, and in these interactions we generate novel combinations, some of which possess emergent qualities."
Manual De Landa, "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History"
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Process …
The exploration of process within the studio … and where it led me. In the first design phase, the idea was to develop 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 o programmatic concerns.
These conceptual ideas were generated through readings from Virillo, Kwinter and Calvino. Using modelling programs such as 3dVIS etc, images were created. Successfully? That’s questionable. It seemed that most of the images looked like objects flying in space.
In this “process driven phase”, I explored ideas of geological formations 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 is surface continually evolving.
Relating back to Kwinter’s, “Architecture of Time”, where he discussed 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 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. The images I produced were representative of extracting or taking away the negative away from an object to create different surface qualities. Through the use of animation, I was trying to capture the dissolving of solids in actual form being translated in the creation of another. (can there be another way of showing this other than animation?)
This now brings me to the second design phase, which was a collaborative design project. Through the generation of 1000 images, we were to draw our knowledge and create a combined cinematic and theatre space, which is 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 out different ideas into this one complex, this one building, this one structure? I guess it’s 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 tighter in order to create images that showed interior spaces. 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 got fixated on what the interior looked like, it was impossible to get our heads around on the idea of the whole building.
So that was one way the ‘leap’ was made – successfully? Honestly, I don’t think so – the essence of our original concepts were intertwined in there somewhere but it was hard to tell. We based our complex on “The Matrix” using the ideas of the real and unreal. I think what was driving the project as purely visual – to make things look as good as possible without really knowing how it all worked.
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