Have a look at this amazing collection of sites by Jonathan Harris which, in some form or another, act as a listening post on the web, filtering text, imagery and information that deals with feelings, love, hate, and a general world state. The amazing thing about this work is the idea that we can capture an unfathomable (and seemingly chaotic) amount of information, and put it into a package that illicits a kind of visual simplicity that shapes a new way we can think about the information presented. It reorganizes the data into something we can easily understand quickly, and operates the way good graphics always do. It is no easy task to represent a “feeling”, but Harris’ subtle use of color goes a long way.
Harris’ work defines a profound new kind of information design: it whittles down the world’s 70 million Web sites and blogs into a framed image of humanity. And it does it live, continuously, and autonomously. Architects and designers have experimented with computational design, letting a computer run through a spectrum of possibilities within a given set of parameters. But Harris’s creations are different: rather than static buildings, magazine covers, or shopping bags, they are constantly changing artistic responses to a constantly changing world. By using the Web as both site and material, they offer a way of seeing rather than merely being a sight…material of experience has changed. The old rituals of memory—photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters—have moved onto the Web, opening them up for a new kind of analysis.
There are a few times when something comes along and kicks you in the ass, and you say, “man, that’s truly amazing.” (See: live child birth, Rocky IV, etc.) Although perhaps, not in the same tier as live child birth, Microsoft Live Labs has been developing an application called Photosynth, which “takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.” It is more or less a hijacked, 3D version of all those sweet collage panoramas you made from site visits with your 35mm, only now each picture is given a point value in space, and you can move through it as if you were there. If the simultaneity of speed and quality can be maintained (each picture is able to be zoomed in on for progressively higher resolutions), then this is bang-up.
Quite incredible, and I think the potential implications are fairly evident as to what this could mean for the ways photos are used and spaces visualized. As architects, I think also far reaching, not only in terms of the documentation of existing space, but virtual space through renderings.
Hendrix image uses a pattern underlay generated by Marc Fornes at the theverymany.
Architecture has seen a renaissance-like resurgence in a return to evidentially rigorous & complex systems of organization, whose complexity is both revealed and open-sourced through advances in digital technologies, namely 3D modeling, and scripting.
Despite the fact that fabrication techniques have made great strides in realizing the ever changing potentials of what we can create on the screen, we have charged forward. As designers, we have, I think become more adept (and consequently less impressed) with these new tools capacity to simply create something “new”, and have begun to refocus on making something better – be it through fabrication or just better design.
Truly “contemporary design” is able to divorce itself from the idea that a computer is only used to generate something nice for its own sake. Technique alone cannot produce something with rich design value. We cannot expect math and algorithms to do the work that hundreds of years of experience have reaped for the profession. Contemporary design will absorb these tools; understand them as pivotal and extremely useful to efficiently realize a design, but there have been and will always be intangibles that define a great project.
Jimi Hendrix is one of the best, if not arguably the best technical guitarist of our time.
His rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner”, a tune he played loudly and sharply accompanied by simulated sounds of war (machine guns, bombs and screams) from his guitar, during his set at Woodstock in 1969, has been described by some as anti-American mockery and by others a generation’s statement on the unrest in U.S. society, oddly symbolic of the beauty, spontaneity, and tragedy endemic to Hendrix’s life…
When asked to comment relative the controversial nature of the version, Hendrix quoted the rendition to him as being “beautiful.” So even though the fact that he played the star spangled banner is not a direct product of techniques he used, the fact that it is played adeptly with that techinque is the crux of what makes it so poetic.
I think we can easily find parallels in architecture.
The SF firm of Iwamotoscott’s proposal the jellyfish house demonstrates both a mastery of the digital technique as seen through the skin tessellation, shape and structural analysis, but they also don’t dispel associations to the evocative nature of a jellyfish, as the name of the house suggests.
Jellyfish House, Iwamotoscott Arch
Tom Wiscombe & EMERGENT also demonstrates a proficiency at both using the technique and situating the design both aesthetically and contextually, as demonstrated at 2 recent library designs for Stockholm and the Czech Republic. In both he exploits the nature of a voronoi tessellation to achieve not only a synthesis of structure, material and form, but also to create space that speaks in language that straddles specificities in architecture as well as poetics realtive to their place.
Stockholm City Library, EMERGENT
Library of Czech Republic, EMERGENT
I am not advocating a return to semiotics, but I am saying that we must reconcile with the idea that although we can claim to not “be interested in it”, we can never fully escape from it. Contemporary design in my view reconciles this fact, and gives us an arena to proactively take new techniques and give them cultural, ecologic and aesthetic significance.
