Æsthe/tech:Tonik
Building | Beauty | Consuming | ImageArchive for Architecture General
Open KSA
One of my most memorable classes as a student was a theory seminar I took by Jeff Kipnis, which at the time was privy to only students in their final year of architecture study. Entertaining, to say the least. Since then, he has also taught lectures to students in their first year of school, and the lectures are available here. I think you’ll find them humorous, and enlightening.
Start with “Windows”
http://knowlton.osu.edu/open/media.asp
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Universcale
An amazing website devoted to the scalar relationships of our known world. Think Eames Powers of Ten with a flash interface. Perhaps the most amazing thing is how small we have been able to create man-made objects (namely single electron transistors). A sobering testament to both our insignificance, and simultaneously our amazing ability to catalogue our environment.
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Kalyx
Engaging the right side of the brain is a liberating exercise, except most times it isn’t something we consciously do. Right-brained thinking is interesting in the sense that it is so unlike its counterpart, aka left-brained thinking, in that there isn’t necessarily work involved in getting from point A to point B. There isn’t an “I get it” or “I don’t get it”, but simply a range/depth of appreciation.
I think we would all be surprised at just how attune to visual phenomena we really are, and how much we can process simply by looking at an object, a space, a face, or an image.
I say that relevant to this project, only because I started with trying to indulge a right-brained urge, and ended up getting there in a pretty linear fashion.
Working on a project in Dubai, our project team found out that a good portion of the masonry in the city is actually cut and hewn coral deposits. Its combination of mass and porosity, as well as availability, had obvious benefits given the climate and region. Though the project pursued another direction, I kept finding new things relative to color, growth patterns, etc.
A project emerged simply by trying to follow the underlying geometric logic of a species of coral whose septa (walls) fuse together from polyp to polyp. Simplicity follows two tracks; a simple thing + complex technique, or a simple technique to get a complex thing.
This employs the latter.
I’ll probably post a more detailed description on my website shortly.
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Architecture; Collective Mediocrity?
I came across this note in the NYT by chance in a google search. Thoughts anyone?
To the Editor:
Christopher Hawthorne asserts that individual geniuses like Frank Lloyd Wright are being replaced by ”collectives” — teams that advocate group design and compromise [''Goodbye 'Fountainhead,' Hello Kibbutz,'' April 27]. As Ayn Rand has demonstrated, however, a collective of mediocrities cannot match the achievements of a single genius. Could Fallingwater have been designed by a committee? The surge toward collectivism in architecture may explain why so many buildings today are trite, disintegrated and/or just plain ugly.
EDWIN A. LOCKE
Westlake Village, Calif.
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Aperiodic Massing
A recent exploration/study involving aperiodic distribution of volumes…
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Midrise?
Image © NBBJ, 2008.
We need to stop referring to 20 story buildings as “towers”. It undermines the typology, and makes you feel like it should be something it isn’t. Although by definition, a tower is a structure whose diameter is smaller than its height, we know this can be applied to a significant amount of buildings we wouldn’t consider to be towers. A true tower has a slender proportion, and has a relentless vertical vector distribution.
As designers, let’s be honest with ourselves, and let these be what they want; tall midrise buildings with their own specific set of constraints, independent of a true high rise. No better or worse, just different.
We will see the Midrise become more prevalent in less dense cities in the near future as developers procure less capital from lenders. We should equip ourselves with the critical tools to make these projects effective as architectural solutions to urban or suburban insertions.
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Simplexity & Registration
Reading John Maeda’s book Simplicity was very telling about our nature as humans. Our lives are so complicated that it is overwhelming, hence our current trend to pare down and simplify all that we can . The funny thing is, we don’t want to rid ourselves of complexity, as we are naturally curious, we just don’t want it at the price of complication. Thus, we find ways of subverting complexity through simple processes, methods and packages. The book applies to all of the design disciplines with varying degrees of relevance, but it resonated with me from an architectural standpoint pretty strongly.
Designers are pretty hard to please when it comes to what they find captivating. Some may espouse a specific stylistic approach linked historically, others a methodology that produces something formally specific. To pull value from such a range of subjectivity, I think we could all agree that we value refinement in either material, technique and form (or perhaps all of the above). What perhaps pushes a project or idea beyond those individually, is when those three things have a synthetic relationship that speaks to us on a somatic, visceral or emotional level.
That synthesis happens more frequently than we would think, and I only got to thinking about it because of some recent/not-so-recent projects, I have looked at more in depth. A recent sciARC exhibition prompted my thinking on this.
Sci-Arc Exhibition; Andy Ku, Marcos Sanchez, Jenny Wu
While the project isn’t groundbreaking, it is no less effective. It allows us to see, with utmost transparency, how a one material coupled with an intelligent method can reveal a new way of thinking about the potential of that material. The project isn’t hard to understand, and in that there is value. Designers (myself included) don’t just design for each other, but for people who don’t care what we care about. Their level of engagement varies based on their interest and amount of time they invest in it. So while I want to produce a project that can accommodate a multiplicity of engagement strata, I also want to be able to speak to someone at the first. A curved wall out of something that curves naturally is less interesting to me than a curved wall out of something that is inherently straight, historically or expectedly.
In contrast, in contemporary investigation, while the value of largely formal projects aims at speaking to people on a visceral level, the overwhelming complexity of shape and relationship can be lost amidst a sea of complication, hence the conversation may be limited to a like/dislike scenario because of a level of engagement that can’t be reached without a core level of competency most don’t possess. While this isn’t a criticism necessarily, as I feel the merits of such work move beyond that notion, I think it is important to note that effectiveness in those projects relies heavily on the suspension of a reality that grounds most projects in favor of the potential of architecture to be fundamentally and diagrammatically organic.
Meghan Pryor, GSAPP Fall 2006
The Fifth Law of Maeda’s book is “Difference,” which notes that complexity needs simplicity to be appreciated or registered. These exist as arrhythmic oscillations when most effective. The sciARC exhibition can be understood as a system that would be just as happy being the complex, doubly curved surface, as it would be a straight-forward vertical wall. We don’t need to see the straight wall to understand the curved wall, but sometimes we do. Registration of that difference can at times help the clarity of a project in this regard. Having looked at the oooolllllldddd Signal Box, it occurred to me how effective that strategy was. Add to that the value of the copper functionally, and you have a synthesis of form, material, and technique that produces a real-world affect through simple means. The aesthetic value would not have nearly the impact had the copper louver not returned to an original condition.
Is this the only way to invoke a guttural response in an end-user? Absolutely not; and even while this formula doesn’t always make for an effective project, I think when it is deployed intelligently, it creates a beauty that is empathetic to a larger audience.
Links:
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End Game
Props to Dominic Leong of PARA for this insightful article that basically surmises what we deal with every day, without being overly academic (aka big words.)
The Game of Architecture via CORE.FORM-ULA
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Nº 5, 1948*
“Pollock’s finest paintings… reveal that his all-over line does not give rise to positive or negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is not inside or outside to Pollock’s line or the space through which it moves…. Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas.”
Pollock’s paintings were not paintings like people knew paintings. Hey considered them events, and his immersion in them was key to their success. They were liberations from aesthetic values. Ironically, they in turn, created a unique aesthetic one that polarized its critics.
And now, you too can paint like Jackson! I stumbled upon this site the other day. The mouse path has a function related to speed of movement and thickness of dribble. Clicking changes colors. Have a looksee.
