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:

The Laws of Simplicity

MS

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

MS

“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.

http://www.jacksonpollock.org

A continuation of the last exercise - this time taking the module in the z dimension…

Image copyright NBBJ, LLC  2007

MS

Here is an image of a screen system I have been developing (rendered with a little 50’s newspaper panache) for a project that I have had the pleasure of helping out on. Pretty straight forward, I think the image speaks for itself, but simply put, the screen tries to achieve depth on a flat façade.

The ultimate goal is to accommodate the multiple scales and gradients of its locale (suburban Moscow) through the use of a panelized screen that can be manipulated to achieve varied effects textually and materially that may respond to program elements of the office behind it. As cost can never be overlooked the screen uses only one panel size, and the effect is achieved simply by spacing the panels differently on vertical struts that run the height of the curtain wall.

The buildings abut end-to-end such that the surface condition can both wrap the corner, and translate across from building to building.

I think all too often we associate “random paneling” with “interesting”, in lieu of actually taking advantage of inherent relationships.

All images copyright NBBJ, LLC 2007

On the tail of the Republic Square competition, another *small* project competition emerged in the heart of Almaty’s financial district that was simple in the challenge it set forth; a speculative office complex 160,000 sm, consisting of four buildings, 2 large (flanking the site), and 2 smaller (in the middle). Our team, since having won the competition, is finding in the midst of its development, that the project has grown considerably in size, scope, and complexity. I will try to document this ongoing effort, to bring to light design issues put on the table, challenges faced, and what it might mean for the client, city, and occupants…

Concept.

The client’s interest for the project is one which predicates a desire to create a formidable presence in a burgeoning financial district at the southeast corner of the city. The Kazak culture as a whole has strong ties to the landscape, which for centuries was the enabler of their nomadic lifestyle. They were a people who farmed the steppe between the lowlands, and the southern mountain ranges. It is this affinity for their environs, coupled with a desire to participate in a dialogue with western society that led them to the development of this project.At its rudiments, the buildings of the Al Farabi Business Center have the advantage of being the third project in an on-going collaborative between NBBJ, E/Ye Design, and TS Engineering (TSE). TSE is the client, developer, and shared user of the complex. As stated above, the formal nature of these investigations resonated highest with the client because of their simultaneous addressing of both the desire to create buildings which become part of, and speak to, a larger landscape, as well as situating themselves in a contemporary discussion with the richness and technology of western architecture. The goal of the project is synergistic with this ideal; to create place beyond the realm of speculative office (the parameters of which were dictated by the client to be four buildings of a specific size and location), which amplifies this discussion. Thusly, an attitude held by the project at its inception was to accommodate the programmatic, ecological and metric requirements of the speculative typology by pushing the Architecture to both the perimeter and interstitial space between the buildings, leaving the interior potential to be a flexible as possible for the future tenants.

Differentiation of these spaces is evoked through a shared formal relationship with the building and ground-plane through manipulated splines, to create an abstracted relationship to the life of the landscape and landforms of the steppe in opposition to the imposed gridded geometry of the city and its gardens (as residual from Soviet occupation). These geometries are subverted, however, described only by rigorous deployment of linear construction methodologies, speaking to a degree of machined western refinement, and adapt to certain situations afforded by the site.

All images Copyright NBBJ, LLC 2007

Despite popular belief, this blog still lives, but has been temporarily neglected due to a project which will no doubt be seen here soon. Stay tuned…

In the mean time check out 40Bond, by H&deM that is nearing completion.

Came across a nifty little plug-in for the Adobe Illustrator creative suites, which actually allows you to run some pretty interesting scripts within Illustrator for generating 2 dimensional graphics based on both raster and vector inputs…check it out…

 Scriptographer 2.0

MS

In an effort to create a more well-rounded dialogue, this blog has been opened up to other contributors to comment as they see fit, which will undoubtedly account for changes in tone, attitude, and flavors of posts. With that said, I would say that relative to “Skepticism”, the funny part is I agree with 95% of what was said, but I’d also like to address some aspects which I think can be built upon relative to the aesthetic domain.

Rarely do we set out to create something ugly. It is not in our nature. Even when we do, we end up making it so ugly, it becomes endearing, and has the opposite effect. Relative to the topic of scripting as addressed in the previous post, we have to look at some potential misconceptions. The first is that it is exclusive to creating Form from metric data. While it has been used in that sense from a performance standpoint, that is not it’s only value. I think its real value comes in creating organizational rigors which go beyond predictability. We are interested in scripting for a number of reasons, whether to give ourselves a built-in medium to ensure a specific organization in response to hard parameters, or to positively affect the construction process by providing a road map to understanding the complex architectures that we are capable of creating digitally, but are trying hard to resolve realistically.

Using scripting successfully is grounded in two things: anticipation and evaluation. So simply “tweaking wind data to make something hot” is both right and wrong. To be able write one in the first place, you have to have a general understanding of what the outcome is going to be when setting up rules and variables. Furthermore you have to be able to evaluate what is produced from the inputs/variables to make decisions on what works and what doesn’t. Enter: Subjectivity. What we fail to realize is that although we can readily employ metrics as variables/rules, so can we employ aesthetic seeds, such as composition, scale and relativity, which are also well documented (think Golden Section). Scripting is only a method for automating and maintaining control, and ensuring rigor, as we can (and have done) since architecture was a profession.

So if we can understand that “scripting” as a method is only another tool in the toolbox, and not a one-button problem solver, we can take the analogy a step further. Think of scripting as a paintbrush. There are people who make paintbrushes and there are people who use paintbrushes. We can also agree that some paintbrushes are made better than others, and that in some circles, paintbrush-making is an art in itself. Furthermore, paintbrushes require but a minimal understanding, if any, of how they are made to use them successfully. Knowing their limits and being able to tweak them slightly, is incredibly enabling. Jackson Pollock lifted the brush off of the canvas, effectively finding a new “technique” for applying the brush. I think it is fairly easy to see the potential implications if we draw the parallel to scripts. We need not be programmers to be architects (although it would allow more control), but we do need to understand capabilities and limitations of the tool to be able to move forward and embrace new technologies. We will find that we will exploit these potentials as we are becoming more adept at using them.

This still does not address the topic of individuality as brought up previously, which we can get to, yet.

MS

Could it be that we actually want the answer to “Why does it look that way?” to be, “Because I wanted it to.”?

In some ways, that’s an easier thing to grasp than understanding the complexities of scripting, etc…Because, you know what?  Despite all of the explanations and the sine curve this and wind data that, I still think it’s mostly aesthetic–you rig the experiment to come up with what you want and tweak it to make it hot.  If someone just said, “I want it to look like this,”  then at least they’d be speaking the truth.  

One of the problems in all of this is that of the singular “taste”-maker.  What happens when an architecture needs to be produced by a group of people?  A network of people?  At that point, you move away from correct taste and into group taste–a place where the results are far from certain and to me, much more interesting.  Do you create a model where anyone can change the variables?  A place where control is not centralized but distributed? 

Beware, it might not end up sexy.  As evidenced by the painting above, public taste cannot necessarily be trusted.  But I like the idea of a place where taste is allowed and encouraged but it must fight the democratic fight.  Too often, a designer gets their way through force of personality (being louder, being meaner).  In a no-holds-barred battle to the death, “taste” would become just another ”idea” jockeying for position.  Actually, I think the better metaphor is gambling.  Gambling is cooler, leaner, more flexible.  Could we place bets on certain aesthetic determinants and see what wins?  It’s not a new idea–the faux Hollywood Stock Exchange has been operating for years–betting on buzz.  And that’s what taste is, really.  Buzz.  Who’s got it?  Who’s lost it?