Architecture and its subsequent production are entering a new phase in the processes of its making. It is nothing new that architecture is always a few steps behind the other related design fields, simply because of its cost and multiplicities of coordination, as well as its direct degree of physical influence. Although I don’t think we would have it any other way, other art forms can provide a window into oblique directions we may find ourselves confronting in the years to come.

Commonwealth is an upstart firm based in NYC whose principals, Zoë Coombes and F. David Boira, have recently found themselves extending their expertise gleaned from an architectural based background into the realm of product design-as-art. Having carved for themselves a distinct working studio in Williamsburg, they have begun staging exhibitions which explore the possibilities that occur at the intersection of different design fields. This ongoing investigation goes beyond simply implementing qualities from the respective fields, but rather takes the expertise and stylistic dispositions of the participants and fuses them into a singular project that creates an experience beyond the capacity of what either party might produce individually.

Tropism: Commonwealth vs. Joshua Davis is the most recent installment in these investigations. It is curated by Maxalot, and is currently on view at Espeis Gallery until July 22^nd. A more in depth description of the show can be found here, but as an overview, Commonwealth contributed a vase design that moved from a 3D digital model in Maya, output and rapid-prototyped in SLA plastics to a positive resin form, and then cast and refined in porcelain. Graphic designer Joshua Davis, the shows second participant, wrote programs for generative graphics to uniquely conform to the vase’s topology. Moving from a vector file to a paint sheet, Davis’s graphics were output as ceramic paint and fired onto the digital-porcelain vases. Davis also generated new print work to serve as a backdrop for the vase installation.

The beauty in these works is partly a product of their process. Commonwealth has used the strides in digital manufacturing beyond just making possible the impossible, but have absorbed the inherencies within the media (specifically MEL scripts and Stereolithography) to make art which exploits those potentials. The result is truly a craftsmanship that exudes a degree of control and precision that I think we as designers are constantly searching for. It is a testament to what rigorous process can bring to form, style and material.

Have a gander.

Product Design | www.commonwealth.nu
Graphic Design | www.joshuadavis.com
Curation | www.maxalot.com
Gallery | www.espeis.nu

Flickr Sets | Commonwealth
Flickr Sets | Joshua Davis

MS

I think anywhere you go you will find someone with an opinion of Hadid and the projects that come out of her studio. For whatever reason, we find her consistently interesting to talk about, and her projects seem to generate a considerable buzz, if not her persona. Some are interested in the work, and some aren’t, but all in all we will still talk about it. I think it harks back to the initial feelings that are invoked by the projects. They don’t require a lot of over-intellectualization to get into the images, representations or diagrams. That is not to say that there is no intellect behind the projects themselves (many would argue differently as simply form making), but either way I don’t think it matters. The projects are engaging. They push boundaries visually, and are evocative both inside and outside in that realm. Add to that many types of innovation that preclude the projects to being built, as well as ways of literally developing those ideas conceptually, and I think you have something that stands up fairly well against a more “cerebral” approach.

I hate to see projects get marginalized because they supposedly offer nothing other than being seductive. Seduction insinuates an immediate satisfaction with little long term value, which I think tends to not be the case. Furthermore, there is considerable effort made, and thought that goes into the achievement of that goal - it doesn’t simply spew out of a computer. It also I think is a testament to the people that work on these projects to produce consistently beautiful drawings, renderings, documents (I had a chance to look at the KSA’s book series on the BMW building), and diagrams.This is not a Zaha praise session (I don’t think she needs any additional back-pats), but more a thought that applies to any project or firm that may seek a similar outcome.

Recently I came across a proposal for the Buiness Bay area of Dubai. This is from World Architecture News‘ project write up.

The Opus project will be fringed by the Burj Dubai development. It will be neighbors with the Dubai International Financial Center and the World Trade and Convention Center, giving it a prestigious location with excellent access to the city. The Opus will appear to hover from the ground. Constructed of three separate towers the building will appear as a singular unified whole, with a distinctive void. The interiors of which will be clad with a fully engineered curved class curtain wall to allow for eye-catching views into the void. Reflexive fritting patterns in the form of pixelated striations will be applied onto the glass facade to provide a degree of reflectivity and materiality to the cube while assisting in the reduction of solar grains inside the building. Within the Opus there will be a retail podium across the ground, first and second floor. The uppermost floor will feature a tranquility zone, a beach deck with a reflective pool and shaded roof terrace, a media zone and a gym. The building boasts an AAA-class rating and has 87 per cent space efficiency.

Make of it what you will.

MS

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.

From the Metropolis article here.

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.

Wordcount

Love-Lines

We Feel Fine

Phylotaxis

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.

Czech out the demo here, and the TED talk below…

MS

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.

MS

“Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans.”

Matt Woolman
Digital Information Graphics

Image: Danny Holten, Heirarchical Edge Bundles,  2006

Diagram: A simplified and structured visual representation of concepts, ideas, constructions, relations, statistical data, anatomy etc used in all aspects of human activities to visualize and clarify the topic.

Map: A graphic that facilitates a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.

As information is increasingly more readily at our finger-tips, we have begun to value the ability to convey ideas as opposed to simply conveying information. Can ideas tactfully be directly linked to the actual information?

In terms of graphical representation, how are ideas being materialized? It would seem that age old methods of distillation and simplification, although still having a lot of value, are becoming insufficient. It would stand to reason that we would like to be able to take the simplicity of the formal diagram, as well as the clarity and objectivity from a mapped instance and combine them into something more; a graphic/strategy that would house not only hard, point for point data (without distillation) and an idealogic method for conveying the design intent. This would serve a number of purposes, it would retain the communicative properties that make these tools informative, perhaps shedding a new clarity on complex system, or creating a new understanding of an organization by percolating its different layers to the surface, but it would also serve as a lossless method to convert information into different media and dimension (2D to 3D, digital to physical, etc.), while still retaining the essence of the host.

Image: Felix Heinen,  Data Visualisation of a Social Network,  March 2007

Resources:
Visual Complexity
Amaznode
ELSE/WHERE: Mapping

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

It was recently announced that Mecanoo architecten has won the design competition for the new National Performing Arts Centre. At 100,000 m2 the National Performing Arts Centre is to become the largest theatre complex in Taiwan. An important source of inspiration for Mecanoo’s building design were the existing banyan trees on location.

Banyans are trees that usually start life as a seedling growing on another tree (or on structures like buildings and bridges), where a fig-eating bird has deposited the seed. The roots descend over the trunk of the host, seeking out the soil below. Once they have rooted into this, the fig roots rapidly thicken and (become wooden). Where the fig roots cross each other they fuse, thus creating a lattice around the host tree trunk. The fig competes with its host for light, water and nutrients, while its roots prevent the host trunk from growing. Eventually the host dies and rots away, leaving the fig self supporting as an ordinary tree, but with a tubular lattice of lignified roots instead of a trunk.

What’s most interesting to me, however, is the way the design is conveyed through the renderings. I think it is fair to say that we have seen a shift in architectural discourse and practice to preferencing the rendering as the most important drawing. While we still rely on orthographics and projections for literally realizing a design, we have come to recognize that as much as modernism was captured in the plan and PoMo in the isometric drawing, we have begun to capture our projects’ essence through rendering. The caveat in this is the degree to which the client becomes attached to specifics within the rendering due to the degree of realism, which is why the Mecanoo drawings presented here are so deft in the was they are deployed. Not only does the pink convey to us vague references about banyan foliage, but also interior experience, and the potentials therein. It does so through a combination of realism and abstraction that leaves room for development, yet a place to return to when honing the project.

MS

Update: Per the previous comments, I found some great animations on YouTube:

Recently there has been an extreme interest in place-making for a remote corner of the world in Kazakhstan (as documented here). Almaty, once the capital of Kazakhstan, still remains its financial and cultural hub. A number of international competitions have recently been sponsored to develop a new financial and cultural district in the southeastern part of the city. Among these, one competition in particular was to design a new mixed use development (consisting of high end residences, a luxury hotel, office and retail spaces) adjacent to the most significant civic space in the city, Republic Square. Remnants of Soviet occupation still reverberate through the city, and the undercurrent for this (and all) of the competitions seems be revealing an image of the city and culture that has always been there, but never focused.

The question is how to do this in light of embracing some of the progressive measures found in western architecture, but keeping a strong tie to a cultural situation as the city moves forward with this vision.

Jury members for the competition were Hani Rashid, Michael Sorkin, Suha Ozkan, and Mohsen Mostafavi.

The competition participants were Eric Owen Moss Architects, Eisenman Architects, Zaha Hadid Architects, and a team of E/Ye Design & NBBJ. The following were the entries, minus the Eisenman scheme, which I can’t find images of. The Hadid and EOM schemes were recently exhibited at SCI-Arc in February. Blurbs can be found on the school’s website.

The E/Ye Design + NBBJ scheme specifically deals with the relationship of the built and the landscape, and exploits the spaces left between as a direct outcropping of the dichotomies created by a true “mixed use” program. Check out the images - commentary welcome…

Eric Owen Moss, Architects

Zaha Hadid Architects

NBBJ + E/Ye Design

Model

MS

What happens when groups of people come together to design a project, each wearing their own “black cape?”

How do we solidify, or more specifically aestheticize an architectural project that objectively wants to be of one persons hand, but fundamentally needs to have input from groups of individuals?

We are forced to broach this topic as our field and consultants become inherently more collective in nature, and projects become larger and more complex. Solutions can’t be pinned back to one “big idea”, but flounder if not given some type of criteria to fall back on. We consistently look for the big idea (conceptually), but quickly realize that we can’t really articulate it without a 5 minute monologue, and consequently are embarrassed that projects addressing multiple scales, economies, and other vectors can’t be tied up with a single bow. Why?

The benefit of the big idea is that it gives us a way to collectively solve a design problem, but it is too broad and non specific.  But who comes up with the big idea? One person? What if it sucks? It is an exclusive, rather than inclusive practice of problem solving, and one that leaves too much wiggle room when the rubber meets the road. Complex problems have a need to be resolved as sets of organizations in concert with one another. How we strategize and delegate those parameters, under the umbrella of a fluid and evolving attitude relative the project, can be a better way of approaching design problem that would accommodate multiple mindsets.

Some thought has gone into what that process could potentially look like, and put into a graphic format, but it is still is in flux to a certain degree. See what you think…

MS

Conceptual Pipeline