Æsthe/tech:Tonik
Building | Beauty | Consuming | ImageArchive for Architecture
KRob 2011
For those familiar with the annual Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition, check out this years Best in Show. All show both the breadth and depth of architectural visualization, and the extents to which it has evolved. I think there is something in here for everyone.
These are some that caught my eye. The entire list of winners and finalists can be seen at the competition website.
Enjoy
MS
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.
MS
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:
MS
