fix our energy addiction

Just like the recent competition of Metropolis indicates, the current studio topic proves to be wit the Zeitgeist:
Rising energy costs present new design problems.

Redesign the broken models of the 20th century. Challenge our patterns of living and working in a fuel-hungry world…come up with solutions that connect us, make us more efficient, more humane.

Ask yourself…
How would I bring work closer to home?
Can a product help eliminate long commutes?
What can I do to revitalize old ideas such as living above the store?
What kind of interiors or furnishings does a telecommuter really need?
Or follow your own dreams…what calls out for a major redesign?

Focus on one area that needs fixing—products, interiors, buildings and landscape, communication systems, or anything else you can imagine—and develop your idea fully.

more under>

metropolitan dreams and visions

SCALE: Consider the visionary statements from the architectural field in the period of the 1960-1970's that were able to condense a critical leap forward, and featuring such firms as Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Friedman, Eckhard Schulze Fielitz etc..
It seems being paralleled by the current similar approach between art and architecture. There is also an exhibition currently in Berlin on the topic, "Megastructure reloaded" until 2. November
images by NOX (NYC) and schulze Fielitz on his design for the canal building to England.

see following links
evolo
megastructure reloaded

fluid continuity

“Architecture has to follow the diversity of society, and has to reflect that a simple square or cube can’t contain that diversity.”
Toyo Ito













Toyo Ito
Taichung Metropolitan Opera House
Taichung City, Taiwan

reading list

for the presentation on your reading, there are no images necessary, unless you choose to do underline some concepts with it.
You should extract the relevant ideas and concepts which pertain to our studio topic on natural systems as the model for generative processes and formulate those in three pages to be presented to the class.

images Venice Bienal, surface explorations with multiple orientations and surface continuity> this is one idea for the generation of a deep surface.

minimal surfaces exploration

http://www.b-l-u-s-h.com

This group of students undertook a similar approach, where a single pattern component is based on a principle of surface transformation.














In a second stage it is multiplied and varied within the larger surface assembly, where particular edge conditions show a street wall solution or eruptions become towers. The first two images show the pattern layout by blush and the surface buildout with surface decreases and increases in areas of densification.


The second set shows the sectional development of the surface for the base buildout and the structural doubling of the surface in certain areas.

Structural pattern

repetition & difference

At the basis of the following exploration of structural geometries towards new organizational structures at a larger scale, the strategies of transformation of several single components need to be guided by a series of concepts.

Can one push the underlying principle to its limits? What is the right tactic to get to the point where the systemic behavior proliferates variations?

(first 2 images by blush)

a) Inversion: An exterior surface is programmed on both sides, example: the roofscape being populated and having surface characteristics related to access and connection to other surfaces and planes below.

b) Continuity: A project engages predominantly multiple surfaces, which are interconnected such that the project utilizes as an example “roofed-over” facades, where one single surface receives a multitude of functions and properties. Like it fluently changes from roof to façade to floor and back etc..remember Ito…remember the different orientations of surfaces.

c)Incongruity: A geometry emphasizes an inscriptive procedure of free massing with strategies like volume-within-volume sections. Some of the characteristic spatial results are incongruous and residual spaces, which are either constant in their succession or interrupted into separated and non-regular parts.

…and complement these conceptual strategies with skill techniques of assembly and multiplication:

techniques:

the pleat/ the fold: folds in the surface might create not only a deformation but lead to structural rigidness in repetition or folding into each other

the layers: either an offset to stack sheets, or a slice in the surface to attach to other sheets-stripes

the weave: bended stripes, or twisted bands form mesh assemblies which also lead to structural stiffness

the eggcrate: multiple perpendicular surfaces joined for a common seam create light but stable structures

Assignm. due mon 13:
3D shape designs of selected assembly parties as a result of composing individual design component generations.

3D development in 11x17 “ sheet (8 ½ on pdf)

Deep surface

air at an unexpected location

With the addition of air, liquids and solids diminish their density. Something homogenous and solid transforms into a loose and perforated structure.

The foam model indicates, that under circumstances yet to be clarified, the dense, the continuous and massive yields an invasion of the void. Air, the element most misunderstood, harvests means and ways to protrude into places, where no one expected its presence.

Even more so, it brings into being strange places, which did not exist before. The process of becoming, is an occasion to watch the subversion of substance. By tradition, we are concerned with the potential to excavate substances and respond with suspicion or even guess transgression not to say perversion.

The aggregation of air filled voids, springs from a questionable victory over the solid, and as a foam like structure, appears to turn upside down the natural order within nature. It seems to be a bastard of material, emerging from an illegitimate marriage of elements. As opposed to this common disrespect of the seemingly vague, the latent, the close to arbitrary, and the irregular, the studio will take the foam model serious and work on a rehabilitation of its inherent processes and expressions.

(images by blush)

In order to complement the widely used methodologies of becoming, such as drift, repetition with difference, processes of catastrophy or creative recombination, we will explore the term explication, in the sense of a discrete move from one condition to the next, like a continuous escape from the status quo.

An important question to answer will be: When does surface become deep?
Do certain techniques accelerate new strategies towards the formation of original organizational structures? Apply one or several of the techniques acquired in the software skills workshops to generate single components of surfaces, further develop and transform them.

You should specifically refer to surface modulations. This means that surfaces get informed or inflected by an extendable variation of interventions on the material and detail level -folded, cutted, sliced, pleated, laminated, layered etc..

(image by sweeney)

Surfaces are initially either smooth or broken, depending on their tangency behavior being continuous or not. Modulations then effect changes in the surface such as folds to foster structural rigidity, or such as weaves of bands supporting each other. Surfaces may be manifold in the beginning or get cut and sliced from an initial larger surface into single elements.

Modulations might be
-bending, slicing, bifurcating as some vertex manipulations.
-Extruding via joining vertex points or doubling
-displacement via translating a selections set of vertices

Assignm. due mon 13 :
3D shape designs of selected parties following individual component design generations.

3D development in 11x17 “ sheet (8 ½ on pdf)