December 2008 Archives

[30 November]

I've decided to present one of the spaces for the end-of-term jury. I'm picking a space, writing the narrative for it (A man enters a room and stands still...) and then I'm making the necessary corners and the curves they generate in order to be able to model one of the spaces of the building.

We know a few things at this stage:

- The building is on a domestic scale
- Its program is to be a structure in suspension, a 'life' structure that holds frozen bodies in suspension, between birth and death and birth, so at least one space is dedicated to the archiving of human bodies
- On the other hand, it's not simply a single space dedicated to this one function - it is a building that features a range of 'ultimate' or 'extreme' space: one in which to die, one in which to wake up, one in which to sit down and read the past 30 years' worth of Popbitch, and so on. The inhabitants use these spaces not only once, but before and after the fact, so to speak. I could choose any of these spaces for this first model.
- It has yet to get a site (though I'm drawn to the urban - London, anyone?)

Here's the first version of a formal narrative for that first space:

Space 01 (first shower/last shower)

A naked woman enters a room through one of its corners and stands still. The room seems fairly small.

She moves slowly towards a corner diptych to her left: light from one of the corners brightens the other, in which she catches a glimpse of her own reflection. She is pleased with what she sees.

Turning around, her gaze falls upon a lit ramp leading down to a lower level. The room opens up and suddenly feels much larger. At the end of the ramp, folded towels are neatly stacked on a table. Water falls down through the opposite corner.

After the shower, a stair brings her back up on the first level, where she finds herself in a triple-height corner bathing in sunlight. She exits through a corner positioned diametrically opposite the one she entered through.

[29 November]

Dreams have as much influence as actions.
- The Stephan Mallarmé Quote Series, #3

This is a bowl of fruit in my flat:



It is clearly a container/vessel/receptacle/repository/embracing surface/space, holding other volumes/spaces. Spaces separated from each other, spaces within spaces.

So where are the corners?

This is what life is becoming now: a seemingly endless walk between corners and thoughts about corners - almost every time I encounter a corner (and that's pretty often when you start to think about it) I reflect on how one surface intersects with its neighbour, how these three-dimensional folds or darts or pinches or whatever they are work. It's a fascinating and exhausting part of the project: the endless considering and reconsidering of the corner.

[29 November]

This is the drawing display mode that I keep nagging everybody about. Has anyone made this work? For some reason, I can't seem to get it to work with my version of Rhino. Issues, suggestions, comments, work-arounds?

Update: I've now got this more or less to work, only need to find a way of using it as an actual render setting, and then, finally...

[29 November]

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.
- The Stephan Mallarmé Quote Series, #2

Quite a few ideas at the moment, battling for space in my mind.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and show you (here we have the blog-before-the-fact!) what I'm trying to get together for Tuesday:



That should read:

• 'Channel 4' (meaning rather generic and a bit stupid, yet informative) curve theory drawing
• Curve theory 'in-situ'
• Plan showing corner behaviours + poetic programmatics...
• Programmatic diagram (bubble diagram?)
• Test model, corner by corner
• Horisontal cuts through one test corner
• Vertical cuts through one test corner, showed in 'imploded' or 'smashed' view (this will become clear later on)
• Sketch showing what I'm doing for the plates
• White book update
• Manifesto and Formal Manifesto printed

This is probably a bit ambitious, but hey! let's aim for the stars for once.

[28 November]

Despite viewing the drawings on my screen rather than printed out, this was a really good tutorial. Thanks Monia! (And thanks Fionnuala for showing a really nice and highly inspiring model - I'm very envious and frustrated that I haven't come even close to that level of thinking/modelling.)

First, the resulting post-tutorial sketch page:



Be hardcore.

That's the gist of the above. If we think about the corner as a Generative Corner, then we should allow ourselves to take that idea all the way.

What does this imply?

The corner sets everything off and ends everything.

The corners are the program.

We are interested in the spaces created by the corners, and with how the corners themselves are shaped, but we're not overly interested in the 'generic' surfaces spanning between the corners, that is, the 'life' of the structure.

Decide your aims: what is a good corner, what is a bad corner? Why?

The possibility of working with curves of different degree.

The corner may take up loads of space: more than half of the space can be just a corner.

The curve takes over.

The corner always shows us the scale - this is how we understand the program. Maybe you can stand inside of the corner.

I need to show where the start point and the end point of the corner is, always. Axo is probably the best way of doing this. [I'd like to make really clean hidden line drawings of this.]

Drawing 1: Good to always show the scale of the generative curve.

Drawing 2: Maybe work with piecemeal curves. High degree = dissolution (high smoothness). If we want to see the corner, go low!

Drawing 3: Should be axo. Mark the corners. New and implied. Openings happen when new corners are created. The corner erodes the volume.

Drawing 5:

A) Location of corners = program, B) New corners = openings (light, connections, circulation, entry...)

Do a 'Channel 4' test drawing showing piecemeal curves.

Parallellogram + cuts

'Open reflector' corner?

Extreme situation scenario!

Two-level model

[28 november]



Drawing sans coloured lines.

This is a near-perfect illustration of life as an architecture student. With about three hours to go to the tutorial, after a fairly long night of drawing-instead-of-sleeping, my printer decides that it will no longer print coloured lines. I try a zillion different settings, to absolutely no avail. In the end, I pdf everything together, rush from home a lot earlier than I had hoped for, and head for the Centre Point printshop in Gresse Street. "Sure, we can print your pages, but the thing is, we can only start doing it around 7pm." It's 3.20pm. I've got 40 minutes. Remember there's another printshop around the corner from the AA. Rush there. "Our system is down." Is there another printshop nearby? "Not exactly, but there is one about five minutes away, in that direction." It takes me about 20 minutes to find the place, and when I get there, deep down in a basement, the guy tells me there's no way they can print anything before Monday.

So Monia had to watch the drawings on the screen rather than printed out. Useless.

Suffice to say it's fairly obvious that printers don't make their money from printing seven A3s for people about to head to an architecture tutorial. 

[27 November]

Here are seven new pages for tomorrow's tutorial, handily numbered 1-7, though backwards, as, for some reason, Movable Type publishes the images in the opposite order from the one in which you upload them. Hm.



The last one (that is, the first one above), the standard AA proliferation-along-a-surface model - isn't really what I want this to become, just a quick sketch to show that the corners can be articulated when doing something like this. And a nice excuse to have a first quick look at McNeels Panelling Tools. The Rhino people really are making rather interesting progress at the moment.

[27 November]



I rather stupidly spend around 30 hours trying to work out (as a complete novice) how to create iterations of my generative corners ("GC"!) in Grasshopper, until I give up - sweating, panting, frustrated, suicidal - and post a cry for help on the application's Google newsgroup website. An hour or so later, David Rutten, my hero, the Rhino genius (and a-lot-of-other-stuff genius, for sure) and the very man who wrote the program in the first place, posts a reply. "I don't think"

Here we have the discussion.

[27 November]

Just some sketches along the way...

[26 November]

Katharina Grosse, Cool Puppen (2002)

Just when I had resolved to stop thinking and focus wholeheartedly on making, Adam (from Dip 9 last year) sent me a really sweet note with an extract from his blog, in which he wrote about Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles's Corners (or, as Adam points out, Cantos in the original Portugese).

Here's the excerpt, by Adam Nathaniel Furman:

A series of lines on millimeter graph paper that is slightly off white and grubby, aged and used, bearing the effort expended on it in graphite bruises; lines that are separated into the three which extend out to the edges of the paper, which pull in three directions away from the ageing surface; and the others, poised in the space marked out for them by the three like a startled nocturnal animal, stand together with a fragile unity which threatens to collapse under the gaze, a unity which coheres into objecthood out of the corner of the eye, but which is demure and unsure of itself under direct observation, ready at any moment to dissolve back into the mathematics of two dimensions. This first small impression was repeated along the wall of the first room in the exhibition as a series of searches, as an attempt to adumbrate an ineffability hidden between the grid and surface of these sheets of paper, the denuding spotlight of the axes x y and z, and the incredulous eye of the observer. Like a row of unfamiliar taxidermic specimens frozen in glass cases, the exposed lines in each display were either huddled, slumped or erect, individually summarizing a possible characteristic of this postulated ineffability, and together laying out its contour. The attempt seems absurd, the medium unforgiving. He is trying to find something within the framework of geometrical axioms that is different in kind and not just degree; he is trying to find meaning in the brutality of facts; he is trying to find sensitivity in the insensible and he does it with an essential earnestness which is disarming. These searches consist of so few lines that they bring to mind the first attempts of a schoolchild at drawing in “space”, and it is precisely this innocence that disarms; it seems as though Meireles has had Euclid’s system explained to him by his teacher, taught to him as a hermetic and preordained reality external to his existence, and whereas the other students picked up their pencils to draw cubes and planes, Meireles stared at the page, troubled. How could this be called space? It all existed before him, before any of them, it allowed for nothing which was not inherent in its logic, nothing which was not a predictable output of a limited set of factors; it was a frozen solid, impenetrable and the precise opposite of what his senses told him was space. There was no room for anything but itself. Forced to participate in the class, forced to accept the axioms and inscribe points and lines in the solid space of reason, he nonetheless looks for some room, for a place where something unexpected might occur, something not entirely predictable and wholly inherent in the system: and so we are gifted these half-formed creatures, the embryos of a poetic instinct struggling to be born, trying to find room for itself in a grid of answers. Meireles continues this search on other pieces of the same type of paper, but swaps the axes for a floor, two walls and wainscoting; and by doing this -with the use of some colour pencils- transforms the specific potential for entombment embodied in Euclid’s geometry into a generalised scenario of existential enquiry. The questions began to form themselves in the clarity of the classroom, where the subject found its object and injected itself into it, producing results which now spill into the everyday, which escape from the nowhere of Euclid to the ubiquitous somewhere of the corner of a room. By substituting the axes for walls Meireles transfers his search within the structure of 3dimensional space into a search within the structure of habit; into the earnest and childlike efforts of someone who sees and will not accept the solid impenetrability of the quotidian, just as he couldn’t that of geometry. The meager resources of the point and line left Meireles with only enough material to form unstable speculations; here he is digging through a postulate necessary to the space of our habits - that rooms have corners, and corners are corners - and finds rich material resonant with familiarity and association through which he fashions remarkably comprehensible and lucid results. The walls, the floors, the wainscotting fold, gently lean or suddenly fall away at an angle, each time vividly encompassing the potential for a moment of respite, a touch of interpretation, an infiltration of the banal with the ineffable. By the last of these pages, by the time you turn around to look at the one-to-one installation in which four of these have been materialised as testaments to a sort of unflinching positivity, an indefatigable resolution to interbreed incompatibilities; by the time you walk around them Meireles has primed you, sensitized you through a set of small drawings for the breathtaking series of shared contemplations which thankfully, for once, take you far away from the unbearable Euclidean vapidness of the Tate Modern.

- - -

An "ineffability hidden between the grid and surface". Gee, Adam! You nailed my project - like a year ago. Thank you so much for sharing this, and for the kind words you wrapped it in.

Meireles, by the way, is apparently still on at the Tate Modern. I'll have to try and catch him when I drop by for the Bacon exhibition.

Here's more on Meireles, and here, and here. (The last one only for the fancy images, or if you happen to read portugese.)

In one of life's weird moments, this quick research on Meireles led me to stumble across some of Katharina Grosse's art, which you could see in the opening image above. Seems to somehow tie in with one of the many discussions with Monia lately, that of applying some kind of colorization, perhaps a gradient, onto the vertical planes in order to amplify the intersections. Once again, think generative corners:

[26 November]

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.
- The Stephan Mallarmé Quote Series, #1

...and you don't make an architecture with words, but with spaces...

[26 November]



We'll see how far I actually get with this, but here's what I'm hoping to get done...

[25 november]

I've started working with a booklet to be inset in the White Book (hi, Amandine!), tracing the poetics of the corner. This started as a discussion with Monia on the 'surface-curve' in Three Steps and a Shelf, the project at the end of my old tutor George Legendre's IJP - The Book of Surfaces. I'll post more about and from this booklet as and when it gets done, but just to start with, an initial note or two on what this revisiting of Dip5 ideas has led me to consider:

In Three Steps and a Shelf, George Legendre's students Nazila Maghzian, Ho-Min Kim, and Dan Narita considers a man who "enters a room and stands still. He moves cautiously to the far-left corner, walks up a few steps and reaches for an upper shelf. After some hesitation he turns and sits."

The site is a corner of an actual room at the AA. The protagonist is "a single three-dimensional curve" that "reconfigures the edges of the original corner". The "bland, rectilinear walls" give way and meet in an intricate seam, the corner, and in the process, it "twists to accommodate the length and width of a foot, doubles up to hold the weight of the body and stretchews into a sequence of smooth bends before vanishing into the neighbouring walls."

The corner "thickens and becomes usable".

This was done, according to the text accompanying the project, by 'neutralizing' one of the indices of a surfaces so as to create an outline of the surface. That is, the surface is shrunk into a curve, or, in Dip5 parlance, a mono-indexical 'surface-curve'. Interesting as that might be, I'm more interested in what this curve does than how it is made.

The corner does everything.

What the designers realise is that in one piece, the surface-curve isn't flexible enough for their programmatic needs. They decided to chop it up into pieces that can be locally controlled and then strung together. They look for a "degree of continuity" to be "maintained across the join point" - all in order to keep the curve or surface "free of ruptures". This is of course only one way of dealing with those ruptures - another would be to embrace and utilise them.

What I like in particular about this project, over and above the fact that it ties in so neatly with what I'm doing at the moment, is how it is presented from a narrative point of view. A man enters a room and stands still. This is clearly the tone of voice for the programmatic/formal sketch in its written form. If i describe each space in this way, and I know that using the corner to allow the man to enter the room and to stand still is my architectural approach, then the project becomes one of joining these conceptual dots through formal means.

Piece of cake. Hrm.

I also enjoy the narrative telling the story of the designers themselves:

Then came the stage of dimensional tuning and programming. The designers isolated every segment of the composite curve and negotiated its dimensions in relation to the scale of the room and that of the human body. They also assigned it a clear programmatic function.

I still wonder if this could lead to a presentation format: the telling of the story of the 'designers' telling a story to come up with 'their' designs. Good idea or just a stupid waste of time?

So we have a GC, a generative corner, made from a CCC, a composite corner curve, and this curve is a point rather than a fold. This latter distinction I feel is still important: I'm interested in a curve that is a beginning (or an end), a curve that carries the information for its continuation, and together with its counterpart corner 'automatically generates' the 'generic' surface in between. Why is this surface generic? Because it doesn't have a programmatic function. It is 'dead' - a mere connection between one corner and the next. This is the 'life' in between the birth and the death of the curve that begins in the corner and ends in the corner, and as everyone who's listened to John Lennon knows, life is what happens to [the corner] when [it's] busy making other plans.

But back to Three Steps and a Shelf: the text states that the coordinates of the control points of the three-dimensional surfaces are the only things that we need to modulate in order to create our surfaces. This is true, but further to this, we may also add a set of conditions:

- The 'semi-global' (dis)placement of the corner curve, that is, whether or not this is pushed away from the 'actual' (bounding box) corner in the first place
- The degree of curvature (of the corner curve)
- The degree of curvature (of the resulting extended curve)
- The blending smoothness (between corner curve and extended curve)
- The blending smoothness (between the resulting corner fold and the two intersecting surfaces)
- The material aspects (this is also a question for the model - perspex? 3d print? card?)
- The colour/surface condition (gradient?)
- The dimensions of the members (which is perhaps part of 'material aspects,' though this needs to be a technical discussion as well)

[25 November]



Bernard Cache lecturing at the AA earlier this year; photo (probably) by Valerie Bennett

One of my many heroes, Bernard Cache, came by the AA today to give a lecture as part of a DRL seminar. Filled to the brim with expectations, I was hoping to learn more about Cache's fascinating study on Vitruvius and parametrics, as well as to get some more insights into the by now 'old' stuff on inflections and image/vector/frame.

Not so. He gave exactly the same lecture as he gave in exactly the same space a few months ago. Cache even used the same Word file as a template for the talk. Not sure about you, but I kind of got it the first time around...

I remember Erandi was inspired by Cache and did some curve studies based on his work last year, and I love a lot of his work. The inflection point is quite interesting with respect to the corner - chances are I'll come back to him later on this year.

[25 November]



Deadline: end of second term.

First (next) meeting in January: 2-3 pages + list of work (Belinda will send an email about this).

Check Isabel's TS on stacked glass.

See Mike/Tony/John/Wolf.

Wavelength...

The most important thing is to show a record of decisions.

Case studies - check them with both Monia/Natasha and Mike.

50-60 per cent should be ready for the first jury.

TS session: good to get in for 10am, borrow a TS and then work away in the library...

Make test models. Test them to failure. Analyse.

Photograph models from different views, on gridded paper.

Scaling up to 1:20 is basically okay, more than that is problematic.

Card/cardboard.

Bachelard on corners?

Hawksmore's architecture of death (English/Egyptian...)

[25 November]

Today we saw Mike Weinstock for the first time, to set off the Technical Studies. I had prepared the following text for him, though I knew chances were minimal we would actually get down to discuss the project in this kind of detail. Nevertheless gave me a chance to sit down and think through the project again, incorporating new thoughts on scale and program:




Projections of Suspension

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. (...) The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.i


Between Tomb and Womb

A house is a machine for staying alive in.ii

In his essay, Twenty-First Century Bodies,iii that most radical of life expansion enthusiasts, Ray Kurzweil, talks about how supporters of the 1980s cryonics movement, inspired by Eric Drexler’s book Engines of Creation, believed in having “their heads (with or without bodies) frozen in the hope that a future time would possess the molecule-scale technology to overcome their mortal diseases, as well as undo the effects of freezing and defrosting.” With tongue firmly in cheek, Kurzweil adds: “Whether a future generation would be motivated to revive all these frozen brains was another matter.” However, this points toward an interesting question for the future: if you were to be frozen, who would you like to care for your body?

The world leader in cryopreservation of human bodies, Alcor, points out on its website that “no large animal has ever been cryopreserved and revived,” and that “such an achievement is still likely decades in the future”. However, from the first ‘suspension’ of Dr James H Bedford in 1967, as of October 2008, the company has already frozen 84 patients, and lists 872 people as members. The technology to reverse cryonics is still theoretical, but as medical technologies make major advances, more and more people are interested in pushing the deadline, so to speak, forward.

Projections of Suspension is not a science fiction project. It is a playful experiment based on a science that is already in use, despite the fact that no one knows whether it will ever work.iv It takes the concept of cryopreservation at face value, linking the idea of using very cold temperatures to stop the dying process when ordinary medicine can no longer sustain life (with the intention of ‘suspending’ - saving - a patient’s life until a cure for their illness can be found) with the notion that the families of suspended patients would want to stay in control of the frozen body.

Rather than creating the next generation of institutional cryonics centres, the scheme envisions a near future in which the family home becomes both the family tomb and the family womb: an architecture that houses and bases its programmatic and formal properties from the body (or bodies) suspended within it. The iconic image of a twenty-first century body is that of a suspended body, its architectural counterpart being an iconic building suspended around this body, the bodily figure traced in space and time, modulated through formal concepts of spatial birth and death, producing a new kind of iconic architecture. The cryonic chamber is the centre point of the house, and the reflections of the body within it are the iconic moments that create the architectural figure of the interior volume.


Echoes of Bodies (Formal Manifesto)

Home is where the heart is on display.v

A domestic architecture that is both tomb and womb will by necessity be programmatically based on extreme functions: a space in which to have one’s last supper, a space in which to die, a space in which to be suspended, a space in which to be revived, a space in which to catch up on all the gossip magazines one has missed during the years in suspension, and so on. The building turns into a carefully instrumented collage of overlapping iconic spaces, an architectural iconoclash in which a space created for a singular event (“the last supper”) is used before and after that event (“the dining room”). Placing the suspension units in the living room redefines this programmatic typology.

On a formal level, the spaces will be sculpted so as to reflect both the body in suspension, and notions of the birth and death of space. Where is space born? Where does it go to die? In the corner, to the corner. The zoomorphic body has no corner, or we can say it is all corners. Any point on it is a corner, any silhouette of it is a folded corner. Nevertheless, some parts of the body are more corner-like than others, and the projection of a body’s shadow reveals these edges, these hidden corners. Paradoxically, the transformation of the outline, the iconic (frozen) figure, of one’s body from three to two dimensions makes us see its demarcations. In Projections of Suspension, the outlines of these frozen body fragments come alive to create new corners, giving birth to and killing spaces, while providing the formal information necessary to create the surfaces that in turn yield the architectural figure (analogous to the painterly figure in Deleuze’s reading of the paintings of Francis Bacon) in between the corners.
 
Thus a suspended limb generates a never-before-seen spatiality. The silhouette of a shoulder meeting a neck, a point of anatomical transition, is not just impressed into, but becomes the beginning and end of the building that encloses it. The building holds the body, the body makes the building. The first corner is birth, the second corner is death, the plane stretching between the two is suspension. Life.

Perceptually, the more or less straight lines between the corners are thus perceived as the least animated parts of the building, yet conceptually they are metaphors of the time passing between birth and death, of life, thus juxtaposing common ideas of the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic, nature and culture. Whether or not we actually comprehend the corner curves as anatomical echoes of bodies we could once touch but that are now in a state of suspension, we can marvel at the intricate spaces created from these curves - a new architectural figure. Since the body can achieve positions that create almost any curve as a shadow, or projection, it is enough to set the play in motion with an actual outline: all following curves will be modulations of the first, just as the body can be modulated to produce these curves. One alternative still to be considered is to use this figure as an extension of or an addition to an existing structure, thereby further highlighting the contrast between ‘static life architecture’ and ‘dynamic birth-and-death’ architecture.


Iconoclashtic Figurations

...space retreating to the corner of arm and knee...vi

Moving through the building, would we recognise on a conscious or an unconscious level these suggested reflections of the bodies of our suspended loved ones? Hopefully not. That would constitute evidence of a process, and such evidence equals indexicality, which we are not interested in. There may be suggestion, but never statement. The curves are the raw material of the architecture, not representative signs or indices.

The iconoclashtic program is carried through in the building’s formal articulation: rather than simply imprinting body curves onto a pre-defined volume, the curves are projected so as to stay true to their origin from a particular vantage point, while deforming to achieve specific spatial effects in three dimensions. The image of the corner curve (the icon) is preserved yet allowed to be stretched, scaled, rotated, folded, cut, and so on, creating unique architectural figures that unfold in space and over time. One icon, or image, simultaneously becomes (part of) another. Projecting without regards to metrics, that is, at different scales, further blurs the clarity of the antecedents, creating a ‘structured illegibility’. We perceive an underlying logic, but can neither tell how it works nor read the curves. The architecture becomes pure figure, neither ground nor figure, like a beautiful language that we do not speak.

What are the ‘specific spatial effects’ mentioned above? They are configurations that create a set of architectural gradients: from enclosed to open (porosity), from small to large (scalar), from simple to complex (intricacy), from primary to secondary (hierarchy), and so on. At the same time, they function as the connecting tissues between the building’s spaces, either giving free passage to or obstructing the flow of space through the structure.


Outlining the Structure (Technical Studies)

I can think of a range of interesting aspects for technical studies, but I think the first one below is the most interesting. The others constitute a starting point for further discussions.

The TS would be based on a study of how the corner is controlling my spaces. This could be modelled in Rhino/Grasshopper. The study would go from an initial analysis of ‘found’ body curves, via a catalogue of spatial effects created through corner modulations, through to programmatic and circulation diagrams, which together with a brief excursion into environmental studies and site analysis would yield the final proposal. This could then perhaps be further investigated through focusing on that one element which we have so far glanced over: the stretches in between the corners.

TS: Glass House Redux

This year begun with a study of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Partly to tie the project back to those beginnings, but mainly in order to further investigate the fascinating properties of glass structures, I’d like to focus the TS on the problem of how to make my more-often-than-not doubly curved glass sections structural. The question to ask would be: how can we make a glass house for the 21st century? How can we make a seemingly vulnerable building (that is still safe) for a seemingly vulnerable program?

Whereas the corners work as generators of space, the stretches in between are where the main part of the structural action (as well as many of the perceptual effects) take place.

Could, for instance, the technique from the Glass house in Leerdam, in which (primarily) vertical sheets of glass were laminated together, be an alternative? Could we have a system with glass fixings working together with curved glass beams? What about glue, acrylics, and different kinds of corrugation strategies?

The ultimate aim of a structure made from glass needn’t always be transparency and lightness. It might be a highly reflective effect, it may be opaque to the point of complete illegibility, it may be made to let coloured light through, or only be opaque (or see-through) from one particular angle. Why - and how - glass in 2009?


Potential Precedents

Casa da Musica (2004: Corrugation - waves of glass...)
Glass house, Leerdam (lamination)
R.O.A.M, Leerdam (structural glass walls)
Glass Bridge for Floriade (2002: glass beams, resin lamination)
Holten (1993: OMA, bundle of glass bars...) + Korea (glue lamination)
Glass-walled house (2001: finite element method computer imagery...)
Aquarium, Arnheim (2001: acrylic - polyacrylic/polycarbonate...)
Dutch Pavilion/EXPO 1998 (undulating glass skin, glass beam + curved glass roof)
Morphosis exhibition design, Centre Pompidou, 2006(?)
Corrugated glass roof for galliera (Rotterdam, 1995: corrugation)
Wallonia Forestry Centre (Philippe Samyn: glass fixings)
Parliament of Flanders (Hexagonal node point)
Apple store stairs (unique structure which also enjoys a ridiculous number of patents)


NOTES:

i  Jeremy W. Hayward, “” (, , ), p.
ii Cf. “A house is a machine for living in” [Fr., “Une maison est un machine-a-habiter”], Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture (, ,), p.
iii  Ray Kurzweil, Twenty-First Century Bodies, in David M. Kaplan (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Technology (Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 381
iv  “Cryonics is an experiment,” Dr Ralph Merkle (the inventor of public key cryptography) once famously observed. “So far the control group isn’t doing very well.”
v  Cf. “Home is where the heart is,” attributed to Pliny the Elder [Caius Plinius Secundus].
vi  Cf. T.S. Eliot, Animula (1928):
“Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs,
Rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys,
Advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm,
Retreating to the corner of arm and knee,
Eager to be reassured, taking pleasure
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree...”
 

[25 November]



If you need the bodylines as a starting point, fine. But the important part isn't whether the corner curve is taken from somewhere/based on something or not. The crucial question is: how are you modulating that corner curve, and what are you getting from that exercise?

Challenge the ground plane. The model should work across a wider range of scalar differences - let it drop down several floors.

Find the scale!

Use Grasshopper to create iterations of these curves. Write Grasshopper logic + set up curve pages. [Can we do annotations with Grasshopper somehow, as part of that process?]

Beginning/end, top/bottom, solid/void, inside/outside, open/closed...

Harder, better, stronger, faster!

[24 November]

A model for tomorrow's tutorial, based on 'corners' taken from (models of) human bodies - the bodies frozen inside of the building. These body corners are then projected/reflected into the corners of the building. It's way too wonky and not the subtle transition between orthogonality and curvaceous geometry that I'm after, but time is running out and it will have to do for now.

[23 November]

Here's a lousy render - published here only as process documentation - of a super quick model that I made to get a rough feeling for what the Slinky idea of a tower that touches down in different corners of the city.



Monia is, of course, absolutely right: it's too much and it's going absolutely nowhere.

So forza. Henceforth: smaller scale. This is now a domestic building, what people outside of architecture would call a 'house'. Though, of course, not just any house, but one that houses human bodies frozen into suspension. To further highlight this connection between bodies in suspension and the building that houses them, I might continue to work with the human body; picking up Bodyline now as per Monia's suggestion...



No idea what the caption for this one should be, guess I'll just mention that I found it here.

[22 November]

"The corner as line, as reflection, as periscope. Both a generator and a meeting point. The corner as figure. Perhaps visually illegible, but perceptually implicit?"

A few random sketches that were done in the course of the work with the next set of models/drawings.



"How do we measure the success of the corner?

First question: Where is the corner?
Second question: Why is the corner?
Third question: How is the corner?
Fourth question: What does the corner do?
Fifth question: Where does the corner end?"

[21 November]

First: a few more sketches that led up to this tutorial.



As I could already tell myself, the cellular automaton isn't working - but the idea of the 'coded corner is good.

Make drawings where things happen in the corners.

Corners penetrating the volumes...

Get rid of the bounding box thinking. The corners can be placed anywhere, not just in the actual corner of a bounding box.

Maybe reconsider the big tower/new cryonics centre approach. It's too much. Instead: domestic scale? A building in which a family lives while they wait for technology to bring diseased family members back to life...

Look at the final story in George Legendre's Bodyline. A curve in a corner...

Think about:

1. Scale (enclosure > open)
(2. Articulation > simple/complex)
3. Starting point
4. Hybrids

Also:

Volumes
Enclosure
Scale

Sectional model?

The corner gets complex, while the edge stays simple.

"Just becomes a corner" - what happens? On which side?

One side registers, things happen on one side...

Scalar difference.

Contrapuntal - work with extremes.

How can two opposite corners share an edge?

Characteristic of point/edge?

What do the corners do?

Juxtapositions - extremes!
Interior/exterior
Complex/simple
Edges: five vs two (complexity)

How do we judge the success of the corner?
Demarcation
Boundary
Enclosure

Write a paragraph that is like Corb's Five Points...

Define the space from the corner.

Create difference:
Interior/exterior
Perception
Top/bottom

Colour the edges? Gradients?

Connections/spatial implications...

TS: One volume holding another might be a good topic.

[20 November]



Williams College Museum of Art's atrium, designed by Charles Moore, featuring Wall Drawing #959: Uneven Bands from the Upper Right Corner by Sol LeWitt.



Sol LeWitt, Corner Wall #6

Some notes for tomorrow's tutorial:

Toward a Formal Manifesto

The Corner as Generative Tool

“Space is born and dies in the corner.”

Nice slogan.

What does it mean though?

The ‘common’ corner is what makes a ‘regular’ room orthogonal. Planimetrically, the demarcation cuts off what we perceive to be a straight line, but which may in fact be part of a larger curved spline, turning it into a measured line of fixed length and curvature. The corner breaks the transformation of information along this (sp)line. The corner is, perhaps, a nodal point in a grid. At any rate, it is the point where we read the information, and, therefore, the space.

Change the corner and you change the trajectory of the lines protruding from or converging into it. Move the corner and you change the space it contains.

We can thus use the corner as a generative tool for the demarcation lines “shooting out of” or “gathering into” it, and thereby as a beginning seed or finalizing point of a space. The corner becomes a generator of growth and decay. First the corner, then the space.


Concepts, strategies, effects

This corner modulation begins with a conceptual notion of a gradient between contrasting extremes, producing the effect that we want the space to achieve through the subject’s reading.

This effect is created through a set of different spatial strategies – the codes, or formal moves, used to evoke the effect.

These strategies can then be further modulated through the application of a set of articulations, in order to focus our attention on particular aspects of the effects.

The concept defines what the corner does, the strategy defines what it is and the underlying logic for how it creates (positive or negative) space, while the layers attempt to highlight the conceptual effects and support the spatial strategy.


Conceptual Effects

01 STEALTH/OBVIOUS
The stealth corner: you won’t see it, but you’ll see what it does. The obvious corner: one that very clearly tells the whole story of how it produces the space. This is all about whether or not the code is legible.
Contrast: invisible/super-visible

02 COLLISION/EXPLOSION
Two planes violently crashing into each other. Collision is a centripetal movement, explosion a centrifugal movement. The corner gets bent, twisted, cut, rotated out of place. Emphasis is put on showing that the movement has a beginning and a direction - or a direction and an end.
Contrast: attraction/repulsion

03 IMPRESSION/HARD EDGE
One or two planes deforming in the corner to preserve one or two others. The impressionable edge accepts the interfering plane and adjusts to it. The hard edge doesn't allow itself to be impressed. This could for instance be achieved through a boolean operation using an 'invisible' corner structure and its resulting space.
Contrast: flexibility/resistance

04 FLOW/RESISTANCE
The corner is displaced out of the envelope. One or more control surfaces are used as outlines, bounding geometry for a 'flow' of edges emanating from the displaced corners. The resulting geometries are altered through an interrelation between corners and bounding surfaces, conveying the idea of a continuous flow between points (corners), interrupted by other corners (surfaces).
Contrast: animation/stasis

05 DIFFUSION/ARTICULATION
The diffused corner occurs when a blurring effect is achieved, for instance through the use of a differential curve. The corner seems to 'bend away from' or 'bend towards' the subject. The corner point may or may not be hidden from view. The articulated corner clearly demarcates the angle between its surfaces.
Contrast: vague/clear


More to consider:

MERGING (CAMOUFLAGE)

INTERCONNECTION/INTERSECTION (difference?) vs AVOIDANCE

SHATTERING/BREAKING

STITCHING/SLITTED (GILLS)

DISTORTION (cut, edit, drop, add, juxtapose)


Spatial Strategy:

CELLULAR
I don’t really wish to get too caught up in the marvelous world of cellular automata that Stephen Wolfram has spent the best part of his life mapping out, but it’s hard to resist.
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/articles/ca/

DIFFERENTIAL
A differential equation generates the corner condition. Wave, ripple, sine/cosine, etc.

RANDOM
The corners are the control points, in between which a random pattern plays out. The corner as definition both as container of order (the 'resting place') and generator of chaos. (There could also be rules to the chaos; jitter, etc.)

RESISTING
The space is a surface/point resisting forces that flow around it. Space as middle ground between point of resistance and point of (new) convergence. See above.

POINT
Simple volumetric displacement, pushing the corner point off the grid to create a figural effect.


Formal Narrative

Global Structure

The most important programmatic part of the proposed building is its archive of human bodies, an ever-growing structure that would have been a tower had it not been for the fact that the sheer amount of 'suspended' bodies inside of it would soon turn it into a taller tower than we can actually build.

Instead, the building moves like a Slinky across the urban field, touching down with a corner in one of the city's corner as it needs to, then shooting off again on a trajectory towards the next corner. The macro structure is analogous with the micro structure: the corners of the building flow from and to the corners of the city. To show that the architecture is constantly evolving, whenever we see the foremost edge of the building, it should be covered in scaffolding and workers. Growth over time will be an important factor here.

Each of these 'cycles' between city corners has its own procession. Whereas these may later be varied depending on which part of the structure we are in, the idea would still be that the archive is carried through in each part of the building. The constantly growing Suspension Storage is what's driving the horizontal tower forward.

There is no grid here other than the city grid (which in the case of London is rather chaotic) and a strategy involving programmatic and pragmatic concerns. There needs to be enough space for the building to actually touch down and shoot off again. There needs to be a local interaction with the city fabric in these nodal points. There needs to be structural support systems along the way. The building needs to make use of existing communications, create new interactions between people where there were previuosly none, and connect poetically and iconically with its site. The improvised nature of the positioning of these nodes ties in with the notion of the iconic, illegible figure, dissolving or ignoring the grid.

If this turns into a monster of a building, completely out of scale and overshadowing everything in its way, then maybe a reconsideration would take into account the implicit corner, turning the structure into a series of towers that point toward and 'meet' implicitly in invisible 'points' in between them. Though somehow this strikes me as a slightly less iconic approach...


An Architecture of Corners

From the formal manifesto, we already know that we're working with corners. But a new kind of corner rather than traditional corners: Corners that control space, that begin and end space, corners that generate surfaces in between themselves, and that modulate the very volumes they demarcate. Corners that reflect conditions, corners that hold the code for the production of space, corners that create effects and affects.

So let's look at one of these building cycles, the stretch in between two city corners, and see what kinds of corners we need, and how they are to interact. This will be done through a brief series of five formal dichotomies, or extremes, that are treated in different ways as we make the procession through the building.

01_Open/Closed
The building, on touching down onto the ground (the beginning/end of the cycle), either opens itself up in a welcoming gesture, or closes back in on itself, depending on whether people should be attracted to it or not. The closing gesture is concave whereas the opening gesture is convex. The closing gesture minimises the footprint, the opening gesture maximises it. The closing gesture produces a corner that is flush with the ground, while the opening gesture lifts parts of the structure off the ground to invite people into the building.

02
Contraction/Expansion
The space contracts towards a set of corners, only to expand - open up - on the other side. This is how we bring scalar effects through, how we turn the horisontal initial movement into a vertical thrust.

03
Facets
The structure becomes crystalline (though this is to be interpreted in a loose manner; it need not be in a form that resembles an actual crystal but could be smooth, skeletal/skinned, articulated, etc. This is what happens along the seams: the corners in between the corners.

04
Directional change
This is the 'exterior' corners of the overall envelope, the corners that define the overall shape of the building. The corners of the Slinky.

05
Void corners
Could be toroidal, or cut into the structure. Corners that open up the building internally and externally.

[20 November]

The Last Supper is an art documentary that “nominally investigates Death-Row prisoners’ last meal before execution; the latter work, borrowing a neutral documentary style that served to underscore the film’s shocking implications, deftly avoided the slightest whiff of earnestness or sentimentality.” In an interesting turn of events, I realized halfway through reading about this project that it was done by Swedish artist duo Bigert & Bergstrom, whom I interviewed ten years or so ago, in a different life.

The Guardian writes about prisoners’ last suppers here.

Celia A. Shapiro has photographed last suppers (the accompanying text by Clara Jeffery and Emilie Raguso tells us that “Prisoners are generally allowed to choose a last meal, though requests for tobacco products and even chewing gum can be denied”):



Harry Charles Moore, age 56, executed by Oregon, 5/16/97



Jeffry Allen Barney, age 28, executed by Texas, 4/16/86



Donald Jay Miller, age 37, executed by Arizona, 11/8/00



Donald Jay Miller (continued, dessert)



John William Rook, age 27, executed by North Carolina, 9/19/86



Larry Wayne White, age 47, executed by Texas, 5/22/97



Ricky Lee Sanderson, age 38, executed by North Carolina, 1/30/98



Karla Faye Tucker, age 38, executed by Texas, 2/3/98



Stacey Lamont Lawton, age 31, executed by Texas, 11/14/00



Velma Margie Barfield, age 52, executed by North Carolina, 11/2/84



Timothy McVeigh, age 33, executed by U.S. government in Indiana, 6/11/01

And now for the big question: if you were convinced that cryonics would help you live forever, and you were about to allow yourself to be suspended, and you had just ordered your last meal (you know what you’d order, right?), then what would you like the space to look like in which you’d sit down to eat it?

[20 November]

...screams that I should try harder to find a way of making the corner construct the space for me. How can I do this? Maybe by turning to a cellular automata analogy? One cell, the corner cell, holds the information for the rest of the cells that fill the space? Since the corner cell has a curve running through it, this curve is continued through space as more cells are added, thus creating the bounding edge between the surfaces that connect to it...

A quick look back through the pages of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, and then a rather frantic sketching session begins:


After which I try my hand at making a cellular automa model (based on a stacking of Wolfram's Rule 110):



And then a rather crude look at how this could work if the corner was a structural member that sets in motion the production of a kind of truss (strangely, this was originally inspired by Jakob+MacFarlane's Conflict - yes, I know it looks nothing like it):



This isn't working. I don't really think it's the way to go, but on the other hand, it did give me some new insights into what I'm trying to achieve: the notion that the corner holds information about its extension/continuation.

[20 November]



To be revised and revised again...

[19 November]


Eva Hesse, Accession (1968)

Eva Hesse again. Although the title confuses me (Wikipedia: "In a museum, an object is accessioned into the collection when it becomes the legal property of the museum, it is assigned a catalogue number, and formal information about its provenance is noted and recorded. (When the museum disposes of the object, it is formally "de-accessioned" from the collection.)"), I really like this sculpture - and it makes me think about how the corner can be turned 'inside out': it can be smooth on the outside, and articulated on the inside. Just thought I'd share that insight.

By the way, did you notice I just wrote this string: .)"),? Believe it was actually correct, too. Ah, the fun you can have with language.



Another Hesse: Hang-up (1965). I've saw this at the Tate Modern the other year, and it's got this incredible force to it - you're almost scared to lean inside of that curve. It totally demarcates space. Very cool.

And while we're looking at corners in art, here's Sol LeWitt's Loopy Doopy (1999):

[19 November]


Emperor Napoelon Bonaparte


Scientist Sir Isaac Newton


Poet Friedrich Schiller


Composer Alban Berg - I like this one; it really looks as if the figure is breaking out of some matter - the face as corner...

Quick note to self about post-indexicality: in Lisa Saltzman's Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006), there's a chapter on the post-indexical. This together with the Peter Eisenman essay (The Post-Indexical: A Critical Option, Hunch, 2007) should be enough to position the project within this particular theoretical fold. Maybe add Rosalind Krauss's Notes on the Index: Part I and Notes on the Index: Part II for historical reference.

Now, perhaps the most interesting part of Saltzman's chapter is this:

Although the classic example of the indexical sign is the footprint, more relevant here is another common example, namely, the death mask. For the death mask is a sculptural object, a memorial object, formed from a mold set upon the very face of the dead. Its anemnetic [sic - this appears to be a misspelling of anamnetic] power derives not just from likeness, but from contact, from touch. Icon and index, the death mask derives its peculiar symbolic power from its founding relation to irredeemable loss. Yet even as the antiquated practice of casting death masks most emphatically literalizes the indexical logic and memorial function of such representational strategies, of physical imprint, so too do the visual technologies of modernity. For photography and cinema are no less beholden to an indexical logic of relation to the evanescent world before the camera. In sum, silhouettes and casts, photography and even film, all of these methods of representation, whose distant origins we encounter in Pliny's mythic tale, are predicated on their contiguous relation to their subjects, their physical relation to the material world.

If i deliberately misread the above and turn it into a passage on post-indexical architecture in a Deleuze-on-Bacon context, I could reach the conclusion that the architectural figure is the mnemonic trace of something that has been taken away to create a negative space. We see the imprint of whatever created the architecture. This needs some more thinking, but I think it could be an important part of the theory of a space of suspension, implying some kind of timelessness.

[18 November]

Interesting discussion on Shape vs Mass vs Form (Robert Somol). Unfortunately, I couldn't bring a lot to the table as I only got half of the readings with me to Morocco - such as Charles Jencks's fairly simplistic text on iconicity and architecture. Note to self: remember to read the rest of those articles soon.



Shape



Mass



Form (Crown Hall that is, not Mies.)

Phew. Did I get it right this time?

[25 November]



You've got the butterflies all tied up
Dont make me chase you
Even doves have pride
- Prince, When Doves Cry

I'm not making this up* – Monia just emailed me and a few other people in the unit who aren't too good with updating their blogs, saying "Don’t make me chase you, I do hate to do that". And in that very same moment, Spotify spit out Prince's "When Doves Cry," with the lines quoted above. “I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path,” as Dalai Lama might have put it.

Anyway, here's my apology: a blog can be used in different ways.

One is to log everything as it happens. Yes, this is a good way of going about it. But maybe there is also another way that one can use in tandem with the former. An after-the-fact log – the blog as a tool to jog one's memory, to go back to old ideas, scribbles and notes, sketches made along the way. Like these:

Sorry about the photographs – this would really be a lot cleaner if I had a scanner. Maybe this is my excuse for finally getting one?

Also, of course, blogging whenever there is a gap in the schedule rather than at the end of every moment gives you a bit of time to get on with the actual work rather than being bogged down with the infrastructure of blogging - re-sizing images, moving files between computers, and so on. On the minus side: no real-time feedback, no way at this point in time for Natasha to stay up-to-date with what's going on, no proper method to the madness. Yet I think both the simultaneous and the after-the-fact (and hey, what's wrong with before-the-fact?) way are good. Which doesn't mean I shouldn't have blogged before, but maybe puts the following notes in some kind of perspective.

Er, anyway.

One more thing before I leave this sad topic: it would probably be more inspiring to update the blog if there were more comments left here. So thanks Ina, Monia, and Adam for the support – if anyone else feels like sending a word of encouragement, please be my guest.

Without further ado, etc. I've been saving up, so here we go. Dates in brackets, as before...

*Okay, so maybe I am just a little bit.