The Poetry of the Corner
[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)
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)
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