Things to Do Over Break

Most important is the development of the system as outlined:

• Look into certain relational models (i.e. Evolutionary Biology, Recursive Code) as a model for the way in which the explorations begin to infuse with one another. In the case of evolutionary biology there is a sense that these explorations are species, each one mates with another to create hybrid species. Such a system feels organic as opposed to a recursive code. In recursion, a particular process is embedded within itself, starting a loop in which the function is nested.
• Make diagrams of both, including dates, medium used, conditions to study.
• Pick a site in Malibu

List of common terms: Recursion, Cyclical, Exploration, Species

Eventually make Glossary

List of potential forms: acted Video, Story, Manga, Photo, Painting, Model, Scripting??, Rendering, Drawing, Drafting, ScreenCapture, Collage, fashion, graphic video, sculpture, ceramics,

Thesis Prep Final

On Resistance

It seems that more than any other other review the issue of dates was at the forefront. Things were said of being from the 50's, the 80's, the 90's. Most likely it was the form of representation, the pastels and paint, rather than the content. Marcus called it a project of resistance. But in my mind I don't feel that I'm resisting as much as I'm trying to develop a more complete architecture that considers the multiplicities of architecture.
I took a few words of guidance from Lebbeus Woods, he says "Until now, I have not thought much about the idea of an architecture of resistance. Although many people might judge that my work in architecture as been nothing if not a form of resistance, I have never considered it as such. To say that you are resisting something means that you have to spend a lot of time and energy saying what that something is, in order for your resistance to make sense. Too much energy flows in the wrong direction, and you usually end up strengthening the thing you want to resist. It seems to me that if architects really want to resist, the neither the idea nor the rhetoric of resistance has a place in it. These architects must take the initiative, beginning from a point of origin that precedes anything to be resisted, one deep within an idea of architecture itself. They can never think of themselves as resisters, or join resistance movements, or preach resistance. Rather ( and this is the hard part of resistance) they must create an independent idea of both architecture and the world."

It's this ' the independent idea of the architecture and the world', perhaps the world is the one a make. The independent world of fiction that I create for myself, one that gets back to the very root of what makes architecture what it is.

Underground Living?

To live underground, no light, no sound

The Ghost of Architecture

The Ghost of Architecture: The Project and its Codification - Antoine Picon

The question when defining CODE is not exactly What is the CODE, for the CODE is a complex set of relationships which bridge multiple fields where all parts act interdependently. So the very act of definition in a sense freezes and limits the potential of the CODE. The real question should be how can the CODE be represented and experienced and how then can those representations be a part of the creation of the CODE. To illustrate the importance of representation let us take the example of the relationship between a father and son. If one were to be asked to document such a relationship one could make a family tree diagram of the two, showing the genealogical relationship as well as date, sex, relationship to other family members. Although very helpful this diagram would show nothing about the emotional relationship the two have to one another. A different document would be a video tape of the two having a conversation, which would perhaps show the feelings each has towards each other shown by their actions and demeanor but would not explicitly show that the two are father and son. As this example shows, no single piece of writing, diagram or drawing can show all the necessary information of a complex relationship or system. In relation to the CODE, this argues against a set of hard prescriptive guidelines as being limited and potentially Utopian in intent.

In the eighteenth century, Durand, an apprentice of Boulee took it upon himself to codify the relationships of composition. Picon writes the following on Durand, "This codification [which Durand created] of the various stages of the design process may have allowed architecture to achieve rigor comparable to the science of the engineers, but the "poetry of art" so dear to Boulee had also thereby been banished from Durand's conception of architecture. In his introduction to the Precis, Durand even went so far as to state that aesthetic pleasure ought not to be part of the architect's objectives. This effort to make architecture subject solely to the imperatives of social and political utility reveals a utopianism in Durand's work"

This is not the only precedent for such an attempt, and it could be argued that each new era of architecture has struggled to somehow create a ruleset for what exactly defines their architecture.

So then we come back now to the real question of How should the code be represented.

Kraftwerk, a German band from the 70's largely credited as the fathers of electronic music, have stated that rather than their songs or albums, it was their studio, Kling Klang that was their greatest creation. It was a conventional German apartment basement, converted into a recording studio arrayed with hundreds of home-made electronic noisemakers that was referred to as an instrument and their greatest musical work. If this shift of artistic emphasis from the music to the space in which the music was created can be seen as analogous to the shift from the product to process, the definition of process becomes a spatial and material condition rather than a series of actions. If the CODE were to be thought of in similar terms, it could be architecture itself that becomes the documentation of the CODE.

What about a single Building/Space/World as the Diagram of Code, represented through models, plans, drawings, comics, video.


Other quotes:

"In their Renaissance reinterpretation, the Vitruvian orders addressed architectural objects in their ability to manifest the regularity of the cosmos rather than in the various steps of their creation. In other words, the built object was given critical weight, whereas the process of its design remained hidden."

"Far from acting as abstractions, writing and walls seek to engage humanity in its corporeal dimension. A new sense of materiality seems to have been called upon to articulate new possibilities for interfacing between man and machine, and new elaborations
of materials through computer-assisted fabrication. This new materiality often goes hand in hand with an eagerness to conform to the laws of the economy rather than rejecting them as the modernist avant-gardes had done."

Thesis Statement v.1

Throughout the twentieth century architects have made the careful planning of space and material, and its experiential effects on the user, the primary medium in which they work. As such architects are often sticklers for form and demand a quality product, they view the accurate execution of the design as the ultimate success. But with such high standards they may often find themselves at odds with the city, with the builder, with economic restrictions, at times even with the client. It is in spite of these hurdles and compromises that the architect tries to make meaningful architecture. In the end they may succeed but the process is an uphill battle.

In addition to the difficulties in realizing any particular design, change in the world is accelerating, and the designer architecture of today is being replaced ever quicker by the next big thing. In such a temporary environment, where spectacle dominates, it becomes increasingly difficult to get support for an architecture of muted quality.

These are the difficulties-but rather than struggling against change as a compromising agent in the process, architects should embrace it and see the long term use of their buildings as the full realization of their architecture. As such, I choose to disengage from the details of form, space, and program, these should be left to the user to define for themselves and to continuously adapt based on need and want. Instead I choose to empower the user by developing a flexible system of building, a sort of genetic code for building, one with many possibilities that rather than defining the growth, defines the potential of the growth. It is this genetic code, embedded in the original building, created through a unique system which includes all aspects of the design and build process, that becomes the voice of the architect. In such a scenario the particulars of any building are no longer seen as permanent but as a temporary state in the evolution of the building. So like a living organism the building grows over time, re-worked, expanded, damaged and healed, as a seamless extension to the lives of the people within.

KieranTimberlake- Residential Design using BIM

The third annual BIM award show saw the "Loblolly House" by KieranTimberlake Architects, the authors of "Re-fabricating rchitecture" take away the prize in two catergories. This building begins to show the effectiveness of using BIM software at organizing a project at the residential scale, one which isn't formally complicated compared to many parametric buildings. The area in which BIM seems to helping the most in this project is to communicate the information of the building to different fabricating groups, which then allow them to build certain components off-site with higher tolerances. As argued in "Re-fabricating Architecture" the old idea of pre-fabrication is gone, KieranTimblelake have been pioneers in seeing a new age of pre-fabrication, mass-customization, and modular building design.

I want to propose a similar type of building construction methodology, yet one in which the 3d model is highly customizable based on the clients programmatic needs to the point that the client can almost design certain aspects of the house by themselves. From these flexible beginnings the 3d model will largely be produced automatically through high level scripting. The actual building could in the end be composed of 90% prefab solutions, 10% custom/unusual detailing. In this scenario it is not the individual building that should be judged for its merit but the entire series of buildings that are produced from the system that should be seen as one architectural endeavor.

Story & Artifact in the Creation of an Aesthetic Grammer

_________There is a strong potential for stories to bring meaning to the places we live and work. Our memories are one such example, the way a certain mark on the wall may help to recall a certain memory of the time a friend slipped and fell while trying to balance on a soccer ball at your twenty first birthday. In this way the houses we live in can be seen as physical container for the memories of our personal lives. But just as memories are relived within our imagination when they are recalled, daydreams and fictional stories can also be played out in our imagination with similar vividness. Such as the way a certain tree in the backyard may give one the creeps after hearing a ghost story about how someone once hung themselves there. Even when we know that it's not true our minds create a possible scenario which none the less changes the way we relate to the tree, and as a result give it a new, deeper meaning.
These personal meanings whether real or imagined overlay themselves onto our surroundings constantly but it is only through time that they accumulate to become the comfortable environments that we can call a cozy home. So it could be argued that one of the responsibilities of an architect is to provide a home that can act as a receptive container for memories, metaphorically speaking a container that has many drawers to place the events of our lives. Better yet, make for an architecture that recalls past event, stories, emotions through a form of association.

_________One possible approach is to create a densely layered environment that follows an internal relational logic based on stories and their artifacts. This fictional 'world' could give the building a history before even being built.

One such process of the creation of this world was done in Kyoto and is documented here:

_________The entire process was based on the training process of the Marathon Death Monks on Mt. Hiei near the Seika campus. This extreme practice in which a countless monks have died or committed suicide takes twelve years to complete and requires the monks to run a 100km daily for a hundred consecutive days with other week long physical tests. This process is what changes an ordinary man into a bodhisattva and became the structural backbone to the project. Initially the monks are required to recreate by hand, two ancient books that become the manual for their journey, in it are listed the rituals and locations that the monks must visit. In my case these manuals were to be two objects that formed an aesthetic foundation as well restructure the relationship between two other stories, the historical account of the burning of the temples on Mount Hiei by the first shogun to unite Japan, and the fictional novel 'Kafka by the Shore' by Murakami Haruki which I happened to be reading at the time. Physically, it began with the collection of two objects that happened to strike me, in this case a bamboo seedling found in the bamboo forest behind the dorms, and the muffler of a moped found on the way to school. These two objects were analyzed as two independent systems, each had inputs and outputs as well as certain functions they performed.



_________These two objects were then converted to clay and united into one object. By using a homogeneous and plastic material such as clay the two objects lose all but formal qualities. In this sense the two objects can be combined wholly into one object on a purely formal basis. This blending creates a new object in which the two independent systems have a unique and dependent relationship, such as the inputs of the bamboo shoot are now supporting the shield guard of the muffler.




_________The muffler was then thought of as the burning of Mt. Hiei and the bamboo as the each of the two stories in 'Kafka by the Shore'. The two clay objects now became the manuals that restructured and combined the relationship between the two stories and gave birth to two new stories. These were drawn up as two possible mangas in which one random page was actually drawn up, the intent to give a sense the one page is just a glimpse into a possible world. These were set to take place on two locations by the proposed build site, an old building in the water treatment facility plant that was to be converted to an artist studio.


Manga 1


Manga 2


The manuals themselves also became objects that found their way into the stories as a sort of aesthetic seedling.



_________The characters, scenes, actions, emphasis, timing, compositions and themes in the mangas were then translated to become spatial perspectives as well as a unique material pallet, including dried mud, ceramics, rope and silicon that were combined based on the internal logic of the stories. This construction logic determined the connection of the prefab artist living quarters to the existing building and formed the public gallery space.



_________In this way, through a self-referential combining of various stories, the artifacts created in the process became the building blocks of a new aesthetic vocabulary and a construction grammar. The outcome is an environment of richness in materials and internal relationships.

Precedents (Logistics)

Gehry Technologies

KieranTimberlake Architects

Precedents (Economics)

Osamu Ishiyama



Teddy Cruz

Glenn Murcutt

Precedents (Aesthetics)

Douglas Darden



John Hejduk



Teranobu Fujimori



Gibli Studio



Matthew Barney

Fab Labs (Localized Production)

Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT talks about his new project 'Fab Labs' at the TED conference. Fab Labs is a program to set up fabrication laboratories in remote areas, giving the community a way to make the things they imagine. It's basically a program to empower designers all over the world.

In the lecture he argues that fabrication is going through a similar period of invention the way that computers did in the 60's. Computer research really took off when the size got small enough to be able to be used by small work groups of five to ten people. Although still clumsy and gigantic by modern standards Gershenfeld argues that this decentralized invention model allowed for computers to really advance. No longer did invention need to come from a big corporation with a massive R&D budget. The Fab labs work in similar ways by bringing current digital fabrication equipment such as water jet machines, laser cutters and 3d printers to the people. It's safe to assume that for Gershenfeld every future household will have fabricating tools the same way they currently have the personal computer.

Architects being at the front of such a push should incorporate such tools into their workflow. This forces designers to think of fabrication immediately working at full scale and themselves becoming an integral part of the construction process.

Undoubtedly there is group in academia that pushes in this direction but there is also a large number of architects that are designing completely divorced from fabrication and construction processes. This is not limited to wild digital designs, even offices that are involved in building fairly conventional buildings often limit their influence to organization and aesthetics. As Timberlake writes in 'refabricating architecture' the success of mass production over the last century has pushed architects from being designers of buildings into the selector of products. In such a model architects are acting like savvy consumers, picking certain products over others because of their performance, looks, or price. This divorce isn't limited to the high tech products, even simple construction systems such as partition wall or mechanical systems are left to the contractor to decide on site. Architects will say such systems are standard and a waste of time to address. But by failing to address such systems architects only have control of superficial surface treatments. Formal geometry no longer is a result of construction processes and many times goes against it. Neil Denari's smooth planes are one case in point, their typical drywall-stick member construction are completely defied and hidden to produce the final effect.

Buildings should be smartly designed and well constructed. The quality of the product should matter to the architect.

Owner/Builder

This is the conventional player diagram from AD Mar 2004

The general trend of recent technology has been to empower the user. Using the internet and software as tools for research and computation we are able to accomplish things that were beyond our capacity. Sketchup is a great example of this. Now, for free, anyone is able to download an intuitive 3d software program and design buildings. They can then take their buildings and put them into google earth to see how they appear on site. The visualization tools that were once only available to architects are now being used by everyone. This leads me to question if the current services offered by the architect are what clients want or need. Although an isolated incident, still funny to read, here a story of a client that didn't want to pay for a design because it was done in sketchup. This little incident shows that even if the architect is talented, if the public see our services as being a unnecessary then they won't be willing to pay.
I think public interest in design is a good thing for architects but it also means that architects have to change from providing design to become someone that helps people find what it is they want. This suggests a closer working relationship between the client and the architect in which the architect plays the role of a consultant. Here a report about a contracting company called Ubuildit. In this case the contractor provides the information necessary to allow the home owner to build their own dream home. I think a similar model can be applied to architecture in which
the owner works as the general contractor with the architect helping them realize what they want to build along the way. This allows for more flexibility in design because it is the owner who takes responsibility for the project, possibly hiring the architect under him as an employee. In this case what the architect provides are drawings and some custom prefab parts that work with the system that the architect has set up. The larger gestural design moves and spatial planning moves are done by the client. This makes the idea of code design more important in that the signature of the architect is not in the gestural move but instead embedded in the every detail of the building, influencing it in subtle ways.