Assignment 5

Assignment 6

Interior Rendering of Boutique Hotel

Reading 3

The process of design is not stagnant. It is static and impulsive. It undulates and moves inconsistently. It morphs and shifts. This process is not a stringent list of rules but rather a journey to create a solution to the problem presented at the site. A designer moves sporadically without a set path. He can move forward and regress reaching different conclusions about feasible buildings forms and spaces. He can explore different methods of abstraction, such as diagrams or sketches to CAD drawings and three-dimensional models. With ever-changing technologies and advances, new programs can expedite this process of design. However, these programs cannot do the designing themselves. Their purpose is not to create design but rather be a tool in the representation of an idea or concept. These programs act as generative tools. They possess the power to quickly and efficiently produce drawings and models. Computer aided design programs allow the designer to explore multiple options and variations of an initial plan. The designer can make multiple generations and then evaluate them to discover the workable elements. Digital media is crucial in producing mass numbers of iterations with the same conceptual backing. The designer controls the iterations but is able to copy and mirror elements with the assistance of computer design programs. The designer also has the ability to manipulate the environment. Technologies allow models to be put under the forces of gravity. Designers can also test their models against sun and wind patterns. All these environmental elements aid in the refinement of the initial concept. They allow an idea to be fully developed and explored at the given site. Digital work is comparable to laboratory work. Technologies allow designers to continually experiment and get feedback in a very short time. Digital work can be moved and edited far more easily than crafted models or hand drawings.  Digital work allows the designer to explore different aesthetics in a particular scheme. He can explore multiple variations of the same overriding concept without having to start over. The different tools of programs such as Rhino or AutoCAD allow the designer to easily create slight mutations of the same concept with ease. The idea behind these digital practices is that a very large number of schemes can be created so that the highest amount of analysis is created. The designer is able to work with the highest number of explorations and schemes. Digital media allows the designer to: take an idea, manipulate it, copy it, mutate it, and build it. 

Reading 4

Greg Lynn explains Blob tectonics using corny horror flick allusions and other popular media portrayals of what a “blob” is to explain this complex form of construction. The general being the larger scale universal theories that are placed on the space and the particular being the more specific means of construction and orientation of the individual parts.

            Using the idea of the blob as a collectively complex structure that is also a single unit, Lynn breaks down the principles of this confusing form. Blobs go against normal tectonics and act as detached entities whose form is decided entirely by its surroundings. They interact tremendously with their context. They can absorb things, stick, mold, and are entirely inverted in structure. Continuous surfaces that is both the interior and the exterior. Then the subject of multiplicity and singularity arises. The blob is neither. It is networked and structured as multiple forms, but the form itself is singular in body. To explain these forms through models animation software creates an isomorphic polysurface or a meta-ball (blob) model. The many surfaces are affected by two influences: the zone of fusion and the zone of inflection. Each outside forces working to manipulate the vulnerable shape of the blob. A single surface is then formed by the changing of many surfaces due to the forces on the blob.

            The idea that structures must always be “standing upright” is then challenged. Lynn considers this rule to be “overrated” and encourages architects to stray from this normative response and attempt to conquer the blob. Aside from a few attempts upon the roofs of small structures this notion is still for the most part untouched.

In built form the blob is a difficult task given its material limitations and its need to be flexible and able to make transitions. Reiser + Umemoto and Yoh’s have, however, made considerable advances. Using truss systems to allow for deflection, a change in thickness, a relation to the height of the volume, repetition of surfaces and fluctuations all enhance the blob’s natural abilities of motion.

The Yokohama Port Terminal uses “plan symmetry” in its programmatic organization and massing, but loosens up its structure and becomes more fluid though each connection of slabs. It is an integration of symmetrical plans and flexible connections and sections.  

Assignment 4

Reading 2

Ali Rahim, throughout his writing, clearly states his thoughts on how modern day architects should engage technology into their design processes. He starts out by introducing a phrase “feedback loop” and subtle yet important distinctions on often-confused-terms technology, technique, and technical. To summarize his points, technology is an application of technical or scientific advance to a cultural context, which only gains meaning in their applications – invention of original techniques. This in turn actively participates in a feedback loop because “technical advances give rise to new uses or technologies leading users to create techniques, that, in turn, demand technical advances, which spawn new technologies” (Rahim). In chapter two, he goes into the concept of temporality and further takes it to argue that technological practices use “temporal techniques” to create innovative works of architecture. According to Rahim, most architects, if they cared enough to consider time as a factor in their design, viewed time as essentially a neutral container for events to occur in a linear, reversible way. This underlying idea of linear, reversible time, brought design process that goes from top to bottom: where an architect first comes up with a concept first and a design that clearly shows the concept and continues the design by adding details to the initial design. Rahim says that during this process, “every effort is made not to change the initial design – in order to preserve the ‘clarity’ of the concept.” However, some architects, believe the theory of time based on thermodynamics, which states that time is irreversible, and there is a fundamental asymmetry. Those who believe in this notion of temporality use design process that goes from bottom to top: in such design process, each step in the process of design reshapes and redirects the next; instead of having an underlying initial design, by analyzing each component of design and adjusting parameters that show the relationship between each components, the architects discover relationships that are not yet known and go to the next step from there, expecting unpredicted outcome.

        Rahim mentions how “techniques, like architecture practices themselves, run the risk of becoming routine and static over time, no longer capable of or inclined toward innovation.” He criticizes “younger architects simply use CAD to implement the hand-sketched idea of a senior designer. The software merely makes this task more efficient. In this model, technology is simply collaged or superimposed onto the design process and is not allowed a more transformative role.” Last year, we started implementing CAD drawings in our design processes. The basic technique of using CAD itself, as Rahim would put, has already become routine and static. Just like the younger architects who simply use CAD for efficiency, by tracing plans and developing elevations and sections from the plans and photographs, we learned how to use CAD. I always thought of CAD as a program that is not quite necessary – since we can draw by hand – but makes the design processes faster, easier, and more precise. Though I still have trouble starting out a drawing on CAD without hand-drawn sketches, I have gotten used to the basic techniques and feel comfortable using the program. What Rahim said made me realize that I am very passively or not even participating in the feedback loop of technology and culture. Instead of thinking of new ways of using CAD or fully enjoying the benefits of computer generated drawings, I just learned the already existing techniques.

If I look through my sketchbook, I often times came back to the initial designs because they clearly retain the original design concepts. Last reading was interesting in its intensive description on modern day digital practices and how typology and generation of forms are critical elements of digital architectural practices. With the development of software that enables execution of four-dimensional space, architects are able to develop specific components of a design, perhaps according to its specified programs, and then set up parameters according to the site conditions in order to find some interesting relationship between each component. By experimenting with different parameters, forms are generated, and from those new generated forms, the process repeats. Listening to the presentations of various firms assigned in DAP assignment, I am starting to realize how each firm or architects struggle to find a unique way engaging technology into their design processes and to incorporate innovative methods from other areas, like airplane or ship industries, to develop a new technique.

 

Assignment 3

Assignment 2

Introduction + Digital Morphogenesis

In terms of the becoming part of the digital age, architecture saw its first major transition during the industrialization of the 19^th century. For the first time, architects challenged not just how we design buildings, but also how we construct them by means of steel and glass. The Eiffel Tower by Gustave Eiffel and the Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton, both originally received scrutiny for their designs because the embodied this technological spirit of the Industrial Revolution instead of the intellectual ideals that were held at the time. In hindsight, however, we know that these two architects were way ahead of their time designing what we, over 100 years later, have come to know as skyscrapers.

Today, digital design in architecture has a slightly different meaning. We are still using the latest technology to assist with the design and build aspects of architecture; however we are not so necessarily focused on the material the buildings will eventually be made out of. Instead, we look at the form of the buildings. We challenge ourselves to come up with more and more complex curves, surfaces, and shapes in an effort to broaden our cultural and design discourse. We no longer first consider the simple platonic solids in our design. Rather we look at the program and consider what forms might embody it the best.

With the introduction of computer aided design (CAD) and Computer aided manufacturing (CAM) into the studio environment, architects have been able to create “hypersurfaces” a term coined by Stephen Perrella. A hypersurface is one that smoothly combines with any other form to create a complex curve, without any fold lines or hard edges. These surfaces are accomplished by using a relatively new form of CAD that uses three dimensions when designing. NURBS editing, or non-uniform rational b-splines, allows us as architects to design both more organic as well as more mathematically complex forms to be used as or within buildings. With NURBS, shapes such as a torus, a Mobius strip and a Klein bottle can be easily modeled and manipulated. This is due to the control points that are apart of every NURB curve.

However, architects were not the first to use this technology in design. We, in fact, borrowed it from the ship building industry. For the obvious reasons of needing to have fluid, smooth forms for ship hulls, NURBS lends itself effortlessly to that profession. This is only the latest part of a long line of borrowing that architects have partaken in. it has always been in our nature to push the envelop of design by integrating new materials, methods, and processes from other industries.

Assignment 1

these are the layouts for assignment 1... patterns

Coop Himmelb(l)au

Coop Himmelblau architectural firm was founded in 1968 by architects Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Rainer Michael Holzer. In its early days, the firm was based in Vienna, but moved to Los Angeles in the 1980’s. Their design philosophy is inextricably tied to the gradual privatization of public space in cities over time, due to decreasing availability of public funding for city architecture and increasing numbers of city projects funded by private investors. They believe that architects are equally designers and urban planners, and in taking on private urban projects must preserve the unity of the city, if not through an urban grid, by creating monumental architecture. Coop Himmelb(l)au usually renders their building in extreme detail, however chooses to barely represent the surrounding context of the site. This also shows that they really do believe that the background is set off by the architectural foreground.
On a smaller scale, however, their design theory retains that people define the space that they are in, instead of the space defining where the people should be. Their earlier work included a series of design experiments in which humans play key roles. These experiments included inflatable spaces that could fit into a suitcase and spaces that changed based upon heartbeats. These particular experiments were small enough that they were represented in full scale. However most of their earlier work was represented by large-scale models. Coop Himmelb(l)au paid attention to extreme detail, creating interior models, many times, at a scale of 1:10.
The name “Coop Himmelblau” is German for “Blue-Sky Cooperative” and reflects the firm’s design intent to make architecture that alludes to cloud-like and heavenly imagery through complex angular forms that create dynamic and airy spaces, as well as their extensive use of glass and steel in their projects. Some of Coop Himmelblau’s recent projects which best exemplify this design intention are the BMW welt in Munich, the Cinema Center in Busan, South Korea, and particularly the Akron Art Museum in Akron, Ohio, which was completed in 2007.
The Akron Art Museum selected Coop Himmelblau in 2001 through an international competition reflecting the museum’s longtime focus on introducing new artists to the region. The firm was chosen because of its leadership in contemporary architectural theory and thought-provoking approach to the reinvention of existing building resources. Coop Himmelblau’s design literally and metaphorically opens the museum to the City and to the public. In designing the museum, the architects of Coop Himmelblau wanted to create a cultural center that was not only an art display case but a monumental part of the urban fabric that functions as a landmark from the exterior and, when occupied, generates discourse among visitors and a flow of creative energy. The building is comprised of three main spaces called the Crystal, the Gallery Box, and, in keeping with the firms “heavenly” building aspirations, the Cloud. The steel framed and glass Crystal serves as an entrance hall to the museum and is also used to host cultural events. The vast amount of natural light allowed to pass into this space minimizes the need for artificial lighting, but the strategic massing of the other elements of the building protect the Crystal’s occupants from harsh southern light. In stark contrast to the Crystal, the Gallery Box is aluminum-clad with very little natural light allowed in, so that the experience of the exhibits can be carefully controlled. There is very little interior structure in this space, which makes it flexible and accommodating for exhibits to come. The steel and glass roof cloud hovers over the two other spaces, and serves to unify the three elements as one structure, provide shade for the Crystal, and denote the museum as a landmark in the city.