Application

Spacial Abstraction

Grasshopper Script and Form

Grasshopper Scripts

Grasshopper Script without any Reference Objects

The Grasshopper plug in for Rhinoceros allows a designer to visualize the intricacy of the design process from start to finish. In this script, an object is created from nothingness, eventually allowing an interplay between two offset circles defined within the Cartesian Grid. By creating this series of objects without reference points, it can then be applied to a physical object, and ultimately a point-attractor could be interfaced with the composition.

Animation of One Slider

Animation of Rotation Slider

Some Thoughts / 2b

The space between surfaces, the rules that we follow in order to obtain objects, the very media that we use in order to obtain these objects are all dynamic. We can follow the rules of a program or we can bend them until they break. We can parametrically alter the space between two surfaces to the degree that overlap or great distance is easily controlled. The very essence of rules within architecture is that they are meant to be either followed or broken, and the latter seems to allow for more interesting results. The avant-garde, or rule breakers, have often been at the precipice of shaping the trajectory of the discipline for years to come. In our current paradigm, there is a dichotomy between the parametric and the mundane, one that highlights the struggle of economy versus intrigue. The Barclays center economically harnessed the power of parametric design in order to provide a building on a tight budget that is also a intriguing place maker.

With regards to the spaciality of Burry's Between Surface and Substance, the relationship between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries / rules is explored through a series of case studies. The Dunn reading examines various media for the creation of architectures, giving the reader tools with which to either break or follow rules. In the context of parametric design, rule breaking is in the pushing of the envelope to see what is possible to rewrite the book from within.

2a - The Perspective Hinge

Masaccio - Holy Trinity

Reexamining The Perspective Hinge through the lens of animation sheds new light upon the aesthetic of vision, framing, and architecture. It also alleviates some issues that one may have with theories of representation, giving a historical focus to the practice. "For architects concerned with ethics and not merely with aesthetic novelty, who seek the realization of places where a fuller, more compassionate human life might take place, that these mediating artifacts [drawings, models, animations, etc.] and tools be appropriate is paramount." The understanding of vision evolved through the classical and medieval eras, prior to the mathematics and geometries that grew out of the Renaissance. It was in this period that light, spaciality and framing became important. These qualities are visible in the realm of animation, not only in the way one positions the environment but also in the way one designs, particularly with respect to views. Architectural tropes were employed in order to frame the audiences understanding within their built environment. For example, the fenestration in Hagia Sofia hides the massive structure that holds the dome, elevating the religiosity of the space and altering the perception between interior and exterior. In a similar way the camera in an animation program can be controlled in order to reveal or deny view, giving the designer a greater understanding of their space prior to its realization. This realization, however, should pull from the imagination as much as from the software. When drawings become to instructional and the architect is merely a button pusher, the value of the built environment is found sorely wanting. Drawings and the buildings they produce serve a function, but functionality can sway between the beautiful and mundane. It is important to pull from the past when harnessing the medium of the present in order to more intelligently shape the future.

2a - Spiller and Burry

Neil Spiller - Towards an Animated Architecture Against Architectural Animation

The process of architectural animation too often homogenizes the uniqueness of the architecture that is being put on display; it results in a banal movement across vistas or along paths, degrading the intrigue or mystique surrounding the design of an individual building. This problem arises because of a seemingly static progression through a site or down a corridor, putting the minutia of the building on display instead of highlighting the "fluid multiple viewpoint 'snapshot in time.'" These snapshots in time or framed clips left pieces of the building in the 'dark,' giving the architecture a realm for imagination. In the realm of artistry, the most successful enterprises are those that leave the finessed details to the imagination of the beholder. In a similar way, the most unique and intriguing architectural animations leave the audience the ability to complete the story of what they are seeing. Animation as a tool for the representation of architecture is capable of producing stunning results, but it is equally capable of muddying the intent of the design. How can one harness this medium without adding to the cacophony of badly animated architecture?

Mark Burry - Beyond Animation

"In teaching architecture one often ponders on what today's student, released by the computer from the hours of hatching and other manual craft-based time-consumers prevalent in traditional architectural study does in their stead. What should we offer in their place, of equivalent usefulness and less excruciating time commitment?" The world of animation has the potential to release the designer from the tedious work of crafting details within drawings. We are freed to bring life to our creations by digitizing their being across a series of virtual Cartesian coordinates, creating infinite variability. Yet something is missing within the digitization of Our World; the answer to that age old question -'Why?' Yes, we should tackle this new medium of animation and define the animate, and the precision with which Burry accomplishes the translation between Phileban geometries is certainly laudable. Yet there seems to be a disconnect between the digitized translation of these geometries and the art of the "master-builder." How does the shifting of a cube to a sphere create better spaces for people to live - are these spaces animated without thinking about life? Are these digitized geometries getting in the way of our imagination?

Animation 2

Animation Attempt 1

Square cropped animation

Widescreen Animation

Dynamic Spatiality

Grosz and Rocker

"Indeed the subordination of space to time in western though [...] is one of the most complex issues in the history of metaphysics." (Krell,31)

"Spacing is of interest in as much as it exceeds the conceptual order it makes possible." (Wigley, 79)

These two points go hand in hand with the readings by Grosz and Rocker, which deal with a the dynamics of space and movement. 

The Future of Space: Toward an Architecture of Invention

There are two different times; a time of differance and a time of knowledge. The focus of this essay was upon that of differance, a seeming temporalization of space and spatialization of time. The dichotomy between spacing and temporization is one that allows space to emerge from non-time or a time of interval. This allows for virtuality to seep into existence, meaning that space and movement are simultaneously dynamic. This generates the modalization of space; a rift between what "is" and "isn't." 

Some key points were that:

• abstract space is nothing but the mental diagram of infinite divisibility
• space is a field for the play of virtualities
• space emerges through motion
• the past is only idea, the present is ideo-motor - a series of unhingings
• contrast between finite moment and infinite past

Versioning: Evolutionary Techniques in Architecture

There is the potential for a dissolving differential data-design that no longer simply 'exists' but 'becomes.' These two words are key to both of the readings. Existence emerges through an understanding of time and processes, becoming an object or space or motion that can be simultaneously understood and controlled. In our dynamic world, "nothing but change persistently takes place." Since we are able to instantaneously project and produce, objects are dynamically 'in-formed.' Through the repetition of difference, finessed objects can emerge, refined to the point of pragmatism, warranting careful studies in form making. 

Some key points were:

• Repetition of difference
• Data-design escapes the realm of the prior-anticipated
• differentiation can dissolve into figures out of 'nothing'

Finally is defined as the continuous process of differentiation. Different versions or iterations are used in order to resolve problems at a w holistic level; such as those of the automobile, airplane, and certainly architecture.

Krell, David Farrell. Architecture: Ecstacies of Space, Time, and the Human Body. State University of New York Press. New York. Print. 1997
Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt. The MIT Press. Cambridge. Print. 1993

Movement 3 and Analysis

Usain Bolt - Gold Medal Finish

Movement2

The dunk is one of the most thrilling aspects of basketball. A player goes airborne and flies to the rim, slamming the ball and their body into the action of scoring. The moment before the dunk is one of compression, whereas making the bucket is one of extension. This process is one that creates a unique pattern through space, with different parts of the body engaging in different movements.

Matrix in Light

The expression of a matrix in light allows for the depth of the whole surface to be measured and better understood. The image conveys an expression of interiority, something important when examining the initial object. 

Matrix of Surface

The manipulation of a surface via moving a point within the Cartesian grid allows for a plethora of results each seemingly stranger than the last. Each row of distortions responds to a particular direction of distortion; some vertical, horizontal or diagonal. The original surface is in the top left of each matrix, and the orange highlights a final distortion within chosen parameters.

Plan Distortions

The view of the manipulations in plan allows one to see when points were being altered horizontally. The first, third and fifth row were prime examples of horizontal manipulation.

Elevation Distortions

The view of the manipulations in elevation reveals a similar yet vertical manipulation. The most extreme example is in the third row, where the object leaves the parameters of the overall grid. The grid is also tested by the fourth iteration, where the line between objects is almost breached.

Perspective Distortions

Matrix in Rhino

Double McTwist 1260

Shaun White: Double McTwist 1260

In honor of the Olympics, here is a video of Shaun White doing some pretty amazing things with rotation. Then the team at the New York Times added some helpful graphics to document the motion as an animation.

Snowboarder - Smithsonian

Death Cube K

The essay by Vidler puts the work of Morphosis into the context of Kafka's interpretation of the place of man in modern times. It seems that the work of Morphosis is an "other," something that emerges rather than being ready-made for the site. The ready-made by Marcel Duchamp is a strange contraction that reminds me of the dystopia presented by the Death Cube K. It is two materials that have been slammed together which give new meaning to the result. It is no longer a bike wheel and a stool, but a bool or a whike. 

Ready-made - Marcel Duchamp

In a sense, the built form is an exercise in perspective; from above buildings seem to cut away and chart geographies of unknown forces. On the ground a different perspective is revealed, one where "racing close to the contours, the models seem to meld with the earth's crust itself, heaving and breaking, splitting and opening up with seismic precision, as if mapping the fault lines of a once hot, now cooling culture." The work of Morphosis points back to that of Duchamp, there is a strange juxtaposition of land and building that makes their structures transcend the mundane.

Cooper Union - Morphosis

One of the tenets of the essay was a return to the principles of modernism, with a slight nod to the past. The statement "modernity's absorption of modernism, working with the language of the latter to construe a critique of the former," sets the tone for Morphosis' work as that in the vein of modernism. There is an assertion that the work of Morphosis critiques the culture that we live in, actively calling for the public to be able to understand our spaces in current context.

Plan Voisin - Le Corbusier

Material also plays a role in the realm of our modernist modernism. The process of building seems to have "exploded from the mechanical to the digital, and thus taking over the public realm by virtue of its conquest of matter as a whole, merging at once with the temporal moves of the population and the spatial shifts of the earth."

Perot Museum - Morphosis

"Morphosis [...]seems to celebrate the underground as simply another dimension of gravity-free space, moving at will around ground zero without recognizing the transition, without the sense of constriction given by the canonical modes of modernism and postmodernism." This in-objectivity of the ground plane presents a carte-blanche approach to architecture, one that allows the architect to describe what he wishes upon any site.

Rendered Surfaces

Rendered view over-lay on original image.

Rendered object in space.

Modeling Surfaces

Imported images to create a frame for model space.

Traced side view of boot.

Performed an intersect command with front trace.

Modeled three surfaces within the abstracted boot space.

Four Surfaces.

Rafael Araujo Drawings

Thank goodness for computational rendering.
Rafael Araujo

Emergent Topologies

Formal ambiguity seems to emerge in two ways; through a decidedly intellectual process, or through an apparently haphazard attack on a given medium. Greg Lynn's essays Animate Form and Folds Bodies and Blobs discuss the ways in which the built environment can emerge from the technologies of our time. These technologies are different from the constructed drawings of old because the process requires a great deal more iterations. "Producing a geometric form from a differential equation is problematic without a differential approach to series and repetition. There are two kinds of series: a discrete, or repetitive series and a continuous, or iterative series." In a similar way to the iterative notion of animation, this response examines several disparate images trying to put them into the context of animation and blobiness.

Peter Eisenman - Diagrams

"Blobs suggest alternative strategies of structural organization and construction that provide intricate and complex new ways of relating the homogeneous or general to the heterogeneous or particular." Therefore, it appears that similar to emoticons, ( >.< ), Blobitecture is architecture that can respond to and fill in any gap in structure. It could in fact evolve to become a new international style; imagine Mies' Lake Shore Apartments with an amorphous blob growing between them. Alternatively, Peter Eisenman's House studies could be blob houses.

Brain Sketch

The discussion of meta-balls and defining characteristics within the animation industry brought to mind the human brain, which was also implicated in Probable Geometries through the bio-medical instruments of modern medicine. The human brain is similar to the very blobs that Greg Lynn is discussing; it is a bounded mass that has a series of control points that determine the way in which it is shaped and how it ultimately operates. Formally, there is not much variety between the brains of humans, but if you were to extend the conversation to those of other animals, they begin to take on the size and shape allowed by the skeletal system. As Lynn eloquently phrases it, "This multiplicity of minor variations does not add up to a single, simple global structure but instead manifests a blobular singularity, or, if you will; a blob." Of course, Lynn was referring to architecture, yet his discussion lends itself to the multiplicity of life, one that lead to principles of precision and perspective.

Masaccio - Perspective

Our mind - in essence a blob - interprets what we see in order to inform how we interact with the spaces around us. If we see Masaccio's Holy Trinity we realize that it is a projection. Yet the artist creates the illusion that there is actually depth behind the wall of the church, occupied by the aforementioned divinity. Masaccio's masterwork predated x-ray machines by nearly 600 years, yet it captures the same principle. As one views this projection, they create a 3-dimensional understanding of the space, one made up of intuitive layers similar to the ones generated by CT scans and other bio-medical image technology of today.

Zumthor - Museum Kolumba

The same reading of interior and exterior can be seen in Peter Zumthor's work in Cologne, Germany. Like Masaccio's Holy Trinity, the building is creating a dialogue between frame and framed space. There is a blending of the interior and exterior that can be read equally between the emergence of a preexisting wall and the window above. This museum for the archdioceses collection of art is urban infill, bounded by zoning restrictions and streets externally, as well as the internal preexisting conditions. As the site was both ideologically and historically significant, Zumthor's building molds itself to these conditions, albeit in a formally rigid way.

Yves Klein - Monique

While Zumthor uses his building as a canvas for history, Ives Klein implements a unique process to capture a moment in time; the moment when a model clad in blue paint was used as an instrument to execute a painting. The resultant image is abstract, it's process is the point of interest. By using a woman as the brush, Klein created a piece that is made up of disparate blobs of paint, that simultaneously represent and suggest. These blobs animate the process of painting, taking one still and turning it into the work of art.

k/o studio - Silver Mountain

The process of animation is evident in today's blobitecture, in essense a series of frames that are generated parametrically between two frames. This tweening is described in Lynn's Animate Form, resulting in an emergent topology that takes shape in the world. When architecture becomes less formally rigid it often becomes a blob, as seen in k/o studio's Silver Mountain. The building is an ambiguous geometry set into a site. There are rectilinear surroundings, yet the building seems to take its form more from the geometries of its structure than the cues of site. At this point the blob becomes unique, at once defining its surroundings as well as itself. 

Geometric Body

Lange Ski Boot

Boot Drawings