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