nexus – a symbiotism Experiment

Project Formal Strategies: Symbiosis in architecture

The project focusses on the interrelationship of different orders in collision. The site as observed exhibits a plethora of such interactions and relationships relevant to the development of the district and city. This is consistent with the program of the building as a center for metropolitan transformation. Historic and planned development, residential and business districts, park and urban spaces, pedestrian and vehicular traffic, are among the more prominent of these collisions. As a result the site provides an interesting study on the relationships between differing orders as a condition of metropolitan function and development. The project proposes to capitalize on these factors in a study of orders in collision.

The formal origin of the project is derived from the harsh cartesian grid observable in the plan of the district and city, a rigid formal order in collision with a much less rigid non cartesian order. It is a reenactment of the urban fabric of the city as it may appear “under a magnifying glass”. This is executed to facilitate a chaotic interaction between the current traffic of the site and the proposed building users. It also allows for and stimulates the development of a desired future linear park imagined to run the length of, and span across, the rail line. It incorporates these users into the mix as well.

It is a symbiotic celebration of the transition between the present and the past, nature and human habitat, local and urban scales. As a center for Metropolitan transformation and on a site rich in the developmental history and strategy of the city, the project looks to the past, imagines the future and facilitates the movement between them.

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The main difference between the mechanical and electrical ages lies in the effect of action and reaction.  Although the mechanical age offered increasing possibilities and control to the daily human life but it maintained, at the same time, a delay between the action taken and the reaction, while in the electric age the separation between those two entities was greatly reduced to the point that they now happen simultaneously. The western man is no longer part of the action; he controls it but is not in it. “The power to act without reacting” likes in the case of the unmanned aircraft pilots who can bomb enemy targets without being physically in the aircraft.

The Medium is the Message?

It is not always easy to see the difference between the medium and the message. In the example of the electric light, where the light is the “pure information”, it is a medium without a message, unless it is used to spell out a name or an electrical advertisement. The actual activity that happens under the light is the actual content. It is important to understand that the content of the light is the impact of the human activity that is resulted by it (i.e. a basketball game at night).

We may look at it in another way, “the content of any medium is always another medium”. The content of writing is the speech and the content of speech is the thought process. While computers may accelerate the design process but they do not add to the actual message. The Railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated..” the process of transportation which lead to creating new types of cities and leisure”

The author argues that technological advancement and the mechanization of every day’s life is not responsible to any of the effects that are caused by it. There is no principal of causality in a mere sequence… nothing follows from following except change” and media is facilitating that change and is not responsible for creating a new content. “…”technology could do anything but add itself to what we already are”

The message of cubsim

The media that is projected on the TV screen is in many ways similar to that of the notion of cubism, as cubism radically attempted to stamp out ambiguity and to enforce one reading of the picture. It achieved that by driving its message by involvement. It became an act of painting more than that of an illusion. Cubism maintain the communication of its message by providing information of the top, bottom, sides, in and out and therefore illuminating the illusion and by “seizing one instant total awareness suddenly announced that the medium is the message”

Hot and Cold Media:

Hot Media presents its message in a high definition way, it presents a more descriptive and informative massage. Most of the information is being filled by the media and the audience has less to fill out, it is low in participation just like Radio and Television. Cold Media on the other hand is more participative and less informative, like the telephone for example. “ A cool medium like hieroglyphic written characters has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium of the phonetic alphabet”

The problem with hot technology:

The introduction of hot technology can be devastating in unprepared cultures. In my personal opinion the introduction of computers in the early 90s has made most of the older generations (baby-boomers) left behind and therefore the younger generation became more adapted to that new and fast moving development. The older generations are no longer able to resist the change and were forced to use the technology, in doing so they turn to their kids and grandkids for computer lessons. The flow of information has been reversed; it is no longer that the younger turns to the older for advice and information. The information is widely available on the internet and the younger generations know how to utilize it. This great shift in the flow of information demonstrates the effect of hot technologies on the traditional ‘tribal’ system in our society.

Is architecture meant to be a cold medium? How is architecture intended to evolve to keep up with the hot media era of the future?

Hot media gone wrong

One of the most growing fields in architecture which is not yet recognized by our association is ‘software architecture’, and since physical space is no longer essential for corporation growth, how will that impact our careers as architects? And how prepared are we for such challenge? Considering that most architectural work these days is ‘service architecture’ (i.e. call centers, warehouses or office building full of cubicles to service the needs of workers who may be operating online)

As architecture is mostly a response of the culture, how would architecture evolve as humans keep on expanding? Will there be a limit where architecture will reach a threshold or are we going to keep on witnessing an open ended cycle of evolvement?

NARRATIVE:

I tried to capture the process of genetic mutation. The genome structure consists of RNA and RNA assistant which usually correspond to each other. When there is a breach in this formation a mutation occurs (1 in a billion chance), this process is called Intrinsic Evolvability. External factors such as other organisms and changes in the environment play a major role in the genetic mutation, this process is called Extrinsic Evolvability and chance of occurrence is very low. The genetic mutational process is extremely random and almost impossible to predict the outcome.

ABSTRACT:

A ‘frozen-in-motion’, architectural prototype that communicates the unsystematic but evolutionary process of genetic mutation.  The form is inspired by the generative process itself, and attempts to document the struggle of genes in the battle of domination. This giant sculpture forms out the island and confronts the river through a sequence of motion.

Vortex : is a powerful circular current of water, usually the result of conflicting tides or currents.(Merriam Webster). Therefore, this structure is battling the internal forces within itself (Intrinsic Evolvability), and the external forces (Extrinsic Evolvability) of the surrounding environment. (Refer to chart on board no.1)

THE SITE:

Located off the coast of Calgary; the lot does not belong to any of the 4 city quadrants, and the property number is: unknown. The site is positioned in the liminal space between the north and south sides of the city.

THE SPACE

The architectural programme of this design attempts to meet the psychological demands of a reading room. The goal is to achieve a uniform natural light pattern that diverse in the space.  The approach is to use semi-reflective interior surfaces and overlapping windows on both sides for light balance and glare reduction

TECHNICAL:

The aspect of thermal comfort was carefully considered in the architectural programme. The building accounts for the challenges of the solar orientation of the lot, as well as the environmental obligations of tomorrow’s architecture. The building‘s long axis is positioned to face the true south for maximum sun exposure; while the tilting angle of the roof gradually follows the sun path in order to provide a natural shading mechanism; without the use of intrusive shading devices.

Hypermediacy

Baudrillard’s new media has each person seeing himself at the controls of his own universe. It is the projection of man psychologically and mentally into reality without any metaphor, into an absolute space which is also the simulation, a space of the man’s own making by the use of media. The private sphere itself is no longer a scene where the individual is engaged with his environment. Man manipulates his environment to suit his will rather than being satisfied with that which is provided by reality. The mutation of objects in the modern era has the tendency towards to greater abstraction of elements and function in a single virtual process, electronic commands, and the miniaturization of time and space.

By the removal of our perception of mediation the completeness of our understanding of our environment is reduced to the notion of simulation. This is immediacy.

The public space has changed greatly in the last few years. The power of advertising has re-organized architecture and caused the loss identity of the public and private relationship. This caused a sense of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media.

The interplay of hypermediacy and immediacy leaves us with a broader picture of the world at the expense of a complete understanding of any of it, in essence we lose an integrated understanding of our immediate environment in favour of a simulated experience of our global environment.

Has media progressed beyond the understanding presented in these discussions?

With the loss, or rather the shifting nature of public space and private space with the inclusion of the electronic realm, what are the implications on architecture? How does the architect plan for privacy and public?

Similar to Gaudi’s method for the Sagrada Familia, Frei Otto studied the “optimized path systems” by developing a method of generating forms, he used wool thread, and soap and water to generate vectorized systems that minimize the number of paths and make them share the same geometry.This algorithmic procedure is developed in three steps, mapping the different program points, increasing the length of the wool thread by at least 8% and then dipping the entire model in water and watch the threads mixing and forming a different pattern every time.

Otto’s Cartesian grid is solid and immovable and is different from that of what Spuybroek suggests. Spuybroek’s grid is wet and flexible enough to create a certain level of plasticity and yet is rigid enough to create a rigid structure. For Aristotle any curve is considered a mixture of straight lines and circle segments, however in advanced geometry a curve is measured by how far off they are compared to a straight line which reduces the complexity of a curve so to speak. The fundamental issue is the difference between flexibility and movement “I believe that extensive body locomotion is possible only when it is intensive first “both in the body and in the system”.

Spuybroek argues that the thread method should not be exclusive to generating shapes from plan, however, “threads should be three-dimensional from the start :plan-threads can twist and become wall-threads”

Is it really intelligent architecture or automatic architecture? Can I really call a computer generate design my design?

Where is that really leading the future of architecture? Where is the sensible and emotional part of creating a building? We can’t argue anymore that a piece of architecture is art anymore because it does not represent the architect’s view anymore.

Assignment 2 – MarcoGeorges – EVDA613L01   .PDF

“We make cages out of our structures, we want our buildings to have frame works but out of a Cartesian compulsion, we compartmentalize space into strict horizontals and verticals” Cecile Balmond expressed his dissatisfaction with the how space is often compartmentalized into a strict and rigorous grid of verticals and horizontals. There is a dominant immobility in such structure, no sense of movement and imagination becomes trapped in such regime. Our environment is imperfect, everything around us is complex and irregular. Juxtaposition becomes rhythm, where hybrid entities are understood as ‘nature’ and not odd and freaky. Why should architecture be any different? Balmond points out that we enter an era where “ambiguities arise, interpretation is the only way forward. There is no single reading of such a building”

Balmond talks about the informal in his article which has no specific rules or fixed patterns, what we call chaos is actually a succession of several orders “quite different from the idea of trapping the arbitrary and calling it order”. Isaac Newton saw the flow of force as a linear movement, and the informal depicts it as the “minimum path through a field of potential”. The informal has no distinct rules nor fixed patterns, it cannot be copied and the mutation of different situations must be taken as valid starting points as opposed to random accidents or exceptional cases.

The works of Rem Koolhass and Daniel Libeskind are the ultimate example of the ‘informal strategy’, in the Université de Jussieu in Paris and the Kunsthal of Rotterdam, structure was an informal response to space, the structural elements were self-generated and chaotic “columns move out of regular sequence in a shameless opportunism” Balmond explains how that resulted in the entrance area of the Kunsthal of Rotterdam only has 3 columns whose juxtapositions defines the “threshold, in a fresh new way”.

Danniel Libeskind expressed his notion of the informal is the Victoria and Albert Mesum, Libeskind proposed the spiral of history, a spiral that is pointed upwards, open ended and entirely holistic.

Balmond demonstrates his ideas through the rotating disk with the light that shines through it, that generates chaotic but symmetrical and even shapes, adding some complexity to the process (i.e.making the disk expands and contracts) will add a different dimension to the outcome, the disk may appear free and suspended but it is supported by a hidden internal strategies that forms the understructure of that particular shape. Mathematics is racing forward with non-linear dynamics, so is science in chemistry, biology…etc, Belmond questions where is architecture in all that? And where is science in architecture? “Flying in the face of conventional ideas of pre-arrangement, new science proposes the plan instead as the starting point and the resulting boundary as a surprise”.

There is no set of fixed rules for generating structures. The rhythm of the hidden connections are implied and felt but not seen.The algorithm of the pattern is to remain hidden “The method is informal, the framework is new structure. The inspiration is science”.

Questions:

How effective is the randomness of the rearrangement of different spaces in creating an informative and cohesive space that will function properly?

Balmond touches on using sickness and mechanical process in creating a random outcome. What is the architect’s role in such process? Does that mean that the machine is replacing the architect? Or perhaps the architect is becoming the operator that machine and the machine become the true creator/architect?

Is the informal to be interpreted as without form or on the outside of form?

Is new structure really new, or just seemingly new to us as new technologies allow it to be explored?

If randomness does not actually exist, but is simply an indicator of something we do not yet understand, with the study and attempted emulation of chaos detract from its enigma?