digital aptitudes - Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

Transcription

ACSA 100th Annual Meeting
DIGITAL APTITUDES
+ other openings
Mark Goulthorpe + Amy Murphy, Editors
ABSTRACT BOOK
Copyright © 2012 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Inc., except where otherwise restricted. All rights reserved.
No material may be reproduced without permission of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
1735 New York Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20006
www.acsa-arch.org
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACSA wishes to thank the conference co-chairs, Mark Goulthorpe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Amy
Murphy, University of Southern California, as well as the topic chairs, reviewers, and authors for their hard work in
organizing the Annual Meeting.
EDITORS/ANNUAL MEETING CO-CHAIRS
Mark Goulthorpe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amy Murphy, University of Southern California
TOPIC AND SESSION CHAIRS
1912: Progress, Technology, and Nature
Open: Community
Fran Leadon, City College of New York
Tom Fisher, University of Minnesota
1988–1997: Ambitions and Apprehensions of a
“Digital Revolution”
Open: Disaster Recovery
John Stuart, Florida International University
Sunil Bald, Yale University
Charles Setchell, USAID Office of US Foreign Disaster
Assistance
Open: Diversity
4D Architecture
Brian Kelly, University of Maryland
Keith Green, Clemson University
Open: History/Theory
Advanced Composite Fabrication Technologies for
Architecture
Michael Silver, Mike Silver Architects
The Agency of Drawing and the Digital Process
Vittoria Di Palma, Columbia University
Open: Sustainable Design
Adrian Parr, University of Cincinnati
Andrew Atwood, University of Southern California
Open: Urbanism
Automatism, or, Post-Medium Architecture and PostWar Art
Post-Parametric Environments
Tim Love, Northeastern University
Sean Keller, Illinois Institute of Technology
Jennifer Leung, Yale University
Becoming Computational: Restructuring/
Reconsidering Pedagogy Towards a (More)
Computational Discipline
Registration and Projection: The Mediations of Urban
Imaging Technologies
Chris Beorkrem, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Nicholas Senske, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Beyond Digital: Speculations on Analog Convergence
Brian Lonsway, Syracuse University
Design Computation: Parametrics, Performance,
Pedagogy and Praxis
Karen Kensek, University of Southern California
Digital Details
Matt Burgermaster, New Jersey Institute of Technology
McLain Clutter, University of Michigan
Situated Technologies
Jordan Geiger, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Omar Khan, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Mark Shepard, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Teaching History in the Digital Age
Carla Keyvanian, Auburn University
Theoretical Implications of BIM: Performance and
Interpretation
John Folan, Carnegie Mellon University
Ute Poerschke, Pennsylvania State University
Digital Nouveau and the New Materiality
Armando Montilla, Clemson University
Emerging Materials, Renewable Energy, and
Ecological Design
Franca Trubiano, University of Pennsylvania
Integration, Not Segregation: Interdisciplinary Design
Pedagogy for the Second 100 Years
James Doerfler, California Polytechnic State University
Kevin Dong, California Polytechnic State University
Digital Apptitutes + Other Openings - Boston, MA - 3
CONTENTS
Thursday, March 1, 2012
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Friday, March 2, 2012
4:00PM - 5:30PM
5
Design Computation: Parametrics, Performance, Pedagogy and Praxis
24
1988–1997: Ambitions and Apprehensions of a “Digital Revolution”
6
Open: Community (1)
25
7
27
Emerging Materials,
Renewable Energy, and Ecological Design (2)
2:00PM - 3:30PM
8
9
Registration and Projection: The Mediations of Urban Imaging Technologies
10
The Agency of Drawing and
the Digital Process
4:00PM - 5:30PM
11
12
Advanced Composite Fabrication Technologies for Architecture
13
Becoming Computational: Restructuring/ Reconsidering Pedagogy Towards a (More) Computational Discipline
11:00AM - 12:30 PM
14
Automatism, or, Post-Medium Architecture and Post-War Art
15
17
Open: Urbanism
18
Open: Diversity
2:00PM - 3:30PM
19
21
Emerging Materials, Renewable Energy, and Ecological Design (1)
23
Open: Community (2)
4 - ACSA 100th Annual Meeting
Project presentations
Saturday, March 3, 2012
12:30PM - 2:00PM
35
Architecture
42
Design
45
Disaster
46
Ecology
47
Landscape
48
Open
10:30AM - 12:00PM
52
Society
28
4D Architecture
54
Technology
29
Digital Details
30
Integration, Not Segregation:
Interdisciplinary Design Pedagogy for the Second 100 Years
2:00PM - 3:30PM
31
32
4:00PM - 5:30PM
33
34
Theoretical Implications of
BIM: Performance and Interpretation
THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2012 - 12:00PM - 1:30PM
Design Computation: Parametrics, Performance,
Pedagogy and Praxis
Karen Kensek, University of Southern California
Folded Sun-Shades: From Origami to Architecture
Nancy Yen-wen Cheng, University of Oregon
Abraham Rodriguez, University of Oregon
Ashley Koger, University of Oregon
This paper describes a hybrid digital+physical process for designing decorative and functional sun-shading screens that flex to meet
changing diurnal and seasonal lighting requirements. A range of
techniques was used to optimize the visual effects created from a
single sheet. Experiments in cutting and folding were combined
with photography and solar testing using a heliodon and artificial
sky. Material characteristics discovered through physical manipulation and direct observation shaped the geometric transformation
and parametric modeling of lasercut patterns. The paper illustrates
how each technique shaped the design development in a delicate
balance of directed study and serendipitous discovery.
Beyond demonstrating possibilities and limitations of cut and folded contiguous sheets as lighting modulators, the project shows
how a material study can be targeted towards architectural applications. Defining a specific architectural problem is crucial for
focusing the work towards building performance. The context
limits the design exploration and sharpens the defining questions.
For the digital+physical design process to trigger different modes
of thinking, design education and the studio environment need to
support agile shifts between design methods. Bringing together individuals with complementary skills and backgrounds enriches how
a project can take advantage of these multiple modes.
Performance-Based Generative Design. An
Investigation of the Parametric Nature of
Architecture
Ming Tang, University of Cincinnati
This paper investigates a collaborative research and teaching project between the University of Cincinnati, Perkins+Will’s Tech Lab
and nD group, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The
primary investigation focuses on the design and fabrication of building components, derived from performance-based parameters. The
project examines various approaches including theoretical investigations and proprietary software tools for parametric design.
The paper first gives a short historical and philosophical background
to performance-based design, then describes the technical and algorithmic requirements, and concludes with the examples of implementation. With two design courses taught in 2011, the authors discuss the “shared body plan” as an essential element for applying
generative form-seeking methods in architectural design. Design
methodologies, such as use of building performance simulation
tools, genetic morphing, and fitness evaluations are discussed as
new paradigms in generative, performance-based design.
This paper also investigates how the large quantity of iterations can
be filtered and selected based on the feasibility of fabrication and
materialization processes. Using several student projects, the paper
demonstrates the methods of mass customization and parametric
iteration through physical prototyping.. The parameters related with
fabrication have been implemented to generate a large quantity of
creative solutions, whereas genetic algorithm functions are introduced as optimizers.
As a conclusion, this paper summarizes the formation process that
nature permits in order to sustain a generative system. The paper analyzes several design and prototyping procedures, and illustrates how
these performance-driven design approaches can be used for innovative forms, utilizing benefits of performance-based influences in architecture beyond formal assumption and aesthetic experimentation.
Material in Performance-driven Architectural
Geometry
Sevil Yazici, Istanbul Technical University
Leyla Tanacan, Istanbul Technical University
Advanced Computer Aided Design Techniques liberated non-Euclidian geometries such as freeform surfaces. In today’s architectural practice, there is a necessity to subdivide complex geometries
into smaller components for realization of buildings because of the
current limitations in Computer Aided Manufacturing Techniques.
Architectural geometry is an emerging field of research focusing
on rationalization of freeform surfaces. This field of research is investigated with panelization tools. However, these tools are not
able to accommodate requirements related to the material properties and building performance. Today, computational tools associated with performance analysis, evaluation and optimization are
undertaken during a later stage of the design process, following
the form generation. This paper aims to discuss how material can
be integrated into a parametric model in which architectural geometry, material and building performance are interdependent for
increasing efficiency in the design process. A parametrically defined architectural surface is generated, analyzed and evaluated as
a case study where parametric modeling, panelization tools and
series of analysis tools including Finite Element Method Analysis
are used with the intent of mapping critical procedures towards
building a complex architectural surface. Different types of materials are tested for the surface within imposed boundary conditions
to assess and compare their structural performance. Future lines of
research are indicated in the paper.
Signature Architecture Franchising: Improving
Average Architecture Using BIM
Ehsan Barekati, Texas A&M University
James Haliburton, Prairie View A&M University
Mark Clayton, Texas A&M University
Ozan Ozener, Texas A&M University
Building Information Modeling provides capabilities to aid architectural design that are so revolutionary as to enable new forms
of practice. Signature architecture franchising is a design process
and workflow that makes use of a “seed” BIM that a designer can
modify rapidly to create a custom design. The design can be constrained to conform to characteristics of a signature architectural
style through use of constraints, components and standard assemblies or families. The design can also be subjected to rigorous analysis for performance in domains such as energy consumption, construction cost and construction schedule. Experiments that have
been conducted to explore and test the idea indicate that signature
architecture franchising appears feasible. It may enable designers
to expand market share and increase quality significantly, perhaps
enabling substantial reductions in energy consumption in average
buildings in the future.
Open: Community (1)
A Small House Nation: Making Our Stuff Fit
James O’Brien, Miami University
Four Transit Villages for Nashville: A Case Study in
University Research and Livable Communities
Thomas Davis, II, University of Tennessee
Our homes inform the way we live. We spend years of our lives
working to pay mortgages, electricity bills, cooling, heating, and
plumbing repair services. As Americans, we have had no reason to
scale down. In 1973, the average single family home in the United
States measured 1400 square feet while today the average single
family home is just over 2,200 square feet. The phrase bigger is
better has informed our spending and building habits as a nation
and our Achilles heel may lie in the more than three and a half million square miles of land within U.S. borders. We’ve built not out of
necessity but because land is both available and cheap. Following
a brief history of the small house movement, this article addresses
the essential functions of the house paying close attention to anthropometry and the ergonomics of space. Through a comparative
analysis of three homes under 600 square feet and one cottage
development, I’ll argue the case for small housing as a viable solution for sustainable domestic living, not only for individuals but for
communities.
Bricks and Bones: Discovering Atlanta’s Forgotten
Spaces of Neo-Slavery
Richard Becherer, Southern Polytechnic State University
Over the past two years, my students and I have been fascinated
with a rundown site on the Chattahoochee River, Atlanta’s western
boundary: the Chattahoochee Brick Company, home to the first
and largest of Atlanta’s brick factories. Local War hero Captain
James English built it in 1878, and he and his family managed it for
almost a century. Our research revealed that English had a private
prison on the site, and that he used convicts as forced labor under
the most abject conditions. A 1907 Sanborn map gives us an inking
of the housing: three convict “tenements” beside the front gate.
Furthermore, we learned what became of some of them at least.
In two construction drawings taken from the hundreds that we
salvaged from the site, we discovered a pair of graveyards. Even
more surprising is the fact that both spots remain quite evident
today on the site. Out of this work, my students came to realize
that any urban site having such a long work history (like this one’s)
must be haunted with stories worth knowing, stories that expose
the human costs behind even the most mundane of materialities.
They also learned that such stories are potentially generative of
form. But their discoveries also left them in a quandary: In light of
such terrible histories as Chattahoochee Brick’s, how is it to intervene, how is it to design? When confronted by sites and histories
like these can ours ever be business as usual?
With the broad support of both public and private sectors, Greater
Nashville is rapidly laying the groundwork for an extension of its
mass transit network out into its region.
In conjunction with these efforts, T. K. Davis’ University of Tennessee urban design students in Spring 2010 worked on team projects for four potential or existing transit station stops in Greater
Nashville. The Nashville Area Metropolitan Planning Organization
(MPO) sponsored the studio in the amount of $11,000, in cooperation with the Nashville Civic Design Center. This is an example of
teaching, creative design and service as a form of applied research,
in which design proposals apply current urban design theories and
best practices related to Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and
Livable Communities.
MPO identified four sites for “Transit Villages” in the generally suburban area surrounding Nashville. One site has an existing commuter rail transit stop, which could serve as a catalyst for economic
development. At the three other sites, however, the ultimate mode
of mass transit was yet to be determined. In these cases, design
proposals were requested that would be capable of accommodating all three of the potential mass transit options: commuter rail,
light rail transit (LRT) or bus rapid transit (BRT).
A unique aspect of this studio involved the formation of interdisciplinary teams of the University of Tennessee undergraduate architecture students paired with graduate students from the Vanderbilt University Owen School of Management. Under the direction of
faculty member Thomas McDaniel, a case study of regional transit
villages was the Capstone Project for the Real Estate Development
MBA Program.
This studio sought to balance three equally important agendas:
first, to present a very intense learning opportunity in urban design
for the students; second, to engage the students in the thinking
and priorities of developers, on the principle that this knowledge
can significantly empower the designer to be proactive, and not
reactive, by adding value both in project design and economics;
and third, to structure the studio as a public advocacy of TOD as a
way to build “Livable Communities.”
Could this collaboration between two university programs, and disciplines, be a model component for in-depth consideration of TOD
in other metropolitan areas? This paper will discuss the challenges
and opportunities of a “creative work as applied research” teaching
model. It will also disclose design and development outcomes as a
case study, and suggest where Nashville goes from here.
Vittoria Di Palma, Columbia University
Blow-Up: Architecture and the Technology of
Contemporary Art
Nora Wendl, Portland State University
Isabelle Wallace, University of Georgia
The contemporary architectural reading of technology as instrumental is far removed from the Greek origins of the word, techne,
knowledge related to making. The danger—and the opportunity—
of such instrumental thinking is that it reduces architectural practice to a series of specialized strategies or operations that can be
done by anyone, opening it up to appropriation. Appropriating the
strategies and operations of architecture has been, for artists from
the 1960s forward, the most direct method of institutional critique,
a radical turn on the historical relationship between art and architecture through which art has often been the necessary vehicle, the
technology, by which the perception, representation and the making
of architecture is transformed.
Over the last twenty-five years, art has become more than a technique to embellish or advance architectural form, it has become a
site for architecture’s analysis. For, although architecture has always
been a motif within the visual arts, in increasing numbers, and as
if in response to architecture’s own willingness to picture itself—a
willingness that begins in the Postmodern era— architecture is now
the explicit subject of much visual art across media. Consequently,
and as this paper will examine, a certain faction of contemporary art
can be viewed as a silent compliment to the acknowledged history
of the built environment—a non-verbal form of architectural history,
a legitimate site of interpretation, criticism, and analysis—and, as this
paper will argue, a technology through which architecture is experienced, theorized, historicized and disseminated.
Leftovers: Residual and Risk in “Our Digital Present”
Jasmine Benyamin, Texas A&M University
Despite the so called ‘post-critical’ moment of our digital present,
those of us who are more involved in thinking about buildings than
in their making may find opportunities for critical inquiry after all,
thereby avoiding the risk of disciplinary extinction. In this essay I
propose possible avenues for a critical re-engagement with current
practice, through the lens of residual and risk. Further, I argue that
how we write and talk about buildings needs to undergo a paradigmatic shift, since the way buildings are made has fundamentally altered. In fact, given the current emphasis on process over
representation, we have a renewed responsibility to inquire about
the changing paradigms of authorship in current practice, but also
in our thinking about practice. What are the implications of collaborative process-based practice on (singular) authorial subject?
Does the notion of process itself so central to emergent technologies risk the loss of the author? Can authorship be re-defined and
re-inscribed in process if not in outmoded notions of intent? This,
after all, must not kill that.
Digital Ecstasy: Architecture in the Post-Fordist era
Elie Haddad, Lebanese American University
Nadir Lahiji, Pennsylvania State University
For three decades, academia and professional architectural establishments have euphorically embraced exactly what this ACSA conference, in celebration of its hundredth anniversary, has termed as
“digital aptitude.” Without a doubt, the imperatives of the postmodern culture have brought to the fore a gifted generation with an incomparable skill and talent to manipulate new digital technologies
for design practices. But, significantly, the same gifted generation
has demonstrated a parallel talent corollary with the first, which we
shall call “political inaptitude.” We claim that this political inaptitude
is the dialectical opposite, or the negative obverse, of the same digital aptitude underlying postmodern design practices. In this paper
we will attempt to critique this new design approach, which simultaneously displays both sides of this dialectic. We begin by posing this
question: should the digital aptitude be necessarily accompanied
by a separation from the ‘political’, a separation that is one of the
symptoms of our society of the spectacle? Our initial answer to this
question is an emphatic No! We will argue against this inauspicious
separation and examine some of its theoretical causes.
Adrian Parr, University of Cincinnati
The Ontological Performance of Sustainable Design
Michael Harpster, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
In recent years, conversations concerning sustainable design have
focused almost exclusively on questions of resource conservation
and energy efficiency within the built environment. As a result, many
assume sustainable design methodologies lead to an improvement
in the quantitative energy performance of a building – nothing more.
While such understandings of sustainable design are not inaccurate,
I do believe they present an incomplete account of the impact sustainable design has (or might have) on our lives. It is my goal to
explore the non-quantitative impacts sustainable design has on our
lives and to thereby provide a fuller and perhaps more meaningful
understanding of sustainable design. Ultimately, I hope to shift the
discussion away from quantitative or technological performance and
toward what I refer to as the ontological performance of sustainable
design solutions. In speaking of ontological performance, I refer to
a structure’s ability to reveal the fundamental characteristics of human being or existence. More specifically, I intend to examine the
potential that sustainable design material strategies and active solar
technologies have to reveal our basic relation to and place within the
natural world, our situation both in and across time, and our basic
human mortality. Finally, while this discussion represents merely a
brief introduction to the idea of the ontological performance of sustainable design, a number of additional issues are outlined in hopes
of promoting and providing direction for further consideration of
sustainable design’s ability to shape the way in which we understand
what it is to exist in the world.
Uneasy Green: The Value of a Semi-Autonomous,
Productively Critical Green Architecture
Doug Jackson, California Polytechnic State University
The architectural discipline’s current attempts to address the environmental crisis are problematically marked by either an attempt to
deploy architecture’s unrivalled formal expertise to produce monolithic works that appeal to culture’s unquenchable thirst for novelty,
or else a foregrounding of architecture’s technical and organizational prowess in order to meet culture’s ever-present appreciation
of performance and pragmatism. The trivial and unremarkable work
that results from these two approaches, however, undermines the
status of the architectural discipline relative to the larger culture.
In sharp contrast, the projects presented in this paper demonstrate
a more appropriate way for architecture to respond to the environmental crisis. These projects are not intended as models for green
or sustainable building, since their value lies not in their ability to
be absorbed by the mainstream but rather in their unique ability to
stand productively outside of it—providing critically alternative experiences that have the ability to beneficially affect the course of the
mainstream. Accordingly, they act as agents for changing the way
that individuals view their relationship to the natural environment
and to the larger, abstract entities that alter, exploit, and transform
the environment on their behalf.
Consequently, these examples demonstrate how the discipline’s
expectation to speak to the culture at large can finally be redeemed
through its unique ability to productively engage broad-reaching
and significant issues—issues that are crucial to the rectification of
humanity’s seemingly unrelenting environmental degradation, and
which are far from answered by architecture’s recent short-sighted, unremarkable, and post-critical performance-driven efforts.
Yes, They Do Walk in Suburbia: Multifamily Housing
and Trips to Strips
Nico Larco, University of Oregon
Marc Schlossberg, University of Oregon
Suburbia is often considered antithetical to the idea of walking and
biking to local shops and restaurants because of its lack of density
and destinations, long distances to travel, and auto-oriented design. While this may be the case for some parts of suburbia, the
suburban commercial strip and the multifamily housing that typically surrounds it stand as widespread exceptions to this notion.
These overlooked areas of density and mixed use actually foster
significant walking and biking by residents. This paper presents recent research that found that not only is there already a significant
amount of walking and biking in these areas, but that the design
and connectivity of the multifamily housing and its surroundings
is critical to increasing that amount of walking and biking. These
findings points to a significant opportunity to recast our understanding of suburbia and the potential it might hold to create more
sustainable models that are centered around walkable, active development.
Registration and Projection: The Mediations of Urban
Imaging Technologies
McLain Clutter, University of Michigan
Aerial Vision-Based Model of Urbanism
El Hadi Jazairy, University of Michigan
Google Earth and airplanes give access to map-scale top-down
views of cities. As a result, observers have a perspective allowing
them to view cities as a whole in a towering position as if they controlled it from outside. This position empowers policy-makers and
city users giving them a sense of control over the visualized object
thereby making it submissive to their desires. This paper is an attempt to relate the meaning and agency of aerial vision with the
emergence of a ‘new geography from above’ in the Gulf.
Modeling Spatial Activity Distributions in Complex
Urban Conditions: The Markov Chain Model for
Weighting Spaces with Attractors
Ipek Rohloff, Mount Holyoke College
Kurt Rohloff, Raytheon/BBN Technologies
This paper presents first insights from an ongoing investigation into
how to predict movement distributions influenced by factors other
than street networks. In current spatial analysis models, the ability
to predict the effect of attractors other than street network properties on movement distributions has been limited. This paper introduces an analysis approach that incorporates normalized weightings
on spaces with attractors along with network properties in order to
provide finer grain analysis explaining movement distributions within
urban complexity beyond the street network. This analysis approach
is based on Markov chain models which have been widely used in
other domains to model complex systems. We use the Markov chain
modeling approach to represent network properties and attractor effects with normalized weightings to estimate probabilistic movement
distributions in a computationally tractable manner. We argue that urban environments with business districts in segregated locations and
green open spaces integrated with the urban fabric are cases of urban
complexity where movement distribution cannot be explained merely
by street networks but with attractors incorporating programmatic
and environmental content. Our conclusion is that a comprehensive
model utilizing Markov chains can be useful to detect the effects of
building density and environmental content on movement, yet further
research is required to establish weighting criteria.
Representing Information: Envisioning the City
through Data
Karen Lewis, Ohio State University
The constructed world is replete with information that governs and
controls its organization. From railroads to highways, building codes
to zoning regulations, the design and development of the contemporary environment is managed by strategies of physical and visual
organization. Architects’ interest in this globally networked environment is reflective of an increasing awareness and attention to the
multi-variant world, one invested in infrastructural systems that support productivity in lieu of pictures and is reflective of a new global
and electronic economy based on intangibles – ideas, information and
relationships. The effects of these systems, once only theorized and
simulated through abstract models, is given attention via the measurement, collection and processing of their effects.
As emerging technologies have enabled new ways of measuring fluvial global, urban and regional networks, new representation techniques have enabled design practice to occupy and design with
information, rather than merely represent its influence. Through
techniques of clarification, simulation, augmentation and revelation,
architecture mobilizes data visualization into architecture praxis.
Spectacle of the Hyper-Real: Environmental
Simulation, Cybernetic Subjects, and Urban Design
Anthony Raynsford, San Jose State University
Like Renaissance perspective before it, contemporary environmental simulation in urban design is an exceedingly codified and artificial
visual construction whose success, likewise, lies in its reassurance
of a certain scientific precision and point-by-point correspondence.
Using a few key examples, I would like to suggest that current, hyper-realistic simulations, such as the Glasgow Urban Model, have a
three-part history, dating back to the 1950s when experiments at
MIT first connected cybernetic models of experience to the formal
aesthetics of film. At this stage, simulations remained highly diagrammatic, translating dynamic urban sequences into an array of visual media, each of which was meant to capture some aspect of the
totality of the visual experience of the city. This phase was followed
by an intermediate stage in the 1970s, in which computer technology became embedded within specific techniques of Hollywood
special effects in order to simulate a more-or-less total environmental experience, with extraordinary levels of detail and precision. This
embedding of special effects technology coincided with a populist
suspicion of urban design expertise that had begun in the late 1960s
and that demanded ever-wider accessibility and transparency of
urbanistic representations. Realism now entailed both close, optical
replications of urban experience and a type of cinematic immediacy
that would be familiar to, and hence legible for a broad audience of
perceivers. The final stage emerged with the adoption of CAD modeling and animation systems that gradually became spliced into and
ultimately supplanted traditional film, without, however, displacing
the filmic visual codes and their subjective viewpoints. Where Renaissance perspective projected a static, often universalized viewer,
centered within an abstract spatial grid, contemporary digital simulations tended later to project a variable and mobile ‘consumer’ of
urban space, a cybernetic subject of endless feedback rather than a
Platonic knower of ideals. The demand for realism, also, became an
appetite for the spectacular results of simulation per se. Simulated
cities became sites for a new kind of hyper-reality, both in the sense
of their intensely detailed duplication of the physical and in terms of
their acting as increasingly autonomous substitutes for the real. The
replacement of physical models and film by digitally scanned environments and digital renderings have further widened the scope for
hyper-realistic spectacle, whether in the form of animated films that
are choreographed in order to produce particular effects of motion,
or interactive spaces controlled, in the manner of games, through a
set of rules by which users move through the space. Although potentially neutral banks of visual and spatial information, the models,
in practice, need to be organized in particular ways in order to simulate the effects of the real and reach a general audience, where they
can be consumed as digital, cinematic media.
The Agency of Drawing and the Digital Process
Andrew Atwood, University of Southern California
(Mis)Behaviors of Drawing
Kelly Bair, University of Illinois at Chicago
(Mis)Behaviors of Drawing outlines a series of statements that reposition analog drawing methodologies as a necessary accomplice
to the ubiquitous digital methodologies that exist within contemporary practice and academia. While some of the statements challenge the conventional role of analog drawing, they do so not by
dismissing the technique of production itself, but by questioning
the agency of the artifact that is ultimately produced. The statements suggest that analog drawing paired with digital techniques
challenge established drawing conventions in an effort to produce
a new language for architectural representation. The intentional
misuse of architectural conventions in analog and digital hybrids
such as view, orientation, projective geometries, and line weight,
suggests variable perceptions of the work, liberating drawing from
a contracted or representational document intended for building.
Instead, drawing becomes a generative design tool, a conceptual
narrative device, and in some cases, more closely calibrated to a
3-dimensional physical construct than a 2-dimensional sheet. Collectively, the statements summarize a catalog of selected analog
and digital methodologies from both academics and practitioners
who replace novelty of technique in favor of familiar processes
of production that when unconventionally choreographed yield
unique drawing agendas within the discipline of architecture.
Drawing the Line; or Surrender, Surrender, but Don’t
Give Yourself Away...
Dora Epstein Jones, Southern California Institute of Architecture
“Drawing the Line” explores the basic critical settings that still guide
our thinking about drawing despite the advent and acceptance of
the computer and other tools used in exploratory and generative
architectural work. Thinking beyond long-held dichotomies of tool
to outcome, and how to what, this essay recognizes the work of
current architects who draw as architecture itself. Describing them
as “somewhats” and “somehows,” to evoke an emerging and unnamed sensibility, this essay emphasizes and asserts the primacy
of exploratory drawing in architecture’s discipline – not as a strategy for moving away from authorship but as fundamental, central
and ever-lasting.
The Stylus Vector
Michael Young, The Cooper Union
The following paper explores the changing conditions in the mediation of architectural representation between manual and digital
techniques, explicitly drawing and the conditions of the line. The
paper discusses three key differences between the two systems
with a specific focus of the investigation on the relations between
geometry and aesthetics. The three issues are measure, scale, and
visualization. These three conditions are pursued in both their
traditional understanding in architectural representation and the
changes that occur in a digital environment. This discussion includes a brief look into the nature of NURBS curvature, the design
practices that developed early surface modeling software, and the
differences in the goals of these practices in relation to architecture. Included in the paper is also a set of digital drawings produced by the author. These are seen as part of an experiment in the
potentials of aesthetic questions raised by digital representation.
If the techniques of developing and manipulating a representation
have radically changed, what conceptual and aesthetic ties do we
still have back into the traditions of art and architecture, and what
novel potentials might be opened through digital mediation.
Fran Leadon, City College of New York
Utopias/Dystopias: From the Progressive Era to a
Sustainable Future
The On-Again Off-Again Romance Between Nature
and Technology in Healthcare Settings
This paper characterizes the decades of the progressive era (18901920), their challenges, optimisms, and investments in infrastructure. From a succinct discussion of utopian and dystopian novels
and their relevance to late 19th century cities, I then explore their
relevance to the early progressive era from the 1893 Columbian
exposition in Chicago to the 1901 Pan-American exposition in Buffalo, New York. I characterize the challenges for architects in this
era when the focus was on urban-scaled engineering projects and
architects were engaged in the expressive aspects of the urban environment that underscored their limitations in the rapidly changing technological realm. At the turn of the 21st century, architects
again find themselves as a similar junction. Urbanized countries
consume more energy and produce more greenhouse gases than
un-urbanized ones, but within urbanized countries, dense urban
centers consume as much as 30% less energy than the suburbs or
rural areas. Cities are struggling to invest wisely in their urban infrastructure and are trying to re-create themselves as denser, more
efficient centers of innovation and creativity. To engage in this discussion, architects and planners need to understand the deep historic roots associated with these challenges and to prioritize the
intersection of the human aspects of design with the more familiar
aesthetic and technological issues of design.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the relative influence and
dominance of technology and nature in the development of healthcare facilities in recent history. The history of healthcare design
over the last 100 years can be segmented into four eras that are
characterized by different attitudes towards technology and nature: the progressive era, the modernist era, the era of scientific
humanism, and the era of evidence-based design. The Progressive
era began in the mid-1850s and is associated with the Nightingale
prototype. Among the design objectives of the period were the
pervasiveness of natural light and ventilation. Hospitals of the Modernist era were often rendered in the International Style. These
hospitals evolved into large, block buildings with minimal daylight
in the central areas due to the deep floor plate. The era of Scientific
Humanism was a reaction to the technological emphasis of the previous epoch. Designers during this period attempted to produce
environments that were softer, and more residential in character.
Our current hospital epoch, the Evidence-based Design era, uses
science to inform the architecture of healing environments and describe the impact of nature. Although many hospitals in the United
States still reflect the modernist vernacular of deep floor plates
and long, double-loaded corridors, most new hospitals have been
significantly influenced by Evidence-based Design.
If nature and technology are the primary predictors of the future of
health care design, their on-again, off-again relationship in healthcare settings may be self-resolving. Our simultaneous desire for
the most advanced technology and the most untainted nature are
intensifying. This approach is currently expressed in the form of
technological sustainability and biophilic healing, concepts that
will likely be the hallmark of healthcare design in developed countries for the next half century.
Marie-Alice L’Heureux, University of Kansas
From Orthographic to Eccentric: Tall Architecture of
Extremes
Terri Boake, University of Waterloo
Height has long served as a benchmark for progress as it relates to
the built manifestation of advancements in engineering and architectural technology. The past 100 years are marked by major advances in the construction of tall buildings. This paper will look at
the architectural ramifications of changes in the structural form of
tall buildings. Building references will span early framing systems
such as those used in the Woolworth Building to more eccentric
diagrid systems. The impact of the destruction of the World Trade
Towers will be examined for its impact on current practices in the
design of SuperTall buildings. The material nature of the structural
system, the emergence of wind engineering and questions of redundancy in design will also be included.
Mardelle Shepley, Texas A&M University
Evaluating Progressivism: A Critique of Biomimetic
Architecture
Wynn Buzzell, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The following discourse considers biomimicry as a progressive
trend, and aims to examine its validity and relevance, particularly
as it relates to architecture. Establishment of validity is accomplished through examination of its historical context, definition of
its typologies and methodologies, taxonomic categorization of its
terminology, a discussion of its contemporary portrayal, and provision of a series of illustrative examples to augment the observations offered. These observations, characterizations, and conclusions, will be discussed through conceptual consideration of how
“second nature” and humanities innate biophilic tendencies have
given rise to biomimetic architectural methodologies. Particular
attention is given to the concept of “second nature” and related
ideas which deal with mankind’s perception of its connectedness
to nature. This connectedness is discussed as it relates to the ways
humankind imitates nature. Conclusions aim to define and clarify
the semantics, typologies and methodologies of biomimicry.
Advanced Composite Fabrication Technologies for
Architecture
Michael Silver, Mike Silver Architects
In-situ Processing of Thermoplastic Composites for
Large-Scale Structure
Anne Roberts, Automated Dynamics
Robert Langone, Automated Dynamics
Around for many, many years, composite materials have been on a
long and interesting evolution. Although rarely recognized, the origin of man-made (or engineered) composites actually has its roots
in architecture. From Egyptian times, straw has been used as an
additive to the clay brick-making process providing both strength
(resistance to cracking) as well as the ability to speed drying of the
clay and reduce the occurrence of loss during the firing process.
By the mid twentieth century, aggressive investment and development of fiber reinforced plastics for the emerging aerospace industry marked a period of tremendous progress for these materials –
particularly marked by impressive gains in performance. The use
of composite materials has been steadily growing ever since as the
various benefits of these materials (most notably their high-strength
and light-weight) have been utilized in many industries. The materials are now synonymous with aerospace, where weight savings
are critical. Here today, advanced manufacturing technologies are
being used to build composite structures for high performance applications such as Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II (The Joint
Strike Fighter) and Boeing Commercial Aircraft’s 787. Here, composites are being used to replace aluminum and steel due to their
high strength-to-weight ratio.
Laminar Folds: Fabric Structure Molds to Jigs
David Hill, North Carolina State University
Laura Garofalo, University at Buffalo, SUNY
By illustrating the design and assembly process of a glass-fiber composite pavilion, this paper considers various production strategies
and constraints, and offers alternatives to conventional static molding processes for producing textile composite panels. The pavilion
is designed to register environmental conditions along the Erie Canal, and it is a demonstration project that intertwines handcraft and
digital fabrication methods in order to test textile composites’ ability
to act simultaneously as structure and enclosure. The research compares traditional carved molds and vacuum-bagging techniques to
versatile wire-strung jigs that can be reconfigured to create variation in panel form. The text explains both compressive and tensile
stringing methods used to shape the supple woven fabrics.
Focusing on the molding process, the project examines the potentials and shortcomings of textile composites as an architectural
material, and it offers an unconventional approach to panel fabrication. Textile composite materials offer promising possibilities for
architecture, particularly in mass-produced, panelized applications.
Lightweight and rigid, textile composites exhibit high strength-toweight ratios that exceed more common structural materials such
as steel, concrete, and wood. But, several factors—such as high material costs, lack of standardized performance characteristics, and
specialized production methods—have contributed to composites’
limited use. However, these same characteristics make this an ideal
material for a process and form that are not defined or dependent
on standardization such as that explored in the Flow Pavilion.
Becoming Computational: Restructuring/ Reconsidering
Pedagogy Towards a (More) Computational Discipline
Chris Beorkrem, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Nicholas Senske, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Bootstrapping a Computational Discourse
Maya Przybylski, University of Waterloo
This paper discusses work from System Stalker Lab, a third year
undergraduate design studio taught at the University of Waterloo.
System Stalker Lab is an introductory exploration of design computing, aiming to instill awareness of the key structures and processes
inherent in a design practice inclusive of computational strategies
and techniques. The studio also seeks to seed a computationally
oriented design culture within the school by clarifying and speculating on the opportunities existing within computing in relationship to
architectural design. Such a practice requires that designers expand
their notion of digital methodologies to include the fundamental
paradigms of computer science. The focus of the paper is on the first
phase of work carried out in the studio, which is committed to building a workable foundation in algorithmic thinking, representation,
programming and design – core skills required for working within
a computational context. The described process exposes students
to the skills necessary for the conceptualization, design, and execution of a project operating within a computational discourse. Having
completed the first, highly structured phase of the studio, students
are enabled to continue to learn independently and to employ computational design in more open design projects.
Computation as an Ideological Practice
Nathaniel Zuelzke, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Trevor Patt, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Jeffrey Huang, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
For computation to become an integral part of architectural design,
it must be recognized as an ideological practice. Insofar as it requires
explicit, precise formalizations of the factors which shape any given
project, computation is a strong assertion of an author’s ability to
solve a problem. Becoming computational involves acknowledging
this agency and the ways in which it differs from conventional paradigms of authorship, and assessing its impact in the design process.
This paper presents computation within the framework of a yearlong Masters-level design studio offered at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. The studio brief and assumptions
are explained and the notion of a “computational engine” is introduced as an evolving document which clarifies its authors’ intents.
Within the studio, the creation of an engine begins with a parametric
site analysis or dynamic mapping of the existing context to construct an understanding of the site which possesses a strong authorial agenda. The temporal, multi-scalar, and diagrammatic nature of
the engine are discussed.
By considering solution space, computational workflows are contrasted with conventional ones. Whereas conventional solution
space is largely unstructured and underexplored, the relational,
combinatorial nature of computational solution space makes it both
unknowable in advance yet efficient to explore. The integration of
evaluation metrics and feedback systems into the computational engine further increases this efficiency without diminishing authorial
will. Finally, some pitfalls are considered, the responsibilities of an
author are discussed, and the mechanisms that computation has to
mediate these concerns are recapitulated.
Ultimately, computation should not be viewed as an end in itself,
but rather as an ideological practice which engenders criticality
and promotes innovation.
Computational Design Methods
David Lee, Clemson University
The ACSA Digital Aptitudes Conference celebrates 100 years of
architectural discourse. Of parallel importance to the theme of
this session, the event will also mark the 50th anniversary of the
internet’s conception. Indeed, Licklider’s concept of the ‘Galactic
Network’ marked a revolutionary shift in thinking about how data
sets could be managed and was followed by a series of influential
publications that collectively laid the groundwork for the Age of
Information.
While computation is not inherently about digital tools, the advent of the Information Age – spawned by the internet and fueled
by technology such as, mobile computing, social networking, and
GPS – is largely responsible for the current necessity for computational thought in design. Computational thinking being compulsory
to the various disciplines that employ information processing, it
is critical that architecture schools adopt an attitude that computational thinking be compulsory to the education of the architect.
Moreover, it must be engrained in every aspect of a design education, from beginning to advanced design as well as in practice. This
paper presents a series of concepts regarding the role of computation in design, specifically architectural, education. Accompanying
these concepts are a series of examples of how they have been
carried out in courses I have delivered at all levels of an architectural curriculum.
Integrated BIM and Parametric Modeling: Course Samples with Multiple Methods and Multiple Phases
Wei Yan, Texas A&M University
This paper presents well designed modeling samples for teaching integrated BIM and Parametric Modeling in a graduate course.
The samples range from parametric curves, recursive solid models, to parametric Building Information Models. Implicit and explicit
parametric modeling methods are introduced to the class. Multiple
phases of one sample are also exercised. Computer programming
is studied as a powerful method for modeling. The objective of integrating the two powerful modeling methods is to foster critical design thinking, which is enhanced by the understanding of the major
advantages of BIM and parametric modeling: Creativity, Constructability, and Computability (3C’s). The paper describes the samples
and methods in detail and compares the different learning focuses
and limitations of the multiple methods.
FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2012 - 11:00AM - 12:30PM
Automatism, or, Post-Medium Architecture and Post-War
Art
Sean Keller, Illinois Institute of Technology
Software: Jack Burnham and the Medium as System
The Solaris Mirror
This essay focuses on Jack Burnham’s 1970-exhibition Software,
the influence of Gestalt psychology under the leadership of György Kepes at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and
the advent of a technologically generated post-medium condition
parallel to Stanley Cavell’s “automatism.” Set in this light, Cavell’s
idea of automatism resonates strongly with media and new media
theories, in particular Burnham’s “systems esthetics” and Marshall
McLuhan’s idea of the technological “extension.” Through the concept of the “haptic unconscious,” I argue that Burnham’s medium
defying systems aesthetics bears greater political resonances than
Cavell’s automatism. In conclusion, I look to The Architecture Machine Group, MIT’s “Seek,” a work of art in Software involving a
computer, robotic arm, an ersatz city in flux, and gerbils, which
played out the strictures of an earlier stage of global biopolitical
order.
Design is a mirror. This is a fundamental theme of Stanislaw Lem’s
1961 science fiction classic Solaris, in which he explores three distinct ‘automatic’ form generation paradigms: (1) abstraction, (2)
mimicry, and (3) the unconscious. Lem’s paradigms remain relevant today, as allegorical models for a range of approaches to the
open question of automatism in computational design practices. In
particular, his final category, the unconscious, evokes a new frontier for automatic design – one which our current digital tools are
only beginning to explore.
Charissa Terranova, University of Texas at Dallas
The Death of Film in Architecture
James Macgillivray, University of Michigan
Within architectural practice, the lopsided relationship between
cinema and architecture has prompted an evasion as response.
The notion of translation, of making a “cinematic” architecture, has
displaced the possibility of confrontation and replaced it with the
pursuit of mimesis. Unlike the modern painters who responded to
the photograph with an open abnegation of the realism it entailed,
architects in the age of film have consistently sought inspiration in
the greater synthetic powers of their cinematic rival. From Le Corbusier’s promenade architectural, to Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan
Transcripts, and recently Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid, the persistence of the cinematic analogy in architecture is to a certain extent
more important than its success or failure as a premise. Whether
or not the moving camera can in a satisfactory way be equated to
an ambulatory sequence through a building, or if an elevator’s trip
through disparate programs in section could be likened to a “jump
cut” is immaterial when faced with the resulting building. The persistence of this cinematic metaphor in architecture constitutes the
basis for this paper. That the base of the metaphor, the medium of
film, is in the last throes of a transmutation into video complicates
and at the same time transforms the architectural product. By looking at two recent cinemas that conceptually straddle the “death
of film” this paper will clarify how the metaphor works and outline
how cinematic buildings make their case. [On Steven Holl’s Linked
Hybrid Cinematèque and Thomas Leeser’s Museum of the Moving
Image.]
Luke Ogrydziak, Ogrydziak Prillinger Architects
Charles Setchell, USAID Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance
Digital and Analog Aptitudes in Emergency Shelter
Design and Fabrication
Bruce Johnson, University of Kansas
The Article discusses the flux between the Digital and Analog
realms in the design, fabrication and outcome of a Prototype Emergency Shelter as conceived in a third year “hands-on” architectural
design studio. The article examines the studio design process with
relationship to both the physical needs of victims and refugees
and with regard to fabrication and design development within the
architectural studio itself. Currently and in the recent past there
has been much emphasis on Crisis Architecture as it pertains to
the need for large quantities of housing for victims and refuges of
Hurricanes, Floods, War, Tsunamis, Earthquakes, etc. and humanmade disasters, this article illustrates the need for such housing
projects to examine the cultural requirements of privacy, family
function, and enclave or neighborhood development in temporary
housing communities such as to facilitate a sense of ownership and
personal/family pride. For both Professionals and Students, Crisis
architecture requires the study of not only the specific needs for
family and community housing during a Crisis, but also of the ability of various government agencies, volunteers, and even victims,
to be able to organize, construct, and to maintain society during
conditions that often manifest power outages and a complete lack
of communication interface. Increasingly Professionals and Design students flaunt advanced Digital interfaces for the study and
manufacture of buildings, components and models – the article illustrates that design is a hybrid of whatever means are available
and that Crisis architecture must adapt in the field in order to best
serve society in a time of need.
Bruce A. Johnson is an Assistant Professor at the University of
Kansas. He graduated with honors from Kansas State University
in 1991 where he was awarded the American Institute of Architects
Certificate of Merit. In 1995 he received a scholarship to attend
Columbia University where he was a recipient of the Lowenfisch
Memorial Prize for best thesis (The Split-Level Sod House). He has
practiced in Kansas City for firms such as Populous, Shaughnessy,
Fickel and Scott, PGAV, and International Architects Atelier, and
in Chicago for Stanley Tigerman and Margaret McCurry. In 1991 he
was awarded the prestigious Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Bachelor
of Architecture Traveling Fellowship, which afforded research and
travel to study sacred architecture in the Middle East, North Africa
and Europe. His current research interests include Alternate Architectural Practice and Direct Fabrication as it pertains to the radical
integration of Structure, Systems and Emergent Materials.
Haitian Rebuilding Initiative: Technological Solutions
That Hinge on Empowerment
Juintow Lin, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Michael Fox, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
This paper outlines a series of studios and seminars focused on
permanent housing solutions in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The project hinges on enabling Haitians through
a housing project that that is built entirely with local labor and a
minimum of imported materials. An entire house is constructed
almost solely with a unique resin-coated corrugated paper core
sandwiched between magnesium board panels which are manufactured locally. The combination of local initiative and a uniquetechnology applied to the construction process enables the house
to be constructed within a very short time and at a very low cost.
The work has resulted in an initial prototype section of a house
constructed at the University campus in the United States and
the first full house completed in Haiti. From a project standpoint,
students learned to design schematic buildings within real material and budgetary constraints. They also were asked understand
real strategies for fabrication, delivery and assembly related to the
unique construction details that they developed. Students also had
to reconcile the global and ethical impacts of their design decisions
and confront real world political situations related to disaster relief
housing. In addition, students learned to apply their discipline-specific construction and materials skills to an interdisciplinary problem where cost and simplicity are primary constraints.
Learning from Disaster: Lessons from CommunityBased Design in Haiti
John Comazzi, University of Minnesota
Jim Lutz, University of Minnesota
This paper will chronicle a unique disaster assistance/learning
abroad program developed in the wake of the catastrophic 2010
earthquake in Haiti, and the pedagogical lessons gleaned from this
extraordinary community-based design experience.
The program began in the early spring of 2010 with two “factfinding” visits to Haiti by five faculty members from the School of
Architecture at the University of Minnesota in collaboration with
two international NGOs providing relief services there. Following
these site visits, a group of faculty, administrators, and research
fellows worked to develop a coordinated, long-term plan for a new
curricular model focused on public interest design associated with
post-disaster reconstruction efforts.
LEARNING in the CLASSROOM
Recognizing the complex circumstances of working in a community recovering from disaster, we used the first half of the spring
2011 term to pilot a seven-week, graduate-level seminar organized
to build capacity among a group of students and faculty preparing
for the program abroad. The first portion of the seminar was spent
contextualizing the larger historical, cultural, social, and natural
systems in Haiti through the creation of a Research Manual and
course website that became an online repository for the research
and analysis created by the students. Following the production
of the Research Manual, the focus of the seminar shifted to the
production of a 277-page Field Guide that concentrated more directly on the information and data most important for supporting
the community-based design work by those students and faculty
traveling to Haiti.
Open Disaster Recovery Continued
LEARNING in the FIELD
The on-site portion of the program consisted of a seven-week studio and seminar operated out of space provided by Architecture
for Humanity (AFH) in Port-au-Prince. Two major projects were
identified by AFH with students working both individually and in
teams depending on the complexity and schedule associated with
each task. The first was collaborative work on the development of
a master plan for Santo, a new community for 500 families (currently under construction) located near Léogâne, the epicenter
of the quake. The second was LaConcorde, an orphanage school
in the Carrefour area of Port-au-Prince. Other work included the
mapping of economic corridors, a model and O&M manual for a
large composting toilet building planned for a school in Cité du
Soleil, and classroom and sustainability “menus” used for fundraising by AFH.
By conceiving of this community-based, learning abroad experience as a comprehensive program we, as faculty, were forced to
rethink and rework the traditional models of design pedagogy and
curriculum. Upon reflection, the experience has provided numerous lessons, architectural and otherwise, about the future of design
education which places a greater emphasis on participatory, community-engaged scholarship. This paper will delve more deeply
into the specific projects completed by the students in Haiti as well
as the major lessons learned regarding the future of architecture
education in the context of public interest design.
reCOVER: Transitional Disaster Recovery Housing
Anselmo Canfora, University of Virginia
Project reCOVER brings together academic, civic, and professional
organizations in a collaborative enterprise to study and build disaster recovery housing for marginalized communities. An essential
part of a multi-sectorial approach, partnerships with non-governmental organizations and humanitarian professionals with experience in assisting marginalized communities rebuild after natural
disasters are an essential part of this research project. While assisting communities improve their built environment and helping advance building technologies, architecture and engineering
students are directly involved in applied research and real world
experiences as an important part of their education and engaged
scholarship. New applications in the area of building design and
construction emerging out of this research underscores the importance of translational research in the architecture academy.
Open: Urbanism
Tim Love, Northeastern University
From the Park to Parking: The Evolution of Suburban
Mobility
Ian Baldwin
Suburbanization began with mid-nineteenth century developments
such as Llewellyn Park, New Jersey and Riverside, Illinois, exclusive
oases of romantic landscape that would pleasantly contrast with
the bustle, noise and pollution of the city. In the early twentieth
century, streetcar suburbs democratized the concept, providing
middle-class families with closely-spaced detached homes on gridded plots. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Garden City ideals underlay
the development of model (though by no means typical) suburbs
like Radburn, New Jersey and Columbia, Maryland. Central to their
designs were superblocks of common green space, extensive pedestrian pathways and -- in the designers’ minds, at least-- a subservient role for the auto.
Thus the spatial practices we refer to with the inadequate word
“suburban” continue to evolve after 160 years. We would do well
to examine the modern suburb and exurb not as a placeless anticity but simply the most expedient and affordable version of urbanism in an era of unquestioned auto reliance.
We know that the modern suburb is defined by capacious asphalt
roadways and sidewalks that are narrow and exposed when they
exist at all. But we know little about how that practice become a
defining standard.
Automobility and suburbanization enjoy a mutually supportive legend that has obscured and oversimplified the origins of the physical patterns that dominate 21st century America. This paper attempts a first step toward excavating those origins by addressing
the relationship between suburbs and cars at their meeting point:
the street.
Laid Bare: Debating an Expanded Role for
Instrastructure at the World Trade Center
Robert Arens, California Polytechnic State University
One result of the tragic circumstances of the World Trade Center’s demise was the possibility to rethink the site, not from the
ground up, but from 70 feet below ground level to the depth of
Lower Manhattan’s bedrock. After months of debris removal, a
space of tremendous potential emerged from beneath the rubble:
an enormous sixteen-acre void made possible by a unique foundation system. This powerful space, which came to be known as “the
bathtub”, was a realm made sacred by the tragedy that played out
on its surface. The fact that the void was laced with infrastructure
in the form of subway and commuter rail lines made it even more
resonant. Recent remembrance ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the attacks, the opening of the September 11 Memorial,
and the near topping-out of the tallest tower on the site are reasons to reassess the rebuilding effort at the WTC. This paper focuses on the project’s potential to involve the unique subterranean
and infrastructural aspects of the site in its approach to urbanism.
This paper examines how the subterranean world of the WTC site
(and, by extension, Lower Manhattan), once laid bare, became the
inspiration for framing not only the memory of 9/11, but all major
land use decisions at Ground Zero. Discussed are redevelopment
proposals from 2001 that explored the resultant void for its potential to lend conceptual and physical form to the site and in doing
so reveal the subterranean world and its infrastructure, aspects of
life so vital to the city of New York yet so invisible on its surface.
These proposals, emotional and quixotic, inspired stakeholders, the
public, the master planner, and the memorial designer to give serious consideration to the role of infrastructural elements such as
tower footprints, slurry walls, bathtubs, bedrock, rail lines and subway lines in future plans for the site. Also discussed are the forces
that ultimately led to a diminished role for infrastructure in the final
master plan.
Although unique conditions at the WTC site make it difficult to
fully generalize the project’s lessons, the engagement of the spatial
and programmatic opportunities below Lower Manhattan’s streets
have certainly contributed to broader discussions about infrastructure and urbanism. Discussed are projects such as New York’s High
Line and Low Line (Delancey Underground) that engage infrastructure in the creation of urban space and expand the spatial section of public realm to include the area both above and below the
street. These projects, the author suggests, have been nudged into
existence by the debate for an expanded role for infrastructure at
the World Trade Center.
Other Urbanisms: A Scalar Approach Towards Pervious Design
Jen Maigret, University of Michigan
Maria Arquero de Alarcon, University of Michigan
This paper fosters the imaginative capacity of visions for Detroit’s
future urbanism by understanding the city through the lens of water. This is a distinctly different approach to the pervasive discussions of shrinking cities, centered around the “demise” of the
Motor City and wistful reminiscence of Motown’s heyday. Whereas
current debate is mired in circular reasoning—the solution to Detroit’s overwhelming vacancy is less vacancy—our work positions
the consideration of urban storm water management as a key tool
for generative design strategies that encourage nested, scalar approaches and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Open: Diversity
Brian Kelly, University of Maryland
Opportunities & Challenges: Learning Experience from
International Architectural Students in the US
Xiao Hu, University of Idaho
During the past two decades, the number of architectural students
from foreign countries in American universities has significantly increased. There are more students from Asia and South America
who are working on undergraduate and graduate architectural
degrees. Also, many educational exchange programs in different
institutions bring more foreign students to architectural studios
during a particular period of time ranging from three months to
one year.
The increasing participation of international students in American’s architectural studios has presented new challenges for the
architectural curricula in each school. For example, most schools’
curricula tend to be homogenized because of the NAAB accreditation requirements with special emphases on studio trainings
with the application of history, technology, structures, theory, and
other technical and academic topics deemed necessary for an understanding of architecture and its role in society. However, most
international students, who come from developing countries with
high school diplomas or college degrees, are normally trained in a
top-down teacher-centered model promoting introspective learning, which is different from the bottom-up student-centered model
of knowledge transmission promoting extroverted learning used in
American schools.
In addition, the different social-cultural settings and language barrier add more difficulties for international students. In fact, there
are wide disparities in the expectations in different nations with
regard to what their architectural students are supposed to accomplish. These disparities include different curricular objectives,
assessment criteria, and student behavior of conductions. When
arriving at schools in the US, international students are often thrust
into studios where they are expected to complete academic tasks
that they may be completely unaware of. This can be very difficult
for international students, especially if their confidence with the
use of the English language in academic communication is still not
strong. Problems with international students’ learning process in
studios can wreak havoc on their academic performance, even if
they actually have insightful ideas to express.
In current architectural research, studies have mainly focused on
general views of architectural pedagogical methods and the majority of mainstream architectural students. Some have discussed
gender, racial and age influences. But the needs of internationals
students gain limited attention, especially in terms of their perception and experience.
Calling for more diverse engagement in architectural teaching and
learning, this paper investigate the learning style preferences of international students majored in architecture and their perceptions
of American curricular model through interviews with individual
international students from three public universities in the US. The
purpose of this paper is to investigate cognitive and environmental
dimensions of international students’ learning experience and how
the content and form of American architectural curricula influence
their learning experience.
This paper is a preliminary report of an on-going research project.
Initial findings show that the most common challenges for international students in design studios are: language, acculturation,
communication and socialization with American students, interpretation of the role of faculty, and passive learning attitude. The
research findings also suggest that students from different ethnic groups demonstrate different perceptions and visions for the
American curricula and thus indicate different learning outcomes.
The Predicament of Diversity through the
Architectural Pedagogy of Beginning
Shima Mohajeri, Texas A&M University
Abstract—The architectural discourse on diversity suggests the inclusion of “other” for the sake of new social, cultural and typological constructs. The assimilation and repetition of exemplary structures derived from a multiplicity of historical and geographical
sources may nevertheless be reduced to an expression of banality
and inauthenticity in architectural design. However, this negativity
could be the beginning of a productive opening only if architecture
builds upon the idea of difference in its original depth and leaves
diversity at its surface.
Through the analysis of one example of the architectural
space of difference found in Steven Holl’s works, this paper theorizes difference not as a generator of diverse forms and types in
design but as an originator of ideas. The critical thinker Gilles Deleuze has discerned in difference the dynamic force to seize upon
newness through the “asymmetrical” repetition of ideas in their
“perpetual displacement.” A similar translation of difference into
architectural design in its state of beginning might bring originality
and authenticity to the work of architecture.
This paper aims to contribute a new pedagogical strategy for the
actualization of difference in design by studying the works of Holl
as he creatively repeats the patterns of modern aesthetic language
in rapport with Japanese and Persian representations of time and
space.
The paper concludes that architectural difference does not arise
from a tabula rasa but from the internal transformation of heterogeneous ideas in their fragmentary synthesis, which is more in resonance with the condition of globalization in architecture.
FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2012 - 2:00PM - 3:30PM
Brian Lonsway, Syracuse University
From Digital Materials To Self-Assembly
Skylar Tibbits, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
A new paradigm is upon us, one that challenges our notions of assembly by looking to transfer digital and computational information
from our design software and machine control through our physical methodologies of construction. The construction industry has
traditionally been plagued by analogue processes inherited from
the industrial revolution where raw materials are sent through machines and assembly sequences fighting tolerance, machine errors
and efficiency. On the contrary, information can now flow through
materials and embody adaptability and material computation, offering a new vision for construction where materials literally build
themselves. This is a new paradigm for designing and making, one
that offers the ability for self-assembling, self-repairing and replicating structures. This vision challenges our notions of the digital,
converting analogue processes into digital information transfer by
“computing-through-construction” and pointing towards new opportunities for manufacturing, construction and design tools.
Parallel Tracks: Digital | Analog Dialogue in Toy
Development
Jennifer Akerman, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Designers and fabricators have long understood their work to
be related, but distinct. Boundaries, some intuited, others legally
proscribed, dictate that designers establish the intent for a given
outcome, while fabricators generate the actual work or product.
That understanding is an action-based view, focusing on tasks performed by specific people or entities. We could shift our consideration towards the nature of work itself and state that there have
traditionally been two fields, interrelated but distinct: design and
craft. How are we to understand the changes to both of these fields
necessitated by the ways emerging methods, practices, and technologies are merging the two? This essay will discuss the digital
| analog convergence in design and fabrication as illustrated by
examples from a line of toys developed through the collaboration
of an architect and mechanical engineer. Our work considers questions of craft and fabrication, relying extensively on both digital and
tangible techniques in continual iterative dialogue. Also at hand is
a parallel consideration of the digital | analog convergence in the
realm of toy design, considering toys as objects designed for interaction and play. Our continued engagement in the convergence
of technology, material, and culture in the interest of design and
fabrication is a catalyst for speculations of what may come next.
Émission
Jordan Geiger, SUNY at Buffalo
More than its physical matter, architecture’s conditions - its determinants, performance, milieu, and multiple stakeholders - grow
ever more ethereal. The “ether” condition can be named as such
because of its entropic, expanding and hazy mixture of physical
and computational and other characteristics; and possibly for a resulting delirium in its movement past any paradigm in which any
of these parameters can lay dominant claim to its formation. Answering to an ever-expanding set of contemporary exigencies from
market crashes and shifting climates to globalized sources of building materials and the evolving influence of ubiquitous computing,
the built environment provokes speculation on its possible futures
that must lie far outside of typological or even scalar parameters. It
needs critical fictions as a means for planning tactically past choices
of utopic or dystopic scenarios, embracing instead a messy tangle
of new and future influences and a sober acceptance that analog
convergence recasts architects more like steampunk novelists or
design noir authors (to borrow here a term from Anthony Dunne).
These influences resemble the categories found in a building code
or current teaching curriculum, but in name only: cultural, technological, legal, material, to name a few. Upon further examination,
the nature of each has already so fundamentally transformed as to
demand speculation far past existing models of architect-consultant relationships or any mere new upskilling for young designers.
We need new methods now to participate in speculating on the
built environment’s future.
A Materiality of Agency//Speculations on the Impact of
Biological Computation on Materiality and Space
Nicole Koltick, Drexel University
Architects have traditionally viewed space as a static entity that is
defined, shaped, and enhanced through the use of material objects
that give form, structure and order to our daily existence. There
have been clear boundaries between inside and outside, delineation between distinct building materials, the program and the
project. But looking forward, is it possible that human interactions
with objects and environments might be drastically re-envisioned,
encompassing a more malleable and adaptive view of space and
materiality? In this paper, I will explore how potential human interactions with space, objects and information may be transformed
in the future through analyzing recent developments in biological
computing, synthetic biology and object-oriented philosophy. To
start, I propose an expanded definition of agency with respect to
materials and objects. How can we begin to formulate conceptions of agency as they relate to objects or new categories such as
object-beings1? Recent writings from object oriented philosophers
may offer a way forward through a novel reframing of the conventional pattern of interactions between humanity, materials and
environments. Object oriented ontology allows for a total reconsideration of the relationships between ourselves, object-beings, and
object-object associations. Humans are highly complex “machines”
Beyond Digital Continued
operating within a dense network of dynamic experiences, yet currently our spatial organizations are highly static, rigid and inefficient. The capacity of materials, networks and objects to possess
emergent capabilities and behaviors requires our acknowledgement of this agency, and new relationships with space will likely
be defined not by static physical boundaries, but rather by a series
of negotiations, signals and exchanges. Space may well take on
a more active role that transcends utility, function and normative
or fashion-driven aesthetics in favor of a shifting, responsive condition rich with varying emotions, perceptions, temporalities and
interactions.
In complex systems, extremely sophisticated forms of higher-level
order at the global scale can emerge from relatively simple, local
interactions among individual agents. This ordering is a phenomenon seen across many systems and scales in biology, from the
macroscopic to the cellular level. Engaging in the practice of design at these newly accessible scales might allow for a variety of information and intelligence to be configured into the materials and
objects that we interact with. Towards these ends, biologically-inspired mechanisms of scaling, information reception and signaling
can help us understand what makes a system resilient, complex
and able to evolve. Such a shift towards a non-human centered
understanding of systems and their interrelationships will become
increasingly important as our environments and materiality expand
their agency.
Emerging Materials, Renewable Energy, and Ecological
Design (1)
Drawing Energy Abu Dhabi: Critical Reflections
Lisa Moffitt, University of Edinburgh
Photosynthetic Energy and Ecological Recycling: The
Architectural Potential of Algae Cultivation
Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
Energy is central to sustainable discourse and yet it is often taught
in a static, quantitative manner that denies it a more productive
role in design thinking. As a design tool, energy’s behavioral abstraction and invisibility overwhelms, leading to conceptual inaccessibility. But it is only by engaging with energy as a spatial entity with organizational consequences and physiological impacts
that it can take on agency in design thinking. In Autumn 2010, I
taught Drawing Energy Abu Dhabi, a third year design studio that
explored energy’s spatial and organizational consequences using
the act of drawing energetic exchanges as a design generator.
This paper is not an exploration of the aims and ambitions of the
studio but a critical reflection of the gaps and misfires that occurred
within the course. A reflection of these gaps reflects larger gaps in
energetic thinking within the discipline. After generally introducing
the Drawing Energy studio structure, the paper explores how contemporary educators and practitioners engage with the topic of
energy as a “spatial project” (Ghosn 2009). More specifically, the
paper provides an expanded platform for discussing the behavior
of energy, its scale and extents of operation, the taxonomic limitations that constrain thinking about it, and the representational
opportunities that have the potential to deepen and enrich its role
in design. The paper explores energy/matter exchanges at a foundational level in order to help build a shared understanding of more
subtle ways in which energy informs the built environment.
Biographical Statement: Lisa Moffitt is a Lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Edinburgh. Lisa studied, practiced
and taught in the US and Canada before moving to Edinburgh. In
addition to teaching, she currently runs an independent practice,
Studio Moffitt, which recently completed a design/build off grid
house in rural Canada. She is also completing a PhD in Design on
Drawing Energy, which looks to establish a disciplinary vocabulary,
tools and techniques for discussing and designing spaces that foreground thermodynamic principles.
EcoArchitectural Machines
Brook Muller, University of Oregon
Ecological imperatives provide impetus to develop new materials,
ones that are efficient, that adapt to environmental stimuli, minimize negative impacts on human and ecosystem health, etc. Yet
it is not simply a matter of what assemblies we might devise and
evaluate: a deeply ecological architecture calls for new forms of
‘accountability,’ new modes of describing materials, assemblies
and their co-dependencies. Such an approach would emphasize
projects as open experiments in the ‘arrangements’ of the living
and nonliving. This essay considers how conceptual predispositions affect our ability to describe ecological materials and environments. It provides a speculative basis for aligning heterogeneous,
event-laden ecologies and dynamic architectures of the city. It asks
how urban interventions as hybrids of architectural fabrication and
ecological regeneration might support a trajectory of enhanced
human and biological diversity. Lastly it considers a proposal for
an eco-architectural machine, a modest intervention that could be
replicated throughout urban public spaces and that collapses architecture and ecology, establishes correspondences at vastly different scales, and aligns multi-sensory awareness, sociability and
dramatically enhanced biological performance.
Designers are expanding the definition of Ecological Design by incorporating biological processes and systems directly in their design. Systems like green roofs and living machines have proved
themselves invaluable for reducing a design’s overall environmental footprint. Algae-based energy is almost 30 times less expensive
per unit than energy generated by photovoltaic technology, and
algae biodiesel can already be produced at market-competitive
prices. With its efficient energy production and potential for improving the health of the surrounding air and water, algae cultivation is the next photosynthetically driven system primed for architectural integration.
This paper examines the various methods of algae farming, its opportunities to support cyclical systems, its design implications, and
its integration into urban space. The paper will support its findings
with examples from built and speculative projects that centrally
feature algae farming: The WPA 2.0 Competition winner, Carbon
T.A.P.; Metropolitan Magazine’s 2011 Design Competition winner,
Process-Zero: Retrofit Resolution; the Blenheim Municipal Wastewater Plant in New Zealand; a Algae Photo-Bioreactor in Klötze,
Germany; and the Green Power House in Columbia Falls, MT.
Cultivation methods range from low-tech open ponds to computer-automated bioreactors. Each method varies the balance of
yields, land, water, and energy usage, susceptibility to contamination, initial costs, and operating costs. Each system has very different design implications. Algae can effectively sequester carbon dioxide and treat wastewater while increasing its growth efficiency.
These properties give it great potential for integration with other
intrastructural systems like wastewater systems. These synergies
can be developed into closed-loop systems within the built environment, resulting in lower CO2 emissions, nutrient reuse and efficient energy generation.
These multi-layered benefits of algae cultivation initiate a rethinking of the relationships between sunlight, alternative energy and
material recycling. This paper argues these new relationships have
strong potential for future development of algae-integrated systems. Possibilities include integration into urban landscapes, existing building stock and power generation on the neighborhood
scale. Challenges include economically down-scaling algal systems, onsite harvesting and the logistics of combining new infrastructures.
To conclude, algae’s high ecological performance generates a
multi-fold contribution towards improving the health of the environment. With its combination of carbon neutral/negative energy
production and ecological recycling of environmental pollutants,
the integration of algae cultivation in the built environment opens
a new dimension to ecological design.
Emerging Materials (1) Continued
REIs: Renewable Energy Infrastructures
Chris Ford, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
If the architectural discipline is to reclaim its influence on the built
environment, then it must conceive of research-led and performance-based solutions that address issues beyond aesthetic finishes and the market-serving provision of habitable space. Furthermore, as issues and problems relating to the built environment
become ever more layered and complex, architect-led interdisciplinary teams will become necessary to address them.
One such opportunity for leadership is infrastructure design, although it is historically shaped by the engineering discipline. However, if we share Buckminster Fuller’s observation that “society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not
realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking,”
then as the discipline of Engineering requires higher modes of specialized thinking, architects remain in an advantageous position to
continue to act comprehensively, and engage both technological
and infrastructural innovation in a critical way. The challenge for
architects first lies in the recognition of their own comprehensive
propensities, and then the deliberate engagement with true issues
of infrastructural performance and associative yields.
While the discipline of engineering continues to generate re-productive and mono-functional infrastructural solutions, then architects, qualified by their comprehensive propensities, are positioned
as “impact players” for conceiving of multi-functional infrastructural solutions to address the demonstrated needs of society. The
design of new infrastructure typologies, especially those with hybridized qualities, drastically changes the position, contribution,
and responsibility of the professional disciplines involved in their
creation. To this end, architects should no longer wait for an invitation to produce viable infrastructure solutions.
The opportunity must be claimed.
Our university-based design / research team has identified and focused on a problem that is defined by renewable energy production, electrical transmission, and urban land use policy. We believe
a Renewable Energy Infrastructure (REI) addresses this problem in
an effective way and ultimately surpasses the prevailing practices
of each of these three identified areas.
An REI seeks to generate renewable energy megawatts (MW) at
an industrial scale through the simultaneous harnessing of wind,
solar, and geothermal resources, but within an integrated, holistic,
and free-standing facility positioned in an urban environment. An
REI is not a retrofit of a pre-existing architectural condition, but
rather is conceived as a new infrastructure typology to be owned
and operated by an electrical utility for purposes of servicing users
in high-population areas.
Infrastructure cannot be fully realized in ideological form alone.
If we are truly interested in affecting either incremental improvements to existing infrastructures, or the prognostication of a fundamentally new infrastructure type, then we must proceed with a
heightened seriousness in our design intelligence, a dire sense of
urgency in the timeliness that we work, and focused clarity upon
the effect that we want to induce, just as the technological innovators Brunelleschi, Wright, and Saarinen have done before us.
Open: Community (2)
Activating Agency: Assessing Impacts of Global
Collaborative Practices
Millennials and Design Education
The question that anyone engaging global collaborative practice
faces is whether the impacts of their work are more positive than
negative. At one presentation I gave early in the process of developing a health center in rural Tanzania, a Brazilian woman asked
me if I spoke the local language. I stated that I did not and she proclaimed that I had no right to design something for a community if
I didn’t speak their language.
All schools of design - including architecture, planning, industrial
design and other allied disciplines - are communities made of faculty, staff and students. Of these groups, students are by far the
largest and most dynamic constituents. Entering the second decade of a new century, design academies find themselves shepherding a new and unique group through studios and classes, the
so-called Millennials. This generation is the first to have matured
with both the computer and the internet. They are distinct, in command, and leading the digital revolution around us. The authors of
this document come from different backgrounds and together they
ground this paper in both recent literature focused on both Millennials and design education, combined with surveys, focus groups
and other outreach. The authors organize this paper in response
to generalized findings on both the behavior characteristics and
personality traits of Millennials, dividing those into two categories:
those supporting design pedagogy and those challenging it. And
while other research has examined common behaviors and traits
that distinguish Millennials from previous generations at the same
age in different environments, this paper selects and discuses the
largely unexamined performance of Millennials within the context
of design education.
Michael Zaretsky, University of Cincinnati
Following three years of extensive research in the US and in Africa, I have come to realize that unquestionable contradictions are
inevitable when an educated American in a Midwestern university
is leading the design of a health center in rural Tanzania – a region
with fundamentally different cultural practices, languages, climate,
construction and context. But, I have also come to accept that if
we recognize this challenge and assume that we are going to make
mistakes along the way, we can still create something that is going
to have positive impacts for communities around the world.
The greatest realization is that while the communities with
whom we are working are gaining benefits, our students, colleagues, consultants and many others throughout our communities are benefiting in profound ways for this process. People
are becoming engaged and active within in collaborative practices within their own communities and communities abroad.
Richard Sweeney, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Darius Sollohub, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Architecture for the Public Good, A Problematic
Development Process
David Kratzer, Philadelphia University
Given public need, architecture can provide for social needs, effect
behavior and support social change. Often referred to as architecture for the “pubic good,” public service architecture can be defined as work built for public need without the incentive of financial
profit. Sandy Hirshen, past Chair of Berkeley Architecture program,
often referred to public service work as “a battle for an appropriate
architecture and for social equity.” He spoke of a “democratization
of design” condition where “a paying client and middlemen are interposed between the user and the designer” resulting in a severed
relationship between the architect and the users of their buildings.
Most students of architecture share an altruistic optimism about
social architecture. The process for bringing public service architecture into being, though, is extremely complex and controlled by
Hirshen’s political “middlemen.” Without an understanding of the
developmental processes and their effects on design, the architect
will be at a distinct disadvantage to better the world of public service architecture. This paper explores this underlying context in
chronicling the work of a homeless assistant center design project
completed by students at Philadelphia University.
1988–1997: Ambitions and Apprehensions of a “Digital Revolution”
John Stuart, Florida International University
Sunil Bald, Yale University
Eulogy to Paperless Studios: The Kernel for Pulsation
in Architecture
The Autonomous Nature of Creativity in Juxtaposition
to the New Structuralism
This presentation is both a eulogy to the paperless era, and a proposal for a new critical reception of digital design through a lens
of rhythmic perception; a hopeful look at the possibility for digital
design to move beyond mere instrumentality and engage with core
aspects of the discipline.
Creativity is independent of technology; it lies in the mind of the
designer and may be either augmented or hindered by the capabilities and limitations of digital software. For the purpose of argument, this paper will limit itself to the creation of complex form.
Fifty years ago complex forms involving double curvatures were
accomplished without the use of digital technology and through
the same basic strategies used today. The only difference is, since
the digital revolution of the 1990s, software allows the designer to
create form through the application of rules or parameters rather
than conceiving form wholly through inspiration, tradition and the
vernacular.
Eric Goldemberg, Florida International University
Paperless studios flourished during the early ‘90s propelled from
the digital hub of Columbia University and quickly expanded
throughout academia, infecting and inflecting the profession as
well as benefitting from the feedback process activated by pioneering practices such as Greg Lynn, Jesse Reiser, Hani Rashid,
and others. These architects overlapped design research practices
with studio pedagogy favored by the pervasive culture of digital
experimentation, and coupled by a fast culture of publications
leading to cycles of excess and consumption. New generations of
designers grew and multiplied the novel techniques afforded by
computational literacy, basking in the glory of a new found faith in
“technique based studios” whereby projects pushed a new craft, an
expertise in handling ever more complex geometrical calculations
and astounding effects. The decade was marked by the boundless
pursuit of new spatial sensations, freed from the constraints of Euclidean geometry and tired notions of typology. As a consequence
of such exuberant and often times overindulgent experimentation,
the conceptual breadth of digital design grew thinner and it has
been difficult ever since to develop new objectives for such work
beyond the physical pleasures of digital fabrication. The death of
paperless studios engendered the discourse of rhythmic affect.
Extreme Makeover; or How the F-Word Shaped
Contemporary Architecture
Dora Epstein Jones, Southern California Institute of Architecture
“Extreme Makeover” is a speculative essay connecting the basic
tenets of contemporary architectural exploration to the philosophical mandates established by second-wave feminism. Beginning
with the discourses iniatiated by Irigaray, Kristeva, Haraway and
Grosz, both formative and embedded in post-structuralism, this
essay traces a direct line from the stated interests in differenceas-difference, minor literatures, cyborg bodies, repressed emotions
and technologized desiring to the ethos of software-driven formfinding permeating architectural academics over the last ten years.
Like the television show it is named for, “Extreme Makeover” celebrates these developments; and in doing so, reminds us of the
fundamental female root source.
Hollee Becker, Catholic University of America
If creativity is autonomous, then digital technology is merely a tool
and not a driver of design. If not, creativity may be directed or
dictated by the limits of software. The term New Structuralism
implies a return to rules, a process- driven design methodology
fully entwined with research of project parameters and materiality.
Rivka Oxman states, “The New Structuralism presents a body of
novel representational and process models in which form, structure
and material are integrated as one entity in a single model of design”16. The disposition of creative autonomy with regard to form,
structure, and material is assessed by comparison of complex form
design in pre- and post-digital design. The case studies then address concerns about the effect of digital tools on creative design.
Armando Montilla, Clemson University
Digital Plecnik : Vienna Years
Magdalena Garmaz, Auburn University
This paper proposes that by looking at the work of the architects of
the Wagner School, Joze Plecnik in particular, one can identify a series of connective threads with the digital technologies of the present day. Digital technologies have enabled production of myriad
of wall panel and cladding systems, with a focus on predetermined
architectural form and materiality. It is important to state that the
basic premise behind his architectural production remains true to
Gottfried Semper’s Bekleidung theory, which provided the theoretical grounding to Plecnik’s work. Semper’s theory remains, even
after a century and a half, as inspiring and fresh, as it was when it
was first introduced to the architectural audience. In other words,
Plecnik’s work embodies the same principles that were/are championed not only by Otto Wagner, but also by our contemporaries.
Semper’s attention to the surface, or skin, rather than the structure
of the wall, in relation to the space (making), found its early testing in Plecnik’s Vienna work. That same “Semperian cloth” richly
adorned with architectural ornament, can be observed in the work
of Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, who, with the help of digital technology, create buildings that give an even more complex
interpretation of the relationship between the surface and space.
Material Postproduction
Adam Fure, University of Michigan
Material postproduction is an approach to working with architectural materials based on principles of manipulation, multiplication,
and mixing. It draws from art theory, most notably Nicolas Bourriard’s text Postproduction and the writings of Simon O’Sullivan.
Both writers articulate a model of art practice based on principles
of connectivity, where establishing links between disparate objects,
people, and practices is more important than creating original or
autonomous art. Following these accounts, material postproduction advances a design approach that combines diverse materials,
varied logics of application, and superficial alterations to create
works of architecture that embody a broad range of cultural and
disciplinary associations and experiential effects.
Nouveau Pulsation - 100 Years of Craft Evolution:
From Art Nouveau to Digital Pulsation
Eric Goldemberg, Florida International University
This paper collapses 100 years between the intense deployment
of ornament during the Art Nouveau period and the contemporary flourishing of ornamental, rhythmic production through digital design and fabrication, speculating on the renewed potential
for modulation systems to generate novel architectural tectonics
and spatial effects. There is a complex and historical interrelation
between ornament and techniques of architectural design and
production that connects the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Ornament is considered here as the ultimate product of rhythmic
perception, a locus for fecund architectural exploration.
Pulsation generates ornamental effects that are not ad hoc, they
are inherent to the rhythmic forces that activate dynamic changes
in space, reflecting mutations and transition which get indexed on
the tectonic connections within the range of topological geometry.
Ornament, rhythmic awareness and new modes of craft triggered
the concept of “Nouveau Pulsation”, a continuum of rhythmic geometries that brings together design sensibilities of two different,
but intricately connected eras. The focus of Digital Nouveau is to
highlight the shifting terrain of craft and ornament, as it has evolved
from the 1900s until the present time. The comparison seeks a critical analysis and integration of a continuum of design production
of 2 intense periods of approximately 15 years each, both of which
articulated important transitions spanning 100 years, connecting
the early 20th century with the early 21st century and the future.
Contemporary digital practices and Art Nouveau share an interest
in the spatial and aesthetic capacities of rhythmic affect coupled
with ornamental form.
Material postproduction is technological in nature but not founded
on distinct technologies. Rather, new technology is used to expand
architecture’s access to diverse types of matter. Material postproduction uses digital patterning to organize and interlace disparate
materials producing heterogeneous aggregates. Superficial treatments are deployed to amplify visual and tactile depth and/or undercut the typical associations of common materials. In this way,
both materials’ ability to transfer meaning and its physical status as
raw matter are exaggerated and contaminated to produce diverse
sets of associations and material qualities, yielding an experience
that vacillates between the realms of the haptic, the visual, and the
conceptual.
Finally, material postproduction is opportunistically positioned in
relation to architectural history. Past theories of architectural materiality are mined for latent relevance in contemporary contexts.
Through the combination of seemingly oppositional strategies,
material postproduction sets up relational approaches to design
underwritten by a diverse set of concepts and material tactics. In
doing so, material postproduction reactivates dormant disciplinary
attitudes, imbuing vitality through insertion into new speculative
domains.
Digital Nouveau and the New Materiality Continued
Tactile Values: A Political Economy of Smooth Surfaces
Ann Marie Brennan, University of Melbourne
Not unlike the age of the Italian Futurists, digital design can be
understood as the result of the merging between man and machine. Today the computer is understood as prosthesis; not quite
an ergonomic one, nor what the Futurists referred to as metallization of humans with machines, but nevertheless trending toward
that direction. We can begin to understand this relationship by
re-examining historical moments within Modern architectural history such as streamlined design and Italian Futurism, and looking
at how these moments were tied to methods of manufacture and,
more importantly, fluid methods of valuation. With these examples
in mind we can begin to contemplate how to assess the values and
meanings of the multiple configurations of digital design.
No doubt, the emergence of digital technologies changed the manner in which architects design today. In addition to the introduction
of this new mode of production, the results of these novel methods of parametric processes create a specific formal aesthetic, one
which has been described as smooth surfaces of forms consisting of some homogeneous plastic or liquid metallic, mercury-like
material, initially referred to within the architectural discipline as
“blobs.” And while these forms are striking in their appearance as
buildings, the formal games employed to bring about these creations seem at best shallow, or even arbitrary. A significant factor
that leads to their similar appearance is that these surfaces seem to
be without qualities other than smoothness, and therefore appear
bereft of any significant meaning. One way to infuse these new
forms with meaning may be to compare them with other moments
within the history and appreciation of forms. Inspiration for such a
process can be found within the discipline of art history, which by
definition perhaps contains the tradition of looking at forms and
smooth surfaces in a more rigorous and analytical way than architects. This paper re-examines some historical moments in industrial design and art history that emphasized the characteristics
of smooth surfaces. These historical cases may offer some insight
into analyzing and assessing current digitally-designed forms and
reframe the way in which we, as architects, assign both aesthetic
and economic values to these seemingly non-descript, digitally designed surfaces.
Emerging Materials, Renewable Energy, and Ecological
Design (2)
Aluminet: A Study In Technology Transfer and Radiant
Barriers Post-Sputnik
Ryan Salvas, Auburn University
The 1950’s were a time of architectural optimism and innovation, a byproduct of an industry-wide digestion and re-contextualization of the
previous decade’s focused war effort. One such product was radiant
barriers, which developed through technology transfer and collaboration between building scientists and NASA researchers. Since then,
architecture has failed to amass a synergy between disparate technological worlds. Architecture is now a commodity industry, and research has devolved into coupling and splitting from other fields. This
paper describes a return to that integrated transfer model through
the development of an interdisciplinary experiment that tests the architectural applicability of a high performance material (Aluminet) as
a new type of radiant barrier. This process is illustrated through a joint
venture between Auburn University’s Architecture Department and
the Kinesiology Department. The result is a proof of concept supporting the future engineering of a new type of dynamic radiant barrier for
use in diverse climates.
Beyond Arrows: Natural Ventilation in a High-rise
Building with Double Skin Façade
Simulating Visual Comfort and Energy Performance of
Organic Energy Harvesting Electrochromic Windows
(EH-ECWs) in Mid-size Commercial Office Buildings
Amanda Bruot, University of Washington
Christopher Meek, University of Washington
An interdisciplinary research group including faculty from the College
of Engineering and the College of Built Environments at the University
of Washington (UW) in Seattle is developing a new generation of organic energy harvesting electrochromic windows (EH-ECWs) based
on recently developed organic conjugated polymers and switchable
dye technology. EH-ECWs offer the potential for substantial energy
saving and increased visual comfort in buildings. This paper describes
work undertaken by the Department of Architecture to simulate the
potential performance of EH-ECWs and to begin to develop optimum
deployment strategies of EH-ECWs in existing and new commercial
office buildings. This includes simulation using a code compliant Department of Energy (DOE) reference model and “high-performance”
building model with EH-ECW window technology in four climate
zones, across the following parameters: net site energy consumption,
thermal performance, and the on-site power generation potential of
energy-harvesting organic photovoltaics. A pilot assessment of visual
comfort using a contemporary net-zero commercial office building
design as a test case was also conducted.
Mona Azarbayjani, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
There is an unexploited opportunity to employ either fully naturally
ventilated, or partially, when mixed with mechanical ventilation in
large office buildings in Chicago climate. This type of ventilation in
those buildings are more desirable than the mechanically ventilated
counterpart because of the potential to reduce the high air-conditioning energy demands, yet provide a comfortable and healthy indoor
environment. The biggest factor to take into consideration when deciding upon a high-rise ventilation is that the building’s velocity profile
increases with height. The conventional way to solve this issue has
been to seal the facade and put a mechanical- ventilation plant into
it. However, double facades are built to allow natural ventilation in
high-rise buildings which represents an undeniable advantage for the
buildings with great height.
The possibility of exploiting natural ventilation due to complexity
of physical phenomena that is non-linearity, chaotic behavior of air
movement, demands a major tool “Computational Fluid Dynamics”
(CFD) for design analyses. Fluent was used to study the airflow and
temperature distribution in the occupied spaces evaluating different
possibiity of exploiting natural ventilation for different outside conditions.
In this study two driving forces-wind and stack effect (buoyancy forces)- are investigated to study the possibility of providing comfort in
the building. The results document the indoor climate, the boundary
conditions for further planning and the possibilities for high-rise buildings with the new innovative enclosure.
SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 - 10:30AM - 12:00PM
4D Architecture
Keith Green, Clemson University
4D Environments and Design: Prototyping Interactive
Architecture
Kihong Ku, Philadelphia University
Jonathan Grinham, Studio27
This paper describes the prototyping efforts of an interdisciplinary design approach that explores interactive environments and
design innovation. 4D environments relate to the proliferation of
interactive appliances and the possibility of interconnecting people and objects, and the paper presents key concepts of 4D environments and its relation to design. Designing 4D environments
extends beyond developing interactive phones, games, reading
devices which confine their interactivity to surfaces of screens. 4D
environments require an understanding of the complex physical
interactions facilitated by embedded computation and physical
kinetic counterparts and the application of such knowledge to design and production.
The authors build on previous work conducted in the field of interactive, responsive and kinetic architecture and describe in detail
one of the exploratory projects that evolved into further outreach
endeavors and design studio workshops. The creative opportunities of off -the-shelf sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers were
examined through the design development of responsive architectural systems which were investigated through the technical
integration of interactivity, physical computing and virtual simulations. The initial design research involved collaborations with faculty and students from architecture, computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, leading practitioners, and
open source online communities. A series of architectural scenarios
of kinetic shading partitions were explored and prototyped using
digital manufacturing tools and processes. Concentrating on developing new tectonics through 4D environments, the theoretical
and experimental explorations of this research expand the understanding of emerging digital technologies and question the impact on architecture: Can architecture actively and dynamically
change physical environments in real time while becoming a social
medium? Can architecture connect the virtual and the physical?
Can architecture become an interface to connect what were once
thought to be disparate ideas and worlds?
Self-organizing Strategy: An Adaptable Growth Model
for Architecture
Taro Narahara, New Jersey Institute of Technology
The paper explores a possible future direction of computational
design strategy through a new conceptual method for a city design
tool. The method uses interactions and feedback among its own
components, agents and environment, and produces new instances of spatial layout of paths and buildings from primary inputs of
a given landform and environmental conditions. Agents’ behaviors
are updated accordingly as new paths and buildings are generated.
This co-evolutionary process between agents and environments is
known to exist in many self-organizing systems.
Reflections on Kinetic Reticulated Frameworks
Bernhard Sill, Clemson University
This contribution is reflecting on kinetic reticulated frameworks,
structures composed of linear elements, that adapt to different
climatic conditions or reconfiguring to various functions. Kinetic
systems are devised to adapt and change in shape, therefore their
assessment shifts from static behavior to dynamic performance.
The aesthetics and technology are linked to movement and variability, revealing ephemeral aptitudes.
The goal is to explore a new vocabulary for kinetic architecture,
expanding the established range of static buildings with adaptive,
convertible and kinetic architectural systems.
The novelty of the approach is the identification and exposure of
a comprehensive survey of loadbearing principles in architecture
structures and to develop for each of the fundamental structural
behaviors a measure to convert a static structure into a kinetic
mechanism. On this basis several new basic kinetic loadbearing
systems could be developed. More complex systems can be synthesized through combination and hybridization.
Cloud Code: Public Space in 4 Dimensions
Andrew Vrana, University of Houston
Joseph Meppelink, University of Houston
Travis McCarra, Metalab
“Cloud Code” in the City of Houston Permitting Center is a conduit and real-time display of the occupancy, activity, and air quality
in the building. The interaction of occupants within the physical
space of the public areas is measured and displayed as civic art.
Digital Details
Matt Burgermaster, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Optimization Takes Command: Miscalculations in
Performative Design
Doris Kim Sung, University of Southern California
As the natural in nature gradually disappears, research’s obsession with simulating, replicating, deviating, and mutating nature as
means to control the extinction of that same organic world around
us, ironically increases the realm of artificiality and, ultimately, the
dependency on math, sciences and technology. Design research is
no exception, where the notions of optimization are derived from
the self-perpetrating obsessions with math and science, reliance on
algebraic or logarithmic equations for geometry generation, and
the dependence on the logic of the physics of nature for identification of the lowest energy states. This same pursuit of optimization
has profoundly influenced decision-making in the design process.
In many cases, efficient use of materials, effective selection of design/construction strategies, lower energy use and minimal waste
have affected the choices that are made from schematic design
to construction, and add to the traditional pressures of cost effectiveness and densification of planametric space. Engineers have
become integral players of schematic design teams, playing larger
roles in the integration of structural and M/E/P systems in order
to prevent unnecessary redundancy throughout. Additionally,
newly available and powerful computer software makes the realization of optimization of complex shapes, fluid parameterization,
unimaginable forms and material feasible. Never before have we
been able to make, test and fabricate parts of architecture as we
can today. As a result, projects have become more ambitious, resulting in forms and tectonics that are complex, multi-faceted and
comprehensive with a definitive effect on the aesthetic outcome
of a project and an indelible change on the new landscape of man.
These projects have historically been limited to static systems.
Tending to the Detail
Patrick Doan, Virginia Tech
In an ‘age of digital ubiquity’ it is important to not lose sight of the
architectural details potency within the practice of architecture.
The detail is not passive, disposable, a production drawing buried
within the pages of a construction document set, or the product
of a specific tool. Rather, it is the embodiment of the architect’s
knowledge, skill, understanding, and sensitivity to how materials
and spaces are thoughtfully formed and brought together. Born
of the architect’s imagination, the detail is complex and multi-dimensional; operating simultaneously at multiple scales addressing
constructive, formal, and spatial questions of joining. Tending to
the detail is to turn our attention back to the role the architectural
detail plays in the making and crafting of works of architecture.
Now, add dynamic input systems into this equation. Because realistically architecture must respond and mediate between multiple non-stationary variables, it is clear that the response of the
architecture must also be dynamic and fluid from the large scale
(programmatically) to the very small (nanomaterials). But, to understand the meaning of optimization vis-a-vis performance criteria in dynamic models, holistic understanding of the input, output
and deviations must be considered. This paper will present projects completed by the author made of thermobimetals, where the
consequences of sheer science resolution and idiosyncratic inconsistencies from logic, lead to an aesthetic of optimization, responsiveness and performance of dynamic systems, namely in the use
or misuse of incomplete digital tools (scripting, programs, etc.),
true understanding of fabrication tools and assembly limitations,
irregular insertion of overlapping mobile components (material behavior), and wavering definition of criteria in structural systems.
Although “form, structure, and material act upon each other, and
this behavior of all three cannot be predicted by analysis of any
one of them separately” (Weinstock, 2010), for purpose of discussion, each will be identified in its own section, but, by no means,
should be considered in isolation from its intertwined context.
Integration, Not Segregation: Interdisciplinary Design
Pedagogy for the Second 100 Years
James Doerfler, California Polytechnic State University
Kevin Dong, California Polytechnic State University
A 21st Century Approach to Trans-disciplinary
Sustainable Design Education
Robert Fleming, Philadelphia University
Sustainability is a powerful force that is fundamentally reshaping humanity’s relationship to the natural world ushering in the 21st Century
and the Age of Ecology. From inefficient unhealthy buildings to carbon neutral living buildings; from paved lifeless landscapes to ecologically integrated environments; from stark and sterile interiors to daylit
and effusive indoor environments, architects, designers, landscape architects and planners have begun to show life, to begin to illicit visions
of a grand and green future. While practicing design professionals
benefit from plentiful continuing education opportunities, the upcoming generation of built environment professionals must rely on the
academies to deliver the kind of holistic interdisciplinary educational
experience that is so needed in the 21st century. At the foundation of
such an approach lies the ethical framework of the Triple Bottom Line.
Now released from their traditional dialectic relationship, social/environmental progress on the one hand and economic progress on the
other can now comfortably coexist to form a more integrated version
of sustainability. However, the now culturally accepted Triple Bottom
Line while useful in explaining the philosophic goal of integral sustainability, leaves few, if any clues as to how to attack such integration in
a design education setting. As a response, this paper will explore a
framework of five intentions for trans-disciplinary sustainable design
education: Design Consciousness (why are we designing?); Inclusiveness (Who is designing?); Cooperation (How do we collaborate?); Realignment (What order should information be communicated?); and
lastly Integration (What is the goal of sustainable design education?).
But design educators must move from the comforting realm of intention into the more painful and impactful process of making interdisciplinary pedagogy operational. Therefore, this paper will also explore
important aspects of each intention in the proposed framework with
a specific focus on how interdisciplinary work forms the centerpiece
of a trans-disciplinary M.S. in Sustainable Design at Philadelphia University. The Program, now in its fifth year, has existed long enough to
provide some useful insight into the various educational techniques,
strategies and methodologies needed to achieve an authentic sustainability experience for students seeking to participate in a sustainable 21st century.
A New Regional Platform for Computational Fabrication
Brad Bell, University of Texas at Arlington
Kevin McClellan, University of Texas at San Antonio
Andrew Vrana, University of Houston
Will Laufs, Buro Happold
TEX-FAB is a non-profit organization founded between three universities in Texas with the primary function of connecting design professionals, academics, and manufacturers interested in digital fabrication.
The three co-directors established TEX-FAB as a collective action,
one that endeavors to combine divergent interests and capabilities,
for the purpose of strengthening the regional discourse around digital
fabrication and parametric design. The three primary avenues for accomplishing this goal are set out as Theoria (Lectures / Exhibitions),
Poiesis (Workshops) and Praxis (Competitions / Commissions). We
see this type of effort as a new paradigm focused on providing a
network of affiliated digital fabrication resources, and a platform for
education and exchange on issues of parametric modeling. It is our
position that TEX-FAB engages the new and growing awareness of a
regional and global hybridization. We seek to leverage the burgeoning global knowledge base to produce a more specific and contextual
dialogue within the region we operate, teach, and practice. We assert
that TEX-FAB presents a new model for collaborative engagement
through the framework of our organization. Specifically, we will use
the international competition REPEAT our organization recently hosted to illustrate how collaboration is a vital tenet to the success of executing a complex full-scale installation entitled Minimal Complexity.
In Support of Pre-Professional Relations: Guidelines for
Effective Educational Collaborations between
Architecture and Engineering
Clare Olsen, California Polytechnic State University
Sinead Namara, Syracuse University
Despite the increasing reliance on architecture-engineering collaborations in the professional world, in the United States, students from
the disciplines generally have few opportunities for interdisciplinary
learning. Recognizing the potential for architecture and engineering course collaborations to (1) integrate creativity in engineering
education, (2) encourage architecture students to strive for greater
technical resolution, and to (3) align pedagogy with practice, the
Syracuse University Schools of Engineering and Architecture applied
and were granted a three year National Science Foundation Innovations in Engineering Education grant. Amongst other initiatives, the
grant supported the development of an interdisciplinary course, and
in the first two iterations, the authors co-taught a design elective
focused on Shell Structures. Teaching a diverse group of students
posed interesting challenges. By recognizing and building upon the
differences amongst the students’ understanding, we sought to establish a common ground for communication and design through a
shared vocabulary and skill set. Analyses of the courses’ successes
and failures were evaluated through NSF-supported assessments
conducted by the Office of Professional Research and Development
in the School of Education at Syracuse University. As a result of
these evaluations and our teaching experiences, we have created a
number of guidelines for future engineering and architecture course
collaborations. We hope these guidelines will support and enhance
future interdisciplinary collaborations, which we see as crucial to the
curricula of professional degree programs.
Reaching for Sustainability Using Technology and
Teamwork: Teaching Integrated Project Delivery in
Multi-Disciplinary Studios
Kathrina Simonen, University of Washington
Carrie Dossick, University of Washington
Robert Pena, University of Washington
Designers and builders are under increasing pressure to innovate
and adapt to rapid changes in economic, social and environmental
conditions. As educators we must be flexible enough to adopt new
teaching methods and creative enough to teach to an uncertain
future. Over the past three years an evolving Integrated Practice/
Design Build Studio has been taught at the University of Washington. The Integrated studio is a project-based senior undergraduate construction management/architecture studio where students
from the two disciplines as well as civil engineering and landscape
architecture worked in a collaborative environment to deliver a
design proposal, conceptual estimate, schedule and construc-tion
plan for a building project with challenging sustainable goals such
as net-zero energy consumption. All studio projects have focused
on reaching towards sustainability and demonstrating the possibilities for making market-ready, high-performance, low environmental impact buildings. The pedagogical model uses technology and
teamwork, building on the processes of Integrated Project Delivery
(IPD), a design approach that integrates people, systems, business
structures and practices for harnessing the talents and insights of
all participants in order to optimize project results, increase value
to the owner, reduce waste, and maximize efficiency through all
phases of design, fabrication and construction. In this paper we
will report the faculty perspective of the challenge of interdisciplinary education that brings together students from departments that
have very different expectations, histories, disciplines and cultures
in the context of a sustainable project supported by BIM technologies and the opportunities that this teaching model presents for
education and practice alike.
SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 - 2:00PM - 3:30PM
Jennifer Leung, Yale University
Biochemical Injections - Architecture as a Biotechnical
Interface in a Post-parametric Environment.
Risky Business: From Digital Fabrication to the Abstract Workshop
Biochemical Injections is examining the potential of a creative, heterogeneous and perpetually variable interface between architecture, bio-technologies, postmodern philosophy as well as political
theory. The intersecting point between these four fields is identified as the organic body, taken to mean all kinds of different bodies, be they biological, chemical, physical or geological. What all
embodied entities share, is that one can clearly conceive of them as
an irreducible, corporeal, informational field which displays the relation and performs the negotiation between different forces. This
difference of forces can be variably re-modulated and interfaced
through different biotechnologies. Since biotechnological practice is circling around harnessing, manipulating and managing the
manufacturing, differentiating, propagating and fusing capacities
of tissues, cells, proteins and molecules, the notion of the organic
body is, hence, rendered as intrinsically open for re-modulation.
The biotechnological re-modulatability of the organic body opens
up a vast ethico-aesthetical paradigm on a molecular level and
clearly implies a re-modulation of the political, philosophical and
architectural as well. Hence, architectural design can be rethought
as inducing organic form from within - through modulation - rather
than mechanically imposing form from the outside. Can we specify
architectural approaches in which biotechnics may amplify, augment, recombine and interface different life forces, forms of vitality, and transformative productivity, governing the emergence of
environmental bodies of habitation?
The legal boundary separating architects’ conception from execution is broached through a new genre of workshop practices enabled by digital fabrication. The challenges and opportunities of
these workshop practices and their reflection on contemporary design culture are made visible through a series of interviews I conducted between 2005 and 2008. These interviews help to position
the pedagogical place of digital fabrication not as argument for the
design-build process, but rather in the formation of the image of
practice as an abstract workshop enabled through parametric design tools. Abstractions develop from real world objects and experiences becoming generalized, as abstractions, to apply to multiple
scenarios and situations, taking the general from the concrete. The
concept of the abstract workshop is grounded by material systems
but not fixed within one particular domain or application, and in so
doing, can leverage scale in the way direct fabrication never could.
Mina Yaney
Communication Theory as an Anti-environment for
Understanding the Effects of Technological Environments upon Cultural Change
Isaac Lerner, Eastern Mediterranean University
Abstract: In order to deal with the bias of the ‘environment’ shaping cultural and social prejudices in architecture and urbanism in
the information age, Marshall McLuhan’s communication theory
of cultural change provides a meaningful analysis of the effects of
technological environments, as a means of heightened perception.
In the current age, where the digital infrastructural environment
of cyberspace envelopes and transforms all pre-existing cultural
and natural habitats, the scale and pace of this transformation and
its psychological, sociological as well as material effects escapes
perception. McLuhan’s prose-poetic style and his mosaic form of
discourse satirize, or as he says “puts-on”, the reader in order to attune perception so that understanding media effects is facilitated.
The interplay of cultures and the possibility for global cooperation
depends on harmonizing spatial biases as determined by the media
ecology (i.e. operational technological environments) and its effects on group behavior. In terms of modern evolutionary theory,
such as the work of evolutionist David Sloan Wilson, at the group
level, altruistic or cooperative traits versus competitive or selfish
traits are selected for which sustains the survival of the group. In
this way, evolution occurs if there is another layer to the process
of natural selection which is the layer of group selection. This is the
layer, in terms of McLuhan’s work, whereby, by shaping our tools
we shape ourselves as a culture. By complementing modern evolutionary group theory with McLuhan’s communication theory of
cultural change this enhances insight, and consequently provides
a means of anticipatory design, for architects and urban planners.
Mark Cabrinha, California Polytechnic State University
The Parameters of the Posthuman
Ariane Lourie Harrison, Yale University
This paper recruits another “post”—the posthuman—to reflect on
the slippery status of the “post-parametic” environment, marking
our changing relationship to nature and registering what we term
an emerging architectural imagination of posthuman hybridity.
The posthuman interpretation of longstanding ecological concepts
of “hybridity” and “assemblage” allows us to explore the heterogeneous urban environments produced in two realized works by
R&Sie (n) and The Living. The paper proposes that these examples
of contemporary architecture modify conventional understandings
of subject/object relations and instead address the posthuman “hybrid subject”. Featuring animal subjects and vegetal cyborgs, these
works visualize the presence of human and non-human subjects as
assemblages which do not perform according to the “optimizing”
filters of parameterized behavior. Instead, A posthuman approach
to architecture expands the architectural subject beyond the human user, extends the architectural building material to include
assemblages of inorganic and organic, and invokes the architectural assemblage as a multi-scale territory. The post-parametic (or
posthuman) imagination suggests that what was formerly known
as nature is an environment bristling with hybrid subjects.
Jordan Geiger, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Omar Khan, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Mark Shepard, University at Buffalo, SUNY
A Cybernetic House Between
Duncan Patterson, University of Waterloo
This paper outlines a strategy for the design of a cybernetic house
so as to successfully navigate what the author perceives as the
‘Faustian bargains’ of the technologization of flesh and field. The
cybernetic house is conceived of us an extended technological
flesh layered between social micro-ecologies and the larger networks within which they are situated. The cybernetic house is designed, following an intention to be under-specified, so that information is spatialized, communal, and interactive.
Appropriateness in the Design of Ubiquitous
Computing Environments
Nasir Barday, TandemSeven, Inc.
The standards for ubiquitous computing technologies are much
higher than those for traditional computing. These high standards
are compounded when considering ubiquitous technologies embedded in the built environment. In the past, the ubiquitous computing community has focused on the technology and infrastructure to support novel applications, leaving largely unexplored the
thinking about using embedded computation to humanize the built
environment and enable it for interactions with information and
other people. The designer must consider the appropriateness of
the intended functions and interactions of an intelligent environment before proceeding with a design.
This paper explores the appropriateness of design for ubiquitous
computing environments brought about through collaborations
between interaction designers and architects. When considering
the appropriateness of a new design, designers can break the study
into the attributes of function, engagement, calmness, and robustness. While in most cases the designer should strive for these attributes, she may decide that a core characteristic of her design is
to ignore one or more of these categories. If this is the case, the
decision should be a deliberate element of the design.
Informing Material Specification
Ayelet Karmon, Shenkar College of Engineering and Design
Mette Thomsen, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Architecture is entering a radical rethinking of its material practice.
Advancements in material science and more complex models of material simulation as well as the interfaces between design and fabrication are fundamentally changing the way we conceive and design
our built environment. This new technological platform allows an unprecedented control over the material. Creating direct links between
the space of design and the space of fabrication, the idea of the
hyper specified material developed in direct response to defined design criteria calls upon a new material practice in which designers of
artifacts are also designers of materials. In this practice materials are
seen as bespoke composites, differentiated and graded, and whose
particular detailing is a central part of a projects overall solution.
The development of this new material practice is central to emergence of a new more sensitive approach to design. As we enter
an era of design thinking that seeks to respond to the increasing
social, environmental and sustainable demands of building practice
we need to develop new models by which we can realize our architecture. To engage directly with material design and to partake in
the development of new material systems is to be part of an inventive culture of material engineering. From the very small to the very
large, the imagination of performative materials that are created
in response to highly defined design criteria are challenging the
traditional boundaries of design and representation. Performative
materials can be structurally differentiated designed in response
to a variegated load, materially graded responding to change in
program or property or computationally steered incorporating
actuated materials designed for state change and environmental
response. Hyper specified and designed, what they have in common is that they are developed in response to particular criteria
by which the strength, structure, elasticity or density of a material
can be devised.
This paper will present a dual investigation into material design as
an architectural practice. Taking point of departure in two cross
disciplinary workshop investigations, we explore ways in which
materially embedded sensing can lead to the making of new strategies for material design. Both investigations use textiles as a model for material thinking. Developing bespoke interfaces between
programmable architectural design tools and advanced computer
numerically controlled (CNC) knitting machines we understand the
practice of textile design as a particular class of material design that
enables variegation across both material and structure. Our aim for
the experiments is firstly: the design of active materials that use integrated sensing as a means for triggering actuation and secondly:
the design of graded materials that use integrated sensing as a
means for specification. In the following we will discuss how these
two practices can be interlinked, what are the shared concepts and
technologies and can these be advantageously merged.
Intelligent Infrastructure: Mobile Networks as Tactical
Transportation
Therese Tierney, University of Illinois Urbana Chamapign
Ben Feldmann, Mia Lehrer Landscape Architecture
Katherine Handy, Field Paoli Architects
Tyron Marshall, Perkins+Wills
Gerry Tierney, 510 Collective
Dinesh Perrera, Format Design
This paper focuses on one key concept related to intelligent infrastructure: new modes of transportation enabled by mobile technologies and wireless networks. Los Angeles_REDCAR, a prototype
project, is described in detail. The project is positioned within an
ongoing discussion of the Resiliant City and “internet of things.”
As cities look to new infrastructural solutions, this research explores the evolving relation between people, networks, and artifacts – and how this connection between people and “things” is
altering the way we occupy, navigate, and inhabit the city.
Carla Keyvanian, Auburn University
Building Socialistic Architectural Schools: The
Transformation of China’s Architectural Education
from American Beaux-Arts Model into the Soviet Model
Xiao Hu, University of Idaho
The professional education is a vital component of the architectural profession. It not only offers special training to obtain the required basis of architectural knowledge and skills needed for the
professional practice of design, but also ensures the stable development of the profession by excluding other competitors through
a monopoly of knowledge and skills. The required formal training
of architecture provides a cultural and social legitimation for architects’ responsibility and importance.
The formation of the modern architectural profession in China was
the product of political and social change – the falling of China’s
imperial system and the rising of Western capitalism in the end
of 19th Century. The introduction of modern Western capitalist
forces of production had undermined and transformed much of
China’s traditional economic order, and the onslaught of the Western model disintegrated China’s traditional architectural practices.
However, the architectural profession in China was not refashioned
in the image of the Western professional world. Although Chinese
architects shared the similar, if not the same, professional criteria and social distinction with those practitioners in the West, the
changeable ideological structures, repeated foreign interventions,
and constant revolutions significantly changed the nature of the architectural practice in China. In the 1950s, China’s architectural education underwent a significant transformation under political and
ideological orders. Within a few years, the American Beaux-Arts
model was wiped off and was replaced by the model borrowed
from the Soviet Union. This paper focuses on how the Chinese
Communist Party effectively implemented its plans and policies
step by step to complete this transformation.
On the Use Value of History
Amir Ameri, University of Colorado
The digital information revolution and the economic globalization
it has greatly facilitated have brought diverse cultures into unprecedented proximity and a precarious dialogue in both actual and
virtual space and time. This cohabitation is transforming world cultures at a scale and a rate that is impressive, if not unprecedented.
The question and challenge this change poses architectural education is how to educate the next generation of architects to meet
the unique demands of a plurality of cultures in a state of flux and
change? To meet this challenge architectural education has to instil a heightened understanding of the complex dialogue between
architecture and culture, along with a spirit of critical exploration,
experimentation, creative thought, and innovation. The history of
Architecture will have an indispensable role to play in any curriculum that seeks to meet these challenges. Yet, to play a pivotal role
in fostering the requisite spirit of critical exploration and innovation, architectural history has to engage and exert a critical impact
on studio pedagogy. Since secular institutional building-types are
the core focus of design studio instruction, architectural history
has to more directly engage the history of their cultural and institutional development. Such genealogical studies can establish a direct link between history and design pedagogy as complimentary
practices. To demonstrate, I focus on the history of the library and
point out how a critical re-evaluation of its ideological underpinnings can form the parameters of a new context for design, within
which the link between the formal/architectural properties of the
building type and its institutional/cultural presuppositions could
neither be restated nor discarded. This new context will require
students to not only think analytically and critically, but also to wilfully manipulate the language of architecture as opposed to faithfully re-produce its various speech acts.
Transparency: Literal, Phenomenal, Digtial
Newton D’souza, University of Missouri-Columbia
Bimal Balakrishnan, University of Missouri-Columbia
James Dicker, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Our proposal consists of a reframing of digital tools that moves
away from its current usage as ‘tools for design’ to ‘tools of design.’
Using a prominent historic example in the architectural discourse,
namely phenomenal transparency (Rowe and Slutzky 1963; 1971),
we will demonstrate how this reframing might be possible, and illustrate the affordances of digital tools in the pedagogy of history
and design.
We recognize that the current digital tools were born in disciplines
outside architecture and thereby divorced from its intellectual core.
We believe that intellectual core consists of moving away from the
practice of architecture as an expressive content (fabrication and
manufacturing), and moving toward the practice of intrinsic content (visual vocabularies, ‘what-if’ design scenarios, and a corpus
of mutually dependent representative network). Digital tools can
be reframed to facilitate such an intellectual core because of their
affordance of a shared, holistic, structured and replicable environment.
This has implications to the pedagogy of history and design and
more importantly to strengthen the history-design studio axis. It
will comprise of an approach that conceptualizes history as a problem-solving domain, and one which becomes available for a shared
scrutiny. Rather than a mere accumulation of explicit knowledge,
this approach allows for dissecting the process in varied ways, facilitating cross-comparison, learning how recurring problems were
solved in the past, and revealing hitherto hidden elements. These
historic lessons can then be extended to design studios through
exploratory exercises that allow designers to launch with conviction creative and intellectually stimulating design scenarios.
Theoretical Implications of BIM: Performance and Interpretation
John Folan, Carnegie Mellon University
Ute Poerschke, Pennsylvania State University
Beauty+ the BIM
Danelle Briscoe, University of Texas at Austin
The assumption that Building Information Modeling (BIM) solely
develops efficient data schedules or coordinates Integrated Design
Process (IDP) collaborators misses opportunities to utilize information as a source of visual creation. This paper examines the role of
beauty within design-based aspects of information modeling and
fabrication strategies. For the development of design culture within a BIM practice to be viable, it will take more than ecologically
regenerative designs or virtual collaboration among consultants.
What becomes additionally indispensable is to nurture a design
process and theory with responsiveness to the visual environment
alongside manners for its production. This requires considering
the role of aesthetic experiences, such as beauty, in re-centering
design consciousness where the architect takes on an authoritative
role in the collaborative setting offered by BIM.
A seminar course entitled “Beauty + the BIM” provides a setting
in which overlapping historical conditions of “sensation” and the
current condition of “reason” in architecture can creatively engage
one another while ultimately situating these activities in the context
of a new theory of practice through representation. The course is
divided into three brief but intensive projects of corresponding disparate theories of beauty. Each respective theory represents a specific resultant CAD/CAM and drawing production: the sublime as
understood through Edmund Burke, the grotesque by way of John
Ruskin, and wabi-sabi from thoughts by Leonard Koren. The trajectory proposes a deeper understanding of sensuous empiricism and
its definition, a potential venue for concept and production in relation to the emerging and imperative BIM technology.
Integrating BIM into the Comprehensive Design Studio
Jerry L Stivers, Oklahoma State University
This paper discusses the successes and failures of integrating
Building Information Modeling (BIM) into the Comprehensive Design Studio (CDS). As a 25-year practitioner turned full time educator, my motivation for discussion is rooted in a deep concern for
the “pedagogical value of BIM as holistic design tool in architectural education and to prepare students of architecture for the inevitable use of BIM in practice.”(1) That being said, it is important to
look at this issue from the different perspectives of those involved
in the CDS experience: educators, practitioners and those who find
themselves in the middle, the students.
BIM offers many benefits to practice and is fast becoming the standard for the design collaboration and delivery of professional services within the AEC industry. From my observation, benefits for
practice, however, do not always translate into benefits for education. If the purpose of CDS is to create a bridge for today’s student to cross over to tomorrow’s profession, and BIM is becoming
standard practice, it is not a question of “if”, but rather “how” BIM
should be integrated into a CDS.
At first glance, the request to integrate BIM into CDS seems plausible; new tools have been integrated in the past (CAD, pin-bar
overlay drafting, etc), however, from studio observations, this is
different. BIM not only affects students design communication, but
also their design process. The integration of new tools and processes comes at what and who’s educational expense?
The thesis of this paper suggests that, without strategic control, adequate software support, new teaching methods, and a more collaborative team-based studio experience; BIM has the ability to overwhelm and limit the individual students’ creativity as well as change
the overall learning experience within the CDS from a semester
about comprehensive design, materials assemblies, and systems integration to a frustrating semester of software manipulation.
Parametric BIM as a Generative Design Tool
Andrzej Zarzycki, New Jersey Institute of Techology
This paper discusses the adoption of building information modeling
(BIM) tools as an opportunity for design generation, validation, and
implementation. It specifically focuses on parametric modeling in
discussing construction details, assemblies, and generative explorations considering digital materiality with physical forces. The introduction of parametric thinking into architectural design allows for
understanding the interdependencies between various elements of
a building assembly as well as for an alternative design process with
possible bidirectional interoperabilities. It also opens doors for “What
if…” speculative exploration that allow for broader questioning of design intent and possibilities. This second aspect of parametric thinking
encourages students to bridge technical knowledge with creativity.
Following this approach, architecture returns to the realm of making, rather than conceptualizing. However, the process of making or
the consideration of material characteristics is no longer exclusively
associated with handmade processes; rather, designers are experimenting with digital exploration into physically based characteristics of architecture. These could include lighting, material properties,
and design behavior responding to physical performance criteria.
Topological Future: Generative BIM
Alfredo Andia, Florida International University
We can no longer think about the future of digital technologies in
architecture without rethinking the future of the profession of architecture. But what is the profession of architecture? Architectural
design operates in the sphere of every thing that occurs before the
buildings are built. Drawings, models, contracts, diagrams are all mediums to administer a very complex dominion that involves many
actors and many divergent professional specialties. Traditionally, an
exhaustive search for an optimal solution is impractical or unattainable in the Architectural domain. In order to manage this very complex dominion Architects use experienced based techniques named
heuristics, which are rules of thumbs, educated guesses, and strategies to synthesize the themes that arise during design.
Professional practice and architectural academia have developed
two diverging stories about the present and future of the computerization in design. Architectural practice is using computer
technology to “modernize” the profession more than truly revolutionize” it. In academia an increasing number of schools of architecture are presenting a broader critique, in which the architectural
discipline can be rethought in relation to generative form-finding,
population thinking, and automated topological structures.
In this paper we argue that a plausible merging of the ideas from
main stream practice and pioneering academia can yield one of the
most novel themes for the future of architecture: Generative and
parametric modelers that contain specific topological intelligence
could be fused to a worldwide network of procurement of products and services in the construction industry.
Architecture
Facade : Building Envelope : Skin
Awilda Rodriguez, Oklahoma State University
In the United States, buildings produce 40% of the total energy
consumption and greenhouse emissions release into the atmosphere (Lawrence 2009). Most major cities around the USA have
a high population of aging buildings, but the U.S. is not alone in
this dilemma. These buildings are not only aging, but they are remarkably inefficient. Many older structures lack proper insulation,
poorly retain heat during winter and are in urgent need of updated
technologies that make newer buildings not only more energy efficient but also more attractive to tenants. No doubt that retrofitting
inefficient buildings is a costly enterprise, but the outcome will well
supersede the financial investments.
Among the solutions contemplated by the design community on
how to re-energize aging buildings is the idea of re-skinning. Reskinning our aging buildings will largely reduce our communal environmental footprint. There are ways to improve the building performance through the redesign of the existing building envelope.
These new skins can provide ventilation systems to dissipate heat,
collect solar or water, and integrate smart technology that can
sense environmental conditions and make the proper adjustments.
At the end of the nineteenth century, architects began to question
the architectural envelope. New materials and technologies were
developing and began to have a physical impact on the façade.
Today, we have similar discourse where the notion of façade is being replace with the idea of a skin. This new notion of the building
envelope fosters systems where the skin is an active and informed
membrane that is capable of understanding external and internal
conditions and reacts to them.
Today, skin systems are one of the most innovative and exciting
fields in architecture. It is the place to explore the visual culture of
patterns, transparency and permeability of the building. Students
at Oklahoma State University’s Introduction to Building information modeling (BIM) seminar not only learn the software, but are
also charged with redesigning the skin of an old structure. Through
the discourse of parametric computation this seminar’s final exercise explores how crafting physical models can inform computational modeling and vice versa. The exercise proposes that a set
of different sensibilities emerged from operating within these alternate modes. From working on the physical model the students
are able to quickly grasp a sense of scale while on the virtual allows
them to quickly explore changes.
Students were asked to explore the articulation of tectonics
through computational modulation of a physically and virtually
constructed component that created a formal continuity or a pattern. Using this basic geometric component, the skins explored
patterns’ openings that filter light, create shadows and through
smart technology control air and light flow. In addition, students
were required to research new materials and technologies that
supported their design proposals. Through the process, they discovered high-tech materials such as nanotubes surfaces, which are
water phobic and materials such as high strength polymers that
demonstrated exceptional three dimensional formability properties using thermoforming techniques. Lastly, having the students
work on alternate processes complemented the shortcomings of
each medium.
Humus House
Daniel Norell, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg
Erik Hökby, Erik Hökby
Humus House is a speculative housing prototype developed for two
NGO organizations providing housing in Haiti. The project is designed to combine material dynamics and digital design processes
with infrastructures and building technologies that are locally available in Haiti in order to create an architecture that addresses sensory qualities as well as local ecologies. The materialist approach of the
project makes it distinct from a lightweight kit-of-parts approach, as
epitomized by historical projects like Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale or a traditionalist approach where local materials are used to
signify authenticity.
Deriving its name from humus, a highly fertile soil layer composed of
organic matter, the project features housing units of approximately
100 sq.m. indoor space. Each pair of units is enveloped in an outer
wall constructed on site from soil-filled earthbags made from geotextile. This outer wrapping cools and humidifies air in and around
the house by storing thermal energy and moist. Over time, its plentiful outcroppings and cavities will collect and retain organic matter,
ultimately accumulating a layer of soil that can support growth of a
variety of plant species. This will turn the exterior of the house into a
green and lush oasis in an otherwise arid Haitian landscape suffering
from deforestation and erosion.
Behind the protecting outer wall, each housing unit works according to a cellular logic where rooms are conceived as framed boxes
that can be freely grouped and recombined around a central courtyard, with smaller spaces forming a network of indoor and outdoor
spaces. Constructed from bamboo, locally available from several
programs that are planting bamboo in order to restore some forest, these boxes are capped off by lightweight tensile roof-pillow
constructed from tensioned bamboo and translucent fabric. The air
trapped inside these pillows heats up when exposed to sunlight, creating an upward thrust and suction that will propel a supply of cool
air through the foundations of the house. The translucent fabric allows for indirect light to enter the interior dwellings. Together, these
elements form a variety of communal and individual social spaces
with open as well as shaded courtyards and gardens.
The structural performance of Humus House is built around dynamic
systems that respond elastically to lateral movement and vibrations
caused by earthquakes. While most heavy construction systems like
brick and concrete tend to crumble if shaken, earthbags are held
together and retained by friction and barbwire alone, making them
semi-rigid but not stiff. The bamboo boxes and tensile roofs are constructed using flexible tied joints and are equally flexible.
The project seeks to provide an alternative to existing approaches
to housing in developing countries by considering the house as being part of local flows of synthetic and organic matter. Humus House
combines the pragmatics of construction on Haiti and the program
of housing with a set of architectural qualities such as massive, undulating earthbag walls with integrated vegetation and floating,
translucent tensile roofs.
Architecture Continued
Living Light
Edgar Stach, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
The Living Light house incorporates the knowledge of the region’s
past and present to create a sustainable, comfortable home to meet
the needs of today. The Living Light home organizes the daily routines of life into two cores pushed to the extents of a large loft-like
space. The north and south glass façades become the stage upon
which the building comes to life, enclosing the main living space
while incorporating lighting, privacy, views, and ventilation. Air harvested within the double façade system will be directed to an energy recovery ventilator, supplying the home with passively warmed
or cooled fresh air. Technical systems, such as the trellis-like solar
array that provides both shade and power, are integrated into the
architecture of the home and find their own unique aesthetic expression.
MISSION STATEMENT
Our team created the Living Light house to maximize opportunities
for interdisciplinary collaboration, public outreach, and research related to energy efficiency, and sustainable design.
Interdisciplinary Education: This project demonstrates how cooperation among disciplines results in culturally and environmentally
responsive designs, which significantly reduce energy consumption
and improve the quality of life for the residents.
Public Outreach: The Living Light house becomes a platform to
demonstrate sustainability, energy-efficiency, clean power generation, and emerging technologies to homeowners, students, and industry professional throughout the state and region.
Research: Upon completion of the competition, our team and its collaborators will begin to make use of the fully-sensored house as a
laboratory for collecting and analyzing energy efficiency, and testing new applications of emerging technologies, which will benefit
the university, regional manufacturers, and research partners
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
The Living Light team based its design on the following four tenets:
•Apply global technologies to local contexts: Although the
forms and spaces of the Living Light home were inspired by the cantilever barns of southern Appalachia, the systems of the dynamic façade and integrated roof array are scalable and tunable to a diverse
range of climates and applications.
•Use passive systems where appropriate and active systems where necessary: Three tiers of increasing complexity define
our team’s strategy for energy efficiency. First, create a tight, highly
insulated envelope. Second, employ passive strategies for shading,
heating, cooling, and lighting. Third, augment the passive systems
with active components as conditions require.
•Fully integrate technical and architectural systems: A primary goal for our team was to integrate multiple complex systems
into a few architectural elements and to find the most refined aesthetic expression of these emerging technologies. For the Living
Light home, the trellis that shades the façade is the photovoltaic array and the expansive window walls are the passive heating system.
•Maximize opportunities for education, outreach, and technology transfer: As a team-based multidisciplinary student project,
the Living Light home creates an environment where a wide range
of subjects can be explored. As an entirely mobile exhibit, the home
allows for dissemination of knowledge to the people of Tennessee and beyond. The use of off-the-shelf technologies in innovative
ways generates partnerships with regional industry and catalyzes
research and product development
Making Machines: Analog Inspiations from
Computational Systems
Robert Trempe, Jr., Temple University
The “Making Machines” project is a study in emergent use of procedural modeling tools and software pipelines as method for investigating,
visualizing and outputting design constructions. “Making Machines”
mission is to denote how designers today have more control over
software to embed aesthetic, tectonic and process-based tendencies
throughout the design cycle via the acquisition, translation and design
of data systems, and that the resulting information visualization can
be used to inform construction technique. In this way, the designer’s
process becomes holistic, with their mark embedded throughout the
entire design process by crafting the very nature of the design pipeline. Resulting constructions reflect every aspect of the design process,
from the crafting of the procedural network all the way through to the
techniques of construction. The resulting work wears the very process
used in its generation.
The “Proof-of-Concept” phase of this project (Phase 03) is the next in a
series of steps designed to display the feasibility of this design process,
using analog construction methods as a metric and testing bed. Earlier
phases tested the ability to make connections between data and spatial constructions within a virtual procedurally-generated environment
(Phase 01) and tested the methods by which the procedural model
can be (hypothetically) connected to a construction system, outputting building designs and proposed construction methods that reflected all of the design aesthetics and processes undertaken (Phase 02).
Essentially, data in the form of survey questions was output to twodimensional mappings via the design of a complex three-dimensional
procedural model. The emergent gradient patterns from this mapping
can then be reintroduced into the procedural model, driving the z-axis
coordinates of curves, outputting sets of architectural surfaces at the
scale of a building. Without a physical and tangible result, however,
the system would still be a hypothesis inhabiting a virtual environment.
Due to the complexity, scale and costs of blindly transitioning towards
the physical articulation of a construction at the scale of a building, a
“Proof-of-Concept” test is required to explore analog connections at a
tangible scale. Three guidelines have shaped the development of the
“Phase 03 PoC” design:
1) The ability to work with physical materials at a 1:1 scale.
2) The desire to continue testing the flexibility and adaptability of the
existing procedural network.
3) The need to employ off-the-shelf parts and construction techniques
as method for establishing a delta.
The procedural network employed in Phase 01 was modified to use its
own graphical outputs (mappings) towards the production of a lamp
shade casting bed, allowing for the usage of real-world materials while
testing the flexibility of the procedural network. The tradition amongst
architects (especially when testing new ideas in a computational environment) to build domestic objects and artifacts with the same techniques as those of their proposed architectural environments has been
copied in Phase 03 to facilitate quick and precise analysis of the connections between the computational network and resultant analog surfaces.
Minimum Maximized
Jae Cha, Judson University
These 4 projects entails architecture for Christian humanitarian missions,
and all the challenges that go into designing and building minimal structures with low-budget and low-tech constraints in difficult landscapes in
developing communities, particularly in the developing world. The buildings are not ornate, complex, or high-tech, and simple means of construction are used. Three structures in Latin America have been completed
almost entirely by volunteers—they are dual purpose, at once churches
and community centers—and a medical clinic in West Africa (phase 1).
A discussion between the functional and the spiritual defines the
concepts of these projects and hence the approach to work. The
functional requires maximizing materials, energy, labor, and construction time. To create a natural and healthy physical environment, off-the-shelf products, sunlight, and passive ventilation techniques are used. The second, more theoretical discussion is engaged
through words from the New Testament: “Where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is freedom.” This verse informs design decisions on
every level of the project, from overall form to the design details.
The Biblical story in the Garden of Eden intended that humanity
dwell in naked presence with God in perfect unity, enjoying freedom and “light-ness”, free of shame or guilt. In contrast to the often
heavy, dark structures that have dominated church design, these
buildings attempt to recreate this original condition of the openness
and love embodied in the Trinity—a place to catch a glimpse of God.
However, the projects acknowledge the difficulties in achieving this
“light-ness” due to restrictions of local building codes, climate, and
resources imposed on the structures.
The goal of these projects is to consider design strategies applicable
for future building projects that can be adapted to multiple global sites in the developing world, so that minimal resources can be
maximized for substantial impact for building projects in developing
communities.
NOLA-Machiya: A multi-use housing prototype for
New Orleans
Kentaro Tsubaki, Tulane University
The reality of the demographic shift combined with the opportunity
to address pre-Katrina urban issues through rebuilding makes the
time ripe for rethinking housing as a connective tissue to “mend”
the urban fabric of New Orleans. This project aspires to develop a
new housing prototype for post-Katrina New Orleans. It is based on
the comparative research of vernacular housing types found in two
unique urban contexts: New Orleans and Kyoto, Japan, the shotgun
house and the Kyo-machiya. The striking contextual, cultural and
technological parallels and contrasts found in the two cities are the
potent source of inquiry and knowledge informing the design.
The main objective is to develop a mixed-use, multi-unit housing
prototype appropriate for standard 30‘x120’ lot, creatively addressing the post Katrina social-cultural and performative issues in the
hot, humid climate. The central hypothesis is that the design principles and features found in Kyo-machiya can effectively be translated
into a housing design strategy in New Orleans. The project promotes
a holistic approach to the sustainable housing design contrary to the
current trend where a product oriented, techno-centric approach is
the norm.
Similar to the shotgun house, the basic physical characteristic of
Machi-ya is defined in terms of a very narrow and long urban lot it
occupies. However, it employes several distinctive spatial strategies, such as Tori-niwa (a covered interstitial side yard), Tsuboniwa (a small courtyard garden for light and air), En-gawa (a circulation porch), etc. to accommodate and take advantage of the
limited lot configuration. Combined with the tectonic characteristics of timber framing and removable screens panels, these features foster impromptu community interactions, alleviate hot and
humid conditions and cerebrate the seasonal transitions, merging
the spatial efficiency and climactic performance with dramatic visual esthetics for urban dwelling.
According to the The New Orleans Index by the Brookings Institution,
the post-storm population of New Orleans is skewed towards well educated young professionals and creative types, singles and couples with
no children. The study also indicates the relative success of Road Home
and other rebuilding programs in the hardest hit areas. However, these
programs are not intended to address pre-Katrina racial segregation
and poverty. The city suffers with disproportionate numbers of unoccupied homes, yet, average rent in the city is still unaffordable for the
workers in the key service sectors. Nola-machiya addresses these issues through unique programing and siting within the city. It is intended to foster economic development beyond its initial investment value,
facilitating the mending of the existing urban fabric.
The Nola-machiya is a hybrid of Kyo-machiya and a shotgun house, an
attempt to transpose, negotiate, and integrate the architectural considerations and features arising out of the two distinctive vernacular
cultures, while addressing issues of context and time. The project demonstrate the NEXT iteration of the performative design thinking for urban dwellings in the dynamic global context.
Parametric Zoning - Wringing Jouissance from the
Regulation Grid
Skender Luarasi, University of Massachusetts
This is a client-commissioned midrise project in Tirana, Albania. The
program calls for a commercial zone in the first three floors, housing
in the upper floors and a two level underground parking. The project occupies a tightly situated corner at the intersection of two busy
downtown urban streets, populated with dense midrise adjacencies.
This urban configuration calls for a strict application of zoning codes,
setbacks and distances from the adjacent structures. The premise of
the project is to address this tight programmatic and urban complexity
by strategically deploying computational intelligence.
The design uses a computationally controlled curvature in order to negotiate between the regulation grid, zoning codes and the building program
and its urban expression. Marching Cubes Algorithm is used to process
the contextual constraints and affect the generic zoning envelope. The
Marching Cubes is an algorithm developed by Lorensen and Cline on 1987.
Its applications are mainly concerned with medical visualizations such as
CT and MRI scan data images, and special effects or 3-D modeling with
what is usually called metaballs or other metasurfaces. Marching Cubes
Algorithm extracts/visualizes a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a
three-dimensional scalar field, sometimes called voxels. An extracted isosurface satisfies a particular topological relation or condition:
f(x, y, z) = c where c is the voxels’ numerical/scalar value.
The algorithm visualizes an isosurface through numerical values by
“marching” through the voxels and selecting only those whose values are below a certain user input threshold. A series of isosurfaces
can be generated from different input qualities according to different
thresholds. (For architectural applications of Marching Cubes (Voxel)
Algorithm see the MArch Thesis works of Styliano Dritsas and Sawako
Kijima). In this particular project the algorithm is modified so that the
numerical value of the distributed voxels plastically morphs the zoning
envelope of the site, which in turn is indexed as the voxel bounding box
in the algorithm. Specific conditions are then selected from the variability output of the algorithm, according to specific design predicaments
and objectives. The algorithm suggests a design process that is not
based on geometrical procedure, but on information processing, where
a particular geometry is an instantiation or actualization of a particular
“slice” of information (see poster).
The building itself performs as a geography of n-dimensional curvatures that
respond to the very contextual constraints that produced them in the first
place. These constraints become in fact the very stuff and material of design.
The final effect is one of jouissance, a sublimation of spatial and material desire that is generated as a result of a negative drive, a joyful reaction towards
the external limit, which is usually considered to be against desire as such.
The building elegantly oscillates as a result of a multiplicity of local zoning
codes and forces and programmatic constraints. The building is wrapped
with a very thin skin that consists of fixed and operable screens. The screen
responds to the geography of the building itself, its habitation units, HVAC
infrastructure, programmatic heterogeneity and the life of the street.
Project GRAFT: Focus on the Future
Jennifer Akerman, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Architectural education is uniquely positioned to imagine and create the
future by critically investigating complex conditions of the present and
past. As designers, we examine how to craft space, light, and material in
the best interest of cultural exchange. The designed world—ranging from
micro to macro, from handheld device to global infrastructural systems—
shapes the way people live and share ideas. Design is transformative,
in ways that can be positive or negative. The underlying goal of Project
GRAFT is to consider what strategies might minimize negative environmental impacts stemming from the design, construction, and ongoing operation of buildings, using ecological systems as a model. Through a critical exploration of existing and recent patterns in consumption, agricultural
practices, and architectural, urban, and infrastructural activities, we seek to
project a possible future that is wholly sustainable and culturally enriching.
We do this by grafting eco-logics onto design logics.
This design studio is an ongoing investigation into the potential for a hybridized architecture of food production to help revitalize urban centers
spatially, economically, and culturally. A number of influences, ranging
from regulatory to grass-roots, are leading to a resurgence of urban agriculture as communities recognize the benefits of returning food production and distribution to city centers. Simultaneously, technological
advances have enabled new possibilities for architects and designers.
We see an opportunity for critical investigation to suggest specific approaches rooted in a deeper context. We analyze the underlying systems
of sustainable food production models as a means of synthesizing a new
approach in urban design.
We specifically analyze permaculture as a potential model for both food
production and architectural design and realization. In the agricultural context, permaculture refers to stacked and interlinked ecological operations.
Optimally, the outputs of one process become inputs to another process,
embodying McDonough’s “waste equals food.” The goal is to limit outside
inputs (fertilizer, water, food, petroleum) and to limit waste (pollutants/
carbon, wastewater, packaging), replacing them with continual, mutually
beneficial, ecological systems.
Key principles of permaculture are applied to a full architectural, landscape,
and interior design project addressing a specific program and site. We
seek to extrapolate and apply strategies of nested and sequential loops as
an alternative to the many disparate inputs and outputs typically associated with buildings. Each team develops a hypothesis explored through
a design proposal that creatively and elegantly connects input and output of various, possibly incongruous, processes. This work interconnects
design across many scales (from human, to building, to city), and across
processes (from ecosystem to conditioned architectural space). The final
sites and programs propose a grafted architecture and landscape intervention in a city in the southeastern United States. The program specifically relates to food production and consumption—conflating grocery,
restaurant, and farm.
The approach of Project GRAFT enables shifting agriculture from rural
to urban, from horizontal to vertical, from exterior to interior. Grafting
blurs distinctions between previously dialectical conditions. The resultant hybrid posits spatial and experiential qualities that can transform
what it means to live in the city while promoting environmentally-positive structures.
Roofless Gallery for [con]temporary Art
Bryan Shields, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Jennifer Shields, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The contemporary city is littered with derelict sites: once active commercial or industrial zones, now void of human occupation, contain
architectural remains left to atrophy. These ruins often exhibit a rich
palimpsest of cultural and material history, ripe with latent potentialities to be revealed. How can these wastelands, remnants of the technological landscape, be reactivated, transforming artifacts of industrial
obsolescence into cultural catalysts through minimal intervention?
In service of attempting to answer this question, the Roofless Gallery for [Con]temporary Art is a design/build project undertaken to
reinhabit a specific abandoned artifact. A dry-cleaning facility lies in
a state of ruin along a heavily traveled spine in Charlotte, the seam between two underserved urban neighborhoods. The roofless character
of the building, a space defined only by walls as a result of neglect and
weathering, creates an unintended but fortuitous Terrellian skyspace.
The inherent boundaries of its urban context offer solace solely in the
vertical dimension, providing the opportunity to transcend physical
and societal limitations and reconnect with the boundless firmament.
This artifact has the potential to reactivate the urban corridor: interventions into the structure will provide a means of reinhabiting the site
and engaging in a dialogue with the community.
Seen as a dualistic membrane, the building enclosure thus becomes
paradoxical, alternately acting as a limit that separates and indicates
the distance between two spaces - between here and there, my world
and your world, private and public, and also acting as the very mechanism by which those same worlds communicate and passage occurs
between them.
- Henry Plummer “Realm of the Landing: Reciprocal Form and Spatial
Dialectics at the Threshold”
This roofless structure has been envisioned as a temporary arts space
that would encourage interaction between local artists and residents.
The architectural intent is to provide partially protected but unconditioned space for episodic arts and music events, including lighting,
display mechanisms, and weather protection for the artwork. Recognizing the rich spatial and haptic experience of the space as a result of
the ambiguity between exterior and interior, students have explored
ways to construct a canopy, or integument, of found materials that
preserves the roofless nature of the building. This integument is kinetic: in its horizontal position, it offers mounting surfaces for artwork,
lighting, and weather protection, while providing exterior lighting of
event signage on the existing building shell. In its vertical position, the
integument creates an illuminated fin, calling attention to passers-by
as it proclaims its role in the new life of the building. The project culminates in post-installation testing through an arts and music event,
bringing together students, artists, and neighbors – the reactivation of
a vestigal urban site through minimal architectural intervention.
Small House
Donna Kacmar, University of Houston
This 544 sq. ft. house was placed at the back of a large lot to allow for future development if desired while also sized to allow for
house to be moved if property was sold for land value only. The
house sits next to a large carport/porch and looks out to a large
Ipe deck and the lawn beyond. The house is efficiently designed for
a couple who spend much of their time away but required a place
near work and family. The house is wrapped in low maintenance
metal siding on the exterior and simple materials are used inside.
The bathroom and closet are clad in vintage white oak siding that
matches the kitchen cabinetry and refers to the cabin like quality
of this very modest home.
Structural Scents
Glenn Nowak, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Erik Swendseid, Univeristy of Nevada, Las Vegas
The Structure of Scent
An examination of past developments between design and human
interaction will generate the NEXT pedagogical intersection between architecture and society; the next point in which designers
educate and inform society of the experiential qualities of a fulfilling built environment.
Throughout the last 100 years, society’s vastly changed perception of color, light, scale, sound, movement, and technology in design and architecture has forever altered the way we live in and
judge our built environment. This heightened sense of awareness
has either redefined or given each element a new role as a layer
in the designer’s thought process. Their combined syntheses with
all other elements of design have led to groundbreaking creativity and innovation in architecture. We now see buildings that are
covered with light that dance to music. Information technology has
made possible a whole new level of complexity and human interaction with architecture. Advances in engineering and the science of
materials have allowed architects to design bigger and taller, while
keeping users safer. Architectural visualizations and architectural
acoustics have made tremendous strides over the last one hundred
years. With such advances happening in the way architecture engages our emotions and physical environment, we can argue the
thought that the olfactory sense will, in the next 100 years, mimic
these advancements and employ a much more critical role in our
sensory experience.
Given its potential cognitive capacity, a heightened sense of olfactory awareness will enable us to do more than merely enjoy a
pleasant amenity, but instead will provide us with a tool for living.
Educating ourselves of this potential, learning the “language” of
scent, and taking advantage of its benefits will deliver only richer experiences in design. Today, the way we perceive scent and
translate its meaning often leaves us describing it in very elementary terms such as “good“ or “offensive“. With such an effort in
society to cover one scent with another scent, we often fail to
recognize the many subtleties in between an under whelmed and
overwhelmed environment. Being able to express and recognize
gradations in scent will allow designers to use scent as a tool for
design, to communicate specific goals to the end user, and will
allow the olfactory sense to become a more functional piece of
everyday life, as opposed to something with which we currently
use to simply recognize decoration. With advances in perfuming
science, scientists can not only create new smells that have never
been recognized before in nature, but they can pinpoint the exact
molecular structure for these and all other scents in order to arrive
at a specific purpose for design.
As designers, we need to seize the opportunity and potential of all
senses in design, while taking into account the complexity of the
human mind and its multidimensional and multisensory comforts
to insure that they do not become dormant in an unchallenging
society. “The architecture of tomorrow will call for an architect that
can embed new kinds of rules and design behaviors together with
design ingenuity.” Maria Lorena Lehman
The Fibrous Structure Machine: a Generative Process
Towards Form-Finding
Emmanouil Vermisso, Florida Atlantic University
The project discussed here was developed during a six week research & design seminar on biologically inspired prototyping
(the project itself lasting four weeks). Based on the observation
that nature produces infinite structural and formal configurations
through re-cycling of only one material (fibers), a ‘machine’ was
designed that would fabricate complex shapes using a variety of
thread types and a simple actuator such as a Lego® motor. The
project is regarded as an attempt to learn from the efficiency of
biological systems; in the long-term, the authors would like to extract a series of ‘rules’ from the properties of the three fiber types
that exist in the human body. We are interested in this line of study
because it operates on both formal (aesthetic) and performative
(functional) levels. The nature of the work involved requires input
from other disciplines like Engineering to perform analysis on the
resulting prototypes which is something that we are encouraging
as a working methodology. From an Architectural standpoint, the
next generations of this machine can provide a good platform for
developing some sort of structural response to form. The precedence for this investigation seems to be assuming an ever-growing
importance within the context of integration in Architecture and
the authors believe that such premises will constitute a large portion of future Design -related research.
Thick-It
Global climate change and the imperative of sustainability have
placed immense pressure on the discipline to consider innovation in
new terms. Technological progress is no longer measured solely by
advancements in structural engineering, responsive skins, and new
composite materials but also by the responsible recycling, renewal,
and reuse of that which already exists. Until now advancements
in computation and digital fabrication have been predominately
in service of the former while material scientists and a handful of
resourceful architects have propelled the latter. Thick-It expands
the role of computation in sustainable material practice by mixing
high-tech digital protocols with low-tech material realities.
Thick-It is the result of research conducted in partnership with a local hardwood mill to consider novel ways to utilize the byproducts
of their manufacturing process. Thick-It focuses on the use of linear
wood cut-offs generated by the standard lengthwise cutting (ripping) of non-standard boards. This wood is high-grade hardwood
but it lacks dimensional consistency that renders it useless in standard wood construction. Thick-It develops its potential as a viable
architectural material.
The project activates an alternative life for this material as a thick,
woody, interior. The first act in the design process is one of optimism—the flipping of a perceived limitation into an opportunity.
Despite having little to offer as a standardized building element
the wood edges do offer up a unique quality: mass… and lots of it.
The mill produces these pieces faster than it can grind them up and
burn the chips. This affords an opportunity to rethink the models of
economy that are associated with most building systems, including
wood, which tend toward optimization as minimum thickness and
maximum performance.
Thick-It flips this model upside down, conceiving of an extreme
thickness from which space is carved. Instead of lining the shell,
the wood is oriented perpendicular to it—hanging from the ceiling and projecting up from the ground. Scripted patterns govern
the orientation and length of each piece, aligning them with virtual
ordering systems that create gradual swells of volume that envelop the body. The natural textures of the wood and various marks
of its manufacturing history beckon the touch of those who pass
through.
Ultimately, this kind of work has the potential to shape the world
from the inside-out. Innovation and integration are defined by the
strategic insertion of foreign (i.e., digital) codes into existing streams
of production. This approach forgoes the ambition to restructure
entire manufacturing processes in favor of a more targeted strategy of cleaving space for design within established protocols. In the
end, Thick-It’s story offers up a new narrative of architectural production—one where architectural agents configure guerilla scripts
to reshape the detritus of global mass-production. Such an agent
may be more akin to a DJ than a scientist, constantly composing
new aesthetic mixtures from the matter at her fingertips.
Tingle Room
Ellie Abrons
Predominately governed by efficiency, maximization, and building standards, the architectural liner (i.e., floor, ceiling, and wall) is
most often built as a thin, taught surface. Its standardization produces a blankness that is then adorned with window dressings, colored paint, and personal artifacts. Tingle Room challenges this thin
surface by transforming it into a deep volume, unlocking a space
within the thickness of the wall, and ultimately moving architecture
from blank backdrop to active participant.
The project employs a tension between multiple material states:
those that resonate with the existing structure—a repurposed, single-family home in Detroit—and those that are foreign; materials
that are highly worked and finished and those that are rough or
raw; materials that play more than one role in the structure, de40 - ACSA 100th Annual Meeting
tailing, and finishing of the space and those that are extraneous
or ornamental. To do this, the standard functions of materials are
redefined, distorted, or multiplied in order to exploit latent qualities
that contribute to the rich experience of the space. Avoiding a fundamentalist attitude towards the use of particular materials, they
are burnt, painted, smothered or otherwise manipulated in order to
extend their possible qualitative effects. There are no material essences to be found, only evocative textures, colors, and forms that
offer up new associations and sensations.
Formally, the project creates a space within a space—a room within
a room—coating the existing floor, ceiling, and walls with a new architectural surface comprised of plywood panels, insulation foam,
and steel cable. The thickening of the architectural liner allows
formal ruptures to cleave space between multiple interior surfaces. As the plywood breaks apart it reveals foam insulation that is
thickened, carved, and poked into a coarse surface that is painted
in rich, vibrant colors. The suspension cables, typically positioned
sparsely on a taught grid, are multiplied and extended beyond their
requisite length to create a cloud of thin tendrils.
The layering of formal variation, material texture, and vivid color
obscures an instantaneous or complete “reading” of the space;
instead propelling the participant to perceive and sense multiple
dimensions that unfold over time as they move through it. In other
words, each material creates its own pattern, but none is visible as
a whole at any one point. More akin to a manifold than a veneer,
each pattern fades in and out of focus, yielding an experience that
vacillates between the realms of the haptic, the visual, and the conceptual.
Design
[Dada]rchitecture
Baltimore Calling
The “Dada” Manifesto was a rejection to War, a rejection to prevailing standards, and the creation of “anti-art”.
This proposal for the Baltimore MTA systems suggest a flexible
approach to embedding landscape into urbanism and providing a
‘third way’ adapted to various conditions, continual change, and
unpredictability. The concept, Baltimore Calling, offers an insertable light infrastructure that mitigates the adverse effects of MTA
Red Line construction from the inside, thus allowing the system as a
whole to maintain balance.
Javier Gomez, Texas Tech University
The cultural movement that began in Zurich in reaction to war included visual arts, literature, poetry, art manifestoes and art theory.
It reached its peak in the 1920s and became a breaking ground for
the contemporary arts. “Dada is the groundwork to abstract art
and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude
to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of anti-art
to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the
movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism”1.
Dadaism began as an anarchist reactionary movement; it was nihilistic and representational of the opposite. It rejected the traditional
culture and aesthetics in search of new meanings that were intentionally meaning-less.
During the late1950’s Dada became influential in the surge of the
Situationist International, the anarchist movement that taught psycho-geography as a means to understanding the environment’s,
“unitary urbanism”.
By introducing [Dada]rchitecture my intentions are not to develop
nihilism or anarchism with political implications in the studio. My
goals strive in challenging the students with unexpected scenarios
in order to achieve better creative outcomes. Through philosophical studies and contemporary arts my pedagogy focuses on observation and critical thinking as tools for creativity. Teach how to observe, to find that magic moment on a trash container, a neglected
alley… an art piece.
Following the premises of the artistic and philosophical movement
of the beginning of the twentieth century, I encourage students to
use the right side of the brain by reading opposites, understanding
that the creation of an architectural apparatus could be found in
banal everyday objects: in dreams, in the unconscious, in the unexpected, in the contradiction, in the accident.
Beginning with assignments including a series of surrealist photocollages, I teach the students, with an analytical-cubist perception,
the nature of the environment and the value of the objects contained within the space. Using semiotic codes, in a “ready made”,
the object not just is defined as a meaningful element of our daily
life, but also defines the meaning of the opposite. By diagramming
motion, and the unconscious human interaction with space and objects, students develop a program. Finally, through diagrams and
a supporting narrative the project for a basic building is created.
The Design Studio is divided in four main topics:
+dweller/user: A first stage will include an investigation of the user
(physical and meta-physical) and the creation of a narrative by understanding the dweller’s beliefs and activities.
+context=site: Mapping site, context, and objects.
++spatial sequences/movement: Space and motion are extruded
and diagrammed.
+program=narrative: Interaction between the space and the dweller, space and context, space and object, and in consequence the
development of a program (trans-program, cross-program or disprogram).
+building: Development of a project, by integrating previous phases of design through ordering systems.
1 Marc Lowenthal, translator’s introduction to Francis Picabia’s I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation,
Gregory Marinic, Universidad de Monterrey
origins
In the 21st century, methods and means of communication have undergone rapid transformation. A dying icon, the public telephone
was once a symbol of modernity and communication. Typically located at a busy downtown street corner or adjacent to bus stops,
the telephone booth offered a simple, direct, and affordable way to
connect and share information. Baltimore Calling recalls the fading
memory of this mid-20th century communication device by reinterpreting its form, function, and performance. The project offers a
way to simultaneously connect people with information, culture, and
nature. Here, the physical dimensions of the classic telephone booth
(4’ x 4’ x 8’), as well as informal geometries of stacked cast-off construction pallets, simultaneously informed the design of site-specific
performative architectural installations for Baltimore. Constructs
may be temporarily installed at various locations impacted by construction activity throughout the MTA system.
opportunities
Built from unfinished spruce, Baltimore Calling has been designed to
flexibly adapt to interstitial spaces found within MTA construction
zones, rights-of-way, and existing stations. The ‘telephone booth’
houses a classic telephone, and acts as a ‘call center’ both literally
and figuratively by providing a refuge and year-round nesting habitat for migratory birds. Seasonally changing and hosting additional
native plant material, each installation will continually adapt to and
merge with its site over time. As individual installations wear into
their sites, these new habitats will collect native vines, tall grasses,
mosses, and lichens. Attracting migratory birds, butterflies, and
plantlife, the installations will become unexpected amenities for
citizens. Baltimore Calling has been designed to effortlessly transform over time with zero maintenance. Materially, installations will
continually weather from gold-to-amber-to gray, while the habitats
themselves will grow into a network of micro-environments that
change from season-to-season and year-to-year. Birdhouse, informal telecommunications outpost, or morning glory trellis--such roles
suggest only three potentialities for the installations. As a source of
both curiosity and delight, Baltimore Calling proposes a time-relevant construct that activates, supports, and responds to its immediate environment. The concept offers the potential to make Baltimore a more environmentally-connected place that actively carves
out space for natural systems to merge with the city.
connections
Baltimore Calling will connect the natural world and humans within
an urban context. Just pick up the phone and receive up-to-date
information regarding MTA construction delays and transit information, as well as details on area attractions and cultural events.
Each phone will offer a touch-tone directory of resources including arts, historical data, neighborhood details, and special events
specific to the location of each installation.
Design Continued
Ornate Screens
Daniel Baerlecken, Georgia Institute of Technology
The project “Ornate Screens” investigates ornamentation of 3-dimensional surfaces through digital tools, which allow the re-introduction
of variation. Ornament has been abolished by the avant-garde in the
first half of the twentieth century and ornamentation has been replaced by material aesthetic. With this project we will argue that ornament is not a parergon, an unnecessary accessory, but that the parergon, the ornament, actually becomes the ergon, the main element.
In that sense ornament becomes performative in two ways. Firstly,
ornament performs in a perceptual way. With Ernst Gombrich we argue that aesthetic enjoyment is guided by the “sense of order” “as an
active agent reaching out toward the environment, not blindly and at
random”, but structured. Ornamentation allows “Einfuehlung” - empathy, the identification with an object.
Secondly, we argue that ornament can perform on the level of the
ergon as structural system.
The project has two design foci: the first focus is the design of a series
of lights, which are fabricated through STL and SLS technologies. The
objects are brought to life primarily as single objects without joints or
seams as ‘additive fabrication’. By that, the objects can be produced
directly from digital information as unique pieces. Each light can be
different from the other, but still belong to the same family. Changing
variables in the original script allows creating a different light, which
still can feed back to a greater family. Mass production is replaced
with mass customization. One can create unique objects by manipulating the parameters.
The second project is an installation, a CNC fabricated wood construction that demonstrates how a pattern based geometry can be
optimized structurally through a set of iterations. The tessellationbased project is adapted in order to achieve a maximum of structural
strength. The structural calculation model contains not only geometry
but also loads resulting from various sources.
The design of a series of lights demonstrates the potential of CAAD
and CAAM tools for a design object and shows how these tools allow
us to re-think the relationship of author and user: Through parametric
tools each user can design its own light within certain constrains. The
second project shows how parametric tools can be used to optimize
geometry to achieve a structural performance.
Ornament can be re-introduced as ergon that allows strengthening
empathy between subject and object and that allows solving problems of performance. Ornament becomes necessary again.
the NEXT curtain
Virginia San Fratello, San Jose State University
The inherent nature of 3D printing opens new possibilities for shaping
materials and it’s my belief that this process will reshape the way we
design and fabricate architectural and interior building components.
Digital materiality, a term coined by Italian and Swiss architects Fabio
Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, describes materiality increasingly enriched with digital characteristics where data, material, programming
and construction are interwoven (Gramazio and Kohler, 2008). The
designs for these two curtains were created as an exploration into the
rapid manufacture of interior building components that are not only
made through the process of 3D printing, but are all also responsive
to the environment.
Unique, one of a kind building components, generated quickly and
economically, from advanced 3 dimensional modeling software were
explored. These 3D printed curtains were studied in conjunction with
solar conditions throughout the day and year and offer an alternative
to traditional curtains and blinds, one that is responsive to weather, to
views and to interior programming.
Exploration #1: The WAVE curtain is a passive solar curtain that is
designed to admit the low winter sun into the building interior and restrict the direct, intense summer sun in order to help keep the interior
cool. The curtain does this through the use of cylindrical tubes that
vary in width and depth along the length of the window. Because the
cylindrical tubes are hollow one always has access to exterior views
-even when the sun is being blocked - unlike a typical shade or curtain.
The curtain is 3D printed of white poly lactic acid from renewable
resources such as corn starch.
Exploration #2: The HEX curtain is designed to open and close automatically in response to natural day lighting conditions. Each row of
the HEX curtain is composed of hexagonal shaped apertures that are
covered by 2 operable shields. The 2 shields have the ability to pivot
open and closed. The shields are hinged at the bottom and threaded
at the top. The top thread connects each shield to the one next to
it. At the end of each row a rotary motor pulls the thread and slowly
opens or closes the shields in tandem. The rotary motor is driven by
an arduino microcontroller connected to a solar sensor so on a sunny
summer day the shields remain closed and on a sunny winter day the
shields are automatically opened to allow sun to enter the interior and
warm the space.
The HEX curtain is constructed of laser sintered nylon and is 3D printed in 27” x 22” panels.
The Next Generative Infrastructure for Detroit
Constance Bodurow, Lawrence Technological University
Detroit has a wealth of empty space, though little intelligence or understanding of it. There is a global, morbid fascination with Detroit’s
emptiness. The media and design disciplines have mythologized it
in imagery and obsessively mapped and quantified it (the reported
yet disputed 40,000 parcels). Vacancy perpetuates entrenched
social, economic and environmental disparities and inequities, but,
in the midst of formal ‘right sizing’ and informal urban agricultural
initiatives, a constructive civic dialogue about the role of vacancy in
the future of the city has yet to begin.
Our transdisciplinary design research lab wishes to prompt the dialogue. We believe that a new urban geography and ecosystem are
required to balance the benefits and impacts of both shrinking and
rapid urbanization and leverage the assets and complex combinations of forces of the city-scape. We look at vacancy as a new infrastructure for the city. We see vacancy, as it manifests: in land,
buildings and infrastructure, as generative. Vacancy provides an
armature for collective dialogue, design intervention and policy. We
recommend a variety of productive, temporal uses for vacancy, to
generate the next urban form of the city. In the same manner that
the grid and infrastructure become a generator of urban form and
use (Smithsons, Varnelis, Belanger, et al), vacancy can guide future
urban form in Detroit.
Design Continued
We define infrastructure networks as the systemic and complex
overlay required to support a city and its associated urbanized region. Infrastructure exists in service to an urbanized region, is a
key determinant of future urban form, and plays a significant role
in establishing a more desirable and sustainable condition for urban growth and change. We have created a Systemic Overlay to
understand the profound connections between neighborhoods,
city, and regional and international context. These connections occur largely through blue, green, gray and white infrastructure networks that span geographic, ecological and political boundaries.
Vacancy emerges as the ubiquitous infrastructure in each of these
typologies.
This poster describes aspects of our current project to create a net
zero energy community, and the central role which vacancy plays
in achieving that goal. In one neighborhood of Detroit, we have
identified approximately 1,500 acres (635 hectares) of vacancy,
in three categories: Vacant (V); Vacant w/abandoned structures
(A); and Vacant w/occupied structures (O). This new armature,
in close proximity to infrastructure systems, supports our recommendations for generative uses for vacant and decommissioned
land, buildings and infrastructure. These interventions include hybrid alternative (renewable) energy, targeted density, water cycle
management, and reforestation. Our recommendations focus on
Detroit’s most iconic examples of vacancy (e.g. Michigan Central
Station), those juxtaposed to economic stability providing opportunities to engage partners and remaining residents in joint ownership, training and management (e.g., Condon Neighborhood), and
proposed regional/international infrastructure investment (e.g.,
DIFT). Each envisions an alternative, equitable, and sustainable
ecosystem for the city.
While Detroit serves as the context for our first design intervention,
we believe that our design methodology is scalable and replicable
to prompt dialogue and guide the future form of urbanized regions
across the globe.
Disaster
School for Darfurian Refugees: Building as a Teaching Tool
SunShower SSIP House
This project began with a study of material and human resources.
Through an examination of indigenous building practices of SubSaharan Africa, a material palette was created. This included a
family of earth construction techniques such as compressed mud
bricks, rammed earth, thatch roofing, recycled metals, and minimal
amounts of concrete, and steel work.
The SunShower SSIP House was the winning entry in an invited
sustainable design competition sponsored by OceanSafe. The program called for a disaster relief house that uses Steel Structural
Insulated Panels (SSIPs) and prescribed a highly specific kit of materials and equipment that could be transported in a standard shipping container.
The process of developing a design that would be transmitted to
a local population on the ground in Chad involved the alternating
process of full scale materials testing with designing through scalar models and drawings. A sequence of brick and rammed earth
studies informed the design of the school. A non-verbal pictorial
construction manual complemented the drawings as a communication tool.
The design of this house is a modest single-level home that uses
its roof forms to serve seemingly opposing roles, providing shelter
from the elements while collecting solar energy and water. The
higher “sun-roof” is angled to the South to maximize efficiency for
solar collection while a lower sloping “shower roof” channels water
into a catch basin and cistern. The house is divided into public and
private zones and designates areas for wet (utility) and dry (leisure) living. Lightweight SSIPs can be assembled without special
equipment and the house is weather tight before any finishes are
applied. Innovative use of SSIPs in this project offers sliding panels
that extend the living space on to a shaded deck. Shaped cut-outs
in exterior panels allow for a moment for individual expression at
the entry of this prototype. Solar panels and a wind turbine provide the necessary renewable energy and enables the house to operate off-grid when electrical service is interrupted.
Jeanine Centuori, Woodbury University
Artur Nesterenko, Woodbury University
Building as a Teaching Tool
The Vocational Academy Building Project serves as a classroom
space and a learning tool for matriculating students. In addition to
housing classrooms for teaching reading and writing subjects, its
construction is meant to serve as a practicum in sustainable building practices. Students enrolled in the program will participate on
building teams to erect portions of the structure.
It is a building that combines indigenous building practices with
state-of-the-art sustainable ethics. A simple rectangular open floor
plan accommodates approximately 80 students (40 male and 40
female students). It employs a double roof structure with a thatch
pyramidal roof that is covered with a second metal roof. The large
metal roof canopy acts as a shade device to protect the interior
from the intense heat.
Tiffany Lin, Tulane University
Judith Kinnard, Tulane University
A prototype of the SunShower SSIP House is currently under construction in the Lakeview area of New Orleans, slated for completion in the Fall of 2011.
The main structure is made of compressed mud bricks using a
compression machine with a hand lever. There is a minimal amount
of concrete and steel rebars needed for beam construction. The
infill walls between the columns are non-structural rammed earth
that is made of soil, and a small amount of cement. These walls are
ventilated with fiber cement cylindrical tiles that may be made by
the students on the site.
This single volume building is designed as one classroom space,
and is intended to accommodate one gender. It is anticipated that
two volumes will be built, along with smaller open-air canopies that
serve as shade devices, lunch areas, and prayer spaces. Additionally, composting toilet structures will be built on the site.
This building acts as a tool by which students will learn sustainable building practices. This is a prototype structure that may be
duplicated and adapted to many other sites in the Darfur region
as repatriation takes place. Student/builders of the school will
acquire skills such as brick making, rammed earth construction,
thatch and metal roofing, installing composting toilets, and water
management and conservation. These skills will be the foundation
to entrepreneurial ventures as resettlements begin to take place.
Ecology
Global Benchmarking for Low Carbon Urban Design
Perry Yang, Georgia Institute of Technology
The project was produced by the ecological urbanism studio, a performance-based urban design studio conducted in Spring of 2011 for both
School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. It is a model of studio teaching that connects urban design and energy-related carbon and solar analyses. Seven
global cities and their central urban districts were chosen for mapping the
urban physical structure, energy- carbon footprints and solar availability.
Design strategies for carbon reduction were then tested by proposing alternative scenarios of density and ecological urban block design.
Based on selected downtown or midtown urban settings from North
American and East Asian cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Macau, Manhattan, Shanghai, Tokyo and Vancouver, the analyses involve the mapping of density, diversity, urban block structure as well as the performance
measures of urban visibility, solar availability and energy-related carbon
footprints from large (L), medium (M) to small (S) scales.
We began the investigation of sustainable urban form by gathering basic
statistics for each city—such as land use, land cover, population density,
and per capita consumption rates. Next, to better understand each city’s
greater context, we mapped each city’s urban spatial structure, landscape
patterns, and transportation network within each large [L] 10 km x 10 km
study area. At this level of analysis, city-level patterns of use and density
begin to emerge.
For each city, the studio chose medium [M] 1 km x 1 km study areas that
are representative of the urban form of individual city’s central district. For
those cities with several distinct character areas or districts, we analyzed
multiple [M] scale study areas. For each 1 km x 1 km site, we did a comparative study of each city’s existing urban framework and mapped building
density, mix of land uses, spatial configurations, transportation connectivity, green space, and building typologies.
At the small [S] scale, we completed a typological study of building types
for each city. Building archetypes were sorted and classified based on
building height, area, and shape. Ultimately, 60 building typologies were
established and categorized based on height and massing. We then compared these typologies based on characteristics such as height, massing,
surface-volume ratio, floor area ratio, carbon emissions, total solar availability, and carbon offset potential.
We aim to derive a set of principles of low carbon urban design through
the mapping of global urban settings to benchmark their performance
measure and criteria. The global cities benchmarking provides a basis
for proposing a hypothetical framework of designing a new ecologically
sensitive urban district. In the case of Chicago Loop, we propose a future urban block design that would reduce 69.2% carbon of the existing
operation based on those low carbon design principles by reconfiguring
the current block structure to have better energy-carbon efficiency and
greater solar availability over the solar-powered urban surface and building envelop. Each hypothetical proposal includes both design and its corresponding performance measure based on L, M and S levels of spatial
analyses and visualization techniques.
Landscape
Balmart: Reclaiming Public Space
Mo Zell, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Marc Roehrle, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
This design proposal combines three distinct network conditions: 1)
softball league network, 2) road infrastructure network and 3) bigbox retail recast from the capitalist catalyst to public space network,
all in an effort to reframe development opportunities in big-box retail parking lots using landscape as the method for redevelopment.
The big-box retail parking lot provides opportunities for new types of
public/private partnerships that use landscape as the creative venue
for crafting public space. This proposal capitalizes on the quantity
and consistency of big-box retail parking lots within Wisconsin and
proposes to create a series of public softball fields that support district, regional and state games. The public/private partnership calls
for the redevelopment of about 100 parking spaces (roughly an
acre of land for games and spectators) into a pervious surface that
doubles as parking during the offseason. The partnership provides
a new location for the public, capitalizing on the number of citizens
visiting big-box retail, ample parking, and an overabundance of
empty space within the development area. As a result of the softball
games, more activity takes place, previously underutilized portions
of the parking lot are occupied during non-peak times, sustainable
land strategies are deployed using public space, safety is increased
with “more eyes on the street [parking lot]”, and a major reduction
in driving (reduced number of errands since play and shopping are
in the same place). This fluid framework anticipates and welcomes
new development patterns in the future.
Details: The field is marked by poles that double as lighting for the
parking lot and supports for a series of flexible yet taut nets that are
dismantled during the offseason. The backstop and benches remain
in place during all seasons as their position on the edge of the parking lot would not interfere with daily parking usage. The grass of
the softball field, as well as native prairie grasses lining the outfield,
provide filtration to minimize the quantity and increase the quality
of water runoff from the adjacent parking lot.
(RED)OX: reduction
The 800,000 SF plinth becomes the INLAND, a large, flexible open
space with 270-degree views (not found anywhere else on Chicago’s waterfront at this scale). The southern portion, a labyrinth of
bioreactors, offers maximum solar exposure to enhance algae production as well as filtered light to the laboratory below. The maze
of ramps penetrating the INLAND mat allow for multiple entrances
to this laboratory, and to the open-air amphitheater (preserving
the footprint of the 1958 Arie Crown theater). A grand staircase
slices the mat building connecting lakefront (and Museum Campus
amenities) to city center. The eastern edge, a ‘water zone’, boasts
public swimming pools and new linear aquarium (highlighting
specimen from the Shedd Aquarium) that activates the existing
promenade along the lakefront.
As a flexible surface/skin, the INLAND hosts active and passive
activities including several soccer matches, or softball games, or
20,000 picnickers or 40,000 spectators watching fireworks. The
raised platform provides a ‘privileged position’ along the waterfront for the public. Commercial activities and water-based think
tank slide underneath the skin without compromising the public
virtues of the site, its edges, or views. A new “ceiling,” created by
stringing lights and shading devices from the remaining columns,
reemphasizes the spatial and scalar parameters of the original volume without the omnipresent roof.
RED(OX): oxidation
This destination barge (the ISLAND), created by floating the existing roof into Lake Michigan, adds 18 acres of new waterfront to the
city, while the submerged web of structural steel transforms into a
freshwater reef. An algae farm of shallow rink-like ponds increases
the quality of declining algae species native to Lake Michigan while
a recreational platform to the north provides lake-style swimming,
diving, and beaches in the summer with ice-skating, ice fishing, and
curling in the winter all with unique views of the metropolitan skyline. A dock and boat slip along the west alleviates boat congestion
in Burnham Park Harbor.
Diasporic Landscapes
Chicago REDOX: Reduction/Oxidation
Mo Zell, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Marc Roehrle, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
The consequence of positioning single program mega-structures
into urban centers in the 1970’s has resulted in a glut of large-scale
underutilized buildings scattered amongst vast parking areas. In the
past, responses to these mega-structures have included demolition,
inserting new program or adaptive reuse. We propose a radical reformation of the existing building components to create new public
space.
REDOX: reuse. Our design reconsiders the embodied energy (intellectual, cultural, material, economic) of Gene Summers’ McCormick
Place (1971), optimally situated on Chicago’s lakefront. Given the
public position of McCormick Place (the base situated 40’ off Chicago’s lakefront), we propose a spatial manifestation of the biological
process redox (the portmanteau of reduction-oxidation). By subdividing the site laterally, two new surfaces for outdoor public space
capitalize on the existing building’s embodied energy. We propose
removing, launching, and floating the roof super-structure into Lake
Michigan, creating a new destination for Chicagoans, the ISLAND.
What remains becomes the INLAND, a mat-form flexible program
below an expansive new surface that hosts seasonal public amenities. This proposal expands 800,000 SF of under-utilized megastructure into 1.6 million SF of public space.
Greater Houston is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States. Over the last 30 years, the region has witnessed an unprecedented expansion. Dramatic growth and demographic shifts
have transformed the city into a thoroughly international place.
With over 90 languages are spoken, Houston is undeniably a multicultural region and home to an estimated 1.1 million foreign-born
residents. Offering two international airports and a major seaport,
the city provides a natural base for the nation’s third-largest concentration of consular offices representing 86 countries.
Houston’s unzoned land use policy promotes inherently fluid occupancies. Accordingly, cultural shifts register considerably faster in
Houston than in cities governed by more conventional regulation.
With demographic diversity and free market commercialism as a
filter, it may be argued that a singularly Western perspective has
become increasingly irrelevant. If architecture and landscape reflect culture, how can contemporary architects engage influences
that more accurately convey recent flows and influences on the
region? How might we engage the cultural, territorial, and temporal memory of the ‘new’ Houstonians? How might we appropriate
aspects of their experience into the built and natural landscapes
of the city?
This visual presentation conveys individual student interpretations
of diasporic architectural influences embedded into the Houston
landscape/mindscape.
Open
Biomimetic Explorations
Entrepreneurship in Architecture
“The waves of the sea, the little ripple on the shore, the sweeping
curve of the sandy bay between the headlands, the outline of the
hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many riddles of form,
so many problems of morphology, and all of them the physicist can
more or less easily read and adequately solve.”
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
On Growth and Form
Architects often frame their professional identity with almost exclusive respect to the buildings they design. In reality, few architects have ventured far from a common conception of practice in
which they provide design services to a client who intends to build.
However, the changing nature of society and the issues it confronts
should compel more architects to reconsider their expertise and the
manner in which it is deployed. Given the current economic distress,
environmental strain, and geopolitical unrest, there is growing pressure on societies to find creative solutions to vast, complex, and
acute issues that transcend the design of the built environment itself.
Clearly, the built environment and those that shape it are critically
important, but it isn’t the only venue for architects and designers
to make meaningful contributions to society. One key to exploring
enhanced productivity for architects may reside in the profession’s
self-conception and its relationship to entrepreneurship.1 Consider
the following. “Entrepreneurship is a process by which individuals…
pursue opportunities without regard to the resources they currently
control.”2 While this definition was conceived in a business oriented
body of research, it bears a striking resemblance to the activities of
an architect. In other words, architects are adept at pursuing opportunities to shape the built environment without much deference
to their relatively limited control of the capital resources employed
in building.
Susannah Dickinson, University of Arizona
This submission focuses on a ‘Biomimetics’ Seminar Class held in
the spring of 2011.Biomimetics is the study and application of biological principles as essential design parameters. This study needs
to go beyond a metaphor; it is not about mimicry, but about understanding the nature of the material itself, looking at our environment and its interconnections as a way to move forward. Negotiating design and performance with engineering and fabrication is
one of the central topics of architectural discourse; driving this is a
growing awareness of ecology and sustainability which this course
intended to address.
The main areas of focus were:
i. Understanding the concepts of nature and technology and their
connection.
ii. The study of generative design strategies for complex geometry; parametric design, emergence, self-organization, swarm intelligence, data integration and agent-based design.
iii. Research in the area of how architecture can perform more ecologically; integrating performative tools and simulation into the design process to ensure more appropriate environmental adaptivity.
iv. ‘Material is an active participant in the genesis of form’ (Manuel
De Landa) - studying options of how materiality becomes one of
the design parameters.
Linkages between digital technology, biomimetics and sustainability were made as all stem from the same aspiration in the study
of systems. This was fundamental in the use of parametric modeling tools where students began to think in terms of relationships
verses single objects. Ecological, inter-connected systems in the
natural world have no separation of form, structure and material: they all act on one another and cannot be predicted by the
analysis of any one separately or in a different context. Isn’t this
how architecture should be; critically sensitive to its region and
holistic? The goal of the course was to focus on process, recursive
design and experimentation; technologically and environmentally,
looking at ways to ‘find form’ rather than ‘make form’ and create
valid feedback loops. The course became a research lab, initially
studying precedent work and processes in this field, but culminating in two group projects which created original, collective fabricated work. Of the fifteen students most were third and fourth
year undergraduates, with two Master of Science students. One
group created ‘Data Scape’; a biomimetic surface installation, while
the other group created ‘Performative Porosity’; a research project, designing an evaporative cooling wall for an arid climate with
ceramic foam.
Nathan Richardson, Oklahoma State University
Another commonly cited definition of entrepreneurship frames it as
the process of creating value by bringing together a unique combination of resources to exploit an opportunity.3 This statement can
likewise be understood in the context of architectural practice; architects are no doubt skilled in leveraging opportunities by bringing
together a diverse combination of resources to create value through
architecture. Even though architecture can be understood as an entrepreneurial endeavor, entrepreneurship isn’t often an explicit part
of architectural practice or education. As such, architects rarely view
themselves as active entrepreneurs or leverage their entrepreneurial
potential in any venue other than architectural practice.
This poster explores cases of entrepreneurship in architecture and
corollary industries. Not only does an expanded understanding of
architecture and entrepreneurship promise to make architects more
effective within standard modes of practice, but it also represents latent opportunities for architects to pursue unconventional methods
of practice to address an expanding array of societal, economic, and
disciplinary challenges.
1. Robert Gutman argues a related point in an essay included in: Dana Cuff and
John Wriedt eds., Architecture from the Outside in: Selected essays by Robert
Gutman, “Architecture: The Entrepreneurial Profession,” (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2010), 32-42.
2. H.H. Stevenson and J.C. Jarillo, “A Paradigm for Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial Management,” Strategic Management Journal, no. 11 (1990): 17-27.
Quoted in, Vesa P. Taatila, “Learning Entrepreneurship in Higher Education,”
Education + Training, 52 (1), 48-61. and Heiko Haase & Arndt Lautenschläger,
“The ‘Teachability Dilemma’ of Entrepreneurship,” International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, 7 (2), 145-162.
3. H.H. Stevenson and David E. Gumpert. “The heart of entrepreneurship,” Harvard Business Review 63, no. 2 (March 1985): 85-94. Retrieved from EBSCO
host (accessed September 6, 2011).
Open Continued
NYC 2 LV: Shifting Pedagogies Between Park and
Playground
Glenn Nowak, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Andrea Limpede, University of Nevada Las Vegas
To get at something provocative requires us to take a carefully
scrutinized projection of the near future and extrapolate it far
beyond its initially intended scope. PlanNYC 2030 was created
(by Mayor Bloomberg and 25 City agencies) to improve the infrastructure of New York City as well as enhance the daily lives of its
residents. It is estimated that by 2030, NYC will accommodate an
additional 1 million people, yet by 2111 there will be an additional
12 million in NYC. Recognizing that daily living in the Big Apple is
enhanced by the park system and, most notably, Central Park; this
poster questions the toll population growth and land value metrics
will have on such spaces of the built environment. While analysis
suggests that parks will not disappear, an architectural ebb and
flow may see development encroach on such real estate. Displaced park space may then be re-appropriated or constituted in
fashions that address evolving definitions of hospitality, proximity,
and priority.
As cities evolve (and in many cases cycle through extended periods of growth and decay) other cities across the country or around
the world may adapt to take advantage of shifting markets or
mode of making. Though the poster presents this notion through
the specific example of park space (structures supersede Central
Park, and Las Vegas capitalizes on yet another icon), the idea may
be extended to any archetype, urban fabric, or design discipline.
Projections
Rami el Samahy, Carnegie Mellon University
Adam Himes, Carnegie Mellon University
Question
If all design can be read as attempts to predict and shape the future, then no specialization looks further into the future than urban
design. The timeframes common to the field are often so long—up
to a hundred years or more—that they can at best provide a robust
framework for future decisions. So how are projections made this
far into the future?
The material here represents the initial stages of a research and
design project to gather as many sources as possible pertaining to
predictions of the future. Cataloguing, cross-referencing and visualizing this archive has allowed us to speculate with regard to the
future and our relationship to it.
In making sense of these competing visions of tomorrow and how
they relate to cities, we have posed a series of questions:
What are the likely parameters of ecological, technological and social changes to come?
What can past conjectures tell us about our present?
Where will future design opportunities lie?
Method
The project not only looks to the future of urban design and architecture, but also examines how recent technologies can be used to
drive design research through an interrelated process with multiple
feedback loops whereby several efforts are used to move the project forward.
It intelligently utilizes an everyday tool—the blog—to organize research so that it reveals trends and potential avenues for further
investigation.
Similarly, the open source tool of Processing literally makes visible some of the trends uncovered through research, temporally
positioning each to make apparent the visions for and fears of the
future as they developed through successive eras.
The blog creates an opportunity for open-source research via an
undergraduate college seminar that allows students to build upon
existing avenues of research in potentially new directions.
The course also acts as a first pass at applying the themes developed via the blog to architectural and urban design projects, thus
leading the way to the eventual generation of design parameters
based on a number of projected criteria that could be applied in
the development of future cities.
Preliminary Findings
Technological changes will have a profound effect on the way we
will live, from the growing ubiquity of information technology, to
the increased reliance on automated processes (robotics), to the
remarkable potentials of nanotechnology.
But will the cities of the future look like the ones we live in today, except more connected to a greater number of people, or will
these technological changes necessitate a more substantial morphological and programmatic evolution?
It’s also evident that the future promises significant environmental
and sociological change. While the extent of either’s impact remains unclear, it’s impossible to deny that significant transformations will occur in both areas. There is no shortage of design opportunities as a response to either outcome, whether the goal is
to mitigate a worst-case eventuality or to adapt to a soon-to-be
situation.
ROPE Pavilion
Kevin Erickson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In Winnipeg, the Assiniboine River Trail is the worlds longest naturally frozen skating rink, beginning in the city center it stretches
nearly 10km west. With an estimated 450,000 visitors annually,
the trail provides an alternate route to access downtown by foot,
skates, and skis, while events such as hockey, curling, and sledding
take place on the river and along it’s banks. Each year the City of
Winnipeg sponsors a competition to design and build a series of
warming huts, located every kilometer along the trail, ROPE pavilion was selected for construction in January 2012.
Through the combination of simple materials, ROPE pavilion, creates a highly articulated form and space while nestling itself into
the Assiniboine River Trail’s landscape. Its relationship of skin – manila rope and structure – birch frame, merge to form a warming hut
whose dense shell blocks winter winds while still being perforated
for light and views. The wood interior creates a sense of warmth
through color and texture and it’s multilayered rope exterior collects snow, further embedding it within the site. The hut’s domelike form is optimized for heat retention, bifurcating only for an
entry threshold and oculus to the sky above.
Open Continued
The structural system consists of vertical ribs and horizontal hoops.
The ribs act as beam-columns to provide primary support for the
pavilion. They are curved in elevation to define the rope’s surface
geometry and span to a continuous compression ring at the top of
the pavilion. At the base, floor beams act as horizontal ties, bracing
the ribs at the bottom while allowing the structure to internally resist horizontal thrust forces from gravity loads. The vertical ribs are
laterally braced by horizontal hoop members. The hoop members
restrain out-of-plane movement resulting from bending in the ribs.
An arch frames the entrance and supports a vertical rib above the
opening. The arch further contributes to the stability by transferring horizontal loads in the interrupted hoops through triangulation
to the base. This triangulation acts in conjunction with the vertical and horizontal members to resist lateral loads due to wind and
other applied forces, while providing a load path to the structural
base at the floor diaphragm.
Each layer of rope is attached at alternating vertical ribs, through
CNC milled notches, creating additional horizontal striation. In all,
there is over 6,000 linear feet of inch rope used for the exterior
cladding. On the interior a series of rope stools – created from
3-inch rope fold into a continuous loop and bound with a steel belt
– provide seating. Overall, the thesis behind ROPE pavilion is to
create simple, yet highly refined artifact that provides an enhanced
visual and tactile experience to those traveling down the Assiniboine River Trail.
The Sustainable Cities Initiative: Universities as
Catalysts for Sustainability
Nico Larco, University of Oregon
Many communities and cities are desperately interested in moving
toward a sustainability and livability context. Simultaneously, there
is a tremendous amount of energy and know how about such issues embedded within Universities, from faculty research to courses
across disciplines that address some aspect of the built environment. Thus, there is great potential to match the community need
with University resources, and even though there are many applied
courses and other engaged applications, the connections between
town and gown are often quite weak and isolated by discipline.
The Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI) is an effort to radically alter
the function of the public university to serve the public good by
catalyzing community change specifically related to the emerging livability and sustainability agenda. SCI is cross-disciplinary,
bringing together students and faculty in architecture, landscape
architecture, urban design, planning, public policy, business, law,
and journalism, to work together and to work directly with communities to help accelerate changes toward livability that the nation
so desperately needs. This work is carried out through a variety of
efforts, including:
•Sustainable City Year (SCY): This is a program that asked
a simple question: “what would happen if existing courses across
a University that had some connection to livability and the built
environment all worked with the same city over an entire academic
year?” The result of the SCY 2010-2011 program was that 27+ professors from ten disciplines dedicated 30+ courses to work with the
City on a variety of urban design, architecture, transportation and
other livability projects. In all, it is estimated that nearly 80,000
hours of student and faculty time were given to this city, which
has been significantly impacted through the diversity and depth of
work and ideas. Projects ranged in topics from streetscape design,
light rail and public transit planning, urban ecology, and economic
development.
•Policy Engagement: SCI has been directly engaged in national policy issues, reviewing legislation for key members of Congress, submitting White Papers to federal transportation agencies,
and meeting directly with Congress members and staff about key
upcoming legislation focused on livability.
•Research: SCI faculty enjoys a national reputation as experts on urban design, transportation and livability. A recent White
Paper on “Transit Livability” prepared for the FTA has recently
been turned into funded research with the goal to provide a series
of performance metrics for assessing how well the nation’s transit
systems serve the livability needs of their communities. This research bridges urban design, planning, and transportation design.
In short, the Sustainable Cities Initiative is a cross-disciplinary effort integrating research, education, service, and public outreach
around issues of sustainable city design.
SCI represents an original and fairly radical re-conceptualization
of the research university as catalyst for sustainable community
change. The truly multi-disciplinary, applied learning, and engaged
community orientation makes SCI a potential model for Universities interested in collaborative, multidisciplinary, and applied service learning as a key component of their curriculum.
Towards [gu] Growing Urbanism
Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
Josh Brevoort, zeroplus
Lisa Chun, zeroplus
[gu] Growing Urbanism is the future of our cities. It is a new paradigm for cities that blurs the boundaries between nature and our
built environment. [gu] a vision for Seattle in 2036 that embraces
the re-emergence of natural systems in a symbiotic relationship
with human developments on multiple scales throughout the city.
Based on their geological, ecological, and social history, three different city zones - ‘water’, ‘tidal’ and ‘dense’ cities - are defined
and developed to function in reciprocal exchange encouraging and
harnessing their inherent characteristics for maximum benefit to
the greater whole. Within these three city zones, micro-infrastructures including a natural, closed-loop water system, an ecological
permaculture food system and an alternative, smart energy network are propagated to thrive as one biological organism. These
micro infrastructures of [gu] are made possible by the emerging
datascape of information, gathered through sensors and users
augmenting our intelligence so that we may fully understand the
complexities of the symbiotic relationships we are proposing each
piece slowly growing together.
On its smallest scale, [gu] is a hybrid, biological building system
and flexible envelope controlling enclosure and microclimate
through adaptive sensing mechanisms as well as providing water,
energy, light and food. Ultimately [gu] is a self-generating and selfsustaining synthetic biology that will change the definition of nature and what we build.
[gu] rethinks developments and trends of the current sustainability
debate and takes them further towards a more integrated, holistic
symbiosis between the natural and built environment.
Open Continued
TWICC:Two-Way Insulating Composite Cladding
Jefferson Ellinger, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Two-Way Insulating Composite Cladding is a customizable tile system that provides insulation to a facade with both the tile’s foam
filled eco-resin fiberglass shell and an exterior layer of stagnant air
generated by the surface geometry.
Critical to the secondary insulate performance of the system is
both the shape of the tile itself and the layout of a field of differentiated tiles. Careful articulations of both the tile and the field
pattern are designed to create a rippled or textured surfaces. In
this test case, a designed depth of 4 inches was used to generate a
layer of stagnant air along the facade. This layer of stagnant air is in
addition to the typical air film layer on the exterior surface of a wall
and will act as another layer of insulation, much like the airspace
in a wall cavity, retarding the thermal flows between interior and
exterior. Testing is currently underway to determine the equivalent
R-value; however, the initial C.F.D. (Computational Fluid Dynamic)
analysis results verify the existence of a substantial stagnant air
layer generated by the geometry at the building surface in both the
2-D and 3-D simulations. This has been verified across a large range
of air flow velocities and directions. We expect the value to be substantially greater than the R-value of 0.17 for an exterior air film and
the air layer generated should achieve an R-value near 1.0. The primary insulation property is, of course, generated by the composite
material assembly and has been calculated to achieve an R-value
of approximately 7.0 yielding a combined R-value of nearly 8.0
for the cladding system. When used in combination with a proper
drainage plane, this substantially adds to the insulation capacity
of the wall assembly at the most desirable position; the outermost
level. A full scale mock up of the system has undergone weather
testing and maintained positive water shedding under hurricane
force conditions. The current iteration of the system shown here
has recently been installed on a small structure for further field
testing and verification.
Equally as important to the insulation performance is the architectural effect and visual performance that is generated. In this installation, the designed pattern is constrained to using only six different tiles to expedite manufacturing, but this was clearly enough
variation to generate a gradient visual pattern and dynamic play
across the facade. The interplay between light and shadow give an
unexpected depth to the wall surface, adding a substantial visual
dynamic to the system at a very personal scale. The pigmentation
is integral to the casting process. It is extremely durable and UV
resistant allowing the project to maintain this look with minimal
effort. The project shown represents a fine tuning of the system as
a response to the local wind conditions balanced against maximizing the visual effects. Effects that reflect and re-contextualize the
local landscapes through the seasons; summer and winter, buttes
and moguls.
Society
[Fab]ricating Habitat: From Digital Design 2
Fabrication // a Habitat for Humanity Prototype
Alexis Gregory, Mississippi State University
Jonathon Anderson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Digital fabrication has become more and more influential in the architecture and construction industry and so must be explored to
better understand the benefits for the future of the field. The goal of
this project was the investigation of digital fabrication as a detailing
tool to better understand the benefits of high tech manufacturing
processes. There is a unique opportunity with digital fabrication to
facilitate an ease of construction that lends itself to projects such
as those required by organizations like Habitat for Humanity. The
cost limitations experienced by Habitat for Humanity necessitates
volunteers to help with construction that have either limited or no
construction skills and experience. The ability of digital fabrication
to detail and establish a “kit-of-parts” that can be put together by
every skill level gives architects and contractors the capacity to
push the limits of design past the boundaries of currently available
volunteer construction techniques. Three building sections were
constructed by the students instead of an actual house due to the
cost and space limitations of the institution and client. However,
the full-scale sections gave viewers an understanding of what the
space would feel like through a view of the materials utilized both
inside and outside of the building envelope, and how the building
would be constructed using Computer Numeric Controlled mills
that generated the parts needed for assembly.
Social media has proliferated among today’s millennial students as
an important communication tool and therefore is important to be
explored as a communication tool in an educational setting. On his
blog site, Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide Network, explains how
“social networking in education opens doors to an unprecedented
array of learning opportunities in an environment where educators
often feel freer to express themselves, share their ideas and be a
catalysts for change” (2006). The use of social media and other
digital tools as a major source of communication in an architecture
design studio is an important issue to discuss and develop as current students and the students entering our programs already use
these tools and will only gain from the implementation within their
curriculum. This exploration of digital tools for both architecture
and architectural communication is important for architects, contractors and especially organizations like Habitat for Humanity so
that they can see how current and developing technologies like
digital fabrication can not only help generate good design through
detailing, but how it can also save money, be volunteer friendly and
therefore help establish a home.
Mi Casa es Su Casa
Javier Gomez, Texas Tech University
Open House: “Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living
envisions the house of the future as a place for new spatial experiences, new systems of sustainability and new sensory enhancements”1.
The cookie cutter house is an emblematic ‘status quo’ symbol, for
the twenty-first century middle class in America. The post-war
American Dream House no longer represents family patrimony, nor
financial security. Neither the nest where the family remains united
with all their moral and behavioral values. It is an iconic representation of success. “I own an MTV Crib, therefore I exist”. To have
some validity, the iconic palace of post-modernity should look as a
romanticized French Villa full of toys and gadgets… granite counter
tops in the kitchen, a sparkling hut tub, and as many flat screens as
possible. The scenographic Venturian mask from glittering Vegas
mutates via HGTV inside the most intimate living spaces. Culture
and class have been replaced by mediatic iconic symbols. Being
tacky is fashionable. Rather than looking like Prince William, better looking like Jay-Z. There are new definitions for the culture of
“bad taste”, everything is valid, and no one accepts the criticism for
lacking good taste.
After researching on different typographies of suburban singlefamily dwellings, students made critical art-design-projects of two
or three bedroom houses to be located in Lubbock Texas. Intended
to be “case study houses”, prototypes were intended to be critical and transcendental. The outcome encompassed a multifaceted
research initiative.
By understanding and manipulating ordering systems extruded
from existing case study houses, students created a series of progressive architectural apparatuses by combining both languages
‘rational’ versus ‘expressionist’.
Precision drawings, sectional diagrams, computer animations, and
a series of models were required. A process that went from analog
to digital, and “vice versa”.
1 Catalogue: Art Center Open House exhibition, Pasadena CA,
2006.
Reappropriation: Abandonment Adapted
This project for the Mercado La Victoria (Victoria Market) in central Monterrey reprograms an abandoned lumber mill as a public
marketplace serving residents in the urban core of Mexico’s second
largest metropolitan area. Rather than considering the market as a
self-contained environment, this proposal transforms a neglected
building into a fluid extension of a central city landscape.
Operating under this axiom, Mercado La Victoria draws pedestrian activity and the urban fabric itself into the structure, and thus
creates a densified node within a characteristically decentralized
downtown. Examining sprawl urbanism and resulting outward
economic flows over time, potential was revealed for the systematic expansion of central city retail. Further study informed the
development of a market providing regionally grown organic produce and handcrafted dry goods. The program organizes these
functions within the two-level existing building. New architecture
and landscape, inserted into the Art Deco context, activates the
space both formally and performatively. The new public market
provides enhanced amenities for downtown residents, while drawing increased flows from suburban districts. An underused and forgotten district of the central core is reappropriated as social space
for future generations, while the memory of its abandoned state
remains incorporated into the design itself.
Society Continued
Spatial ConTXTs
Anda French, Syracuse University
Sibylline TXT (SP2009), What If… (SP2010) and SyrAsks (SP2011)
are three text message based urban installations that explore how
an emerging form of mobile communication and its attendant social
models have and can shape the use and understanding of “public”
space.
These research projects identify a rapidly changing social-spatial
landscape, which is only visible, comprehensible and accessible
through direct experimentation. The work examines spatial practice
which encourages public interaction. Speculation about the possibility to heighten, augment or reinforce this practice through the integration of digital communications is best served by testing in the public
realm, using the devices directly.
Part 1: Sibylline TXT, my own research project, began the sequence.
This project dispersed a fictional story through 60 separate text messages, dispersed through 26 urban sites, over 30 days. The project is
named for the Cumaean Sibyl at the Oracle of Cumae (seen in Virgil’s
Aeneid). The Sibyl inhabits a cave with one hundred openings, and
reveals her prophesies on a series of oak leaves within the cave. When
a wind blows the oak leaves are scattered, thus re-sequencing the
prophesy and creating potential through mis- and reinterpretation.
The project explores the potential of digital communication to operate as a modern oracular mode of narrative grafted on to physical
spaces in the city.
Part 2: This “Spatial ConTXTs” course sequence was funded by an
Imagining America Grant, meant to support courses pairing scholarly
work with community engagement. These courses focused on the
production of installation work that engages mobile communication
technologies. The student installations, What If… and SyrAsks, both
claim that a public can be gathered and encouraged to inhabit the
city through urban “conversations.” These conversations were facilitated through the dispersal of physical installations within the city
that act as collectors and markers of the discourse. What If… worked
with vacant storefronts in the city as sites to ask citizens to send texts
speculating on the possibilities for the city. SyrAsks created sculptural
pieces fastened to existing infrastructure to pose questions, created
through our workshops with 7th and 8th graders in one’s of the city’s
schools and answered through text message. Both projects culminated in final projection events that invited all contributors to read the
city’s responses, furthering the recursive nature of the work.
As a forward-looking pedagogical model, for students these projects
of spatial inquiry with minimal construction, enhanced by their digital
elements, can provide an opportunity for making the most immediate
effect on the environment. This is work that is both theoretically speculative, and real and engaging as physical practice. These projects
necessitate immediate engagement for students with the community
and with urban conditions.
The work combines the reality of the urban field with design techniques that rely on quick, fluid work to get on the ground as soon as
possible. It is the experimentation and mobilization of theory, a powerful pedagogical tool, an important future model for the integration
of studio teaching and field research within an increasingly complex
set of urban conditions.
Technology
“Soft” Kinetic Network (SKiN)
Vera Parlac, University of Calgary
Richard Cotter, University of Calgary
Todd Freeborn, University of Calgary
Adam Onulov, University of Calgary
The SKiN project consists of small scale prototypes of an adaptive kinetic surface capable of spatial modulation and response to
environmental stimuli. The emphasis is on the nature of material
systems in the built environment and their capacity for change and
adaptation. Elements, structure, surface and performance of the
developed networked kinetic material system are designed as integrated layers that make up a “tissue” capable of accommodating
dynamic nature of human occupation.
The “Soft” Kinetic Network (SKiN) surface is organized around
the network of embedded “muscle” wires that change shape under electric current. The network of wires provides for a range of
motions and facilitates surface transformations through soft and
muscle like movement. The material system developed around the
wire network is variable and changes its thickness, stiffness, or permeability within its continuous composite structure. The variability
in the material system enables it to behave differently within surface regions; to vary the speed and degree of movement; to vary
surface transparency; to enable other levels of performance such
as capture of heat produced by the muscle wire and distribution
of heat within the surface regions. The main idea is that variability
of the material system can bring us closer to the seamless material
integration found in biological organisms.
Our focus on seamless material integration and capturing of emitted energy hints at our broader goal that architectural intervention should find a more productive place within larger ecologies.
We are very much interested in suspending a challenge of finding a non-permeable and clearly defined boundary between inside
and outside in exchange for a surface that fosters constant flow
of information, matter and energy. One possible application of the
SKiN is to provide a heated surface/street furniture/structure that
is capable of mediating environment in cold climates in order to
make outdoor public spaces active year-round. The Skin Surface
has capacity to register weather conditions as well as number of
people around the structure and to adjust accordingly. Energy that
structure uses to adjust its shape to the climatic conditions is captured and transferred into heat that in return mediates temperature around/on/below the surface.
The developed SKiN prototypes are part of an ongoing research
project in responsive systems in architecture. It is driven by an interest in adaptive systems in nature and a desire to explore the
capacity of built spaces to respond dynamically and adapt to
changes in the external and internal environment. “Smart” systems
(sensors, actuators, and controllers) and kinetic parts (movable
architectural components) are embedded into surfaces to enable
spaces we inhabit (homes, workplaces, streets) to sense, respond
and interact with us. The goal is to develop technologies and designs that are capable of transforming static building components
into active responsive surfaces that produce added functionalities
in architectural spaces. Buildings that could sense and respond to
environmental changes and interact with their users can operate
more synergistically within larger ecologies and therefore move us
closer towards more sustainable future.
Biomanufactured Brick
Ginger Dosier, American University of Sharjah
“People used to say that just as the 20th century had been the
century of physics, the 21st
century would be the century of biology... This would, inevitably,
involve new technique, new vision, new models of thought, and
new models of action.“
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order
What if we could grow architectural materials with microorganisms?
The built environment is constructed using a limited palette of
traditional materials: concrete, glass, steel, and wood. These traditional materials contain a high-embodied energy, with components of concrete and steel mined from non-renewable resources.
Forty-percent of global carbon dioxide is linked to the construction industry, primarily due to material production and disposal.
Traditional brick manufacturing requires the use of energy intensive processes for vitrifying clay particles into hardened materials.
It is estimated brick production alone emits over 800 million tons
of carbon dioxide each year.
Simple organisms create hard mineral composites in ambient temperatures, such as coral and calcium carbonate shell structures.
Sporosarcina Pasteurii, a nonpathogenic common soil bacterium
and naturally found in wetlands, has the ability to create a biocement material that can fuse loose grains of sand. A hardened
material is formed in a naturally occurring process known as microbial induced calcite precipitation [MICP]. The material is made
by mixing specific quantities of bacteria, urea and calcium chloride
in a matrix of aggregate, and allowing the biological and chemical
reactions to take place. The resulting material exhibits a composition and physical properties similar to natural sandstone, and takes
a few days to complete. The manufacturing process is similar to
hydroponic gardens, whereby bricks are grown similar to farming practices Current structural tests exhibit equal compressive
strengths of clay fired brick.
The bioengineering method for growing architectural materials is
pollution free, with a low embodied energy, and can occur in a range
of temperatures: 10-50 C. As traditional brick construction is heavily
dependent on burning natural resources such as coal and wood, this
reliance results in increased carbon dioxide emissions and a greater
dependency on limited energy sources. The process of manufacturing biological building units is economical as the large portion of the
raw materials are found on site. Experiments have been conducted
using a variety of aggregate matrixes with large success; these include: sand, soil, recycled glass, fly ash and plastics.
Biological brick manufacturing can be achieved utilizing traditional
casting methods, or articulated by digital tooling to fabricate layered
units with a programmed material composition.. The use of 3D printing technologies is economically driven as it generates little waste, accommodates a variety of potential materials, provides a high degree
of accuracy, and allows for infinite variation. Digital brick models can
be designed to specifically and precisely locate mineral templates for
growth and different sizes of aggregate for structure.
Employing bacteria to naturally induce mineral precipitation, combined with local aggregate and rapid manufacturing methods, this
research seeks to define and commercialize a local, ecological, and
economic building material for use throughout the global construction industry.
Technology Continued
CFS - Cross Fabricated Scales
Wendy Fok, University of Houston
Sue Biolsi, WE-DESIGNS.ORG
Cross-Fabricated Scaled is an investigative prototype of experimental
cross-fabrications between geometry and materials research, serving
as a crossover between architecture and art—with a high concentration on the developmental nature of experimentation and details, relating to the scalability of a singular, yet repeated, patterning unit.
The emphasis of this piece is the seamless transition between scales
of a composite geometry, which is an evolution of topologies, exploring the physical properties intrinsic within the technique of digital and
analog design experimentations. In fostering the synthesis of repetition and variation within a scalable logic, Cross-Fabricated Scaled
anchors its design experimentation in exploring the challenges of
producing a continuous surface condition through a composite unit
which has the ability to seamlessly scale up through the minimized
connection of parts.
The form-finding investigation and evaluation included active lab
testing of physical models, in conjunction with computer simulation
and optimization processes through a CNC (3D) milled prototype of
each individual module, which attaches to a framing system. In addition, the fragility of the forms and differentiated materials were conceptually assessed through experimentation during the design development research process.
The final [whole] wall is constructed of modular self-supporting aggregates that seamlessly unite through a minimal connection of parts,
creating a gradient of tessellation across scales. The collective units
could possibly scale ad infinitum, yet the perception of its parts is
diffused through its design that expresses a maximum variation for a
minimum amount of parts, which also allows for ease of transportation and construction. In order to fully express the effect of the scalar
transition, the repeated units are best viewed as a formalized wall partition system, which can divide or constructed within a taciturn space.
Climate Changes: Thermal Response Verification of
a Building Envelope Using Transient Heat Transfer
Analysis
Kyoung-Hee Kim, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The rapid expansion of the world’s economies demands enormous
consumption of fossil fuel and construction materials. According to
2011 Energy Information Administration Data, world marketed energy consumption grows by 53 percent from 2008 to 2035. The rapid
growth and increasing emissions of greenhouse gas are expected to
accelerate global climate change. Scientists expect that the average
global surface temperature could raise an additional 1 to 4.5° F within
the next 50 years which are attributed by both human and natural
causes.
The environmental impacts of a building are alarming and it is important to understand how global warming in future is going to
affect the energy performance of a building. Certainly, there are
many building systems that can play a role in implementing sustainable concepts and mitigating impacts from climate changes.
Among various building systems, a building envelope system - an
immediate mediator between outdoor and indoor climate conditions – requires through understanding of its response to climate
changes. The primary purpose of the presentation is therefore to
address the impact of climate changes on the energy performance
of building envelopes and further on the built environment. As a
pilot study, a transient heat transfer analysis using finite element
modeling was used to simulate the thermal response of a building envelope based on hourly recorded weather data in Charlotte.
Further, the presentation also will discuss about challenges and opportunities using transient heat transfer analysis method in class or
seminar environments as an efficient learning tool to visualize the
dynamic nature of the built environment. Detailed analysis results
will be presented in the conference meeting.
Electropolymeric Dynamic Daylighting System:
DisPlay Technology for Bio-responsive Mediated
Building Envelopes
Bess Krietemeyer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Increased awareness of the negative effects that limited natural
light exposure has on the human circadian rhythm has drawn attention to the role of daylight in buildings. Human health and energy problems associated with the lack of control of natural light
in contemporary buildings have further necessitated research into
dynamic windows for energy efficient buildings. Existing dynamic window technologies have made moderate progress towards
greater energy performance for curtain wall systems but remain
limited in their performative response to dynamic solar conditions
and variable user requirements for thermal and visual comfort. In
contrast to existing façade technologies, emerging display technologies could actively reconfigure their basic patterns to respond
to fluctuating bioclimatic flows while simultaneously adjusting to
the changing visual desires of its occupants. Recent breakthroughs
in the field of information display provide opportunities to transfer emerging display technologies to building envelopes that can
achieve high levels of variety and control over the passage of solar
radiation with immediate switchability. Electroactive polymers are
one such emerging technology that, when deployed within insulated glazing units (IGUs), could significantly increase the range
of solar heat gain coefficient, U-value and visible transmittance for
windows. Integrating electroactive polymers within the surfaces
of an insulated glazing unit (IGU) could dramatically improve the
energy performance of windows while enabling user empowerment through the control of the visual quality of this micro-material assembly. The Electropolymeric Dynamic Daylighting System
(EDDS) is a dynamic glazing technology that could respond to
variations of sunlight and temperature while allowing for view and
varying degrees of user control. The EDDS is currently being developed by an interdisciplinary research team and tested with labscale prototypes to evaluate the energy performance according to
dynamic environmental conditions, fluctuating building demands,
and multiple user types. If electropolymeric shutters are applied
in multiple layers of a pixilized array within the surfaces of an IGU,
then this layered pixilation creates a geometric and spectrally selective two-axis tracking system that responds to both diurnal and
seasonal fluctuations. Another significant benefit that the EDDS
could provide is the modulation of heat gain through the building
envelope in order to mitigate heating, cooling, and lighting loads.
Through the switching of these surfaces and interception of direct
solar rays, the EDDS is anticipated to have substantial energy savings over the course of the year in comparison to existing fixed
layer systems. The EDDS also offers the benefits of individual control to its building occupants and surrounding participants for the
manipulation of visual effects along the IGU surface. The flexibility,
immediate responsiveness, and remote switchability of electropoly
meric display technology make individual choice over one’s shading density, privacy, views, and dynamic visual effects entirely
achievable. Introducing design variability and individual selection
over the visual quality of architectural envelopes and interior surfaces has the potential to satisfy the diverse needs of building occupants while reducing the energy consumption in buildings, responding simultaneously to bioclimatic, biological, psychological,
and socio-economic needs and desires.
Firefly: Propositions of Future Illumination
Rashida Ng, Temple University
Firefly, a winner of an international design-build competition invites the public to treasure the natural processes of the Earth while
educating them in more sustainable ways to live in harmony with
the environment. In addition to its use of well-established environmentally responsible principles such as design for deconstruction,
use of reclaimed materials, and passive-design strategies, Firefly
excites more provocative theories of integrated forms of illumination. The sun shelter utilizes a variable pattern of phosphorescent
to provide shading during the day while emitting a passive emerald
glow by night. As such, Firefly aspires towards the production of
light that replicates the efficiency, complexity, and beauty of the
natural world.
Firefly was designed to maximize off-site fabrication, minimize
material waste, and to allow for the reuse of its materials in the
future. The triangulated design of the structure provided material
efficiency by reducing the number of columns, while also providing
lateral support to the shelter. Individual components were bolted
together utilizing steel plates, which also provided additional reinforcing to the curved beam extensions. The joints were developed
to facilitate the on-site assembly and disassembly of the components to allow the site to be easily returned to its natural state at
the end of the project.
As one moves into the shelter, multiple curvilinear surfaces encourage visitors to inhabit the floor as it slowly rises and falls. The undulation of the interior decking is created by subtle manipulations
of each floor beam and their bowed extensions. The rhythm of the
decking and its contoured surfaces provide a variety of places for
children of all ages to comfortably rest. Converging in both plan
and section, the interior space of Firefly is minimally defined and
suggestive of infinite space. Blurring the lines between inside and
outside, floor and wall, ceiling and sky, Firefly tempts its inhabitants to take pleasure in the sights, sounds, and smells of its surrounding context. From within the space, guests are encouraged
to relax and enjoy the tranquility of the site’s scenic hillsides.
The fabric roof panels utilize a patterned layer of phosphorescent
minerals printed onto cuben fiber, a semitransparent non-woven
fabric, to produce a passive source of illumination within this elevated sun shelter. Phosphorescent minerals produce light through
the slow re-radiation of previously absorbed luminous energy.
Similar to the bioluminescence of fireflies, phosphorescent materials provide an energy-efficient and cool source of illumination. As
such, Firefly transcends customary environmental design strategies in its proposition of a dematerialized manifestation of responsive light. Reactive to the setting sun, the pattern of minerals on
each panel produces a glow each night for up to twelve hours. This
moderately simple installation of phosphorescent minerals proposes extensive possibilities for future amalgamated illumination
assemblies. The phosphorescent materials utilized in Firefly can
be considered a proxy for alternative forms of solid-state lighting
that will soon be available, such as organic light emitting diodes
[OLEDs] and electroluminescent [EL] materials. As such, it suggests a future of light that is at once thin, flexible, touchable, translucent, passive, and responsive.
GLS - Kitchen Tent
Glenn Wilcox, University of Michigan
Anca Trandafirescu, University of Michigan
The GLS Kitchen Tent is a project that is situated on a rural site in
south eastern Michigan. The design employs both high and lowtech methods in its development and subsequent fabrication.
Structurally the project benefits from the traditional form of the
arch and vault. Yet these forms are manipulated through parametric and scripted systems to allow for variation in the overall form
in response to aesthetic and pragmatic conditions. The project will
ultimately utilize CNC tube bending technologies in conjunction
with 5-axis laser cutting to resolve the complex tube geometry, in
combination with CNC fabric cutters and sail making technology to
facilitate the construction of the projects skin.
The projects form is in part a response to the program - the creation of a multi-purpose meeting, dining and food prep space, but
is also shaped in response to particular views, negotiating mature
surrounding trees, and creating ‘rooms’ with existing site features.
The design of a computer based ‘system’ allows for continuous
tweaking of the complex geometry throughout the design process
- without having to remodel the form, for subsequent iterations.
The overall form of the project can be manipulated through the development of a parametric system in the software program Grasshopper. This allows variables such as the shape of the foot print,
height of arches, and dimension and orientation of the oculi to be
changed continuously throughout the design process.
Once a parametric solution is selected - a series of control lines are
output for each vault form. Following, a computer script - is run on
the control lines, generating a triangulated frame based on a second series of variables including density of triangulation and pipe
dimension. Also from these control lines the skin of the structure - a
series of developable surfaces are produced.
A physical model is used in conjunction with the computer model and software to explore different patterning techniques of the
structures skin - which will eventually be fabricated out of nylon
sailcloth. A wire-frame armature of one of the vaults is constructed
and used as a type of dress form. Variations of the covering are
patterned sewn and fitted to the model.
Molecular City
Roberto Bottazzi, Royal College of Art
Description:
Molecular City is an installation presented at the 2010 Future Places Festival in Porto, Portugal. By taking advantage of Augmented
Reality technology, it challenges the tenets of contemporary planning by collapsing real and virtual experience.
Concept:
As technology increases in computational power and user-friendliness, portable devices will be completely tuned in people’s needs
and desires to their environment. The future of augmented reality
technology [AR] will be urban. However, if fields as diverse as music or the military have already capitalised on such radical advancements, architecture and urbanism are still largely unaffected by this
revolution. Architects still see themselves as the solitary creators
of static physical objects seeking to single-handedly control urban
experience.
Molecular City challenges this outdated vision by speculating alternative modes of planning and experiencing the twenty-first century city.
Similar to how simple molecules can be aggregated to form complex organic compounds such as proteins, Molecular City imagines
a condition in which the overall complexity and richness of the urban experience is the result of a multitude of diverse narratives and
singular gestures. The construction of such environment emphasises contingency and discontinuity over exactness and stability.
By taking advantage of AR technology, Molecular City allows the
public to create their collective hybrid city by superimposing
virtual architectures onto the existing city of Porto via computer
projection. The physical space of Porto becomes a canvas constantly connected to the endless possibilities provided by virtual
space. The role of the architect recedes to the background; the
city transforms into a gameboard where cultural desires and needs
can be seamlessly projected and negotiated. Conflations of place,
scale, emotion and history overlay to give rise to a hybrid (half real,
half virtual) urban condition. A library of digital architectural models to play with will be provided via either ADS1 student models or
free downlodable models from the Internet.
Banking on the ongoing four-year research on the relation between
digital technologies and urban environments, Roberto Bottazzi has
a long experience in creative academic work that hybridise virtual
and actual domains. Our most recent exhibition – at the Royal College of Art in February 2010 – utilised AR to invite the visitors to
play with students’ work to compose their own landscape of projects.
Performance-Based Generative Design
Ming Tang, University of Cincinnati
This project investigated a collaborative research and teaching
project between the University of Cincinnati, Perkins+Will’s Tech
Lab and nD group, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The primary investigation focuses on the design and fabrication of building components, derived from performance-based
parameters. The project examines various approaches including
theoretical investigations and proprietary software tools for parametric design.
The project first gives a short historical and philosophical background to performance-based design, then describes the technical
and algorithmic requirements, and concludes with the examples of
implementation. With two design courses taught in 2011, the authors discuss the “shared body plan” as an essential element for
applying generative form-seeking methods in architectural design.
Design methodologies, such as use of building performance simulation tools, genetic morphing, and fitness evaluations are discussed
as new paradigms in generative, performance-based design.
This project also investigates how the large quantity of iterations
can be filtered and selected based on the feasibility of fabrication
and materialization processes. Using several student projects in the
poster, the authors intend to demonstrate the methods of mass
customization and parametric iteration through physical prototyping. The parameters related with fabrication have been implemented to generate a large quantity of creative solutions, whereas
genetic algorithm functions are introduced as optimizers.
As a conclusion, this poster illustrated the formation process that
nature permits in order to sustain a generative system. The project analyzes several design and prototyping procedures, and illustrates how these performance-driven design approaches can be
used for innovative forms, utilizing benefits of performance-based
influences in architecture beyond formal assumption and aesthetic
experimentation.
Points + Clouds: Tactical Hermeneutics:
Robert Yuen, University of Michigan
“We hold to the idea that architecture is not simply reducible to
the container and the contained but that there exists a dynamic exchange between the life of matter and the matter of our lives.”
Reiser + Umemoto
Device: an instrument or tool designed for a specific task or set of
tasks.
Abstraction: the act, idea or concept that filters or extracts, manipulates, and distorts specific elements from the whole.
Tooling: the process of engaging the tool itself within the design
process.
Apparatus: the collection or family of instruments, devices and tools
designed for a particular purpose.
Atmospheric: have an emotional quality that resembles that of air,
wind, and cloud.
Research-through-Tooling as an explicit vehicle, provokes interrogations and explorations of environments. It consistently reiterates
the condition that minds the gap, situated between spatial representation and the built environment, informed through a series of
hermeneutic devices. The devices create the occurrence of mistruth,
errors, holes, and mistakes that formulate poetic spatial possibilities.
The potency of the unfamiliar and the unseen that lurks within the
atmospheric construct is exploited. It is simultaneously ambiguous
and specific to the slippage between spaces and realms. Defined
tactics expand the traditional thinking of spaces and volumes as dualities of surfaces and solids to a notion of points and clouds: the
atmospheric.
Heremeutic Series
Interpretation of spaces, and designing around techniques but not
reliant on them to design transmissible, navigational properties of
space. Conceptualizing space between the dualities of surfaces and
solids to a notion of points and clouds: the atmospheric, draws on
the questions of authenticity and the infidelities. Producing a body
of work that explores interpretation through representation of reality that is full of errors, distortions, gaps, and residue. The drawings
act as markers for the next projective moments of this work.
“Space becomes a background for interaction rather than a co-producer of interaction. But what takes place is, in fact, a double movement: the user’s interaction with other people co-produces space
which in turn is a co-producer of interaction. Through focusing on
our agency in this critical exchange, it is possible to bring our spatial
responsibility to the fore.” Eliasson, Olafur
The research project exams and unveil this condition of space
through the use of digital technology to map and project alternate
realties that co-exist within. It draws a spatial condition in a different light prior to traditional techniques of 2D representation of
solid and void within the discipline of architecture. The project is
a protagonist within the movement of spatializing conditions as
atmospheric representations.
It
It
It
It
It
It
It
It
is ambiguity and specific.
is relational.
is real.
is meaningless but meaningful.
operates through modes of vehicles.
crosses technological bearings.
is a paradigm shift.
is within the discourse of spatial understanding and perception.
Spider Cow: Design/Build Project for a Moveable
Interior Partition System
Craig Griffen, Philadelphia University
This project was the main component of a 3-credit Design/ Build
course offered to 4th and 5th year architecture students. A newly
renovated building on our campus had flexible lobby space that
was planned to be open for exhibits and events but also needed
to be partially closed off to accommodate drawing courses. So
the university asked the students to design and build a partition
system that would provide visual privacy, be easily moved for spatial flexibility and be durable. An additional concern was the need
to reduce the reflected noise created by many hard surfaces in
a shared space so an acoustic dampening role was added to the
program.
For the main project each student created an individual design
from which similar ideas were combined to form 4 groups of 3 students. These groups designed 4 unique partition systems and the
winning entry was selected by faculty and studio vote for construction. The winner was selected in part because it had the greatest
chance of success but also the greatest chance of failure, guaranteeing a challenge for the students.
The idea behind the wall is a steel skeleton of welded rods and tubes
that suspend acoustic foam panels to absorb sound with a translucent fabric cover stretched across the fame to protect the panels.
A spider web-like grid of rods suspends 8 tubes in each 4 foot long
rolling panel. The tubes extend beyond the face of the frame to
keep the fabric in tension and prevent wrinkles. Initially the ends
of the tubes were to be open to allow light to penetrate but connecting the fabric to the tubes ends would have resulted in a sloppy
detail. Therefore natural light was substituted with artificial by using round LED lights (originally intended for customized automobile
headlights) activated by a motion sensor when someone walks by.
As only one student had welded before, the rest acquired a great
education in the technique and the jigs they created to hold the
steel in position while welding were as interesting as the finished
product. The acoustic panels are constructed like a sandwich with
upholstery foam on both sides of an inner core of quarter inch plywood to provide stiffness and a connection point for the hardware
to the frame.
The spider web-like steel rods were painted black to stand out and
the tubes painted white to “disappear”(hence the moniker of Spider Cow). While there was concern the fabric cover was too delicate and would be ripped or stained quickly, it has held up very
well over several months. Even so, it is designed to be easily replaced as needed.
Even though our school lacks computer aided machinery, I think
our students demonstrated how it is still possible to create beautiful, complex forms out of unfamiliar materials with the use of a little
ingenuity.
tetra | N
Glenn Wilcox, University of Michigan
Anca Trandafirescu, University of Michigan
tetra | N project is driven by the impetus to design a generative
self-supporting structure capable of variable form – through utilizing a single robust detail – one which could be fabricated out of
flat stock material. tetra | n project accomplishes this through two
means. First is the development of part geometry based on a tetrahedron (see diagram) – structured in this way – the generation
of more complex geometry through simple base geometry always
produces well - formed planar objects. Additionally, coincident
faces of adjacent tetrahedrons always produce continuous forms
– joints always meet correctly – regardless of the position or scale
of the next part. Secondly - through the utilization of Rhinoscript
– highly complex variable formed structures of n tetrahedrons are
possible. The script is simply ‘run’ on an assembled tetrahedral
base structure – part generation, connective element generation,
labeling, drill holes, and part flattening are integral functions of the
script.
tetra | N is formed as a single unified tower structure with an occupiable base that supports itself simply by standing on the ground.
Depth and redundancy in the form develop not only a robust structure – but a level of complexity and intricacy found only in organic
forms. The visual effect is of a structure that is, on the one hand,
highly ordered, rigorous and geometric, and on the other degenerates into near chaos, simulates organic growth, and confounds
clear distinctions between foreground and background.
Abstracts from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
100th Annual Meeting in Boston, MA
Address 1735 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20006
Tel 202.785.2324
Fax 202.628.0448
Web www.acsa-arch.org

digital aptitudes - Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

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