Structure and Instability: Simulation Laboratory
Professor Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa
As a
laboratory, we experimented with a vectorial nine square grid structure and
dealt with surface as a “ground” through analog and digital computer assisted
architectural constructions and transformations. This content-oriented
workshop’s intention is meant to critically construct an architecture autonomy
within the virtual informational space of the computer, through specific
software strategies. Alternative processes of instability, that brought about
contemporary architecture canons and resulted in an expansion of the discipline,
were studied to inform space by affecting the structure of this organization by
enfolding these canons back as a contraction. Surface writing and parametric
design as algorithms relied both on analog and digital strategies between
sketches and multiple software interfaces. The exercise was presented with an
animated digital simulation that reworked time-based sequential diagrams that
indexed and edited its constitutional process. Students were tutored using a
comprehensive +400 pages manual developed by the professor.
Two
aspects of the contemporary displacement of the tectonics of the surface were
part of the initial assumption in relation to the current expansion of the
discipline. First, the dissembling of the object towards the expanded field
condition was resolved in the thickening of the ground as an inhabitable
surface. The surface became the interface by which architecture shifted the
tectonics of the wall surface to the horizontal-topological, as topo-logos
or the specific logic of the place. Second, as part of this process of expansion
of the discipline, the surface and its digital displacement induced by the
computer, and in opposition previous tectonics, is an external model that was
incorporated to architecture referencing spatial warping and continuity. This
model transformed the architecture envelope and its interior-exterior
relationship as well as the substitution of Cartesian space for a mathematical
topologically-based space, a space of bi-continuous deformation. These
post-structuralist tendencies opposed typological displacements as
absolute forces with topological displacements as relative forces,
propelling non conceptual differentiation.
The use of
the vectorial surface is understood as analogous to both of these tectonics. In
order to enfold these canonical processes and confront them with more stable
historical structures, the mathematical writing of this surface is understood as
a strategy to inform topological displacement to Cartesian space. As originally
external to the field, the mathematical parameterization of geometry of computer
space, parametric surfaces, minimal surfaces were developed
and reformulated inducing structural displacement and
then spatial warping. Informational binary numeric control parameterization of
mathematically striated computer language and, as a consequence its visual
translation as an image of perspectival space, is confronted through
parametric design that forces the formal disjunction between information and its
visual translation but that recognizes the design product as autonomous an
independent to that previous informational moment. The interface surface-matrix
works as an analog program in which transformations are accumulated in a layered
process distinguishing degree change from conceptual difference. This conforms a
visually driven analogically produced architecture based algorithm which informs
space indirectly and that resists the automatic array of non-critical solutions
of the binary tree-like organizational structures of algorithms or the computer
logos.
Students:
ARC177, The School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, Undergraduate program
ALEXANDER JAMIE
ALIU VISAR
BARNEA NOHAR
BENSON DERRICK
BROWN CHULLY
CHO EUNIL
CHOI HYUNG WOOK
GAFFNEY SEAN
KOFMAN TEDDY
LEVITT JUSTIN
MARTINEZ EMILY
MURZYN HARRY
PENG GE-NAN
RUSSELL JESSICA
THOMPSON MARK
VAN DYK DANIEL
VARON DAVID
