dragons

House of Worship_MEL

flashes flashes lights lights

Free Fall From 13.500ft ( 4.200 m )

Thanks_Diego

Cad/Cam Conceptual Models_part 3

"arch"

Algorithmic Architecture_1st Assignment

Cad/Cam Conceptual Models_part 2

The assignment is to produce a lamp with thin metal sheets. (The waterjet will be used to cut the final pieces) . A parametric design system of some sort, such that possible variations can be produced, has to be employed.

We are working so far on the problem of "enclosure" of space in a more abstract sense, keeping in mind that all surfaces have to have gaussian curvature of zero degree, that means they need to be developable surfaces. 

Cad/Cam Conceptual Models

First models for the second assignment for the "Cad/Cam: advanced Fabrications" course_ working with Stephen_

Kill the Spider for me

Solid States Conference

The Solid States_Changing Times for Concrete_Conference was held at Columbia University in the beginning of this month. A wide variety of topics were covered ranging from research in the molecular structure of concrete, new perspectives in concrete reinforcement(fiber-nanostructures , employment of fabrics,e.t.c.), historical retrospectives and innovative use of concrete in contemporary engineering and architectural practice. Architects once again proved their total inability of maintaining a scientific grounding on their work. (In the photo Prescot- Scott-Cohen and Neil Denari "praising" each other.) There is a lot to expect in the following years from the concrete industry who claim that concrete will be revolutionized and transformed in a completely "new" material.

 What was overall impressive though is the amount of concrete produced on planet earth every single year. More or less a cubic meter every year for every human being on the planet. The fact then that at least 35% of concrete takes water(potable water) to be produced makes the political implications obvious.

Parametric_bench

This is our first assignment for the CAD/CAM course. 

My idea is to create a bench relied on spline profiles and by changing the profiles position or form to produce variations of the original form_the exciting thing nevertheless is the control over the form and moreover the fact that this file can be sent straight to the manufacturer and have your bench ready by next week, no matter what the form_

The software we are using is Digital Projects, basically Gehry Technology's interpretation of  Catia for architects. 

original form and a possible variation

New Lab (?)

As unfortunately the MDesS people are not supported by a working space we figured out we could look for more radical solutions! The program director seems interested_

1st Day

I have the best impressions so far, we had the international student orientation today.

2 Greeks in the postgraduate courses of GSD this year. Lots of Korean.

MIT Building Technology Lectures

building technology lecture series
MONDAYS 12:30-2:00 PM AVT 7-431

SEPTEMBER 8
"Building Schools in Sierra Leone"
Dr. Jonathan Bart, President of Village Hope, Inc.
SEPTEMBER 15 
"Freedom of Formfinding"
Laurent Ney, Principal and Founder of Ney & Partners in Brussels, Belgium.
OCTOBER 6
"Greening an Architecture Practice"
Meredith Elbaum, Senior Associate and Director of 
Sustainable Design at Sasaki Associates.
OCTOBER 27
"Recent Works"
Dr. Steven Van Dessel, Associate Professor at the Department
of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University, Belgium.
NOVEMBER 3
"Structuring Light: Three Explorations by James Carpenter"
Joseph Welker, Senior Designer at James Carpenter Design Associates.

DO SOMETHING USEFUL

DO SOMETHING USEFUL

Anish Kapoor Exhibition

The History of Sculpture is the History of Materials.

These are two of the very interesting Anish Kapoor's works presented in the Boston ICA, which is by the way the building designed by Diller+Scofidio. Kapoor is constantly dealing with issues of corporeality, our perception of space and our illusions of stability and change. Through his installations you can explore the three-dimensionality of space and go beyond the familiar in the abstract darkness of our universe. This was the first time I had the chance to elaborate on his work. Kapoor's concept is a constant reevaluation of architectural space as we know it, moreover his work with new emerging materials shows there is also an alternative or at least side way of elaborating on technology. Aesthetics is crucial part of the architecture project. Materials can perform in an optimal way as building components and at the same time produce a wide range of aesthetic effects, rarely utilized so far in our buildings.

Acadia_Silicon and Skin

The Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) together with the Digital Design Consortium in the School of Architecture and Computer Science at the University of Minnesota will hold the ACADIA 2008 conference in Minneapolis. The upcoming conference entitled Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation fosters design work and research from the worlds of practice and academia which lie at the intersection between design, biology, and computation. More specifically, this conference seeks to identify and examine current trends in digital design technologies developed and applied in the framework of biologically inspired processes and digitally assisted sustainable design.

Message from the Directors

Read Comment

Summer Reading

The list below covers several basic sources in the broad Design, Technology and Environmental Studies area that are widely used at the GSD.  The list is long and there is no expectation that you should be familiar with all of these sources prior to coming to the GSD, but you should look over the list with respect to your own interest area and start becoming acquainted with the relevant works.

DESIGN TECHNOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

In general, Antoine Picon’s French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment provides historical background to the development of technology in architecture that should be of interest to all of you.  For those of you interested in materials should especially take a look at Smart Materials and Technologies and Fernandez’ Materials and Design.  Those of you interested in design computation should look at Expressive Form: A Conceptual Approach to Computational Design, Architecture and Science, The Language of New Media, Architecture and Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, and Digital Design and Manufacturing: CAD/CAM Applications in Architecture and Design.  Product Design and Development and Mass Customization are especially suitable for students interested in product/industrial design. Students with this interest should also look at Digital Design and Manufacturing and the books on materials. Students interested in environmental issues should look at the collection of essays by GSD Faculty in the Harvard Design Magazine No.18.  It is a good collection of essays on all sides of the environmental debate.  Readings in other areas will be assigned in individual courses. Student interested in structures could read Innovative Surface Structures, an in-depth introduction to rigid shells and membranes. For those of you interested in BIM we recommend the BIM Handbook (Eastman et.al.).

Soap Bubbles

The following is an abstract from Archinect's article on Aug. 28

Broadly speaking, construction of the Beijing Water Cube (Olympic's Aquatic Center) proceeded in two phases: erection of the framing and installation of the cladding. The architects and engineers conceived of the internal structure, or skeleton, as an extension of the arcane Weaire-Phelan principle. In 1993, physicists Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan set out to find the answer to an aged scientific mystery—how the shape of soap bubbles is formed. They discovered that these shapes aspire toward maximal volume for minimal surface area; thus, they observed that cohering bubbles aren't round, but rather odd-sided polyhedrons, all clung together in an organic array of shared-sides that resembles naturally occurring structures: the honeycombs of a beehive or the osmotic renderings of a cell. 

They next developed a geographic model that reproduced this randomized lattice-work, then experimented with virtual slices of these shapes. The result is the seemingly-random (but repetitive enough to be feasible to construct) pattern visible on the exterior walls of the Cube. In tangible terms, then, the building's skeleton is constructed of steel girders—nothing intrinsically thrilling about that—but the shapes sketched by the girders are something else entirely. Not your usual complex of criss-crosses, of triangles and trusses, the Aquatic Center's members mimic the dazzlingly random patterns of agitated water.

Red_line

second experiment on color and the RGB (red, green, blue) mode_

RGB

[ Natural landscape in the process of becoming digital ]

Landsapes are as much the product of projection as they are of interpretation.

Moreover everytime it is a matter of the techniques and the technologies we employ instrumentally on the landscape,

the landscape in turn revealing the precise limits of these technologies. 

Indeed it can be argued that there is nothing to the landscape beyond these technologies,

that both are made visible by their mutual projections.

Atlas Of Novel Tectonics, Reiser + Umemoto abstract_pg 208

pin_ball

Stain

getting_ready

Materiality and beyond

" The microdomain of the virus is that in which the tobacco-mosaic experiments first showed that the domain of the virus is apparently the threshold between what we have known in the past as the inanimate and the animate. The virus follows all the behavioral rules of inanimate crystal, but also follows all the laws of animate biology. It is both animate and inanimate- in fact as a threshold it overlaps both. It does not divide them. It calls for a totally new concept of what we are physically; it asks just how physical is life and what is unique to the individual? Within the virus we have the famous DNA and RNA, the nucleic acids of four chemical compounds whose interpatterning sequences in helixes control all the patterning and all the designs of life." 

[Fuller_Prevailing Conditions in the Arts]. 

If this is the case, how animated can materials and utterly buildings become? It is already obvious that a building responds as a living organism to it's environments,through heat exchange etc., but how literal can that become? Living tissues embedded in building materials could make buildings grow in time, and utterly die at some point! And regenerate_ That could lead to a new building ecology. Building could just grow following a genetic code of some sort, and then architecture would eventually be bio-architecture, or biotecture, a whole new domain. But before getting to extremities we could anyway have materials "perform" one with another, possibly on-site, through chemical reactions.

Biotecture seems to be old-news though. As a term at least, it has been used some times now to speak of sustainable design, green roofs, breathing facades etc. And it has indeed been used once or twice in the way implied before. The closest example seems to be the project at MIT some years ago, the "Fab Tree House"- a proper home constructed almost entirely from living trees and plants. The "Fab Tree House"uses an ancient technique called pleaching- where branches are woven together to form lattice structures.

Tim McKeough, ("The new Climate Almanac: Grow your own Home") ironically points out that biotecture may seem far-fetched, but the tools to build a tree house already exist. 

But you can never know..

Fuller_on learning

Again in his series of lectures, Buckminster Fuller deals with our way of learning or more precise the way our ability of learning and ultimately our IQ is developed. Fuller himself quotes Professor Bloom of Chicago University and his book "Stability and Change in Human Characteristics". According to Dr.Bloom and neurophysiologists there are built in "alarm-clocks", which go off at unique moments, which put "capabilities" progressively in operation in the new life. At the age of four, 50% of the childs capability to improve it's  IQ capabilities either have been expended or protected. Teaching does not add capability. Teaching can either gratify or frustrate capabilities, and usually they get badly damaged. Usually the IQ is affected by what happens in the first four years. Between four and eight the next 30% of capability to self-improve is brought into operation. At the age of 17 finally, the potential capability has reached it's 100%. 

Fuller comments how ironic it is that, at his time, 3 billion $ was appropriated by the United States Government for higher education, where the most probable self-improvement is 0%. On that basis he believed that the educational system needed soon to be reformed on a completely different strategy, to deal with facts such as these presented by Dr.Bloom .

Dr.Bloom goes on to explain that from birth to four years there are clearly three defined factors which govern the inauguraton of capability to improve IQ. Factor number one is trust. Human young stay helpless longer than any other living species. If the new life has it's utter trust in its parents violated then it is pretty sure to be a dropout. The next two factors are autonomy and initiative, which more or less go together. You do not know how to tell the young life to stand up-it just stands by itself when ready. The initiative is innate. 

_from the essay "Prevailing Conditions in the Arts"_

Fuller exhibition

Buckminster Fuller portrays the Tetrahedron as the fundamental geometrical component of nature's structure. In fact Fuller strongly believes in the perception of a universe structured on a "simple" code. These experts are part of his lectures held back in the 1970's arguing on these and other really interesting fields concerning the "Spaceship Earth", as he puts it and it's "Operating manual". Fuller has been an inspiring personality for generations of scientists and designers and his work and ideas seem to be coming again in the foreground. I had the opportunity to watch an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art on Buckminster Fuller and buy a collection of essays under the general title "Utopia or Oblivion", edited by Jamie Snyder and published by Lars Muller. The abstracts come from this collection.

_"I said to myself back in 1917  "Inasmuch as the planar force diagrams which we were taught are, to say the least, inadequate, is it not possible to find an adequate model for us- an omnidirectionally interacting, minimum set of vectors?" We have to deal always in the reality of an omnidirectional physical universe, so how many forces are really operating on us?"

Through experiments Fuller points out there are always a minimum of 12 restraints(vectors) for the universe to completely immobilize a body, as for example you need the minimum of 12 spokes to make a wire wheel. So there are always 12 fundamental vectors which converge at the angular degrees of freedom in the universe : 6 positive and 6 negative, which, when symmetrically interacting, represent the 6 edges of the positive phase of the tetrahedron and the 6 edges of the negative, or vertexially inside-outed phase of the same vectorial tetrahedron.

Fuller takes examples from our everyday experience to draw our attention on the stability of the tetrhedron. Such is the pilling up of oranges, assuming them as balls, in the supermarket cases.  Because the "spheres" are the same size, equilenght vectors may connect each and every adjacent sphere, with the vectors running from the centers of the spheres through the points of tangency to the adjacent sphere's centers. Remove the spheres and leave the vectors and you've got the tetrahedron-octahedron complex.

 The "isotropic vector matrix" is a structure that I discovered independently back in kindergarten in 1899, says Fuller and seems to believe that all humans, once children, have an inherent, built-in, understanding of nature's most basic functions. By the way the isotropic vector matrix is the official scientific name for the tetrahedron-octahedron complex. Fuller explains to us that besides the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the icosahedron are the only three basically stable omnitriangulated, omnistructural systems. When he begins to explore the relation of volume between the tetrahedron, the octahedron and the cube he points that if the tetrahedron has a volume value of 1, then the octahedron has a volume of 4, and the cube a volume of 3. As the tetrahedron is inherently more stable than the cube,which represents the Cartesian ideal of the structure of the Universe, had we replaced our familiar coordinate system with a new based on the tetrahedron, we would end up with a much more "economical", in terms of representation, system, as well as a system that could deal with equations on the fourth and fifth power, the one's Einstein was dealing with at the end of his life. Fuller argues that it's a scientific fallacy that the forth dimension came to be so widely recognized as the parameter of time. And that it was exactly due to the Cartesian coordinate system's inability to portray a fourth dimension that this came to be.

Fuller's theory are further supported by findings in the science of Chemistry of that time and before. Van't Hoff is the first chemist to receive a Nobel Prize back in 1901 for his work with solutions. He was the first to claim, and prove, the tetrahedronal configuration of carbon, the combining master of all organic chemistry. Since the time of Van't Hoff and until the lectures of Fuller organic chemistry had been tetrahedronally coordinated. The way the tetrahedra bonded defined whether the result was gas,liquid, crystals, etc. Half century later Linus Pauling with the use of  X-Ray machine discovers that all metals which he analyzed where tetrahedronally coordinate but instead of being linked vertex to vertex they were linked midledge to midledge with common centers of gravity. Two leading virologists of the time as well, again through X-ray difraction found the shape of the protein shells of the virus to be similar in appearance to Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes [which are a product of the tetrahedronal "geometry"]_