Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Asylum Scene

A next version of diagram- reclarification of linear relationships... also, this diagram will serve as a "cut sheet" and construction template for surface generation.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The Asylum Scene in The Conformist


Preliminary diagram of line/object/frame relationships over time

Monday, April 16, 2007

Preston Scott Cohen's exploitation of the perspective hinge

How would I explain the value of Perez-Gomez's writings regarding the "perspective hinge" to my mom? I ask not because this writing is obtuse, confusing or obscure but because it is almost too obvious. A standardized system for simulating and mimicking what we perceive is important to architects. The history and theory is not controversial or contentious. I have found though, that there is value in revisiting the most basic relationships between perception and representation. Yes, its obvious but its critical and relevant. Mitchell advocates a similar modernist re-examination of the pixel. At risk of going off on a tangent I will note here that this is good reason for embracing evolving societal standards for evaluating value (fads, fashion, etc). It is only now that we are "over" the pixel that we can (and we must, to stay ahead of the trends) really dissect it, conceptually. We can not dismiss it though because a good fashion sense requires historical resonance AND innovation or mutation ("new hotness"). And so, as uncomfortable as it may sound, perspective generation is not cool anymore. I mean specifically "generation" as in computer generation. It is no longer neat that computers have the computational power to calculate and display perspective projections.

This is where Preston Scott Cohen makes perspective fashionable again, by revisiting the value of descriptive geometry and the algorithm itself (as opposed to the speed or convenience at which the algorithm can be implemented). His remarkable product reveals and represents the algorithm as such AND exploits traditional graphic tendencies (linear convergence, rarity of the 90 degree angle, etc) as sign for perspective. Also, he has one of the trendiest/cool first/middle name combinations EVER (I mean, currently).

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

The Conformist

"[this] film really just expresses film."
-Bernardo Bertolucci

time and the fork in the road (plus the spoon in reality) and [the knife and the slice (title revision pending)]

"The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light." -Paul Virilio

We, or at least I, have previously acknowledged the conceptual fork-in-the-road that is ahead of us: Either emphasize the model or emphasize the animation. What is important though is that each road, if traveled successfully (this is where the road is a bad metaphor...probably track would've been better) necessitates an isolation from the other road. As Pasquarelli points out, his versioning is significant in that parameter-based computational design "promotes technique rather than image." He seems to be promoting the "fork." Visualization for visualization sake is of course another technique, valid but not [as?] valuable.

However, later in the article, Pasquarelli notes that versioning produces coherent, tangible, real results but the result is architecture, not a model. The content within this issue of AD is meant to be direct and straightforward, although versioning is an open, gestural idea and the range of contributions should signal the pluralistic nature of the concept. Versioning can be seen as an attitude rather than an ideology. It allows architects to think or practice across multiple disciplines, freely borrowing tactics from film, food, finance, fashion or economics and politics for use in design..."

Tehrani and Ponce de Leon have gone a level deeper in discovering meaning in the physical conditions that can be controlled given versioning applied to form generation. More specifically, "the divorce of surface and space."

Later, Rocker and Keller specifically assert that the essence of versioning is time. Keller notes "we haveto map how and why this engagement of time and effect is is taking place...These technical advances in dine define the horizon of a designers ability to control time as well as space. Virilio and others have theorized this morphological shift of 'time territory' in the military/cinematic space." So if versioning is indeed, "gestural" it can be applied, also, to the generation of animation as directly as it can be applied to a wall paneling system (a-la "A-wall"). This is especially relevant as new technology allows us to systematize tracks into parameters and these parameters work to create non-represenational architectural artifacts.

Whether this implies the fallacy of the fork in the road or just that the roads eventually converge will yet be seen.


"Images contaminate us like viruses. "-Paul Virilio

Monday, March 26, 2007

project one [section+surface+frame+motion]


file size: 14.2MB



As the culmination of the previous exercises to date, this animation explores the interpertation of section, surface, frame and motion as growth. This process of revision involved employing a new critical eye on the previous MOVIES (not previous models or even concepts). In acknowledging that the value was in the movie, I was able to use the movies themselves as building blocks. What was once the focus has now become the transition, the periphery to the new focus: the expression of raw, cyclical, infinite growth expressed, using a grammar of forms and spaces, in a language of animation.


I have always thought of the film industry as ahead of architecture in terms of integrating and embracing technology as a key player in shaping our respective products. Its easy to trace the potential causes of this phenomenon:

the film industry is much newer than architecture and therefore has less of a tendency for crippling nostalgia

the film industry is fundamentally about entertainment, it does not shy away from popular culture

our market driven economy demands that films provide new and surprising experiences with each successive release


a great movie review, From Here to Thermopylae, in this weekends post helped me clarify an opposing argument. Apparently Hunter wrote a bad review of 300 last weekend and there was some kind of public outcry. The public sentiment was that he somehow "didn't get" what the movie was REALLY about. First of all, don't ever tell an arts critic he doesn't know what he is talking about. But nonetheless, this essay published on Sunday brings up an interesting point. Bad movies by immature film makers are, at least lately, becoming too "self aware." The argument is that movies for movies sake are often too much about the actual movie rather than some sort of idea, concept, or "story," that transcends the actual movie experience. In the case of 300, this is especially problematic because the entire concept is allegedly historic. This conflict between represented event and the new event created to represent the event does not appear to be addressed.... This is beginning to sound a lot like the conflict that goes on between architecture and the representation of architecture.

I realized also that in using animation as a process, as a language, architects often have the opposite problem. Our animations are often so completely unself-aware. So much so that architects produce animations that fail, as animations. A critical point for me was when I stopped trying to communicate, or explain the form (as in a documentary--a concept that the makers of 300 would cringe at) and began to embrace the value of moving pictures to communicate more than the models used to generate those moving pictures.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

Section


This is the revised animation studying section--specifically the relationship between geometric section and the constantly varying temporal section of this (and any) animation.

Note: I did my best to get the file size down but its still something like 10.5MB... sorry for the potentially slow load time.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Lines

Catherie Ingrham is to the line what Deluze is to the fold. I see so many similarities in their respective manifestos that I can start to interchange the two meta-terms, "fold" and "line". I call them meta-terms because the are simultaneously analogies, metaphots and literal descriptors. The most significant difference seems to be that Deluze was primarly a philosopher who has, lately, seen his thery applied directly to architecture. Ingrham is an architect who has designed this theory much as a retrospective. In many ways she links the "line" (because if this words prevelance in everday language it is necessary for me to put it in quotes whenever I mean her meta-term rather than a figure of speeach) retroactively to high modernists. She paraphrases their intentions, aesthetically and experientialy, on many levels. Contemporary architects who have embraced the "fold," do so actively.

Back to the line, we find way of way of thinking and operting that is linked very direclty to the literal, graphic descriptor. We could, of course, make many lists of concepts that fall "in line" with the concept of "line." Some of the most important, to me, seem to be lines as modes of thinking and operating.

Also important to me is the potential of the line as raw digital artifact. One step up from the pixel, ie, wireframe. In this weeks final animation I have revisited wirefram as section and traces of previous sections.

Monday, February 26, 2007

undulating section (week 4)



look for a more layered, rigourous analysis that expands upon what was started here in terms of isolating one dimension and one section of the unrolled "hand to hand" surface for class tomorrow.

growth and degradation (week 3)


This is the video I presented in class

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

Objectifying Greg Lynn


Its ironic that for all Greg Lynn has proposed regarding forms being animate, or more explicitly "intensive" and "differentiated," he is often judged as though his proposals are for static, "extensive" projects. It is only that his work is taken out of context. Its that his work directly and literally proposes a different context. Peter Cook and Greg Lynn are really quite different actually. Cook's blobular built projects are actually physical manifestations of the blob as geometry. They are static, stylistic, and almost completely about the aesthetic. Which is why it is fair for someone to say they are ugly. They are ugly. Because Greg Lynn's concepts can best be described in the language of form and space he is often associated with a translation of those ideas into the built environment. Greg Lynn's Presbyterian church is instead the realization (or application maybe) of these concepts applied to the process of designing and constructing architecture.

I have realized that many of the analyses of movement so far has been, rather successfully, about the static resultant space generated from some process of abstraction. The spaces we have made/discovered are hard design from scratch. I've tried. However, these exercises, if not intellectually kept in check, can provide pseudo-exigence for our form-loving and image-loving tendencies. The real test of rigor here does not lie in the accuracy of translation (very accurate contour tracing, for example) but rather the quality relationships we can now control (seeing is not good enough).

That was a very long way of my saying I wanted to do something more than represent the given the wealth of geometry I now have. The first procedure that came to mind was the extending of the nurbs surfaces given patterns and relationships that were discovered in the geometry. Here is quick image showing an extension of the hands space surface... The blue represents the complete motion originally captured and the green shows the extension (forward and backward).

the process of representing the dance






still struggling with the lack of depth cues (or confusion by multiple, sometimes competing depth cues) so I have
this animation

Sunday, February 4, 2007

more images from the dance (the next holiday card for Architecture Program?)

images from the dance







One of our failed attempts at tracing contours involved plotting specific points on the body (left hand, right hand, right shoulder, nose, etc) as they moved across the picture plane. This proved to be incoherent two-dimensionally but I still had hope for the potential of this kind of analysis. These images are the result of plotting paths for both hands, knees and feet (using the contours as underlays in both the "font" and "side" planes). By associating each control point on each path with one captured contour I was able to spatially represent velocity. This association also allowed for a more "timely" NURBS surface to be generated--control vertices intersect the edge of each NURBS at simultaneous positions along the movement path. In other words, the NURBS surface for the hands represents the space between the hands as they move in relation to each other simultaneously. The result is the condition of V or U vertices never being parallel (or perpendicular) to another (as would be the case if the geometrically simplest NURBS surface was generated between both paths).

more about templates + motion and week 1

I retract most of what I said last week about templates and architecture. There are templates in architecture....EVERYWHERE. Architecture is system design, relationship design, module design... template design. And it turns out I can edit these templates down to the html so my anger was misdirected. Since blogspot doesn't seem to be video friendly I imagine I will be spending a lot of time linking to a website I can control more directly anyway. Or, next week I will learn how to embed a flash animation and I will eat my words, again.

So we went ambushed some nice women at CSPAC and took some video... Tzveta and Sarah were very hospitable and enthusiastic. They were even able to, "do that exact same thing, but rotate 90 degrees." Perfect, amazing, stunning. Thank you. Thank you.

Here is what we made as a group with the traced contours. Also we took some time to edit some of the content down to one video which shows both angles and iterations simultaneously and another that overlaps both angles.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

there are no templates in architecture

I picked the most template-like template in protest