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.