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