STONES AGAINST DIAMONDS

STONES AGAINST DIAMONDS is a new collection of short essays by Lina Bo Bardi, many translated from Portuguese into English for the first time and published as part of the Architectural Association’s ‘Words’ series. I have long felt a strong affinity to Lina. Lina’s work is extremely clear, simultaneously brutally cutting and beautiful.

As Silvana Rubino explains in the introduction to this volume, Lina was born in Rome during a moment of futurist energy, and never passed through the moment of crisis from academicism to the modern mentality (think of Alvar Aalto, et al). She trained in Rome and began her career in Milan before emigrating to Brazil, where she built her life. 

Carrying the heritage of the Italian Left, which was reacting to fascism while attempting to grapple with the divide in their own country between the industrialized and sophisticated North and the comparitively provincial and underperforming South, Lina engaged modernity and the past with a nuanced criticality. 

Rubino:

‘With the founding father of Brazilian modern architecture, Lucio Costa, Lina engaged in a dialogue that hinged upon a point of honour: the relationship with the past. For Costa, the key to Brazilian modernism lay partly in colonial architecture, while for Lina the essential root was in vernacular construction…’ ‘In generational terms, Lina could have been a member of Team 10. Her brutalism brings her close to the Smithsons; her embracing of ‘folk culture’ earned her an ally in Aldo van Eyck.’ 

A further banal point I will add in agreement with Rubino: Lina immediately recognized the stink of death surrounding postmodernism. As Rubino expains 

‘she continued to declare herself a modernist even after the next generation came along and many of her compatriots converted to postmodernism, a term and practice that she condemned without even taking the trouble to translate - it was the death of architecture.’

Lina’s projects, one thinks of her own house, are among the most aesthetically and ideologically well crafted works of the last century. Her commitments, focused through writings and design practice, drew together vernacular knowledge and climate (cultural and physical), with a sophisticated reaction to and deployment of the emerging modern technologies and material proliferation of her moment.

Sketch Models - Starling Test

 Playing with Starling Mesh Components for Grasshopper. This greatly simplifies the process of combining breps into a single form like boolean-combinations should do, but never manage with any great consistency.

Weaverbird was used to further relax the meshes in the second and third iterations.

Crude Bridging

[crude bridging]

Unruly Objects

[unruly objects]

Internal self-collisions and external constraints fight with the gridding system that organizes the form.
Uneasy distortions of the Roman Striations of Space arrive via these contested processes, but nonetheless remain captured by the grid.

Emergent Gestures

[emergent gestures]

...an aesthetic of pixelation
of a staccato stuttering
a freeze frame of harsh
disjuncture between moments

an incomplete integration
the coherence of the overall
is eroded as the scale becomes finer
and local patterns become more apparent.

the larger scale takes on
an increasingly florid and excessive posture
driven by the rigorous
indeterminacy of local interactions

Basento Viaduct Simulation

[Kangaroo Simulation of the Basento Viaduct Structure designed by Sergio Musmeci]

Italian Engineer Sergio Musmeci's design for the Basento Viaduct (completed 1969) utilized a method of form-finding based on the stretching of tensile fabric to develop an optimized shape which was then constructed out of a continuous concrete shell structure. This methodology arrives at a form which presumably distributes stress more evenly than a more typical trussed or arched system.  The resulting viaduct structure creates fascinating interstitial spaces between the concrete membrane and the viaduct that it supports. Please visit the Funambulist post on the bridge to explore photos of the realized structure. Also see Arturo Tedeschi's version of the simulation.

Catenary Pavilion - Sketch

[Catenary Pavilion - Second Sketch]

Pier Structure Sketch

[Pier Structure]

Route Optimization

[Route Optimization]

Pavilion With Catenary Roof

 [Pavilion With Catenary Roof]

confused machine

[confused machine]

GH Locust: Wander

[GH Locust: Wander Behavior]

Robert Cervellione [www.cerver.org] has released a still-in-development component that implements a number of classical flocking behaviors in Grasshopper for Rhino.

See also: Dimitri Stefanescu's flocking component for grasshopper, mentioned in an earlier post on Causa Locuta.

Also Daniel Hambleton's [Architecture In Combination] SPM Vector Components is starting to incorporate flocking type behaviors to its simulations of field based particle dynamics.

Wooly Paths

[Wooly Paths Take 1]

Topo Excerpt

[Excerpt]

Vector Field via Attractors

Rough Matter

[Rough Matter]

Procedural Typologies

[Procedural Typologies]

Form: Graphs

Strata Overlay

[A]

[B]

[C]

[D]

Parrhesia: Minor Manifesto [to myself]

Parrhesia is a freely accessible journal affiliated with the University of Melbourne University of Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. The content of Parrhesia tends towards concise and on point essays + translations of essays in current philosophy.

The name of the journal refers to the rhetorical concept of Parrhesia which Wikipedia defines as follows:

In rhetoric, parrhesia is a figure of speech described as: to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking.^[1] The term is borrowed from the Greek παρρησία (πᾶν "all" + ῥῆσις / ῥῆμα "utterance, speech") meaning literally "to speak everything" and by extension "to speak freely," "to speak boldly," or "boldness." It implies not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrhesia

There is some common ground between this rhetorical figure of Parrhesia -  and the intentions of the Causa Locuta web-log. The impulse to guard speech and expressions comes about for a number of reasons, not the least of which is general politeness. Domain specific talk (a la Niklas Luhman/ Patrick Schumacher's book) is generally aggravating in general company with some exceptions. As a result it is easy to begin to check and censor expressions which will become inhibited unless they are aired and will be unable to develop unless they are articulated/ manifested formally.

Transitioning to architectural practice from the academic training means coming to terms changing the terms of representation from communication that addresses professors, to communication that is addressed to clients, contractors, engineering, the various consultants that are part of the building process, the various regulatory committees and their members, etc. The core of architecture consists as it maintains a domain specific discourse and conceptual apparatus in which we remain autonomous from these other groups. This autonomy means that when we communicate to these other groups (this communication is constant) we communicate from the position of members of the architectural community. This basis comes about via detailing, aesthetics, organization, articulation etc within the architectural tradition, specifically modernism and its aftermath, and lines of experimentation and escape that we are developing (con)currently.

Causa Locuta as a web-log of experiments is based on a principle of speaking as if in confidence to ourselves (even a more private ourselves of course than 'to the profession as a whole' -people that speak like this tend to be awful/ architecture-bros-) as a way of forcing the unarticulated and the still-in-process into the open. A distinction that we would draw between the previous generation, is a shift away from the linguistic turn of the late 20th century and a move towards speculative sciences (not strictly analytical) in a dilettantish way rather than speculative language as the basis for disturbing our own operations and finding beautiful accidents. Frei Otto's work with the Institute for Lightweight Structures provides a set of work to examine for explanation of how we would like to operate.

Minor hypotheses that will increasingly play a part in the experimental derive, and that will breed in the petri dishes of this mobile architectural laboratory:   ecological thinking/ideologies/technique,  urban geographies, sociologies, geography.  These come about within the framework of architectural/urban/landscape speculations. The experimentations in computational processes, geometry and naive physics simulations (ie not for the purpose of truthful analysis, but for design, for breeding architectures) are the toolkit for this work in contemporary architecture culture. Without this toolkit, it would be difficult to carry out these experiments. Towards these ends we are constantly tooling up - though this is maybe somewhat different from the modern generations and 'technological progress' for its own sake. This is a wild technology that is increasingly lighter and more disseminated, it tends more towards software than hardware initially, and then feeds back with full force into the physical world as a new generation of objects post-internet, post-algorithm, post-economic collapse, post-global, post-mass-media. Francois Roche says that it is via narrative that we are most easily and pointedly able to gain entree. JG Ballard's emphasis on science fiction (a la Tomorrow's Thoughts Today/ the Bartlett) is similarly a strong directive within architecture. The technical capacity to realize projects may be even more important in advancing a critical conversation.

Let's see how that goes.