[A]
[B]
[C][D]
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
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.
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.
Let's see how that goes.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Potential Flow: Runge Kutta
[Flow Lines]
First test of Ursula Frick and Thomas Grabner's implementation of the Runge Kutta 4th Order [Iterative] Method within grasshopper to simulate laminar flow in a Isopotential vector field.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Non Volatile Variations
[Non Volatile Variations]
Variations with too much predictability. The random generators driving the variation are not producing enough volatility because the operations for which they are inputted are not properly building iteratively on the previous stages.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Disordered Networked Flow
Disordered Networked Flow
Following Yiannis Chatzikonstantinou's work with form-finding in emergent networks - Ive been experimenting with early grasshopper particle systems. Parametric [post-] processing of the animated particulate flow begins to extract organizational principles which could be interpreted to inform and choreograph circulation within buildings or urban morphologies.
This particular sketch employs Daniel Hambleton's SPM Vector Field Integration component and Giulio Piacentino's Shortest Walk components within grasshopper.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Lighting Tests
[image sampling play]
[lighting test]
A rather buggy first attempt at an image sampling script. It is part of an ongoing mapping project that is simultaneously about building correlations to data and artifacts of downsampling procedures with information in parametric models. There is a half-formed idea of loneliness and mystery re-emerging in the dehumanizing play of precise and explicit data. As we build datasets that correlate and reference multiple sets of inputs and processes through assemblages of multiple integrated operations we start to experience a decreasing relation to predictability and and increasing emergence of ghosts in the machine. One of the questions is how we start to pick our way through unfamiliar landscapes that result from the critical hyperextension of human technique through digital technologies. How do we follow way-finding procedures and myths and turn these into habits to gain comfort with the unfamiliar? (mis?)recognition and habitual motions? A surpression of the strange? A luddite cordoning of a territory? To what unexpected mutations do we expose ourselves? How will we tell the story to our children decades from now?
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Form: Partial Figures
[a sketch towards a partial theory of form]
Architectural attitudes about form generally arrive as more or less direct [and simplistic?] translations from whichever philosopher[s] an architect is reading in a given decade...
Ideas of substantial form in Plato or Aristotle [morphe - form - as opposed to hyle - matter] are appropriated as an infrastructure for ancient through medieval compositional methods. Unity, clarity, and proportional relationship of parts are derived from metaphors of the body. The mathematics of extrinsic forms in nature are appropriated as examples for architectural composition.
Rene Descartes' challenge to substantial form in philosophy, often characterized as a mechanical model, introduced an analytic geometry in place of the analogic geometry of proportions of classical architectural thought. When combined in the 20th Century with theories of the assembly line and the managerial regime [Frederich Winslow Taylor], a Fordist modernism was birthed which was absorbed across political lines of Capitalism, Soviet Socialism, and even National Socialism in Germany. Economic Production was God, and the scientific management of production drove the relevant architectural thinking on form. [Albert Speer's architectural production might at first glance appear to be a rear guard return to substantial form, but his most important production which was the choreography of the Nuremberg rallies was a sophisticated Taylorist orchestration]. This paradigm translated into a modernist anti-form, or a thinking of generic, identical, and extensible space in contrast to figure. Superstudio famously paradied this idea, by attempting to over-extend the managerial space towards a totalizing system. Peter Eisenman describes one line of escape in the conflict that Le Corbusier develops between generic extension of the grid, and dynamic partial figures animated by subjective movement through space as well as alternating moments of centrifugal and centripital forces within his projects.
<aside>
Jacques Derrida delivered a wildly significant assault on form and identity from the domain of literature, which nevertheless can mostly be seen in retrospect as a still-birth in its architectural version. By identifying with literature and the text as the way of accessing the world, de-constructive thought largely failed to access the political and the forces which give rise to form. Barthes' search for a degree zero resulted in a more critical architectural anxiety which drove architects towards a questioning of the most basic building blocks of architecture. Eisenmen and Tschumi's approaches towards finding a deep structure of form prior to significance remains highly relevant to the crafting of architectural objects. [Jenck's and Venturi took Post-modernism as an excuse to pander to a cultural conservatism and, along with their associates have discredited the semantic degree-zero.]
</aside>
In his 1988 book Le Pli (The Fold) Deleuze breathed new popularity into Leibniz's dynamic physics and theories of the object. In contrast to Descartes' rigid brand of modernism, Leibniz's fluid rationalism re-appeared as a sharply distinct counter-thesis that appealed strongly to designers. Following Greg Lynn, 1990s architectural thought focused on the use of animation software appropriated from the Film Industry to primitively model the philosophy of time and event in architectural terms. Advanced architectural thought at this time proceeded from the degree-zero experiments of Eisenmen's process architecture and began to introduce Computer-Aided-Manufacturing methods. This advance moved architectural working drawings from symbolic objects, intended to convey methods of assembly to contractors, in the direction of operative drawing. This newly direct relationship of design visualization software to manufacturing methods has resulted in a rupture that has opened up in real terms, a path out of the Taylorist production as a primary determinant of architectural form. Toyota's success with its Just-In-Time Production System [developed between 1948-75] is often cited as a fundamental rupture with mass-production and a move towards mass-customization. This returns us to the question of what we are doing formally with the object currently.
The digital avant guard remains obsessed with single celled organisms and small populations at the scale of the petri dish which are simulated as particle or agent systems within virtual physics models [http://theverymany.com/, http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/]. This is highly relevant [or at least fashionable] scientifically, but falls rather short of the complexity of the architectural assemblage. As the current generation finds its voice, it is important to return to the half-completed projects of Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache with the far more developed toolkits we have on the table twenty years later. The move towards informal disintigration, while interesting, is taking too long to achieve a high level of formal differentiation and cohesion.
[Agenda]
The sketches collected here are part of an experimentation which takes some guidance from Eisenman's search for deep structure within architectural grammar. We are developing procedures by which to move from point to curve to surface to volume within the toolsets of emerging graphical algorithmic editors (grasshopper) which will allow us to critically interact with this generic topological geometry at each stage of its formation after the manner of the 1990s animation experiment. By associating the parts of an architectural assemblage in a relationship based model, we can begin to expose these to information/signals from datasets or simulated environments, such as physics models or structural analysis packages, or from arcGIS formatted mappings. The methods by which we build these relationships is the focus of this study of the explicit history of the object. Discussions of formal development in animal genetics, especially at the embryonic stage, as well as cybernetic theories of signals/information within biological and mechanical systems are strong conceptual material to draw from as we develop these procedures.
Architectural attitudes about form generally arrive as more or less direct [and simplistic?] translations from whichever philosopher[s] an architect is reading in a given decade...
Ideas of substantial form in Plato or Aristotle [morphe - form - as opposed to hyle - matter] are appropriated as an infrastructure for ancient through medieval compositional methods. Unity, clarity, and proportional relationship of parts are derived from metaphors of the body. The mathematics of extrinsic forms in nature are appropriated as examples for architectural composition.
Rene Descartes' challenge to substantial form in philosophy, often characterized as a mechanical model, introduced an analytic geometry in place of the analogic geometry of proportions of classical architectural thought. When combined in the 20th Century with theories of the assembly line and the managerial regime [Frederich Winslow Taylor], a Fordist modernism was birthed which was absorbed across political lines of Capitalism, Soviet Socialism, and even National Socialism in Germany. Economic Production was God, and the scientific management of production drove the relevant architectural thinking on form. [Albert Speer's architectural production might at first glance appear to be a rear guard return to substantial form, but his most important production which was the choreography of the Nuremberg rallies was a sophisticated Taylorist orchestration]. This paradigm translated into a modernist anti-form, or a thinking of generic, identical, and extensible space in contrast to figure. Superstudio famously paradied this idea, by attempting to over-extend the managerial space towards a totalizing system. Peter Eisenman describes one line of escape in the conflict that Le Corbusier develops between generic extension of the grid, and dynamic partial figures animated by subjective movement through space as well as alternating moments of centrifugal and centripital forces within his projects.
<aside>
Jacques Derrida delivered a wildly significant assault on form and identity from the domain of literature, which nevertheless can mostly be seen in retrospect as a still-birth in its architectural version. By identifying with literature and the text as the way of accessing the world, de-constructive thought largely failed to access the political and the forces which give rise to form. Barthes' search for a degree zero resulted in a more critical architectural anxiety which drove architects towards a questioning of the most basic building blocks of architecture. Eisenmen and Tschumi's approaches towards finding a deep structure of form prior to significance remains highly relevant to the crafting of architectural objects.
</aside>
In his 1988 book Le Pli (The Fold) Deleuze breathed new popularity into Leibniz's dynamic physics and theories of the object. In contrast to Descartes' rigid brand of modernism, Leibniz's fluid rationalism re-appeared as a sharply distinct counter-thesis that appealed strongly to designers. Following Greg Lynn, 1990s architectural thought focused on the use of animation software appropriated from the Film Industry to primitively model the philosophy of time and event in architectural terms. Advanced architectural thought at this time proceeded from the degree-zero experiments of Eisenmen's process architecture and began to introduce Computer-Aided-Manufacturing methods. This advance moved architectural working drawings from symbolic objects, intended to convey methods of assembly to contractors, in the direction of operative drawing. This newly direct relationship of design visualization software to manufacturing methods has resulted in a rupture that has opened up in real terms, a path out of the Taylorist production as a primary determinant of architectural form. Toyota's success with its Just-In-Time Production System [developed between 1948-75] is often cited as a fundamental rupture with mass-production and a move towards mass-customization. This returns us to the question of what we are doing formally with the object currently.
The digital avant guard remains obsessed with single celled organisms and small populations at the scale of the petri dish which are simulated as particle or agent systems within virtual physics models [http://theverymany.com/, http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/]. This is highly relevant [or at least fashionable] scientifically, but falls rather short of the complexity of the architectural assemblage. As the current generation finds its voice, it is important to return to the half-completed projects of Greg Lynn and Bernard Cache with the far more developed toolkits we have on the table twenty years later. The move towards informal disintigration, while interesting, is taking too long to achieve a high level of formal differentiation and cohesion.
[Agenda]
The sketches collected here are part of an experimentation which takes some guidance from Eisenman's search for deep structure within architectural grammar. We are developing procedures by which to move from point to curve to surface to volume within the toolsets of emerging graphical algorithmic editors (grasshopper) which will allow us to critically interact with this generic topological geometry at each stage of its formation after the manner of the 1990s animation experiment. By associating the parts of an architectural assemblage in a relationship based model, we can begin to expose these to information/signals from datasets or simulated environments, such as physics models or structural analysis packages, or from arcGIS formatted mappings. The methods by which we build these relationships is the focus of this study of the explicit history of the object. Discussions of formal development in animal genetics, especially at the embryonic stage, as well as cybernetic theories of signals/information within biological and mechanical systems are strong conceptual material to draw from as we develop these procedures.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)