Group Form Sketch

Group Form Sketch

Parametrics before Parametrics

Lecture:

Anthony Vidler
Re-writing the History of the Recent Present: Parametrics before Parametrics
Date: 29/11/2012
Time: 18:00:00
Venue: Lecture Hall
Running time: 63 mins

http://www.aaschool.ac.uk//VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=2019

Re-writing the History of the Recent Present: The New Brutalism to the New Parametricism
Presented at the Architectural Association, London

Synopsis (my own):

Anthony Vidler presents his reading of the conditions of the architectural technology vs history debate in the 50s-60s in his lecture 'Parametrics before Parametrics'. He relies on the evolution of Reyner Banham's publications and debates to ground his retelling, also referring to the French technological Utopians. Vidler referrs to Topologies..., an excellent book by Larry Busbea, which presents the French Utopian experiments in great length. 

Vidler recalls Banhams warning that by the early 60s as it had become clear that the emergence of Neoliberty, Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi, et al signaled that the historical camp in architecture was about to foreclose the technological impetus of the discipline. Banham, an important apologist for the technological camp in architecture, observed that technology had at that moment failed modern architects as it developed according logic internal to the technology and not according to the hopes of architects (vis a vis the various early polemics).

Vidler recounts Banham's insistence that while at that moment technology had let down architects, tomorrow it would be computers.

In comments following the official lecture, Vidler mentions that much of the technological and topological utopianism was developed in the context of a feeling of impending nuclear apocalypse. He observes that that the nuclear apocalypse has been replaced by current spector of ecological apocalypse - that this attitude can infiltrate an entire school.

Vidler conversationally offers a comment that parametricism and computation is currently seen as a panacea to address these issues, and that the conversation is often confined to a scientific conception of the problem, while downplaying other registers of performance such the human,  social or political.

His critique to the room is very simple, that we cannot rely on a sort of automatic resolution of problems by employing parametrics, especially when we are not using our own senses to define problems before we try to solve them.

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