Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Between_Surface_and_Substance

No.  I don't agree.  I won't write a review of this, since there is little to be reviewed.  The tactics that are discussed are of a flailing interest to me, as they seemingly lack the rigor in order to be adapted to the macro scale of the built environment.  That's not to say that any of the methods or theories mentioned  in the article aren't plausible as architectural forms, but I would argue that they aren't important enough to be studied at the academic level.  More and more, the vernacular and visualization of the digital practitioners seem to be the masturbatory habits of those obsessed with digital games.

As mentioned in the essay, the "Truth to materials," comment leads to a debate over the final application of digitally conceived design schemes, as examined by the Burry in the article.  When a hyperbolic surface is construed utilizing oblique geometries, the shape tends to be alluring to the designer, but the image doesn't really truly convey the massing, but simply presents a planar rendering as a visualization.  When true extrusions of constructed surfaces are forged, the integrity of such surfaces may be complicated by the adaptation of structural supports, insulation, lighting, and other systems that need to integrated into the building components. 

I've yet to see a digitally designed project that I find to celebrate the elegance of the medium, and instead highly gestural buildings conceived via a machine, and built by human hands have yet to bridge the liminality of the artificial purity that can be captured on the computer screen. 














As a final note, Mr. Burry mentions one highly intellectualized phrase in this piece, which reads as follows.  "It is the visualization concurrent ideas that appear to be the same yet different at the same time."  In the context of the article, this notion may be founded in the principles of modern art, but it's application is justified relative to the development of a digital language.  I would argue that greater analysis of the modern pieces of Picasso, Braque, Oldenburg and Lichtenstein could lead to a development of an architectural language that could be composed of a series of pieces that seamlessly integrate in order to forge a magnanimous typology, which could utilize the digital realm in the production of the design, but not it's initial realization. 



1 comment:

  1. I hope this isn't too irrelevant to your point. In tech today we were discussing shear moment diagrams and how we could design efficiently through mathematics, by actually considering why we study the moments through out a structure. I realize these are dated examples but consider the Washington Monument versus the Eiffel Tower. Towering symbols of significant importance...really just translations of the obelisk. But Gustave Eiffel uses mathematics to reconfigure his design. Out of context (it might be a stretch) but we can compare these design methods to replicating a precedent (Washington Monument) and furthering our design process by using technology to create forms (Eiffel Tower).

    ReplyDelete