Thursday, June 26, 2008
Cyber Classes, Good or Bad?
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Emergent Architecture
For those of you who remember i mentioned how last fall i volunteered for the LA Forum, well one of the best lectures of the series was by a man named Tom Wiscombe and his firm Emergent. I would there work to be simple amazing and the methods of deriving the form to be even more amazing. enjoy
Founded in 1999 by Tom Wiscombe, EMERGENT is dedicated to researching issues of structure, tectonics, and materiality through built work. EMERGENT is a platform for experimentation, leveraging techniques and logics from fields outside architecture including biology, complexity science, aerospace engineering, and computation. EMERGENT’s directive is to move beyond categorical thinking in architecture and the stratification of building systems. This involves a re-examination of heirarchies and discreetness of systems toward coherent but differentiated constructions. Ultimately, the results are understood both in terms of performance and spatial and atmospheric effects.
EMERGENT’s approach is informed by contemporary models of biology and systems theory rather than by the arts, toward an architecture based on structural pattern formation and emergent behavior. The work is part of a larger contemporary movement in architecture referred to by Detlef Mertins in 2004 as ‘Bioconstructivism’, where a bias toward material intelligence begins to produce an architecture characterized by its variability and responsiveness to local forces.
The work questions the dialectic of excess and efficiency in architecture, in favor of a more complex understanding of both through biological thinking. The recursive process of random mutation and natural selection in nature provides a model for how a dynamic feedback between excesses and efficiencies can create innovation and elegance. This feedback logic is executed in the office using both generative and analytical algorithms as well as hands-on design techniques.
Key to the work is the phenomenon of emergence which offers insight into the way apparently isolated bodies, particles, or systems exhibit group behavior in coherent, but unexpected, patterns. The animated beauty of emergent organizations, such as in swarms or hives, points to a range of real architectural potentials where components are always linked and always exchanging information, and above all, where architectural wholes exceed the sum of their parts.
Biological thinking has led EMERGENT toward the exploration of new methods of systems integration, construction documentation, and fabrication. Recent co-ventures with international engineering companies, including Buro Happold and DeSimone Consulting Engineers, have begun to reveal new working methods which establish active feedback loops between engineering and design disciplines, ultimately pointing to a redefinition of AEC territories.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The contagious blog
The Combination Rule
The Plastic Surgery Debate
I don’t support or condone plastic surgery; people can do with their bodies what they please. My take on the whole matter is that its becoming an epidemic in this country; being spurred on by the publicity given to people on reality tv shows and on internet websites. This very clear when you look at the numbers, in 1948 there were 300 board cert. plastic surgeons, today there are over 4000 in the US; and in 2004 there were 12 millions cosmetic surgery operations.
Again I have no real sway to either side, I don’t think that its something that people should have I think that doctors could better use their time helping the sick or victims of accidents crimes or fires but then again people work to make money so they can spend it as the please, and if that’s what makes them happen who am I to say that they should not partake.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
A childs mindset
Also at the MFA while in the impressionist room there were tons of kids sitting and sketching their views of the paintings. I walked around and looked at the paintings and then looked at the interpretation that the kids had drawn, and I couldnt help but to wish I were a kid again. I loved the way the kids didnt think to hard about what they were drawing they just did it, the scale didnt have to make sense and the forms were more expressionistic then representational. I often wish that I to could just get into the mindset of a kid.
I once heard a story of a lady sitting on a bench with her dog lying on the ground infront of her. A kid walked by, stopped and asked her if it was dead.
Kids don’t have anything in their brains that stop them from saying or doing anything that want.
Dormition of the virgin
I chose to write about the Dormition of the virgin, by an unknown Bohemian artist because it clearly demonstrates the evolution of perspective. It was painted around 1350-1360, which puts it towards the beginnings of the renaissance. If you examine the painting you can still the two dimensionality of the medieval painters in the people; while seeing the new advancements of perspective and the figure ground.
Being on the cutting edge of anything you take from what you have and you push the boundaries. The artist tries this with his representation of people. They are still as a whole two dimensionally drawn, but they all have hints of shape to the face. Also a major advancement is that people are become expressionistic.
The perspective/axonometric is the part that draws me in the most. If you look at the ceiling you can clearly tell that the artist is trying to give depth and a three dimensionality to the space. Looking closely at the painting it seems almost axonometric rather than perspective, which to me shows the evolution of the though. They knew that object were moving away from the viewer but they didn’t know how to show that in a diminishing fashion, so what they did was they took the forward measurement and then replicated that at the rear of the painting.
I personally like this painting a lot due to the fact that this is a freeze frame in time. Commonly people look at either medieval or high renaissance paintings and they do not take the time and look at the missing links between the two; which are the ones that I like the most. The in between paintings show the artists who are pushing the limits if what is possible at the time, and this process and evolution is what I like.