animations...animations...animations

The following animations is an attempt to describe the spatial conditions in the model. The first set of animations, explores the model in a linear organization mode. I feel that the fragmented dance moves should be reconstructed and then explored in the similar linear method. The next set of animations attempts to move through the same spatial condition in a different way, moving in from below and out from above, through, reverse...etc


This model is without global illumination turned on.




This model has a 2 bounce global illumination setting.




This model is without global illumination turned on.



global illumination turned on, no bounces



lights from below global illumination turned off



white background, global illumination turned off

towards an animated architecture against architectural animation

As architecture students, we all have experience with the seduction of the medium. I remember back in my undergraduate days, spending endless hours rendering a perspective, loosing alot of time and energy that could have been spent elsewhere. Not only that, but alot of the decisions made in the design process seemed to have been driven by what would look good on paper. I was an art major before being an architecture student, and one thing about art majors in egypt is that they heavily emphasize technique over substance in education. While looking at works by Picaso, Monet, Manet, cezane..etc, we were encouraged to look at the quality of the brush strokes and the use of color mixing techniques instead of the organization or spatial constructs of the painting. The latter was considered implicit I guess.
The thing about art is both the technical mastery and the spatial depth of a painting go hand in hand, like two sides of one coin, i.e. one cannot exist without the others. If you are painting a particular scene, you either focus on your line and shading qualities to achieve the depth needed, or focus on the depth needed that then dictates the technique used. One side of the coin maybe further developed than the other, but still both exist
I would argue that this is not the case in architecture representation. The message in this sort of representation is the ultimate goal. Maybe with actual hand drawings this idea of the double sided coin still existed, even with lavishly colored section drawings, the section cut line would still be powerful enough to communicate the message I suppose, although I would argue that certain Perspective drawings Ive seen, and sometimes drawn myself, tell nothing of the story other than "im a pretty building, look at me". It seems that animation is a very seductive and craftsome process that very easily distracts the student from the essence of the whole picture story, focusing instead with the technical craft of the animation, turning it into a work of visual artistry rather than a viable means of architectural representation.
But even then, after reading architectural representation and the perspective hinge, the "distance" becomes an important character in the stage setting, or as Gomez and Pelletier better articulated it "The distance made it possible for space itself to become an object of artistic representation". The inception of the Greek tragedy is a direct evolution of the ritual participations. Spectatorship was born through this transformation, and the act of participation has been redefined. In order for any art form to be successful, it should acquire engagement from its spectators. Any successful artform embodies such acts of engagement and evokes emotional reactions from the observor / spectator. It varies from one art form to another: engagement in portraits is through facial expressions, in landscapes through spatial depth within the foreground - middleground - background, in surrealist / cubist paintings through the nonsensical and odd representation of the figure, in music through the "soulfulness" and attitude of the notes, in movies through the composition of the frame, allowing the viewer to feel as being part of the actual movie.
It is thus important as architects to know, what is the message are we trying to communicate, and elaborate on that on our methods of representation. Whether its communicating to a client, fabricator/manufacturer, coworker, or ourselves, we need to have our drawings reflect what our ideas are and inform us of possibilities we have not thought of before.
An interesting notion brought up in the perspective hinge article is the idea that "architectural conception and realization usually assume a one-to-one correspondence between the represented idea and the final building." Kinda sheds light on the "form follows software" statement made in the first class. Going back to experiences in undergrad, I remember my first year when we had a project to design an addition to an existing Islamic house in older cairo.



Being brought up in an architects home, I always thought of the act of designing to involve the use of a pen and paper. I was blown away when I first saw the plan of the house I was going to use for my project. It just didnt make any geometrical sense to why the shapes of the spaces were the way they were, there were awkward angles, looong narrow corridors, an unending variety of wall thicknesses. My naivety led my to believe that the design was very haphazard, until I actually went to see the building myself. The introduction chapter of Beatrize Colomina's Modern Architecture as Mass Media talks about Le Corbusier's love with arab architecture, where the architecture doesnt seem to stem from any drawing but from the act of onsite design, where the architect/master mason engages all his senses in the act of building; extruding the spaces exactly to where he feels comfortable; building thicker walls in rooms thats require more noise isolation or protection of weather; understanding the issues of privacy, especially with women, in the realm of the house...etc. Even the amazing craftsmen ship of the mashrabeya window, is not a "designed" element per say. It is the solution to the problem of sheltering the interior from harsh sunlight using tiny little wooden leftover pieces, as wood was not an abundant resource in that part of the world, scraps from construction was used to build these windows that has become a symbol of islamic architecture.

The article talks a great deal about the represented idea in both gothic in terms of construction and renaissance in terms of idealized geometries and perspective drawings as methods of participant engagement. What about today's architecture? We can definitely see traces of autocad and other standerdised cad software in the american vernacular architecture of the 21st century. When I take a stroll in downtown washington DC (or in other words, run towards the chinatown metro station), all the buildings being errected there nowadays seem to have traces of the autocad offset command still aparent on their facades. Just vertical and horizontal lines placed upon the facade, looking less and less like the rhythmic lines produced in the renaissance architecture they are trying to emulate

didn't I tell you to get the funk out?!

Alright, so here comes the next set of videos. I tried to incorporate alot of your suggestions from last class; I wasn't able to get old white socks, but I put tape on the shoes to pin point where the exact tip of her foot was. I also drew a line with tape on the front of her leg from thigh to ankle (in retrospect, maybe doing the sides would have been a good idea too). I had her wrap her sweater around her waist. I wasn't able to tape the floor to create a grid like Lin suggested (I was kind of getting excited and anxious to start filming before the camera batteries died, so I probably forgot). I was able to secure 3 cameras (instead of the 5 we talked about).

The first camera captured a frontal view of her, up to her waist. 

Get the funk out!

alright, video posting time...looong overdue!

I've been trying to post this video from youtube, but to no avail! I may have to re-edit this later. But for now, I urge all of you to take 5 mins off your time and check out this clip:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UTk3b1oH0Co

The band, as some of you may already know, is the same one responsible for the now infamously cheesy "more than words" song. You would be surprised to find out that "get the funk out" is the style that 90% of their songs follow. The song, as well as "more than words", can be found on the "pornograffiti" album.

My intent is to analyze the rhythms that the song generates through the human body's interpretation of it. So in comes Ms Martiena Schneller, 3 time 2nd runner up tapdancing world champion. I put together a list of songs that include interesting rhythmic grooves, and she picked this one. Using one camera at first, I filmed her dancing to the song while listening to it on my Ipod. This clip is of her tapping to the intro of the song (up until the point where the guitar pick scratches the strings before the vocals kick in).

warped space = warped brain

Folded forms from Leibniz to Lynn... From reading the chapter, I felt that these folded forms that Leibniz talks about are polar opposites to that what Lynn produces! Maybe I've missed something in the reading, but I got the innate gut feeling that The House of Folds talks about folds as a spatial concept, while Animistic Architecture views folds as a formal concept, thus rendering whatever the space is as residual space.

Starting with The House of Folds, the mind and soul are ever evolving and rely on outside forces to feed this evolution. Man does no evolve from standing in a corner, avoiding contact with the outside world, he evolves through constant interaction with his surroundings. These forces that are continuously fed to him throughout these interactions, are not linear, are not predictable, and are not measurable. Lets observe a man walking down the street, and pin point ten seconds of his journey. What are the forces effecting whatever he is feeling/thinking during the ten seconds? Well there are elements that address all of his five senses (what he sees, what he hears, what he smells, what he feels whether by his feet touching the ground or with his hands, and possible the taste of the air the slams his face), there are also the forces that affected him before these ten seconds (possible in the ten seconds before that, or even the ten years before ) and whatever he is thinking about, maybe his gf dumped him a few days earlier and that is affecting his mood, or a song on his ipod is blasting through his ears and is making him sway to the beat... all of these forces (and a hell of alot more)are affecting whatever is in his mind or soul at this exact moment in time. So in a sense, he does not see the toad hopping down the street as merely a toad hopping down the street; the information that is a toad hopping down the street is taken in through his eyes, yet mixed in and intertwined with feelings like his gf dumping him a few days ago and the relentless sensation of the aftertaste of the chicken  he had at yesterdays lunch.

Head hurting yet? mine sure is. This goes back to the Leibniz curtains (diversified by folds) and Locke's camera obscura references in the chapter. The folds (which are always in constant motion) filter in information (or using Locke's camera analogy, the image): "...Not only do we receive images and traces in the brain, but we form new ones from them when we bring complex ideas to the mind..."

Which brings me back to an idea I threw out in last week's class, and one that claudia touched upon in her reaction towards Lynn's furniture. Let built two cubes, and place one in the middle of a heavily condensed downtown hustle and bustle city in africa, and the other on in a cool chill climax climate like in the bahamas (try finding a spot oblivious to spring break idoitics). Both cubes should be identical in virtual materiality (made out of the same gooey stuff that would allow it to be permeable, the kind of gooey stuff that someone hasnt invented, but what computer models are made of). As time passes, each cube would deform into what the context wants it to be. Each deformation is a resultant of multiple forces filtered through a series of Leibnizian curtain folds, and is an evergoing process, even if these cubes are torn down and replaced by newer ones, the memory of the old cubes still remains and affects the form of the new cube.

In a sense, this happens today, and has happened since the beginning of time. Any piece of architecture is affected by its context, no question about it, and nothing can stop that. Even globalization, that tends to make societies more homogeneous, get affected by the surrounding culture, forming new ideas of what globalization has to offer. McDonalds is a prime example of corporate domination of the world, bet even McDonalds is subject to being affected by its surrounding forces. We all remember the infamous "royal with cheese" combo meal that prefers to put mayonnaise on its fries than ketchup, well to twist things around even more, McDonalds Egypt have come out with a new line of fastfood sandwiches, including the McFalafel, McArabia, and McKofta. 

But its easy to include or disclude something on and off a menu, what if, in a hundred years of now, maybe due a political uprising or something, the contextual deformation of our cube is not enough, and there is a need for a more drastic recubing of our cube. We've seen this issue happen throughout history ALL the time, important buildings need to be reused due to abandonment, destruction, or a simple change in philosophy. Some hire architects, and we get modern installations implanted or attached. Examples of these would the Foster's Reichstag (i would argue that Foster follows Lebbeus Wood's notion of showing the scars, but that is a whole other discussion) , Pei's louvre (the national building could be considered under the same umbrella too, wouldnt it?), and Herzog and De Meuron's Tate (to name a few). Whether these examples, and others like it are succesful or not is up for debate, but the fact remains that these installations are temporary, and solely reflect the 20th/21th century ideology, what about after that? Some dont hire architects, they hire 9th rate architects with questionable licenses. This usually happens to 3rd world countries, where the end result is something worthy of destruction. This is where I would suggest that we find this virtual gooey material and turn this concept into reality, and use if to deform our architecture whenever possible.

The next part of the chapter, Animistic Architecture, provides Lynn's solution to the problem, one that I do no entirely agree with. Over and over again, it mentions that Lynn is after the formal solution of the problem. For me, the beauty of his ideas of  "bloblike" and "viscous" architecture are in the fact that they are malleable. Why is he then solidifying them and creating exactly what he says he is reacting against, everlasting monumentality. I feel that there is somewhat of a disconnect here, and I hope Im wrong (please, if this is a misunderstanding of the reading, let me know). Where I agree with Lynn that prescribe interior spaces offer little for the individual to interact with, and residual spaces provides opportunity to transform it into something  new the user identifies with, but I will say this, all the residual spaces in history evolve through time and interaction, they are residual spaces because of this interaction with it. There is a rational order for them, not one of geometry of mathematics, but one of constant back and forth, addition and subtraction, reaction and interaction.

body matters

It took me a while to figure out what Lynn meant by the word "body". I thought he meant a literal human body (which actually fits in with alot of the text), but when I started to read Composition Through Differentiation and Parasitic Exchanges I started to get very confused. It was not until watching those YouTube lectures where I started to grasp his concept of "body". To Lynn, the body is like a vessel, being it the human body composed of organs and body parts housing the soul, or architecture composed of construction materials housing the human body, or urban setting composed of enclosed spaces and roads housing architecture. What interests Lynn here is the relationship between the whole body and its kid of parts (as Schumacher puts it). 

The unified body that he mentions in the beginning of the chapter I think is referencing the idealistic views of architecture, that started since the time of Vitruvius, and has been the limelight of architecture theorists in the renaissance, baroque and even modern eras. If you think about the classical orders, the centralized churches, the harmonic proportions in palladian villas, the ideal city, and the modular are all based on a unified body; a basic set of rules that shape the outcome of the product. Lynn attributes this to the simplicity of mathematical rational. It worked way back when, but like every other idea throughout history, there comes a time when it becomes overused and turns into a fashion fad with no critical reasoning behind it (Lynn uses the modular banality of todays toothbrush variety to illustrate this point in the lectures). The age of computers, or calculus as Lynn likes to put it, has brought-forth a new paradigm in how we view the body. To make things easier, the artist responsible for creating the body favored the general consensus of what the body should be, and discarded other "variations". 

With calculus aided computer technology, "bodies can emerge through local intricate connections, alliances, aggregations and affiliations of base matter". I think (i pray this aint bullshit) what this means is with today's technology, the body now has the opportunity to react with its surroundings and its own organs. Here, Lynn's idea of the "primitive" comes to light. If we think of the design process as continuous,  one that is continued after the building is built, where the architect takes a back seat, and watches how his work reconfigures itself due to its interactions with its inhabitants (i've always thought that the best uses of architecture are the ones where the architect did not expect, yet built an opportunity for his audience to shape it into what they need it to be, e.g. what i call the auditorium of the spanish steps in rome), and even before any line is drawn or thought of when the project "starts" (if you consider peoples' need that brought them to the realization that they need architectural intervention, and the whole cycle of events that lead up to that point, then this will make alot more sense). The "primitive" is not a starting point, it is just a point of departure, the active embarkation of the architectural process. 

This whole idea of the "primitive" and the use of the gravitational field of the mutated body (see Animate Form) intrigued me quite a bit. One of the books that influenced my thinking about architecture is Edward Hall's The Hidden Dimension (I read that in professor Beckhoffer's Regionalism seminar). Hall says that there are 4 different distances that the body keeps track of: public, social, personal, and intimate (public being the most distance to the body and intimate being the least). This is what we say when we talk about our spatial bubbles. When I sit really close to you, my dear fellow american, you will feel that I invaded your personal space. When a lover kisses the partner, he is invading intimate space (lets hope that it was an invited invasion). When people are walking around in a party or gathering, the distances between them are considered social spaces...etc. I will be very pissed at myself if I dont throw in the fact that each culture understands the concepts of these spaces differently, and therefore we get many of cultural clashes.

Charles Moore's Body, Memory and Architecture takes this a step further; he says that we create a bubble surrounding our own bodies that take the shape of the body, but is tailored to suit our own comfort levels with our body (or soul) image. Lets say that there is a specific body part that one is not comfortable with, or a previous injury on a specific location of the body, or other philosophical comfort levels that I dont want to get into, the bubble inflates to give that specific part of the body more area. This bubble is what I understand as a blob. An architectural space (the whole body) should be animated to house the spatial blobs of the human body (the part) with all its variations, thus creating a more dynamically rationale towards architecture.

Ok back to the article at hand. What I just described above could also be understood as Lynn's parasite. It took me a while (and still is) to fully wrap my head around the parasite concept. Now a parasite is an organism that lives in its host and benefits by deriving nutrients from the host (at its expense?)...um...I'm just going to go out on a limb here and try to type the thoughts in my head about this issue. Could the interior be the parasite of the exterior? No this can't be it, the interior metaphor would be the body organ and the exterior would be the body's flesh. Are we then, the human beings inside the body of architecture, the parasites? If that's the case, weren't we always parasites? The computer aided architecture didnt just redefined us as the parasite, classical architecture would have seen us parasites as well...I need help with this.

In Greg Lynn's lectures, during the Q&A sessions, he mentions Peter Eisenmann's dislike of his embryonic houses. It seems, atleast according to Lynn's explanation, I do not propose that I know much about Eisenmann to make this statement, that Eisenmann would use the same process technology to find the best house out of all of the series, while Lynn stressed the need for variation; one is not important, it is the collective whole. This is where I have to express my disagreement and point out what could be a paradox in my own mind. Now I do agree with his call for the need for variation, but Lynn does not suggest that the dweller or inhabitant shape this variation himself, Lynn wants to be in control of the product in the end, and impose the form on the dweller. He clearly states in the Q&A session that he is not interested in a world where a layman could build his own vernacular. On one hand, he calls for a paradigm shift in the thought process of architecture, but he does not consider a re-evaluation of what today's role of the architect could be in terms of low cost housing. My ideas are still very wet and very conceptual, but I consider myself a regionalist, and I see alot of hope and promise in letting people build their world's themselves. Lynn, and everyone else who thinks what Im saying is a total act of mutiny on architecture, worry that a world where layman have a say in their architecture would result in a land of pure banality, a world where mindless contractors and developers rule as king, turning the united states and other first world nations as an suburban nightmare, and third world countries as settlement hell.

 They have a point. 

However, with this surge of new methodology (that brings new technology), architects may have a great say in affordable housing. It's all about the process, correct? It is impossible to guarantee what the end product looks like until we cycle through the process, correct? What if architects can adapt their skills into creating a conceptual bubble, and let the laymen realize the physical entity. For example, if architects use animation technology to test out new, cheaper, construction materials and methods, and alongside with it, testing out different configurations of spaces, whether its a relation between room and house, or house and neighborhood, and construct a set of parameters (also know in today's excitement free workforce as "design guidelines") to aid the laymen to construct his own house. The trick is to carefully layout these design guidelines, and make it more about the use of parts to create a whole, and less about the overall look and aesthetical value of the house (sure, of course issues like choice of color should be regulated). Us architects should be wise enough to realize that a carefully selected list of parameters would give us the aesthetics we want, and also make the layman feel that it is HIS house. The poor do not care about style or elaborate articulation of any sort.

I digress. I am sorry (not really).

If interested, I suggest reading Amos Rapport's house form + culture, E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, and Hassan Fathy's Architecture for the Poor. All part of the Regionalism seminar reading list.

I am also interested in discussing this further, and knowing myself, will probably bring this issue up during class discussion when applicable to the subject matter.

Greg Lynn, European Graduate School Video Lecture 2004

I found this lecture on youtube. It is interesting to see how the theoretical concepts of animate form and folds, bodies & blobs apply to his own practice. The Q&A session at the end is particularly interesting, generating a depth of discussion and dialogue (apart from those statements that keep on praising and kissing his ass). I am especially intrigued by his ideas on mass customization, one that I would enjoy having in the 670 class, as I am sure it will be a topic of debate of this century.

part 1    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u_IE9jmIZs

part 2    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KURvYOjwO4

part 3   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsWE5SDRcvM

part 4    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1ZG2anwV0

part 5     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WyRQhw2Fs

part 6    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckRJ0jzZ6oc

part 7    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zkgt0JJYr8

part 8    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmgP8xpFaQs

part 9      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzk9gqabJco

part 10   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxV0ma3LbZY

part 11     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc9bbCUeEtQ

ps. ignore the annoying mp

Architecture remains as the last refuge for members of the flat-earth society

I fell outta my chair, or should I say sofa, with laughter after reading that sentence (Sorry Ambrose, I just had to start it this way). I feel that this sentence captures the whole essence of what the chapter (Animate Form) is about. The whole world is in motion, we are experiencing technological breakthroughs almost everyday now. I'm sure that we have all been in a position where we get morph into our inner child, with jumpy excitement when we purchase a new gadget: laptop, dvd player, or ipod, only to be crushed a few days later by finding out about a newer, better, faster, and sleeker model that has just come out. Architecture evolution, for one reason or another, seems to have come to a halt.

Science, mathematics and technology, since the inception of civilized earth, have served as means to achieve both spiritual harmony and efficient craftsmanship in architecture. Artists have always seen mathematical and proportional beauty in nature, and have always thrived to use the same free flowing, seemingly organic, forms of nature into their own work. Whether is the majestic colonnades of ancient Egyptian temples, or the Domes roofing religious architecture, or the curvilinear surfaces of Baroque churches; architecture seeks solace in the mathematics of nature to ascend to a higher spiritual level of consciousness and a heightened sense of experience. It then makes sense that when a mathematical breakthrough occurs, case in point calculus, architects should re-evaluate their process methods. Greg Lynn's curve diagrams shine a great deal of light on this situation. Baroque architecture relies of simple geometrical compositions to achieve the curve needed. The compositional equation from which the curve is derived from should be simple enough and communicable to the builder, and as a result, looks more like a constructed curve and less like a free flowing organic curve found in nature. With the arrival of calculus a century ago, and the later arrival of the computer systems that can now easily calculate these very complex equations, the curve, or spline, becomes a better reproduction of nature. This should open the doors for architects of the 21st century to explore further uncharted domains, allowing their creative process to evolve.

Greg Lynn's curve diagrams should not always be taken literally. When converted in 3d, the geometrical curves form spheres, whereas the splines form blobs. Spheres are literal rigid objects, unaltered and static, whereas the conceptual paradigm for blobs brings the concept of dynamic flexibility. With blobs, if you apply a force to one end of it, a reaction of its opposite side will occur. Imagine a balloon filled with x amount of air; if pressure is applied on one side, the other side will inflate more. In an architecture setting, lets assume that the program is shaped by a number of connected blobs rather than geometrical shapes. During program alteration, it is much easier to reshape blobs that have no geometrical inheritance than it is to reshape rectilinear forms, as they have to adhere to certain mathematical principles. The blobs in this instance take the more literal association of bubble diagrams. They are computated bubble diagrams, the only difference is that they play a more active role in the design process as opposed to free drawn bubble diagrams.

These blobs are easier to control and manipulate when one takes into account Lynn's descriptions of the continuous series. He states that "Architectural space is infinitized by removing motion and time through iterative reduction." They are added back later after the fact, hence not taking part in shaping the form into what it needs to be. Even nature takes part in shape shifting through the ages, why should architecture confirm to static properties? One of the major concerns of the 21st century is diminishing natural resources, land being one of them. Green and sustainable architecture speak of building footprint, and yet our buildings continuously become abandoned, or even worse, torn down due to its inefficiency to flexibility. More materials then become used to replace a building, that didnt comply to today's spatial needs, with another static building, that in twenty years will probably face the same fate as its predecessor. Greg Lynn talks about the use of animation to create dynamic spaces that will help eliminate this phenomenon (an example of using technology to solve our times problems). This by no means that the building should develop legs and runaway whenever a bulldozer comes its way, or whenever it feels like moving to another location (although some mobile structures are exploring this concept), or even doing a transformers "autobots...transform" trick (although, Lynn's conceptual idea does exactly that). Taking example from a boat's/ship' s hull, animation allows topology to incorporate a multiplicity of vectors and times, in a single continuous surface.