Jan '06 - May '07
I've been getting a lot of crap from people for not blogging lately. The semester went mostly smoothly and Tina was an awesome critic. Honestly I really don't have much to say. It was good, I learned a lot, I produced more than usual, and made a building that I actually like. I think I gave up a little conceptual-ness for reality, but that was ok for me. I really wanted just a complete building this time, so it was ok. I came up with a lot of cool ideas that I think can come back in the future, but were really difficult to impliment on the scale of this project. Our site was a 7500 sf triangle at Lincoln Center. So it was a tough site. In short we had to choose part of the UN and make a project about it on one of three sites in NYC. I chose to make a stem cell research lab/dormitory/museum-education space. So here are some pictures. 
I heart Rhino _make2d. 15 minutes in Rhino, CAD and AI makes a kickass little drawing.
I also love VRay. This is looking down through the multi-story space. Check out the sweet iMacs that I modeled. Took about 10 minutes and I really like the result of having modeled furniture. The chairs etc are from Steelcase.com. 
Night view though the skin with the glowing.
Public space viewing the offices and lounges.
The only thing that is really chapping my ass is the ridiculous, continuous use of the words 'complexity' and 'emergence' at Penn. It's like the use of 'XTREME' a few years ago to describe everything from sports to deodorant to GI Joe. Last year, I took a class called Technical Case Studies. This year it's called Technical Case Studies in Emergent Technology. Now there is no problem with that title other than the fact that EVERYTHING else in the damn school is emergent. I got something emergent for ya...it's called bullshit. Ooh, it's also non-linear if you want some of that. Kinda a weird blob! Or like I mentioned a few months ago, History-Theory III is now Architectures of Complexity. Disaster Complexity +. I get it already.
Have a Merry Complex Christmas and and Emergent New Year!
12 Comments
nice...
man, i was thinking today that some people's words are so disconnected from the form of their architecture...instead of words explaining the project...the project is forced to have more meaning by adding words...
metamechanic's project for example (just a critique)...that one blog had so many words and when i saw the final building it was like "your building contained all those words plus references from lefebvre?"...i just couldn't see it...
i seriously think now that experimentation or getting too deep into finding the "fringes of architecture" should not be taught in school...that should be later when the student have explored the fundamentals...this emergent thing is not fundamental...
just some examples of what i think students should be learning:
-r.m. schindler...orientation of spaces within a site to react with light and sight...
-green and greene- the beauty in craftsmanship...
-alvar aalto-the beauty in brick and manipulation of light (his library projects)...i visited his mount st. angel abbey in oregon and the intentions hit me straight...how he wanted the light to enter the building and spread in the central reading area, etc...it felt like alva aalto was communicating his intentions to me straight up...
-mies van der rohe-beauty in simple details...
-peter zumthor-creating moods...
-le corbusier-playful space planning...i was amazed to find these seemingly insignificant designs in his unite de habitation in marseille...i was on the balcony in one of the units and i saw a niche on one of the walls...i immediately began thinking of possible uses for it...how did he mean for me to use this niche?...did we have the same idea of using this niche? i thought of putting candles...maybe that's what he wanted me to put there...dope!!!
there's a whole career to explore you own shit...
how many semesters do you have left?...have you considered transferring?...the only advantage of being in the middle of all that shit though is that you can clearly say to yourself that...that whole shit was bullshit...been there, done that, got the shirt...
dammson, I totally agree
eduardo, please disagree...with some...
hasselhoff, congrats on learning something. i will quote a famous archinecter, abra, with regard to emergence: emergence is a solution seeking a problem. focus on your ideology and look at emergent methods. thats where the gap in knowledge exist.
you could also skip emergence altogether and spend your whole career building up from schindler, the greenes, aalto, mies, zumthor, and le corbusier. there's plenty there from whic to work.
nice project, robert. simple/clear.
your emergent and comples design does not meet egress requirements.
other than that, good job my friend...
meta-most designs are done in three days when there is money at stake...
i think emergence is a very rich idea, but will agree, how it is used in architecture as a way of describing how you derived a certain form i think is crap. as in "deconstruction" or "folding", emergence is a misapplied term that is lost in representation. given that, i would take schindler, mies, aalto, zumthor any day of the week.
however, i think emergence is a very useful way of describing behavior and interactions between people at an urban scale which i think is more precise than conventional surveys or polls that urban planners use. along those lines, emergence is a way of looking at architecture as a practice, not as a way of describing 3d representations.
Typically how I see emergence used is to post rationalize a point cloud from Rhino that has been meshed and turbo smoothed in Max. Or the results of a component being jibbered around in GC for 2 months. Anyway, I'm not going to get into it, because I don't really care. Nintendo is calling my name and that is much more interesting than a complex emergent field affordance right now.
but why? just because or to wank off?
at least detlef has dropped 'emanence' for 'emergance'. has detlef's leadership emerged yet?
this discussion-burst seems to have died off, but just wanted to quote an aalto lecture in it's entirety as an answer to the adventurers pushing "architectures" boundaries:
"Architecture - is hard..."
that was his lecture, this is my rant:
Aalto meant the Architecture he practiced, an Architecture dealing with site, material, light and occupant.
Metamechanics suggestion that he (or his kind, whoever they may be), could do a slightly boring glass-box building with a smattering of quirkily configured spaces may be true (after taking a look at the studio pdf I would not put my money on that, though) - but the implied idea that he (they) could do Architecture is ridiculous. Architecture resides in the junction of the cultural and material - it has quite a lot less to do with emergences, singularities, complex systems or non-linearity - more with everything we can sense and remember as human beings. And it is very hard to do well: create real buildings that resonate in the culture where they are situated.
The desperate search for the ever-multiplying excuses for generating "novel" forms is something cooked up by people that have not seen a brick in a while.
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