digital aptitudes - Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 2012 - 12:30PM - 2:00PM
Technology Continued
Points + Clouds: Tactical Hermeneutics:
Robert Yuen, University of Michigan
“We hold to the idea that architecture is not simply reducible to
the container and the contained but that there exists a dynamic exchange
between the life of matter and the matter of our lives.”
Reiser + Umemoto
Device: an instrument or tool designed for a specific task or set of
tasks.
Abstraction: the act, idea or concept that filters or extracts, manipulates,
and distorts specific elements from the whole.
Tooling: the process of engaging the tool itself within the design
process.
Apparatus: the collection or family of instruments, devices and tools
designed for a particular purpose.
Atmospheric: have an emotional quality that resembles that of air,
wind, and cloud.
Research-through-Tooling as an explicit vehicle, provokes interrogations
and explorations of environments. It consistently reiterates
the condition that minds the gap, situated between spatial representation
and the built environment, informed through a series of
hermeneutic devices. The devices create the occurrence of mistruth,
errors, holes, and mistakes that formulate poetic spatial possibilities.
The potency of the unfamiliar and the unseen that lurks within the
atmospheric construct is exploited. It is simultaneously ambiguous
and specific to the slippage between spaces and realms. Defined
tactics expand the traditional thinking of spaces and volumes as dualities
of surfaces and solids to a notion of points and clouds: the
atmospheric.
Heremeutic Series
Interpretation of spaces, and designing around techniques but not
reliant on them to design transmissible, navigational properties of
space. Conceptualizing space between the dualities of surfaces and
solids to a notion of points and clouds: the atmospheric, draws on
the questions of authenticity and the infidelities. Producing a body
of work that explores interpretation through representation of reality
that is full of errors, distortions, gaps, and residue. The drawings
act as markers for the next projective moments of this work.
“Space becomes a background for interaction rather than a co-producer
of interaction. But what takes place is, in fact, a double movement:
the user’s interaction with other people co-produces space
which in turn is a co-producer of interaction. Through focusing on
our agency in this critical exchange, it is possible to bring our spatial
responsibility to the fore.” Eliasson, Olafur
58 - ACSA 100th Annual Meeting
The research project exams and unveil this condition of space
through the use of digital technology to map and project alternate
realties that co-exist within. It draws a spatial condition in a different
light prior to traditional techniques of 2D representation of
solid and void within the discipline of architecture. The project is
a protagonist within the movement of spatializing conditions as
atmospheric representations.
It is ambiguity and specific.
It is relational.
It is real.
It is meaningless but meaningful.
It operates through modes of vehicles.
It crosses technological bearings.
It is a paradigm shift.
It is within the discourse of spatial understanding and perception.
Spider Cow: Design/Build Project for a Moveable
Interior Partition System
Craig Griffen, Philadelphia University
This project was the main component of a 3-credit Design/ Build
course offered to 4th and 5th year architecture students. A newly
renovated building on our campus had flexible lobby space that
was planned to be open for exhibits and events but also needed
to be partially closed off to accommodate drawing courses. So
the university asked the students to design and build a partition
system that would provide visual privacy, be easily moved for spatial
flexibility and be durable. An additional concern was the need
to reduce the reflected noise created by many hard surfaces in
a shared space so an acoustic dampening role was added to the
program.
For the main project each student created an individual design
from which similar ideas were combined to form 4 groups of 3 students.
These groups designed 4 unique partition systems and the
winning entry was selected by faculty and studio vote for construction.
The winner was selected in part because it had the greatest
chance of success but also the greatest chance of failure, guaranteeing
a challenge for the students.
The idea behind the wall is a steel skeleton of welded rods and tubes
that suspend acoustic foam panels to absorb sound with a translucent
fabric cover stretched across the fame to protect the panels.
A spider web-like grid of rods suspends 8 tubes in each 4 foot long
rolling panel. The tubes extend beyond the face of the frame to
keep the fabric in tension and prevent wrinkles. Initially the ends
of the tubes were to be open to allow light to penetrate but connecting
the fabric to the tubes ends would have resulted in a sloppy
detail. Therefore natural light was substituted with artificial by using
round LED lights (originally intended for customized automobile
headlights) activated by a motion sensor when someone walks by.