digital aptitudes - Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2012 - 2:00PM - 3:30PM
Registration and Projection: The Mediations of Urban
Imaging Technologies
McLain Clutter, University of Michigan
Aerial Vision-Based Model of Urbanism
El Hadi Jazairy, University of Michigan
Google Earth and airplanes give access to map-scale top-down
views of cities. As a result, observers have a perspective allowing
them to view cities as a whole in a towering position as if they controlled
it from outside. This position empowers policy-makers and
city users giving them a sense of control over the visualized object
thereby making it submissive to their desires. This paper is an attempt
to relate the meaning and agency of aerial vision with the
emergence of a ‘new geography from above’ in the Gulf.
Modeling Spatial Activity Distributions in Complex
Urban Conditions: The Markov Chain Model for
Weighting Spaces with Attractors
Ipek Rohloff, Mount Holyoke College
Kurt Rohloff, Raytheon/BBN Technologies
This paper presents first insights from an ongoing investigation into
how to predict movement distributions influenced by factors other
than street networks. In current spatial analysis models, the ability
to predict the effect of attractors other than street network properties
on movement distributions has been limited. This paper introduces
an analysis approach that incorporates normalized weightings
on spaces with attractors along with network properties in order to
provide finer grain analysis explaining movement distributions within
urban complexity beyond the street network. This analysis approach
is based on Markov chain models which have been widely used in
other domains to model complex systems. We use the Markov chain
modeling approach to represent network properties and attractor effects
with normalized weightings to estimate probabilistic movement
distributions in a computationally tractable manner. We argue that urban
environments with business districts in segregated locations and
green open spaces integrated with the urban fabric are cases of urban
complexity where movement distribution cannot be explained merely
by street networks but with attractors incorporating programmatic
and environmental content. Our conclusion is that a comprehensive
model utilizing Markov chains can be useful to detect the effects of
building density and environmental content on movement, yet further
research is required to establish weighting criteria.
Representing Information: Envisioning the City
through Data
Karen Lewis, Ohio State University
The constructed world is replete with information that governs and
controls its organization. From railroads to highways, building codes
to zoning regulations, the design and development of the contemporary
environment is managed by strategies of physical and visual
organization. Architects’ interest in this globally networked environment
is reflective of an increasing awareness and attention to the
multi-variant world, one invested in infrastructural systems that support
productivity in lieu of pictures and is reflective of a new global
and electronic economy based on intangibles – ideas, information and
relationships. The effects of these systems, once only theorized and
simulated through abstract models, is given attention via the measurement,
collection and processing of their effects.
As emerging technologies have enabled new ways of measuring fluvial
global, urban and regional networks, new representation techniques
have enabled design practice to occupy and design with
information, rather than merely represent its influence. Through
techniques of clarification, simulation, augmentation and revelation,
architecture mobilizes data visualization into architecture praxis.
Spectacle of the Hyper-Real: Environmental
Simulation, Cybernetic Subjects, and Urban Design
Anthony Raynsford, San Jose State University
Like Renaissance perspective before it, contemporary environmental
simulation in urban design is an exceedingly codified and artificial
visual construction whose success, likewise, lies in its reassurance
of a certain scientific precision and point-by-point correspondence.
Using a few key examples, I would like to suggest that current, hyper-realistic
simulations, such as the Glasgow Urban Model, have a
three-part history, dating back to the 1950s when experiments at
MIT first connected cybernetic models of experience to the formal
aesthetics of film. At this stage, simulations remained highly diagrammatic,
translating dynamic urban sequences into an array of visual
media, each of which was meant to capture some aspect of the
totality of the visual experience of the city. This phase was followed
by an intermediate stage in the 1970s, in which computer technology
became embedded within specific techniques of Hollywood
special effects in order to simulate a more-or-less total environmental
experience, with extraordinary levels of detail and precision. This
embedding of special effects technology coincided with a populist
suspicion of urban design expertise that had begun in the late 1960s
and that demanded ever-wider accessibility and transparency of
urbanistic representations. Realism now entailed both close, optical
replications of urban experience and a type of cinematic immediacy
that would be familiar to, and hence legible for a broad audience of
perceivers. The final stage emerged with the adoption of CAD modeling
and animation systems that gradually became spliced into and
ultimately supplanted traditional film, without, however, displacing
the filmic visual codes and their subjective viewpoints. Where Renaissance
perspective projected a static, often universalized viewer,
centered within an abstract spatial grid, contemporary digital simulations
tended later to project a variable and mobile ‘consumer’ of
urban space, a cybernetic subject of endless feedback rather than a
Platonic knower of ideals. The demand for realism, also, became an
appetite for the spectacular results of simulation per se. Simulated
cities became sites for a new kind of hyper-reality, both in the sense
of their intensely detailed duplication of the physical and in terms of
their acting as increasingly autonomous substitutes for the real. The
replacement of physical models and film by digitally scanned environments
and digital renderings have further widened the scope for
hyper-realistic spectacle, whether in the form of animated films that
are choreographed in order to produce particular effects of motion,
or interactive spaces controlled, in the manner of games, through a
set of rules by which users move through the space. Although potentially
neutral banks of visual and spatial information, the models,
in practice, need to be organized in particular ways in order to simulate
the effects of the real and reach a general audience, where they
can be consumed as digital, cinematic media.
Digital Apptitutes + Other Openings - Boston, MA - 9