Hybrid Morphologies - Infrastructure, Architecture, Landscape

This reading began with the idea of creating a new urbanism not based on order and similarity, but rather uncertainty and new potential territories. It will no longer be about trying to impossible limits, but more with defining boundaries and discovering unnameable hybrids. We should try to manipulate the infrastructure for endless diversification. Robert Smithson said the environment consists of unrelated fragments of places that will change landscapes and a new terrain with emerge. and example was Freeways, power lines, family houses are considered a landscape as one system. He believes the new societies created now are reliant on both natural and synthetic processes.

They describe:

Site: - "Material reality of a pile-existing situation."

Non Site: - "Abstract representation of reinterpretation of the site in the form of a text or a sculpture."To alter a site, non site strategies are applied.

Scape: - "A reading of the urban territory as landscape" Basically an endless city of continuous flowed form.

The Generic City: - Has three elements which are roads buildings nature and relate to each other through unpredictable ways. When these elements are together its wrong they should be treated as one not separate entities. This creates a constant uniformity. This unifying idea leads to an urban hierarchical organization.

Scaft: - "meaning to give form or to shape" We should try to create urban places with an unknown finished result that is adaptable to varying circumstances

Urbanity: "Expression of a mental landscape mirroring society changes both as material and cultural levels."

The article described how urban space is created, less by predetermined forms, but by the interactive forces. Favouring the dynamic, fluid condition of urban landscape. There is a relationship between infrastructure, architecture, landscape and through mutations and transformations they are explored. An example was Zaha Hadid considers her architecture a form of landscape extension. By blurring the boundaries it goes against traditional architectural objects as a finite entity. Her mountain building is the example of interconnected infrastructure and landscape. Rem Koolhass thinks a city is "A field determined by accumulations, connections, densities, transformations and fluctuations. This is when infrastructure, architecture and landscape form together as a spatial field. A wasted city can be reclaimed through the introduction of interconnection. In a new city there should be no figure-ground distinctions. This is a morphing of traditional city planning. Formal and spatial forms and objects will emerge continually and will allow a new interpretation of cities to grow. This is because the formal is undetermined. A new hierarchy can be established if we connect the three categories of a city: infrastructure, architecture, landscape.

Renzo Piano Green Museum

"The building had to be green and sustainable to go with its purpose - study of the earth and science. It is also in a very unusual place, the middle of one of the most beautiful parks in the world. You almost never get a chance to build something in the middle of a great park, so it needed to be transparent. You needed to see where you are. Normally a museum of natural science is created like a theatre, so that you can have the exhibits inside. All museums normally are opaque; they are closed, like a kingdom of darkness, and you are trapped inside. But here you need to know about the connection with nature, so almost anywhere you are in this building you can see through to the outside" Renzo Piano.

The energy efficiency building stretched up a 2.5 acres of living roof that absorb around 2 million gallons of rainwater each year that would otherwise go down the drain. The roof is at maximum capacity during heavy downpours. water will siphoned off the roof to an underground water system that will siphon it back into the park.

Piano was determined to build the greenest museum possible using complicated system of weather sensors that connects a central computer, which motorized windows to shut and open. His design incorporates with the environment by using undulating roofline brings cool air that helps to cool the museum without using air conditioning.

This project definitely defines regionalism when Piano integrates the relationship between architectural building and the nature of the site altogether describe as a sustainable regional work.

Green Museum - San Francisco
photo taken from
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/renzo-green-museum-san-francisco.php

The Ecstacy of Communication

Baudrillard is a critic of technology in modern society.   He describes the meanings of objects in everyday life and how there is a system through which objects are organized and valued in our society.

He argues that there is a screen and network within our society, where there is a communication between production and consumption through which objects are meaningful to humans. The example given of an automobile in the article argues that a vehicle is now a capsule with a computerized brain. The dashboard being the brain and the landscape in the window becomes the screen like the television. The vehicle is no longer a projectile but a participant in a series of mediated moments.

He has a cynical view of media and it’s effect on humanity. The example of the television displays that the object becomes the body.  He states, “the displacement of bodily movements and effects into electronic commands.”  The universe is essentially becoming a controlled screen, completely affected by technology.  It’s very evident that society mimics and mocks television personalities.  The media dictates how we dress, who we know, and how we react to situations.  Baudrillard has a lot of valid points, which stress that society has let technology take over our lifestyle. 

Baudrillard continues to explain that the most intimate processes of our life become a reflection of the media.  Our actions and universe unfolds onto the screen.  We’re part of the ecstasy of communication – we strive for the communication of the networks – telephone, television etc. The communication is the obscene, Baudrillard says. The scene excites us and the obscene fascinates us.

Technology is a developing aspect of society.  The article was written in the 1980’s, so at that time, technology was still sprouting.  If Baudrillard says that we have to suffer through this new state of things – how does he feel about how the technological networks have developed in the 90’s, and 2000’s? Baudrillard argues that technology is affecting society in such a negative way, but isn’t it technology that has developed culture over the past years?  Historically, the effect of technology has only benefited medical research, freed time through efficiency of shopping and paying bills and new safety innovations in vehicles and airplanes. If the scene is the obscene – we are obscene.  There is no way to get away from this development – so it becomes the end of private and intimate life.  Humans are no longer their own body, but a mirror to technology.

Regionalism/ Materials & New Living (Class Notes)

Max Weber

“Disenchantment of the world due to rationalization and secularization”

“Iron age of capitalism in which modern world is imprisoned”

Post-human theory of human nature machine all together as one.

Conflict? Relevance?

-Rationalism/ regionalism

-Culture/ civilization

-Organic/ rational

-Codes: technological/ cultural

Regionalism dilemma

-Essentialism (contextualism)

-Authenticity & representation

-“Use of local materials, sensitivity to context”

-What makes something authentic? Value?

-What is the public collective value?

Good way to represent authentic regional architecture

Ex) delta shelter-olson sundberg kindig allen architects

-Building relates to the atmosphere of environment morph change to e in control of the environmental perform ability.

-Decision that’s performative to response of communication

Image taken from http://www.olsonkundigarchitects.com/gallery_cache/38/159_159c/Delta-Shelter-TB-056.jpg

ex 2) Patau architects seabird school

-Uses local labor trained them to build the building

There is a core issues with the client, joint positions with the client and architectural manifestations. The end result is unknown.

Other examples were shown such as toyo ito – bridge pavilion, sendai mediateque columns. And foa yoko-hama port building

Material/Construction

Tu-Vaccum ball bridge

Eco-Tec

-New language of architecture

New territory

bridge optimistic version for merchants

LTL architects new suburbanism

Laneway house- superkul

Keenan house/// Faye the village, Arkansas

Marlon Blackwell

New living

Investigate your tectonic place.

We all live differently.

Elevate to a level all the functions used when you’re there.

How do you live? (series of room configuration)

Do we create a new transivibile way of living?

Space can be changed make it any way like you.

New agenda

-Reuse/ recycle

-Places created cancer city vision division concrete habitat for crayfish

-Building for animals human nature typologies.

Types of Architectural Regionalism Research

Architectural Regionalism has components within which can outline numerous examples and discussions.  Vernacular Regionalism can be broken down with simple examples.  Igloos, Inca Cities, Zulu huts are all regionalist examples.  They are influenced by it’s location in time and in space. 

Critical regionalism applies to contemporary architecture from a postmodern line. 

Upon researching types and examples of architectural regionalism, a blog was located which discussed post war critical regionalism. This approach shows  meaning in Modern Architecture using a sense of place and meaning. 

Historical references of the term critical regionalism is introduced and explained.  It also shows and discusses the falling water house by Frank Lloyd Wright.  The modern design captures the sensitivity to its environment and reacts to it’s surrounding climate.  It is a sheer representation of regionalism. 

Falling Water Blueprints: Frank Lloyd Wright

This blueprint displays how the structure interacts with it's environment.  The building literally appears to be sprouting from the ground and use the elements of nature as it's base.  

Falling Water: Frank Lloyd Wright

1. Katarina Chelsea comment on "Post-war critical Regionalism,” The Contemporary Practice Blog, comment posted January 28, 2010, http://katarinachelsea.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/post-war-critical-regionalism/hist-homes-10-fallingwater)

(accessed October 14, 2011).

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

“Vietnam Veterans Memorial” http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/card1.html 


This article discusses how Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as experiences of sight, sound and touch. This creates a full-bodied experience of the viewer, connecting us to the design in many ways. She was still an undergraduate at Yale University when she conceived this proposal. Its very simple, unique and beautiful created out of polished, black granite. From a distance it looks like a cut in the landscape, however when you actually enter the work it is designed for the reader of the deceased names to stand below the horizon. 6 feet to be exact, the typical height for the dead to be buried. Lin designs many projects with ways for the viewer to connect to the project without even realizing. The visual scar of the landscape was used to display grief and pain. Its sole proposition is that human life is a harsh cost of war. The names are written along the horizontal walls and the memorial is responsive to the individual experience of the visitor. When a visitor looks at the wall, their reflection is shown within the engraved names, this was meant to symbolically bring both the past and present together. One of the most interesting points of the design is the names are left without rank or unit and everyone is considered the same including women. In total there are as of May 2011, 58,272 names with different symbols beside their names of a cross, a circle or diamond to show if they are missing, dead or returned alive. Lin connects human activities through a beautiful design of a memorial inscribed in the landscape. 

Maya Lin - Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington DC)

photo taken from http://mayalin.com

TECTONIC (class notes)

SENSES + ENVIRONMENT

• Environment as an extension of body 
• Investigation of body (body-space)
• Implied action 
• operational/ contextual/ sequential/ experimential 
• inhabitation/ narrative condition - dwelling
• function is NOT a space 

Creation of built environment = creation of sensorial environment that body inhabits 

OTHERNESS + SOCIAL

• "work of art implies a bodily interaction"
• presence of other 
• presence through "character"/craft
• "architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly" 

Peter Zumthor - Thermal Bath  (Switzerland)

photo taken from http://valeriehassett.wordpress.com/tag/thermal-baths-at-val/

Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen - Temppeliaukio Kirkko (Rock Church) (Helsinki)

photo taken from http://rosemariejohn.com/2011/02/06/finnair/

Diller & Scofidio - Blur Building (Switzerland)
 
photo taken from http://themodone.com/2010/04/fashion-show-venues-1/

TECTONIC vs STEREOTOMIC

Tectonic      : layering construction/ materials 

Stereotomic : compressive mass to mass

• Scenographic (visual operation) vs Tectonic (act of construction) 
• Ontological vs Representational
• high art (bourgeois) / labor 
• scenographic / thingness
• structure symbolic / structure technical 

Tectonic can consider as a "craft" - "presence of the hand" -

Sterotomic work of Alberto Campo Baeza

Moliner House

The Moliner House is a representation of stereotomic architecture based on the large mass of concrete used in the structure.  It displays a jointless nature and uses minimalist detailing.  The project was started in 2006  in Avda Spain.  The raised high walls created a stark white box, with little to no detail on the exterior.  The interior of the space was dug into the ground and trees were installed to mimic an intimate landscape.  It's not common that such minimal materials are used in such a mass volume form and Albertos structure seems to be a representation of stereotomic architecture.

Tectonic Precedent

Frampton discuss the disposition of current tectonic form that aims toward scenographic that accommodate with all the repercussion that signify the future environment. He adds that the doctrine governing has altered from being the autonomous realm of techno-science to extremely insubstantial. Architecture needs to be divided into structural and constructional form to find its equivalent foundation.  There exist the figurative origins of abstract art and the constructional basis of tectonic form.

TECTONIC

•       Technological Object
•       Scenographic Object
•       Tectonic Object

1.               Ontological – constructional elements: represent the static role and cultural status
2.        Representational – constructional elements: represent the present, but hidden

STEROTOMICS

•            Compressive mass
•        Common materials: wood and brick (represent the interest of permanence)

Fundamental syntactical transition may occur if one passes from the stereotomic base to tectonic base, which also evoke the essence of architecture.

The difference between:

• Kernform (nucleus)

o   Address the fabric of a structure

• Kunstform (decorative cladding)

o   Symbolize the institutional status of work

Through the concept of site and the principle of settlement (in structural terms), environment becomes the essence of architectural production. Tectonic dissolves between the culture of the heavy-stereotomics and the culture of the light-tectonics symbolizing load-bearing crafts and tends towards the earth and opacity and the dematerialized a-frame and tends towards the sky and opacity respectively.

“BREAK” vs “DIS-JOINT”

•  Things break against each other rather than connect: indicates the essential part at which the materials end to give way to another unexpectedly.
•  Rupture may have just as much significant as connection

Frampton conclude that tectonic advocate itself as a mythical classification and the critical myth of tectonic joint subject to the unaffected passage of time as well as separated from the continuity of time.

Authenticity/ Placelessness/ Identity (Class Notes)

Tectonic Precedents Oct 4^th

Authenticity

-What is the source of authenticity?

            Patent something

-What constitute/ construct authenticity?

-Who has authority to claim/ declare?

-How does a place become a place?

-Death of the author/subject

            -Situation/ history/ time-culture

Placelessness/ identity

-Where/ how do we start this?

Identity (home-ness)

-Why are we obsessed with identity?

-*This all has to do with authentic connection to objects. Maybe Isolation?

-How do you create/ develop an identity?

*We now design for resale

Bjerg parking apartments

-Life with a garden, and a life with a city. You can have both

Seven mountain of asapichan carbon neutral island in central Asia

Sense of connection is important to Canadians

How do you engage in all these distractions?

-Animosity… You don’t know the user or the next viewer

Craft/Materiality

Craft: Relationship to the Hand

-All that work of the hand:

            -Praxis/ craft/ tectonic

            -Cost (up front vs. lifetime/physical vs invisible)

-Weathering and aging materials/ durable material resale

*More lasting is more damaging?

Architecture should be biodegradable

Oral tradition/ invention of printing

-Thought expression sight

-Sound-space vs sight-space

-View vs. experience (ontology) in the world

-Tectonic (Material) logic/ copy

            -Can ‘copy’ be non-visual?

Sight

-Culture of distance

-“de-sensitization and de-eroticization”

-Privacy

-Liability

“Society of surveillance is necessarily a society of a voyeuristic eye”

-What’s so negative about optical culture?

Time

-Building and city as instrument of time

-How do you put architecture, as part of history?

-Timelessness vs material weathering?

-*Loft!*

Scent

-How do we plan/design the smell within the culture of temporary contracts and obsessive-sanitization!

-Why contemporary structures are sterile?

-Understanding can bring our renewed strategy for a factory design

Touch

-Can you design a room not be function, but by a different reason why do we design for functions that we don’t use any more?

Virtual Tourism

My Secure Cyberspace on Virtual Tourism

The article discusses about the viable of “virtual tourism” by the Internet that limit “tourist” to engage with the practical environment (destination). Users instead, explore their destination with easy directional camera control using 3D graphical program. When others are trying to perfect their program interface, “GigaPan” project aims to provide extreme high-resolution panoramic photos that allows user to zoom in on and pan across at anytime. Besides virtual visiting, “Second Life” allows user to buy virtual property, virtual goods and interact with other users in these “virtual tour”. Although, the initial intention was to promote tourism, it became a quick getaway for those too busy to get away from their comfort homes. Another example is the Google’s Street View and related Web 2.0 technologies which provides users to “tour” the city and watch created video at specific points. With the help of YouTube, users can also embed video on YouTube onto Google Maps service to produce interactive environment for new users (virtual tourists). This trend has grown extensively that some companies such as K Zero claim to be the "resident expert in virtual world" that offers many related articles for keen visitor. 

Credits: flickriver.com

Architecture of Seven Senses. Questions of Perception

Juhani Pallasmaa says there are seven senses of humans that occur during an architectural experience and they are eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, bone and muscles.

The idea of buildings losing their plasticity and their connection with the language and wisdom of the body leads to isolation. Disconnection from construction doesn’t justify authenticity. Natural material showcases age ie stone, brick, wood, which enriches the experience. Materials of today don’t convey anything of their material essence or age. Every touching experience of architecture is a multi-sensory experience. Sound connected to imagination. Spaces traced by the ear create a sense of connection and solidarity.

Most essential auditory experience created by architecture is tranquility and silence of matter and space. Examples such as a museum waiting patiently because they silence external noise and you focus on existence. Another example is memory of space for example scent of candy leads to thoughts of our childhood.

Skin reads texture, weight, density, and temperature of matter. For example the clean shimmer of ageless wear can turn a doorknob into an image of welcome and hospitality.  There is also density and texture of ground that was connecting us with skin to home, comfort and intimacy. Great architecture offers shapes and surfaces molded for the pleasurable touch of the eye. Eye senses most importunately separation and distance of a building.

A real architectural experience is approached, confronted, encountered and related to ones body. The authenticity of architectural experience is grounded in the tectonic language of buildings and the comprehensibility of the act of construction of the senses. Constant dialogue with environment is impossible to detach the image of self from its special and situational existence. This means the encounter of any work of art implies bodily interaction.

When experiencing the building and construction they will accept unconsciously lots of phenomenon’s by the brain and include all of the bodies sensory organs.