Introducing FY!-Langes

Hello my fellow microcosmonauts!!!

As an alumni of the microcosm studio, I wanted to reach back to my roots and some of my favorite people to shed some light on a fabrication installation I'm involved in at GSAPP (columbia university).

It's called: FY!-Langes.
 and here's our media abstract:

FY-Langes is an installation that is currently being designed and produced by 10 students enrolled in the Fast Pace/Slow Space technology course at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), and will be on display on campus in the middle of May of 2012.

Our aim is to push the boundaries of digital fabrication and experiment with a non-conventionial material, and push the boundary of its performance in order to create an occupiable structure. The goal is to marry non-conventional cutting techniques with advanced digital design tools in a singular project.

please check out our site @ fylanges.com and help us turn this into reality!!!

fy-nance @ fylanges.com and please, please, please, spread the word!  you're crowd based support will go a long ways!  thanks in advance.

p.s. the microcosm studio is kicking-ass.  woot woot uwm!

FY!-LANGES!

ISM wonder wall process

Exhibition This Thursday in Riverwest

Zarletti: Wood Veneer Panel Prototype

The past week has been a whirlwind of details, details, and more details.  Here is the prototype that embodies the spirit of the final design


Here is a glimpse of how it will look in the restaurant


A script allows us to calculate the curvature of the veneer as well as the positioning of the structural fins. The curves of one section (three adjacent panels) is pictured above. The blue circles control the density, the green circles control the peaks, and the yellow circles control the valleys.

We can't wait to unveil the final fabricated panels at the gallery on May 5th!

Team "We Will Rockite You" In Process

Thinking up Forms...

Paper or Plastic?

Plastic!

Generating an Army of Forms.

Connections...

So what next?
Surface Texture, Zip Ties, Craft Foam!
More on this later..

Posted By Team "We Will Rockite You" (Ted, Paul + Hollie)

Update!

heres a little update with our prototypes. The full scale wall is now up in the commons to enjoy! more pics on diagrams and so forth soon!

'team banzai

Relationship Between Experimentation and Theory

(This is really a comment on Kevin's post from March 10, placed in the main thread in order to draw attention back to the question.)

The question of the relationship between experimentation and theory is a sub-set of the larger question: what is the relationship between action and thought? The answer is: thought drives action, and it is subsequently informed by action. This is the core lesson of the feedback loop. To act effectively, we must guide our actions with knowledge acquired from our observations of the world, and to enhance and expand our knowledge of the world, we must engage it in action. We must explore and discover. The relationship between action and thought is not unilateral, in which one element dominates the other, because we are integrated beings, possessing both a body and mind. We need both to survive and to thrive. To paraphrase Ayn Rand: A body without a mind is a zombie, and a mind without a body is a ghost. Both are archetypes of the undead.

Experimenting is an action. It is a way of doing the work of design. Its antithesis is perpetuating, which is the mainstream’s dominant way of working. That is a different action. So the question really is: what ideas (i.e., what theories) are coupled with these actions? What are the ideas that complete the necessary coupling of action and thought in the work of architects? Perpetuating … what? Experimenting … for what? Experimenting is pointless as an end-in-itself. It must be directed, guided by a curiosity about something. It is always guided by an idea (explicit or implicit) about what is important to explore and discover about the world. In other words, every act of experimentation implies a value-judgment – a choice to explore this as opposed to that, which implies that the selected subject of experiment is more important than alternative subjects not pursued. Every act of experimentation expresses a view of the world – a view of what is important about the world or life in it.

Perpetuating is the same. What does one choose to perpetuate? Every act of perpetuation involves a choice, and thus, it too expresses a view of what is important.

So what have you been experimenting with in your projects this semester? What aspects of the world have been drawn out and accentuated? What conventions have you accepted and perpetuated in your work this semester? Answering these questions will lead you toward an understanding of the view of the world embodied in your work. It is a good way to begin to see what your work means.

Regulation of Energy

What do you think about LEED?

LEED began as a voluntary system used to assess energy conservation through accumulation of points. It has become a mandate of political correctness in corporate practice, and it promises to become a requirement of licensure. Thereafter it could become a model for the first energy conservation building code, involving a massive expansion of the already massive regulatory bureaucracy governing the building industry.

Even if this future does not befall us, LEED is already beginning to have the effect of other building codes. Architects used to be experts in fire safety; now they are experts in the application of building codes. They often have no idea what a code means or why it was invented. (Even Building Inspectors and other code officials often do not know why a code was invented, since the code does not contain its own history and justification.) Architects only know that they must comply, so the question of the relationship between the code and fire safety is irrelevant. The same effect of regulation can be seen in the government-run high schools, which now predominately teach to standardized tests. Instead of conveying real knowledge to students in a way that prepares them for life, they convey statistically probable test information in a way that prepares them for the SAT.

Architects, currently compelled by social pressure and in the future compelled by the government, learn the rules and regulations of LEED to become certified, rather than the principles of energy efficiency. In this case too, compliance with a regulatory bureaucracy replaces real understanding. This is the pattern of government bureaucracy: it poses as the protector of some aspect of life, be it education, fire safety or energy conservation, and then promptly displaces this aspect of life, pushing regulatory rules into the foreground of our minds, and pushing life to the periphery. Wisdom in the nature of childhood learning, combustibility, and energy consumption is replaced by wisdom in compliance to an ever-expanding tapestry of rules. This gradual substitution of government for life is the inevitable result of regulatory bureaucracy, since a mind cannot be regulated. Government cannot force a person to understand. Government cannot force a person to master the principles of energy conservation, only to conform to a point system, and these are far from equivalent. Because LEED plays a growing role in this process of dumbing-down our profession, I do not support it. Or put another way, I do not support LEED because I believe architects need to understand the principles of energy efficiency.

Materials Research and Parametric Techniques

How do you see materials research and generative scripting (or other parametric techniques) influencing today’s practice?

It depends on whether by “today’s practice” you mean mainstream practice or experimental practice. If you mean experimental practice, then I would say that materials research and parametric techniques are not “influencing” today’s experimental practice – they are today’s experimental practice. They are the methodological backbone of the practice. They are the means of such practice. Another way to say it: today’s experimental practice is the practice of materials research and parametric techniques. There is certainly more to contemporary work than these two methods, but nonetheless, much of what experimental designers do, falls into one or both of these methodological categories. This is why it is crucial for young designers to master these methods, if they want their work to be seen as relevant and their skills to be seen as valuable to experimental practitioners who might employ them.

Surface vs Structure

Do you think scripting can be a tool for structural innovation or just for surface articulation? Any real life constructed examples?

With regard to scripting, I talk about this in Feedback Loop in the chapter Refutation of Arguments against Scripting. This discussion occurs in the section on the Argument from Decorative Effects. However, I think there is a larger question here, which goes beyond scripting: Is contemporary experimental architecture overly concerned with the production of surfaces and surface effects, rather than with structure? Below are some thoughts on this larger question.

How can designers accentuate surface? In what state does the surface aspect of architecture dominate? Surface dominates when architecture contains large expanses of smooth, continuous, opaque areas, whether flat or curved. The typical painted drywall surface (wall, ceiling) is a common example. This is surface accentuated to an extreme. It reduces the experience of wall or ceiling to a thin plane devoid of depth and materiality, and with no way to perceive its structural anatomy or thickness. In a typical drywall house, structure is seen nowhere, and instead, everywhere is pure surface planes. Much Modern architecture accentuates surface. Consider the Barcelona Pavilion: an environment of free-slipping, pristinely smooth surfaces with a negated sense of structure. Or consider the typical curtainwall enclosure: conceived of as a taut, flat, continuous “skin” stretched over a largely hidden structural framework. Post-Modern architecture aggressively sought to detach surface from structure. The surface was conceived of as an impenetrable or distorting veil. Consider Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall or Experience Music Museum, in which there is no intelligible relationship between visible surface and underlying structure. Seeing the surface tells you nothing about what lies beneath. (In his more recent projects such as the Chicago park pavilion, Gehry reveals the structure that holds up the surface, but they remain two completely incongruous sub-systems.)

Despite the widespread efforts to make surface architecture in previous decades, and despite the fact that conservative mainstream designers continue to perpetuate surface architecture today through the conventional curtainwall, these opponents of experimental work like to accuse experimental designers of a surface bias. This is nothing but a smear tactic, since in fact, the trend in current experimental work is to reject surface architecture. This is one way contemporary work breaks with the Modern and Post-Modern past. So rather than have a surface bias, experimental designers today tend to have a strong bias against the surface. Instead, they seek to accentuate structure.

Consider the many recent studies for interior systems: partition systems and ceiling systems. They share a goal: to structuralize the smooth, continuous surface, breaking it down and converting it into a highly articulated structure. When a wall or ceiling gets componentized, and when the joinery between components is articulated, and when the components are given overt materiality, and when, due to this materiality, they have visible thickness and weight, then what was once a thin, intangible surface becomes a deep, tectonic, corporeal entity (i.e., a structure). Experimental designers today have such a strong aversion to the pristine, detached surface that they have devoted significant research to figuring out how to treat every surface as a structure, even in those places where plain surfaces have historically been taken for granted, as in non-structural interior systems. The articulated surface is the structuralized surface. In this work no surface is allowed to remain a surface. Everything is treated as structure.

This renewed love of structure, which is an outgrowth of the renewed love of Nature as a model for architecture, can be seen everywhere in experimental work, at every scale, not just interior partition systems. Consider the Caltrans Headquarters by Morphosis. A taut curtainwall “skin” covers one side of the building, but at its lower edge the “skin” metaphorically unravels, buckling into a folded plate roof structure at ground level to cover a public plaza and bus terminal. Banal surface mutates into complex, multifunctional structure. In this new way of thinking, even when surface remains smooth and continuous, it is used structurally. Consider Richard Rogers’ Law Courts in Bordeaux. A series of smooth-surfaced, conical “barrels” hold the courtrooms, and they are covered by a giant-scale smoothly undulating roof surface. Yet these surfaces are actually crucial components in the structural system. They possess conical and undulating curves in order to enhance rigidity and spanning capability. So to the extent smooth surface still exists in experimental work, it is used for its structural capabilities, integrated into a structural system rather than concealing or subverting it. Norman Foster’s undulating curved roof above the British Museum Court is another example. Its curvature is so integral to its structural performance that a parametric system was developed, which automatically recalculated the size of spanning members whenever the curvature was adjusted.

Material Surrogates

What is your reasoning behind the materials assigned in Project 2? Are they supposed to be thought of in terms of building materials or as creative inspiration for componentization, fabrication, structural concepts, etc.?

In Project 1 we studied how to identify latent properties of materials as a source of design innovation. While this is useful in design, it has limited usefulness in the particular way we encountered it in Project 1. Once the latent property was discovered, it was merely nurtured: filtered, accentuated, etc. Since it was discovered in the process of designing a full-scale enclosure panel, the latent property was applied directly in the context in which the property was discovered. It was discovered while designing a panel in glass and it was applied to the design of a panel in glass, for example.

Project 2 releases the full power of material research by combining the identification of latent properties with creative recombination (i.e., “reinterpretation”). Because the material of study in Project 2 is not the material of full-scale construction, any latency found in the material of study must be reinterpreted for a different scale and different material implementation (if it was a real project moving forward toward construction). This requires creativity. On the other hand, Project 1 really only required selectivity. It required a choice about what latent property to accentuate and how to accentuate it. Project 2 requires this, but also requires recombining the latent property with other aspects of one’s situation to generate ideas for the design of a bridge. It requires scalar and material translations from plastic tubing to tube steel, or from Rockite to reinforced concrete, or from folded museum board to bent steel plate. In this way the material of study acts as a stand-in for an anticipated material of construction in the many cases when prototyping in construction-grade material at full-scale is unfeasible. Even when designers can’t prototype at full-scale, they need a way to tap the complexity of materials as a source of inspiration. Plastic tubing and curved steel tubing have many different properties, of course, and these differences must be respected, but they also share much in common, much more than we usually acknowledge, and these commonalities allow plastic tubing to act as a model-scale surrogate.

This surrogate relationship also aids collaboration with a structural engineer, for the same reason. Models made in tangible materials, which a structural engineer can even handle and manipulate, help designers communicate a more complex set of desires. Such models capture a more complex set of properties, which often capture an engineer’s imagination and spark further ideas. If you show an engineer a digital rendering of the geometry you want, then you will likely get that geometry. If you show him something he can engage empirically, he might push on it and think, “Hey, see how that bends around there, if we did that with a cable net, it might allow us to…” Empirical engagement reveals possibilities. Static depiction, less so.

To answer the question directly: materials at model-scale are engaged as what they are: plastic tubing, Rockite, wax, in order to reveal what another material might be: tube steel, reinforced concrete, structural fiberglass. This gives model-scale materials a hybrid status: such materials are both actual and representational. A designer engaged in materials research oscillates the status of such a material in his mind, one moment exploring what the material can do in its own right, the next reinterpreting this to inform his conception of a future full-scale construction.

Pure Bottom-up Design

Is there an example of a completed building that employed a pure bottom-up design process? Was it successful in your opinion?

Remember that although it is possible to focus selectively on the bottom-up aspect of design or the top-down aspect for the sake of study, and it is possible to construct classroom exercises that emphasize one over the other (as in Project 1), it is never possible to design purely bottom-up or top-down. Doing so would be disastrous. However, designers have historically neglected one or the other aspect, muting its influence. Disaster follows to the exact extent they neglect one or the other. For example, consider the typical Post-Modern, top-down biased process, in which designers consider only form in early stages of a project, making decisions with little, if any, feedback related to materials, constructability, budget, etc. This leads to: value engineering to realign a design with its budget and change orders in the field to realign a design with constructability. Value engineering and change orders are corrective measures that involve needless expense and erosion of design quality. They are the price paid by any designer who neglects bottom-up, and they became the norm during the decades of Post-Modernism. (Note that these are only some of the consequences of neglecting bottom-up.)

So what happens if you neglect top-down, implementing an intensely bottom-up process? You get incoherent, purposeless wholes. Few projects using such a method have been implemented. I can think of two examples off hand, one proposed and one constructed. The proposed one is Aranda/Lasch’s Grotto project in Pamphlet Architecture 27: Tooling. The built one is Diller Scofidio’s Blur Building. In each case the configuration of the parts into a whole is predominantly unintentional, the result of a material or geometric process acting on its own, with minimal evaluation and choice on the part of the designers. (Note: in the Blur Building, I consider the water mist to be the component parts of the building.)

The question of contemporary design in this regard is not merely how to rediscover bottom-up. Such rediscovery is only a first step. The real question is how to achieve an integration of bottom-up and top-down.

Biology and Habitation

Does the use of biological systems for design inspiration place greater emphasis on the form of a building rather than its programmatic use?

No, not form. It puts greater emphasis on structure. Things in Nature are “unselfconscious” forms: they are structures first, and since every structure must have a form, organisms have form. Another way to say it: form is merely an attribute of structure. Form cannot exist apart from rigid (or semi-rigid) materiality that holds the form.

Every structure large enough to inhabit creates potentials for and limitations on how humans can act in it. So as soon as a designer gets an idea for a structure, it implies programmatic possibilities. It is not possible to sever design of structure and design of a program of use. They are interactive, mutually dependent aspects of architecture. But just as designers can choose to ignore structure and focus on form-making, they can ignore the programmatic implications of structure and focus on structure-making. Designers can ignore them, but that does not make them disappear. The implications are there, so if examination of the structure of organisms gives rise to ideas for the structure of a building, and if the structure of a building is always connected to patterns of human activity that can unfold in that structure, then inspiration drawn from organisms is both structural and programmatic, if only a designer chooses to look.

Does Our Education Prepare Us for Jobs We Hate?

Check out this lecture related to our recent studio discussion:
http://www.good.is/post/does-our-education-prepare-us-for-jobs-we-ll-hate/

The start of Spackling panels

Update...I have switched back to my original idea of Spackle and bubble wrap, it was a bit easier to control and better enforces my word "Diaphanous"








heres a start of my spackle magic. the rest of this will be posted when its completed.

special thanks to michelle,
Song by carly comando : everyday.

First post of the semester (Microcosm Spring 2010)

I have started having issues with Spackling....how troublesome the material assigned to me....I started out forming it through presses, and after seeing a previous example done a year and a half ago I decided to avoid extruding Spackle.

The question that I decided to focus on was "how can Spackle hold light?" (its a window installation after all) I have noticed is that when Spackle is thin enough, it can glow when the light hits it. The light then also shows imperfections in the Spackle compound I have created.

here are some images from my testing phase.

Preliminary Thoughts on Microcosm Studio 2010

The first principle of the Microcosm Studio is: Design should always start with materials. This often strikes students as a strange dictum for a studio committed to aggressive experimentation with digital tools. How are these two aspects reconciled? After all, the digital and the material are fundamentally different, right? Many students assume that if digital tools play a significant role in a designer’s thinking, then design becomes formalistic, visually driven, and detached from the material realities of building construction. That is to say, to whatever extent one embraces the digital, then to the same extent one necessarily loses touch with the material. This assumption too often proves true in schools of architecture, as students use the glossy imagery of digital simulation to substitute for real understanding of how a design is made and inhabited. The Microcosm studio rejects the idea that computers necessarily cast designers into a fantasy world, and instead, it holds that computers grant powerful new control over material reality, when they are wielded properly.

In the conventional (non-Microcosm) approach, digital design starts with a formal idea (i.e., a parti) or some other kind of geometry, which is tested visually through various simulations (e.g., models, renderings) before finally being constructed out of materials. The dominant flow is from digital to material. The digital is formative, while the material is conclusive. Microcosm reverses this flow, moving instead from material to digital. Through hands-on experimentation with materials and through the iterative fabrication of prototypes, designers find new creative potential in materials that inspires formal ideas. Armed with this insight, designers then encode a material’s interesting properties and behaviors, using this information to generate and explore digital simulations. Insight gained from this second wave of experiments then facilitates the fabrication of more prototypes. The flow becomes an iterative cycle from material to digital and back to material again.

The project sequence for this year’s studio reveals that Microcosm is grounded in materials research, prototyping and a careful consideration of the interaction between material systems and human inhabitants. Digital tools are engaged intensely in this effort, but the question is how to engage digital tools competitively and to our fullest advantage as we reshape the material world.

Project 1: PANEL

The first project introduces students to a method of materials research and prototyping. The final product is a full-scale prototype of one panel for a proposed curtainwall shading system.

Project 2: JIG

In the second project students learn how to extend the exploration of materials into the digital medium, using parametric thinking and mass-customization to augment understanding and creative control of materials. The final product is a large-scale model representing a design for a pedestrian bridge across a forested gorge in Grant Park on the south side of Milwaukee, which will replace a deteriorating existing bridge.

Project 3: LOW-TECH

Armed with a new set of principles and methods from the first two projects, students will tackle an expanded version of the challenge presented in Project Two. They will explore the creative potential of a cheap, off-the-shelf building system such as aluminum siding, electrical conduit or wood stud framing. Through creative materials research, iterative prototyping and parametric analysis, they will transform a banal, low-tech building system into an innovative ceiling or partition system. The final product is a full-scale ceiling or partition prototype. Because it is made out of cheap "Home Depot" materials, the cost of the prototype will be comparable to the kind of pristine basswood model students often make in a conventional studio, yet these seemingly ordinary "Home Depot" materials will be transformed into a customized, exotic, compelling, architectural organism.

Project 4: HABITATION

The first three projects focus on materials, building systems and the hands-on making of architectural fragments: panel, structure, ceiling, and wall. Project four shifts the focus from materials to space, asking questions about how people inhabit and experience buildings, and how designers can deploy material systems to offer meaningful habitation. The scale also increases to that of an entire building with multiple building systems and a program of spaces to be resolved on a real site. (The details of the program and site will be revealed later.)

What is the Microcosm Studio?

Contemporary culture embraces complexity in countless forms: networked mobile computing, news on-demand, global air travel, mobcasting, robotic-assisted surgery, computer-controlled fabrication, global positioning systems and Facebook. Each of us is part of an increasingly integrated global system that offers higher and higher degrees of local, individual influence. This is an unprecedented kind of order, which defies traditional categorization. The world is both orderly and unpredictable. Its parts are both integrated and independent. The world can no longer be convincingly described as centrally-planned or as a chaotic mess. Instead, it is a complex dynamic system.

This view is transforming diverse fields of inquiry from robotics to economics and from software development to architecture. Whereas architects have predominately sought simplicity and regularity in design, a new movement explores architecture as complex and diverse. The Microcosm studio investigates and extends this work, using emerging technologies and design methods to understand and channel complexity, rather than deny it.

Students undertake a series of short-duration research projects culminating in the design of a complex building. Based on empirical experiments and a review of writings in complexity theory, students identify the properties of complex systems, including non-cyclical order, emergence, redundancy, ubiquitous difference, and rule-based behavior. In early experiments, students test common materials such as concrete, glass and aluminum. By subjecting them to a tooling or chemical process, unexpected behaviors emerge. These behaviors are documented and tested further to reveal architectural potential. In another set of experiments, students analyze biological organisms and identify parametric rule-sets used to reproduce the organisms’ geometry. The geometry is then tested for its structural potential. In a final set of experiments, students integrate the results of material and geometric research to design a mass-customized, parametrically-controlled, architectural enclosure system.

Lecture Announcement: Learning, Designing, Making

Check out Ryan O'Connor's lecture "Learning, Designing, Making": Monday, April 6, 1:30PM, UWM School of Architecture, Room 345.

Studying Human Habitation

In her response to Ted’s recent post, Jessie says: “This is perhaps why I have such a problem with the "simplicity" of this next project 4: You can never separate yourself from experience or from the outside city world while considering an active and passive life. Nothing is so simple that it can be expressed without reaction to other things, or be isolated from psychology or personal history.”

Regarding narrowness of the exercise: Many folks are probably feeling the same way. It is a very narrow exercise, isn’t it? (Well, not really. I hope you will discover ultimately that it is not narrow at all.) What does narrowness imply in a studio exercise? It could indicate a desire in a teacher to restrict creativity and experimentation. Well, I certainly don’t want to do that. Narrowness can also arise from a desire in a teacher to help students see something they normally take for granted. In this case “narrowness” is a preconception, one that the teacher hopes to help students overcome. Consider for example Project 1. The material study often seems very narrow to students at first – an extremely constrained exercise. But once students engage the exploration, they realize that the role of materiality in architecture is far broader and deeper and filled with vastly more creative potential than they had previously assumed. A new realm of creativity is opened, and what seemed narrow reveals its vastness.

Regarding the city: Is it true that we pursue the active life or the contemplative life only when out-and-about in town? Why would such pursuit be limited only to an urban context? Why can’t a person engage in active doing or in focused contemplating while inside one’s own abode or workplace? If this fundamental aspect of life (doing or contemplating) is limited to the outside of architecture, then what is left to the inside? It seems that the inside would be in danger of becoming irrelevant. I hope for the sake of everyone that inhabits architecture that the inside – the stage for the vast majority of human activity – has the capacity to influence the active life and the contemplative life. We sure need it to.

Regarding context: It is true that in order to act, we must act in a context, which I think is part of what Jessie is trying to say. The outside world (i.e., the city) provides part of this context, but not all of it. A person’s psychology and personal history also provides part of this context, but not all of it. Project 4 asks you to consider part of the context that is normally overlooked, neglected by designers as too narrow, too mundane. The context of Project 4 is a person’s interaction with the material framework of architecture – its walls, doors, windows, floors and ceilings. But more precisely: the question is how this material framework filters and constructs a person’s interaction with his own work (Scenario A), other people (Scenario B) or the natural surroundings (Scenario C). Each of these is in fact a crucial part of the context of human habitation.