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!

Exhibition This Thursday in Riverwest

Compound Components

Structural Test

First Iteration of Connections

Latest Prototype of Pavilion

Light Detail

Complex Compound

Final panel inserted into the curtain wall at SARUP.

Close-up detail of the multiple layered surface.

Overall Process.

Buckling Aluminum Panel Insert

Panel insert installed at SARUP.

Close-up detail of buckling material effect.

Taxonomy of heat, time, and sand contact parameters.

Drape

Vapor

Carapace

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.

Spackle Panels

Spectrum diagram

Taxonomy diagram


The final product

a frame less panel system was a success! Forming it was a tricky process due to all the wait time and the fragile nature of Spackle, overall I'm happy with results.

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.

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.

LaDallman Lecture

The lecture given Friday by La Dallman was entitled 'Sedimentation, Strata, and Other Stuff', although I would argue that simply 'Other Stuff' would be sufficient to describe what was presented. I left the lecture surprised and confused by their work for a number of reasons. Let me attempt to frame my thoughts and analyze them in the context of emerging contemporary design.

On material and craft:
Grace described a situation in which panel ties for the cladding system were not placed in the concrete wall with sufficient accuracy. These ties are the crucial link between the heavy CORTEN sheets and the structural walls of the house. Their imprecise placement seems to be not the result of negligence of the construction worker who placed them, but rather an unavoidable byproduct of manual process in which they are placed. Rather than embracing this emergent behavior, it was deemed a mistake. A system of lasers was quickly employed to 'correct' any of these mistakes made in construction. This presents an particularly interesting and troubling scenario to the contemporary designer in which mass customization is used in the pursuit of achieving sameness. In this light, we as designers appear to be apologizing for the lack of precision that is inherent in hand craft and materials. There seems to be two roads to go down from which we must choose. The first has already been described. This is life of abusing the technological power that is now available to us in the name of form. The second requires the designer to listen and observe what is physically happening and extract the best qualities. If we embrace this way of thinking, we do not dogmatically have to accept all of these potential 'failures', but it does offer us a flood of new opportunities. In this case, it seems as though La Dallman missed one.

On meaning and metaphors:
In the Levy House: Peeling the finishes off at particular moments in the interior to reveal the structure somehow connects the occupant to nature. The idea of floor plates stacked on top of one another somehow being reminiscent of the ground plane. A structure that sits as an object in the landscape, but through its form is connected as well, maybe?

Why? Why? Why?

What does any of this have to do with anything? La Dallman describes their projects in a metaphor-rich fashion, but fail to ever take a stance on what they believe. Is a metaphor able to hold meaning in and of itself in the first place? In a formalist tradition it seems as if the building is put in place first, and meaning is applied like a band-aid at some point in the future. There was little to no mention of any of the spaces entrained within any of the firm's projects, which was disappointing. I wanted to know the feeling they were trying to achieve with the marsupial bridge as it wound its way through the ancient ironwork underneath Holton Street, and what about the Levy House that they thought made it so great [other than its shiny finishes, vast swaths of glass, and overhanging floor plates of course...]

I was equally disappointed in the meaning behind the use of materials, although maybe not so much in the arrangement of the materials themselves. In saying that, what I mean is that I think the form and shape of the house are ok aesthetically. They are perhaps a little conventional and boring, but that.s not the point of my analysis [im striving for a not so subjectivist approach to this all]. I was hoping that the title of the lecture implied some sort of research that had a direct effect on the way that firm thought about materials. Perhaps the study of strata would reveal unique and interesting ways in which different materials engage one another. Or how the immense forces inside of the earth push and pull on sedimentation creating beautiful patterns. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case. Rather, a fairly conventional house was constructed on site, and there is nothing wrong with that. I do think its absolutely ridiculous to design a house in that manner and label it a fabricated landscape. Not allowed. I couldn.t help but feel like I was sitting through a sophomore review as I was, piece by piece, walked around the house. The house is just that, a collection of pieces that seem to lack any greater meaning now that they are in place sitting on site.

Let me just say that I am not cutting down any of the work that La Dallman has done. Rather I think we are better off for it. They are pursuing innovative production methods, and seem to take on the types of projects that other firms would scoff at. Its empowering for us as contemporary designers in Milwaukee to be able to not only analyze but also improve upon the quality of architecture in our fair town and beyond.

This is the current state of things. The concept driving the model is the idea of the world as a framework for exploration. The images show the progression from ground level to birds eye to overview, revealing and concealing the different elements to be explored and engaged. Also, it looks like a spaceship.

Paul

Geometry of Bending

Here's an interesting blog showing a designer researching bending (read blog from the bottom up). Notice the integration of materials testing and scripting.
http://thegeometryofbending.blogspot.com/