plants

Parametric plants made with grasshopper, inspired by http://fk3d.de

Responsive Components

Grasshopper test with a triangular tiling, perforation controlled by attractorpoints.

Responsive Component Car

Random playing around with a responsive grasshopper component and an Audi TT which I modelled a while ago. Attractor points influence the size of the perforations, and the extrusionheight of the panel.

VR and dirt

"Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they've learned how to put some dirt in it?"
I was pointed last week on William Gibson's great text Disneyland with the death penalty, written for Wired in 1993. Gibson, the inventor of the word "cyberspace" - back in 1982, is without any doubt the father of the sciencefinction genre "Cyberpunk". Cyberpunk is about a dystopian, "used future", as one can see in movies like Bladerunner or the Matrix. Gibson's writings are often cited by Rem Koolhaas, oa to describe his ideas about the generic city. Just to get back to the previous post, on Koolhaas interest in "dirtyness", an image of OMA's Ras-Al-Khaimah project. The project is referred at by OMA self as the "death star" in the Star Wars movies. The atmopshere in the architectural rendering would serve pretty well in a juicy science fiction movie.




Notions as dystopian future, cyberpunk and unheimlichkeit are of a specific interest for the latest evolutions in the work of the whole Sci-Arc digital scene, emerged around people like Hernan Diaz-Alonso and Tom Wiscombe. Greg Lynn describes this work as "monstrous indexicality". In an interview with Sanford Kwinter, Jason Payne, founder of Gnuform, talks about the monstrous as " [...] appears scary, with repeated elements that look like bones, or other biomorphic shapes such as teeth, claws, or scales. Only shapes with a sinister or threatening appearance seem to do" This project of Sci-Arc graduate Steven Ma definitely displays some of these monstrous qualities.

It's intersting to look at the different ways this "dirtyness" operates. In both cases, the appearance of the buildings seems threatening. The scaryness is even altered by the rendering style and colors. Both can be looked at as futuristic. The Death Star building's threatening effect somehow derives from the "totalitarian" abstract form of the sphere. There's no nuance in it, no compromises. In the same time, the sphere has undergone some decay, which alters the end-of-time feel. Holes have been digged through, the utopian form is degraded.
The sci-fi project just looks pretty alien and monstrous in itself. It mimics a skeleton tectonic, and insect-like dynamic. Skeletons and insects aren't really those things you like to keep in your bedroom.
Both of these projects could nicely mess up the abstract and clean generic city as described by Gibson.

Gibson's text can be found here:

disneyland with the death penalty

Rouse[D]Competition Detroit

"Rouse[d] will focus on re-inventing the city of detroit through the use of digital computation methodologies. This is an international open ideas competition challenging people to come up with designs that will rouse the city of detroit and encourage an evolution of our understanding of its unique urban environment."

This competition, organised by ao. theverymany, sjet and Dora, is introducing a stricking theme to the digital architecture landscape: namely a social dimension. It's challenging to see how the digital scene, which is mainly focusing on just forms, geometries, form generation, etc, now tries to test it's capacities on " real life ", in the urban ruins of Motor City, founded in 1701 by a certain Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. It's an intriguing question how computational architecture could help generating scenarios to help Detroit and make it better in some way. Finally, digital designers are asked to look beyond the formal aspects, and come up with proposals for a specific context.

This is Post-Crisis digital Architecture in all it's aspects. This is not about form anymore, but about society, and about it's dirty backside - situated in the poor, devasted, and abandoned neighbourhoods around the old industries...

www.rousedetroit.com/

Dirty Koolhaas

After watching Ila Bêka's movie "Koolhaas Houselife", I had a look at the extras, which include an interview with Rem Koolhaas himself. Koolhaas counters the daily life cleaning problems in the Floriac House with the very nice " you see two systems colliding, the system of the kind of platonic conception of cleaning, with the platonic conception of architecture. It's two ideologies confronting each other" After having compared the daily life in the Floriac villa with the Nigerian capital Lagos (what did you expect?) he happens to touch the very notion of "dirt", as contrast to recent architectural production which is merely image based, almost virtual.
"If you look at some architecture it's becoming more and more like this virtual images. I think there has always been a sort of very large controversy about how we build, because we were always very interested in dirt and imperfection, but not as a form of incompetence [...]. If you look to the work of our colleagues, more and more the dirty is evacuated. If you look - not that I'm comparing myself - to the work of Le Corbusier, there is that kind of imperfection from the very beginning and as an integral part of the repertoire and of the value of the whole thing"
Koolhaas points an interesting evolution, in wich architecture ressembles more and more the virtual, perfect image, left without any trace of dirt or imperfection. The notion dirt is about reality, about the real world. Dirt is the byproduct, the trace of the process.

Aperiodic Skeleton news

Good news for the died-out animal world! The Aperiodic Dodo Skeleton has been selected out of worldwide entries to compete in the final round of the Pure Creativity Competition. The selection of the finalists was made by Philippe Starck and Naomi Kaempfer, art director of Materialise.MGX