Digital Design: Camera Obscura

Wired magazine had an article about one of the buildings being analyzed in our 401 studio.


"The camera obscura is the first building to be 100 percent digitally designed and computer fabricated, SHoP's partners say. "

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/gehry.html

Inchoate

Inchoate: Incomplete and imperfect circumstances…

Architecture’s unified and stable conditions make the notion of inchoate seem irrelevant.

It seeks to unravel…"the undoing of fixed categories.

One faces a split condition of understanding the norm and shattering foundational presumptions.

Teaching architecture remains dynamic and changing…displaying an acceptance of architecture’s unsettled condition...the difficulty in teaching architecture comes from the strategic and sequential nature of teaching that usually progresses from a point of origin. Architecture sits on un-secure grounds.

"Primacy of visual appearances, asserting the value of the final object’s formal presence has been traditionally considered paramount in the formation of architecture. Primacy of authorship, asserting the existence of a creator architect, has been commonly considered a essential act of architecture.The primacy of the object, asserting the presence of the work in its pristine condition, has been conventionally perceived as architecture’s final end in itself."

Like film, architecture can be questioned as an ambiguous construction, an open ended condition with plural interpretations.

Reading Reflection 2/14

I think the notion of the constraint of an idea verses the potential of a process is a phenomena that we can continuously experience in the studio world instead of being confined by the specifics of our imagination we can thoroughly explore the full potential in multiple directions. The other readings bring the potential of the design process and its results to the development of culture.

Our understanding of architecture has become so conceptual...constantly encompassing more than simple the process of building structures.

F-35

Folds, Bodies, & Blobs/Warped Space

Descriptive geometries provide a concrete foundation of platonic forms and understandings that go on to create a underlying language of architecture. Even when the progression through space and the intent that governed its sequence are ambiguous, there is an order that is rooted in this universal understanding. But when we converse in the written language that describes our built environment we run into the deception of writing. A further ambiguity that is arguably too deceiving for pure forms. Therefore, where form meets language we run the risk of sacrificing one for the other. This conflict takes us from the first article to the second, opening a conversation that has also began in our studio sections. There we discussed the notions of space. It was necessary to further explore the relationship between space and shape, a relationship which creates a condition linked through geometries. The larger question coming back to whether or not the distinguished shape formulating a space could be written in words. The intellectual realm of architecture bleeds across disciplines, connecting our understanding of sequence and space to philosophy and psychology. The opens a dialogue that has the potential to deepen the thought processes we battle with in design. But how we re-present what we produce may well be too much for words.