Soft[ware] Boundaries
Soft(ware) Boundaries exhibition will
open on
Soft(ware) Boundaries exhibition
aims to introduce prominent contemporary architectural designs generated with
computers and the theory behind these designs. Specifically, we wish to expose
the soft, folded, curved surface of the new architectural objects. The Title ‘Soft(ware) Boundaries‘ refers both to the formal appearance and to
the computer as its mean of production.
In the
exhibition we would like to emphasize the challenges that designing with
computer posits against the Euclidian modernist formal language by introducing
curvilinear surfaces, hypersurfaces, isomorphic polysurfaces (blobs) and by creating a higher level of
formal complexity in architecture. These emphases will be backed up by
philosophies and theories such as the Deleuzian
fold.
‘Soft(ware) Boundaries’, nevertheless,
will not only focus on of formal manifestations and conceptual definitions of
the boundaries of new architecture, but it will also present the meaning of
these manifestations for architecture and culture. It is clear that the
emerging formal language redefines our perception of the relations between
outside and inside, wall to floor. It presents new relationships between public
and pr
The exhibition
will present architectural projects, using animation and multimedia
presentation on computer screens and projected on the gallery walls. It will present
11 works by international architects:
Kas
Ooosterhuis -
Ocean D
-
Diller
+ Scofidio – New-York - http://www.dillerscofidio.com/
Servo -
Peter Eisenman
- New-York - http://www.eisenmanarchitects.com/
Emergen-C
- International – http://emergen-c.fiume10.org/
Asymptote
- New-York – http://www.asymptote.net
Zaha
Hadid –
Greg Lynn - Form
- New-York – http://www.glform.com
Tom Kovac
-
+RAMTV
- International – http://www.ramtv.org
Curators:
Architect Yasha
J. Grobman,
M. Arch, A.A.
London. Currently writing his Phd thesis on building
implications of digital architecture in the Technion, Israel
Institute of Technology (mailto:yasha@tx.technion.ac.il)
Architect Shelly Cohen,
Chief curator of
the Architects' House Gallery, B. Arch, Technion,
Israel Institute of Technology, B. A. Philosophy and Art History Tel Aviv
University, Winner of the State Rechter Arch. Prize,
2003 (mailto:c-shell@internet-zahav.net).
Projects:
Asymptote
MotionScapes
MotionScapes:
Spatial studies
based on the tectonics and forms of both physical and virtual movement, speed
and flux as pertaining to the contemporary urban condition.
MotionScape
Object:
A physical construct in a state of digital augmentation
effectively delineating a series of mappings of an abstracted urban condition
both ubiquitous and pervasive in contemporary city-space.
MotionScapes embody new architectural formations
that are at once familiar as they are strange. These discreet ‘architectures’
reveal the space of the meander. They are structures that draw upon the
convoluted and delirious constructs of media, advertising, branding and desire
that circulate through contemporary city space. Places where spatiality is
essentially a rarefied urbanism construed of abstract movement, chance mutation
and constant transformation.
The new
urbanism that surfaces is 'performed' utilizing a plastic-spatial apparatus
(architecture) and data streams generated by various readings of ‘urban-flux’.
This is found data that is manipulated digitally and redeployed to augment the
physical state of the apparatus. Viewers
(inhabitants) are thereby immersed and contained in the resulting flows and
tectonic shifts. Through a process of digital data capture and video
redeployment of urban information an immersive environment is formed that
evokes a
Asymptote: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Diller+scofidio
Eyebeam/Museum
of Art and Technology, (Competition, 2001)
The most
challenging problem in designing the new Museum of Art and Technology is the
dynamic integration of traditionally distinct programs such as the “museum,”
"theater," “school,” and “production facility.” The new paradigm for
this programmatic hybrid is the operational and aesthetic interlacing of production and presentation.
The spatial
logic of the proposed building is based on a simple premise: a pliable ribbon
that locates production (atelier) to
one side and presentation
(museum/theater) to the other. This ribbon undulates from side to side as it
climbs vertically from the street. The floor becomes wall, turns into floor,
turns into wall, etc. With each change of direction, the ribbon enfolds a
production space or a presentation space, alternately. The combing of programs
also combs together two diverse populations: the building's residents
(students, artists, and staff) and the building's visitors (museum and
theatergoers). The alternating programs require each population to pass through
the space of the other while moving between successive levels.
The
relationships become more intricate when a loop of ribbon at one level is
sheared in half and slipped into alignment with a level above or below. The new
alignment allows a production space
to infiltrate a presentation level or
vice versa. This controlled contamination juxtaposes technical processes with
their effects, people at work with people at leisure, the prosaic with the
poetic. The adjacency of a brightly lit atelier space of experimentation and
the theatrical ambience of a multi-media installation may raise the question,
which is the spectacle? Residents and visitors will observe one another as they
move fluidly through the building sometimes on parallel paths separated by a
transparent prophylactic, sometimes crossing paths, sometimes merging paths and
sharing programs.
The ribbon is
two-ply with a technical space sandwiched between layers that
houses the building's "nervous" system. The smooth concrete
ply facing the exhibition space has a real pattern of precast
service jacks. The ply of modularized panels facing the atelier permits easy
access to the interstitial space for rewiring and servicing of exhibition needs
at specific locations below or above.
The interlaced
production and the presentation programs each have distinct physical
attributes: while the production spaces require an even distribution of natural
light and artificial light for day/night work, the exhibition spaces require a
high degree of light control and sound isolation. Effectively these
requirements necessitate that the fluid spaces of exhibition and the fluid
spaces of production each constitute a discrete building: one filled with light
and one that can be darkened. The levels of these buildings appear to be
“shuffled together” like a deck of cards, their qualities put into relief on
the facade.
Project
Credits:
Essential:
Diller+Scofidio
Principals:
Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio
Project
Leaders: Charles Renfro, Deane Simpson, Dirk Hebel
Structural +
MEP Engineering:
Additional:
Team: Joshua Bolchover, Alfio Faro, Reto Geiser, Gabriele Heindel,
David Huang,
Dieter Jansen, David Ross
Animation: Matthew
Johnson with dbox, James Gibbs, Eric Schuldenfrei
Associate
Architects: Helfland Myerberg
Guggenheimer
Media
Consultants: Ben Rubin, Tom Igoe, Joe
ParadisoGeo-Technical Engineering: Mueser Rutledge
Peter Eisenman
City of
Eisenman Architects
1999 - in progress
The violence appearing today is of an altogether different kind.
. .an implosive violence no longer resulting from the expansion of a system but
from its saturation and contraction. . .
Jean Baudrillard, "The Beaubourg
Effect," 1977
More than thirty years after the social revolutions of 1968, we are still
facing an unresolved urban condition: an implosive one resulting from a
saturation of media and information technology that, no longer able to expand,
must contract. If the force of this contraction is almost unintelligible to us,
it is because our entire image repertory is based on a logic
of expanding systems. Architecture too addresses and approximates the
expansionist paradigm, amplifying its gestures as it attempts to hide from
itself the futility of its effects.
Given the logic
of today¹s implosive reality, models of randomness are rapidly superceding
models of determinacy and classical causality. This change expresses the passage
from definite systems of expansion to multidirectional systems of matter both
expanding and contracting a pulsation of surface, Baudrillard
argued over two decades ago, that is "capable of infinite and interstitial
saturation."
Architecture has traditionally been a semiotic system expressing a defined
expansion of matter. Today, however, due to an oversaturation
of media and information technology, we are moving from a time of liberation
and release of energy into a phase of implosion and social inversion. This
implosion marks a shift from a representation-obsessed semiotic culture with
its overabundance of information to another sensibility.
Such a post-semiotic sensibility is not dominated by easily consumed imagery of
representational signs and their signifieds, but
rather is understood as a series of traces, marks that produce an alternative
condition of figure and ground. Our project evolves from the superposition of
three sets of traces. First, the plan of the old city center is placed on the
hillside site. Second, a Cartesian grid is laid over these medieval routes.
Third, the topography of the hillside is allowed to distort the two flat
geometries, thus generating a topological surface that superposes old and new
in a simultaneous matrix.
The original medieval center of
ground and a figured figure that supercedes the figure-ground urbanism
of the old city. In this transformative operation, Santiago¹s medieval past
appears not as a form of representational nostalgia but as an active present
found in a tactile, pulsating new form.
As a condition of the implosion of contemporary secular culture, and as a
deliberate gesture against obsolete explosive models, the City of
center below, yet expresses the trace of the old city as its foundation.
Credits:
Architect
Eisenman Architects: Team Leaders: Peter Eisenman, Richard Rosson, Sandra
Hemingway, Jennifer Mujat-Kearns, Andy Saunders
Architect of Record: Seoane Architects
Engineers of Record: Unitec
Client: Fundacion Cidade de
Cultura de
Venice Biennale Installation: Matteo Cainer
Emergen-C
BrandGallery
Emotions are as
powerful a factor as economics in the relationship between consumer and Brand.
Brand seeks the optimisation of its “emotion
quotient,” the seductive and insistent qualities, to engage the consumer and
maintain interest. BrandGallery’s initial research
focused on leading
Located along
The path-oriented structure is an aggregation of
a series of 3-dimensional tiles connected to enable gradual motion as a
translation of rotation and change of envelope over time. Tiles
link together to form BrandStrands containing a
program of embedded images from the Brands’ websites. BrandStrands react to pedestrian density and directionality
through shape and image strategy. A strand’s path may be straight or curved,
tiled with tiny images or coated in a unique, distorted image. The envelope’s
manipulations occur constantly, as both a gradual response to User requests,
and occasionally, as an abrupt and shocking manifestation of the identities of
sponsor Brands.
BrandGallery is a smart structure able to
recognize, through mobile technology, the presence and identity of Users as
well as their specific proclivities. BrandGallery
proposes different means of interface for its users to communicate their
requests: touch screens, SMS technology or the internet site. BrandGallery expands usable commercial space and
exaggerates image bombardment potential both in and on the upper stories of
Once inside,
you are trapped on an inescapable pathway where the choices you make modify BrandGallery and are monitored by BrandGallery. The machine knows who you are, where you are
and what you want from your
Emergen-C:
Zaha Hadid
BMW Plant in Leipzig
The project is
40,000 sqm
The
The
organization of the building is transparent and flexible: the generous lobby
allows for deep views into the building, and the insertion of courtyards admits
daylight and visibility to the building’s heart. Interaction between blue and white-collar
sectors is encouraged and facilitated by the mixing of functions and creation
of combined social spaces.
The car-park is
an integral architectural feature that draws on the inherent dynamism of
vehicle movement to generate a sense of fluidity. The result is an assimilation of complex
forms and directions within a seamless whole.
The completion
date is set for 2004.
Greg Lynn –
Form
Project
Description:
The
Dates:
Design
commencement: 2002
Client:
The President
of
Abel Pacheco de
la Espriella
Minister of
agriculture and Livestock:
Rodolfo Coto Pacheco
Carlos M. Lachner
Design
Architects:
Greg Lynn FORM,
Florencia Pita, Elena Manferdini, Chris Kabatsi, Jackilin Hah, Patrick McEneany, Nuri Miller
ArcA,
Walter Hidalgo Xirinachs
Graphic Design:
Graphicarte
Architectural Rendering :
Farana
3d Printing
Model Fabrication:
Morphosis
Kas Oosterhuis
Cockpit & acoustic barrier
Utrecht
The rules of the game. The brief is to combine the 1.5km long acoustic barrier
with an industrial building of 5000m2. The concept of the acoustic barrier
including the Cockpit building is to design with the speed of passing traffic
since the building is seen from the perspective of the driver. Cars, powerboats
and planes are streamlined to diminish the drag. Along the A2 highway the
acoustic barrier and the Cockpit do not move themselves, but they are placed in
a continuous flow of cars passing by. The swarm of cars streams with a speed of
120 km/h along the acoustic barrier. The length of the built volume of the
Cockpit emerging from the acoustic dike is a 10 times more than the height. The
concept of the Cockpit building is inspired on a cockpit as integral part of
the smooth body of a Starfighter. The Cockpit
building functions as a 3d logo for the commercial area hidden behind the
acoustic barrier.
The most striking design principle of the Hessing showroom, which is immersed in the long stretched
volume of the acoustic barrier, is the use of long continuous lines. Lines, which do not have an explicit beginning and not an abrupt
end. Close to the Cockpit the top line goes up, and the bottom line goes
further down, thus creating a great space for the showrooms. The showroom is a
horizontal cathedral for cars. Hessing displays Rolls
Royce, Bentley, Lamborghini and Maserati. Right under
the spectacular 3d track of the showrooms the workshop and the garage are
located, just revealing the top of the cars the mechanics are working on.
Mission statement oosterhuis.nl
Once technology invades the body, the body will never be the
same again. Technology evolves at a fast rate and uses our bodies as software
for the technological bodies, just as the car uses its driver as software to
travel along its route. In the meantime it has become clear that human
development is not the final goal of evolution, but that technology is
gradually taking over our prominent position in evolution and is evolving at a
much faster rate than biological life has ever been able to develop. What were
initially technological extensions of the human body to increase the power of
humans are now moving step by step towards complex emotional instruments whose behaviour is unpredictable. Technology is turning wild.
Architectural
bodies too are now the target of technological invasion. These bodies are a
part of global networks, they are (linked by cables) wired. The bodies are
connected to databases and their behaviour and (form)
shape can be programmed. The body-specific scripts feed on data from databases
that are upgrading themselves in real time. The architectural bodies can now be
literally animated. Architecture no longer has a static final image, its visible form is becoming as unpredictable as the
weather. Architecture is turning wild.
credits Cockpit & acoustic barrier
Date: March
2003
Client: Hessing BV
Site: De Wetering, Leidsche Rijn, Utrecht, The
Netherlands
Project architect: Prof Ir Kas Oosterhuis
Project team: Kas Oosterhuis, IIona Lenard, Cas Aalbers,
Sander Boer,
Tom Hals, Ines Moreira, Dimitar Karanikolov
http://www.trans-ports.com/, http://www.webvannoordholland.nl/, http://www.oosterhuis.nl/
Ocean D
LJ House
Muswell Hill,
house conversion and new pavilion
This project is a conversion and extension of a
1970’s late modernist house, with galleries looking onto a three storey living
space. A bridge with a gradient of 4
degrees is proposed to span over the entry threshold and lead from the living
space to a new pavilion to be used as a studio, children’s play area an guest house. The roof steelwork structure buttresses to
and from the existing load-bearing brick house, forming an
evolving roof topography with a secondary structure of serially iterated
timber joists. The external envelope
opens to form graduated sizes of window openings. An integrated carbon fibre
stairway connects the ground level with the mezzanine.
commission; 2002-2003
Budget £150K Pounds Sterling
Site Operations 2003
Client
undisclosed
OCEAN
structural consultants Arups BG4 Bob Lang
+RAMTV
negotiate my boundary!
Its first
product-book, negotiate my boundary! (AA
Publications,
A single,
definitive outcome in a system is never achieved on an urban level – rather,
the evolution of the project site is continually recorded by online
information-gathering, display and negotiation. The project becomes an ongoing
life-game simulation of fluctuating preferences, constraints and local
agreements.
+ramtv: Aljosa
Dekleva,
Servo
Lobbi_Ports
Conceived as a system
of architectural implants for upgrading existing buildings with additional
programs and infrastructures, Lobbi-Ports
addresses the highly transitional nature of the contemporary urban hotel lobby.
The lobby by definition is a complex spatial and programmatic interface where
perpetual oscillation between the hotel and its host city is juxtaposed with an
array of global and local forces. Lobbi-Ports appropriates this interface zone
as a potentially productive form of public space, act
The spatial hardware is a system of very light digitally-integrated curtainwall cladding that is harmonized with video, sound
and structure. A honeycomb composite of
carbon fiber and steel makes up the interior lining for each lobbi-port that is suspended from a steel
and carbon fiber truss composed of three basic modules to take up lateral
loads. The direction of each skin-like
system produces a graining which doubles as a digital network allowing the
architectural implants appropriate the surface of existing buildings and
produce a new landscape of intervention.
The spatial software consists of a network of interactive probes that reach into the
building interior to establish virtual connections to each port and city
beyond. Using programmable LED sheets situated vertically in the new wall
system embedded within the carbon fiber modules, video streams through each curtainwall structural module at various speeds. This
produces informational eddies that drift high above the urban floor and cascade
across the walls of individual lobby-ports.
These implants
use the curtain
walls, act
servo
David Erdman, Marcelyn Gow,
Ulrika Karlsson, and Chris Perry
Design team: Chris Kabatsi, Mike Mangelli, Tyen Masten, and Clare Olsen
Models: Zcorp 3d printing
Paintings: Perry Hall
Special thanks: Donald Albrecht,
Tom Kovac
Digital Design
Gallery
The Digital Design Gallery brings together the aspirations of a number
of instrumentali-ties of the State Government ( including the Department of Infrastructure and the
These aspirations are
infrastructural at a cultural and at an urban level.
and the main counter spine is being
extended into Docklands.
Tom Kovac ’s gallery extends the civic spine with a pedestrian link
from the busiest station on the inner city loop - situated between the
refurbished city Library, RMIT and the retail district - to the northern
knowledge precinct. The Gallery provides a linear urban simulation space and an
underground scale- defying egg- shaped gallery with an inner and
an outer shell and a ramp between. Users
will include RMIT ’s Interactive Information
Institute, the
and through broad band the myriads
of software companies that support the Architecture, Medial research, and
materiel science industries of
Professor Leon van Schaik
ddg/ rmit/ details
name: digital design gallery
client: royal
technology
location: corner victoria & bouverie
streets
completion: incomplete
volume: 13449 m3
mass: ~ 300000 kg
size: 118000x28000x21000mm
site area: 3775 m2
materials: concrete, glass, plaster, steel,
timber
finishes: reinforced concrete
construction: in situ cast concrete
monocoque
category: subterranean underpass gallery
project team: tom kovac, david morison,
jonathan podborsek, alastair
Flynn
Ua/federation_square
Urban Attitude is the first of our projects involving digital technology
from the beginning of the design phase right through to the construction. Its
success sets a powerful precedent and crosses new terrain in that which we knew
was possible, but had not previously attempted. Design was carried out entirely
digitally - the 3D model became the medium for interaction with the client and
consultants. Throughout the process there was a formal and structural
consistency between the digital and the built.
This can largely be attributed to the use of a “Digital Mockup ” (for want of a better phrase) , a digital model
where the structure is built as it is in the real world. This becomes a
powerful problem prediction tool– whereas the half- baked 3D model can become a
problem creation tool.Through the knowledge brought
through the ‘Mockup ’, a kit of parts was manufactured
by a local laser cutting specialist.
Laser cutting was beneficial in this instance, as each complex piece was
unique, but required no more effort or cost than if they were all the same.
Each of the 456 pieces was cut and labelled by a
machine, creating a kit of parts ready to be rapidly installed on site, without
manual trimming or fitting. As we immerse ourselves deeper into this world of
digital tools, we seem to ache for a time when the work done in the office and
on the building site is more closely bound. It seems to us that this time is
not as far off as we imagine.
ua/ federation_ square/ details
name: urban attitude/ federation square
client: urban attitude
location: atrium, federation square,
completion: 2002
volume: 324.3 m3
mass: 3240 kg
size: 13000x7600mm
site area: 98 m2
materials: mdf, glass, concrete, plaster
finishes: polyurethane gloss, black acrylic
construction: laser cut monocoque
category: public branded retail
project team: tom kovac, melissa
bright,
jonathan podborsek, roland snooks
soft(ware) boundaries - Tom Kovac
There are
inevitable interpretations of the soft(ware)
boundaries that may require a diagnostic position.
While this question
is not strictly about architecture it opens a conversation about the position
of architecture, the role of digital processes which theoretically have been
with us for some time but are only now emerging in architectural research and
as actualised work anchoring our projects during
recent years, These concerns have extensively engaged in the research and
applications of numerical tools for the design and spatial production.
Are we the
cultural resistors in this Cultural Revolution? Armed with new processive technologies and soft(ware)
for spatial warfare, we may be perceived as form generative spatia
lists that are challenging the exhausted modernism still contained in
considerations of typology or form. Perhaps the anecdote resides in a
discussion about architecture in crisis and the diminishing cultural role of a
profession unable to renew itself with the optimism of other digital mediums
that recognise that pure imagination is still a
legitimate action of creative fields. This new edge condition needs to
construct its own critical frame. In this discussion about non standard method
and frontiers,it is
noteworthy to recognise the outmoded model of architectures
participation in a global accommodative consumer society and interrogate
its existing processes and its research into uncertain territories of non
standard production.
In this arena
where the focus of the new discussion is about deconstruction of a system and a
reconstruction of a non standard procedure for an architectural production, the
question of objects of standardisation and standardised production has credence, the idea of shelter
and the western model of the pr
In current
research and architectural projects we are interested in the questions of organisation, culture, program and performance code as
models of architectural creation The interest in finding a data driven model is
a desire to act