Original Detail object before the Super Un-roll.
Final Project for Secret Life of Buildings with Ronald Eckels III
Super-unroll
Super-unroll
“Drawing in
architecture is not done after nature, but prior to construction; it is not so
much produced by reflection on the reality outside of drawing.”
Robin Evans
In the essay “Translations from Drawing to Building,” Robin
Evans argues that the hegemony of drawing over the architectural object has
never been challenged. The discussion goes further into introducing the idea
that the architecture drawing does not operate in classic representation but
precedes the architectural object, creating a complex relationship between
objects—drawing and object. This generic architecture roof detail relies on the
possibility to be unrolled, in order to distance itself from the drawing, and
to produce friction between the object and its representations. According to
Evans, “Despite the possible astronomical roots or symbolic backing of the
parallel projections, the architectural meaning and likeness are preserved
through the process making the transportation from idea to construction
successful and compelling” (1).
We decided to use a generic architectural detail (taken out
of a catalog) as it becomes non-specific therefore its ontological status
oscillates between a three dimensional object and drawing but it is not a form
of representation of an architectural building some sort of proto-architecture.
This object/detail uses a process of dimensional translation, the drawings of
the object/detail was derived from three-dimensional medium that was, in
consequence, unrolled in Rhino, producing the official point of departure. The
digital operations of rolling and un-rolling present a kind of subjectivity
that has a degree of agency upon this particular object/detail. This becomes
the crux of the problem.
This un-rolled object is an atypical application of a
conventional wall section/detail drawing. This technical sophistication aligns
itself as a reflection of two major developments within speculative
architecture of the past decade: a broad diffusion of technological expertise
and a shift from critical to projective theory. Perhaps this project reclaims a
new critically speculative position.
The object has the capacity to fold horizontally as many
times as needed for effects of the drawing exercise, with no other purpose than
to articulate a discussion from a specific architecture or a specific detail.
Technically, in its un-rolled position, it disrupts our preconceived notion of
any architectural orientation. The device that makes this argument possible is
the developed un-rolled drawing.
The object/detail went full circle, cycling through various
iterations of dimensional status and quality of line work, removing from the
object its familiarity without sacrificing its integrity a sort of post-digital
abstraction. These low-fi operations or post-digital shifts produce a kind of
reconstruction of the object, a drawing machine. These are motivated completely
by the planes/drawings as an object, despite the suggestion of the seemingly
alien end product.
When the three dimensional object/detail was unrolled in
Rhino, translating 3-D data into a 2-D printable format, stripping away its
ontology through the removal of qualities attributed to an architectural
detail, nomenclature, dimensions and references. It is important to observe
that this type of developable surface tools work best for designing airfoil and
hydrofoil type surfaces, so we have to force the software and capitalize on
possible glitches. They were not designed to be used for bending and unfolding
sheet metal like duct work or for developing flat fabric patterns, which is
exactly what we did. This is precisely why it was an interesting challenge to
use this process and un-roll this object/detail to gain an unplanned complexity.
Three-dimensional moments were then injected back into the
rolled planes, giving the object the appearance of a cube. Once the file was
ready, the 2-D version was laser-cut on 1/16” aluminum sheet. This surface/mass
reinterpretation of the object suggests that rather than using digital
technology to reverse engineer the construction of the complex form, the
digital tools should become a mechanism to better understand material and
fabrication potential.
We would like to argue that there is a similarity between
unrolling as a digital operation and Deleuzian notion of fold as the ontology
of becoming, more specifically the Superfold. “It would be neither the fold nor
the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism, but something like the
Superfold, as borne out by the foldings proper to the chains of the genetic
code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by
the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature 'merely turns
back on itself in an endless reflexivity.”(2)
In the fold (Deleuze) the form/object tends to convey three
readings at the same time: what it was, and the current status as well as the
future possibilities (the real, the actual / the possible, the virtual). In
unrolling as digital operation you can still get that multiplicity of readings
but with a concentration on the previous (what this object was) the future is
in question here or could be again the same as the previous: folding, unfolding
and refolding. Specifically the concept of the fold allows Deleuze to think
creatively about the production of subjectivity, and ultimately about the
possibilities for, and production of, ‘non-human’ forms of ‘subjectivity’. In
fact on one level the fold is a critique of typical accounts of subjectivity, those
that presume a simple interiority and exteriority; appearance and essence, or
surface and depth.
In his appendix to the book on Foucault Deleuze continues
his meditation on the fold, but looks to the future. If the fold is the
operation proper to man, then the Superfold is synonymous with the superman,
the non-human, understood as that which ‘frees life’ from within man. This
focuses on an ontological shift, the non-human is in charge of the animals (the
capturing of codes), the rocks (the realm of the inorganic) - and the very
being of language (the realm of affect ‘below’ signification). This new kind of
fold no longer figures man as a limiting factor on the infinite, unmarking the
subject/cultural combination. In this new kind of fold man is involved in what
Deleuze terms an ‘unlimited finitude’. It is a fold in which a ‘finite number
of components produce an infinite number of combinations’. This is the
difference 3 and repetition of Deleuze or what we might term his fractal
ontology. The object/detail becomes part of this ontological argument. This is
a fold that opens man out to that which is specifically non human - forces that
can then be folded back ‘into’ himself to produce new modalities of being and
new means of expression. Today more than ever we live in a superfolded moment,
since we live infinitely more than ever multiple possibilities of agency. The
object/detail stands for an autonomous post-digital object that is a product of
new codes of subjectivity as part of a non-human machine, which by means of
operations like folding and unfolding could produce unlimited finitude. Its
ontology has been fractured from the architectural regime acquiring its own
agency.
References:
1. Evans.
Robin . Translations from Drawings to Building and Other Essays. (1997).
Architectural Association. London. p. 181
2. Deleuze.
Gilles. Foucault. Appendix (1998). University of Minnesota Press. P.131
