BA-ROCK

Texas A&M University. Department of Architecture. T4T LAB Spring 2015. 

ALIEN, MESSY, DISCRETE

Invited Professor: Gilles Retsin 

With Gabriel Esquivel

Team: Jeff Lemley, Austen Kernodle, Aaron Rosas, Chris Thackery

The word baroque refers to a “rough or imperfect pearl.”Baroque as a condition of ancestrality, not simply as a term to describe a period of architecture. We are not only arguing the surface affective  characteristics of baroque pertaining to ornamentation, but a deeper meaning from where baroque derives its infinity: the process of FOLDING, which has always been present in nature. We can discuss the Baroque as a machine, the folds and pleats of matter we are arguing have always naturally occurred, for example in rock formations.

The fold is the process by which our project, which we called “BaRock”, generates its folds and its high fidelity. Our BaRock machine is folded with a porous crust that retains the identity and chemistry of the object within any scale, this is relative to the discussion of its monadic structure. This is to say, as we look at the images of the chunk, we notice that they are mereological parts of the whole, and as you dive deeper into the folds we would notice the same organization every time. That is because no matter how deep one goes in an attempt to communicate with the objects, the monads do not change.

BaRock is only bound by its form, but always folding into space. This is defined by the outlines of the original base mass on the flow diagram. Within this space BaRock has 2 infinities: our coils of piping and the folds themselves. BaRock folds are always open ended and in exhaustive, where there is always space to grow despite its parameters. The object is in a constant state of action, beyond what we can denote as movement. While some coils move and fold at lighting speed, others act as a fluid solid, the way older panes of glass “melt” within their frame.  The coils and the fold are excessive and unlimited. Every layer of piping is creative, generative, and an ongoing process, which allows for alternative actualizations of the piping. These actualizations act to enhance the depth and fluidity of the folds. What brings out the fold is the flux between exteriority and interiority. In the interior, the folds produce an atmosphere where our desire for inhabitation connotes stairs and floor plates, this is not a particular operation of the object machine. According to Deleuze affect is not dependent upon the perception of man and can change at any moment as the object continues its folding, producing new affects.

Because BaRock grows as it folds we can understand the object as we see it. Although we do not need a section to gain more understanding of the object, through section we see the active porous poche as it is enfolding. We see the fluidity of waves as the smaller poche pushes out and compress in. As it meets its surface it forms a porous crust that further helps blend exterior and interior. This crust also helps create the boundaries we associate as a surface, furthering our understanding as exterior and interior. What we see before us is an ancestral baroque peristaltic machine.

MIES/REDUX

Texas A&M University. Department of Architecture. T4T LAB Spring 2015. 

ALIEN, MESSY, DISCRETE

Invited Professor: Gilles Retsin 

With Gabriel Esquivel

Team: Francisco Reyes, Davis Eubanks, Cathy Florece, Jose De Leon.

The project based on Franz Kline’s painting The Ballantine, simplifies itself in to a single line. This line is a drawing machine quantifying itself to completion, where the more it is the more it draws, this action creates operational qualities which we don’t know what they are. This dogma applies to every single new machine or “stroke” that is related to itself in a flat plane of eminence outside of  human knowledge. Nevertheless this drawing machine reaches a level of absolutism performing its own duties, where architecture becomes as it follows its characteristics instead of being in contraposition. This Deleuzian flux machine is being captured in a glimpse of its existence, where we don’t know its beginning nor end as well as its scale, making humans the ones who accept it as an ecological machine rather than IT changing to human needs. For humans to communicate with  this drawing machine we have capture different glimpses of the machine where the line is always present but we don’t know its location, intensions, scale or materiality.

 “The mass” as we call it is our attempt to understand the composite machine as a Mega-structure, expanding its endo-system which can be placed in any context anywhere making this drawing machine non-conforming to  any reality but its own, embedded by its own standards found at  any given time. The line can be two characteristics; one very organized and another one jerky and messy.

 The Chunk produced by another moment of this machine will continue to be and develop as a Deluzian flux object as well as the mass. The Chunk of this mega-structure can behave as any part of the house, composed by different bundles of lines that are discontinues in a spatial-temporal revelation. These instance can reveal that the machine can create discontinues machines placed in space which are still on a direct connection with this autonomous object, creating an illusion of what we understand as a whole even though this machine keeps on fluxing, expanding and drawing.

The Details can show in further understandment how the machines relate to themselves to create a new machine or part where the human interaction can happen in a supra scales object meant as language and instrumentation.  

OO'House Advances

Preliminary 

OO'House. The un;grounding of the Juan O'Gorman House.

Collaboration with Ronny Eckels.

T4T LAB 2015. ALIEN, MESSY, DISCRETE. FINAL REVIEW

Texas A&M University. Department of Architecture. T4T LAB. 2015 "Alien, Messy Discrete"
Invited Professor: Gilles Retsin.
with Gabriel Esquivel
Jury: Bruno Juricic, Levi Bryant, Adam Fure, Stephen Caffey, Rene Graham and Craig Babe.

01. Introduction : computing architectural objects

Set within an Object-Oriented framework, this studio investigates computational design strat­egies for an architecture of increased heterogeneity. In contrast to holistic, organic and para­metric fields, the studio is interested in accelerated or high resolution forms of bricolage and assemblage. Computationally, the focus is on developing design methodologies which work with the fundamental constituent objects of architecture - the bones – rather than the skin. Students will research methodologies to organize and assemble large amounts of elements into heterogeneous structures which respond to material, structural but also aesthetic con­cerns. The lab takes a materialist, low-fi speculative approach, which just slightly shifts real­ity. Computational design methodologies focus on concepts like assemblage and discreteness, rather than organism and continuity. These processes are set in a messy and discrete work flow, not as a single meta-computational process, but more as a plethora of methods and ob­jects. Through establishing a rigorous connection between concepts of computation, hetero­geneity, objects and assemblage, the studio attempts to create a framework for understanding the relation between computational design and architecture.

The studio attempts to develop non-metaphorical computational strategies, a design ontol­ogy proper for architecture. Computational models are build up to organize and negotiate fundamental architectural objects into new, strange mereologies – or sets of part-to-whole relationships. The work resists a paradigm inspired by “nature” , which has been omnipres­ent within the discourse surrounding computation and architecture. Instead of appropriating computational logics from nature into architecture, we will try to develop a rule-set specific to architecture and the material infrastructure it is based on today. Instead of computing and generating predefined natural systems such as agent-based behavior, cellular automata or L-systems, the studio is interested in computing architectural objects.

02. Interregnum: the aggregatory

In recent years, architectural academia developed a renewed attention for the object instead of the field. Inspired by object-oriented ontology – architects started to question ideas of of continuity, process, and nature which have been closely linked to the digital paradigm in the past two decades.

Where computational research in architecture initially started out with a deep interest for curvature, continuity and gradual change, new research understands computation as funda­mentally related to the concept of the discrete and distinct. This shift from continuous field to distinct object is profoundly linked with the nature of computation and information, which can in the end be broken down to the calculation of a single bit or unit. Computational process­es like Finite Element analysis, cellular automata, agent based systems and object-oriented programming languages are fundamentally based on discrete units rather then continuous wholes. Object-Oriented programming is a programming paradigm that translates concepts as objects or classes which have specific methods to interact – the agency or behavior of a class.

Levi Bryant describes his own philosophical work, in particular the book “ The Democ­racy of Objects” , as a form of bricolage. Indeed, the book is eclectic and heterogeneous, an as­semblage of Deleuze, Luhmann, Lacan and Harman. For Levi Bryant, bricolage loses the nega­tive connotation and becomes a rich concept. Bricolage is the attempt to forge heterogeneous matter into a consistent object. From unrelated parts, a whole object emerges. The bricoleur works with matter, with the material infrastructure available.

In a non-bricolage process, there is a predefined whole which is assembled out of per­fectly fabricated, highly customized parts. These customized parts would have no existence outside of the whole – they are reducible to the whole. In bricolage however, as a strange mereology, there is initially no whole – there are only parts. There is an internal resistance and autonomy in the parts, a reluctance to be wholified into an overarching object. This is were the material - realist grounding of the bricoleur comes in. A bricoleur is fundamentally material­ist, as he has to somehow battle and negotiate with the material infrastructure of the parts he wants to wrap into one object. Within a framework of strange mereology and bricolage, com­putational power is not invested in the subdivision of an object, but in a process of formation as a messy assemblage of objects into an “emergent object”.

03. Ferment: mereology

Through a series of initial workshops, students are asked to develop a computational design strategy, in which local object-object interaction can create differentiation and establish bigger objects as high-entropy, contingent multi-object objects without a need for morphological co­herence. Computed interactions between the agential objects should result in a radically het­erogeneous architecture with previously unseen levels of information density. After a period of tooling-up where students familiarize themselves with Processing, Rhino/Grasshopper and Zbrush , a concrete design project rooted both as a computational and theoretical response will be developed. The theoretical response aims to understand the nature of the object within an assemblage and a framework of part-to-whole relationships.

Students are expected to produce an actual readable architectural proposal for a small scale project, both through digital computing and physical model building. Physical models can help developing rules for the assemblage of material elements. The architectural proposals will spe­cifically develop knowledge and strategies about the interaction between small scale elements and large-scale mass. The studio resists “mereological nihilism” where an overall building model is developed and generated without interaction with matter and material, and subse­quently subdivided in customized building components. Architectural projects emerge from a messy feedback between high-resolution assemblage of discrete bits of material and top-down design intend. Core-issues such as the relation between envelope and structure, surface and mass, opaqueness vs transparency will develop as examples of top-down decision making.

As a final output students are expected to produce large-scale renderings and drawings, as well as a 1:33 scale physical model.