T4T LAB 2016. Object Redux. Sweep

T4T LAB Spring 2016. Object Redux. 

Invited Professor

Adam Fure

Team: Ricardo Gonzalez, Abby Stock, Madison Green, Julia Pena

The project evolved from investigating the origin of form and suggesting canonical architecture as a database of formal information. The object argues leveling of the figure, the paradox of developing complexity from exhausting a facile operation, fluctuating authorship, and the equivalence of the infinite figural sweep to a three dimensional brushstroke.

The project derives figures from baroque poche and aluminum window profiles. The process of using a single operation like the sweep to manipulate the figures digitally diminishes their symbolic origin and flattens them onto the same plane of significance, homogenizing the notion of figure.

The gesture of the orthographic filleted sweep serves as the catalyst for this reaction, inducing the ambiguity of the figure. The misuse and exhaustion of this one mundane operation creates a surface condition of paradoxical complexity and endlessness, with the figure in a state of constant motion. The object only becomes static when cut via plan and/or section to reveal an exact moment of the figure within the sweep.

The figuration becomes difficult to track outside of plan and section due to the recursive nature of the sweep that further equalizes the ontology of the baroque poche and aluminum window profiles the figures were derived from. This equalization and ambiguity of figure is also perceivable at the level of the object itself being composed of sweeps that embody figures in infinite flux.

The process of creating sweeps digitally also forces the issue of transmission of authorship. The software’s inherent restrictions on generating sweeps transmit authorship from the user to the software, leaving only the path of the curve determined by the user. However through each generation of objects an intuitive expertise of sweep creation developed resulting in a slight regaining of authorship from the software, making the authorship of the objects fluctuate.

The sweeps, because of their fluctuating authorship, begin to be read as three dimensional brush strokes with the object produced being an architectural painting of figures in flux while maintaining the fundamental properties of figure.  The object becomes an ungrounded diagrammatic architectural painting of figures composed of sweeps that liken fluctuating figures to a brushstroke with an infinite reproducibility.

T4T LAB 2016. Object Redux. As Built Drawings

T4T LAB Spring 2016. Object Redux. 

Invited Professor

Adam Fure

Team: Cody Clancy, David Forero, Paul Germaine McCoy, Matt Foster

As Built Drawings is an exploration of the manifestation of form through line and figure, utilizing deformation as a set of tools to achieve meta-reality.

"To operate critically with the instrument of architecture implies a deformation of architecture itself: it has to change from language into meta language, it must speak of itself, it must explore its own code without leaving it, except for very carefully measured experiments."  

- Manfredo Tafuri

A characteristic of the post-digital era is the access to the historical canon as a set of data. We acquired freely accessible geometries and drawings, treated them as raw data, and through the deformation of architectural tools, produced new geometry. Through continuous deformations we uncover the resilience of the substance that the operations cannot exhaust. Intentional exploitation of the methods of drawing , such as technique and viewpoint in relation to the directionality of cut-plane of such drawings (plan-oblique, axonometric section cuts etc.) produces the reality of the drawing AND figure through the forced occurrence of conditions, languages, and parts.

The produced is a new object; changing the inflection of the qualities in the original geometries to establish new form and spatial configurations. The qualities produced, such as the excess overlap of of line and figure (treatment of poche, thick-thin, interstitiality, delamination, and corner condition) provoke new realities of architectural language: a visual meta-language. Expressed within each reality is a new architectural syntax that is nevertheless accepted as such.

T4T LAB 2016. Object Redux. Piranesian Object

T4T LAB Spring 2016. Object Redux. 

Invited Professor

Adam Fure

Team: Matt West, Sophia Kountakis, Erin Biedeger, Reuben Posada, Brooks Van Essen

Our project is a Piranesian object developed with Mannerist operations like disjunction, striation and overlap, and generated by the Stamp.

The team began with an interest in three canonical churches (Il Redentore, San Giorgio Maggiore, and Rainaldi’s Santa Maria in Campitelli) and observed how these ideas of insertion, intersection, and interaction of spaces in plan revealed or concealed themselves. This led to their dismantling and compilation into a historical data set of objects, and a reconstruction of a new plan-object that blurs the line between figure and ground.

The items in Piranesi’s Campo Marzio are classified as either Autonomous Infill or Architectural Infill. But we see the plan-object as being both, as each part within the model was placed there intentionally just as Architectural infill is, yet at times these elements combine with others to generate secondary forms with a scalar hierarchy, or are subservient to another such piece in the vicinity. Just like the churches we studied, placed these objects offset from each other to create the same overlapping of spaces that we are interested in. In this way the plan-object creates its own ontology as it has no anthropocentric quality or use that can be perceived by a viewer.

This brings us to the notion of the Stamp. In our project it takes the form of Boolean operations of varying severity acting on extrusions of our plan. Stamps are exhibited as shallow indentations resembling a bas relief, and deep gouges that are more similar to a die punch. It was these deep stamps that generated some of the strange intersections that have become such a central idea in our project. As two parts intersect, the resultant geometry carries a resemblance to the original part, yet at the moment of the intersection, that legibility is somewhat lost. This creates the blurring of the stamp that reinforces the object’s autonomy.

The plan-object became the epicenter of our object, first as the stamp operating upon a cube, then as the interior to a more subtle object with similar ideas of stamping (in the bas relief), and then a skeleton on which new sub-objects and elements of that plan can be placed (or stamped) again and again, duo-mining the precedent materiel and creating a labyrinthine object which calls to mind Piranesi’s Carceri. The plan-object, with its offsets and intersections with the cube, or with other iterations of itself, generates strange spaces as well as new poche that echoes source objects. So the exterior of the object that we see is the reverberation of the interactions of the object at its innermost. Yet the objects interactions and its results do not necessarily inform the overall nature of the object. As Jonah Rowen states “Theseus may be able to use the trick of the thread to find his way around the labyrinth, but the omniscient view is reserved for the architect.”

The idea of the Labyrinthine Object is that spaces are created by the Stamp that cannot immediately be identified, and there is no real way to perceive the object’s interior and its progression. Yve-Alain Bois writes that “The elevation cannot provide the plan [and vice versa], for as one walks around it, one finds no element that has maintained a relation of identity with the others.” Like the Carceri engravings, the object is composed of recognizable canonical architectural elements, yet the composition itself is strange in terms of its mereology and organization. The stamping in from the exterior generates unfamiliar relationships between familiar objects. In this way the Stamp acts as a force estranging the interior of the object from the plan-objects that created it. 

The surface articulation itself is the result of our study into ideas of positive and negative stamping - that is stamping in from the outside and out from the inside. As well as the notion of the field, and investigations into the formal stamp vs the pixel stamp. Where the formal stamp is the actual moves and modifications we’ve made to the object’s geometry, and the pixel stamp is the post-production process we used to create the field of stamps, or Stamps in the Extended field. Meaning that the stamps function on all levels of the object; bilaterally but asymmetrically. In this way an infinite field of stamps is created at random. Despite its repetition it maintains uniqueness and difference. This field of stamps becomes, in part, the new object; the coalescence of the surface conditions of its predecessors, draped over a form generated by the plan-object.

As we moved forward into studying the color and material logic of our object, we looked to the sort of strange brutalist nature of the form, heavy orthogonal elements articulating new corners and new scalar relationships. So in order for the material brutality to follow the formal brutality, we’ve imagined our object as having this sort of lithic quality of striated, colored marble, that a form which is such a synthesis of its own precedent necessitates a material that is similarly unlikely.

Our object is a thing which is totally removed from its source data, yet has a similar nature; a series of objects overlapped to create a new space. Operations of the Stamp act upon surfaces to create new conditions, on that surface and beneath it.  And a space that is thoroughly labyrinthine, a strange extension of the disjunction of the source objects, where only a viewer of each plan and section could even hope to grasp it’s whole complexity. This hermitry of the object affirms its Architecture and its Autonomy while denying the metaphysics of presence. 

T4T LAB 2016. Object Redux. Object Obscuration

Model Photos

T4T LAB Spring 2016. Object Redux. 

Invited Professor

Adam Fure

Team: Justin Zumel, Elin Verhoeven, Tung Dinh, Maria Fuentes

Within the realm of representation, a resolution occurs during the transition between mediums: creating the possibility of emulating new objects.

In our process of photogrammetry, we rediscovered the idea of flattening.  Through this process of using the camera as a marker between physical to digital, there is a loss of information that creates formal and textural discrepancies. For the methodology, reproducing these objects in the digital form can be controlled through the amount of photos used.  For example, less photos equate more data loss and tears within the mesh, while more photos create higher dense polymesh digitally. 

The categories of objects in our mereology consisted of: physical natural rock, Physical synthetic rock, and rock-like object. Through that process, these object’s unequivocal qualities dissolved into the same field to a point of obscured qualities between the three categories.  Another production from this method was an image that represents the object through texture; which creates a flattened representation of the object as if the object were a flat image. 

Through this exploration of controlled resolution of meshes, we then created an object digitally that would be added to this array of meshcount.   We noticed that if we widened this spectrum of density from high poly to low poly meshes, then the low poly meshes will turn into flat planes or faces.  Through these flat planes, they do not represent the rocks, but the idea of flattening.  Again, this idea of flattening is not only a production of the photogrammetry, but also a production between the pure digital, pure physical, and translation between the physical to digital. 

These planes and objects were then mapped with textures that did not emanate from the objects themselves, but other objects.  For example, the texture map that was created for one object was mapped onto another object to form another degree of obscuration; the delineation from what the object was to what the object manifested itself through digital manipulations.  To exhaust the idea of obscuration even further, our collective of textures did not only come from the photogrammetry, but also photographed textures of found objects.  Through the post processing phase, there was another level of obscuration that manipulates the way in which a rendering software actualizes a digital texture, and how photoshop renders that same texture.  This degree of obscuration is executed by the creation of certain moments of photoshopped texture filters within the same image of the raw render. 

In this project there are two autonomous forms that create the illusion of a dichotomy rather than a visual articulation of cohesion.  In a trivial notion, this illusion represents these flat planes as a form of disruption through the splitting of these objects, but what these planes are argued to do, is create a plane in which the objects have a relationship with the ground.  In a way, these planes create a notion of flattened ground where all of these objects have a direct relationship with their planes.  This contains the idea of figure and ground and that all of the objects are on the same field of different degrees of flattened representations. 

As a whole, this project is a question of representation and translation that… are these objects a representation of the initial object?... or are these objects a creation of new objects that do not rely on the idea of representation; because through the process of photogrammetry, they do produce a representation of what was scanned initially, but because of the control of the input of images processed to purposefully produce tears, these objects become new objects.  As a result, the idea of representation does not exist.