proj2_animations

proj2_intentions

My process thus far:
- diagram the movie
- animate the diagram
- digitally model the animation
- physically model the digital model

What emerged from this process was a set of drawings used in the constructrion of the physical artifact that were far more compelling than either the animation or the artifact itself.



My intention is to begin the process all over again, using the new, emergent diagram as a basis for future investigations.

proj2b_construction documents

proj2_physical artifact

experience_vs_perception

ster·e·ot·o·my_[ster-ee-ot-uh-mee]_noun_the technique of cutting solids, as stones, to specified forms and dimensions.

Preston Scott Cohen’s Stereotomic Permutation attempts to reconcile the seemingly divergent orthographic and perspectival methods of projection, the result of which is a series of lavishly distorted recombinant layers. Fiver’s re-imagining of this idea as of the dichotomous pairing of perception and depiction is an effective way in which to understand an otherwise overly arbitrary idea. Replacing the word “depicted” with “experienced,” however, seems to more accurately convey PSC’s intended relationship between orthographic and perspectival projections.

With this new rubric, we can begin to understand Cohen’s intentions. Can the perception of architecture, both conceptually and physically, merge with the experience of architecture? In other words, is it possible to design a form whereby we both see and understand it simultaneously? In a sense, our brain does this already in the re-positioning of convergent lines as parallel in “our mind’s eye.” Using visual cues such as foreshortening and pattern recognition we project the equidistance of columns in a colonnade, knowing that our perspective of them tells us that they are getting progressively closer to o ne another. Our innate understanding of convergent lines allows us to understand that the column are the same height, despite the fact that we "see" them as sequentially shrinking.

Sterotomic Permutations seems an attempt to utilize this particular human trait in form generation. PSC's provocative line drawings, which read both flat and three-dimensional, revealing that perhaps the successful merging of these different projections lies in using in intersection, folding, and overlaps to create a powerful ambiguity.

In this study, perspectival effects of a simple colonnade are abstracted to a single axis, and recombined as series of layers.


Re-combinant variations redirect the investigation of perspectival (perceived) and orthgraphic (experienced) projection.

2b_constructed morphology

The process by which this morphology was created began with creating a 3-dimensional interpretation of the animation diagram from part 1. The result is a series of layered planes which are organized into three systems according to areas of visual importance in each cut of the original video. Connecting the various planes of each systems created a literal structure derived from the visual structure of the movie. Subsequent versions used the new structure to generate a series of blobs, surfaces, and sweeps that connect various parts of the structure.

proj2_status

Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge

" . . . projection is literally the hyphen between idea and experience that is the place of culture . . ."

The essence of design, then, lies in representation - the translator of conceptual ideas into built form. This is, I think, the essence of Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier's "Architecture and the Perspective Hinge. According to them, the development of different types of representation has always coincided with a significant shift in the conceptualization of the built environment. The development of perspective drawings, for instance, occured simultaneously with a more humanistic world view. All of a sudden, the "viewpoint" of mankind mattered. Thus, artists and architects began developing ways to more accurately, descriptively, and expressively depict this perspective. Contrast this with the Gothic master builder who, without the use of scale or orthographic drawings, constructed magnificent spiritual edifices. This architecture was not seen as being a creation of the builder itself, however. Rather, the master builder was merely a vessel through which a supreme being instilled its order upon the earth.

Gomez and Pelletier began by critiquing contemporary architectural practice and its use of representation as "prosaic transcription" rather than "poetic translation:"

"Functionalist motivations of our technological world have promoted the pragmatic capacity of architectural drawing over its potential to construe a symbolic order. For architects, it is important to remember that a symbol is neither a contrivance nor an invention - nor is it necessarily a representation of absolute truths or transcendental theological values."

This line of inquiry proposes an important question: What comes first, the means of representation or the conceptual shift? On what side of the "perspective hinge" does architecture sit? Gomez and Pelletier would seemingly say that it lags behind, that it is struggling to keep pace with technological and cultural inovations - that contemporary architecture, the goal of which is to symbolize and respond to both time and place, is not rooted in either.

proj2_sequence analysis

_the movie
American Beauty, 1999
Director: Sam Mendes
Screenwriter: Alan Ball



_compositional analysis
A two-dimensional analysis ignores perspectival views and studies treats the compositional structure of the screen. In this scene, the screen is divided into six retangles. The center two are split again in several cuts. In each cut, the director has called attention to one either these specific rectangles or a particular intersection.



The animation uses the grid of American Beauty to create an alternate composition. Significant spatial zones from the original scene are weighted according to their visual signficance on the screen. Three lights, one of which corresponds to specific camera views reveal the spaces as they emerge from the composition.



_spatial analysis
This scene also plays a clever game with the lines between the four actors - girl, boy, camera and television. The camera and television reveal the direct and frontal relationship of the two actors, yet the space projected by their respective "lenses" is always perpendicular (with one important exception). When the camera is passed from one person to the other, the camera is pivoted, letting the television pass through its frame (which is revealed by the television itself). The viewer's frame, or the film camera, also engages the lines created by the actors in varying ways. So, in short, the scene utilizes frames within the larger frame to reveal the spatial relationships between the actors in the scene.



This sequence analyzes each camera "cut," only showing those relationships which that particular view reveals.

versioning_vector-based design

In their introduction to Versioning, SHoP Architects make a distinction between “vector-based information and pixel-based simulation and representation.” These two divergent systems present, through their contrasts, the essence of versioning.

Vector based graphics use precise mathematically based forms, which are continually adaptive and flexible. Change the equation, and the resulting image responds accordingly. A vector-based graphic is completely precise, its accuracy limited only by the medium on which it is projected. Raster or pixel-based graphics, on the other hand, are estimations, and limited by their initial inputs. The accuracy of a raster image depends entirely on the number of pixels that create it. If given enough of these digital dots, they merge together, creating a continuous, seamless whole. This relies on a simulation - a tricking of the mind - and is dependant on the initial input. Future iterations will be directly descended from that original image/idea/form. Ingebord Rocker equates this with architecture that is merely the representation of an a priori idea or image. It is also his critique of DynaForm, which began with a “master form” as opposed to a set of “master rules” from which the form is derived.

Versioning, or vector-based design, fosters a non-linear approach that attempts to control the process by which the form is created - “a formal means of production to address variable conditions” – rather than the form itself. Versioning, then, is a shift not in design style, but in design process.

Vector-based design that can easily be translated from digital projection to physical fabrication reveals versioning’s greatest asset – reviving architecture’s commitment to built things. Purely digital design is limited by its “immateriality.” Through versioning and digital fabrication, we now have the potential to “recombine” the processes of virtual and physical modeling.

proj1_review

As this project progressed and I struggled through the challenges of my inaugural foray into animation, two issues came to dominate my thinking. First was the way in which I was conceptualizing the intial study of the body in motion. The intial impulse for me was to take a very scientific approach. I was concerned with the accuracy of the inputs and the descriptive value of the derived model.

At some point, however, it became clear to me that our analyses of the body in motion were incredibly superficial and arbitrary. The reality of the situation reveals that no matter how many views we took, or how accurately we plotted points in 3-dimensional space, we could never perfectly describe the space through which these bodies moved. This realization was important to me in directing my investigation away from discrete, tangible objects to one in which I began harness the representational and design potential of animation.

This leads to the second issue - namely, what role did animation play in my design process? Was it merely the assigned media? Was I only using animation to describe what I had already done? Did it lead me down new paths, instill in me new ideas?

Of course, as my first shot with this new media, my narrow range of knowledge and experience limited my exploitation of animation's potential. However, I did begin to utilize its ability to describe not only the beginning and the end, but the in-between, as well. This change in thought is incredibly enlightening, as I can now, using animation, study, represent, and design processes, not merely discrete objects or views. Similarly, I now have a more accurate method by which to represent and design space, which exists in the "in-between".

[An obvious criticism of my latest animation, then, is that my models described actual, discrete moments, as opposed to depicting the fluid process of echoes.]

virtual projection_final

virtual projection_final_progress

virtual projection_version2

A more precise animation, sections are interpreted as snapshots, or discrete moments in time. In much the same way as a series of spatial sections can determine the form or sequence of a buidling, these "time sections" reveal the form and path of the bodies in motion. The concept of action and mimicry is further explored, as the two movements act in separate "time sections" and follow slightly different paths.

virtual projection_version1

Catherine Ingraham's essay comments on the inevitability of frame to influence the way in which one perceives or imagines a "scape." Here, a consecutive and animate frames engage the camera as it moves through them, transforming the perception of each subsequent frame. The frames were conceived as as series of sections that are in constant flux - each with its own unique transformation.

lines and linearity

scenario: A child (who is too short) cannot see himself in the mirror until his mother props him up. This metaphor, used by Jacques Lacan to explain his mirror stage theory, is used by Ingraham to describe the relationship of architecture to both the human body and psyche. Until the boy is able to see himself in the mirror, he has neither knowledge of his own image or a sense of himself as "other" sited in the world. Only by being propped up is he put in the appropriate time (the time it takes light to travel between his eyes and the mirror) and space (the physical distance between the boy and the mirror) to understand these complex relationships. According to Ingraham, architecture is the prop that allows the mind to perceive the body.

"One might say that the architect tries to supply the insufficiency of the fragmented whole - the self and the body - by sketching the scaffolding as a web to keep us forever propped upright in front of our own image. Or, rather, the architect tries to hold us, using the force of lines, at the moment of meconnaissance, the mis-recognition that inaugurates our belief in the possibility of space and inhabitation."

Ingraham contrasts this view with one that spawned from the humanistic thought that man is inescapably separate from the world, but able to understand it through representation. Representation, however, necessitates translation, "connection and adequation," which are linear processes which assume that "mimesis (imitation of the world) is possible."

The problem here is that the world is always viewed through a frame (physical, psychological, cultural, etc.) that belies the notion that there is a linear connection between the perceiver and the perceived. Speaking architecturally, the line can be thought of as "lines of passage and division, the 'threshold' or boundary condition. . ." A more sophisticated view of threshold and boundary, reveal that a line is wholly inadequate to describe these conditions that can and should be engaged, not merely passed through.

Therein lies the fundamental difficulty with linear constructs. A line is without dimension and cannot be defined - it is a descriptor or an "apparatus." It is in the morphing ("bastardization) of pure, dimensionless lines into pairs that space is created. This is similar to the morphing of pure geometries into "impure" shapes, while still maintaining the essence of the original (a shape that maintains the roundness of a circle).



A pure line can only be passed through, but not engaged in the direction of its defining characterstic (its linearity) until it is morphed into two lines (It is a wonder then, that while walls are typically drawn as two lines, the thought of inhabiting the space within is not more common).

animation_revamp

Because of the aforementioned problems with EIAS, I decided to switch to FormZ. Here's an updated and vastly improved animation.

_warped space

dystopianism - a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

In Warped Space, Vidler successfully juxtaposes neoformations in architecture with the purer forms of functionalism to reveal striking and important differences in their respective zeitgeists.

Modernism was interested in standardization and efficiency in regards to its use of new technologies. The formal results of this line of thought are evident and resulted in a search for utopian, idealized spaces and relationships.

Firms like Morphosis are specifically challenging monochrome modernism and post-modern excess.

(I find it particularly ironic, then, that the people who architects such as Morphosis and Koolhaas are criticizing are the very people paying for these projects - dramatic buildings specifically calling out the excesses of corporatism)

Further, modernism’s interpretation of the human form was entirely about dimension and form (see Corbu’s Modular Man). The architecture of modernity, according to Vidler, is investigating the space of the mind, or “[the bodies] introjected projection.” (quote Morpheus from in the Matrix, “the digital projection of your virtual self”) Our “virtual selves,” as brought to us in neoformations, come complete with all of our fears, prejudices and “neurosis” included. The formal result is buildings like Coop Himmelblau’s UFA Cinema Center in Dresden, which, love it or hate it, is a challenging image of the contemporary human condition.