STUDIO AIR JOURNAL

Leah Tausan

2015

CASE FOR INNOVATION

A IntroductionA.0 Design futuring A.1 Design computationA.2 Composition & GenerationA.3 ConclusionA4 Learning outcomes A5 Algorithmic sketches

EXPRESSION OF INTEREST

B.0 Brief & Site AnalysisB.1 Design FocusB.2 Case Study 1.0B.3 Case Study 2.0B.4 Technique DevelopmentB.5 Technique PrototypesB.6 Technique ProposalB.7 Learning Objectives & Outcomes

PROJECT PROPOSAL

C.0 Addressing FeedbackC.1 Design ConceptC.2 Elements of Design C.3 Final Design & ModelC.4 Learning Objectives & Outcomes

cont

ents

‘ We need to dream new dreams for the twenty-first century as those of the dreams of the twenthieth century rapidly fade’ -Anthony June & Fiona Raby.

01week

Introduction about me:

Name: Leah TausanAge: 20Course: 3rd year Bachelor of Environments majoring in Architecture.

Architecture has always appealed to me, as it is the one art from you cannot escape. I consider the world we live in to be an enormous canvas. Yet people do not treat it as such, they destroy its beauty through means of polluting it, excavating it, deforesting it, carelessly littering, and constructing, cheap, poor

A: Introduction

quality and generally ugly objects. Then they complain about their unsightly living circumstances are. Yet it is our canvas, humans as a species construct the world that we live in instead of cohering to the nature one. Design is a way of transcending from the world we live in now, to the future world we want to live in.

Past Projects & Experience with Rhino

I have a little experience in parametric modeling and am feeling quiet apprehensive

about it because I have personally always felt limited by technology in design. I

feel in order for a designer to use technology in a way that enhances

their designing they have to know the computer program

as well as their own brain. This requires a very

steep learning curve, which I have found

to be all of my designing in

previous studios in

university. Even though I have used Sketch up, Rhino, Autocad and Revit on occasions, I have never been able to feel like I have a full grasp of the way i design using these programs. I kind of feel like i often ‘stumble’ across outcomes.

My only other experience using Rhino was in the Subject ‘Virtual Environments’ which I completed in my first year (2013) in semester two. The brief was to create a ‘second skin’. My group interpreted this as a protection mechanism, like how a puffer fish inflate their spikes when they feel like they are in danger. Hence our second skin was dynamic and could be retracted when the user felt they were in a safe situation. We used Rhino for the design process to mold a skin to a three-

dimensional model of the user and then panelled it to create spikes.

I have this past experience, but I still do not really feel

like I know what I’m doing with Rhino due to us

being in a group and doing different

components of the design process.

Project Brief Preliminary Thoughts

The brief really excites me because of its lack of limitations. There are so many possibilities with the design, that to be honest, I do not know where to start!

I have found in the past that I often get an idea or a feeling of what i want my design to be in a studio and that this limits my design. I get stuck on this concept, and am very hesitant to deviate away from it. The openness of this brief and the concept of only using computer modelling from start to finish in the design process should prevent this from happening and allow the design to develop more naturally.

Grasshopper has the ability to generate multiple design possibilities very quickly. This changes the role of the designer, if they are not designing the design then who is? The algorithm? Designers are now often the filter for design, they use algorithms to generate multiple possibilities and then choose the final result. Yet this is only one way of looking at it, in order to be innovative there has been a switch from designers using software to designs manipulating and create the software algorithms in order to be incontrol of their designs.

This is the level of understanding i want to generate with grasshopper, i want to be able to understand the algorithms and parametric design enough to be able to alter my design to respond to its context.

‘Sustainability is the quality the global system has if the relationship between and within its subsystems are able to persist and nourish each other’ - Helena Bender

week

01A.0 Design futuring

Eat me wallAndrew Heumann

Project Partners: Damon Wake, Monica Freund, Daniel Quesada.

Consultants: Dana Cupkova, William Jewell, Kevin Pratt.

Description

The ‘Eat Me Wall’, is a façade system for existing or new buildings that goes above and beyond the traditional green wall. The wall differs by being productive, it sustains the growth of food crops such as toma-toes as well as the using the roots of the plants to naturally filter the building’s gray water as it passes down the façade. The plants also improve air quality, shade the building, reduce urban heat island affect and fulfill office workers biophilla needs.

The water filtration logic of the wall is based on Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) for hydroponic plant growth and is calcu-lated based on William Jewell’s method for water purification (Jewell 1992).

Design futuring...

This project expands the future possibili-ties of urban life. It addresses paramet-ric design being used to solve complex ‘wicked problems’ instead of just aesthetic issues.

I find this project to be very future intended. It is Envisioning that due to our cur-rent growth trends, cities in the future will be even more highly overpopulated than they are now. That the quality of life will diminish because of our strained agricultural systems not being able

to cope with the pressure exerted on them and the decrease of biophillia Implementing health issues.

Hence this project seems perfectly viable to me, we do not have much open space at ground level in cities to grow food. Yet we have a lot of space on vertical facades on the outside and inside of buildings. Why not use the green wall (which has become so trendy recently) to grow supplementary crops?

Eat me wall

A new way of redefining urban

productive space...

This project is adjacent with the recent conception that design needs to move away from its currently accelerat-ing ‘defuturing condition of unsustaibability.’ As human numbers increase and conjugate in cities, the importance of sustainable design also increases as nature alone can-not sustain us.

I feel in my social circle that this idea of public conscious-ness about design that is sustainable, zero carbon or cre-ates a biophilic connection with people in an urban space is widely accepted and understood as necessary. But then again, this is my demographic. In other demographics this idea is not as accepted as people a) do not believe in climate change (i.e. our unfortunate priminister) b) sustainability is put aside to accommodate rapid eco-nomic growth (China).

Currently a not built, computer fabricated ideal...

This project hasn’t been built in a large scale model yet, but this is not

Important in its ideology. The project was built in a small pre fab scale and installed in an office building. It is a new project,

so with the publicity it gets from being advertised by architectural magazines like

‘architizer’ it is only a matter of time that an investor decides to refurbish an existing office

building or build a productive green wall on a new office building.

Contribution to urban space and its inhabitants...

The eat me wall project is progressive with its de-sign thinking as it is a project that uses computer

Generated design to create an intelligent object that responds to the climate to produce a potentially bet-

ter urban environment. The actual design does not have a ‘radical’ appearance and its the preliminary idea behind the design of ‘back yard farming’ is also an ideal that is practised by people, including those near the Merri River site at CERES.

Yet what makes this project futuristic is that it com-bines modern day, computer generated, prefabricated technology to turn the practical ideal of growing your own food and being self sustainable to larger more industrial and hence productive outcome. When I vis-ited CERES and Merri creek for my site visit my one critique of the life style of the backyard farming they promote there where everyone has their own little plot of vegetables growing, is that it cannot possibly sustain anyone. The area of land used by each indi-vidual is too small to be productive, and would only act as a supplement. Hence the idea of this project on a larger scale has more potential to actually change the world.

01week

Description

Casa Mila was commissioned by a ‘new money’ business man Pere Mila i Camps and his wife Roser Segimon i Artells. The building design was originally very spiritually symbolic as Gaudi was a devotee of the Virgin Mary. Yet due to the anti sematic views at the time, the commissioners of the building toned down its religious design against the wishes of Gaudi, eliminating the statues of Mary, our lady of the rosery and two arch angles, as well as removing the planned rosary prayer on the cornices.

The building’s structure is architecturally innova-tive due to its undulating stone wall

facade that is self support-ing, load

A.0 Design futuring

Casa MilaAntoni Gaudi

1906-1910

bearing columns that are also self support-ing freeing the floor of any load, and using wrought twisting iron balconies. Gaudi also pushes the extent of his organic design having the internal walls and floor plans that are free flowing and undulating. This had never been done before, even in Gaudi’s design’s and was controversial for a family home, and the organizational structure of daily life. Geometric shapes that pushed Catalan modernism ...

Gaudi began as a Gothic Revivalist, be-ing heavily influenced by Ruskin’s ideas of the Gothic style being the ‘‘true’ religious architecture, which led to him using natu-ral, organic motif ’s in his buildings, being inspired by ‘the designs of god.’

Gaudi reacted poetically to the hedo-nistic Mediterranean landscape and vegetation as well as to the maritime character and traditions of the city of Barcelona, which is reflected in his work.

His Organic and yet Rational structures pushed Catalan Modernism progressively forward as well as influenc-ing the Art Nouveau.

Influence on future architecture...

Gaudi’s style was a abstraction of medivial forms meshed in with natural motifs that rebelled against the popular Second Empire style at the time. He inspired Catalan Modernism to be more free flowing and organic comapred to other modernist movements aroudn the world.

A built surreal reality.... ‘The richness of Gaudi’s art lies in the reconciliation of the fantastic and the practical, the subjective and the scien-tific, the spiritual and the material.’

I am constantly, absolutly astounded by the fact that Gaudi designed all of his building without computer generated software. All of the complex geometries and self supporting structures came from his creativity and understanding of matha-matics. Even more mind blowing, is that these structures were able to be built and were socially accepted by the public.

Gaudi’s buildings different from the Eat Me Wall because they were so ubsurd at the time, the fact that they are more than a conceptual theory or sketch is very important. Having a crazy, organic, geometric structure standing in

the middle of Catalan Spain physically would have had more impact of the architecture of the area than any

conceptual theory or diagram could have.

Adding a sense of oragnic to an otherwise very regular boulevard...

Having visited Barcelona and Gaudi’s works Casa Mila stood out to me not just because of its undulating form, but because it just seemed to appear out of no where. You’re walking

down this nice, regular boulevard, you round a corner and all of a sudden there this big, overpower, curvy, substantial form of Casa Mila imposing itself on you. This notion of being out of place kind of goes

against computation where the context, site, data and other information is input into the algorthym in order to gerate an outcome. Yet again this links to the idea that with computational design its harder to get an idea ‘stuck in your head’ and hence the designer responds to the site and context better.

Casa Mila

week A.1 Design Computation

02Casa Mila HelsinkiXefirotarch

Description

This is an unbuilt, computational generated project proposed for Helsinki’s national library. The library design is proposed to have the ambience of a park, but to also be a new icon for the city that is monumental as ‘libraries are the modern day cathedrals.’

The space intend is designed to be quite (it is a library after all) but also be awe inspiring and be a reflection of playful urban organization. The idea of putting a foreign, wild, organic object into a regular urban environment reminds me very much of Gaudi’s designs and the Casa

Mila. Yet unlink Gaudi’s design for the Casa Mila that has a very cut off from the street, its facade

being flat like the Second Empire style at the time, this

project plans

to disintegrates the boundaries from the urban space and the library by create intermediate spaces.

Computing and the design process...

There is a tendancy now in architecture for young designers to use computation and algorthymic design from the beginning to the end of the design process, instead of using computerization where it is used to represent a pre-existing idea more neatly than could be done by hand. Hence there is a new design ethos that has grown out of digital, computational architecture that has triggered keys shifts practices.

Some of these shifts are:

-Representation of forms: Greater focus on specific architectural or design problems. Building are no longer built without justification and design think-

ing to sustain their idealogies.

-Cultural: With computa-tion, the virtually unlimited

range of possibilities engendered by this shift

in architecture, made architects rethink

their philosophi-cal and ethnical

motivations.

can be potentially so easy, it is now about having the right form. Having design that is efficient, cost effective, more than sustainable, aesthetically pleasing, radical, and created using new technological advancements.

As reflected in class discussion in week 3, the idea of being an architecture today seems a lot more daunt-ing than an architect in the past. Not that I was alive in the past, but from previous study in the past to be an architect you would have studied all the classical Greek and Roman architecture, read Laugier’s, Ruskin’s, Viollet-le-Duc’s essays, learnt to draft and draw and viola you are qualified.

In order to be successful in today’s practice in architec-tural design I feel like I need to study and master being an engineering, software coder, expert render and the traditional skills of architecture. Not only that, I have to be able to work an communicate efficiently in a team

of other designers. To me that’s something that really stands out in archi-

tecture these days, in this project, like many others a team of

designers is employed, but yet the com-

pany takes own-ership of the

design. I feel its almost impos-

sible to be a sole

architect in the

mod-ern

Buildings are no longer just built for aesthetic purposes.

-Geometric & Close up detailing: because technological advancement has made the production of complex, geometric objects so trivially easy, the mere ability to produce these objects alone cannot be the sole virtue of the designer.

On going and incoming changes in the con-struction and architecture industry...

There is now a greater focus on specific architectural or design problems

than there was previously in the past. Because

generating a form is

Abu Dhabi Performing Arts CentreZaha Hadid ArchitectsDescription

The new preforming arts centre is a proposed one of five new cultural buildings to be con-structed in Abu Dhabi.

Zaha herself describes the building as being ‘a sculptural form that emerges from linear inter-sections that slopes towards the water.’

Detailing...

With Zaha’s architecture it is very obvious that all of her work is computer generated with algorithms and parameters. Yet what I admire about her design’s is their detailing. It is said that ‘detailing is the preserve of the architects, until that shifts to engineers as well.’

Architects have finally come free from the struc-tural concerns of the building, with engineering rapidly taking over most aspects of architectural practice. Yet due to computational design, the detailing remains an inherent part of architec-ture. After all you wouldn’t expect and engineer to design a building like this.

Urban space...

The planning of how a building reacts with Urban space and its context is an aspect of design that architects have been recently more and more concerned with.

With this Performing arts center, Zaha and her team of architects have focused on hav-ing people moving efficiently through the site using linear intersections. They have used the purpose of the site and the context to create the whole design through computation.

Another aspect of this space that is very intui-tive is the use of a flexible theater that can seat up to 6,200 people. Biomimic design has been used to create performances in architecture more dynamic by having parts of the building change and be adaptable.

Falling Water house

Frank Lloyd Wright

- Wright used compositional architecture. -Yet design responded to the site in a way that we get computational design to do now.-

week

- Washington DC, 2004.

-One of the first companies to build-ing such a computational design

-Used computing to generate a struc-ture that was new an innovative but was compatible to the classical archi-tecture it enclosed.

-The arrival of parametric digital mod-elling changes digital representations of architectural design from explic-itgeometric notation to instrumental geometric relationships.

-Architects are beginning to shift away from primarily designing the spe-cific shape of a building to setting up geometric relationships and principles described throughparametric equa-tions that can derive particular design instances as a response to specific variables, expressions, conditional statements and scripts.

A.2: Composition Generation

03Smithsonian Institute Courtyard EnclosureFoster and Partners

week

Through these three weeks of read-ings, lectures, and discussions I feel like

my design has respond to the site context and have a world view. Being sustainable is not enough

when it comes to environment that we live in, its is not a good adjective. As Dominique Hes pointed out, you would not

describe a good relationship as sustainable. Yet our relationship to the en-vironment is NOT EVEN sustainable. Therefore I want to create a structure that

brings our awareness of this issue at hand.

When visiting the site, it was almost very easy to forget nature is constantly under struggle to sustain human kind. The site is so peaceful, so idyllic. In the heart of the inner city suburbs it is this quite refuge of biophilla. Even being in the site for the short amount of time I was just made me feel at peace.

Therefore I want to design something by using data from the site (maybe stats about the pollution, types of species of animals there, etc) that bring awareness to how special it is to have such a great reserve. Designing using computation can benefit designer’s by broadening the possibilities of design. Hence will use computational design to generate forms from this data and then as a designer pick the appropriate one.

A3: Conculsion

03

03week 3 A4 : Learning

Outcomes

My knowledge, understanding about para-metric design have increased

dramatically over these past 3 weeks. Hence my thinking of how these aspects of design are now used

and how they fit in with architectural practice today have changed. The part that really has influenced my thinking and un-

derstand of computation is the aspect of doing the readings about the theory behind the computer generated design and then following the online

Grasshopper tutorials to figure out what they are talking about.

Before hand I was slightly against ‘using a computer to do all of your design work’ but I wish someone had introduced me to computational design sooner. I see this subject as an opportunity to learn to open up my design thinking and just be more open minded about computational design in general.

Previously I felt a little uncomfortable about how algorithms had complete control over the output of a designer’s design. Or so I thought. Now I understand that in order to be a successful, innovative designer in the current architectural industry, algorithms are something you have to understand and manipulate so you can still be in control of your design. Hence this semester I am going to rise to the challenge, using computation to generate design ideas I would not have thought of in the past and of understanding the math-ematics behind these formulas.

‘When architects have a sufficient understanding of algorithmic concepts, when we no longer need to discuss the digital, then computation can become a true method of design for architecture’ -Peter Brady

week A5: Sketches

03

I have never used Grasshopper before this subject, hence these past few weeks have been a real steep learning curve for me. I have never considered myself to be ‘mathamatically minded’ and have always struggled with numerical problems.

Looking back at the lofting exercises I did in the first week, the forms I selected and how I represented them, I now realize that they show my affinity for hand sketching, and skepticism of computer generated design. Over the past few weeks, playing around with Grasshopper, doing the tutorials, readings, reading blogs and further research my opinion of computer generated

design has changed greatly. The sketches on this first page were selected because they are good comparison to the next page where I am less concerned with keeping a ‘hand drawn’ or ‘artis-tic’ feel to the design. The reading that really changed my view on computational design was the Kalay one, where it is stated that computational design is a step forward in solving the planets wicked problems due to designer’s being able to use it to respond to data and context.

These are some of the forms I accidentally stumbled upon trying to create the biometric form of a barnacle. Now i realise that i did not use the BoxMorph tool correctly, but I have still included them as i think they posess an interesting aesthetic. Their forms remind me of early modernism, of Frank Lloyd Wright’s falling Fater House. These forms created through computation surprised

me because unitentionally they link back to architectural history and hence inherit an uninten-tional symbolism. From my research so far, this I find this symbolism is slightly contradictory of compuational design, as it tries to generate new forms using algorthyms that designer’s may have no thought about creating before.

Yet these sketchs I believe show the vast limitness of computational design. There was previously a tendancy in architecture that ‘architects drew what they could build and built what they could draw.’ Computer generated design, compared to computerization, is pushing these limits, but these sketchs show that it can still link back through architectural history aesthetically.

‘Previously architects drew what they could build and built what they could draw’ -Kolarevic

week A5: Sketches

03

These are examples of the creating your own mesh exercise. I’ve previously felt a little ‘out of control’ when using some of the tools in Rhino because of my lack of understanding

of them and their ability to do produce unexpected results onto my design. Through creating my own mesh, with its own properties, I was able to feel more incontrol of my

design and manipulate it the way i wanted to. This I was really able to relate to the week 3 Brady reading ‘The building of algorithmic thought’. Especially when he states that architects are moving away from an era where they use software to an era where they make software.

REFERENCING

03week

Bender, Helena, Reshaping Environments (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Brady, Peter, ‘The Building Of Algorithmic Thought’, AD journal, 2015, 9-15

Curtis, William J. R, Modern Architecture Since 1900 ([London]: Phaidon, 1996)

Fazio, Michael W, Marian Moffett, Lawrence Wodehouse, and Marian Moffett, A World History Of Architecture (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008)

Kolarevic, Branko, Architecture In The Digital Age (New York, NY: Spon Press, 2003)

McCullough, Malcolm, ‘20 Years Of Scripted Space’, Architectural Design, 76 (2006), 12-15 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ad.288>

Oxman, Rivka, and Robert Oxman, ‘Theories Of The Digital In Architecture’, 2015

redboxmedia.com, redbox, ‘Smithsonian Institution | Projects | Foster + Partners’, Fosterandpartners.com, 2004 <http://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/smithsonian-institution/> [accessed 20 March 2015]

fry, tony, ‘Design Futuring’, 2009

Xefirotarch.com, ‘XEFIROTARCH / HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO / HELSINKI LIBRARY’, 2015 <http://xefirotarch.com/current/index.php/helsinki-library> [accessed 20 March 2015]

Zaha-hadid.com, ‘Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Centre - Architecture - Zaha Hadid Architects’, 2015 <http://www.zaha-hadid.com/architecture/abu-dhabi-performing-arts-centre/> [accessed 20 March 2015]