110331 - synthesis

On a continuum without values, everything can dissolve into inconsistency; however if we negotiate its inflections, we can ensure continuities between the most disparate registers, between the most distant eras.

- Bernard Cache
Earth Moves, The Furnishing of Territories, 1995

A synthesis combines diverse parts into a coherent whole. In the next phase of the project, synthesize concepts generated by text mapping and writing with structural and dynamic systems operating in the ground / intervention. This synthesis will function as a continuum that applies value across registers. It will provide a conceptual framework in which the product of material experiments may be evaluated, modified and augmented. You will generate a new series of written documents, and then use these documents to inform a next-generation intervention that considers issues of envelope.

Bernard Tschumi, plates from The Manhattan Transcripts – 

a synthesis of Action (photograph) and Space (plan drawing) 

into Movement (notational diagram)

EXQUISITE CORPSE

Revisit text mapping and writing in a group exercise based on the exquisite corpse game. Begin by writing a series of converging and diverging sentences with combinations and sequences of words extracted from your text map. Explore how graphic qualities of the map inform the writing. Create combinations and sequences of words that add information (i.e. gentle + tiger adds more information because it is an unexpected combination, fierce + tiger adds less information because it is an expected combination). Write these sentences in pencil on a 9” x 9” sheet of bristol board.

Then, in a specific sequence, one after the other, each member of your landscape group will rewrite the converging and diverging sentences on a new 9” x 9” board, adding to it and modifying it with combinations and sequences of words extracted from her/his own textmap. At the end of this process you will receive three new versions (one modified once, one modified twice, and one modified three times) of the original document you wrote. The third version will be the most dense and contain the most vocabulary, use it to frame ideas about converging and diverging sequences of movement through qualitatively different spaces in your landscape / intervention.

ENVELOPE

Develop a next-generation version of your intervention responding to exquisite corpse writings while also considering these two definitions of envelope:

1. An envelope is a membrane continuously enfolding interiority and exteriority. This is more like the skin of a body with all its textures, curvatures, and folds than a normative architectural system of walls, floors, and ceilings.
2. An envelope is a set of performance limits, i.e. the performance envelope of an aircraft. The performance of envelopes in your project will be measured in terms of sunlight control and the framing of movement sequences. 

The intervention must address both definitions of envelope given above. Build a new model and draw two 1/4” scale vertical sections of the intervention in the landscape. Sections must document as many different spatial experiences as possible, include shadows and scale figures, show deep space by calibrating line-weight and line-type.

110322 - systems

The organization of a machine [system]…only states relations between components and rules for their interactions and transformations…
- Humbert Maturana & Francisco Varela
Autopoiesis and Cognition 1972

A system is a set of components defined by ‘their interactions and transformations.’ The organization of a system emerges from consistently enacted behaviors among its components. Low-level, part-to-part interactions among the components of a system produce pattern and organization at a higher level. Architects work with systems that have structural (pattern and organization) and dynamic (movement and transformation) aspects.

   Louis Kahn – 

traffic flow study for Philadelphia city center

Busby Berkeley –

42nd Street Musical

Kahn’s traffic flow study and Berkeley’s musical choreography exemplify systems with structural and dynamic aspects. The structural aspect of the system in Kahn’s diagram is the spatial organization of pedestrian and vehicular traffic flows; the dynamic aspect is movement along these flows. The structural aspects of Berkeley’s choreography are the positions and orientations of bodies in space and their relations to one another; the dynamic aspects are the movements and transformations of these bodies. Note that one of these systems is described theoretically in a diagram and the other is realized in physical space.

ATTACHMENT SYSTEM

Develop a system for introducing the light filter to the landscape. Consider structural aspects of this system:

• associate specific modules of the light filter with specific molding pieces, units and/or strands in the landscape
• position and orient the light filter relative to the landscape
• control passage of sunlight through the light filter 

Consider dynamic aspects of this system:

• transform position and orientation of the light filter as it moves across the landscape
• transform how sunlight is controlled across the light filter
• organize flows of bodies through spaces created by the landscape and light filter

Study this system in physical and digital models. Physical models must be built in basswood on the foam landscape. Scale models to 1/4” = 1’-0”.

SYSTEM DIAGRAM

Diagram structural and dynamic aspects of the attachment system.

Structural aspects deal with:

• connections between light filter and landscape
• how light filter modules are positioned and oriented relative to landscape
• how light filter modules are positioned and oriented relative to sunlight

Dynamic aspects deal with:

• how structural aspects transform
• flows of bodies through spaces and across surfaces

This diagram will be an extension of the material analysis drawings (modeled in Rhino, graphics and notations in Illustrator).

110321 - grounds

Here are my notes from Rajchman, Grounds:

This essay uses the word ‘ground’ as a starting point from which to unfold architectural / philosophical possibilities.

For Wolfflin, ground has to do with a basic formlessness. The will, as a vital force in immanent things must try to overcome this formlessness. ‘Force of form’ pulls us up from formlessness. Notions of regularity, proportion and symmetry derive from this idea.

In The Radiant City, Le Corbusier declares ‘natural ground’ to be the bearer of disease, and the ‘enemy of man.’ Thus buildings should be separated from natural ground. Severing the relationship to ‘natural ground’ gives a building an autonomy; it is free to become monochromatic planes set on pilotis barely touching the ground.

This is a type of un-grounding, a freedom from the weight of tradition. Artificial rather than natural, abstract rather than figural (abstract in the sense of a universal language reproducible anywhere).

Oppositional ways of thinking about ground:

• natural vs. artificial 
• organic vs. abstract 
• figural vs. geometric 
• contextual vs. abstract

Replacing the first with the second is meant to bring about a ‘revolution.’ What non-oppositional ways are there to consider the issue of ground?

Questions concerning ground (and becoming ungrounded) will address the following:

1. a move away from ‘proper’ visual form, form-giving movement prior to the ground
2. becoming ungrounded is not something that happens once and for all, but it is a potential force 
3. notions of history or memory that move away from progressive time to more complex time

At a certain point in Eisenmann’s work, he treats urban sites as superimposed layers of ‘memory’. The ‘geology’ of urban memories can then be reconfigured to produce a type of ungrounding. The artifice generated here is different from Le Corbusier’s artifice, more Piranesi than Mondrian.

For Eisenmann, fiction comes before narrative and sure judgment, he moves away from “progressivism” and the idea of a complete-able architectural revolution toward something more like Borges’ garden of forking paths. Joints of time can come out of joint.

Matta-Clark’s cuts through buildings (unbuilding or undoing) provide another way out of contextualism. His interventions were seen as a resistance to attempts to revive the context of the historical city through architectural form.

This may be seen as a continuation of Smithson’s notion that the Earth is not a stable ground, but an entropic force, constantly undoing formal structures.

Another type of ungrounding derives from ‘dynamic topologies’ the move away from classical relations between gravity and vision, weight and upright posture. In this case, formlessness becomes a positive feature of space.

“…the faceless figures in the painting of Francis Bacon reveal an undoing of the Albertian relations between face and ground in favor of another kind of corporeal space shown as well in the loss of the skeleton/flesh relation, flesh becoming “meat” – soft, malleable, perhaps even bloblike.”

Groupe Espace (Virilio, Parent) spoke of rejecting vertical and horizontal axes in favor of the oblique – a move that should redefine architecture. Oblique function allowed for planes oriented toward movement and a ‘re-eroticization’ of the ground as a folded or pleated force-field.

This reflected Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the ground in architectural space should be a part of a more general rediscovery of the body, a phenomenological critique of abstract Cartesian space.

Virilio departs from the traditional phenomenological view of a corporeally grounded ‘lived’ space in which the Earth is stable, and instead works with a dynamic conception of the body. These movements are not about going from one fixed point to another, but are traces of an unbounded space.

Virilio says that we are constituted by a ‘corporeal “trajectivity” prior to our subjectivity and objectivity.’ This is another way to imagine becomings of cities and bodies and the spaces in which these becomings transpire.’

As axonometric drawing can produce an overly rectilinear, segmented view of space that dynamic topology can overcome, a programmatic view of space can produce an overly operational view of space that might be superseded by a more affective diagram. What types of spaces might this thinking imply?

We must understand ourselves as vague or indeterminate beings prior to being tied to fixed grounds.

Indeterminate spatial beings are not calculating individuals, members of organic communities, or participants in civil society. Instead our social beings are intersections and assemblages of indefinite trajectories through time and space.

‘Traditional’ social space is said to be grounded in tradition and possibly even in a specific location. The individual is an integral member of an organic whole. ‘Nurturing community.’

‘Modern’ social space is ungrounded from tradition and location. The individual is an atom drifting through undifferentiated space. ‘Possessive individual.’

As an alternative, modernity is a process that turns us into indeterminate beings that do not fit into grounded collective narratives and are not simply individual units in self-organizing processes. “The modern world unleashes patterns of demography or migration that put people in situations where…they are no longer able to tell straight narratives of their ‘origins.’”

We are all potential ‘anybodies,’ the life of a body is indefinite, ungrounded. There is something ‘yet to be constructed’ in an anybody. And this ‘yet to be constructed’ is particular. We are at once close to (particular) and far from (indeterminate) ourselves.

Once the life-world is understood as being ungrounded, we are free to move with lightness. “Movement and indetermination belong together, neither can be understood without the other.”

110321 - atlas of novel tectonics

Here are my notes from Reiser + Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics:

2. Difference in Kind / Difference in Degree – Meaning that is assigned and fixed (chess) vs. meaning that is acquired in context (go).

3. The Unformed Generic: Form Acquiring Content – Projecting content and scale into an unformed field. The field implies no specific scale of content. The stain is at once generic and specific. It contains a wide range of variations.

4. Similarity and Difference – Difference can emerge from similarity and similarity can emerge from difference. Things that look the same may perform differently and things that look different may perform similarly.

5. Variety (Difference) vs. Variation (Self-Similarity) – Intensive quantity generates a whole irreducible to the sum of its parts. Differential repetition is a means of handling program.

7. After Collage: Two Conditions of the Generic – Transformation is a quality perceived through deployment of quantity. Difference is a product of transformation. The universal is understood a “progressive differentiation.”

10. Selection vs. Classification – Typologies are important because they have range within limits. Selection within this range is based on performance of program relative to type.

11. Intensive and Extensive – “The most important distinction in our changed notions of architectural design is the shift from geometry as an abstract regulator of the materials of construction to a notion that matter and material behavior must be implicated in geometry itself.”

Intensive = properties of matter with indivisible differences, gradient. Temperature
Extensive = properties of matter with divisible differences. Mass
Potted plant, intensive proliferation, and extensive limit.

12. Geometry and Matter – Extensive and intensive qualities (quantities) collaborate in the production of architecture. Codes and other constraints can be considered extensive while material systems generate intensive characteristics.

13. Folly of the Mean – The mean is expected, extremes are where there is potential to innovate. The Aristotelian mean is justified in terms of human conduct and gets transferred to proportional systems.

21. Exchanges among Systems – “The architect is, in effect, neither a passive observer of determined systems nor a determined manipulator of passive material, but rather, the manager of an unfolding process.”

24. The Diagram – The diagram is not about the thing itself, but its relation to its context, milieu, or environment. Relationships may change due to scale shifts or behaviors may move from one scale to another. The diagram tracks performance (of relationships) as an abstract model of materiality.

34. Systems Becoming Other Systems – Even received structural systems have the capacity to be transformed along a gradient. New potentials emerge between the standards or norms.

38. Operating under Surfeit of Information – The management of a material process (like cooking) occurs at a different level than scientific research (the minutia are not directly controlled nor are they necessarily understood). This is acceptable because it is the larger scale effects that are important.

39. Asignfying Signs – An asignfying sign is an indication of material quality and performance. It is a locus for becoming, not a linguistic reading. It promotes production of the unforeseen rather than representing the known.

110221 - emergence

Here are my notes from Steven Johnson, Emergence:

Introduction

Slime mold: oscillation between a single creature and a swarm.

Morphogenesis: the development of ever more complex structures out of simple beginnings without any ‘master planner’ calling the shots. “Bottom-up behavior.”

Simple agents follow simple rules to generate complex structures. They operate according local conditions, not a knowledge of the whole.

Positive feedback loops encourage particular behaviors to take shape.

Behaviors (or qualities) identified in emergent systems are only recognizable at the collective scale, not at the scale of an individual agent.

Emergent systems are operative in diverse fields. The systems are similar, but the medium in which they operate is different.

Emergent systems get their intelligence from “masses of relatively stupid elements rather than a single, intelligent ‘executive branch.’”

Emergence is movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication, however a system is not emergent until it displays some type of macro-behavior.

Adaptive emergent systems adjust themselves until a productive or useful macro-behavior is produced. Emergence without adaptation is like snowflakes, beautiful but useless.

Tuning the system. Given a stated goal, how do you make an emergent system adaptive?

Control Artist

Cannot predict results just by looking at the rules. The system must live before it can be understood.

Our tendency is to think of systems such as flocking birds as having a leader rather than a set of the simple rules that each bird follows.

Emergent systems obey rules defined in advance; the rules govern micro-motives. Macro-behaviors are controlled indirectly. “All you do is set up the conditions you think will make that behavior possible. Then you press play and see what happens.”

New form of programming, software that is “grown” rather than “engineered.” Programming that is ‘more like baking a cake’ than ‘engineering a machine.’

In the fitness landscape, there are local maximums. Finding global maximums is a process of trial and error.

‘Fitness’ implies that there is a gauge for success.

The rules of the game and the world of the game can be explored simultaneously. As a society we are becoming more tolerant of being somewhat out of control. We are more tolerant of the phase where the rules don’t all make sense.

Emergent systems are controlled “from the margins,” therefore the unexpected is possible.

“Rules give games their structure, and without that structure, there’s no game: every move is a checkmate, and every toss of the dice lands you on Park Place.”

A game where anything can happen is, by definition, not a game.

Emphasizing rules may seem antithetical to an open-ended, exploratory system, but this is not the case. The capacity for growth and experimentation relies on low-level rules.

“Emergent behaviors, like games, are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”

In game design where a player has oblique control, it is up to the game designer to determine how far to the margin the player’s control will be located. Too much or too little control results in a poor game.

Designers have a feel for the middle ground between too much control and too little.

110310 - over the break

Keep pushing your project forward over spring break.  Spend time working in studio and away from studio.  Travel with your laptop.  For those of you who are behind, this is an opportunity to complete any incomplete midterm requirements.  For those of you who are caught up, this is a time to develop the light filter and tracking document further, as well as to modify / augment your work in response to criticism received in the review.

On Monday 3/21, we will discuss readings and have a pin-up of work done over the break.  We will discuss Rajchman's Grounds and Johnson's Emergence, which were assigned earlier; and Reiser & Umemoto's Atlas of Novel Tectonics [excerpts].  All the readings are available for download here on the blog.  After the pin-up I will meet with each of you individually about your midterm evaluation.  Fill out the top half of the sheet (which I emailed) and bring it to the meeting.

Email me photos of models, pdfs of drawings and jpegs of images for feedback during the break.

110308 - material analysis 2

Examples of individual material analysis drawings.  Go here for a slideshow of more drawings and here for the handout that introduced this exercise.

Yoshiki Mino

 

  

 Sol Ok

 

110307 - material analysis

Example of the material analysis drawings.  This material is composed of wood molding profiles, cut into parts, in assemblies of increasing scales (unit, strand, braid) to construct a landscape condition.  Go here for a slideshow of more drawings and here for the handout that introduced this exercise.

 unit - sol, girolamo, jenny r, abraham

strand - ned, aimee, jenny b

braid - alyssa, julie, matthew, yoshi

110228 - instrument

This expanded notion of materiality…liberates form from a dualist approach that separates ideas from substances, objects from subjects, and production from perception. Today, abstract and dynamic materials can be precisely measured and visualized with the aid of digital software, and merged with concrete materials used to produce the design of built forms. It allows built forms to address multiple causes and hybrid concerns, and allows us to redefine the role of function in built forms…

Farshid Moussavi 
The Function of Form, 2009

Design a form with a function – an instrument for tracking and filtering sunlight. Designing this instrument will not separate ideas from materials; it will aim to address ‘hybrid concerns’ within a particular material logic. Consider how sharkskin merges material and function while simultaneously being hydrodynamically efficient and resistant to microbial infection. Consider how Francois Roche’s building “that never dies” works as an instrument tracking the moon through the sky, and how drawings of the project associate paths of celestial bodies with geometry of the building.

Microscopic image of sharkskin

 

Francois Roche, R&Sie(n) – 

The building “that never dies”

SUNLIGHT FILTER

The instrument will track and filter sunlight with a graduated series of apertures and fins. It will reflect material logics of units and strands, curving and twisting while distributing apertures and fins of varying depth. Explore potentials for the instrument to address hybrid concerns – how can it filter sunlight and simultaneously create enclosed spaces?

Construct a physical model of the sunlight filter from two-ply bristol board. Build it to the following specifications:

• width = approx. 9”, length = approx. 18”
• depth of apertures/fins must vary at least between 1/2” and 3”
• apertures and fins must filter sunlight differently for different times of the day and year
• the physical model of the sunlight filter must be rigid and self-supporting

Use Rhino to study how aperture and fin configurations control the passage of sunlight and to study how the sunlight filter is associated with geometry of units and strands.

TRACKING DOCUMENT

Develop a document tracking how the light filter controls sunlight. This document must show superimposed shadows for at least five different lighting conditions occurring at different times of the day and year. Use Rhino to render shadows from multiple views. Compose the document in Illustrator.

110221 - strand studies

Examples of curving / rotating strands built from cut and re-assembled bits of straight extruded wood molding profiles.

 Alyssa, Yoshi, Matthew, Julie

  

 

  Alyssa, Yoshi, Matthew, Julie

  

 

 Ned, Jenny B, Aimee

  

 

Sol, Girolamo, Jenny R, Abraham

110220 - (un)grounding

…one might say that the concept of “program” may dispose us to an overly operational view of the space through which our bodies acquire their trajectivity, which another less programmatic, more affective diagram might allow us to see. A new question arises: What kinds of spaces or constructions might accommodate, show, facilitate, release these ungrounded sorts of movement, encounter, connection, for example in urban spaces, and the ways in which we fill them out? What would an architecture of such trajectories and movements look like…

- John Rajchman
Grounds, 1998

In the next phase of the semester, you will be analyzing landscapes of effect and affect. Effective potentials of a landscape are grounding; they suggest a level of stability in the earth. Effect will be studied in shadows moving across the landscape. Affective potentials of a landscape are ungrounding; they suggest open-ended trajectories of bodies in space. Affect will be studied in a text mapping exercise. The aim of these analyses will be to unpack unique qualities of landscape in your project.

Day-long shadow study, top view – 

Ashish Kulkarni 

Conjugative Mass (detail) – 

Daniel Zeller, 2004

SHADOW ANALYSIS

Build a Rhino model of the new smoother, more ‘surfaced’ landscape. Reflect all modifications to profiles, units and strands in the transition from wood to foam. The digital model must correspond as closely as possible to the physical model, but do not expect it to be an exact replica.

When the digital model is complete, use Rhino’s ‘One-Day Sun Study’ tool or the sun path model provided on the blog to track shadows moving across the landscape. Locate the landscape at 40 degrees north latitude, the approximate latitude of New York City. Orient the model to north and to gravity, then render shadows in selected view(s) for every 20 minutes of the winter solstice (shortest day), summer solstice (longest day) and equinox (equal day and night). Create a vertical filmstrip of small (approx. 2” high) still images for each of the three days.

TEXT MAPPPING

Refine and expand branching sentences from the first writing workshop: consider how branching organizes space and time, consider how branches converge and diverge, generate multiple alternatives for each sentence, work quickly by hand in your sketchbook, and scan selected branching sentences when complete.

Select one of the following Octavio Paz poems: As One Listens to the Rain, Axis, Spaces, The Street (find a link to Paz’s work on the blog). Using this poem as a pool of language, map text onto the river-scape. Strands of the river-scape will structure strands of text. Devise rules for relating text with notations in the map. Graphics and scale of text will be modified to reflect transforming characteristics of the river-scape. Create a high-density field of text. Text may be overlapping, but it must be legible in particular moments.  

110220 - riverscape maps

Examples of the riverscape maps.  Go here for a slideshow of all students' work.  And here for the assignment that introduced this exercise.

girolamo carollo

abraham dreazen

jenny rong

sol ok

Great job everyone, these turned out very nicely!  Now the challenge is to see how the organizational qualities found in this mapping work can inform the next phases of the project.  And of course, those of you who haven't submitted the map yet, please do so ASAP!!

110220 - sun path geometry

Here is a Rhino model of sun paths for New York City's latitude for summer solstice, equinox, and winter solstice.  You'll notice that each hour is divided into three segments of 20 mins. each.  So bring this into your landscape model, scale as necessary and render a sequence for each of the three days by placing a directional light on each point aimed toward the center of the dome.

This will be more labor intensive then using Rhino's sun animation tools, but will yield accurate results.  Hopefully it will give you a better idea of sun path geometry.  Let me know if you find any problems with the model.

110211 - limit / surface

A move away from ameliorative and scenographic designs toward more productive, engendering strategies necessitates a parallel shift from appearances and meanings to more prosaic concerns for how things work, what they do, how they interact, and what agency or effects they might exercise over time. A return to complex and instrumental landscape issues involves more organizational and strategic skills than those of formal composition per se, more programmatic and metrical practices than solely representational.

- James Corner 
Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, 1999

Whether natural or artificial, landscapes come into being through transformational processes (such as farming, town planning, weather and plate tectonics) unfolding on their surfaces and in their depths. Though these processes may occur on time scales too long to be humanly perceptible, a landscape must be considered more a process of becoming than a fixed condition. Now working individually, you will continue transforming the landscape, testing its limits to produce surface.    

 gobi desert - image via google earth

the netherlands - image via google earth

GROUP LANDSCAPE

Before beginning individual landscapes, the group landscape and material analysis must be complete. The landscape model must be spray-painted with Krylon indoor/outdoor primer in All-Purpose Gray. This is available at Janovic and other paint/art stores around the city. Call ahead for availability.

INDIVIDUAL LANDSCAPE

Choose an 18” wide x 36” long zone of the group landscape that features at least three strand crossings and significant quantities of horizontal surface. Rebuild this portion of the landscape in foam. Modify procedures for building units and strands to produce larger amounts of smoother surface. Selectively increase the resolution of molding profile parts to increase smoothness of strands. Selectively modify (stretch) molding profiles to increase horizontally oriented surface areas. Carefully maintain transformative and combinatorial logics of the material system though all modifications.

Begin constructing your own Rhino model of this modified landscape. Reflect modifications to the material system in your own version of the group material analysis diagrams.

110211 - landscape material (julie, alyssa, matthew, yoshi)

The system that creates our group's landscape is based on the characteristics of a braided river. Each strand is created by using three different units, all put together in different ways. There are three types of strands and two different types of moldings.

The units are created by 10 to 15 individual pieces that change incrementally within each unit. We tested several oblique angle cuts to explore the ways to manipulate moldings to emphasize the profile of the moldings rather than the surface(top).

There are three primary strand that run individually to each other and secondary strands that weave under and over each of the three primary strands. After creating primary and secondary strands we end up with three bigger 'units' and the four tertiary strands are the ones that weave the entire structure together to transform individual strands into a single landscape.

Unit A was inspired by this study unit. Unit A does have curvature 
in it but the curvature is not extreme.

Unit B is quite similar to unit A but has slightly bigger curvature, 

it was inspired by this study unit.

Unit C has the most extreme curve out of three units, 

it was inspired by these study units.

110211 - landscape material (jenny b., ned, erfu, aimee)

Our landscape is based on the characteristics of a braided river in the way that it consists of several strands intertwining within each other, therefore "braiding" together to form a single project. Each strand is made up of units that incorporate incremental change by deconstructing then reconstructing to manipulate the molding profile.

Our units were cut at on oblique angle and incrementally changed in the length of the piece. With two types of strands, the primary and the secondary, we created a rule system for the strands to braid within each other systematically.There are 3 main streams (primary strands) that run “parallel” to each other, with 2 secondary strands weaving in and out. We followed the 1-3-1 proportional pattern, which is carried out by the secondary strand. With this pattern, the strands are able to braid each other in a systematic way.

Primary strand – This strand is made up of 3 similar units, forming the 

pattern AA CC BB CC AA, and was cut on a 40 and 25 degree oblique.

Secondary strand – This strand is made up of 2 similar units, forming 

the pattern A B A B and so on, and was cut on a 30 degree oblique.

110211 - landscape material (sol, girolamo, abraham, jenny r.)

Our landscape is revolves around the characteristics of a braided river. The landscape is created by systematically cutting and reattaching moulding in order to form units and later, strands. Each unit incorporates an incremental change in some aspect such as cutting the moulding at an oblique, horizontally or vertically, changing the length of each piece, or the rotation at which the pieces are being reattached at. Units are developed which are then attached to one another to create strands. The strands are then systematically braided together to form the landscape.

We have developed two types of strands, the primary and the secondary. In our landscape, the primary strands touch each other while the secondary strand braids with a primary strand and one other secondary strand.

primary strand

secondary strand

110203 - multiplicities

Multiplicities are rhizomatic…A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as a multiplicity grows).

- Gilles Deleuze
Rhizome Versus Tree

A multiplicity is an organization belonging to the many.  A multiplicity is a flexible body that alters its configuration as it repeats (see images below).  A multiplicity is defined from its outside through relationships with other multiplicities.  Units and strands becoming landscapes are multiplicities.  Repetitive alterations to their configurations define transformative logics.  Relationships with other units or strands define combinatorial logics.

Four dimensional projections – 

E. Jouffret, 1903 

   Recursively patterned landscape – 

Tom Beddard, 2011 (www.subblue.com)

MATERIAL DEVELOPMENT

Transformative and combinatorial logics derived from the geometries of molding profiles, units and strands yield a type of material.  Careful maintenance of these logics – even as they are adjusted in response to the braiding diagram­ – will produce order and pattern in the material as it is worked.  Do not allow other externally defined constraints ­– size, structural integrity and opacity of the landscape – to override internally defined rules for incremental change (transformative logics) and attachment (combinatorial logics).

MATERIAL ANALYSIS

In Rhino, model the molding profiles, units and strands used to build the landscape.   From these models, develop a series of diagrams that unpack the derivation and assembly of this material. Indicate the following:

• How analyzing curvatures of molding profiles informs cutting and reattaching parts to form units.
• How units attach, rotate, etc. to form strands.
• How strands braid with each other to form the landscape. 

Develop notations using line-weight, line-type, tone, nodes, vectors, cutting planes, angle indicators, etc. to communicate this information.   Develop these diagrams in groups.

110201 - the fold

Here are my note from Deleuze's The Fold - Leibniz and the Baroque. This reading is an excerpt from the book of the same name and it can be found in AD Architecture and Science.

Deleuze’s work informs contemporary notions of society, subjectivity and creativity.

He favors a world where everything is in one mode of substance, in the same level of existence. There is no good and evil, only relationships that may be desirable or undesirable to particular individuals.

Two fundamental concepts:

Difference – there is no identity, only difference
Repetition – nothing is ever the same, everything is always changing, reality is becoming, not being

Deleuze was a constructivist; he argued that philosophers are not just interpreters, but creators of new concepts. In his work he often wrote about other philosophers, radically reinterpreting and freeing them from one fixed, dominate interpretation. This was a way of setting up an ‘encounter’ that would spawn new concepts. Deleuze believed that every reading of philosophy should set up this type of ‘encounter.’ For Deleuze, studying the work of another was inspirational, a resource for developing new ideas.

The Fold – Leibniz and the Baroque, is in this spirit. Deleuze re-evaluates Leibniz and derives new concepts to characterize the Baroque period. Deleuze argues that Leibniz is the philosopher whose thinking can best inform the Baroque and vice versa, in fact he claims that one cannot be fully understood without the other.

Leibniz’s theory of the monad – the whole universe is contained or reflected within each being.

The basic unit of existence is the fold. There are elements of folding in the Baroque and in Leibniz, but only in bringing them together, does the concept gain consistency.

The Baroque refers to an operative function, not an essence (a single style or formal language).

Two types of folds: the pleats of matter and the folds of the soul.

These folds are situated in a two-level regime, with pleats of matter below and folds of the soul above. This is a diagram of subjectivity or a way of thinking about how beings are simultaneously framing and being framed by the world they inhabit.

The first level contains matter folding into itself again and again, ‘caverns upon caverns.’ There are also beings in this level; the animate and inanimate are continuously folded together.

The second level contains the immaterial aspects of our subjectivities, ‘the folds of the soul.’ This level is closed in on itself.

There is another fold between the levels, a ‘style’ of being encompassing one of the many possible worlds expressed by the beings that inhabit it.

The fold implies a recursively curvilinear model of matter – “Matter thus offers an infinitely porous, spongy or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns...”

A fluid is the absence of coherence or cohesion, the complete separability of parts. Hardness is a cohesion or inseparability of parts. A body has a degree of fluidity and a degree of hardness. Neither the Cartesian hypothesis of complete fluidity or atomistic hypothesis of complete hardness holds.

Thus Leibniz proposes a flexible body that still has cohering parts – a series of recursive folds upon folds that apply divisions to the continuous rather than break into separate or unrelated parts.

In the model of matter as folds, relations (or continuities) are folds that may be realized in multiple ways.

The multiple – one that has been folded in many ways. A multiple is not a series of unrelated parts, but a way of thinking about complexity through interconnectedness rather than divergences.

An organism is defined by endogenous folds, folds that come from within, implying a type of sensibility, intelligence or agency.

Inorganic matter has exogenous folds that are determined from without, from the surrounding environment.

People are a type of folded being, folded from within and without. Our modes of being are complicated and manners of being are impossible to predict.

Modernist ‘machines for living’ expressed the needs of the mechanical body. What spaces will be invented for the folded multiplicitous body?

Plastic forces (folds) apt to foster connections, more apt to force change and more apt to evidence a degree of cohesion. “The living organism…by virtue of preformation has an internal density that makes it move from fold to fold…”

epigenesis vs. preformation – starting from material that is unformed and gradually taking shape over time vs. individuals that adhere to a form defined in advance.

A plastic organism can fold and unfold itself, not to infinity, but to extents allowed within a particular species.

Does folding produce truly different types? Or only differentiations along a continuum?

110201 - sandstone and granite

Here are my notes from the Manuel De Landa reading Sandstone and Granite which is excerpted from the book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History:

Meshworks (rhizomes) and hierarchies (trees).

Engineering diagrams (similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract machines) are structure-generating processes.

Is it possible to go beyond metaphor and use an engineering diagram to think about the generation of both geologic and cultural formations?

Rivers act as hydraulic computers to sort pebbles of different sizes. They carry and deposit pebbles of different sizes according to the strength of the flow. For a given period, pebbles of a relatively consistent size are deposited on the ocean floor. Then another process fuses individual pebbles into a relatively permanent structure.

This two-stage process (double articulation) can be found operating in other (i.e. cultural, biological) regimes.

The formation of strata occurs in the evolution of species. Genetic material accumulates (material deposited) until a subpopulation becomes isolated and it cannot reproduce outside its group leading to crystallization.

Cultural strata form in a similar way. People are sorted according to what they can do or what they have. Then these categories are crystallized by religion or law.

This process of homogenization and consolidation to form hierarchies operates across heterogeneous regimes.

There is not as straightforward an engineering diagram for meshworks as hierarchies. The simplest type of meshwork is the autocatalytic loop which is self-stimulating and self-maintaining.

They are dynamic systems with stable states (attractors) and they grow by drift. A two-node system (two chemical reactions that catalyze each other) can grow through the insertion of a third reaction using the byproducts of those already in place. This is not a planned growth. This growth may be constrained by external factors (supplies of raw materials) but it is not designed to meet any requirements of the external environment.

Deleuze and Guattari propose a diagram of meshworks with three parts:

• interconnection of diverse overlapping elements
• intercalary (something inserted between) agents, a special class of operators that effects these elements
• there must emerge some stable pattern of behavior

As opposed to sandstone which forms according to the hierarchy-producing diagram, granite forms according to the meshwork-producing diagram. Granite is produced when magma cools:

• heterogeneous crystals interlock during cooling
• densifications, intensifications, reinforcements, within the material bring about local articulations
• chemical reactions within the magma bring about stable states

Granite is a self-consistent aggregate.

Gene pool of a species = stratified structure (homogenous).

Ecosystem = self-consistent aggregate (heterogeneous).

Small-town markets = self-consistent aggregate. Markets are meetings and exchanges of heterogeneous needs.

• markets come about through an interlocking of producers and consumers
• money is an intercalary agent
• markets seem to produce a stable state in the cyclical variation of prices

These diagrams producing hierarchies and meshworks are relatively simple and would need to evolve and become more complex to more fully describe the functioning of biological or cultural systems. Furthermore, in reality one must deal with combinations of hierarchies and meshworks.

Alternatives to causal thinking (simple arrows going from cause to effect):

• negative feedback (stabilizing or deviation counteracting) – i.e. thermostat, sensor triggers heat production which effects sensor, forms a closed loop in which temperature is held constant.
• positive feedback (destabilizing or deviation amplyfing) – i.e. a self-accelerating explosion, explosion generates heat which accelerates the explosion, temperature goes out of control.

It is important not to conclude that meshworks are intrinsically better than hierarchies.