core.form-ula

Have a look at Nikki Graziano’s work, who is a mathematician and a photographer by training.   She is projecting two ways of understanding her work….the right and left side of brain are equally being simulated by her work.  Her work also makes me think about whether people outside of architecture, industrial design,  and sculpture understand space and objects in 3 dimensions or in 2 dimensions when producing their work.

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New addition to our 3rd column scripting++ section wework4her

_Context and argument.

Ted Kruger , in his lecture series, Instrument and Instrumentality , uses Herbert Simon’s distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ sciences to describe the ‘sciences’ as operating on two agendas: understanding the world ‘as-is’ and speculating on ‘as-it should be’. Subscription to, and extension of the argument would mean that ‘applied science’ could be posited as the bridge between the two. Further, (architectural) ‘design as research’ could be argued to exhibit similar properties of using, translating, transposing and adapting the descriptive tools of natural science to engineer an imagined and wished world. However, it could also argued that this ‘translation’ has to be negotiated against more ‘weathered’ concerns of design including discourses on formal language, performance fitness, spatial perception and experience, socio-cultural implications etc. The over-arching context of this paper will be ‘apposing’ the current interest and rapid evolution of computation within architectural design, against such an idea of applied science. read more

The architectural design community is faced with a shift in focus from an object-centric model of design creating aesthetic objects in fields to propose, instead, valid and relevant solutions to complex problems within complex systems. In this, traditional boundaries of ownership, ego and control need to be examined as does the flow of, and access to, elements of the design process. The issue is how to adjust an old model of project methodology which is not structured to support a systems-based approach. Based on philosophical foundations which have been developed precisely to address these issues, the SYNCH Research Group (synchRG), Lawrence Technological University, has initiated a project focused on a theoretical organizational system of research which addressed the idea of systems, curatorship, invited experts, open source standards and focused crowd-sourcing as a core operational structure. read more

In the past, we have seen the likes of Haresh Lalvani and Ron Resch producing ideas that have pushed  morphology and geometry into new areas, but there was limited access to high end computing to generate or simulate them.  Now with your average laptop able to process great amounts of information, things have changed not only in the way we work, but more importantly, how much we can produce and manage.   Enter Daniel Piker, who is producing some incredible studies and simulations of known geometries.  Daniel is using Rhino and Grasshopper to do most of these studies.  Please take  the time to see these amazing animations he has so carefully assembled.

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Branching Morphogenesis is currently on display at the Futurelab within Ars Electronica , Linz Austria-European Cultural Capital 2009. On view through 2009.

“Since its very inception, Ars Electronica’s focus has been on the tension and interplay at the nexus of art, technology and society. Formulating and implementing the future manifestations of this interaction is the chosen mission of the Ars Electronica Futurelab.” read more