IaaC blog

The book includes series of esseys offering a different assortment of perceptions and thoughts concerning relationship between landscape and architecture, aiming to rethink and redefine that relationship.
The esseys are concerning 4 main issues:
1) the way people think about and understand architecture and landscape
2) developement of strategies for looking at and interpreting that relation ( using projects to describe it)
3) inherent connections between nature and urbanism
4) issues of history and culture in respect to the relationship between landscape and architecture

- Cognitive landscapes -

- “whenever we perceive to be reality, it is already framed”

Nike Sawas ” Atomic - full of love, fll of wonder” Art Gallery of South Wales-

an installation of hundreds of brightly coloured vibrating particles on the exhibition,
both visually stimulating and thought-provoking

The meaning of a term material, according to its etymological origins, was inextricably related to its physicality, same as it is with materiality. Recent studies on cyberspace, “electronic nirvana over data lines of global networks” and technological progress lead to redefinition of “materiality”, changing the understanding of materials as physical substances into “immaterial materials”, in a virtual realm. Nowadays materials can be perceived as virtual.
There appears a dichotomy between the virtual and the material world. Despite the increasing to conversion of atoms into bits, as Nicholas Negroponte points out in Being Digital, we still need atoms interact with the bits. If Being Digital is a state of being hooked to the network with one’s point of view flying through empty space, then it is Being Material that makes that connection a reality.
What follows is a question how different is embodiment in the virtual realm from the embodiment in the material realm. Merleau Ponty in his exploration in Phenomenology of Perception comes to the conclusion that the mind and body are intricately intertwined in the project of being in the world. Our vision is perspectival, our body parts determining what perspective we will obtain of the object that is the focus of our attention. . Body without consciousness is dead matter and consciousness without the body has no way to materialize itself. Thus, subjectivity is always embodied in the lived world.
However we can go in our considerations one step futher.
What determines the physicality of materials is its sensual measurment possibility, like for emample visual appearance or touch.
Nowadays technology gradually tend to invent materials, where one of it’s sensual physical characteristics is reduced, like transparentness ( transparent concrete), shapelessness, interactivity a.s.o. Integrating some of those characteristics would create materials, which are still in some way physical, but on a level of perception became immaterial. Their physical structure is fine enough to make them be perceived as invisible. Nanotechnologies enable working on the smallest possible structures, what created a wide spectrum of new possibilities. Understanding material as a structure consisting of milliards cooperating atoms and opportunities of designing them can let us omit thresholds of human perception in the sphere of  feeling materiality. For instance there are enormous undiscovered possibilities while working with substances others than solids, like liquids or gases. Particularly among gases, their existance understood in a physical way, is rarely noticed- human senses does not register their physical features. Therefore repartitioning them main functions like dividing, creating barriers, isolating a.s.o. creates a huge potential for developement and evaluation of science or architecture. Ever since, there was a desire to invent materials that could be visible and invisible in the same time, or such that you can go through them. In consequence the boundaries between material and virtual realm slowly start to blur.  Somewhere between reality in virtuality atoms and bites could overlap each other, physical substances could be perceived as virtual and virtual – materialized.

our group ( nr.4) decided to concentrate on the issue of spacechanging and we came up with the following list of linked key-words to evaluate:

mapping-311007.ppt

The short presentation about global eating in barcelona, exactly in barri gothic - done by agata kycia and krzysztof gornicki

“Using art to provoke thought, promote discussion, inspire action and heal communities…”
The Heidelberg Project is an open-air art environment in the heart of an urban community on Detroit’s East Side.
Founded and directed by an artist Tyree Guyton,the project is an installation out of re-used and re-arranged garbage in one of the abandoned, neglected areas of Detroit;

aimimg to save forgotten neighborhoods,

touches issues of social change through art, “recycled art”.

I have posted three graphics of our group about global eating. The first is a diagram showing turistic flow in the city, local places there and diversity of prices in Barcelona.
It base on some characteristic, small areas in the city which were deeply analyzed by us.The second graphic is about our model. We would like show by it the mess which is in centre.That is really diffcult to define some places by local specifics and to find original restaurants in the streets taken over by Mc Donald, Pizza Hut etc.
That is why we closed the city and some local foods in the Mc Donald’s box (as a symbol of global eating). It is also important to create some kind of suprise by it,
because in whole the city you are often suprised by locazation of some nice places to eat. The sequence of photos shows a part of our research which we did during this week.
You can read it in to directions: by localization in the city and by the prices level.

and some sketches…

What came to my mind after a last class discussion is one more aspect which Robert Venturi describes in his “ Learning from Las Vegas. He analyzes the Las Vegas Strip as a phenomenon of architectural communication.
…the roadside architecture of styles and signs, visible on the highway before the signed building itself, being simply antispacial…
… architecture of communication over space…
“This commercial, persuasive, architecture, designed to be seen by people driving by cars, provoke impact on vast, landscape of big spaces, high speeds and complex programs”.

…the “drive-in” and “drive-thru” types of architecture, world consisting of a maze of highways makes people loosing the orientation in the space. Paradoxically, to turn left the driver needs to turn right, so lost in that overlapping mega-structures he relies on signs to guide him, “enormous signs in vast spaces at high speeds”.
The movies like “American graffiti” by George Lucas or “Paris Teksas” by Wim Wenders also bring up and enroll issues of american vast space phenomenon and roadside culture.

Some photos from “American Graffiti”:

A term “complex geometry” is usually treated as a developed, sophisticated and parametric system, useful in creating new objects. In architecture it is generally related to physical structures and used as a good design tool. However, much more stimulating can be perceiving the same geometry as a void around us.

Changing stereotypic point of view and looking at the same things in a different way, not through matter but inmatter, not through mass but through space in between, can open new possibilities and bring us new experience.
It seems to be necessary to use the same geometric system to describe both mass and void. We have to treat matter as well as inmater as complex structure. As well in mathematics as in philosophy we can find a lot of proves that there is no difference between them. For instance, Paradox of Zenon brings us another point of view, claiming that we can’t be sure if anything like physical being exists. That is why we should think about a void exactly like about the physical objects. We are supposed to measure it, to divide it, to explore it in the same way as we usually do with places strictly arranged by matter.
It allows us to discover new spaces, generate any kind of geometry, play with the whole surrounding, and with all the natural sources. For example in the void we can try to find new spaces generated only by the sun and shadow, noise and silence, by different smells. The only anxiety for architecture is to amplify feeling of that kind of space; to characterize it and to describe it extremely precisely. In this kind of geometry it is very hard to define spaces for people without any deceive obstructions.
In this way void can offer much more complicated and complex geometry, to be arranged without using any physical barriers, pure geometry.

G10 - Agata Kycia, Magda Osinska, Krzysztof Gornicki

Some sites with philophy, maths and new architecture, which devolop this subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno’s_paradoxes
http://mathworld.wolfram.com
http://hipercroquis.wordpress.com/