IaaC blog

Professor Joseph Louis Mateo, in a book: “Object Laboratory, Architectural Papers 1″ proposed a very interesting agenda for his seminar studio 1 at ETH. The agenda was to design a building in a no-place, understood by terms of a total lack of context. The program was a club for 10 000 visitors, playing mostly techno music. Two very interesting issues might be brought up at this point. One is the form finding of the building, which might be driven by new factors instead of quite common ones, related to physical context. Here the no-place idea itself might have been research extensively, what could provide some new insights on the proposed strategy. Second is the idea that the building, after the form-finding process, informs the landscape. The physical context relation is inverted.
The idea of designing in no-place might to be also understood in terms of contemporary social conditions, like in “Globalization of nothing”.
Unfortunately students of professor Mateo failed to liberate themselves form the traditional notions of the physical. Most of them tend to locate their designs in the imagined context of “any” road or motorway. Prof. Mateo therefore concludes that contemporary no-place is most likely to be transportation infrastructure. I think prof. Mareo narrows the term in an unjustified manner. It would be more interesting to try to establish a design strategy driven by one’s feelings and sensations changing in time. An individual in the context of a massive techno-party might be conceived as a no-person. She is taken away from her natural contexts and even taken away from info networks that usually wrap her body. The sensations of the no-individual might have become a much more interesting starting point for form finding than the imagined standard road infrastructures.

We are developing the idea of 3d diagram driven by values read from recordings with Adobe Premiere. In addition to that we are thinking about incorporating the additional information about, for example, the possibilities of sound dispersal in relation to section of the street. Above there are ideas for additional maps of Ciudad Vella or logo-like representation of gathered information apart from the actual level of sound.

New post for digital technologies class is ready form group 12. We continue our inquiry in performative environments. Performative environments are actually executed with augmented skins. Take a look!

This week we were looking closer to some characteristic sites in Barcelona’s Ciudad Vella. Our zoom-in diagrams are available in pdf.

In “Wikinomics” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, peer producing is described as a process that is a natural outcome of contemporary social and economical condition, but at the same time as a process that requires specific conditions in order to appear. Those conditions are: “object of production is information or culture”, “tasks can be chunked out into bit size pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments and independently of other producers”, “the cost of integrating those pieces into a finished end product… must be low”. “Wikinomics” uses Wikipedia as an example of peer production: “a new way of producing goods and services that harness the power of mass collaboration”.
It seems quite common to theorize the idea of peering only in regard to the production of the intangibles. The tangibles mass customization is related in Wikinomics to the idea of prosumers. Consumers become producers by customizing the ready product to a limited extend. Very interesting example of prosumerizm in spatial intervention is Negotiate my Boundary designed at RAMTV.
My inquiry, however, would be more about the creation of an internet platform literally connected with spatial environment. I would like to wonder if it is possible and if it makes sociological and economical value to create a platform (I think we might call it a kind of a wiki) that allows the potentially mutable spatial environment to evolve with time. I would like to see the collaborative mind in action of creation of the physical.

Here is a group 4 try to come up with final idea for the information representation of the amount of noise in Ciudad Vella and the causes of noise at the same time. We came up with the diagram that represents the information both in 3d and 2d. The drawings are avalible at here.

I’ve designed it with Monika Szawioła. First thing we did was taking it to the world:

I think it enjoyed the sun.

…and here is how is was layed out for printing.

The assembly instuction:

We have wrote the complex geometry post on hyperbody research group and idea of performative architecture: http://iaac-digitalarchitecture.blogspot.com/search/label/G12

Our team:

Maria Eftychi

Monika Szawioła

Michał Piasecki

have finished the presentation for the first part of tree research studio.

Our attempt to describe the tree in terms of branching structure drove the method of measurements. We used the Euclidean system and took 3 coordinates of characteristic points. The pyrus comunis turned out to be a young tree, so we found only 4 branching generations, while in ficus carica is a mature. The branching process in it reaches up to 7th generation.

We also took the sections of each generation in a set distance (20cm) so it is possible to model the complex curvature of the trees’ surfaces.

Now we will look at the idea of modeling the branching generations using the quasi self-similar fractals. We would like to thanks the people responsible for maintenance of the park. They proved to be more then helpful and friendly: