Been very silent lately. Moving from Berlin, settling back in geneva, and reading all the due texts I meant to read has kind of push blogging far from my daily errants.
Still, as the hand-in dates are approaching, I'm again writing a lot, so you can expect new posts on a more frequent basis. To start off this batch of posts, here's a japanese answer to the megacity :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRsp6DhxLDU
While searching to refine my understanding of the implication of the spaces of flows in today's architecture and city planning, i stumbled upon this Conference : architecture in the space of flows: buildings - spaces - cultures . Here's how the meeting is described on the site :
Flows of energy, libido, capital, water and information make our lives possible. The buildings and spaces that support our activities inflect the flows; we tap into them, surf them, block them at our peril, or we may be excluded from them. Flows are global, but have local effects. Buildings are local, but their embodied energies flow from great distances, and their embodiments can cause local or distant turbulences. Everything is moving, intensifying, dispersing; growing, decaying, proliferating, networking, sedimenting, eroding.
Understanding ourselves, our buildings, our cities as modulators of flows represents a fundamental shift in sensibility away from the perfect Euclidian geometries of Vitruvian man, to the productive consumer, the desiring subject. Cultures and spaces are fluid and relational, and designers are searching for ways to give expression to these telluric undercurrents that are shaping and re-shaping our worlds. New sensibilities are taking shape, and it is the aim of this conference to explore and gain understanding of emergent possibilities.
The conference, or confluence, will be transdisciplinary, bringing together people who are developing ways of thinking about places and our responses to them, making use of ideas of flux.
Unfortunately I haven't been able yet to get my hands on the papers presented, but that shall hopefully happen soon enough.
Sabine Müller from SMAQ architects has accepted to be the external expert followwing this diploma. Having had her as a teacher (with William Veerbeek from Din architects ) already in Delft while researching Madrid in the Urban Body studio, I'm very pleased she agreed to be a part of this.
Her insights then were very relevant, especially concerning the implication of computation in urban planning, as well as in architecture. During the studio, it became out that the use of computation in architecture, changed the role of the architect and city planner, while making him more of a policy designer. Indeed, the approach was so made, that the reactions to the feedbacks of the computation forced the architect / hacker to "limit" himself in building rules that would generate the desired outcome. This result would then take very various forms, but all be responding to the set rules.
The tools developed at that moment were more about verifying possible outcomes of different sets of rules, than actually generating shapes. They could then be used in such situation as to verify a programmatic distribution, a shading law, or a maximum density regulation. This shall clarify how computation is seen in this thesis, more as a scenario verification tool than a shaping device. Thus helping to have a more rational approach to design and city planning.
Posts
All Comments
