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
Just stumbled on this very nice initative by some potsdamer students : http://portal.mace-project.eu/ It lets you browse through user favorites, pictures, as well as browsing architecture by city or architect, and locating the buildings on the plan as well as fetching flickr images.
Seems pretty complicated, but I highly recommend checking it out and helping it grow.
Seeing i am reading a lot nowadays and have some difficulties settling and focusing this reading, i decided to draw a first structure of the theoritical text. It should hopefully develop as follows.
// INTRODUCTION //
Postulate
// THE MEGA CITY & THE NETWORK SOCIETY//
The rise of the Network Society.
The rise of the Mega Cities.
The Space of Places and the Space of Flows.
// DESIGNING THE SPACE OF THE NEW SOCIETY (learning from the contructivists) //
An architecture / urbanism for the R-evolution.
The constructivists thoughts and schools.
The ASNOVA.
The OSA.
What is there to re-use to build the space of the Network society?
Bridging spaces.
// COMPUTATION AS A PLANNING TOOL FOR THE MEGA-CITY//
The city planner of the Mega-City.
The tools of the Mega-Architect.
I a also thinking of postponing the scripting process and developing them in the term of the second process. But I still need to confirm this.
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.
The research posted here is based around fundaments in the Constructivist theories.
As a part of their goals into achieving a "new society", constructivists architects wanted
"...to establish a scientific method of architectural urban creation free of all subjective and irrational aspects, who were, according to them (the constructivists) the main characteristics of the preceding methods (post-1920's)" (translated from A. Kopp, Architecture et mode de vie, textes des années 20 en U.R.S.S. - 1979)
I strongly believe the use of computation is a great tool to achieve such a purpose up to a limit of course. The fact that everything used in scripting can be quantified, measured, evaluated makes it so that it is a method closer to freeing itself of subjectivity than any other that I currently know of. This, of course, is up to a certain extent. The architect / programmer behind the project is the one building his own method of evaluation and of creation which will inevitably be subject to his own subjectivity and (ir-)rationality.
Their quest to build the environment for a new society and the ideas they formulated within this quest, lead me to think that many of the questions raised during their time is still relevant today, as we are entering (or have we already?) the Information Age (M. Castells, The rise of the Network society - 2000). As architects we are faced to conceiving an environment where the development of informational technologies have dramatically altered our way of living.
The focus of this theoretical research will hence be to follow the main ideas of the constructivists in their quest of developing an environment for the "new society" while using today's computational tools and adapting the ideology to today's social an economic issues.
What you'll be finding here is the development of my master thesis @ the EPFL in Lausanne due in June of 2009. It is a research about the russian constructivist school and the forgotten late 70s russian architects, as well as scripting / programming in architecture using MEL. The teachers following this research are Mr J. Huang and R. Gargiani assisted by G. Labelle .
I'll be posting up a summary of my research everyday. Quoting authors from my readings, ideas that have sprung to my mind, as well as posting pictures and examples i'll have stumbled upon. What will also be found here is all the code I will have generated.
This place is also going to be used as a virtual library, stocking pieces of virtual information i find interesting. Hopefully you'll find something interesting here too.
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