WEEK THREE - READINGS

CHUCK HOBERMAN - EXPANDING FABRIC DOME

• Hoberman effortlessly fuses design, engineering, art and architecture.  His formation of the HAI (Hoberman Associates, Inc) was founded with the primary aim to design behaviour, to create objects with living qualities.
• Focuses on a dynamic relationship between product and user.  Subsequent design explorations including rapidly deployable tents, miniature medical instruments and juvenile products.
• Places emphasis on the notion of transformable design: objects, structures and spaces that can change size and shape through the respective movement of their parts
• Expanding sphere & iris dome can be considered as prototypes, later adapted for multiple uses
• Development of controlling surfaces defined by geometric transformation, with zero material thickness has been combined with the rigorous design and engineering of hinged and folding mechanisms capable of expanding and contracting
• Mechanism designer
• Transform from original form

Expanding fabric Dome

“The Expanding Geodesic Dome blossoms open from a 14” cluster to a 48” dome when pulled open from its base. When deployed it has the same shape and triangulated pattern as Buckminster Fuller’s static, geodesic dome, taking this seminal historic structure into the 21st century.

Originally exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1997, the Expanding Fabric Dome was more recently included in the exhibition Living Form, The Transformable Work of Chuck Hoberman held in the POLA Museum Annex, Tokyo, Japan.” 

(http://www.hoberman.com/portfolio/pompidou.php?projectname=Expanding+Fabric+Dome)

ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL

The dramatic transition from the analogue to the digital has changed many aspects of everyday life.  Within architecture, it has seen a slow, gradual shift, yet a drastic amendment to the methods and traditions that once controlled and defined the industry.

The Digital Culture in Architecture addressed and exposes the reality of the digital transformation as no longer a good or bad influence within an architectural world, rather it address the direction in which the transition is taking architecture.

As the conversion to a digital world was occurring, Hoberman on a small scale exploited they ways of using technology as a creative medium, rather than just a tool (Archaeology of the Digital).  Within the industry today, the use of this digital technology as a creative medium is the direction in which architecture is heading.  Software’s and technologies are no longer being used as a tool to represent and construct things, rather they are being used in conjunction with computational methods to create a platform for new parametric design.

In Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture he underlines that these new digital methods are causing a revolution within architecture.  Corbusier explores the notion of “Architecture or Revolution”.  Upon this, he forces his audience to believe that only one is preferred.  Can architecture and this ‘revolution’ not be intertwined?

Additionally, is this new technology really a revolution, or is it just an evolution of the old?  And as explored in the Digital Culture In Architecture this new direction that the digital is influencing architecture to go in, is in fact an evolution of what currently exists to adapt and keep up with the modern pressures and desire for greater structure, simplified processes and a greater study of types.

Texts: 

1. Picon, Antoine, “Introduction,”* + “People, Computers and Architecture: A Historical Overview,”* in Digital Culture in Architecture: an Introduction for the Design Profession (2010): 7-57.
2. Lynn, Greg, ed., Archaeology of the Digital: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman, Shoei Yoh (2013).
3. Le Corbusier, “Architecture or Revolution?” Toward an Architecture (1924/1928/2007), pp.291-307.

WEEK TWO READINGS

ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE DIGITAL

• the process of designing buildings became entangled with three dimensional computer modeling around 1990.
• there is a healthy, strong, and rarefied architecture outside of modern medicine
• Urban and architectural design should “demand more body movement and fitter lifestyles,”
• “forcing users to climb steeper stairs, walk longer distances and avoid elevators”
• spatial history of medicine is cogent with practices of control by segregation, historians show, exclusionary practices arise as much from social contexts as they do from medical science
• varied, vulnerable, disorderly, and hybrid bodies are inspiration for radical new approaches to architecture and urban design.
• artifacts from the studios of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman, and Shoei Yoh in order to argue that the core ideas of digital architecture today, notions such as tiling, complex surfaces, optimized structures, and parametricism, were already fully formed twenty-five years ago.
• Today we have to confront the multiple forms of digital documents
• Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Chuck Hoberman, and Shoei Yoh’s offices were considered to have architectural ideas suited to digital exploration
• They used the computer as a new ‘creative medium’ instead of ‘a tool’
• Only hoberman sat at a computer to design
• None of the four architects programed a computer
• Using a modicum of architectural history to advance a critical stance

DIGITAL CULTURE IN ARCHITECTURE (An introduction for the design professionals)

• 15years ago there weren’t many computers in architectural offices
• Design was done by hand – initial sketches and rendering
• 1992 Columbia University Paperless Studio = one of the first large scale attempts at using computers for architectural design
• Architects were confronted by the advancing tide of electronic equipment and software applications
• Today no architectural practice could do without digital technology
• Staggering scope of change has triggered diverse reactions
• No longer about whether it is good or bad, rather the direction architecture is taking under its influence
• The diffusion of digital equipment and software seems linked to a series of shifts in the definition and content of architecture
• TO BE CONTINUE

WEEK TWO TOPIC

“Archaeology” as a theory helps us write “a history of the present” instead of finding truth from the past. By examining this exhibition catalogue under the same title edited and curated by one of the architects in the Digital Turn, the lecture reveals the material condition of the digital and how it allows openings of a cultural condition for technology to enter into both the future and the past.

WEEK ONE READINGS

TEXT NOTES

LE CORBUSIER – TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE (Architecture or Revolution)

• Specialization ties a man to his machine; everyone is held to an implacable standard of precision
• Architecture or demoralization, demoralization or revolution
• All these objects of modern life end up creating a certain modern state of mind
• Our social organization has nothing ready in the way of a response
• These people too claim their right to a machine for living that is plan and simply humane
• Old ownership is based on inheritance and thinks of inertia, of changing nothing, of perpetuating the status quo
• We would be enthusiastic about building, and we would avoid revolution
• The advent of a new age intervenes only when earlier work has quietly prepared the way
• Industry has created its tools.  Enterprise has changed its ways.  Construction has found its means.  Architecture finds itself faced with an amended code
• Such tools are made for improving human welfare and lightening human labor
• If we set this renewal against the past, there is revolution
• Enterprise has altered its routines; it is now encumbered by heavy responsibilities: cost, time frame, solidity of work.
• Low price and high quality
• Everything is possible with calculation and invention when you have tools of sufficient perfection, and these tools exist
• Steel and concrete have completely transformed the organization of building
• The man of today sense on one hand a world that is elaborate rating itself regularly, logically, clearly, that produces with purity, and on the other hand, he finds himself disconcerted, still inside the old hostile world

WEEK ONE TUTORIAL

1.       Why it is that architecture and technology have this relationship?

• Push the boundaries with emerging technologies
• Concrete and steel a revolutionary occurrence in Corbusier’s world
• Relationship intertwined with each other
• Relationship of advancement, more complex designs are created

2.       Why has the relationship been so pressing against modern times?

• Improved “human welfare”
• If we continue to follow traditional ways, methods and theories won’t keep up with modern times
• Old architectural styles and methods won’t be able to cope or keep up with current techniques or technologies advancing architectural design
• Computational design allows for the constraints of old architecture to be removed

3.       Brief the text, do you agree/disagree?

• Le Corbusier’s argument isn’t clear as to whether he is encouraging revolution or not
• Is he saying that Computational ways, new technology is revolution? Or is it just evolution of the old?
• Addresses the breakdown of family structure due to a technology – industrial revolution
• A sense of demoralization
• Loss of generational skill traditions

4.       When does technology become cultural? What causes these changes?

• Changes in technology encourages people to acquire or develop a desire for greater structures
• Technology simplifies the process
• Evolution to the technology
• Egalitianrism
• The study of types = building, software, etc.

WEEK ONE LECTURE