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It is refreshing to read this article as I’m taking my first stabs at animating. It’s sometimes hard to imagine how such process of using new techniques could be applied to our thought and design process and potentially contribute to new architectural ideas, methods or even forms. However, Ali Rahim manages to lay out an easy to understand context for where the “contemporary techniques” could fit in our today’s’ architecture; not mentioning their larger impact on cultural, social, and political scales.
He introduces the “contemporary techniques” as new effects of the previous techniques, or in other words as a qualitative evolution of the past techniques which in their own turn will result in further “cultural transformations”. Thus, he describes a nonlinear but continuous temporal process that has the “potential to spontaneously self-assemble, and produce effects that are … larger than initially anticipated.”
Further he adds: while the “contemporary techniques” allow for exploration of the possibilities that stretch the static boundaries of real objects, the attempt to actualize these virtual possibilities allows for creation of new and “genuine” architectural effects.
Yet, this ties into what we are doing in class, when he describes how they used animation techniques in designing a residence in Islamabad to study the relationship of the “scale and intensity of events and their correspondence with the temporal cycles of the site,” which almost ties back into what Greg Lynn was talking about in the Warped Space. Animation is one of the effective techniques to use as a design process that has the capability to simultaneously represent and evolve through time and react to environmental forces or contextual stimuli. As a result it is an opportunity to investigate possibilities in a boundary-less gray zone of extremes (such as figure or ground, building or landscape, public or private, etc.) which could eventually be “actualized” through a freshly-gained understanding of the versatility of the program, space and material.
Vidler talks about two distinct forms of spatial warping; one which occurs on a more psychological level as a product of the ideals and culture of modernism and the other which on a smaller scale is a hybrid result of unconventional use of different media and thus breakthrough representational methods. Psychological and artistic warping, although are different, they are closely related; and in the fabric of the large city _ metropolis_ they begin to merge.
Further, Vidler introduces the “Neoformations of Morphosis”. Their new and unconventional forms are a result of their clear understanding of psychological, cultural and social values and ideals, and their eager attempt to push the boundaries of the digital technology and the artistic media. They tend to warp the conventions of the past in promise for new forms that are boundless to dogma of modernism.
Vidler talks about several ways that Morphosis has broken the past conventions (modernism) by reinterpreting new forms or even new methodologies (modernity). He talks about “Scapelands” where Morphosis creates a landscape which refuses to “rest in horizontal” and where it adopts a new from and that from becomes a new standpoint. Then he talks about “ Morphing the type” which describes Morphosis’ return to typology, by creating a warped space for the same conventional function( ex. Ove Arup offices, Los Angeles).
In “Tipping the Wall” he describes an architecture that defies gravity and has no reference to vertical or horizontal, a space where the floor becomes the wall and the wall becomes the ceiling and where there is no distinction between the planes. And at last he describes Morphosis’ interpretation of the “Burrow” , an architecture buried in the earth and formed by the earth. This time the distinction between the earth and the architecture is blurred, and the ground warps to womb the architecture buried inside of it.
I wished I was introduced to this system of thinking about the architectural form and its properties two years ago when I was just about to start with my studio sequence. What we think and we are often taught about architecture is a rigid description of a static form which is frequently exemplified for its timelessness* and formal purity*.
Consequently, from the very beginning we tend to bound ourselves to what Lynn calls an “abstract space of design”, which in a nut-shell is our ideal dry pen and paper with neutral Cartesian coordinates. We are asked to design spaces, rooms, or buildings that are often meant to be occupied by human beings; by people who are just like us: alive, animate and aware, who live in a real world environment with real world rules such as " gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions, and communication ”. Thus, I wonder: just like our actual surrounding environment, shouldn’t our design space be assumed as an intricate field of interactive forces and motions?!
And if so, in such animate environment of design, concept of time also becomes a critical component, which could ultimately defy the ideal of permanency and monumentality of the traditional models of architecture.
Yet I wonder if the animate from is a composite response to the interaction between the matter and the environmental forces and penetrations, what is our response based on the traditional models of architecture to these external flows?
Could one argue that what we see today as architecture is actually a virtual response to the manipulative surrounding context, rather than an actual reaction to the body of external forces that govern the natural environment?!
As Greg Lynn introduces and unfolds the nature of an animate form, I couldn’t help but to be critical of the traditional techniques of modeling the architectural form, and question the necessity of developing an animate space of design which follows the rules and parameters of the natural real world that we live in. Should we as architects set our goal to create spaces that are as natural and responsive to human interaction as the real world itself, and allow for a deformable animate form to interweave into its context? , or follow the traditional model of leaving traces of human creations that are static and artificial while their permanence solutes their monumentality and human arrogance?!
It is refreshing to read this article as I’m taking my first stabs at animating. It’s sometimes hard to imagine how such process of using new techniques could be applied to our thought and design process and potentially contribute to new architectural ideas, methods or even forms. However, Ali Rahim manages to lay out an easy to understand context for where the “contemporary techniques” could fit in our today’s’ architecture; not mentioning their larger impact on cultural, social, and political scales.
