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.
3 comments:
In reference to your second paragraph, I agree the same connection between traditional and contemporary techniques have been established. Simultaneously, in class, Jay has verbally communicated the connection between the earlier lessons in studio and fundamental drawing and their fundamental basis for the compositional values of digital animation.
In an iterative and evolutionary process in the profession as a whole, the very roots of human understanding of space and composition (relative to every culture) is carried through independent of technology. Although the physical technologies may change, human understanding of spatial quality will always be rested on the core basics of relative cultures.
According to your review Ali Rahim states that computer applications can fit to express cultural and social values, which I think it has become less visible and more personal to each architect. Browsing through projects of *starchitects like Zaha’s, Rojkind’s, etc I feel they tend to lack a sense of place (not site). When I first saw the image you posted of Rahim’s project I really thought it could be anywhere in the world, so can this style of architecture really embody the culture of a society in this case Islamabad’s. Or do you think that “the cultural transformation” of today’s society is to embrace globalization to its fullest no matter if architecture suffers the lost of cultural identity?. So the zeitgeist is one world one culture?/// (I’m confused..).
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