Monday, February 4, 2008

I react to:...Greg Lynn [animate form]

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?!

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