January 16, 2012 • 8:41 am 0
I am continuing my interest from last semester in painting buildings with light. I am working on a tower right now and I am painting different forms in light. These aren’t images of the tower but I liked them.
iPad in motion
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January 11, 2012 • 4:44 am 0
I am working on my thesis now. I am basically trying to understand the intersection between digital and physical space through the library. I have done quite a bit of research on libraries in the last few months and find them to be some of the most symptomatic space to the problems of competing digital and physical space. The physical library as it exists today cannot exist for much longer as a relic of the way we used to learn. However, the promise of the digital is clouted in physical problems and legal ans economical problems. I actually feel like I have a good understanding of the problems faced in the contemporary library, but what I have yet to understand are the architectural implications of the research. I am beginning to feel burdened by the problems facing the library. I think that media is in such flux right now that almost any physical library would be insensitive or at least have to be imagined as a completely temporary solution. I began thinking about a library of the future but I began to move away from that idea. After reading so much and trying to understand the ideas about the future I have determined that it might not be such a good idea to try to understand the future. Also, stuff is changing so fast that designing for the future would be too much of a guess and I think is antithetical to the way people are learning aand the way things are moving with the digital culture we are seeing the dissemination of knowledge and a redefinition of collaborative work and experience. I think the idea that one dude designs the future library is too similar to the problems facing the current institution of the library. That being said, it also doesn’t seem that the design of the library should be left entirely to to the collective, to the digital mass. Anyways, I have to figure all this out soon. I have strong feelings about the library but I am unclear as to how I should operate on it.
For now I am starting with provocations, just to get me going. I am considering the possibility that my thesis will consist of many (up to 20) small projects. 20, formal investigations into what the library is/could be. The intent isn’t to solve the problems facing the library, but maybe to show them more clearly through speculative projects. The projects wouldn’t all be fully resolved, but would begin to ask more questions than they solve and I think that is probably the best thing a thesis can do for a discourse in such flux as the library.
The image above is one I worked on today. Basically in this provocation for the library, you have to imagine a world where we are completely digital but there still remain pockets of people who need/want the physical book. In this case, the city has become so dense with building and land in the city has become so valuable, that the physical storage of knowledge can no longer itself justify a central site and large scale public building. Instead, this building operates like a vertical, laundry-mat machine but with books. It is 700feet tall (+ a 500 foot pier drilled into the earth for support) and only 10′ wide. It this case the library has been pushed to the parts of the city that are otherwise unused. The library is placed in between 2 tall buildings in a city in the alley. There is one reference desk facing the sidewalk and you just call for the book you want and it rotates like a Ferris wheel to the ground to you for checking out. There is no public space…nothing, just storage of physical objects in the smallest footprint possible. It’s basically like redbox for books but it would have pretty much everything. It wouldn’t matter how you organized it just as long as the person operating logged into the computer which bin it was placed in. There is no browsing…there is nothing…only the book.
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January 8, 2012 • 8:11 am 0
I had this idea the other day for a tower…so I didn’t sleep that night and developed plans and sections and renderings and diagrams for no reason except that i couldn’t get it out of my head. more images to come soon….
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December 16, 2011 • 2:09 pm 0
I never rendered any images for my final project so I thought I would just try some idea really quickly. This would sort of be what the building might look like as you were walking over it. The sharp gable lines start to frame Venice in a new way.
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December 16, 2011 • 1:43 am 0
easily the most ridiculous building I have ever designed. One reviewer called it an “urban beast”…like if you were on safari and saw an elephant…you might go up to it, and maybe even touch it to feel it breath, but you wouldn’t get on it. I thought that was great.
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December 15, 2011 • 1:57 am 2
Here are some of the boards I presented during my final…many of them had models coming off of them which is not shown here as well as animations stuck to them.
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December 15, 2011 • 1:43 am 2
I finished studio. I saw the sun rise 7 days in a row…i was completely nocturnal. It went well and I was pleased with the work this semester. I mean, the project wasn’t as resolved as I would have hoped, but the rest of it was pretty cool. I was happy with the models, all the ipad stuff, and the drawings. One reviewer said the drawings looked like comic books that had been left in the sun too long…haha. Anyways, the reviewers were mostly Spanish dudes and it was a really productive conversation. My first studio critic from GSD was there, Lluis Ortega of f451 Architectura. Also, Michael Meredith of MOS, and Hashim Sarkis, as well as Manislla + Tunon from Madrid, as well as Julio Salcedo of Scalar Architecture in NYC, and Ignacio Gonzales Galan of Princeton and of course my instructor, Luis Rojo of Rojo Fernandez-Shaw. It was a pretty intense room…but in a good way. I think the comments were good and constructive. They highlighted a lot of problems with the project that I could work on further. They also engaged a discussion about representation and how it can provide feedback to the design project. Basically, how representation isn’t and after-thought, but can be used as a very didactic method. I was happy to have this discussion because I focused a lot on representation this semester. I think too often at school we just design and dump some stuff out at the end…that models and drawings are the result, not the process…but I believe the opposite and I was trying to explore that this semester. We went out for drinks afterwards and had some good conversations with the reviewers. One of them told me i was twisted, in a good way and that I should just embrace it and go crazy. hahah, I might do that. Anyways, it was a good semester and I with I could do it again right now. Here are some images from my review…not shown are models, which I will take photos of and show later.
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December 10, 2011 • 3:03 am 8
I am in the final days of Venice Studio. I am barely sleeping now. I will post more images from the final project, but for now here are a couple images from light-painting with my ipad. It is working much better now, but i have to put it down and work on more architectural drawings.
how it happens
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December 1, 2011 • 6:48 am 2
So my friend and collaborator Jeff Goldenson saw my iPad models (there is another one now that is site model/iPad cover) and showed me these guys in London, BERG, who did these great things with lights and the ipad. These guys are so cool and they made a nice video about this stuff…http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/09/14/magic-ipad-light-painting/…so clean. They animate the stills and make like animations of animations sort of…very cool. They call it Making Future Magic. I am not quite making anything magical, and am just completely biting it from them…i just wanted to play around and see how hard it would be to do that.
Anyways, I wanted to see if it could be a relevant way of exploring my project. Maybe the iPad doesn’t just light up the model…maybe it can become the model. So I created a 3d model, took 200 contours of it, animated those contours back together, played a 5 second animation on my ipad as I pulled it gradually through space, with a camera on a 5 second exposure. It took a tripod to get it to look decent, but I am happy with it. The animation was missing a frame or something so that error with the vertical bars kept showing up all the time…woops!
it kinda worked
still not future magic
not quite future magic
OK, so I am gonna put down the iPads for a while and try to finish my project instead…no more messing around. Our final reviewers were listed today and they are some really great architects and I want to have a complete project, not a bunch of interactive toys!
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November 25, 2011 • 5:38 pm 1
So I am gonna make 4 of these for my final presentation showing different conditions about the building and site. The next one will be a small site model that lights up.
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