Architecture and the Virtual: Towards a New Materiality

Antoine Picon, trained as an architect, engineer, and historian, has a unique perspective of how the profession of architecture uses, and is impacted by the introduction of the computer and technology. Many architects see the computer as a threat to architectural materiality, but Antoine Picon proposes that technology can create a new understanding of materiality that was impossible to realize until now. Materiality is never experienced in the traditional architectural drawings, such as the plan, section, or elevation, as these should be used as drawings necessary to create the physical. Humans experience places and buildings in three dimensions, with multiple viewing angles, different lighting conditions, textures, etc. With computers and technology the creation of a walkable three dimensional space, built in the virtual world, can manifest a more convincing feeling of what the experience will be in the physically built world. This ease of design can cause cause ripples of consequences as the true tectonics and scale of design can be ignored during design. This causes a gap between the computer modeling and the physical component as what is seen in the computer may be difficult to create in reality. Technology being developed in the architectural world should not be seen as a new form of architecture, but as a tool to be utilized.

Seattle

Upon arriving in Seattle we saw many architectural pieces throughout the city that play as a precedent for the winery we will be designing later in the semester. Frank Gehry’s EMP building, Steven Holl’s St. Ignatius Chapel, and Seattle’s public Library by Joseph Ramus are a few we visited during our trip. Along with these buildings we also visited several wineries in the Bainbridge Island area whose wine has many different qualities to compared to Oregon’s wine country. Overall this trip to Seattle played a vital role in the research we needed to create a functioning winery.

www.elevenwinery.com/

Oregon Wine Country

Oregon focused mostly on the understanding the grape growing and wine making process first hand from experts. With this new found knowledge of wine, the process of both designing an apparatus and a winery has been simplified greatly. The array of different wineries and the proprietary secrets associated with them has given me inspiration for design, as the winemakers do not see wine as a final product, but an artistic journey. A relation to wine and architecture is seen, as this is a journey both professions go through. The two professions do not have the same processes or the same tools, but in the end they both are proud of the product they put their name on, and are concerned about how people enjoy their works.

Chaos Theory

Chaos theory is an area of applied mathematics that deals with the prediction of situations that cannot be predicted. Chaos theory is also known as the butterfly effect, the theory that if a butterfly flaps its wings in India, that small action can ripple out and become a tornado in the United States. Correlating wine growing and making with the idea of Chaos Theory is a fascinating aspect as one small aspect such as evaporation levels could change the final product. Delicate initial conditions correlate wine and Chaos Theory in the way that both must begin with exact inputs to create a specific output. As in with weather, ecology, economics, etcetera, the smallest change in the initial conditions can change the prediction of the final output, in other words the output becomes impossible to predict.

Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant, and the Supple

Greg Lynn, the author, associates the practices of parametric design not as another system to create disconnected, contradicting architecture, but as creator of a smooth, flowing, folded, solution. He stated that folded design can be compared to a chef carefully incorporating two ingredients together, the two become intermixed yet still retain their individual characteristics. Many systems that we as architects try to combine have an analogical correlation to the culinary world. One can fold many different design variables together, such as material, shape, lighting, and use these elements to create a smooth, blended, continuous form, yet still heterogeneous, without the loss of individual character. This becomes the direction of modern computer aided design as opposed to the discontinuous, opposing, and contradictory nature of modern architecture in the past years. Buildings should not only react to materialism but to the the ever unique situation of context. No building should ever be designed twice in two separate locations as these would not be responding to the individual locality of the surroundings. The term anexact geometries, as stated by Edmond Husserl, responds to such situations of context. With an anexact geometry a form is meaningless to repeat unless it is faced with the same situation which is unlikely surface, therefore a design should always be unique and one of a kind and become the solution for the problem laid before it.

Boundaries/Networks

This article that dealt with the physical, social, and emotional interactions that we come in contact with in our everyday lives. The evolution of our physical world and how time has become such an important aspect of how we live our everyday lives. Within this article I found it fascinating how the social aspects of our lives have also change considerably as our boundaries have evolved. Before our technological advances in what some would say “making the world a smaller place” the social interactions between people based at a more local level. Now we as a society we can leave the comforts of what we call home and connect with anyone we have contact at our home  and throughout the world from anywhere we can imagine. Overall the rate of change of our technology and how it affects us has increased so much that what could have never happened fifty years ago is a normal occurrences. Our boundaries and networks have changed from an enclosed city and a small networked of people to an entire world that knows of and befriends one another, either through business, family, or pleasure. This world we live in is extremely networked and this allows us to be everywhere at once and to know and see what is changing in the world today at a pace that is almost unrealistic.

Preconception

Before the precedent research I believed that the art of wine making had not yet entered mainstream architecture. The Italian Villa or the French Chateau, to my knowledge, was still the desired architecture for the winery and the surrounding vineyards. This was an incorrect assumption as modern wineries have sprung up around the world with internationally recognized architects as the designers. Sustainable strategies are being pushed into the program of wineries with the collection and reuse of waste water, photo-voltaic panels, and computer controlled building systems. Other low tech green practices are also being used such as sheep wandering the vineyard. With the sheep playing the role of a tractor and keeping the grasses trimmed in between the vine rows, a large percentage of fuel can be saved. Contemporary design is being used to manifest a building that has had the same function for 8000 years. With this first design charrette and the precedent research that came along with it, I have a firmer grasp on what a winery was, is, and what it can be in the future.

Wine Studio Yay!

ARCH 551 Professor Lance Walters