Week 7 Readings

This week’s readings starts off stating that architecture and design depend on sources such as clients and patrons, and need to consider the culture, the economy and the scale of the building. Architects are given the budget, consultants, and builders rather than the architect being the prime source to gather these clients, and these decisions are adjusted towards the architect.  The materiality of architecture is seen as either an impediment that needs to be overcome, or just to be placed it down and start again fresh. These impediments need to be confronted as they relate to the needs of practitioners, who ask what the architecture can do rather than what it means. 

Computer based architecture implements a dimension which seems to ignore the materiality of the form, and this becomes a problem in regards to properties such as weight and resistance to which the architecture can or cannot be converted to a real life object. So simply having built a design or architecture within a computer program and the convincing techniques doesn’t say anything about the actual experience of the built reality. A great series of questions arises in regards to the change in design from pencil to paper to virtual design, questions such as whether this “change is quantitative rather than qualitative?” and this places a questionable boundary and limitations to whether virtual design can be designed in a way so that it of the highest standard of what the architect desired rather than producing a series of random models that formed whilst trying to design a desired object.

Reference

Allen, Stan, “Introduction: Practice vs. Project,” in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, (2009): xi-xxiii.

Picon, Antoine, “A different Materiality,” material by design, in Digital Culture in Architecture: an Introductin for the Design profession(2010): 143-169.

Week 5 Readings

This week’s reading takes us to the core of the history behind the revolution of machine technology, and the different forms of energy and materials being able to be formed. The use of these materials and energy helped transform the uncultivated land into cities and towns, and the use of electricity and light on signs from shops and businesses attracted more people. However not all people thought that machines would industrialise cities, but also a new world and possibilities towards design and problem solving.  Through the positives of machine and technology also attaches the negative perspective side which was studied by a German historian named Oswald Spengler who argues that technology was a cause of loss of culture and tradition. 

He also interestingly dwells within the religion aspect relating to creativity and how creativity also contains a satanic side due to its effect on humans to think that the world is built by men, when in truth the all creating God has created all things initially. Machine and technology are viewed as tools which humans saw as an opportunity to gain power and change the land, and had to be mastered and controlled to use these transcendental powers. As these industrialisations were to take place, an sceptical critic of technology and society Lewis Mumford protested that the forms of human-built environments should comply with the organic development in nature in so that organic functions and human purposes may still be intact with this world than to lose it completely. 

References

Hughes, Thomas P., “Chapter 3: Technology as Machine, “ human built World: How to think about technology and Culture(2004): 45-76.

Week 4 Readings

Heterogeneous textures are explored in view of different architects, and he differing and conflicting cultures and individual characteristics produce varying degrees of results. The deconstructivism theory enabled forms to be made within architecture in terms of differences and contradictions. These are seen in projects such as Gehry’s House which was designed in a way that the surrounding environment and the contradicting features and textures were represented in the materiality of his house. These environments don’t just include the basic grass and concrete, but the external materials too such as sheds, vehicles, and exposed plywood. Gehry’s house in context can be seen to be a dominant pressure against its neighbouring environment. 

A new global style by Patrik Schumacher defines that parametric design and the availability of technology help allow the possibility of mass production hence more variety of designs. The view on parametric coding wasn’t just seen as a design technique but a new innovative style which attracts new values and ambitions in architecture. Le Corbusier wanted to view things differently and didn’t want to be limited to ordinary designs and geometry, but a path that takes a pattered and a diverse path with a degree of complexity.  Frei Otto explores these factors in the urban models that he designed, and shows a large amount of components of patterned buildings surrounded by linear shaped buildings to emphasise the continuous differentiation of the path network it portrays.