Folding, structural and micri-event experimentation

For Week 10
1- Continue your folding exercise with 3 layers of different concepts:

Structure-outside skin (hard cardboard)
Transparency-opacity (transparent,tracing paper, multi-cuts paper)

Interior-furniture (thiner cardboard)

Once you have your first layer, the one in hard cardboard, you should try to redo another layer of the same geometry with a thiner paper/carboard and put it against your first layer using masking tape at points that need structural support. There would be moment where the 2 layers would not match, creating pockets of structural reinforcement.

You could play with the thiner cardboard to fold furnitures, using the same rules (small cut+folding). Do the same with the transparent plastic, see where glazing and opaque geometry could happen.

Document your work in progress with digital photography and set a clear power point presenting your work illustrated by diagrams.

2- Digitise your folding geometry according to the site constraints and the program. You can either use scripting with grasshopper or simple Rhino. Draw diagrams and sketches of your design so we can understand the volume, concept and scale of your project.

3- Bring a power point showing your work in progress.

Example of house using the Oblique and folded design method:
White Base, Kodaira, Japan, by Akira Yoneda, Masahiro Ikeda

White Base, Kodaira, Japan, by Akira Yoneda, Masahiro Ikeda

Adelaide Zoo Entrance Precinct / Hassell © Peter Bennetts

The Oblique Plan, a return to physical interaction with the environement

Oblique Architecture,  a style of architectural design which Virilio and Claude Parent pioneered in order "to work with gravity, with heaviness, the way a sailboat works with the wind". An early, but often unconsidered part of Virilio's practice, Oblique Architecture creates a situation in which "Every dimension, every direction of space becomes a modification of the body". This conception of the built environment, which resonates so strongly "posthumanist" discourses, seeks to engage the body with the environment at every turn. But taken in the context Virilio's larger concerns with "the contraction of distances" and the loss of the human body, the project of creating environments which readily call people to interact with them in unique ways brings about a different type of assemblage than that of the cyborg body. His description of the artist Stelarc's body modifications relates them to Mengele's dream of biology as the "art of creating monsters", and as an offense to human ecology in the sense that this post- or trans-human body pays no respect to proportionality, and in fact tries to change proportion by enhancing speed, stamina, and size-the posthuman is an attempt to escape the confines of the earth. In this light, Virilio's architecture (and by extension, many other parts of the human milieu) which calls the subject into an assemblage, does so in a way to return human-scale to a world that is quickly attempting to render it obsolete. By interacting with an environment, not to surmount it, but to live in it, the function of the oblique seeks to undo the disregard for freedom that is the product of regulation.
Taken from a critic of Crepuscular Dawn, Paul Virilio

from Architectures de cartes postales

‘the last element to be revealed in architecture will be the floor’. That is the key. Architecture has always been about the wall, the column, the roof… The thing that is overlooked is the floor… Architecture in this sense becomes choreographic. Its value comes only from the fact that it engages the body in the same way that the great staircases of Palladio engage the body. Somehow that is architecture.
…it was necessary to discard the notion of vertical enclosure, whose walls are made inaccessible by gravity, and to define habitable space by means of wholly accessible inclined planes, thereby increasing the usable surface areas.
…In contrast to partitions or vertical walls, which provoke an opposition between in front and behind, a combination of oblique and horizontal planes would result only in above and below, surface and soffit.
By setting the structure on an incline, and making every part of the built surface (except for the underside) habitable and accessible, the range of truly habitable spaces would be considerably increased.

The Function of the Oblique, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio

Venice Biennale 1970, Claude Parent

Verner Panton, Visiona Installation 1970

Villa VPRO, MVRDV, 1997

The Water Pavilions by Lars Spuybroek and Kas Oosterhuis, Holland, 1997

Taichung Metropolitan Opera, Taiwan, Toyo Ito, 2006

Rolex Learning Centre, SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa)

Hotel Q!, Berlin, Graft Architects, 2004

Folding planes and site

The Reading for this week
Introduction to Atlas of Novel Tectonics

The Folding exercise with different steps.
Reprogamming the Dom-ino system allows us to investigate on the modern typology and shift it towards an architecture of continous planes meeting in 3 levels.

Dom-Ino system

Folding the Site allows us to investigate the site and the program. By creating a field condition, a site of events, one elaborate decisions, and geo-strategic moves, folds and cuts on the diagram of the site, thus creating a new topography. These steps are the same taken by digital scripting. The new topography is the diagram of the future house.

Diagram of the Mariotti House with elements of the program, Architecture Principe

Mariotti House, Model of the House, Architecture Principe

Mariotti House, Exterior Envelop, Architecture Principe

Site presentation

Site files


The Site and its historical value


The clients


A family of New Australians, immigrants, arrived in Australia around the 60's. Fleeing Europe and a long history of pogroms, holocaust, displacement.


The Father, Historian, Anthropologist, works from home.
The Mother, Director in a buisness consulting company in the CBD
Children: a musician, a poet, and a baby
Grand father, classical pianist
Grand mother,  doctor in medecine


Program


The house is a space of retreat as well as a place for learning. It is a house of meditative moments and a place of happy gatherings. An emphasis is made on the possibility to have privacy but as well a possibility to modulate the openess of the public area. It is a new home for this family, their new axis mundi, treat the living room and the dining room as the centre of the house. It is the place where all meet.
A large garage is necessary, and an elevator is required for goods and disable access. It could be an elevator that follows the slope, a type usual for the coastal region of Sydney.
The parents, the children and the grand parents need to have their quarters, with adjacent ensuite and play or study rooms.
There is a need as well to have protected and very private courtyard, a meditative garden, a place of rememberance for the past, the family history but as well the site past and its complex history. There is as well a need to have a swimming pool connected to the heart of the house, the living room and the dining room. This living space should embrace the view to the sea. Landscaping should be part of the design.

Greg Lynn, Architectural Curvilinearity, the Folded, the Pliant and the Supple

Reading
(this link is available for 2 weeks only)

This week's reading is Greg Lynn's, "Architectural Curvilinearity, the Folded, the Pliant and the Supple". It is a very important historical text published in A.D. Architecture Design Vol 63 3/4, March/April 1993.
Another text attached to it is Claude Parent, the Oblique Function Meets electronic Media.

After the Interim Jury, we were still un-impressed by the quality of theoretical criticality displayed by the work. What we are asking is a degree of maturity in each student to be able to read outside the field of the course. We can direct the readings and the design exercise towards a direction, but the rest should be done as well by the students. It is a question of self discipline but as well of mental hygiene and intellectual curiosity.
University and especially Master's degree are meaningless if there's not a certain level of intellectual autonomy displayed by the students.
In the case of the Greg Lyn's text it means that if the author is referring to Colin Rowe, Venturi, Koetter, Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson, these references have to be studied by the students before each studio session.

The next few weeks of the semester are going to be very demanding on each student in terms of design and intellectual references.

Villa in Bordeaux studied by Mija Rose Yoon Hee Keane and Grant James Bates, part 2

Few sllides from Mija and Grant

Spidernethewood studied by Susan Sohyun Kim and Matthew Mark Senkowycz, part 2

This is few slides from the presentation for the 7th of September.

Moebius House studied by Amanda Jayne Stollery and Ami Meng Wang, part 2

This is a very shorten extract from the 1st submission held on the 7th of September.

The Landscaping was done by West 8