3D DESIGN: DEEP ORNAMENT AS ASSEMBLY PROCESS: Carlos Alvarado / Alex Hernandez

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Carlos Alvarado / Alex Hernandez

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Strategies for Spatial Aggregation and Fabrication

Introduction
The seminar seeks to develop digital design skills rooted in techniques of fabrication using a ‘composite organizational strategy’ to execute an assembly that is critical of both making and theory. This strategy embodies a conceptual blending of space, structure and skin into a fluid thickness that is capable of responding tactically to environmental, topographic and programmatic criteria as well as configurability at multiple scales.
The sequence of tutorials and exercises will progressively equip the students with the capacity to identify potential for the direct application of the learned skills in a studio project.
Grounded in this approach is a set of tooling techniques that optimize ‘commonality’ while being capable of accepting data that may form irregular, varied and intricate relationships.
The privileging of an assembly-based technique will necessitate the development of revised drawing types that inform fabrication and construction processes, as well as a conceptual spatial agenda.
The goal of the seminar is the ordering of space and form through the process of digital design, fabrication, and construction so as to create a bridge between thought and practice, through digital techniques.

3D – Digital Modeling Techniques
It is impossible to think design and mathematics as separate terms after the advent of digital design into architecture; calculus is embedded in the operations that gave rise to a new way of performing in design. The digital field allows its calculating power to engender an extensive array of formal manipulations, at the same time the digital environment transforms the understanding of the object by collapsing the vertical and horizontal. Via simultaneously rendering plan, section, elevation and perspective, the three-dimensional devise enables analysis and object to become congruent. The tool does not represent, it engenders, it is a technical apparatus that inserts a generative mechanism, it is a technique. This approach to design through technique has transcended the problem of representation and proven to be effective design tools.
Techniques are behaviors and procedures that are systematic, repeatable, and communicable. Over time and as contexts change, existing techniques may become inadequate, stimulating users to develop new methods through experimentation; over time, users develop new techniques for exploiting the technology, and the technology itself is adapted and transformed.
Techniques are the specific means by which architects can harness and direct the powerful potential of new technologies toward the shaping of architectural design, research, and manufacturing. Techniques are process-driven; they often grow out of trial and error, evolving and undergoing continual adjustment.
Contemporary technological practices employ scaleless techniques that can be applied equally well to the design of products and cities, whereby details are retained from the largest to the smallest scale; digital design strategies operate across different scales and contexts –from the molecular scale of materials to the scale of the body, from the dimensions of a building to those of the city-.

Iterative processes: Transformation logics
As dynamical systems, transformational techniques allow technological practices to access the virtual. Transformational methods entail the manipulation of continuous surfaces or objects through procedures such as cutting, folding, and stretching. The objects are structured as sets of interconnected points in such a way that operating on one area of the object induces changes to all other areas. The precise manner in which an individual change will be redistributed over the whole cannot be predicted.
Each transformational procedure applies a pressure on the surface that generates other transformations across the surface. The interactions between these transformations comprise the ‘versioning’ power of the technique.

Procedure: 1. Performance ground - 2. Pair - 3. Back ground - 4. Field membrane
1. Performance ground is a spatial module generated from the analysis and manipulation of a primitive, either a polygon or nurbs geometry.
The module is embodied with the performance of a ritual, and a scale of a large piece of lounge furniture is assumed to start and manage the geometries and resultant module in relation to the human scale.
2. Two consecutive modules produce a ‘pair’ related by a spatial joint, a hinge that may encompass space in itself, as it creates a spatial and material contact/continuity between the 2 modules.
3. The joining and regeneration of modules generate a ‘background’ or chain of modules.
4. The field membrane is a structural matrix of topological variation, generated by aggregation of multiple components, adding chains to extend in more than one direction, thus producing an intensively ornate membrane.

“Indexical time: multiple static frames of an object in time are captured and superimposed in the same space simultaneously, generating a temporal palimpsest. In contrast, animate design is defined by the co-presence of motion and force at the moment of conception.”
Greg Lynn

The semester will be devoted to the development of an incremental system that goes from one module to a pair, and then on to form chains and extended membranes with spatial intricacy.
It will be supplemented by digital lectures/tutorials in which we will discuss how tooling and prototyping can be explored in architecture. Students will work on the design of shapes and techniques for their fabrication, organized in groups of 2 individuals with specific expectancy of expertise development. In addition to intensive work with the computer, students will be expected to produce physical models to test both the precision and feasibility of their proposals. These digitally developed models may be produced through a computer-numerically assisted fabrication process. Using 3D software and rapid-prototyping technologies, we will analyze and catalog a multitude of techniques for the management and fabrication of complex shapes.

Prototyping
A variety of computer-numerically assisted fabrication processes will be explored.
The opportunity to use new fabrication processes to compress the traditional relationship between structure, program, and skin will be paramount in the execution of proposals, mandating the exploration of both modularity and a tendency towards standardization in fabrication methods.
All projects should present a final model of components using digital fabrication methods and analog procedures to display the logics of assembly.

3D DESIGN: DEEP ORNAMENT AS ASSEMBLY PROCESS

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Carlos Alvarado / Alex Hernandez

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