Matt Storus Architecture

Halloween 2011

2011-11-01T11:15:00.001-04:00

Done

2011-05-19T18:45:00.000-04:00

Thesis done! Updates to come soon.

Thesis: Two weeks left

2011-05-04T19:59:00.001-04:00

Typological Proliferation (in progress)

Crustose Lichenic Urbanisms

2011-04-22T11:02:00.001-04:00

Images from Geologist Doug Waylett's evocative Lichens of Alberta photoset on Flickr

via Wikipedia

Thesis : Diagram Updates

2011-04-17T23:19:00.007-04:00

Continued works in progress....

Thesis: Incubator Typology v.2.4.4

2011-04-12T17:24:00.003-04:00

Below I have posted iterative prototypes of the largest spatial typology: the incubator (aka the Nerd Coliseum). All 2.x iterations shown in the diagram below.

This most recent version is undergoing modifications to allow for the inclusion of multiple variable typologies with different spatial/access/privacy requirements. While the previous helically stepped version produced continuously accessible work surface on their roofs, this has been replaced with smaller discontinuous runs of roof working spaces. I would like to bring some of the previous connectivity back into the next version, while avoiding the rigidity of the pure helix. I will attempt to do this by using an arc-sector strategy (ie pie slice) wherein each arc-sector spans between access cores, and can be variable in its programmatic content.

Thesis : Typology Studies

2011-03-29T23:07:00.001-04:00

Thesis : Site Subdiv Studies

2011-03-12T14:19:00.002-05:00

Early site subdivision studies. These have since been abandoned, but were useful as tools to think about site strategies and relationships.

GSD Beaux Arts Ball

2011-03-04T19:23:00.003-05:00

My poster submission for the GSD Beaux Arts Ball poster competition.

Video + Game

2011-02-26T19:52:00.006-05:00

Last week Greg Tran and I exhibited work from our independent study project in the lobby of the GSD. Our independent study was looking into new modes of design representation, with specific focus on augmented reality video and video game engines.

With geometry donated by several MArchI first year students, we demonstrated the capacities of both technologies in architectural applications.

Video
Current computational tools produce a disembodied representation of three dimensional space on two dimensional surfaces. These representations and modes of design production lack tangible spatial scalar context, and fail to emphasize processional or experiential qualities from an embedded perspective. New developments in video and mixed reality visualization allow designers to engage in an embodied understanding of design spaces, and offer a link between intuitive experience and digital worlds.

As the technology of design representation advances, we must focus not only on enhanced visuals, but on the new subjectivities that those technologies promote. Composite video and mixed reality visualization are one facet of a second wave of digital representation tools. Spatial interface devices (such as the Wii, Kinect, and iPhone) comprise another facet with a great deal of potential. However they have yet to purposefully engage the built environment. As architects and designers of space, we must utilize these technologies in order to project their potential as experiential modes of design.

Game
Traditionally limited to the entertainment industry, video games are expanding beyond their traditional role as entertainment into other industries. "Serious Games" are video games used as problem solving tools, training simulators, and research collaboration facilitators in a growing number of fields including defense, education, science, health care, management, politics engineering and design. Within the context of design, these games have enormous potential as tools for visualization, communication, iterative design development and collaborative design.

As a design tool, first-person perspective games overcome the disadvantages of contemporary 3d modeling software. Specifically, current modeling software fails to give the operator an embodied sense of scale, speed, distance, atmosphere, gravity or sequence (each being a fundamental aspect/effect of architecture). This is produced by infinite zoom, instantaneous movement, wireframe transparency within a gravity/friction/environment-less condition. This working environment favors the analytical at the expense of the experiential / spatial.

The promise of game engine technology is to be able to simultaneously deliver both the experiential dimension and analytical dimension while iteratively developing a design. Furthermore, from the perspective of non-designers, games offer a highly intuitive mode of communicating design intent that is much more accessible than traditional two-dimensional modes of representation.

Thesis : Google Company Town

2011-02-22T17:12:00.013-05:00

Evolving Relationship between Life and Work

Site Organization Sketch

Geometry Detail

Google Opt-Out Village

2011-01-30T14:06:00.003-05:00

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

Thesis : In Search of a Critical Methodology

2011-01-25T01:33:00.007-05:00

Increasingly, I am coming to the conclusion that a graduate thesis in architecture should not simply be an architectural investigation of a particular building type or cultural condition that one wishes to work on throughout their career, but it should also fundamentally be an investment in developing a highly self-conscious, critical and deliberate design methodology.

Let say you were presented with the design challenge I am approaching in my thesis: design Google's new campus. How do you start? What steps follow? What does your methodology privilege, and what does it diminish? A chosen methodology (whether deliberate or subconscious) necessarily conditions the types of outcomes that are possible in a design project.

From my experience, most design is carried out in a semi-subconscious way by drawing on design approaches accumulated from previous professors, employers, peers or notable architects in an unsystematic way. Even for those who deploy a set methodology on each project, it is typically the product of an accumulation of experiences rather than being a carefully designed process.

I typically take on a design challenge as a problem of site context and programmatic requirements, striving to produce an "insightful" combination of these ingredients in order to organize building form. This reflects both my training in undergrad, and my experience in professional offices. And while this is a totally legitimate (if not generic) approach to a design problem, it fails to engage my specific thesis in a significant or profound way.

Instead, I would like to develop a highly refined process that relates to the design challenge at hand, while reflect a fundamental personal set of convictions about architecture's role in the world.

Conversely, the danger of developing a highly refined, yet static, methodology is that after time it loses its relevance in an ever-changing context (cultural, economic, technological, disciplinary). The challenge would be to continually reevaluate one's methodology through application in order to adapt it to emergent contexts.

Parametric Methodology
Naturally, this discussion must confront the most pressing contemporary methodology-research-project (particularly at the GSD): the parametric. The term has become a catch-all for any design that employs digital software to define geometric form and order. As a general definition, a parametric project is one where a set of geometric relationships are defined by an ecology of interdependent parameters (numeric, logical) that can be adjusted manually, mathematically, or based on data inputs (environmental data, material data, etc).

In terms of methodological research, the parametric is exemplary for the breadth of research into its technical capacity. From my perspective, while the ongoing research has produced many compelling Hows, it is still searching for a compelling Why.

One attempt at Why comes from Patrik Schumacher, of Zaha Hadid's office and the AADRL (who will be speaking at the GSD on March 9th as part of a symposium titled "The Eclipse of Beauty"). Schumacher has prosthelytized for the parametric in a number of essays, with titles ranging from The Parametricist Epoch: Let the Style Wars Begin, to Parametricism as Style - Parametricist Manifesto. Schumacher believes that Parametricism is bound to become the dominant "style" in the same way that Modernism became hegemonic (concurrently, it is important to point out that on a meta level, he believes that the a dominant, unified style is a good thing - as opposed to a view that would embrace a pluralism in design approaches). For Schumacher, Parametricism is fit for ascension due to two factors:

First, he sees a strong connection between the heterogeneous nature of contemporary society, and the capacity of Parametricism to represent and organize it:

Architecture finds itself at the mid-point of an ongoing cycle of innovative adaptation – retooling the discipline and adapting the architectural and urban environment to the socio-economic era of post-fordism. The mass society that was characterized by a single, nearly universal consumption standard has evolved into the heterogenous society of the multitude.
The key issues that avant-garde architecture and urbanism should be addressing can be summarized in the slogan: organising and articulating the increased complexity of post-fordist society. The task is to develop an architectural and urban repertoire that is geared up to create complex, polycentric urban and architectural fields which are densely layered and continuously differentiated.

Secondly, he believes that the ecological imperative that has been broadly embraced by architects and society-at-large represents a justification of the techniques:

The new style claims universal relevance for all architectural programs, on all scales from architecture and interior design to large-scale urban design. Parametricism is also uniquely geared to engage with the ecological challenges that architecture must address. Both in terms of techniques and in terms of sensibility, parametricist architecture is eager and able to elaborate adaptive responses to diverse environmental parameters.

An interesting counterpoint (or at least alternative) to the parametric has been developed by Michael Meredith in his essay Never Enough (available here as pdf), and addressed in my Fall 2009 studio Mediums:

Performance optimizaiton is not a fundamental architectural problem. Architecture is primarily a cultural socio-political form, not technological determinism; it's super vague, it's inclusive, relational, it's parametric, but it's far more complex than any of us could singularly map out within the computer and totally understand because it's out of our grasp. Not everything is easily quantifiable, not all relationships are geometric, and not all are to be coordinated into a smooth relationship.

I especially like the last point which questions the emphasis on smoothness or continuous differentiation. While these formal tropes have been made possible thanks to advanced software tools, one must question the underlying socio-political subjectivity they constitute. Furthermore, Schumacher's work with Zaha might still be considered to be operating at the level of an image. The form and its image is produced (either with or without parametric tools, primarily focusing on geometry), and parametrics then comes in to rationalize it for construction in a way that is similar to Gehry's working method.

Instead, parametrics might be used to put a variety of geometric AND non-geometric relationships into order. Therefore there is less of a reliance on a totalizing smooth form, and more emphasis on the parametric's capacity to produce emergent order (again, not simply geometric) that would otherwise be unmanageable due to shear permutations.

Next
Of course, parametrics isnt the only methodology to react against in my drive to develop a coherent design method for my own thesis. Recent architectural history has been filled with methodologies that privilege their own socio/cultural/political viewpoints, and sit within a particular historical context.

My hope is that I can develop small methodological experiments (operating on the context of the Google campus and the future of work) in order to achieve this coherent method (likely in a non-linear manner).

GSD Thesis

2011-01-04T22:30:00.019-05:00

In the next four months I will be working on my design thesis, which will explore the relationship between architecture/ landscape/ urbanism and emerging regimes of employment in a knowledge-based economy. I will be using Google's planned campus expansion to the NASA Ames Research Center site in Mountain View, California as the context within which to design new spatial and organizational models of work and life. The industrial "company town" and its spiritual descendant, the corporate campus, will frame the agency of architecture and urbanism in producing these new lifestyles.

_Work

I am interested the evolving nature of work because employment plays a fundamental role in ordering our lives, buildings, and cities. From a systemic perspective, the organization of employment has structured the nature of education, government, urbanization and culture. At an even deeper level, some have suggested that work forms our basic identity as humans.

In his 1995 book The End of Work, economist Jeremy Rifkin argued that the West is facing a future of systemic unemployment due to technological advances. Just as manufacturing jobs were replaced by automation, jobs in all other sectors, including knowledge-based sectors, would be rendered obsolete by advances in information technology. Rifkin states that "the great issue at hand is how to redefine the role of the human being in a world where less human physical and mental labour will be required in the commercial arena."

While the spectre of a workerless future has been dismissed as fallacious at a macroeconomic level, it does offer an insight into the importance of work in the modern psyche. This attitude towards work is a product of a historical lineage of thought and philosophy of work:

Within a contemporary context, how is the nature of employment changing? In particular, what changes are occurring within agile, rapidly evolving companies within the IT, advanced manufacturing, finance and service sectors of the western economy? While deep structural changes are taking place across all sectors, the aforementioned industries are at the forefront of these changes.

_Paradigm of Organizational Stability
Richard Sennett approaches this question in The Culture of New Capitalism by tracing the history of organizational culture from the present moment back to the German Unification of the 1870s. Building on Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Sennett notes that in Otto von Bismarck's Germany, both civil society and private enterprise were increasingly modeled after the strictly ordered Prussian military. Bismarck saw this as a way to guarantee the survival of the new nation by eliminating the uncertainty that bred revolution. Within civic institutions the role of permanent civil servants increased, schools became increasingly standardized, professions were regulated, and schedules (including transportation and production) were systematized. Each member of society was promised their place, and as such required to buy into Germany's pioneering national social insurance system.

Within private enterprise, the unstable free market that characterized English capitalism during the early Industrial Revolution (described by Marx as "the violent destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as a condition of its self-preservation"¹), were eschewed in favor of predictability and order through the rationalization of time and labor. Just as in the military, the individual functions of each employee was well defined in relationship to everyone else in the organization. This system offered a predictability that was attractive both for employees, and for long term investors - allowing those companies to weather fluctuations in market conditions.

By the 20th century, Sennett argues that this system characterized all large corporate organizations. Adam Smith's division of labor, and Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management guaranteed stability from the employers perspective, while labor unions fought for stability in the form of long-term job guarantees and benefit packages.

_The Paradigm of Instability and Fragmentation
By the late 20th century, the era of relative corporate stability was undone by three systemic factors:

The rise of international investment in the 1970s (due to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods monetary exchange policies) resulted in instability at the management level of corporations, as foreign investors expected and exerted higher degrees of control. .
Global markets began to prefer short-term investment gains based on share prices, rather than the promise of a consistent dividend. Organizational stability was recast as stagnation or weakness by investors. Innovation was seen as the key to short term growth, and this often required dramatic reorganizations of labor and production. .
New communication and production technologies have eliminated large numbers of human jobs, while simultaneously reordered organizational hierarchies. Outsourcing, temporary contract work, and project-oriented sequencing of work (as opposed to the task-isolated work of the assembly line) are all made possible through the speed and reliability of networked communications technology. Furthermore, mobile devices and ubiquitous communications infrastructures are allowing knowledge work to take place anywhere and at any time. The concept of work-life balance is obsolete, giving way to a work-life blend.

From the perspective of the corporation, this new paradigm of fluidity has necessitated complete organizational restructuring favoring operational agility. In a study title Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, the MIT Sloan School of Management attempted to envision how these changes might produce new realities for both corporations and employees. The study suggested that we are moving away from the large organizations of the 20th century, towards smaller organizations that instead rely on a wider network of temporary workers and firms. The business model used by the entertainment industry (wherein small specialized groups assemble for the duration of a project) would become standard for all other industries. This process has been accelerated by the economic pressures imposed by the latest global recession.

From the perspective of the employee, the rise of a free-agent-based, entrepreneurial mode of employment will have dramatic consequences on the organization of society. Recent studies have indicated that up to 50% of new US hires in the post "Great Recession" era will be on a contingent or temporary basis. Consequently, these temporary workers will constitute approximately 25% of the total US workforce. The MIT study noted that since the Industrial Revolution, American workers have traditionally relied on their employers for benefits, training and as a primary social unit. The new regime of temporary work will mean that workers will instead come to rely on professional associations, local communities and independent groups for those needs (just as they had prior to the rise of large corporate organizations in the 19th century). In order to flourish in the face of increased fragmentation of work, workers will need to actively pursue new venues for social interaction and networking (both real and virtual).

_Architectural Potential

The focus of my design thesis will be to negotiate these challenges through the design of Google's new campus. Rather than reproducing the spatial models that accommodated the stable organizational models of the past, I am looking to produce models that anticipate future conditions. My intent is not to pursue the new or unconventional for the sake of difference, but rather the hope is to develop a design that acknowledges the new operational realities of business, while also creating supportive conditions for workers in the new, volatile economic reality. These conditions require not only a reconsideration of the spatial requirements of an office, but also necessitate a redefinition of the relationship between life and work.

_Next

As previously mentioned at the top of the post, the company town and modern corporate campus provide an architectural context for the design of the new Google campus. Google's preliminary plans are unique in that they are planning not only for around 1 million square feet of office space, but also housing, schools, retail and leisure facilities. The connection (at least from a programmatic perspective) to the company town is strong. In the next post I will expand on that connection and describe a programmatic ambition for my project within that context.

GSD 2319 Final

2010-12-17T13:27:00.004-05:00

The following are renders from my final project for Chris Hoxie's Immersive Environments elective at the GSD.

I modeled Herman Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer Office building in Apeldoorn, NL. I was interested in the building for both its material qualities (glass block + CMU's + precast concrete beams), and its relationship to my thesis research into corporate environments.

Completed in 1974, the Structuralist office is composed as a multilevel matrix of platforms that provide working space for a small group of employees. The project fits into a lineage of post-war architectural research into the relationship between working spaces, technology and lifestyle. Hertzberger's developed as a response to both the 1950s Taylorist open office plans and the Burolandschaft projects of the 1960s.

The geometry was modeled in Rhino, texturing and lighting was done in 3dStudio with Vray, and post-production used Photoshop. Below are some process shots that demonstrate some of the iterations of lighting, texturing and camera placement. The full sized textures that I created are also available to download at the bottom:

GSD Halloween Party

2010-10-17T19:35:00.021-04:00

Last week the Student Forum held a contest for the Halloween poster, and of the group of pan-GSD entrants mine was voted the winner.

The concept was to create a "parametric zombie". Most of the GSD halloween posters feature some inside joke related to design culture or Gund Hall itself. I wanted to jokingly refer to the often nightmare-ish projects that often result from the indiscriminate use of tools like grasshopper. The Voronoi (until recently the coolest parametric geometry around) is used to both abstract the figure of the skull while evoking spider webs and fractured bone.

The poster was made using grasshopper's image sampler + an image of a skull. The image's luminosity was used as a boolean mask on a background grid of 2D points. Where the image was black, the corresponding point in the base grid was deleted. The next step was to jitter the points in the XY plane, and filter out more points randomly to create some differentiation. Lastly, the remaining points were plugged into the Voronoi component and offset slightly. The rest of the line/fill/text work was done through illustrator.

*Download the grasshopper definition here.

I had also played with varying the colors based on the area of the voronoi cells and then shuffling the results around to create a more playful composition. I stuck with the black/white poster - which hopefully will prove easier for Student Forum to print with consistency (and save on ink + $).

Voronoi Image Generator by Matt Storus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

back

2010-09-15T23:50:00.003-04:00

After a great summer working with KVA MATx in Boston, its back to the GSD for my thesis preparation term. I am taking three classes this term, pursuing an independent study, and preparing research for my thesis (which will be executed + presented next term).

My courses include:

Immersive Environments with Chris Hoxie, where we will be developing films through advanced rendering techniques.

Computational Design with Panagiotis Michalatos, where we will be working with a mix of custom software and commercial tools (grasshopper, rhinoscript, C++) to generate, describe and analyze geometry from structural and cost perspectives.

Real Estate Finance and Development Fundamentals with Edward Marchant at the HKS.

My independent study focuses on developing interactive modes of architectural representation through the use of mixed-reality interfaces and multiplayer video game environments. I am working with my classmate Greg Tran on developing this line of research, and in preparing an exhibition at the GSD tentatively scheduled for early February 2011. As the research develops I will post links to our work. For now, check out some of Greg's animation and mixed-reality experiments on his Vimeo page.

Lastly, my design thesis will be exploring the changing nature of work in an increasingly virtual economy, and will speculate on the role that architecture may play in that future. Crowdsourcing, "serious games", mobile computing, aging populations, the growth of the Generation Y workplace demographic, the so-called post-geographic workforce, and the future of the corporation (as economic, social and political unit) are touchstones for my research. Expect to see more soon.

secret music

2010-07-04T14:15:00.033-04:00

This summer Ive been secretly having fun with FL Studio making short songs/beats.

Since Im working with the demo of FL Studio, I cannot save and reopen each project. Therefore Ive been cranking out the songs in one sitting (usually <40 minutes). Ive noticed that as a result of working on these songs (as modest as they are), I am listening to music in a totally different way, and with a much greater appreciation/awareness of their structure/components/effects/etc.

Below is what Ive done so far. The videos are pretty minimal at the moment, and are mostly also ways to experiment (and have fun).

My youtube channel and CBC Radio 3 Page will be updated with new tracks as soon as I make them.

*Headphones Recommended*

1313: More Primitives

2010-04-23T02:26:00.002-04:00

1313: Primitives

2010-04-21T14:19:00.005-04:00

2408: Inorganic Assemblies: Print Screen

2010-04-12T00:50:00.008-04:00

Unfiltered screenshots from current work-in-progress for Marc Fornes' Inorganic Assemblies Rhinoscripting/Fabrication seminar.

A surface is recursively populated with cubes, the network connections between cubes is mapped, and those lines become the framework for the final "table".

6421: Digital Craft

2010-04-08T12:50:00.015-04:00

I am taking a class at the GSD this term titled Digital Craft, taught by Veronika Schmidt. The aim of the class is to construct an installation in the GSD using a combination of digital fabrication techniques and hand "craft" techniques.

My group (including Greg Tran, Victor Lorenzo and Kelly Provot) is planning an installation on the balconies/fire exit stairs on the north side of Gund Hall (pictured below).

Our project uses the tie-holes in the concrete wall as an infrastructure to support the growth of artificial "ivy" made with generic Schedule 40 PVC pipe and custom fabricated joints. We hope to populate the empty tie holes with various types of joints, and "grow" the piping across the wall.

The installation explores ideas about the relationship between generic and custom construction components, while also aiming to "soften" the shear concrete face of the wall, using a material palette that imitates the internal structural/hvac elements of the GSD.

Connect-the-dots strategies for "ivy" growth:

The support concept is to fabricate custom joints that will friction-fit inside the existing tie-holes, and be able to support a number of PVC pipes. The negative mold for the joint will be 3D printed with the Polyjet, and multiple copies will be produced by pouring a rubber casting material into that mold.

Possible growth patterns:

Views from the 5th floor level:

Joint testing on-site:

Heat bending pvc tubes by (mis)using the shop vacuform machine:

On site single module mockup:

Next steps: fabricate several mock-ups of the mold to test for its capacity to carry the weight of the PVC. Based on the time it takes to cast a single mold, we can determine (given the short amount of time left) how many tie holes we will be able to populate.

Also - test out glow-in-the-dark spray paint on the pvc. During the day, the pipes will appear as solid white elements contrasting against the concrete wall. At night, they will begin to glow and create an interwoven illumination pattern.

New Mini-Portfolio

2010-04-07T16:25:00.006-04:00

I just finished putting together my new mini portfolio/resume. The portfolios were printed on 1-ply museum board, cut to fold into the size of a single standard envelope, and placed within a custom-cut and printed envelope.

I went through several iterations to of the booklet, testing different formats, orientations, packaging methods. Some photos below:

1313: More

2010-04-05T22:19:00.004-04:00

1313: Foundation for Creation Museum

2010-03-24T18:40:00.011-04:00

(For a detailed overview of the project, please visit the Convergence studio blog. My initial programming studies are also available here.)

Some recent work-in-progress images below:

The museum is organized as a series of differently scaled gallery "towers". Visitors can circulate between towers through an enclosed interior space between them.

Studies for the gallery towers:

Niches carved into the exterior of each gallery tower accommodate multi-media art installations, and allow visitors to enter into the interior gallery spaces.

1313: Convergence Blog

2010-03-11T00:51:00.003-05:00

Our studio blog is now up and running. Check it out at:

1313 Convergence

2408: Inorganic Assemblies

2010-03-07T00:58:00.007-05:00

This term I am taking a class with Marc Fornes from theverymany titled Inorganic Assemblies. So far we have been learning computational form generation techniques using Rhinoscript, and working towards designing and fabricating a large installation within Gund Hall.

Below are some images from scripts in development:

1313 : Week 01 : Mobile Museum

2010-02-09T22:33:00.006-05:00

Our first exercise was the design of a Mobile Museum in the spirit of Shigeru Ban's Nomadic Museum (as an aside, Ban is currently teaching an options studio at the GSD focusing on temporary structures for disaster relief).

The Mobile Museum is conceived as a temporary, prefabricated and flexible exhibition space for art. We were asked to iterate a single design theme through several variations, using only manual model making methods to prototype design ideas.

My design process focused on a the development of a deployable and flexible structural system for the exhibition space. The exhibition space is conceived as a reconfigurable open hall, populated by mobile pavilions capable of absorbing program that requires additional enclosure or spatial definition. Towards the end of the exercise I studied several variations of a triangulated grid-shell type structure based on Yoshimura buckling patterns and origami folding techniques.

GSD 1313: Convergence

2010-02-09T21:17:00.005-05:00

This spring I am taking part in Edwin Chan's options studio entitled GSD 1313: Convergence. The studio seeks to interrogate the interface between physical and digital design processes.

Since the early 90s, three-dimensional digital working methods have become the default mode of design within architectural practice. Manual design methods such as physical model making have been largely neglected as design tools, and relegated to supporting roles as representational techniques.

The studio argues that analog, intuitive, and manual methods are powerful techniques for conceptualizing, developing and testing architectural design. Rather than abandoning these techniques, the studio seeks to merge their strengths with those of advanced digital modelling and fabrication.

The sophisticated physical/digital working method developed by Gehry Partners and Gehry Technologies will be staged as a point of departure in order to develop other hybrid methodologies.

Please click here to read the official studio brief.

In addition to my blog, in the next weeks I will be developing a blog for the entire studio where we will post regular updates on our work and methodological explorations. As soon as the site is up and running I will post it here.

1311: Studio Works

2010-01-22T14:53:00.004-05:00

Church Machine was nominated for the 2010 GSD Studioworks.

1311: Church Machine

2009-12-19T12:45:00.002-05:00

All final videos can be viewed at the GSD 1311 Mediums blog.

1311: Studio Detritus

2009-12-19T11:58:00.061-05:00

1311: ZITS!

2009-10-14T16:04:00.002-04:00

1311: Cellular Prototypes

2009-09-30T19:32:00.011-04:00

1311: Folding Prototypes

2009-09-22T13:46:00.004-04:00

1311: Interactive Frame

2009-09-18T13:29:00.010-04:00

Click the images below to launch the applets.

To interact with the structure, use the key commands listed on the next page.

1311: Processing Test 01

2009-09-10T13:46:00.008-04:00

A quick exercise in Processing

Click below to view applet in a new window:

GSD 1311 : Mediums

2009-09-06T18:49:00.006-04:00

Coordinator : Michael Meredith

(introductory text from studio brief)

Are you tired of ____?

It could be said that avant-garde production works according to this formula: Medium (technical support) + Convention (artistic genre, typology, history) + Play (improvisation, !@#?) = Architecture. Once you have filtered the history of architecture through this formula, however, it becomes clear that these variables are in constant turmoil. While Convention is perhaps fairly resistant to the anxiety and whimsy of change (though not impervious), Medium remains consistently problematic and has often, especially in recent years, instigated and exacerbated Play. We will be investigating the problems inherent in this understanding of medium and working towards the possibilities of a post-medium condition for architecture.

Architecture still operates for the most part according to the modernist criteria for medium specificity (see Clement Greenberg and Colin Rowe). The notion of medium specificity tells that the work (or art) is successful if it fulfills the promise of the medium used to create that work of art. Currently, there is no shortage of specific mediums for architects to work with : Space or Image or Geometry or Typology or Program or Materiality or Narrative or Figuration or Digital Representation or Algorithms or Digital Fabrication or Experience or Structure of Environmental Systems or Tectonic Expression or Politics, etc.

Embedded with each of these instantiations of medium specificity is a specific subjectivity. Armed with these subjectivities, architects see the constrains of Convention and the possibilities for Play refracted and distorted through the specifics of Medium. History, then, can become a geometric problem or a material problem or a programmatic problem, etc. Within this medium subjectivity there develops a symbolic specificity: people who share the same subjectivities, with increasing narrowness, can understand and read the nuanced signifiers and symbols of that medium. Although medium specificity is no longer a dominant idea, architectural discourse has been left with its remnants: the narrowness and specificity of continually splintering regimes in its current state of disarray.

As architects (especially students) operating today, we do not built the thing we are designing. The act of architecture is fundamentally mediated. This lack of clear self-image is where architecture is both empowered and weakened. For better or worse, the problem of medium is tied to the problems of representation and methodology: the problem of a blank page, or how to begin. Once you pick your medium, these problems of representation and methodology (how you are going to work) rely upon an associated discourse and set of referents (Convention) with their own politics and history.

---

The hypothesis of the studio is that the problems of medium specificity can be addressed by exacerbating multiple medium specificities into impure, awkward, and paradoxical recombinations. The goal is to be as specific and detailed as possible while assembling a series of competing mediums into a project.

As an open laboratory in search of alternative architectural models, these investigations will be anchored by several texts concerning mediums and the post-medium condition. From there, we will proceed in a hybridized mode of a seminar, group therapy, collaborations with visiting guests (artists, architects, computer programmers, writers) and, most importantly, the development of projects that address the problem of medium. The studio is conceived as the production of a rich and heterogeneous discourse: a microcosmic view of experimental, multiple and promiscuous possibilities for contemporary architecture.

Studio participants will develop a highly self-conscious diagramming and working min-history of at least one medium of their choosing, and, more importantly, an understanding of the modalities of medium itself in general. Site and Program, the usual ingredients of a studio project, are just two of many possible mediums to be considered and understood. Both are characteristics of different, perhaps competing, architectural regimes.

Our site will be the High Line in Manhattan, and the program is a Unitarian church. Additionally, we will investigate interactive processes, animation and film as methods of architectural representation. These mediums among other will be operating in parallel with each other and at times directly competing with each other. The hierarchies of multiple mediums can be determined either through an absolute hierarchy or a relative one. For instance, the problems of concrete material construction could trump a perfectly precise algorithmic geometry, etc. These relationships will be described and mapped out. Through a careful teasing out of mediums, both obvious and latent, we will try to develop an architecture for a post-medium condition, to generate what Rosalind Krauss calls differential specificity through the committed interrogation and recombination of mediums.

Pentagonal Surface Discretization .03

2009-08-24T10:55:00.003-04:00

Pentagonal Surface Discretization .02

2009-08-18T21:02:00.007-04:00

Pentagonal Surface Discretization .01

2009-08-17T22:17:00.008-04:00

Pinch and Bump

2009-08-10T00:38:00.001-04:00

Surface Folding .02

2009-08-08T03:40:00.002-04:00

Surface Folding .01

2009-08-05T22:31:00.009-04:00

Surface folding tool designed in Grasshopper:

Tessellate

2009-07-28T20:55:00.003-04:00

GSD 1202 Final : Brooklyn Zoo

2009-06-01T12:48:00.002-04:00

The Space of Representation Competition

2009-04-17T02:50:00.000-04:00

Trays, the online student journal of the GSD, recently announced the winners of the Space of Representation Competition. I was pleased to learn that my entry, The Naked Crit, was selected as the winner. A full description of the competition can be found on their website.

The Naked Crit seeks to challenge the hermetic nature of design reviews in an architectural education. From the entry:

If you showed your final studio project to a non-architect, would they care? Would it be irrelevant?

Currently students present their project to a panel made up of architects and colleagues. While students are encouraged by their critics to consider the world beyond the walls of academia, nobody from the “outside world” is actually present.

If we are serious when we aspire to a wider relevance to the Harvard community (or even outside the safe walls of the academy), lets start by exposing our production to them. Lets show them everything. The good, the bad, the ugly, the embarrassing.

Lets leave the GSD.

Some studios might be ideologically opposed to the naked crit – studios that deal with developing the internal logics of architectural design may feel too exposed presenting tentative research in the gaze of a potentially skeptical and uninformed public. The intention of the naked crit is not to dumb down the discussion to make it comprehensible, but perhaps by exposing it to the general public we may generate a productive friction.

Lets get naked, and show off a little.

First Experiments with Grasshopper

2009-04-14T17:42:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I decided to learn Grasshopper in an attempt to parameterize my ongoing design studio explorations. The tests below represent my first attempt at the software.

The parametric world of Grasshopper forced me to consider each piece of geometry and its associated data set as a highly fluid, yet inherently precise component to play with. On one hand I found myself unable deploy geometry in the familiar yet relatively arbitrary way that manual modeling allows. On the other hand, the capacity for variable automation allows for rapid generation of highly complex geometry sets.

I see tremendous potential for this software to be utilized as a method for quickly prototyping design solutions at variable scales across the length of a design project - from schematic massing models to the co-ordination of fabrication geometries.

GSD 1202 : Thick Park Urbanism / Midterm Review

2009-03-29T00:07:00.003-04:00

Moving from the scale of the protoblock to the scale of the entire site, I developed a strategy for distributing massing and program that would respond to the specific urban context of Brooklyn, while managing environmental parameters and creating a new public space.

Thick Park Urbanism seeks to re-deploy the early Modernist dream of a city in a park. In place of the undefined and homogeneous parkscape of earlier dreams, a heterogeneous thickened landscape of interlocking public and private program is proposed.

Various community facilities are embedded below the park, and emerge occasionally to engage the park surface, adjacent residential /commercial program, and surrounding urban context. The top surface of the park doubles as an ecological corridor, supporting a mix of recreational program, extensive native green roof, and urban agriculture. The park also provides new pedestrian connections across the site.

Design and Science

2009-03-28T23:41:00.000-04:00

On March 14th I participated in an interdisciplinary workshop at Harvard University for the Picturing to Learn project. In association with the National Science Foundation, Picturing to Learn seeks to improve scientific education in the United States by introducing drawing as a tool and basic skill for science students and educators.

Drawing is used by science students to distill their own understanding of specific concepts and communicate them effectively. By thinking through drawing, students and educators can move beyond standard scientific jargon and equations as educational tools, and begin to make scientific concepts engaging to a wider audience while retaining accuracy. Drawings have the potential to encode multiple layers of information while remaining legible and accessible.

Please read more about the event at the Picturing to Learn website, or through the Graduate School of Design News.

GSD 1202: 1/3 Way Review

2009-02-26T18:05:00.003-05:00

GSD 1202 : Protoblock Feb 26

2009-02-26T02:42:00.002-05:00

GSD 1202: Protoblock Feb 24

2009-02-24T16:46:00.002-05:00

GSD 1202: Early Diagrams

2009-02-22T19:22:00.003-05:00

Early diagrams showing programmatic analysis.
Photos show massing strategy for the podium across a single large block. Podium accommodates a dense mix of commercial, cultural, infrastructural and residential program.

GSD 1202: Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn

2009-02-22T18:51:00.002-05:00

GSD 1202: Project Brief

2009-02-22T18:48:00.002-05:00

(from project brief)

The project will be developed on the 8 acres over the Vanderbilt Rail Yards, in Brooklyn, NY. It is a contested area that has gone through different Master Plans and Community Proposals.

Part one: Protoblocks
During this part of the semester students will focus on the development of a protoblock, for which they will design and articulate parameters for growth and expansion into larger formations. The protoblock will be embedded with urban intelligence and will be constantly evaluated according to its environmental performance.

This exercise will focus on the development of iterations of volumes that are capable of hosting the program defined for the protoblock. These volumes should occupy no larger than 1 acre. The volumes will focus on the speculation on the distribution of program (with the typological implications that this could have) and the urban effect that the resulting volumes are capable of producing: alignments, corners, continuities, transparencies, shadows, view obstructions and so on. This exercise focuses on the urban potential that certain volumetric distribution strategies may have. The design of the volume should include the definition of the ground and its potential use as infrastructure, landscape or open space to support social activity. The student will choose the area of the site to test the volumes and will develop urban prototypes with which to work (block, tower, tower-block,etc.)

Program Protoblock
Footprint: 1 acre. 44,000 sqf (4046.85 sqm)

187500 sqf housing
11875 sqf cultural and community service
Possible programs:
Theater
Public Library
Hotel
Senior Citizen Center
High School
Elementary and Middle School
28750 sqf retail commerce
38125 sqf office space
10750 sqf recreation and leisure
37500 sqf infrastructure
FAR: 7.1

GSD 1202: Cities, New Ecologies

2009-02-22T18:43:00.006-05:00

GSD1202 : 4th Semester Core Studio

Coordinator Lluis Ortega
Prof Florian Idenburg

(introductory text from studio brief)

There is a long history of proposals and reflections on the city and the environment. Since Vitruvius there have been attempts to construct relationships between the City, Society and Nature. Whether we are considering the aesthetic history of the architectural Sublime, techno-futurist visions for utopian cities, the hygienics of orthodox Modernism, or the ideals of garden cities and the proliferation of suburban sprawl; architecture’s preoccupation with its relationship to the environment and the role it has to play in the interpretation or construction of Nature has taken many shapes. So what is the contribution that we could make today to the history of that discussion? Can we resume some of the unresolved questions of previous proposals? How do we frame our own speculations on Nature?

After a drift in disciplinary attention and energy from the city towards technology, we currently have an opportunity to revisit the discussion of urban form equipped with a new set of tools and a new conceptual framework. By new tools we refer to emergent capacities in production and analysis enabled by digital technologies, and by new conceptual framework we mean the reorganization of the architectural or urban problem through the lens of regulatory systems that has been made available by scientific developments in the second half of the 20^thcentury. Using feedback from all and any relevant inputs and processes, particularly in this case the particularities of environmental analysis and simulation, we will search for new and optimized manifestations of the sustainable city.

Cities will be the medium with which to address effectively the pressing environmental problems of our time, and we will be exploring urban scenarios of high density. If dense, hyper-technical utopias were environmental responses emblematic of the enthusiasm over industrialization in developing countries, fatigue with urban disorder and density ultimately spawned critiques of the nineteenth century city. From that critique one counter model, the Garden Cities of Howard (1898), appeared and became incredibly powerful and influential because of its capacity to contribute to a cultural imaginary of nature, despite how it was ultimately distorted and realized in contemporary suburbia. Currently there is a resurgence in the imagination of utopian interventions at aggressive scales and high densities as a response to looming environmental catastrophe, but we are yet to see the true performative viability of proposals of this type, what their contribution to larger narratives about architecture and nature might be or how effective they will prove at capturing public imagination. Our current task is to articulate a new aesthetic and cultural understanding of nature in response to current social and environmental problems and to critically re-imagine cities to address the current and future needs of a sustainable society.

GSD 1201: Plug-and-Play Harvard House

2009-02-11T20:36:00.003-05:00

The Plug-and-Play Harvard House
GSD 3rd Semester Core Studio
Fall 2008

The Plug-and-Play Harvard House is a new model for academic housing that addresses the expanding role of networked digital culture in higher education. As classes, seminars and research are coordinated and attended virtually, the residence is increasingly becoming the locus for educational activities.

A new model must support these unconventional academic activities while recognizing and embracing the resulting blurred boundaries between living, learning and play.

Rather than building a rigid set of spatial resources, the residence must become a flexible infrastructure that allows for rapid adaptation to spontaneous academic and non-academic events, often driven by students themselves.

An ecology of prefabricated mobile interactive components encourage spontaneous social interaction while reinforcing group collaboration and negotiation skills as essential to personal, professional and academic growth.

Earlier in the development of this project, I was interviewed by the Harvard Crimson about new academic housing at Harvard. Read this article here .

Online Portfolio

2009-02-11T20:18:00.001-05:00

mattstorus.com