1311: Cellular Prototypes

1311: Folding Prototypes

1311: Interactive Frame

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

1311: Processing Test 01

A quick exercise in Processing

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GSD 1311 : Mediums

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.

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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

Pentagonal Surface Discretization .02

Pentagonal Surface Discretization .01

Pinch and Bump

Surface Folding .02

Surface Folding .01

Surface folding tool designed in Grasshopper:

Tessellate

GSD 1202 Final : Brooklyn Zoo

The Space of Representation Competition

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

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

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

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

GSD 1202 : Protoblock Feb 26