Project 3 Thought Process Documentation

 Last week, I alluded to taking Project 3 to generate the framework for an algorithm or methodology in order to produce a variety of diagram that permits the user, whether architect, architecture student, or otherwise, to obtain a physical embodiment of the forces active on the site.  I know that the format of this post is counter or unorthodox to the theoretical requirements, however this past week I have been enlisted as a human render-farm for a variety of thesis projects, inhibiting my ability to gain a working understanding of Grasshopper.  Instead, this is a documented system of my thought process, including the points of departure and sources of influence that have generated this thesis.  So, the concept is to harness the site forces to influence, or suggest a generative list of jumping-off points for design.  Shown above is the site that I have spent this semester designing on.  It is located in Baltimore, MD on the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art, MICA for short.  In beginning to take site inventory of the players and shakers that make this location unique, it should first be understood that in addition to merely documenting what is there, I feel this generative process should take into account the importance or historical significance of these found conditions.

 For example, one of the most interesting characteristics on the site is the river that runs through it.  You may say, 'so there's a river,' but it goes deeper.  The Jones Falls River provided power for the steel mill industry of Baltimore, essentially acting as the generative source of the City itself; and this new design can interact with this amenity.  Additional site forces which I'll simply list for brevity's sake include: North Ave, a three-lane, bidirectional East-West highway connecting Route 1 to West Baltimore, North Howard Street, which extends from Camden Yards through to Towson, light rail lines, the CSX freight rail line, bounding the site to the West, three existing buildings, service roads, existing vegetation, unique arching on the underside of the North Ave bridge, the Northwestern wind that influenced the layout of the old grid of Baltimore...and on top of this the 'ground' floor exists on two separate levels, the river basin, and the man-made City level 25 feet above it.

 My initial thought process would be to overlay the site with a rectangular form that could be divided into strips.  These strips would then be influenced by force lines which would themselves be dictated by these found conditions.  On top of this, a value system would be enforced, giving hierarchical response in the shape to the more influential forces.  Multiple iterations of this cause and effect system could be analyzed, perhaps incorporating a slide bar to visualize the deformations created when one, two, or more forces assume a dominant role, in relation to others that become subversive or passive in the dialogue.

 The following diagram set portrays an example of what this could look like.  This series is part of a tutorial on diagram story-boarding by Alex Hogrefe -

This set uses pedestrian movement patterns as a parameter for the iterative process.  Different permutations of end conditions seem to be influenced by other forces on the site.  The resulting form however seems to be generated as a byproduct of splitting a lofted geometry.  In the first diagram(s), the splines are seemingly defined by the solids and voids found on the site.  The resulting form reminds me of the process I had used in Project 2 when digitally diagramming the relationship between the General Lee and the camera's movement.  The model represents a physical manifestation of the blend tool found in Adobe Illustrator.

The second set by Hogrefe further relays this observation -

Compared side to side to my Project 2 model -

 

I would like to take this process one step further.  Rather than depicting the site forces with a series of static models, I would want to generate a manipulative surface that shares the same concept, but can be deformed by translating site forces or adjusting their influence through the Grasshopper derived digital model space.  These deformations could then be visualized within the Rhino program, or exported as an animation, and when viewed simultaneously, may give rise to interstitial iterations that spark ideas for design form  I am definitely open to other techniques to document the forces at work, but this is where my thought process has evolved for now.

Final Recombitant Sequence Model

The final recombitant sequence model exists as an resultant intersection of the studies of 2A and 2B.  The sequence itself has been broken up into eight constituent sub-sequences, each of which map the camera's relationship to the General Lee.  Although there are 25 camera takes in this opening sequence, these eight are unique in the fact that they exhibit the widest range of centripetal force between the car and the surface it is traveling along.  The repetitious lofts give substance to the rate at which the different cameras in the scene move in relation to the position of the car.  Their thickness is derived from the distance between the camera and the right or left side of the car respectively.  These sub-sequence models have then been mapped along the original model which materialized the spline lines of the camera and car through the scene.

Vigorous Environments

At this point in the post, I have only gotten to the second page of text, where the concept of Vigorous Environment is being broken down into its constituent parts of vigour, environment, and the inherent ecology at play.  It seems to me that the idea of adaptation is playing heavily into the innovative threads of modern day architecture movements, and as a result, the precedent focus is shifting back to nature.  As an interesting side note, the topic of bio-mimicry is well documented on TED [ted.com], including many inspiring lectures that give foreshadowing into methods by which adaptations in nature are making appearances in technology and even building design.  For example, the whale shark has a pattern of ridges on its skin which serve 1) as protection, but also actively reduce its drag as it is moving through the water.  Think of Studio Gang's office tower in Chicago.

This is that very same technology adapted to the skin in between the floors.  The undulating form responds to the wind loads in the Windy City, and similarly reduces the impact of the wind on the building by up to 20%.  Doing so allowed for the upper floors of the tower to be utilized for office space as the skin compensates for the traditional method of including an wind damper.  Garth Rockcastle once said, "Everyday I watch the Discovery Channel, and there's always some weird animal that has some kind of weird adaptation to suit its environment."

Recombitant Sequence Physical Model

Recombinant Sequence

This model is derived as the physical condition generated through the analysis of the camera's location in relation to the right and left side of the General Lee within the confines of a selected camera sequence.  The undulations of the surface are influenced by the original parametric surface from project 2a and a new surface condition that maps the adjacency of the camera through the scene.  The uneven spacing of the individual curves serves as indication of the intensity of the camera's movement.

Digital form of physical model

General Lee Animation