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Architecture is Jazzy.
Roller Coaster construction, design as you build.
No final design until the design is built. How liberating! While I value traditional means of design and construction I think it would be fantastic if we could liberate ourselves from the need to have final drawings, an end to the design. In the practical world I can understand why that would ease the construction process but drawings do not always reflect the real world accurately. And to be able to allow the building to become what it needs to be in order for the function, style, and structure to work as a single unit I think would make a far more interesting environment.
“Architecture is not a plastic art, rather the construction of material life.”
Here are a couple images of my modeling so far. I sectioned the car into quarters and modeled half the hood and a fender first. Then I began working on the back quarter, which I have not finished. The fender so far is the most interesting to me but I noticed some crimping in the surface, so I may have to remodel that area, unless anyone knows how to fix that.
In this reading Vidler introduces the idea of folds/folding through various theorists, artistic movements, and architectural concepts.
Folds it seems is more than just a formal exploration of bending lines or planes, it is a wormhole of sorts that connects space, time, ideas and things. Also metaphysically it joins the mind body and soul. This is described by a sketch, “Le Maison Baroque”, a two story house in which the second story is closed to the outside world but has openings in the floor to allow for a each sense to drape out into the ‘body from the ‘mind’. . The ‘curtain’ them becoming the receiver of imagery, like a camera. The difference between an ordinary camera and our minds though would be that as we receive imagery we immediately begin to build relationships to past imagery and thus our memories are not in a straight linier timetable but is a series of warped and folded combination of past images. But one thing that Vidler points out is that people have tended to take the idea of folding and taken it literally in terms of the envelope or skin of the building. I find this whole concept quite fascinating. I think is easy to see why some designers may choose to take folding literally. Formal folding makes for interesting seemingly fluid structures, but buildings are static. The only moving element in a building is us as we move through time and space of the building, and it is in the promenade and spatial organizations that that the folded reel of imagery is created.
Probable Geometries –
This reading was a bit difficult to follow but after a couple attempts I think I understood most of it.
I thought the reading did well in outlining previous architectural attempts to free formal spatial organization from the exact geometries. But it seems that Corbusier and the deconstructionists are attempting fluidity with ideal forms. If architecture is an anthropomorphic art, then why do we use exact geometries and ideal forms to represent the human body which is asymmetric, fluid and subject to its environmental condition? But the Greeks didn’t have MRI machines that they could measure from. Can we even perceive the subtle irregularities in our bodies? Then why not reduce to ideal forms?
I also liked the way Lynn brought up biological and geological sciences. I think it helped me realize that nature cannot just be reduced to ideal forms and that the beauty of nature is that it isn’t exact.
Blob Tectonics –
This reading made me wonder if the reason why architects are partial to ideal forms is due to the ease of drawing and then building? It is much more simple to build a square than it is to build a blob, of course with technological advances it will be much easier.
The thing that completely confused me about this reading was the multiplicities and irreducibility, and stability or lack of, so I have some questions.
A blob is irreducible because it can only attract mass? So then what happens if the blob is split?
In accretion of blobs, can blobs completely ingest other blobs or will they always just intersect? They then are a singularity in the surface? And the multiplicities are a result of the internal geometric intersections because the internal forms of blobs do not change? More intersecting blobs means more complex geometries but a more stable object? Is geometry even the right word to use in describing blob aggregates?
So, if anybody can help me understand all this that would be great!
I have chosen the Maserati 450s.
