To regulate systems—existing and designed—is the role of the contemporary architect. Systems are governing practices, rule sets, manners of assembly, part-to-whole relationships, and networks. Increasingly, architectural design can be understood as the management of interrelations and degrees of correspondence between multiple systems—technical, structural, material, ecological, infrastructural, and sociocultural.
The influence of abstract organizational principles on corporeal/material constructs will be a central point of examination for design research. The studio will frame the horizontal spatial planning practices of mat-building typologies and the vertical material constructs of thickened wall-surfaces as distinct but reciprocally related forms of material-organization—systems that exhibit a predisposition toward continuity and a potential for differentiation. We will invent novel systems of organization at the intersection of visual and spatial fields, with the promise of eliciting new formations capable of providing diverse social ecologies and alternative performative characteristics.
Our investigation will depart from traditional modular organizations (uniform and repetitive) in favor of systems of complex repetition. Modernist architectural space sought to establish consistency between parts and wholes through modular logics made possible by the processes of industrialization; these methods relied on regulating systems and planning grids to organize space, particularly in plan organizations. While modules are stable or homogeneous systems of elements that can only be replicated or aggregated, complex repetition is an example of part-to-whole patterning that can become locally specific. While early attempts at complex patterning systems were still periodic (based on filling space with more varied yet still fixed parts), new tools allow us to explore aperiodic and non-recursive part-to-whole relationships, based on variable but specifiable parts and geometries. The studio will explore the possibility to organize flexible part-to-whole relationships that can grow and differentiate to produce complex material-organizations.
Grid Focus by Derek Punsalan 5thirtyone.com. Converted by Blogger Buster. Distributed by : Blogger Blog Templates of the Fractal Blog Network
1 comments:
Sang Hyuk,
The plan seems like an improvement over the last version. I think your manipulations to the geometry (now that everything is not determined by straight lines across the entire site) produce a more interesting plan that gives you more potential to vary the relationship between different program areas, like the change in geometry from open office to conference space, etc. So it has been a good move to manipulate the geometry of your site lines into something more complex.
At the same time, I still think you are making these manipulations first, and then placing the programs into the building after. This method is not so different from what you have been doing so far; you remember we talked about doing things in reverse order from now on. If you start to make the different program areas much more specific, and think about what requirements each has (and how the requirements are different for one program than from another), then you should have to start manipulating your system to accommodate these needs. Right now the different program areas have different shapes, but it is not so clear that these shapes are really motivated by the needs of the program in each particular case. For example, the private offices are split into two areas that are only connected by a small crossing of circulation paths, but I doubt that this is the best arrangement for these spaces.
Being more specific means putting much more information into the plans: desk areas in the open office, divisions within the research space, the geometry and seating of the auditorium, etc. How does the large-scale circulation (the gray lines in your program diagram) connect to the more local circulation within each program area?
It is also interesting that you now have a secondary (smaller) scale within your larger geometry of site lines, so that each program area is now broken into a smaller grid—the open office is broken into four more regular areas, just like the open laboratory, etc. Does this subdivision really want to be the same in each program? Probably not, since the office areas will need a different circulation from the lab space, etc.
It is also not clear what is happening in section. Right now you are simply stacking the same circulation system onto itself (as in the model), but we had talked about a much more terraced organization, where the areas are "filled" in between these lines are different in each plan level. This way the circulation areas become much more important in connecting plan areas on different levels that may not be directly on top of each other, but only connect vertically in these circulation areas.
I am also not sure you need the little "fingers" of gray circulation that stick out in plan, past the boundaries of the different program areas in plan. (You can see what I mean most clearly in the drawins marked "Building Footprint + Plan".) Do these circulation paths go somwhere or connect to anything? If not, cut them off.
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