MSMO: starting fresh

Thursday, November 6, 2008

starting fresh

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Introduction

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.

MSMO

starting fresh

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Mat-Systems, Material-Organizations: Silicon Hills Technology Park

Introduction

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