Architectural Design Research, Vol 2, No. 1.

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Architectural Design Research PRO JEC T-BA SED DESI GN RESEA RCH A ND DI SCOUR SE ON DE SIG N

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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH Project-based design research and discourse on design. Architectural Design Research is an international refereed academic journal featuring project-based design research and discourse on design. All research projects and articles published in the journal are double blind refereed by scholars actively engaged in project-based design research and in discourse on design research and practices. Architectural Design Research is a journal of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (AASA). The journal is supported by financial contributions from all of the member Architecture Schools and Programs in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

Copyright: All rights reserved. Except as permitted by the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be printed or reproduced or utilised in any form by electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing by the copyright holder. The authors of manuscripts that appear in this journal take responsibility for securing written permission for the publication or re-publication of any copyright material included in their work and also assume responsibility and liability for any libellous, unlawful, or injurious statements that may appear in their work.

Editors: Brent Allpress, RMIT Architecture, Melbourne, Australia. Michael Ostwald, University of Newcastle, Australia. Communication Design: Stuart Geddes, Chase & Galley, Melbourne, Australia. www.chaseandgalley.com Editorial Board: Mike Austin, Unitec Shane Murray, Monash University John Macarthur, University of Queensland Mark Taylor, Victoria University Sarah Treadwell, University of Auckland

All opinions expressed in material contained in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Architectural Design Research, the Association of Architecture Schools in Australasia (AASA), the Editorial Board or the Editors. Š 2007 Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (AASA) Copyright of all drawings and photographs is held by the authors unless otherwise indicated. ISSN 1448-9007

Editorial correspondence should be addressed to: Brent Allpress, Editor, ADR, School of Architecture + Design, RMIT, GPO Box 2476v, Melbourne 3001, Victoria, Australia. Email: brent.allpress@rmit.edu.au Architectural Design Research is published annually in full colour, with occasional special issues. Detailed submission details can be accessed on the Architectural Design Research website: http://adr.tce.rmit.edu.au/


Architectural Design Research PRO JEC T-BA SED DESI GN RESEA RCH A ND DI SCOUR SE ON DE SIG N

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Project-based Design Research Models

Brent Allpress RMIT Architecture, Melbourne Australia

The research economy for the architecture discipline in Australia is about to change radically with the introduction of the proposed Research Quality Framework (RQF). The existing DEST regime in that country has employed a metric system that simply counted up grant money, refereed publications and postgraduate completions to determine research performance and subsequent Federal funding. This quantitative model privileged the sciences and precluded a whole range of other activities of value to creative industry disciplines.

end the proposed RQF Panel 13, which groups architecture with the creative industries and creative arts, will now assess a range of activities that have struggled to be supported and recognised institutionally in the past. Design research is taking on renewed prominence in this new economy. Architecture academics will be able to submit designs, creative works, exhibitions, awards, competitions and professional reviews for consideration by the RQF panels. Determining how the quality of design research is measured remains a challenge. A range of new qualitative metrics and mechanisms are required.

This “one size fits all� approach has finally been abandoned. The RQF model that is about to be introduced relies on peer review panels that will assess the quality of key nominated research activities for individual academics or groups over the preceding six year period. This brings Australia in line with the United Kingdom and New Zealand, who have already made the shift to a qualitative rather than quantitative research assessment process.

The Architectural Design Research Journal was set up in anticipation of these emerging developments. It is the first academic journal internationally to primarily publish project-based design research, that is, research undertaken by and through design project investigations. It also publishes associated discourse on design. Submitted design research projects are peer reviewed by scholars active in the field of design research.

It will now be up to the architecture discipline to determine what research outcomes and outlets are of primary value in making a contribution to knowledge in the discipline. To this

The academic research journal structure is inherently flexible enough to accommodate projectbased research. It offers a robust 2


peer review model for assessing the quality of submitted design research. It is proving to be an adaptable dissemination medium. How the design research is framed and represented is crucial. Submissions must meet the requirement that the embodied research undertaken through projects is captured and communicated to others in order to make a contribution to knowledge within the field of design research. The communication design of the ADR journal publication is not neutral or generic. It actively facilitates the projects by providing a semiautonomous formatting approach so that each project can be situated on its own terms, against its own criteria. The design research projects published in this issue of the ADR journal constitute a range of emerging approaches to undertaking architectural design research.

Schaik, where practitioners are invited back into the academy to reflect on and extend their professional design mastery in a research context.1 Richard Goodwin is a Sydney-based artist and architect who explores the scaleable prosthetic relations between body and technology across art installation, public art, architectural and urban design projects. In “Porosity” he reports on Australian Research Council funded projectbased design research into categories of transient, event-based public space that might be recuperated within privatised commercial spheres, with Sydney CBD office towers employed as case studies. Latent capacity for alternative modes of inhabitation within office buildings is modelled using simulation software in order to provoke new speculations on the scope for intervention within existing sites and contexts, co-opting and renewing infrastructure.

“Desert Parasols” by Finn Pedersen, Adrian Iredale and Martyn Hook, of iredale pedersen hook architects, documents research embodied within and across a cycle of architectural practice projects involving remote desert Aboriginal housing and community facilities. Difficult constraints of desert environment, remote distance, and cultural difference are drivers for an architecture of communal infrastructure that is modest in materials and generous in its extended spatial arrangements. All three directors of this practice are undertaking design research by project postgraduate degrees at RMIT in the invitational reflective practice stream, directed by Prof Leon van

“The Cotton Caves at Stevenage Newtown” by UK architectural academic Victoria Watson, documents an instance in a cycle of installation projects. Watson proposes the sitespecific construction of lines of coloured thread, producing volumetric colour fields that instil an ephemeral atmosphere of spatial activation. The role of architecture in Lefebvre’s general theory of space is employed as a parallel discourse informing the materialisation of these works. Jane Burry and Andrew Maher, Research Fellows in the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT, present an account of researchled project based design teaching, 3


undertaken in collaboration with RMIT Civil and Environmental Engineering. This cycle of supervised projects trials the “co-rational” integration of emerging digital technologies and techniques into the design process from conception through to design development.

1 Postgraduate models for design research by project are discussed further in Brent Allpress and Robyn Barnacle, “Projecting the PhD: Architectural design research by and through projects” in Changing Practices in Doctoral Education, David Boud and Alison Lee (eds), London: Routledge, forthcoming 2008

The final article by Zeynep Mennan revises and reworks, in English, the essay “Des Formes Non Standard: Un ‘Gestalt Switch’,” which was originally published in French as the catalogue essay accompanying the “Architectures Non Standard” exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, curated by Frederic Migayrou and Mennan. This article traces a prehistory of non standard architecture within strands of modernist practice associated with the organic. This authoritative account remains highly relevant to current debates on the biological as a model for the role of digital technologies in contemporary architecture, particularly in the development of emergent compositional techniques, and in the generation and curation of complex systems and morphologies.

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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH Project-based design research and discourse on design VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1

2 • Editorial BRENT ALLPRESS PROJECTS 7 • Parasols in the Desert FINN PEDERSEN, ADRIAN IREDALE and MARTYN HOOK 37 • Porosity RICHARD GOODWIN 97 • The Cotton Caves at Stevenage Newtown VICTORIA WATSON 115 • Building Bridges JANE BURRY and ANDREW MAHER ARTICLE 137 • The Question of Non Standard Form: a ‘Gestalt Switch’ ZEYNEP MENNAN 151 • Notes on Contributors

152 • Notes for Contributors and Submission Guidelines

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para sols in the de sert

Finn Pedersen, Adrian Iredale, Martyn Hook iredale pedersen hook architects

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Over the past 8 years iredale pedersen hook architects have undertaken an ongoing series of projects for indigenous communities in the remote West Australian deserts. The research embodied in this work addresses the complex parameters of this neglected realm of architectural practice and attempts to engage with underlying issues of social equity and sustainability in a West Australian housing context. The projects deal primarily with an architecture of extremes, that is, the production of buildings that must respond to extremes of climate, extremes of remote distance and the challenge of extremes of cultural difference. The typical context of remote indigenous housing projects is that of a series of small

family based hamlets with populations of 50 to 120 people. The current housing stock on these communities ranges from humpies and dongers through poorly designed homestead style houses and concrete block bunkers of a design imported from the Northern Territory to several other more appropriate house designs. In the remote housing designs by iredale pedersen hook there is no attempt to impart or represent any notions of Aboriginality other than through responding to the specificity of the challenging functional and cultural requirements of the brief. The following paper describes three of the projects, focusing particularly on the Walmajarri Community Centre. 1

western desert semi-transportables Mardu Country, East Pilbara, Western Australia

The Western Desert is in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia, bounded by the Great Sandy Desert to the north, the Gibson Desert to the south and the rocky plateau of the Pilbara Craton where much of Australia’s iron ore is mined. Summer temperatures range from 30 degrees Celsius at night to 55 degrees maximum in extreme events, while winter temperatures range from a minimum of minus 5 degrees to a maximum of 35 degrees. iredale pedersen hook was commissioned by the WA Department of Housing and Works, Aboriginal Housing Infrastructure Directorate in 2003 to design 4 prototype semi-transportable houses for Western Desert Mardu Aboriginal Communities. The designs were driven by the need to provide radically different plan forms, while maintaining an approach to the component systems and materials that ensured that the buildings met the difficult challenge of being economic to build, transport and assemble on remote desert sites. The design approach also addressed the aspiration to

achieve qualitative outcomes for the community housing that exceeded the pragmatic requirements of the brief. A population of up to 20 people often uses the infrastructure of the desert house. Each house is conceived as an outdoor house wrapped around an indoor house. This allows extended family members to live in and around the houses. Each house consists of two fully enclosed pavilions on a pre-stressed reinforced concrete slab, with insulated steel frame walls, lined with 9mm fiber-cement sheet internally and clad with corrugated Colorbond wall sheeting externally. In-situ concrete has been replaced with steel pipe piles. The parasol roofs above the pavilions have the effect of dramatically reducing the heat loads on the living spaces to that of ambient air temperature, and the concrete slabs provide a thermal link to the earth, stabilizing the temperature within the pavilions. The designs are now in their third generation, with some 17 houses being built in 6 communities.

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tjuntjunjara community houses Great Victorian Desert, Western Australia

Tjuntjuntjara is extremely remote, some 12 hours drive east-north-east of Kalgoorlie on the Western and South Australian borders. Many of the community lived through the British Nuclear tests on their country, Maralinga, in the 1950s. The community is located on the southern edge of the Spinifex homelands and acts as control point for people entering their homelands from the south. This was one of the last ATSIC/NAHS funded projects, allowing the community to interview and directly engage consultants of their choice. This is no longer an option under the current DHW procurement methods. iredale pedersen hook was invited to participate in the project under project management of Perth engineering firm Capital House, with funding manager Parsons Brinkerhoff. These houses were developed in close consultation with the Spinifex people over 3 separate workshops, involving all members of the community working with a multidisciplinary team that included an anthropologist, an architect, an engineer and community staff members. Every family in the community was interviewed as part of this process. After the initial interviews and briefing meetings, cardboard sketch models were used to communicate the initial design responses, and

these were further refined for subsequent meetings. In a continuing development of the design system, the parasol roofs were again used to reduce the heat loads on the enclosed parts of the houses, and new energy management and water conservation systems were incorporated into the designs. All of the houses align on a radial axis focusing on the new community meeting shelter, also designed by the project team. Locations of individual houses relate to the actual direction of the family members specific homeland, an insight drawn from seating arrangements at the community meetings. The site is surrounded by spectacular desert country, with scattered Mulga, Western Myall and Casurina trees, and smaller flowering plants such as cassia species, Sandalwood and Spinifex grasses. As with the western desert projects, these buildings were designed to be simple and robust, and to support a variety of living patterns inside and around the building. The house around a house concept was again applied and extended by the use of a breezeway living zone that contained a fire-pit. This was wind-protected by wide roller doors to mediate the exposure of this semi-enclosed space to harsh external conditions. 24


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walmajarri community centre

Djugerari Community, Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia

When Australia was colonized in 1788 there were some 350 individual Aboriginal Nations, each with unique languages and cultures. Today there are less than 200 languages still spoken and all but 20 of these are regarded as endangered. Walmajarri is one of these endangered language groups. The Walmajarri people are a nation of Indigenous Australians who have survived the impacts of colonisation and subsequent government neglect over the past 80 years. In the 1950’s, and within only one generation, the Walmajarri desert dwellers left their homeland behind to face station life and a world beyond the sand hills. The last Walmajarri family who lived a traditional nomadic life left the desert in the early 1980’s. The last massacre by police occurred in the late 1930’s, with several survivors still alive today. The families are faced with almost third world conditions of unemployment, poverty, poor health and social problems. Most critically, they face the question of how their children will tread the path between the modern world and traditional culture. When the Fitzroy River valley to the north of the Walmajarri homelands was opened up by pastoralists, the indigenous people on who’s country the cattle began to roam were coerced to work on the cattle stations as a way of staying on their own country. Familial ties between the language groups had to be maintained and these pulled populations to the north, from the desert into the river valley, and the Walamjarri people began to leave their country.

Djugerari, population 80, is some 600km due east of the West Australian tourist and pearling town of Broome (pop. 15-30,000), 160km north of Fitzroy Crossing (pop. 700) and 2225km from the state capital Perth (pop. 1.5 M). Djugerari community is the beachhead of Walmajarri country. It is the point where the Jilji, the parallel sand hills of the desert, meet the ancient sandstone ranges and mesas that separate the river valley from the desert. It is here where the Walmajarri people could gaze from their own homelands towards the lands to the north, where the new strangers with their cows, horses and guns were steadily encroaching. iredale pedersen hook was selected by the Djugerari community to design an office, a training centre with separate areas for men and women, and a staff house for Walmajarri Inc. an Aboriginal Corporation representing a group of Walmajarri people. The types of learning scenarios would cover practical homemaker and adult education topics, as well as culturally specific learning including language and law teaching. Due to its remote location the facility was designed using transportable modules with prefabricated roof elements as the key construction approach. The complex was again conceived as an arrangement of insulated pavilions, sited on a concrete platform and sheltered with a large parasol roof, with specific outdoor spaces that economically extend the interior spaces. 28


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The arrangement of the pavilions was determined by framed views of isolated mesas, pyramid hills and sacred sites, including a massacre site. Each of these views has an important cultural heritage or Dreamtime story, and in this way the building itself becomes a kind of teaching tool that reveals Walmajarri stories to people visiting the building. Wall panels constructed from cement sheet frame these views, ready to receive murals depicting the coded stories of the local painting style. It is extremely expensive and difficult to build in these remote desert locations. To this end, the detailing of the construction systems was simplified, the range of materials was limited and selected to minimise ongoing maintenance costs. A simple portal frame construction was used to create the parasol roofs, while the pavilions are constructed from conventional steel stud framing, clad with corrugated steel and fiber cement sheet. The desert environment is extreme. Summer temperatures reach 48 degrees Celsius at this site and can drop to 28 degrees at night, while in winter temperatures can range from below zero to 35 degrees. Winter brings cold dust storms and willie-willies. Tropical wet season rains can drench the hills every few years. Each wet season the Fitzroy River and Christmas Creek flood and cut the community off from road access. Self-sufficiency is a necessity. The facility has achieved a level of ESD considerations appropriate for this remote

Aboriginal community. Complex or high maintenance systems were avoided due to the isolated desert location and lack of skilled labour. The parasol roof provides a large amount of shaded outdoor activity areas, and shades the enclosed rooms, dramatically reducing heat loads. Doors and windows have to be sealed against dust penetration. Inverter type air-conditioner systems are therefore used to allow for year round use of the facility. These have been modified to have high minimum thermostat settings and run-down timers that shut the units off after 6 hours, minimizing the power consumption of the units. The pavilions have mineral wool insulation in the walls and sub-roof. The parasol roof’s eaves and windows allow for winter sun penetration on cold mornings while providing a large shadow lowering the heat load on the platform and pavilions during the day. The community currently maintains its own electricity supply by diesel generators and energy efficiency takes on a high priority. All light fittings are low energy type. The hot water systems are jacketed solar with a single “Hot-shot” booster switch that shuts off automatically once the water has been heated. The exhaust fans and electric stoves are connected to run-down timers that shut off automatically after 1.5hrs and then need to be re-activated. Water collection was ruled out as there is a reliable water supply taken from an artesian bore and the practicalities of maintaining a collection and distribution system are currently beyond the community’s resources. 30


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communal infrastructure

For these Aboriginal communities, the house is not simply a private realm, it is literally a piece of communal infrastructure. The approach to the design of the houses as an enclosed and sheltered core volume, nested within and framed by extended semi-enclosed canopy spaces, offers generous amenity and spatial flexibility within a harsh and challenging environment. The scalability of this approach is demonstrated in the Walmajarri Community Centre, designed to support and enhance the broader cultural and educational aspirations of this desert community. Outcomes are achieved with a necessary economy of means through the use of transportable modular fabric systems. Construction detailing is direct. Modest materials

are given primary roles. The architecture emerges from the layered assemblage of simple components and singular systems. Across these projects, architectural arrangements reflect ties to the land, patterns of spatial use, family relationships and genealogies, and cultural and spiritual beliefs.2 Desert climate, remote distance and cultural difference are all constraints that confront and challenge conventional architectural concerns. Extensive and inclusive community consultations were crucial to the development of culturally relevant and practical outcomes. These processes need ongoing policy support and funding if the conditions on these remote communities are to be improved.

1 The Walmajarri Community Centre, designed by iredale pedersen hook recently received international recognition with the award of an Honorable Mention at the Architectural Review Awards for Emerging Architecture in London, 200. 2 Narelle Yabuka discusses the community consultation process

in her review article “Tjuntjuntjara Housing,” in Architecture Australia, May/June 2007. Photography: pp7–17, 30–34 Shannon McGrath (some of these images have appeared in Next Wave, published by Thames & Hudson), pp19–27 Finn Pedersen

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Porosity:

The revision of public space in the city using public art to test the functional boundaries of built form.

Richard Goodwin


Pore: n. minute opening in surface, through which fluids may pass. Porous: a. full of pores (lit. or fig.); hence of cogn. Porosity: porousness, ns. 1

Ancient Chinese scholars were fascinated with porous rocks that became known as “scholar rocks”. The more richly porous the structures were, balancing air with mass, the more valuable they became. “For the world of Chinese scholars stones has to be a source of inspiration, - mysteriously shrouded in feathery mist – to anyone with an interest in transparency, transformation, immateriality, dynamism, in spectacular surfaces, monoliths, or raw lumps of rock, in minimalist or archaic monuments”. 2 Mine also is a fascination with both exoskeleton and its fleshy centre, as a model for the body and architectural minimums, and the idea of architecture being analogous to the mathematical model of the “Sierpensky sponge”. This is a theoretical cube which is infinitely porous and hence: “more than a surface, less than a volume….Its total volume approaches zero, while the total lateral surface of the hollowings infinitely grows.” 3 This obsession with dissolving architecture runs hand in hand with the idea that art has a role to play in promoting the adaptive re-use of existing urban structure via new “parasitic forms”. Hence the social construction of cities is prioritized over physical construction, program, or any issues to do with aesthetics. My position as a practitioner is fairly unique. I am a registered architect who has practiced almost exclusively as an exhibiting artist since 1976. Only relatively recently has my practice fully engaged with the built environment. This combination of disciplines unites my interest in the city with my interest in minimum architectures of the body or their relative “prosthetic architecture”.

I have explored public art practice since the mid 1980’s and this work has grown to expand the notion of site specificity to encompass the skin of architecture itself. In other words my art/architecture practice has moved from architecture to performance, to performance in the city, to gallery installation, to object making, to site specific public artwork both permanent and temporary, to parasitic architectural interventions, to urban infrastructure and planning projects, and finally to the idea of architecture as a site for art and through which we may reread the city. This line of inquiry builds on the lineage of Dada, Surrealism, and the Situationists. With the aid of an ARC Discovery Grant, I have been able to further investigate a methodology that will help promote the use of “parasitic” public art/architecture attachments to buildings in order to redefine public space within the city. The following text maps the journey of three years of research into the possible re-definition of public space in the city. The title for the project is as follows:

Porosity: The revision of public space in the city using public art to test the functional boundaries of built form. “The work lies in having thought of the action to perform.” 4 This quote from “Walkscapes” by Francesco Careri, follows discussion about the early Dada city interventions in Paris around 1921, which explored the banal spaces of the city. Not only does this research build on the foundations of Dada actions, it also owes much to the lineage which folds the Surrealists into the Situationists and through an “expanded field” (Deutsche) of operations for art into the nomadic “smooth” space of

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Deleuze and Guattari as it mediates the “striated” or structured space of our capitalist western cities. “Smooth space and striated space – nomad space and sedentary space - the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the state apparatus - are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned into a smooth space.” 5 The Porosity research has been performed in the city of Sydney and has depended on field observation by the researcher acting as a type of tourist or in fact nomad. Central to my belief is the following model: if one can visit a toilet adjoining a corridor leading from the lift lobby at level X of building Y and stay within that space comfortably for 1 hour then that constitutes a 1 hour public space. In other words, the city is full of spaces of transition, connection and bodily comfort that have yet to be claimed or classified as types of public space within the city. Clues lie within the networks of these spaces for what cities might become. I believe that by claiming these spaces as types of public space, and connecting their structures to the already sanctioned public spaces ranging from footpaths to parks, that only then will the city reveal to the architect/artist/planner its potential as a three dimensional construction with the possibility of more than one ground plane. This threedimensionalising of public space enables the possibility of both more public space opportunities and also access to valuable facilities such as toilets, landscape and seating

or refuge. That this affects or makes healthier the social construction of the city can then be argued. Porosity (my name for the study signifying the degree of permeability to access a building can have) simply doesn’t believe that public space ends at the front door of highrise city buildings – far from it. Porosity also seeks to engage in the continual flux or state of becoming which constitutes the edge condition of architecture now and architecture in the future. Porosity also believes that art is historically well qualified to interrogate architecture. The research aimed to test the functional boundaries ascribed to the physical dimensions of public space in the city. It aimed to do this via the device of public art and the procedure of comprehensive mapping of both internal and external spaces in Sydney. Sydney’s central business district has been used as a paradigm for the western capitalist city. Public art is ideally suited to the task of interrogating architecture via its symbiotic relationship with built form. The marginality of public art makes it ideally suited to the task of commenting on or contradicting the main body of the text of a culture. Public space is largely misunderstood and under-utilised. Proof of this lies in the endless empty foyers and deserted leftover spaces in subways and beneath freeways. Currently, the boundary for public space exists at the threshold of architecture. However this orthodoxy has left the definition of foyers, toilets and the means of egress within and between buildings within an indeterminate zone. The mapping of all the ancillary spaces, which facilitate public space or movement, will create a comprehensive understanding of the totality of public space in the western city. The study is informed by the theoretical and conceptual ideas of Rosalind Kraus and Vito Acconci whose works negotiate between art and architecture within the public domain.

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Architecture is already permeable to public space. Increasing the permeability of architecture will change architectural design and urban planning imperatives. The desired effect of this research is to expand the uses of public space within the city and alter the design of buildings and their linking structures. Porosity challenges the notion of pedestal architecture and engages the existing flux or edge breakdown of buildings, via a range of city structures such as monorails, signs, restaurant seating etc. In particular the investigation sought to: • Revise existing research into what constitutes public space both inside and outside architecture. The theorists Rosalind Kraus, Vito Acconci, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scoffidio have envisaged scenarios where public space, via public art, intervenes in the space of architecture. Their work has moved the idea of “public space” as a space where people gather to a space that is made public. Porosity seeks to take this investigation deeper into the body of building function. Public art will ascribe new meanings via function to these extremities. • Create an index of city spaces (Porosity Index), which analyses a range of physical and cultural properties and characterises them functionally. This index crossreferences the virtual 3D mapping and informs the making of models that describe the internal porosity of the buildings studied. It also gives each individual building a percentage score that indicates its level of porosity or permeability to pedestrian access and inhabitation. • Realise a “parasite” project involving a block of inner city buildings, which tests the theoretical boundaries of public space, as they are currently understood. This parasite would interpret a reading from the MAYA modelling of porosity-indexed spaces (this is explained further on in the text). The study builds directly on Rosalind Kraus’s investigation of “axiomatic structures” which intervene in the real space of architecture. It also builds on a history of

artworks by a range of artists over the last 40 years, in particular the works of Gordon Matta Clark, and the writing and works of Vito Acconci. Gordon Matta-Clark’s physical attacks on architectural fabric illustrated graphically how vulnerable architecture can be to redefinition via art. The image of an artist physically cutting slots and holes in a range of buildings, changed for all time the relationship between art and architecture and reduced buildings to armatures for future actions. This image reinforces the aim of this study to challenge the current perception of buildings in the city as pedestal objects and instead reinforce the idea of buildings merging into a viral mass breathing the oxygen of public space. Lebbeus Woods adds to the predictive power of Matta Clark’s actions by creating images of radical reconstruction of cities damaged by war. Fragmented facades become the platform for scab-like attachments and connectors. The new structures mediate between the armature of the architecture and the diminished public space. These virtual actions mirror the theoretical positioning of Diller and Scoffidio whose practice as artist/architect/academics has used architecture as a surgical instrument to operate on itself. Via installations, which often use devices such as video surveillance, their art activity addresses the pure exteriority of meaning. This work points to another frontier of construction that will invert our perception of what a city is, pushing the emphasis towards attachments and penetrations rather than pedestal objects. “Since any site has the potential to be transformed into a public, or for that matter, a private space, public art can be viewed as an instrument that either helps to produce a public space or questions a dominated space that has been officially ordained as public.” 6 The term “porosity” describes the nature of the edge condition, which exists between

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the skin of architecture and the public space of the city. The 60’s and 70’s saw a shift in art practice towards site-specific art. Via “land art” and the work of artists such as Robert Smithson, the restrictions on and the commoditisation of art were broken down. Public art shifted from the self-reverential works of modernism to the expanded field of post modernism. Public art was now positioned between architecture and not architecture, and between landscape and not landscape. To use the terminology of Rosalind Kraus, an “expanded field” was created. This research is situated between architecture and not architecture in what Kraus defines as axiomatic structures. Significant artists first operating within this zone were Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Christo. The early work of Joseph Beuys’ is seminal to the research. His artworks made concrete social failure and sought the wound in our urban fabric. Central to this notion is the idea that by selecting wounded sites, and processing them via art, they begin a healing process. Works such as Tallow 1977, in which Beuys chose a leftover space in Munster and made a casting of it in fat, clearly illustrate these ideals. So do such works as Show the Wound 1976, in which Beuys believed there was a need to demonstrate trauma before the healing process can begin. Within this expanded field a complex series of works can be mapped which develop the body metaphor of the city centre. The most significant of these works were carried out by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark in the 70’s. Works such as Office Baroque 1977, in which his situational cuts into the building fabric, pointed to the dysfunctional nature of urban society. This and other actions set up architecture as an interesting first proposition in an ongoing flux. That the public artist can be active within this ongoing flux is pivotal to the future research of Porosity. Other key works, instrumental in the no-

tion of dissolving the edge of architecture and revealing its social structure, include the projection works of Krzysztof Wodiczko. Works such as the projections for the Sydney Biennale 1982 onto the Qantas Building, The Art Gallery of NSW and the MLC office, destroy the notion of stable and permanent structures and explore architecture as a psycho-political experience. The architect/artists Diller and Scoffidio have reinforced this attack on architecture by the use of installations which use as their model the prostheticised body or cyborg. Rather than simply creating architecture for “natural” bodies they define environments for bodies projected outside themselves by means of technologically extended senses. Their practice calls into question the mutant body of architecture and the nature of our existence as the body’s limits literally delaminate in cyberspace. Often they make use of video surveillance to interrogate architecture and public space. Public Space is made and not born.

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The aim of Porosity research is to accelerate the process of making public space by re-negotiating corridors of private space that facilitate the “public” on its journey from public to final private destination space. By characterizing these spaces, and colouring them with particular qualities, types of public spaces are invented. By types I mean new types - previously misunderstood spaces, private spaces that share public spaces, public spaces in disguise. What’s produced is a “production”: a spectacle that glorifies the corporation or the state, or the two working together (the two having worked together in the back room, behind the scenes, with compromises and payoffs). The space, then, is “loaned” to the public, bestowed on the public - the people considered as an organised community, members of the state, potential consumers. 8 These “ersatz” public spaces would be even more sinister if the only people enter-

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ing them were there for a specific destination purpose. But what of the passer-by, the vagrant or the person seeking a toilet or warmth, or coolness? These participants are subject to the propaganda that can be read within the space. They can equally be in transit to somewhere else or even lost. What might the schizophrenic make of the space or indeed the agoraphobic? Viewing so called “spectacle” spaces as finite destinations is as limiting within the virus of the city as viewing buildings as pedestal objects - something modernist architects are still at pains to do.

Public space is a contract: between big and small, parent and child, institution and individual. The agreement is that public space belongs to them, and they in turn belong to the state. 9 Public space, however, has just grown up. In some circumstances the individual holds a weapon that renders the fabric of buildings, between the circulation space of lift cores and the street, immaterial and endlessly connected. The terrorist explosion immediately invents new public space at the expense of any contract between government and individual. It forever changes our perception of the wholeness and might of buildings. In the wars of the past there was a perception that “cities fell”. Today individual buildings can be vaporized and the public move in to fill the hideous “gap” and contemplate the fragile nature of their journeys. Milling in the crowd, lost in the crowd, are the “others”- the outsiders, the people who have broken the contract, the people who don’t have a home here. 10 To be “outside” is to be disconnected. Disconnected from what exactly? In social and economic terms the reasons are complex and highly specific. In concrete terms the disconnection is specifically from two things. The first is shelter. The second is the sewer. Architecture is an elaborate connection of the body to the sewer - the great human communion. As such Architecture is an elaborate connection to the sewer by definition. Physi-

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cally one primarily seeks reconnection at will. Deprivation of such needs soon de-humanises the subject. They can be tourists, transients, scouts; but they can never be inhabitants. For them, public space has to be taken. 11 Being a tourist is the perfect description for the Porosity Researcher. It is from a state of disorientation that new perceptions about city spaces can be made. By entering buildings without a specific agenda or destination, other than to observe and explore, one immediately takes on the non-territory of the displaced tourist. The tourist blunders into spaces that true inhabitants will never find. Seeking both to explore and culturally decode, the tourist de-laminates built form and mixes it with slices of view in an attempt to orient. The tourist leaves an umbilical thread through corridors and spaces - a way to get back. Laying this cable is parallel to the process of exploration by the Porosity Researcher.

ies. The definition includes the dispossessed and homeless as they are destined to operate as nomads. By giving value to transitional spaces within buildings Porosity reduces rent times, in some cases to the time it takes to make another step forward or back. The space to tie a shoe-lace or adjust a tie or answer the mobile phone is rented momentarily within the porous zone beyond the boundary of possession. The mobile phone, another umbilical linkage and system of human communion, facilitates the possible transgression of property and propriety entertained by Porosity Research. The phone allows communication with someone who has deeply penetrated a private building zone. Locations and tracts can be quickly communicated as people move through the labyrinth of marginal spaces that are associated with public spaces. Keep telling yourself: its only a dream… its only a novel…its only a movie…its only a video game…keep telling yourself: it can’t happen here, this is a public space. 13

Each person, having a right to be there, has the responsibility to respect other people’s rights. No person owns a place within the public space; each place changes hands: now it’s occupied by one person, now by another. Each person has the right to a particular place, but only so long he/she stays there, in place only so long as she /he keeps her/ his place (obeys the rules of the public space); when that person moves on (or when that person is moved off, by the authorities), another person can move right in. One person after another “rents” the space, each person has the rights of a tenant; for the time being, each person has her/his own rightful place, in the middle of the public space and contiguous to every other person‘s rightful place. 12

Keep telling yourself you haven’t arrived… you are not there…therefore your journey is interrupted by the formality of entering “the building” …you can only enter the planned encounter, the appointment, the other’s home, the home of destination… It is only a movie. It is a movie in the process of being made. We are all the extras and we never see the stars and the action of the movie being acted out in front of the director. We simply anticipate being called to action. Always ready to be called, we mill around the distant glow of the lights. Tourists are bit part players of movies from other cities. Their anticipation of being called to act is muted by their dislocation. Hence the ability to explore and act in a more dangerous manner, with little or no possibility of being seen by their directors.

This constant sequence of momentary possession or sense of belonging establishes public space and the definition of what constitutes the huge communities of cit-

A public space is not a space in itself but the representation of a space. A public space is a game-board for mating games and war games. 14

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Currently public space is mis-represented. It is a numbered and grided board of snakes and ladders on which the snakes and ladders have not been printed. Porosity seeks to play the game of snakes and ladders on the grid, which describes what is public and what is private. Only via the imposition of the metaphorical porous snakes and ladders can the nuances and subtleties of mating and war games be described. War games ultimately describe, in the form of exploded cavities, the snake and ladder forms of catastrophe, hope and despair – the results of violence. The exploded city is a static representation of the umbilical journeys of one moment in a million different love affairs.

elling. These I established early within the process of data collection. Coupled with this modelling was a dependence on field research and direct observation accumulated over many visits to the city. 1.

Tree Models This modelling includes all the zones within a building that facilitate vertical and horizontal movement by visitors and inhabitants. It does not include private “destination” spaces (actual offices or residences). Therefore it embodies and distinguishes stairs, lift cores, corridors, toilets, and carparks. The resulting diagram of connected volumes constitutes a map of possible access for visitors to the building. The extent to which this is possible becomes the objective of Porosity Research. Tree models look like an internal trunk and branch diagram of spaces within buildings – hence the name.

THE STUDY Fundamental to the hypothesis of this research is the characterisation of the interior spaces of city architecture, or towers, as possibly other to private space. The internal configurations of buildings feed off transport and access spaces and the need for amenity and linkage to the sewer, plumbing being the veins and roots of the system. Porosity research has created three categories of modelling, which form the basis of the study. In order to carry out this research all buildings studied had to be re-documented in AutoCad, 3D Studio Max and finally MAYA softwares. Porosity Research depended on the creation of three types of mod-

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2.

Cactus Models This modelling qualifies and classifies “tree” modelling. Following field research the Porosity Index is formed which characterises the spaces and measures their respective “porosity”. Sections of the original tree model may prove to be inaccessible and hence disappear from the model. These models are colour coded in a gradation to indicate the degree to which they are accessible to prolonged stays. The Cactus model is like a denuded and swollen version of the original tree model – hence the name “cactus”. This modelling is accompanied by the more detailed index data taken from the field excursions. Over a period of three years many visits were made to the city and the zones being studied. This data results in a porosity score for the entire building which rates its degree of porosity in relation to other buildings in the city as a percentage.

3.

Monkey Models The final cactus models are rebuilt within MAYA software and all the external or perimeter surfaces of each space are given qualities of transparency or softness to pressure according to their measured capacity for access and refuge. Average daily usage of each building including inhabitants and visitors are then counted. Using the power of MAYA software, in relation to particle pressure and fluid dynamics, we are able to convert the numbers of people entering and using the building into a particle pressure, which is then applied to the reconstructed cactus model. That is, the Cactus model becomes an interlocking hollow envelope or balloon into which a pressure can be injected. The resulting deformation of the computer model is dependent on the random action of the particle pressure as it journeys up through the structure and reacts with surfaces of differing strengths or resistances to this pressure. In effect the modelling is subjecting the more remote areas of the building to the total occupancy of the structure on an average day. By doing this, and mapping the deforming model, I believe that it is possible to see what the building desires to do. In other words I am identifying the porous spaces within the building as similar to external public spaces by nature of their ability to facilitate unprogrammed usage and refuge. Then I am subjecting them to a public pressure which forces their morphologies into a possible reconciliation with the spaces outside the building already deemed public. These explorations and diagrams are in no way meant to be read as literal form. They are merely suggestions, provocations for the imagination of the artist/designer. They are also subject to the machine out of control, which parallels the unpredictability of pedestrian movements in the city. These images also form a de-authorised proposition to the problem or equation. In the same way Wolf Prix and COOP HIMMELBLAU used the Surrealist tool of automatic drawing to start a process, MAYA modelling field research, can be used as a tool for suggesting the future public link-

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age of city structures via a type of computer automatism. The resulting images are characterised by building envelopes, which sprout arms, appendages and spillages from their uterine inner structures, hence the name “Monkey Models”. As the monkeys link arms, so we see how the city might make these connections and how public space can begin to be more three dimensional. These diagrams, and indeed the data used in their manufacture, are also in a state of perpetual change. They are in fact momentary and respond to the data gathered at a particular time. Monkey modelling has also led to my theory of “newspace” and “newspace engines”.

NEWSPACE Porosity modelling has also led to the formulation of a new structure for the city, which employs 3 dimensional public space or public space at different levels above or below ground. I have named these spaces “Newspace” within the study. The simplest explanation of these nodelike spaces is that they form at the intersection of the deformed monkey model protrusions from different buildings. By subjecting large zones of the modelled city to independent pressures, the rate of intersections between buildings can be mapped and measured. If done over the entire CBD of the city, it is possible to calculate an average “molecular” length for that city if one is to use an atomic metaphor. This length averages the distance between major intersections formed between buildings during the monkey modelling process. The molecular structure may form the basis for a range of functional planning decisions such as the location of stations for elevated transport systems, bridges or parasitic structures. The connecting structures that link these theoretical “Newspaces” are parasitic to their host architectures. As such they are likely to be formed using private capital. The node spaces of intersection, where two or more parasite bridges intersect would be publicly owned spaces. Hence the overlayed new molecular structure for the city is a lattice of public/private construction with parallels to the existing monorail service. Through this theory the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, merge with the Situationist Constant and the visions of Lebbeus Woods. The molecular linkage of public spaces echoes Constant’s notion of “unitary urbanism” (ie: one continuous city building structure covering the earth in a web-like form). I have further developed this molecular model for the city by characterising the base structure of the city, or striated space, as being similar to the structure of Graphite, ie: layered planes of atoms with strong horizontal bonding. The bonding between the

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various layers or storeys is weak. When great pressure and heat is applied to graphite it gradually becomes diamond. The structure of diamond is a 3D interlocking one of consistently strong bonds. The parallel then becomes obvious. The “smooth” space overlay is a diamond form with “newspaces” as its atoms. All the bonds are of equal length and strength. In each city they may have a particular length based on the indexing and mapping of Porosity. The overall aim of this research is to promote the idea of more diamond structure forming over and within the graphite structure of the existing city and that this process is in continual flux.

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THE POROSITY INDEX Introduction It took 12 months to develop an index system that accurately reflected the degree to which a building was porous to public usage. Only after extensive field work and testing of results were the parameters of the index finally tuned. The resulting data can only ever be a quasi-science, however after mapping a range of buildings within Sydney’s CBD and analysing the results it was clear that my parameters reflected the experience of dealing with each of the buildings as a member of the

public. In other words if my final calculation was that a building was 75% porous then in relation to a building measuring 40% porosity this had to correlate with and reflect direct experience. The key parameters for measuring and analysing city spaces are formed under the following titles: 1 Permeability Index, 2 Transparency Index, 3 External Connectivity Index, 4 Internal Connectivity Index, 5 Orientation Index, 6 Social Construction Index, 7 Human Movement Index, 8 Environmental Index, 9 Heritage Index, 10 Spatial Quality Index.

1

3

1 2 3 4 5

Permeability Index Blue Beige Yellow Brown Red

2

1 2 3 4 5

PERMEABILITY Impenetrable Entry only Slightly porous Porous Very Porous

EXACT TIME 0 3 Minutes 10 Minutes 30 Minutes up to 5 Hours

SCORE 4 8 12 16 20

TRANSPARENCY COEFFICIENT ratio of transparent / opaque wall area % 10% or less 11% to 20% 21% to 30% 31% to 50% > 51%

SCORE

Transparency Index

Blue Beige Yellow Brown Red

/

• Opaque surrounds

2 4 6 8 10

}

Transparent surrounds

• m : m • Om2 : Tm2 express as decimal - % • convert to no. 1:10 2

2

quality

Connectivity Indexes - Possibility of making connections to other spaces or buildings - Connectivity index: based on external and internal possibilities Space Internal possibilities x Link to external skin via lift lobby or other spaces

External possibilities Link to other buildings, adjacent roof or floor level

External Connectivity Index

EXTERNAL 1

CONNECTIVITY TO ADJACENT BUILDING Street level access to adjacent building 2 Roof level access to adjacent building 3 Other level access to adjacent building 4 Access to toilets in adjacent building 5 Access to fire stairs in adjacent building Score out of 10 4

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1 1 1 1

Internal Connectivity Index

INTERNAL CONNECTIVITY WITHIN SUBJECT BUILDING 1 Street level external access to skin/ window 2 Direct lobby external access to skin/ window 3 Access through external private office to skin/ window 4 Other access to external skin/ window 5 Access to internal window 6 Access to toilets 7 Access to roof level 8 Access to fire stairs 9 Direct access to from subject transport building 10 NO surveillance cam- of subject eras building Score out of 10

• Scale of 1→10 + Scale of 1→10 = n • n = 1→20, 20 → maximum connectivity • Connectivity Index = Internal possibility + External possibility ÷ 2 • Score out of 10

SCORE 1

SCORE 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5


5

8

Orientation Index

ORIENTATION CUE 1 Access to space with or without view 2 Immediate access to view from lift lobby 3 View from any location accessible on floor 4 View outside 5 View of street 6 View of adjacent buildings 7 View of sky 8 View of harbour 9 View close and far 10 View oriented to north to sun Score out of 10 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 ÷ 2 7

SCORE 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Social Construction Index CUE Access to Access to Access to Access to Access to Access to building Access to building Access to Close proximity to Close proximity to Connectivity between Connectivity between Mixed usage within Mixed usage within Low ext. sound level Operable windows View outside View outside View outside View outside for score out of 10

toilets kitchen phone/ data/ power public rest areas public art recreation service roof area adjacent buildings food outlets transport offices floors floor adjacent floors

any view including street of greater city to north

SCORE 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5

Human Movement Index

APPR. NUMB. PEOPLE MOVEMENT PER HOUR 1 1 to 10 2 11 to 20 3 21 to 30 4 31 to 40 5 41 to 50 6 51 to 75 7 76 to 100 8 101 to 150 9 151 to 200 10 200 + Score out of 10

SCORE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Environmental Index

CUE 1 Opening windows 2 Cross ventilation 3 Daylight 4 Northern orientation or sunlight penetration 5 Sun shade devices fitted 6 People-friendly finishes + fittings 7 Possibility for rest eg seating 8 Free water fountain access 9 Access to toilets 10 Access to food outlets Score out of 10 9 Age Index 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Score 10

SCORE 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

AGE

SCORE

1 year 2 years 3 years 4 years 5 years 6 to 10 years 11 to 20 years 49 to 100 years 101 to 200 years 200 years + out of 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Spatial Quality Index SPATIAL QUALITY

SCORE

1 Extreme Discomfort 1 2 2 3 3 Situation comfort/ psychological 4 4 security response. Different zones 5 5 may not be calibrated. 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9 10 Extreme Comfort 10 Score out of 10 • Situation comfort response – subjective on scale of 1 to 10 • Psychological security response of space • Comfort index • Discomfort index Spatial Quality Index 1 to 10 – 10 being the score for maximum comfort within a particular zone. Different zones may not be calibrated with each other. The final score for each building is represented as a percentage figure.

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THE SYDNEY MODEL THE ZONES Introduction The total modelling of any western city is a much larger project than this 3 year research grant could afford. Therefore it was necessary to summarise the Central Business District of Sydney via the selection of a series of zones or building samples which best represented the range of building types and program of this city. Not only was program considered but also a range of issues such as site permeability security sensitive types of buildings and access to public systems of transport. This would ensure that both government buildings and public buildings would be represented. Finally, three zones were chosen for study, each including more than 4 tower structures within the block or blocks. The following text describes each zone and illustrates the data and results achieved during the research process.

Zone 2

Zone 1

Zone 3

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ZONE 1 345 - 363 George Street

11 BARRACK STREET

Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality Overall TOTAL SCORE

Introduction This zone, situated in the mid-city, forms a good example of high-rise mixed use offices for a range of business types. It summarises many similar sites in the city, combining within the city block a range of new and old structures. Predominantly occupied by private companies, it also features the Property Council, restaurants and perimeter shopping in some sections. It is clearly a typical city scenario. The block also features remnants of the old city’s structure via a network of redesigned laneways and interconnections within the block. The site perimeter is formed by George Street, Barrack Street, York Street and King Street. 363 GEORGE STREET

70% 45% 10% 42% 53% 19% 28% 23% 20% 55%

Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality

41%

Overall

Average 41

345 GEORGE STREET

35% 27% 6% 18% 32% 11% 10% 17% 50% 21%

Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality

22%

Overall

Average 22

TOTAL SCORE

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TOTAL SCORE

67% 53% 10% 38% 46% 34% 19% 29% 40% 46% 41% Average 41.1


Very Porous Porous Slightly Porous Entry Only Impenetrable

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In order to further test and illustrate the power of the research to suggest results, the original proposal sought to use a public art/architecture intervention that reacted to these results with built form. Public art is privileged to transgress a variety of the city’s proprieties. However this project alludes to a new situation of privilege, which enables parasitic art/architecture interventions to occur in future city developments. The project was physically modelled first, using standard architectural modelling techniques at scale, combined with my use of readymade model pieces from kits for helicopters, aeroplanes, cars, and space technology. These forms, which have functional links back to the body, also provide a suggestive readymade palette for the artist/designer to choose from which echoes the issues of adaptive re-use, recycling and transformation implicit within the Porosity Project as a foundation for renewal. It can be argued

that new shapes and forms do not need to be invented when such a rich choice of forms already enliven the imagination. Central to this practice, which informs my gallery art, is also the notion that we simply cannot rebuild all the bad buildings within the city. Society has neither the time nor the energy resources. We need to adapt and transform existing structures in a process that also reinforces the definition of architecture as a process of continual flux rather than timeless pristine stasis. In other words architecture is at best a continual process of becoming. The reality of the confusion of structures that constitute a street – from signs to the architecture of cars and buses, light poles, underground access stairs, building construction, paving, awnings, monorails, accidents, and endless renovations, makes a nonsense of modernism’s vision for the city.

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54


55


56


57


East Elevation

West Elevation

South Elevation

North Elevation

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The final forms of the Zone 1 Monkey Models (MAYA Modelling) were used to inform the possible shaping and configuration of the parasite action. In particular the massive foyer swellings in 363 George Street and its vertical connections with vacant floor protrusions from 345 George Street found links with public access via Barrack Street and York Street. Another extension which penetrated the external skin of 345 George Street formed the perfect possible pick-up point for monorail linkage of the entire parasite to other destinations in the city via George Street. Also informing the parasite was the need to introduce a “newspace” construction or central node in keeping with the possibility of suggesting the “diamond” form over the exist-

ing “graphite” form of the city structure. This node found its position above the foyer of 363 George Street and below that building’s plant rooms. As a result the public/ private foyer space is ghosted from above by a new public link space, which feeds a network of parasite structures adjoining the historic Land Titles Building on Barrack Street and vacant floors in 345 George Street, which the study commandeers as public access and amenity with the possibility of private restaurants and shops etc. These spaces feed back to the public “newspace” and also to a proposed high speed monorail system, which would operate on George Street (Sydney’s main Street running north south between Central Station and Circular Quay).

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60


SNAKES

AND

LADDERS

I have chosen to run parallel to the ARC Discovery Grant a PhD in Fine Arts. The ARC Porosity Research forms a theoretical foundation and source of data, which can be further tested by a series of art actions. This also represents a commencement of the real process within the city, led by art. Running the two programs together further blurs the distinction between art and architecture, art and urban planning, building and ephemeral actions. The artwork events, proposed for the PhD, set out to prove that the research has real substance and also to interrogate both the process of the research and the city itself. I decided early on that the form of these interrogations should be a series of games. Games are extremely refined structures, richly socially encoded and developed to produce results or temporary solutions to a problem. “Snakes and Ladders” is a board game of chance, which pits the players on a numbered grid, against the ups and downs of their progress towards winning the game. Throw the dice, progress like counting, and where you stop may be either a blank square space, or one inhabited by the tip of a snake’s tail, a snake’s head or the end of a ladder. The bottom of a ladder brings a fortunate climb and progress up the scale. The top of a ladder is passed without descent. A snake’s head brings a slippery slide down the scale to a less fortunate position. A snake’s tail cannot be climbed. The game is one of chance only. No tactics can be applied in the race against another player. Fate takes its course. How can this metaphor be used in relation to the western city? Is this metaphor then useful in assessing how spaces are or can be linked? Assuming that it is a useful metaphor, then the following notions might follow about the nature of public and private spaces. I see the ladders as representing the vertical access systems in high-rise buildings,

such as lift towers and fire stairs. These systems can be classified as destination spaces or as spaces of aspiration. They are either completely open to use by the public for 24 hours/day or are mediated and restricted according to the culture of the building. I see the snakes as the hidden or unclassified spaces associated with building circulation. These spaces link with and connect the vertical access systems with a myriad of other corridor options. The options can be classified according to time, spatial quality and outlook. Outlook, in association with specific spaces, forms a measure of the site’s ability to be further connected to adjacent spaces across public space. This is due to the relationship that the space shares with “outside” or conventionally framed public space. It is also due to the positioning of a window or door. Windows and doors are the openings and potential openings in the impermeable layer surrounding both circulation and private space. The potential for building envelope openings does not depend on the precedence of a glass window. The needs and desires of future development will always easily unfold architecture’s skin. The flaw in the metaphor offers other meanings to the city analogy for assessment. This flaw is due to the sense of loss or potential demise associated with going down or backwards and then possibly losing. However there is another way of interpreting this downward spiral of events. The snake or “porosity” on the board is a way back or out. This passage doesn’t imitate the normal passage of entry and is found by chance. The player who descends down many snakes does not necessarily lose the game. Indeed the more snake descents by each player the longer the game. Is it possible to overlay, on the day to day functioning of city spaces, a set of oppositional performative forces, which effect the perception of that space? Is it possible to enact a complex series of games within the structure of a building, which permanently change the way in which that building is used and perceived? One could argue that this al-

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ready happens by chance. One could also argue that the pressure exerted by public space and its furniture on private building spaces will continue to perforate and heal those envelopes regardless of affirmative action. Using the umbrella of public art action and the information explosion it is now possible to accelerate the effect of a performative action which signals a rethink of that structure in a dynamic way. The idea is to effect our perception of building in a way, which is as powerful and undermining as the performative and ephemeral actions of Gordon Matta-Clark. The identification process treats the city as a body in much the same way as Joseph Beuys did in works such as “Tallow” and “Lung”. Identifying and acting on or on behalf of those spaces in order to promote a process of healing. “Healing” however is no longer the objective – this is far too uto-

pian a gesture. Renegotiating the boundaries and expanding programs is closer to the mark. These actions have resonance with a great range of artistic and theoretical movements of the last century. From the Situationists to the artists involved in performance happenings of the 60’s to the attacks of Gordon Matta-Clark in the 70s to the installations of Vito Acconci and Richard Wentworth in the 80’s and 90’s. However I believe that never before have the internal circulation systems of the city’s architecture been challenged in a way which will eviscerate the pedestal object ideals of architecture. From this argument the devised game of Snakes and Ladders tests the research results and maps the journeys of participants as a model of Porosity. This performance forms the first art action of my PhD in Fine Arts.

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“Inside the Parasite” Artspace 2005 Snakes and Ladders was enacted in conjunction with Artspace Gallery under the curatorship of Nicolas Tsoutas (Director). Snakes and Ladders was played out within Sydney’s CBD at the location 345-363 George St. Orchestrated by myself it involved my assistant Tia Chim and 10 students from UNSW COFA. The students were divided into 2 sets or types of players. 5 students took the role of instructors and 5 became participants in the game. The interiors of two buildings on George St were already comprehensively mapped in relation to the Porosity Index. Therefore it was already known where people could and couldn’t go within these structures, and how long they could stay before being subject to security. Each instructor was given a set position within the two buildings, which he or she had to remain in for the duration of the game. They were given five instructions to give out randomly when approached by a student who was a player. These instructions said either “I am a snake go down to x floor location …” or “I am a ladder go up to y floor location”. Each ticket also formed a marker for the player to leave at the site “see image” which stated boldly “Opened by Porosity” and the date. This had to be left on location as proof of occupation. So there was the possibility within the game that each player would find five instructors and make five plays. If the game was not stopped by security within the hour, then the player at the highest level within the buildings would win. Each player was also instructed to phone the control within the Artspace Parasite and indicate when they had successfully reached each location with a mobile phone photo of themselves and/ or the location plus tag. The instructors were carefully placed in locations known to have minimal surveillance. Again this formed a test of research data. The locations to which each player was sent were of varying degrees of Porosity. Some

would prove very challenging for the players and test the Porosity Indexes. Each player had to roam the two buildings in search of an instructor from which to receive a random note of instruction. This formed a complex web of exploration of both city buildings. Each building had varying degrees of high security and regular office occupancy. The construction of the “Inside the Parasite” installation at Artspace in Sydney formed the centre of the game. After a year of negotiations with Sydney City Council, it was found to be impossible to construct a “parasite” structure on the roof of the building. As a compromise, I improvised a temporary building within the Entrance loading dock of the Gallery. Behind stretch plastic we constructed a dwelling/office from which I could both command the game but also beam the information gathered from the city back into the gallery space for projection onto the walls as an ongoing installation. Hence the “Parasite” was the collection point for all information emanating from the game. Appropriately the Parasite claims parts of public space to become an extension of architecture. It then speaks to spaces within architecture that are trying to become part of public space. Evidence of the occupation is then beamed into the private/ public space of the art gallery to be claimed as new public spaces via the interrogation of a game. The five instructors were given their secret locations and sent to the city to take up those positions for the start of the game at a set time. The players were sent off 15 minutes later, knowing only the address of the two buildings and that each one of them had to attempt to find each of the five instructors and obey the command of the snake or ladder. Once they reached they city location as a group they were instructed to disperse and operate independently. The aim was to win the game by being on the highest level of either two towers after 1 hour. Back in the Parasite, Tia and I awaited the phone communications, ready to immediately download their images and location each

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of person within the 3D construction of the porosity “cactus” diagram. The game commenced slowly as the players found their way cautiously through the labyrinth of possible spaces. Eventually the calls started to come in and the excitement began to build. The 25 positions to be occupied by the players constituted a thorough penetration of the possibilities for infiltration of both buildings. Some were in toilets of otherwise secure floors while others were corridors under intermittent surveillance. Once all commands had been negotiated the entire “cactus” diagram (see illustrations) would have been properly interrogated. Within 30 minutes of starting the game, calls came in back to back with pictures at-

tached. They were quickly downloaded into the system and the locations were plotted on our maps. While occupying the Parasite we were filmed by Tania Doropoulos. Ultimately the twin projection within Artspace would reflect the two streams of activity. One projection gave evidence to our occupancy of the parasite and commanding the game of snakes and ladders. This was then mixed with images from the research activity and previous film from the location to set a context for the viewer. The other projection strung together the phone messages and images recreating the space/ time of the game. Remarkably the game finished almost exactly on the hour with all players having reached five separate locations. We had a winner also

64


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who had reached level 23 within 363 George St just inside the hour. The Parasite at Artspace was maintained throughout the exhibition with both workstation computers displaying the event in loop form. The two simulations were echoed within the gallery space via digital projection. From “Inside the Parasite� tentacle-like fingers of the exploration reached out into the city spaces within building. The viewer was able to engage in the game of Snakes and Ladders while witnessing the incorporation of these porous types of spaces into the lexicon of city public space. The final performance installation is a record of the interrogation of city spaces and their subsequent redefinition as types of public space.

INSTRUCTOR 1

INSTRUCTOR 2

INSTRUCTOR 3

INSTRUCTOR 4

INSTRUCTOR 5

Position: 345 George st. Level 14

Position: 345 George st. Level 2

Position: 345 George st. Level 2

Position: 363 George st. Level 25

Position: 363 George st. Level 19

Level 2, Toilet

Level 15, Hallway

Level 3, Vacant Space

Level 30, Lobby

Vestibule Ground Level

Level 7, Toilet

Level 6, Toilet

Level 5, Vacant Space

Level 27, Toilet

Level 25, Toilet

Level 9, Hallway

Level 12, Foyer

Level 4, Toilet

Level 24, Hallway

Level 26, Foyer

Level 14, Vacant Space

Level 1, Artwork

Level 1, Ground Toilet

Level 19, Kitchen

Ground Coffee Shop

Level 16, Foyer

Level 8, Toilet

Level 5, Vacant Space

Level 18, Hallway

Level 23, Foyer

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ZONE 2 AURORA PLACE GOVERNOR PHILLIP AND MACQUARIE TOWERS

Zone 2 is bounded by Macquarie Street, Bent Street, Young Street and Bridge Street. The block was chosen as an example of the city in which buildings are occupied by both Government and private corporations. It therefore represents a section of the CBD that is subject to elevated levels of surveillance and security. It is therefore potentially the least porous zone within the city. Acquiring adequate information to re-document the respective buildings was a great challenge. Field work was also very challenging and required a strategy of urban camouflage. This took the simple form of a dress code mimicking wealthy beaurocrats or company executives. The strategy worked extremely well. Without a suit it wasn’t even possible to enter the lift lobby without questions in the case of Governor Phillip Tower. In an expensive suit and with my assistant looking like a highly paid executive we were able to pass most checkpoints unquestioned.

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GOVERNOR MACQUARIE TOWER

MUSEUM OF SYDNEY

GOVERNOR MACQUARIE TOWER Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality Overall TOTAL SCORE

AURORA TOWER

MUSEUM OF SYDNEY 10% 0% 0% 0% 10% 0% 0% 10% 40% 10% 6%

Average 6.5

Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality Overall TOTAL SCORE

GOVERNOR PHILLIP TOWER

GOVERNOR PHLLIP TOWER

AURORA TOWER 75% 60% 20% 40% 60% 50% 70% 50% 50% 70%

Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality

58%

Overall

Average 56.5

TOTAL SCORE

75

30% 20% 0% 20% 30% 10% 10% 20% 70% 20%

Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality

20%

Overall

Average 20

TOTAL SCORE

35% 20% 0% 0% 30% 10% 10% 20% 40% 20% 20% Average 20


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77


NORTH ELEVATION

SOUTH ELEVATION

EAST ELEVATION

78

WEST ELEVATION


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ZONE 3 WORLD SQUARE ERNST & YOUNG Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality Overall TOTAL SCORE

1.3/20 0.9/10 0.2/5 1.7/5 0.6/10 0.4/10 0.3/10 0.4/10 10/10 0.7/10 15% Average 15

WORLD SQUARE SHOPPING CENTRE

This zone is bounded by George Street, Liverpool Street, Goulburn Street, and Pitt Street. It was chosen to best represent a major mixed development block. As such World Square, adjacent to Sydney’s China Town, is the most significant example of new high-rise inner city apartment blocks mixed with office towers, shopping arcades, and hotels. The block also connects with major bus transport, the monorail service and adjacent underground train stations.

Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality

20/20 10/10 4/5 4/5 9/10 7/10 10/10 10/10 10/10 6/10

Overall

90%

TOTAL SCORE

L10 90

AVILLION HOTEL Permeability Transparency External Connectivit Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movemen Environmental Age Spatial Quality Overall TOTAL SCORE

WORLD SQUARE Permeability Transparency External Connectivity Internal Connectivity Orientation Social Construction Human Movement Environmental Age Spatial Quality Overall TOTAL SCORE

80

31% 25% 24% 22% 21% 15% 12% 19% 50% 24% 25% Average 25

Commercial 85% 58% 58% 34% 29% 29% 16% 24% 100% 46%

Residential 6% 6% 2% 2% 5% 0% 2% 5% 100% 1%

51%

14%

Overall 14% 11% 8% 6% 7% 6% 3% 6% 100% 9% 17% Average 17


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HIDE AND SEEK The World Square site has extensive ground floor and basement floor access and hence porosity. Above ground the city block includes a series of towers dominated by Sydney’s largest residential building, “World Square”, which includes Hotel accommodation. The commercial towers have a variety of porous qualities that have been measured by the field research. Another major Hotel dominates the north east corner of the block. In relation to the study, Hotels provide another type of public space where members of the public can lease space for short period of time in a climate of openness to the city via lounges, restaurants and lobbies. After assessing this mix of development I opted for the game of “hide and seek” to test the limits and strengths of the research. In order to penetrate the residential towers I devised a strategy that included the booking of 2 hotel rooms for the duration of the performance. Room 1 was situated in the World Tower residential building. Room 2 was situated in the Hotel. By renting these 2 rooms other spaces within the towers, such as gymnasiums, swimming pools, restaurants and lecture or meeting rooms were made accessible. The study classifies these spaces as types of public space also. The hotel rooms became bases from which the simple game of one person hiding while the other seeks could emanate. Strict rules associated with timing of both the act of hiding and the act of finding a hiding place were laid out. These rules included the necessity to return a set number of times to the hotel rooms within the game time. Each of the two players was accompanied by an assistant who kept times and mapped the paths taken. A third assistant moved from team to team, via mobile phone communication, and filmed the action. The final result included a series of captures and a very complex series of paths travelled. These pathways were later fed into the computer and constructed into a series of 3D animations. When viewed as structures

within the buildings “Tree” diagrams the game creates new possible constructions of public space. These models of the game are examples of the porous architectures possible within this zone’s public space.

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16:51

16:1 9

16:55

16:2 4

17:00

C AU GHT ! Av illion Hot e l Ba r

16:2 8

17:04

16:3 3

17:09

16:3 7

17:13

16:4 2

17:18

C AU GHT ! World Tower Rm 6 5 01

16:4 6

CAU GHT ! World Towe r Foy er

17:22

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SEEK

HIDE

SEEK

HIDE 16:1 5


GAME TWO HIDER

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GAME TWO SEEKER

85


GAME TWO HIDER

GAME TWO SEEKER

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Caught Hider - Richard Goodwin Seeker - Tia Chim

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POROSITY CONCLUSION NEWSPACE THEORY Porosity: The revision of public space in the city using public art to test the functional boundaries of built form. This title, as well as a commitment to map significant areas of Sydney, has formed the basis of more than three years of research and study. The process of re-documenting all the buildings within the study area, via AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max softwares, took one and a half years to complete. The subsequent MAYA modelling, as illustrated, has taken the study into areas not envisaged when I first set-out on this project. The net result proves the original hypothesis that within buildings there are many spaces and sequences of spaces that can be classified as types of public space. The study proved that the reality of city spaces and their usage is far less defined than one would expect. The city is porous to pedestrian access in many complex ways. But what does this information tell us? My theory for the city is based on a belief in the endless flux of architecture, and that an engagement in this state of perpetual becoming, will further enable designers and artists to adapt and transform existing buildings.

That this action involves a more fluid attitude to boundaries is implicit. We are able to initiate these tests via “art� actions because, for all the problems of public art, it does have license to transgress planning laws that govern architecture. This is proven by my actions and those of other public artists to date. Parasite Roof, 1999 (as illustrated) could only be built on a heritage building as an art project. It does however blur the boundary with architecture by having program. Parasite Android, 2002, projects beyond building boundaries. Cope Street Parasite, 2006, projects beyond boundaries and has a limited access program.

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THE NEWSPACE ENGINE It can be argued that if western cities are to survive then they will need multiple ground planes. This also means multiple levels at which roads, footpaths, bridges, living bridges (i.e. those with architectural program in addition) and parks can exist. Cities are already transformed by the beginnings of these actions. However instruments and mechanisms need to be created at the level of planning and legislation that enable the further acceleration of the state of flux. This theory of transformation and adaptation is diametrically opposed to both the Modernist idea of utopian ideals, such as those espoused by architects such as Corbusier and the model of complete urban and political control exercised by the likes of Baron Hausmann on Paris. During my 2005 Porosity Studio, held in Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art Beijing, titled Parasite Car, students from a range of disciplines and countries revealed frightening data about the future of that city, which underline the necessity for a multi-layered public and transit space. By 2008 it is estimated, according to current data, that Beijing will have a plan area of car mass equal to 40 square kilometres. Apart from the obvious environmental and social implications of this equation it remains necessary to multiply the cities public layers for survival itself. Although a relatively crude example, this data proved a valuable starting point for ideas about cars, the body and architecture, which challenge the idea that these elements of our city should remain disparate. The Newspace Engine Diagram

circle. The crossover space forms the nucleus of the circle and must have different characteristics from each arm as it combines a combination of links in one. The spokes of connection to the nucleus represent the desired connections formed during the deformation of my Cactus models using MAYA software. I have called the nucleus space the newspace or new public space as previously described. This diagram is also multi-layered and three dimensional. By drawing a sequence of these wheel forms or city molecules the modelling can then reflect the idea of connecting the newspaces in 3 dimensions. The space surrounding the building forms is public on the ground plane of origin. The spaces between the parasite spokes is public airspace. The spokes generate deep within the architecture in toilet spaces, which are already types of public space as defined by this study. The spoke then travels through corridor space and foyer space to become a desired parasite connection. The parasite connection is essentially privately built public access – similar to transit corridor. Within these spaces public amenities of a commercial nature, such as restaurants and cafes, may occur. The parasite spokes combine to form a linked hub around the newspace nucleus. In order to establish a new network of 3D public spaces at different ground levels I have theorised that these spaces would be publicly owned and funded. As a new structuring order, free from the layered discipline of the existing city, these nodes need to be connected, either back to the ground or potentially to each other with bridges or rapid transport systems such as elevated monorails. As the structure will develop in a series of new growths in a range of positions, I call these linkages “The Haphazard Monorail”.

In order to deduce a theoretical diagram, which best explains the city of new connections, I positioned building symbols within a circle. The circle condenses the focus on potential connection between each building unit. The shortest distance between these units crosses the centre of the connecting

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Graphite and Diamond As previously stated the city can be characterised as a type of graphite-like structure: stacks of floor spaces in even layers with weaker interconnecting bonds represented by stairs, lifts and facades. The idea of an overlaid conchoidal structure of equal strength connections, similar to diamond, gives form to the newspace engine theory or modelling. Hence the objective of the Porosity study, and its deformation of built form, which is porous in a variety of ways, is to find a system of mapping and analysis which seeks answers from the reality of the haptic or smooth spaces of the city. To find what buildings desire and hence what cities desire – a starting point. An endlessly changing series of starting points to the process of adaptation and transformation. Ultimately the public experience of space in the city should equal the private spatial experience. This equilibrium can be equated with the measuring and testing of capital or the capitalist system in which we live. Measuring capital against public ownership is a social equation of inverse proportionality. The politics of this balance fills the spectrum between right and left politics. As in nature this equilibrium can never be reached. We engage the process of flux as it exists.

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City Valence The possible end result of all this modelling would be the establishment of an atomic valence for buildings within an individual city. By deforming the entire city model (MAYA Monkey Modelling), in cactus form, it would be possible to check the rate at which parasitic extensions intersect and the average bond length or strength between building forms. By ascribing these nodes with an average rate of connection the degree to which a city desired connection could be given a relative number or building valence. Coupled with graphs of every building’s Porosity score or percentage, the nature of a future 3 dimensionalising of that city could be interpreted by both designers and planners.

FOOTNOTES 1. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, p 798. 2. Philip Ursprung, Herzog & De Meuron: Natural History, Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture/ Lars Muller Publishers, 2003, p 111. 3. Ibid. p 487. 4. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002, p 3. 5. Gilles Deleuze, & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p 474. 6. Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996. p 288. 7. Vito Acconci, Making Public: The Writing and Reading of Public Space, The Hague: Stroom, 1993, p 394. 8. Ibid, p 394. 9. Ibid, p 394. 10. Ibid, p 394. 11. Ibid, p 394. 12. Ibid, p 395. 13. Ibid, p 396. 14. Ibid, p 396.

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3

T H E COT TON CAVE S AT S T E V ENAGE NE W TOWN V ICTOR IA WATSON


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The research embodied in this project arises as a consequence of two, differing, lines of inquiry: first, the development and manufacture of a physical artifact, called Air Grid; second, the investigation of a philosophical question, asking: how does Henri Lefebvre envision a specific role for architecture in his general theory of space?


Air Grid The first line of inquiry is concerned with an entity called Air Grid. Air Grid is a light-weight, three-dimensional lattice structure made from brightly coloured machine embroidery thread, sewn into a foam-board support and held taut in the grip of fine incisions, sliced into designated members of the support frame. The support has two tasks to perform, first it must serve as an apparatus for measuring and locating points in space and second it must be able to maintain the shape of the grid. Foam-board is a composite material consisting of a polyurethane core, sandwiched between two layers of thin card, The material is light and rigid but not brittle; it is easy to punch small, relatively clean, holes through foam-board; Because of its card surface it is easy to mark setting-out lines on foam-board and foam-board is easy to cut. The three-dimensional grid is made by drawing thread through a network of holes, pierced through panels of foamboard and held taut in the grasp of a sharp incision cut into the vertical members of the foam-board armature that gives stability to the panels of holes.

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Although the idea of the Air Grid is conceptually simple, in its material manifestation what is simple (the figure of the grid) is nowhere to be seen. Sometimes the colourful structure will appear to condense a cloud of radiant plasma, at


other times to vibrate, as if an invisible force were acting upon the threads, switching them from on to off. The Air Grid quite literally constitutes a volume of coloured hatching in the air, a kind of three-dimensional grating of sufficiently fine grain that human vision, as it scans back and forth, trying to make sense of what it sees, cannot separate individual images. The effect is like that of a badly tuned television or radio, of unfocused information; the imagination can make no sense of what passes across the perceptual field. But unlike the effect of a badly tuned instrument, which can be most disturbing to the viewing subject, the experience of watching Air Grid is curiously delightful: Air Grid generates a feeling of anticipation, as if something is about to happen, this elusive quality of the Air Grid is provocative; it draws forth the desire to make something new. Development of the Air Grid having reached the point where it was possible to draw forth grids of a size corresponding to the scale of the human body (the first Air Grid measured only 10 X 13 X 11 inches), so the ambition to use Air Grid to define habitable space becomes increasingly feasible. But this ambition is curtailed within a much broader question concerning the nature of architecture: in order to investigate this broader question the thought of Henri Lefebvre is drawn into the inquiry.


Towards A Lefebvrian Architecture In the collective effort of constructing the spatial environment of a particular society how, if at all, does Lefebvre envision the role architecture? Lefebvre often refers to architecture in the sense of a stage, or setting for events; but he also refers to architecture as the producer of living bodies. The two notions seem contradictory: the idea that architecture serves as a setting for events has implications of passivity; as if the architecture were a mere backdrop to the events that unfold around it. The idea that architecture produces living bodies seems to imply, somewhat problematically, that the body of architecture is alive! If architecture lives then surely that life is played out in the activities of the users; and the idea that the life of the architecture is played out in the activities of the users leads back to the idea that the work of architecture is merely a setting for events.

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However, Lefebvre insists that: Architecture produces living bodies, each with its own distinctive traits. The animating principle of such a body, its presence, is neither visible nor legible as such, nor is it the object of any discourse, for it reproduces itself within those who use the space in question, within their lived experience. Of that experience the tourist, the passive spectator, can grasp but a pale shadow. 1


It is important to note that Lefebvre does not say that architecture is a living body; he says that architecture produces living bodies; the implication would seem to be that architecture is some kind of productive force. Furthermore, Lefebvre does not say that the ‘animating principle’ of the body that architecture has produced lies with the users; he says it is reproduced in the users. Lefebvre is proposing that the relationship between the living body produced by architecture and the living bodies of its users is a kinaesthetic relationship. In his understanding of architecture Lefebvre stresses the fundamental role of the social body as simultaneously both the product and the producer of space; and the mutual relationship between the social body and space is governed by laws, these are ‘the laws of space’. In suggesting that architecture is the producer of living bodies, Lefebvre is suggesting that architecture performs a cultural function, similar to the natural function that relates an organic creature to its body and to its immediate environment. The Production of Space contains an extraordinary description of a particular work of architecture, the work in question is the Church of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, built from 1903 onwards and designed by the architect Antonio Gaudí. In fact, the Sagrada Familia can hardly be described as having been designed in the conventional sense, for Gaudí’s


intention in the work was ‘the building of a cathedral without planning.’2 This is not to say that Gaudí worked upon the Sagrada Familia without deploying techniques of design, such as drawing and model-making; what was unusual in Gaudí’s approach to the design was the way in which he structured the relationship between conceiving and making the building. Gaudí did not produce a complete design of the building before work started on site, he produced a model of a physical structure, which was sufficient for the purpose of forming a physical and mental framework that could serve as an outline of the building. The subsequent process of the development of the design involved Gaudí in constant activity on site, an activity which included working with conventional tools of design, but which also included carving and the management of the work of others. Lefebvre does not mention the unusual circumstances of the Sagrada Familia’s production, but it is likely that he was aware of these circumstances and saw in them an antithesis to the conventional means by which modern society produces its space.

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Lefebvre’s description of the Sagrada Familia conveys the feeling that this place is the site of profound, carnivalesque excess: The flouting of established spatial codes and the eruption


of a natural and cosmic fertility generate an extraordinary and dizzying ‘infinitization’ of meaning. Somewhere short of accepted symbolisms, but beyond everyday meanings, a sanctifying power comes into play which is neither that of the state, nor of the Church, nor of the artist, nor that of theological divinity, but rather that of a naturalness boldly identified with divine transcendence. The Sagrada Familia embodies a modernised heresy which disorders representations of space and transforms them into a representational space where palms and fronds are expressions of the divine. The outcome is a virtual eroticization, one based on the enshrinement of a cruel, sexual-mystical pleasure which is the opposite, but also the reverse, of joy. 3 It seems that for Lefebvre, the work of architecture offers a sensuously affective environment for the collective social body, serving both as a haven and as a site of stimulation. In the Sagrada Familia the painful, but at the same time pleasurable and necessary, sacrifice of self-separation is prompted and protected. The reason the Sagrada Familia can facilitate this abstract but vital process is because it has been produced by architecture, it is a living body, built in the likeness of nature and replicating the laws of space.


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The Project of The Cotton Caves In 1960 Lefebvre wrote a short text on the subject of the new town of Mourenx, which was under construction near Navarrenx, his home town in South Western France. Lefebvre was fascinated and disturbed as he watched the new town being built. As he watched so Lefebvre was profoundly aware that the phenomenon which he was studying was emblematic of an abstract and global space: Everything is trivial. Everything is closure and materialized system. The text of the town is totally legible, as impoverished as it is clear, despite the architects’ efforts to vary the lines. Surprise? Possibilities? From this place, which should have been the home of all that is possible, they have vanished without a trace. 4 By comparison to Lefebvre’s profound experience of the Sagrada Familia, the new town left him cold, seeming to lack a vital ingredient: the power of architecture, necessary to vitalize space, seemed to be missing. The first Architecture of the Air Grid is called The Project of the Cotton Caves, it is set in the context of a new town called Stevenage – or, rather, a not so new town, for it is now sixty years since Stevenage was built. 5 The Project of the Cotton Caves consists in the creation of a series of caves; these will be located in the dells that circum-


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scribe the new town of Stevenage, their purpose being to house an endless array of Air Grid structures. The extent of the caves is potentially endless since new excavations can be added at any time; the first sequence of caves, however, is to be built to the north of the new town, located under the chalk berm that cuts from east to west across a gently sloping field near Crow End, this will be called Cotton Cave 01. Cotton Cave 01 will serve as the operational headquarters of The Project of the Cotton Caves, for this reason Cotton Cave 01 will be equipped with facilities to support the person whose task it is to manage the construction of the caves. The purpose of the Cotton Caves is to provide a place where the people of Stevenage and visitors to the town can come to search for Air Grid and to enjoy the experience of Air Grid when it is found. The experience of searching for Air Grid will involve anticipation and delight, rather like that of searching for crystals, precious stones, gorgeously coloured species of insect and fossils. It is envisioned that the effect of finding an Air Grid, of entering and of engaging with the Air Grid, will have resonances of the profound sensory experience, imagined by Lefebvre to inhabit the environment of the Sagrada Familia. The addi-


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tion of the Cotton Caves to the environment of the new town will have a fairy-tale effect on the minds and the imaginations of the people who visit them, producing an exhilarating lightness as if the users of the caves are becoming one with coloured light. The spatial logic of Cotton Caves offers the potential for a wide range of different journeys and modes of occupancy, in fact, there is such a variety of possibilities built into the architecture of the Cotton Caves that it is hard to imagine ever exhausting the entire range of possibilities; however, should the range of possibilities ever seem to have reached its limit then so too will the project; and the Cotton Caves will melt into air.


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1 Henri Lefebvre, The Production

5 Stevenage was one of the eight

of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith

new towns proposed by the Greater

(trans.), Oxford UK & Cambridge

London Plan, 1944. The ambition for

USA: Blackwell, 1991, 137.

the new towns was that they would

2 Quoted in, Robin Evans, The Pro-

each provide a community in which

jective Cast, Cambridge Massachu-

60,000 people could live and work.

setts & London England: MIT Press,

The village of Stevenage became

1995, 333.

the first designated new town in

3 Henri Lefebvre, ibid., 232.

1946.

4 Henri Lefebvre, ‘Notes on a New Town’, in Introduction to Modernity, John Moore (trans.), London & New York: Verso, 1995, 119.


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Building Bridges

4

Jane Burry and Andrew Maher


Building Bridges

Introduction

Within architecture and the design of built structures, the pursuit of simple perfection through cosmic analogy and the geometrical hierarchical order derived from it is no longer a single dominant paradigm, nor is the open axial channeling of space between clean lines and planes that challenged the detail to follow.1 The expression of structural honesty is a choice not an imperative. But in the time of the fine grain decoding of life as DNA there is a keen interest once again in a type of organicism that emerges from an underlying system, complexity from simple roots, form that follows certain growth criteria and responds “naturally� to constraint systems like gravity and site conditions or the external forces of weather and use. This appears fertile philosophical soil in which the curiously estranged disciplines of architecture and structural civil engineering might grow together. Accepting that the co-existence of these two fields with apparently similar objectives has a historical foundation, it is possible that the points of distinction have not remained consis116

tent throughout history. Robin Evans hints at a baton passing in late eighteenth century as descriptive geometry, specifically stereotomy, a minority but virtuoso technique in architecture, was passed in the influential writing of Monge from the architect and stonemason to the engineering community to be taken up in their new roles as designers of steam ships and locomotives in the nineteenth century.2 So the means of representing and describing spatial conceptions, the particular preoccupations with materials, the types of value ascribed to various attributes of the design may always have followed separate paths in architecture and engineering, but paths that have crossed in their wanderings. To some extent the particular approaches to description can be said to have fed back into the conceptional process of form making. It is possible to construct the case that architectural education has progressively eschewed any interest in the deployment of formal mathematics. Spatiality and spatial organisation can be argued to be innately mathematical, but consideration of proportion, statics, and the manual construc-


tion of perspective view have now largely left the pedagogy, following long departed mathematical descriptions of surface. Projection remained (and largely remains) an important conventionally prescribed conceit that bears heavily on the conceptualisation and realisation of architecture, but the strict Cartesian stranglehold on design has been relaxed as it has been internalised and obscured in hidden algorithms.3 Now that much of the work of projection has been subsumed by the machine, the allusion of full shifting-perspective occupiable space, freed from its three imposed axes and fixed view points, makes formal and spatial complexity outside a single framework more accessible. The orthogonally grided world may still be the most prevalent procurement reference frame but conceptual spatial design need not set up its relationships according to this universal locator – the whole of Euclid is now not only available as a conceptual framework (as it always was) but relatively effortless to deploy; and manifolds that exhibit non-Euclidean characteristics at large scale are also within reach of the three dimensional virtual modeler. ‘Digital clay’ is still relatively geometrical or at its most analogous, still influenced by the particular surface algorithms available. However, it is possible, with a little effort, to work in earthen clay and plaster, as Frank Gehry’s design processes and work to continue the realisation of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família church show, and find a geometrical description or controlled surface rationalisation routine later through semi automated processes that help translate the spirit of tactile scale models at architectural scale and complexity.4 Within architectural education and practice, long gone are any imperatives interpreted from classical orders, harmonic proportions, or the modulor, gone even is the quest for universal truths. Design space is no rules space or, at least, the search for appropriate rules systems has opened up with the technological means to ap-

propriate more complex geometrical structures and programs from other fields. In place of truth we seek and use what is productive and enjoy dialectics. Aesthetic arbitration holds less interest than defining the framework from within which it is being exercised. Liberated from any one universal constraining context, designers can choose their tools and their goals for their exploration of spatial possibilities. With the slow acceptance of the idea of the planet as a closed economic system of finite resources, exploration of economy with regard to use of structural materials has a credibility sometimes obscured in an open market (monetary) economy where capital becomes confused with income and the overriding influence on value is volume production and standardisation.5 In main stream practice, economy may be met by reducing the overall number of standardised structural members used or finding an effective mean span but there are more subtle approaches to conceptual structural design more closely aligned with biology. D’arcy Wentworth Thompson still holds his reader in thrall with explanations for the scale and form of the living, demonstrating the diversity and specificity of evolutionary outcomes all conforming to the same Newtonian physics. Cell growth too is a stimulating, potentially useful metaphoric process to consider in relation to designing the design for structural systems, conforming as it does to the genetic blueprint while at a micro level cells are laid down and removed in response to local structural exigency. What is the computer for if not to test these ideas by simulating or at least emulating the binary aspects of such processes to find structures that obey the same basic principals of getting the best performance for the least? What are the aesthetics of this kind of minimalism?

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Form finding systems

The terms form finding and generative design refer in a general way to creative investment in the design of a system to define possible formal/spatial outcomes according to specific relationships and criteria rather than in the more deterministic design of specific spaces or forms.7, 8, 9, 10, 11 They are to some extent generic descriptions of several specific processes with different objectives. One manifestation is a graph of geometrical relations that supports a consistent topology that can generate many different contextually responsive forms and selecting forms from this field of possibilities through optimisation for certain ranges of values of particular parameters or relationships between them. An example of this might be a roofing element with sculptural qualities that admits indirect light into the building applied in a grid across a changing undulating roof structural system and optimising the roof form so that the largest percentage of the roof lights are within a value of the south compass point. This might yield a range of solutions better and worse for different reasons. The actual geometry and dimensions of every roof element can be unique while conforming to the topological blueprint and recognisably similar across the field of instantiations, much as individuals vary in a population of oysters across an oyster bed. This looks like a return to a highly Platonic concept of a contingent perceptual world of (imperfect, imprecise) copies of ideal forms. Another specific and contrasting example is the deterministic optimisation method called Evolutionary Structural Optimisation (ESO).12 This is an iterative structural optimisation tool, closely analogous to processes in nature. It uses finite element analysis to identify and remove the least stressed material in a structure. This process is repeated many times and a highly structurally optimised 118

form emerges. The form is determined by the way that the loads have been applied and the way the object is supported. Only one particular optimised form can be found within a particular set of conditions for a particular number of iterations. A simple and classic example shown to illustrate the process by Professor Mike Xie is the evolution of a cube suspended from one central top point. At the end of the process it appears the shape of an apple. In extending the biological analogy, the author quips, what would have to be changed to achieve a pear? In reality this method has been developed to generate complex three-dimensional structural forms, the current version allowing both the subtractive and additive processes in response to both compressive and tensile stresses. This process is essentially non-geometrical by its treatment of structure as finite elements.

Context of the project

Form finding lies within the broad territory negotiated between architecture and structural engineering where the paths are likely to cross. Potentially this cross roads should be a most fruitful and emergent social and operational locale for conceptual design activity for built systems. Dissolving the Boundaries between Architecture and Engineering was the name of one of the eleven research projects under the broad umbrella of the Virtual Research and Innovation Institute (VRII) for Information and Communication Technology at RMIT University to research ways to grow this shared activity. It brought together the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory from the School of Architecture and Design and the Inno-


vative Structures Group from the School of Civil and Chemical engineering, from different faculties. Although the two professions work together continually in practice there is a deep cultural and epistemological chasm running between the disciplines that is established and maintained in the education system. This is not limited to any particular University or even country – it is common to Australia, New Zealand, USA, Canada and UK at least. The institutions where this is patently false are the exceptions in these fields. The gulf may be linked to or exacerbated by the nature of accreditation by the respective professional bodies. As part of the research into dissolving these boundaries a research–based, experimental joint design studio for final year undergraduates from both disciplines was proposed and given the title Re-engineering. This was a loosely structured research project supported by a team of staff from both disciplines with the overriding and much emphasised brief to explore the concept of corational design. This is the idea that there is a third way as an alternative to either taking a structural system as a point of departure - the pre-rational approach - or designing a structure in response to a pre determined formal solution – the postrational approach - or ‘please make it stand up.’ The studio provided an environment in which to explore structural systems in synthesis with other design drivers. Each architecture student was paired with an engineering student. One partner had four years experience of being immersed in a progressively more student-led vertical design studio context continually challenged to initiate conceptual design and speculate through projects focused around the built environment. The other had been trained for a similar length of time to be a focused problem solver, seeking appropriate solutions to problems posed in a range of engineering contexts, of which building structures was one, reporting rigorously on the outcomes of ap-

plying solutions and accustomed to a well defined problem as a starting point. The architecture students were enrolled in a course that requires a speculative semester of supported research in preparation for their Major or thesis design project. The engineering students were enrolled in an investigation project, their final project leading to the submission of a written research report. There was no prescription as to the means of communication and sharing but there was a heavy emphasis placed on the co-rational design objective of finding a means to co–authorship. The studio was uncompromisingly process driven and divided into three phases. These three phases were articulated to encourage continual return to the origin throughout the semester, albeit with a more developed focus each time, and to suppress the inclination to develop designs more fully or diverge into separate disciplines in the process.

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The Project

Here we chart the development and outcomes of one particular architectural research project undertaken in the context of this course, curious to locate this with regard to the multifarious relationship between mathematics and architecture. In the project described, the overall objective of finding a co-rational way to work together conceptually was most successful in the intense closing stages of the project. The first phase was a series of weekly investigations, each starting with a new program and structural concept chosen or devised by the students. The groundwork for this project was wide ranging. First, experimental use of an early simpler prototypical 2D Evolutionary Structural Optimisation (ESO) tool developed by Professor Xie provided structurally optimised cross-sections for an extruded or extrapolated Hanging Tower. This was followed by calibration of the tool by reverse engineering the cross section of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water in order to move on and find a series of varying structurally optimised cross sections responding to local support conditions for the free form envelope of a suspended space in a Melbourne laneway: China Bar. In subsequent weeks the student partnership further experimented with the laneway proposal, developing an undulating shell structure attempting to minimise the surface area, and to learn how to use finite element analysis to resolve this into a compression structure in a way analogous to the funicular model used by Gaudí to find the lines of force and hence the form for the church for the Colonia Güell.13 They modeled it using the vacuum former and applied physical loads to measure the deflection. They also considered material strength testing. 120

The second phase of the research narrowed the focus to one particular structural approach, possibly one of the first phase experiments. The partnerships changed. The architecture student considering shells and continuous surfaces was now teamed with an engineering student who saw his own strength in mathematical understanding. The ‘architect’ immediately adopted some difficult, mathematically derived surfaces. A number of equations were selected including a combined Jacobi elliptic function and hyperbolic cosine function. They were chosen from a library of surfaces curated by the student on criteria of aesthetics and spatial potential. Through very simple manipulation of these found surfaces, Booleans to create edge boundaries and openings and differential scaling, a series of formal articulations of program were suggested, including an interpreted railway station roof and a sinuous tower development. The most compelling was the use of a surface in its most raw state as the shell structure of the Hybrid Cathedral. In this proposal the surface mediated between a soaring sacred space of the monumental at the heart of the project and multilevel apartments nestled in the sinuous peripheral undulations. It was prototyped in wax to enjoy its engaging formal–programmatic encounter at a more sensory level. At this point the differences between the software and processes introduced by the architects and engineers became very apparent and divergent. Apart from the usual issues of format compatibility and transfer, the rigid yes or no, right or wrong solution inherent in the engineering software compared to the forgiving nature of the architectural modeling software in supporting speculation, meant the engineer struggled at this stage to define a role.


Figure 1: Hanging Tower developed from a swept cross section optimised for structural performance using a prototypical 2D version of the Evolutionary Structural Optimisation software

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Figure 2: China Bar showing the same ESO tool used to define a surface from differentiated optimised structural sections for changing support conditions along its length.

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Figure 3: One of the pages from the collected library of surfaces

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Figure 4: Functional Railway Station roof using Booleans and scaling to create a programmatic surface from a mathematically defined surface.

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Figure 5: The Hybrid Cathedral: worship space and the apartments to fund it mediated by a single mathematical surface. It was proposed for an environment such as Hong Kong with scarce land and burgeoning population and economy.

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Figure 6: View of the interior of the Hybrid Cathedral.

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The final stage of the project

The third phase introduced site and location, subtly inverting the program-seeking form experimentation earlier. It led this same partnership to the development of an inhabitable bridge that could be mathematically defined. Architectural and structural parameters were identified as they embarked on writing an equation that would satisfy both parties and the program that they had jointly defined. At this stage a much more intense interaction with the mathematics unfolded. A publicised but short lived proposal to divert the Geelong freeway across the entrance to Corio Bay was reawakened to advance the concept of a single mathematically controlled surface as structure, rich space defining boundary and interface between monumental scale and domestic infill. The real world requirements of maintaining and spanning the dredged shipping channel, also allowing small craft to pass between Corio Bay and its parent Port Philip Bay, maintaining the tidal flow, observing the spatial, gradient and curvature constraints of the freeway and separating the habitation with its services and access roads from the freeway, intensified the quest to develop the relationship with the surface equation that would allow detailed manipulation of the parameters without relinquishing the emergent qualities and aesthetic coherence of the surface itself. It introduced all the architectural dialectics around the intensity of the experience of crossing the bay at the historic fording point and the iconic and environmental impact of the bridge as it reshaped the view and context for Geelong. It also engaged with the specific engineering challenges of exceptional long span, building in water and site conditions at the springing points.

Simply editing the variables within the original function had a similar impact to scaling the surface using external software algorithms; for instance it altered the distribution of bridge piers but continued to create repetitive regularly spaced piers. To be able to create the large opening for the shipping canal but find more optimised structural intervals for the other parts of the bridge it would be necessary to add a second function to disrupt the rhythm. Various functions were overlaid, some causing too much disruption and surface distortion. Finding a satisfactory addition through empirical experimentation imbued a situated awareness of the power of superposition of different functions, and it was possible in the same way to overlay a fine grain to the surface, a detailed level of surface undulation or corrugation for combined aesthetic and structural opportunity. The formula was then simplified in experimentation to find out how to control the level of detail and hierarchy of peaks, calibrating it to control the height of the ‘peaks’ in the undulating surface (varying this in relation to the width of the bridge and spans) and a further function superposed to vary the height of these peaks. By this stage the designers had entered or immersed themselves in equation or function building as their design environment. At each iterative step the formal elegance and subtlety of the model increased with the increasing control and mastery over its potential to vary. In order to curve the bridge in plan into the sinuous ‘S’ needed to meet the freeway routing at each abutment and make the crossing at the old fording route, some of the existing components of the function could be used but had first to be rearranged and separated or their impact altered through denomination. The peaks then had to be controlled in a way that specifically reduced their height at the 127


Figure 7: The Geelong Bypass bridge site. The bridge proposal in this project was to be a 5 kilometre long, one street highway town with prime views and real estate helping to fund its construction. The freeway and bridge city were to be separated by a surface generated to test a particular mathematical function. Ferry terminals at the base of the piers allow the residents to reach Melbourne and Geelong without entering the freeway.

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springing where short piers were required and at the main shipping canal where the vast span would require stiffness but all possible reduction in the weight. This variation could be periodic but the period relative to the pier intervals needed to be controllable in a specific way. This required the further superposition of a specific function for u and v in Z. Although the formal mastery now extended to understanding how to vary not simply the parameters but the function itself, the means to arch the bridge deck following a specific curve from springing to springing was not yet clear.

The source of the original kernel of the function and surface led to the Astro-Physics Department of Swinburne University. The function was rewritten in a way that clearly parametricised it for the variables already identified and an additional Gaussian function now gave the arch to the road to allow it also to rise up 70m over the shipping channel from its low lying springing points. The designers could now rewrite the equations satisfied by the x, y and z values of each u,v point on the surface with the list of variables in table 1.

Variable parameters in bridge surface function 1

Number of piers

2

Height of the piers

3

Width of the road

4

Length of the road

5

Number of cycles in the x-y plane (controlling the plan curvature of the road)

6

Amplitude of cycles in the x-y plane (also controlling the plan curvature of the road)

7

Number of cycles in the secondary function controlling the varying heights of the piers

8

Amplitude of the this secondary function

9

Height of the road arch (number of cycles will be constant for the single arch)

Table 1

A lower deck was needed below the freeway to provide access to the inhabited pier shells. For this the same functions could be used with a small change to the value of the last variable: altering one variable in the short Gaussian expression. In summary every aspect of the bridge is periodic, determined by its tidy three line function but the superposition of these periodic behaviors is formally subtle and variably aligned with programmatic constraints. Its description is simple and simply conveyed or transmissible; its spatial manifestation rich and animalistic. 129


Figure 8: Manipulation of the function showing the effects of superposition of functions, restructuring the function and parameter value changes.

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Figure 9: The bridge surface showing its potential for manipulation for all required characteristics except achieving the necessary arch from its springing up seventy metres over the shipping canal without causing surface distortion.

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Figure 10: Illustrated table of variable parameters for the definition of the bridge form.

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Figure 11: One of the alternative experimental iterations of the bridge.

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Figure 12: View of the bridge in its final form

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Discussion

What is the significance of this work? Clearly in the context of the particular academic studio in which it was taken, its significance lies in this transmissibility;14 its power as a common vehicle for a student of architecture and a student of engineering from their strictly segregated educational cultures to work concurrently on formal conceptual design: “In the long run what must be transmitted is not the object itself but its cypher, the genetic code for the object at each new site, according to each site’s available resources.” 15 In the context of architectural borrowing, inheritance, and deep inspiration from science and mathematics, what is the significance of the experimental application of the discoveries of Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi around 1830 and Gaussian number theory developed in the closing years of the eighteenth century for a joint architecture and engineering studio held today? Perhaps it is Antoine Picon’s hypothesis that it is the similarity of operation between science and architecture that at certain points makes the relationship most productive. Picon and Ponte also write of “a new type of connection between architecture and science” for which “the computer, of course, is central”.16 The tradition of metaphorical and methodological exchange between science and mathematics and architecture goes back a long way. In the fifteenth century Alberti took a philosophical and aesthetic lead from the contemporaneous revolution in astronomy and nature’s preference for roundness.17 The terms “structures”, “mathematical surfaces”, and architectural examination of biological sciences all seem to lead back strongly in our time to the nineteenth century. “What would nineteenth century architecture have been without the notion of structure?” 18

So analogous to the model for this studio or of design itself, this architecture reaches back in an iterative cycle to retrieve largely nineteenth century ideas that find new applications underpinned by the current state of technology. Martin Bressani writes that “The central problem with architecture’s relationship with modern science is not the distance that separates the two disciplines but, on the contrary, a closeness that prevents free metaphoric exchanges.” He highlights the nineteenth century as a good illustration of the paradox. The French word structure was first used in biology to denote the internal organisation of the body and Violet-le-Duc’s vast library contained no volume on the modern science of engineering. Despite his advocacy of rationalism and structural determinism, his analogies and archeological methodology were all drawn from physiology, anatomy and geology. 19 What is compelling about mathematical surface definition or of generative processes that bear a metaphorical resemblance to the ‘laws of nature’? Clearly there is a rationalist drive to define design objectives as a rule set controlling the configuration of space and form. This is a way to gain greater efficacy from the technology - using computation to achieve a set of complex spatial or geometrical objectives simultaneously through the definition of their relations. Then there is the matter of beauty. There is the rational scientific idea that underlying natural beauty is a profound system of law-abiding relationships. By reconstructing a closely analogous system, not only the source but also the resulting sensory delight will be rediscovered. Finally there is the distinct question of mathematical beauty: the author’s delight in a bridge of great spatial and programmatic complexity from a three-line function. This aes135


thetic is so intensely felt yet so ineffable that even Paul Erdös said on the subject: “Why are numbers beautiful? It is like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful? If you can’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.” 20

Acknowledgements

Figures: All the figures are the work of RMIT Architecture student Steven Swain, prepared for his Pre-Major design studio submission 2005. Project: The project is the work of RMIT Architecture student Steven Swain for his final year undergraduate Pre-Major design studio submission working in collaboration with RMIT Engineering students Andrew Rovers and Sean Ryan from the RMIT School of Civil and Chemical Engineering, as work for their final year undergraduate research reports. Steven Swain’s subsequent Major-Project design thesis work was exhibited at the Beijing Biennale and was awarded the Student Built Environment Design Prize, in the Victorian State Government Premier’s Design Awards, in 2006. Context: The Re-engineering Pre-Major Design Studio and Engineering Research project was led by Andrew Maher and Jane Burry from RMIT SIAL, with Dr Saman De Silva and Professor Mike Xie from RMIT Engineering, with critical input from Prof Mark Burry. It was an initiative of the Dissolving the Boundaries between Architecture and Engineering project which received RMIT support through the Virtual Research and Innovation Institute for Information and Communication Technologies. 136

1 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London: Alec Tiranti Ltd., 1952, 11-12 2 Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, 328 3 Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and Perspective Hinge, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1997, 378. 4 Mark Burry, “CAD/CAM and Human Factors” in Automation in Construction, March 2002 5 E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973. 6 D. A. W. Thompson, On Growth and Form, New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1992. 7 Kristi Shea, Robert Aish, and M. Gourtovaia, “Towards Integrated Performance-Based Generative Design Tools”, in Digital Design 21st eCAADe Conference Proceedings, Graz, Austria, 17-20 September 2003, pp. 553-560 8 Mark Burry, “Gaudí, Teratology and Kinship”, Architectural Design: Hypersurfaces, London: Academy Editions, 1998 9 Branko Kolarevic, ed. Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing, New York & London: Spon Press, 2003 10 Axel Kilian, “Fabrication of Partially double-curved Surfaces out of flat sheet Material through a 3D Puzzle Approach”, in Connecting >> Crossroads of Digital Discourse, Proceedings of the 2003 Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design In Architecture, 2003, pp. 75-83 11 Y.M Xie and G.P. Steven, Evolutionary Structural Optimisation, London, Berlin: Springer, 1997. 12 ibid, 97. 13 J. Bassagoda Nonell, El Gran Gaudí, Editorial AUSA, 1989, 365-373 14 This allusion to the work of Marcus Novak was included by RMIT Architecture student Steven Swain in his project submission, see note following. 15 Marcus Novak, “Transmitting Architecture: the Transphysical City”, in ctheory.net, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker eds, online, accessed 02.02.07: http://www.ctheory.net/articles. aspx?id=76, 29 November 1996. 16 Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte, Eds. Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, Princeton NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, 14. 17 Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London: Alec Tiranti Ltd, 1952 18 Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte, Eds, Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, 294 19 Martin Bressani “Violet-le-Duc’s Optic”, in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, Princeton NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, 120 20 Paul Erdös, quotation, online, accessed 02.02.07: http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty


5 The Question of Non Standard Form: a ‘Gestalt Switch’ 1 Z E Y NE P M ENNAN

Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Hand Sculptures, Institute of Design, Bauhaus New-York, 1940, in Vision in Motion, New York: Paul Theobald, 1947

An architectural exhibition introduced after the name of a mathematical analysis2 and through the bias of multiple external fields into which it extends, points less to an exhaustion of architecture’s practical and formal capabilities than to a general and synchronic paradigmatic shift in the theoretical, philosophical, scientific and epistemological accounts of the world in which architecture takes place. Indeed the advent of a new paradigm with a double biological and computational essence has drastic implications and consequences on architectural form. The projects exhibited show evidence of this new formal vocabulary which brings back the organic, the dynamic, the animate with renewed interest. Formal stability submits to an architectural vitalism and ecologism constantly shifting form, caught in ever-developing morphogenetic abilities in its rational and sensible self-extension. The right angle capitulates in a relaxation releasing an open, fluid, adaptive and supple inflection; form explodes, overflows itself in constant variation and change, accomodating and recording data and forces shaping both the environment and itself. This new spatial and formal paradigm expands the visual and plastic repertoire by the production of ever complex gestalts, augmented in information content, a thickness which defies the limits of our perceptual and mental abilities, and appeals for a similar augmentation of our faculties.

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Form-Norm Non standard form is a statement of non-identity extended to the infinite: It forms a powerful challenge to the entire organisation of human experience and philosophical thought, used to be defined between order and chaos, identity and difference, invariable and variable, universal and singular, essence and appearance. Such antinomies are both generated and controlled by an extra-formal normativity that defines form as the incarnation of a model implicated by a norm. The intricate bond between form and norm indicates that a provocative challenge is now being posed to the stability of norm by a formal activity generating singularities that do not retrieve the identity of the model or type; by a shifting definition of essence and origin that refuses a reiteration of similitude; by a denial of telos that opposes a potential infinite to an actual one. The most significant indication of this changing condition of norm and form is given by developing modes of industrial production that are seen to undergo changes in order to adapt to a rising demand of singularity. What is called customisation was a first attempt to deviate the norm, allowing industrial repetition an occasional departure from the model for an accomodation of singularity. The formal variability allowed by customisation operates though within the limits of a still bounded norm. In this sense, customisation can be defined as a process of ‘de-standardisation’, to distinguish it from non-standardisation. Non standardisation launches an unprecedented simultaneity of mental and material processes, asking for an adaptation of serial modes of production to altering modes of conception. Developing processes of production - CNC milling machines, rapid prototyping techniques, smart moulds - allow the computation and materialisation of any discrete moment of form in lubricated variation itself with the use of algorithmic systems. This new logic of production enabled by a growing unilaterality of formal/computational languages dissolves the delay between conception and production and has important implications in terms of the relation between form and norm. A new notion of form, defined as simultaneously serial and singular, gives rise to the notion of a fluctuating norm, one which is in constant redefinition in an open-ended series formed by the non-determinacy of a formal catalogue. This new condition that can be named as the synchronicity of fluctuations in norm and form indicates that the current problematic of the so-called digital architectures lies in an active and pressing reengagement in material and industrial logics of production that redefine formal processes. The exhibition3 articulates this problematic that displaces the first generation discourse on dematerialisation and immaterialisation that accompanied the advent of the digital, to reorient theoretical and critical interest on new forms of materialisation of architecture, repositioned in its current epistemological condition.

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Idealism-Formalism This condition opens with the growing simultaneity of tools of conception and production drawing closer the traditional epistemic polarity between idealism and formalism. Characterised by a turn towards reality and practicality, away from a-priorisms, this second generation discourse on digital constructivism marks a shift towards a more naturalised epistemology. In mathematics, non standard analysis marks a similar epistemic turn; once inaccessible fields and scales of observation, calculus and proof open with the study of infinitesimals and the advent of computer-aided calculus, and bring forth a more experimental, pseudo-empirical phase for mathematics. This new phase develops a constructive mathematics which opposes pure mathematics, and claims scientificity in the articulation of constructed theory and mathematical reality.4 A branch of constructive mathematics, non standard analysis revives intuitionism as a lighter variant of a heavy formalism shifting towards the pragmatism of the techno-sciences.5 An understanding of the formal implications of the epistemic resolution offered by the non standard requires a return to the idealismformalism debate which accounts as well for an art-historical unfolding of the problem of form. The problem of form is epistemically and historically inscribed within this debate that centers on the extrinsic-intrinsic dichotomy, that is, the problem of mediation between an external positive world of contingent things and phenomena, and a mental/intellectual world housing the conceptions and interpretations of the former. This philosophical problem is known to stand at the source of the act of creation and operate behind diverse approaches to architectural design. One historical instance of the unresolved oscillation between the two poles of this dichotomy comes as the early modernist indecision between standardisation and artistic invention, or typicality and singularity, a modern bipolarisation which inscribes itself within the organic-mechanic debate.

Organic-Mechanic The modernist project of cultural and historical unity brings forth a new normativity resting on a powerful overlapping of artistic, social, economic and political norms made operative with the shifting of emphasis to industrialisation and standardisation. Justified by its adequacy to an emerging mass-society, serial production consolidates the prominence of the machinic paradigm in early modernism. Standardisation means the self-iterability, stability and perfection of the model/type and norm through mechanical means, a perfection that in the Werkbund ideal of the gute form would also restore to the self-identical product the spiritual effect of the craft object.6 A simultaneous reading of social, technical and formal norms confers a sense of unity, totality and Sachlichkeit to the mechanic

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paradigm. The organic paradigm, on the other hand, challenges this modernist normativity defined by serial production and typification. Defining an inside-out, open-ended and unpredictable formal process, the organic as an evolutionary metaphor alluding to vitalism and intuitionism resists objectification, producing anxiety all by itself. The organic confronts the disquieting vital element, in mutation and movement, to the morphostatis and identity of typical forms.7 Organic formal processes can not be governed by the normative logic of standardisation. Incompatible with serial processes of industrial production, organic forms inevitably fail the test of their serial self-reproduction. With ‘mechanisation taking command’, borrowing the expression of Siegfried Giedion, the organic becomes the term of exclusion of the regulative norm.8 The mechanic-organic debate invariably records this negative anchorage of the organic in modernist thinking, as a counter-modern instrument denouncing mechanic normativity.

Top, Left to Right: Hermann Finsterlin, Form Study, 1920; Frederick Kiessler, Endless House, 1950-1959; Bottom, Left to Right: Hans Scharoun Concert Hall, watercolor, 1922-1923, Josef Albers, Works on Paper, Bauhaus Vorkurs, 1926; Antoni GaudĂ­, Casa Mila, detail, Barcelona, 1905-1910

This incompatibility further extends into a basic epistemological distinction between the mechanic and the organic: While intelligibility in formal processes is invariably associated with stability and identity, as displayed in typical, standardised forms, organic formal processes are defined as individualistic, subjectivist, intuitionist processes that escape systematic analysis and rationalisation. The modernist connotation of the organic amounts to a crisis of mastery over the formal process and product, resulting in the banishment of the organic from the realm of the rational and the objective to that of aesthetic psycholo-

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gism. The mechanic-organic debate then translates into a rational/irrational opposition,9 one which is less then conclusive in the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by the intensity of avant-garde debates revolving around the question of form, and the recurring dichotomies between typical and singular, rational and irrational, objective and subjectivist/intuitionist, utilitarian and artistic.10 The divide is reflected in the two directions taken by the formalism-idealism debate: on the one hand, a formal/analytic approach which strives to develop a science of form (Formwissenschaft), and on the other, an insistent psychologism and intuitionism focussing on the subjective and sensible aspects of aesthetic contemplation.11 The symmetry is reflected in Wilhelm Worringer’s 1907 thesis, Abstraction and Einfühlung,12 attempting without resolution, to bring into equilibrium the two poles of normative and psychological aesthetics.13 Drawing heavily on Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen, this collective and anonymous will to art, abstraction for Worringer arises out of a psychological need to keep distances with an uncontrollable nature, thus opposing ‘Einfühlung’, this intuitionist sense of well-being and euphoric overlapping with nature.14 Worringer’s symmetry is emblematic of the mechanic-organic opposition translated into his abstract and natural forms: Abstraction, denoting the inorganic, takes on geometric form and mathematical legitimity, leaving the organic in an insistent castration in psychologism, maintaining the rational-sensible opposition in which the organic remains hermetic to the disclosure of its formative activity.

Left to Right: Ernst Kropp, Seashells, in Ernst Kropp, Wandlung der Form in XX. Jahrhundert, Reckendorf, coll. « Bücher der Form, Deutsche Werkbund », Berlin, 1926; Le Corbusier, Sketch, 1930; Hugo Häring, Housing project for Friedrichstrasse, Berlin, 1922

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Euclidian-Non-Euclidian The opposition is deemed to remain unresolved without the recognition that the so-called abstract and natural forms may not have a common geometric ground. Non-Euclidian geometry, named after its opposition to Euclid’s fifth parallel postulate, owed its initial formulations to Gauss, Lobachevsky and Bolyai, as early as in the first decades of the 19th century.15 Later in 1867, Riemann formulated still another alternative to Euclid’s system, a geometry as “the study of manifolds of any number of dimensions and of any curvature, using differential geometry as the measure of this curvature.”16 The provocative challenge that these alternative non-Euclidian geometries represented was the possibility of surfaces or spaces with variable curvature, on which a figure could not be moved without being affected by changes in its own shape and properties, thus invalidating the Euclidian assumption of the indeformability of figures in movement, in other words, the positing of an absolute unchanging form.17 The fallibility of Euclid also meant the fallibility of the Kantian a-priori categories of space and time without which perception cannot occur. This first refutation of mathematical axioms would mean a turn from the absolute to the relative nature of truths, as pronounced in Poincaré’s conventionalist view of the axioms, stating that geometric axioms are neither synthetic a priori, nor empirical, but conventions.18 Though not settling the issue, Poincaré’s relativism for the first time pointed to the incommensurability of different geometries in which form takes place, that is, the recognition that the so-called irrational organic forms and rational typical forms develop into philosophically and mathematically different formal and spatial paradigms, explaining also for the aesthetic and epistemological divides that separate them.

Visible-Invisible The consciousness of this incommensurability would however not bring the idealismformalism debate to a dead-end. Early 20th century interest in new geometries and in the theory of Relativity opened new conceptions of space and perception with new possibilities of intuiting form and space that allow for an exploration of form in mutation and movement to challenge the identity and stability principles of the mechanic paradigm. However, modern art in the early decades of the 20th century continued to perpetuate the rational/irrational opposition in a diversity of positions taken by the modernist avant-gardes. All these positions were actually different reactions to an ‘invisible’ which opens with non-Euclidean geometry and the geometry of n-dimensions, with their claims of a curved space and the possibility of a fourth dimension that remain beyond the reach of the visible and of reason. As Linda Dalrymple Henderson notes, fascination with new geometries, and especially with

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the fourth dimension was common to almost all avant-gardes (Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Dadaism, de Stijl, Surrealism) and was synonymous with emancipation from established truths: The impalpability and versatility of space was either tried to be visualised and measured through the submission of form to empirical, mathematical laws governing the dynamics of its evolution, or met with a denial of intelligibility, turning to pure intuition and pure sensation in an increasingly abstract art liberated from natural references.19 A rigorous formal/mathematical approach to problems of form would then meet a double resistance in either a para-scientism mystifying the invisible, or a Surrealist and Dadaist relief from reality and materiality.20 The mystification of mathematical and scientific developments in early 20th century (in the form of pseudo-philosophical movements such as Hinton’s Hyperspace Philosophy and Theosophy, or the popularisation of the fourth dimension in science-fiction novels21) account for a resistance to a formalisation that can not yet be redeemed by existing mental and cognitive structures and for the same reason overflows intelligibility. It can be noted that this condition echoes itself in the proliferation of the literature of cyberspace and virtual reality, in the frenetic emphasis on the dematerialisation of the visible and the tangible in invisible bits. This distrust in visual reality was however balanced with an interest in visualisation. A proponent of what he calls “the mathematical way of thinking in visual art”, Max Bill points to the necessity of “the assistance of some visualising agency” so that “abstract conceptions assume concrete and visible shape, and so become perceptible to our emotions. Unknown fields of space, almost unimaginable hypotheses, are boldly bodied forth.”22 An enlargement of the visual template, already apparent in the 19th century practice of modelling mathematical objects and the artistic interest in them, would contribute to the formation of a plastic language and provide for new formal idioms. Interest here is less in formalism than in “form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance…an image that is no mere transcript of this invisible world but a systematisation of it ideographically conveyed to our senses.”23 This will to visualisation, as a demystifying endeavour to map what remains beyond the scale of vision24 is fulfilled for instance in the case of fractal geometry, developed in the 1970’s by Benoit Mandelbrot, depicting the geometry of nature in the figure of the fractal enlarging the domain of the visible to at once inaccessible scales of observation and with an accuracy that would not have been conceivable without the help of the computer.25 The limits of the visible extend with the limits of computation and reason.

Determinism-Indeterminism However, the insufficiency of mathematical tools and topological-geometric models was still an obstacle in 1917 when D’Arcy Thompson wrote his major treatise On Growth and

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Form, developing a morphogenetic theory repositioning the problem of form as a mathematical problem and that of growth as a physical one.26 D’Arcy Thompson extends his treatment of form as number to both animate and inanimate forms that are claimed to obey the same mathematical laws derived from the precise model, the latent logos of nature.27 The claim that a common typological and determinist drive underlies the invariable laws generating form, whether inert or animate, not only denies a special status to the living, but also affirms the possibility of subordinating the irreducible organic to a computable and determinable behaviour. According to D’Arcy Thompson, the only obstacle in reducing the complexity of natural forms into a mathematical intelligibility would be the lack of quantitative measures and deficiencies in mathematical and physical methodologies, and not an irreducible residue in the vital element.28 This remarkable formalisation of the organic went largely unheard in the early modern artistic and architectural practices redeeming the new geometries as new plastic opportunities revealed only through the intuitions of the artist. D’Arcy Thompson’s work was however a precursor of studies in differential growth, that have been extended by contemporary theories of complexity. Overcoming the obstacles faced by D’Arcy Thompson’s reductionist enterprise, studies in complexity sciences ironically oppose this reductionism to develop a phenomenological hermeneutics of form.

Left to Right: Ernst Haeckel, Skeletons of various Radiolarians, 1899, in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge, 1917; Ernst Kropp, Sketch, in Wandlung der Form in XX. Jahrhundert, Reckendorf, coll. « Bücher der Form, Deutsche Werkbund », Berlin,1926

The study of forms having unpredictable dynamic behaviour is given impetus in complexity sciences, gathering diverse morphological theories29 which account for the radicalisation of a new formal, geometric and computational paradigm by placing the study of form on an empirical continuum of spatio-temporal data within which form presents an infinite variety: Alain Boutot notes that this elimination of discontinuity, of the discrete, disposes of tools of differential and integral calculus invented in the 17th century but remained ignored as some kind of limit case to continuity itself, together with some branches of mathematics, such as topology.30 Complexity theories offer new insights into the continuity-discontinuity problematic31 which projects itself into the question of formal processes governing stable

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and dynamic forms, hence the divide between typical and organic forms. The theory of Catastrophes, for instance, suggests a doubling of space; a substrate space of empirical observation and an ideal mathematical space of parametrisation of the qualitative properties of the substrate space at any of its points. Continuity is a feature of the ideal space, in which the dynamic at the origin of morphology is played out, whereas the morphology itself occurs as a discontinuity in the substrate space. The ideal space of mathematical logoï determines form which is engendered through projection on the substrate, where empirical morphologies appear as traces of an abstract superstructure.32 An apparent neo-Platonism in this projection of the intelligible on the sensible does not allow however for a revival of idealism, one that has been weakened with what Boutot calls an “ontological neutrality”, a common attribute of all morphological theories which refuse to pronounce themselves on the essence of being.33 This ontological indifference to the nature of the substrate of forms is affirmative of the autonomy of form from the abstract space of control parameters. Form refuses its self-determination and self-prediction despite an augmentation of accuracy in the control of parameters, augmenting also predictive capabilities. Indeed, determinism is inhibited in the case of complex systems which are unstable, dynamic and open systems constantly exchanging information, energy or matter with the environment – characteristics that are common to the projects exhibited. That is why, though remaining under the spell of classification in their search for common, simple, iterative rules in the generation of complex form, these theories do not strive to derive ideal invariables out of empirical morphologies, but instead develop a new language for deciphering and rationalising forms in motion.34 Modelling inner logic rather than external form, complexity sciences provide insights into the ways organic forms evolve in constant relation with dynamic and variable influences from their context. They mark the shifting interface between the hermetic and intelligible aspects of organic formal processes.

Left to Right: Max Bill, « The perfect cube exist in nature », in Form, Basel: Karl Werner, 1952; Hans Jenny, Vibrational Effects in a Liquid and Vibration of a waterdrop, in Cymatics : Wave Phenomena, Vibrational Effects, Harmonic Oscillations with their structures, Kinetics and Dynamics, Vol. 2, Basel: Basilius Press, 1974

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Biological-Computational The resurfacing of the organic in non standard architectures is therefore not a mere formal revival. The organic paradigm is now augmented with a computational essence that adds to the first biological essence of the modernist organic tradition. Indeed, the organic owes its revival to this double essence which reforms its epistemological status and betrays its historiographical obfuscation during modernism. The non standard redemption of the organic accounts then for a powerful ‘gestalt switch’, simultaneously perceptual and epistemic.35

Left to Right: Enrico Castiglioni, Syracuse Basilica, 1957 and Greg Lynn FORM, Ark of the World Museum, 20022006; Frei Otto, Space Frames, 1962 and Servo, Lattice Archipelogics, 2002

Early modernist and non standard instances of the organic lineage show a remarkable formal reminiscence which conceals however significant epistemological, perceptual, geometric/mathematical and technological distinctions. This return of the organic in a differentiated form suggests an extending non complete form-class, the historical reading of which would be obscured by a stylistic and normative classification of forms. George Kubler in The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things36 brings forth a theory of formal sequences which allows for a simultaneously historical and formal reading. A sequence suggesting an open-ended expanding class, the biological analogy of style (birth, maturity and death) is replaced here by the mathematical analogy of topology which allows historical segmentations for elastic expansion and releases them from the fixity of style. The biological analogy in Kubler’s theory is speciation, where form is manifested by a large number of individuals undergoing genetic changes.37 Stressing the indeterminacy of the beginning and end of formal sequences, Kubler notes that some formal sequences may remain inactive for long periods, but be reactivated when the problem is given greater scope by new needs. Thus “abortive, retarded or stunted sequences” can be boosted under new conditions, especially in the case of renewal in craft techniques or technological innovations.38 Carefully avoiding stylistic categorisation, Kubler refers only to early and late solutions, differentiating the early ‘pro-morphs’, “technically simple, energetically inexpensive, and expressively clear”,

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from the late ‘neo-morphs’ that are “costly, difficult, intricate, recondite and animated.”39 Following Kubler, the organic tradition can be reformulated as a formal sequence that has been retarded in the art-historical construction of modernism, and waiting for technological, scientific, epistemological and aesthetic paradigm changes for its reactivation in non standard neo-morphic solutions. The visual genealogy presented in the exhibition and the catalogue40 correspond to pro-morphic solutions of this once hindered sequence.

Top, Left to Right: Konrad Wachsmann, Structure Study, 1955 and R&Sie, Wireframe, 2002; Bottom, Left to Right: Kisho Kurokawa,Helicoidal City, 1961 and Kovac Architecture,World Trade Center, 2002

The historical unfolding of this form-class opens a multi-faceted philosophical, epistemological, and geometrical debate on form, linking to problems of perception, gestalt, cognition and computation. The gestalt switch we are experiencing through the ontogenesis of the organic accounts for paradigm changes developing around three axis; an epistemic axis of determinism-nondeterminism, a geometric axis of discontinuity-continuity, and a perceptual axis of simplicity-complexity, where the shift from one pole to the other is increasingly yielding the organic towards rationalisation, de-ontologisation and de-naturalisation. The perceptual gestalt switch we are experiencing between the early and the late forms of the organic is then also a consciousness of their incommensurability. The hermetic formal processes of the organic tradition are becoming increasingly transparent as studies in complexity and computation develop. Organic form, which used to escape definition as intelligible structure, is being rationalised and objectified with an ever increasing computational content, one that is supplied by advances in computer-aided methodologies and

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procedures used in the development and control of form. The organic is increasingly denaturalised within an increasingly naturalised epistemology offering an epistemic resolution to the rational-irrational dialectic historically framing the mechanic-organic debate. This resolution is itself intricately bound to developments in computational sciences and the industrial production interface. The formalist methodologies used in computational design research ease the understanding and control of complex forms and enable their production by extending the interface from standardisation to non standardisation. The advent of a non standard regime of industrialisation imposes a radical disruption in terms of modernist normativity, and adresses a provocative challenge to modernist standardisation. In this sense, the non standard also prepares for a reversal of mechanic and organic paradigms. Non standardisation legitimates the singular, as standardisation legitimated the typical. The current revival of the organic inserts itself at the very heart of altering logics of material and industrial production which sustain and supply organicist formal processes with technical and material processes of serial but non-identical realisation. This is a first reconciliation of mechanic and organic paradigms,41 as the neo-organic is now inclusive of the mechanic, and can be sent back into the materiality of serial industrial processes to stand the test where its modern predecessor failed. We can then think of an anachronism in the case of early organicism with respect to current processes of formalisation. Prior to contemporary studies in complexity and computation, and in the absence of formalisation, early organic processes could not withstand the modernist demands for rationalisation nor serial production. Early organicism then necessarily constructed intermediary metaphysical structures or a pseudo-scientism compensating for this anachronism. Form now recovers from the ontological delay of idealist conceptions, approaches the intelligible through a flattening of ontological strata. Translation delays between conception and production are overcome with the help of a growing accuracy to translate form into computational languages which allow for a rigorous discussion of once intuitive topics.

Intuitionism-Formalism The question of non standard form is seen to leave the idealism-formalism impasse to reinscribe itself in an intuitionism-formalism debate, where intuitionism and formalism no more oppose each other but form two epistemological variants. The current status of (organic) form within this debate needs yet to be defined. On the one hand, a process of continous formalisation claims for an overall objectification and an almost impudent denudation of cognitive and spiritual processes, of the mysteries of the mind. The black box acquires transparency in a formal language dreaming ultimately of replacing human intelligibility

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and rationality with artificial intelligence, an overarching deterministic endeavour occupying an immutable place in architectural history. From ancient treatises and pattern books to the design methodology movement of the sixties, the pragmatism of a problem-solving approach invariably disciplined architectural activity, grounding it in foundational forms that are produced through laws and norms expected to free the formal activity from the vagaries of the designer. Prescriptive approaches to design and form-making can now be fulfilled within the formalism of computational languages. On the other hand, the positivism and pragmatism of this heavy formalism confronts the intuitionism of contemporary theories of complexity which radically oppose the analytical-reductionism of the techno-sciences and its determinism.42 Developing a formal hermeneutics disinterested both in a-priorism and a-posteriorism, they can be said to align with the epistemic position of non standard mathematics, its constructive, intuitionist method denouncing formalism as ideology while retaining it as method.43 In mathematics, systems extending incomplete systems are generally called non standard systems. This consciousness of incompleteness seems to be the most important contribution of the non standard; it is secured by an irreducible intuitionism against the exhaustive attempts of an overarching formalism. This intuitionism is now seen to be different from its counterpart in the realm of aesthetics. Drained of its mystical and subjectivist references, non standard intuitionism comes as a lighter variant of formalism, one which cultivates our abilities to tolerate indeterminism and incompleteness, that are inherent qualities of non standard forms. Non standard intuitionism ensures a never-completed space of creativity and non-identical reproduction, releasing an infinity of possibilities suggested in the plural of non standard architectures.

Notes 10/12/2003-01/03/2004, Curators: F. the pragmatic use of non standard 1 First publication in French: Zeynep analysis being more stressed in the Migayrou, Z. Mennan. Mennan, “Des Formes Non Stanformer, while the Reeb school focusses dard: Un ‘Gestalt Switch’,” in Fréderic 4 Jacques Harthong and Georges Reeb, “Intuitionnisme 84,” in H. Barreau and on its hermeneutic significance. The Migayrou and Zeynep Mennan (ed.), title of the paper is also making an Architectures Non Standard, Paris: J. Harthong (ed.), La Mathématique non Standard; Histoire, Philosophie, implicit allusion to George Orwell’s Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2003, 1984 as a warning against the growing Dossier scientifique, Paris: Editions du pp.34-41. This revised and shortened hegemony of formalist ideology. See version of the original essay in English CNRS, 1989 Harthong, Jacques and Reeb, Georges, is reprinted with the permission of the 5 Georges Reeb and Jacques Harthong, op.cit. representatives of the French school of Editions Centre Pompidou. 6 Detlef Mertins, Introduction to The Victhe non standard, refer in “Intuition2 Abraham Robinson, Non Standard tory of the New Building Style by Walter nisme 84” to Abraham Robinson’s Analysis, New York: Princeton UniversiKurt Behrendt, Harry Francis Mallgrave ty Press, 1996. (First publication: Abra“Formalism 64” paper, comparing his discussion of formalism in 1964 with (trans.) Los Angeles, CA: Getty Reham Robinson, Non Standard Analysis: search Institute, 2000, p. 44. Studies in the Logic and Foundations of their discussion of intuitionism in 1984. Mathematics, Amsterdam: North HolThe text accounts for non substantial 7 Nikos Salingaros and Terry Mikiten’s differences between the two positions, memetic theory of modernism might land Inc., 1966) which are actually the analytic and conbe inserted here to account for the 3 Architectures non standard, exhibidegree of exclusion. Defining meme as tinental variants of the non standard, tion, Centre Georges Pompidou,

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any idea that endures and propagates, Salingaros and Mikiten explain what they call the unlikely success of modernism by advancing a Darwinian theory of formal selection that would retain only simple and minimalist memes. They introduce further their concept of encapsulation which accounts for the insulation of modernist memes from competing forms and styles, hence assuring their propagation. A negative encapsulation renders itself possible as well, by placing under quarantine the pathological memes that cannot be allowed to link with the successful ones. See Nikos A. Salingaros and Terry M Mikiten, “Darwinian Processes and Memes in Architecture: A Memetic Theory of Modernism”, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission Vol. 6, 2002. Available from: http://www.cpm. mmu.ac.uk/jomemit/2002/vol6/salingaros_na&mikiten_tm.html. [Accessed: 20 July 2003] 8 Gombrich relates that the term ‘barocco’ originally referred to the “sin of deviation’ from the classical norm, denoting that which is no-longer classical or degenerate. See E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. London: Phaidon Press, 1966. 9 Colin Rowe relates how this reference of organic form to subjective licence and individuality sets the elementary dialectic between the mechanic and the organic paradigms. See Colin Rowe, The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect. London: Academy Editions, 1994. 10 Detlef Mertins notes that architects such as Behrendt, Häring, van de Velde, Van Doesburg, and Mondrian placed an equal emphasis to typicality and singularity, being and becoming, collective and individual. See Mertins, op.cit., p. 52. 11 Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, “ Introduction,” in Julia Bloomfield, Thomas F. Reese and Salvatore Settis (ed.), Empathy, Form and Space : Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1994, pp. 1-88. 12 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction et Einfühlung: Contribution à la Psychologie du Style, Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1986. 13 Dora Valier, Presentation to Abstraction et Einfühlung: Contribution à la Psychologie du Style, by Wilhelm Worringer, Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1986.

14 Ibid. 15 Linda Henderson Dalrymple, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. 16 Ibid., p. 5 17 Ibid., p. 6 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 See Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, New York: Dover, 1992. 22 Max Bill, “The Mathematical Way of Thinking in the Visual Art of our Time,” in Michele Emmer (ed.), The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993, p. 8. 23 Ibid., p. 9. 24 Henderson notes that Gauss and Lobachevsky turned to the observation of mountains or distant stars, to test their new geometries against higher scales of physical space to determine whether space had a non-Euclidian curvature that has not been apparent enough to affect the formulation of Euclid’s system. See Henderson, op.cit. 25 Benoit Mandelbrot, “Fractals and an Art for the Sake of Science,” in Michele Emmer (ed.), The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1993, pp. 11-14. 26 D’Arcy Wenthworth Thompson, On Growth and Form. NY: Dover Publications, 1992. 27 Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, “D’Arcy Thompson, la Forme et le Vivant.” Alliage, No. 22, 1995. Available from: http://www.tribunes.com/tribune/ alliage/22/mazz.htm. [Accessed: 18 June 2003] 28 Ibid. 29 The theory of Catastrophes (René Thom), the theory of fractals (Benoit Mandelbrot), the theory of dissipative structures (Ilya Prigogine), Chaos theory (David Ruelle), or cynergetics (Hermann Haken). See Alain Boutot, L’Invention des Formes. Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1993. 30 Boutot, op.cit. 31 See Jacques Harthong, “le Continu et le Discret, un Problème Indécidable,” in Jean-Michel Salanskis and Hourya Sinacoeur (ed.), Le labyrinthe du Continu, Proceedings of the Cerisy colloquium, Paris: Springler-Verlag, 1992. 32 Boutot, p. 82. 33 Ibid., p. 83. 34 Ibid. 35 The term ‘gestalt switch’ is used both in its original sense, as developed by gestalt psychologists to define

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perception changes occurring on the same object, and in the much debated connotation it retains in the philosophy of science, first developed by Wittgenstein in his duck-rabbit switch discussion in Philosophical Investigations (1952), and further by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) to account for switches between paradigms. 36 George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962. 37 Ibid., p. 34. 38 Ibid., p. 48. 39 Ibid., p. 55. 40 Fréderic Migayrou and Zeynep Mennan, Ed, Architectures Non Standard. Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2003. 41 Detlef Mertins refers to the concept of ‘gestaltung’, “added to the arsenal of Modernist polemics” by the 1920’s, as the organicist metaphor of form in open-ended evolution attempting to reconcile the mechanic and the organic, but one that still kept transcendental residues in its reference to the mysterious origins of creativity. Mertins, op.cit., p. 43. 42 The epistemic position of complexity sciences offers an intriguing synthesis between positivist and phenomenological approaches, much in the same way as Gestalt theory positioned itself at the crossroads of logical positivism and phenomenology. Gestalt theory represented an important step away from the mystical intuitionism of 19th century, exploiting the mind with the aid of the developing science of experimental psychology. The original essay contains a discussion of the intuitionist approach in the realm of perception in order to deal with a complex form displayed in a continously inflecting space. A reconsideration of Gestalt theory is suggested for an understanding of the perceptual organisation of complexity. For an experimental design research problematising the premises of Gestalt theory within the context of the complexity paradigm see Zeynep Mennan, “Questioning Graphic Rationality in Architecture: Experimentations on the visual and the non-visual,” Architectural Education Forum 3: Global Architectural Education Area GAEA, Association for Architectural Education Arch-Ed, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, 15-17 November 2006. 43 Reeb and Harthong, op.cit.


Notes on Contributors FINN PEDERSEN is a Perth-based director of iredale pedersen hook architects, and is the director in charge of the Aboriginal remote community projects. He has been designing housing for Aboriginal remote communities since 1992. ADRIAN IREDALE is a Perth-based director of iredale pedersen hook architects, and is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Architecture and Interior Architecture at Curtin University, Perth, Australia.

JANE BURRY is an architect and Research Fellow at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT, Melbourne. She leads research and teaching in the area of mathematics and design. She has worked with Prof Mark Burry on research for the continuing construction of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia church.

ANDREW MAHER is an architect and Research Fellow at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at RMIT, Melbourne. He leads the area of practice-based research, including the MARTYN HOOK is a Melbourne-based Metrics of Change, technology uptake director of iredale pedersen hook archi- within practice, and the architecture tects, and is a Senior Lecturer in Archi- engineering nexus. tecture at RMIT, Melbourne Australia. ZEYNEP MENNAN is an architect, VICTORIA WATSON is a Senior Lecand Associate Professor in the Dept. turer in Architecture at the University of Architecture at METU, Turkey. She of Westminster, London. She is director has co-curated the “Non Standard of The Big Air World, an association Architectures” exhibition at the Centre formed to develop and promote the Georges Pompidou (2003-2004), and phenomenon of the Air Grid. co-edited the exhibition catalogue. She is the founding member and director of RICHARD GOODWIN is an artist the computational design research unit and architect, based in Sydney. He at METU, where she is teaching graduis Adjunct Professor in the College ate and doctoral courses in architecof Fine Art, University of NSW, Sydney tural theory, research, epistemology Australia. His practice includes instal- and computational design. lation art, public art, architectural and urban design.

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Notes for Contributors

through the design of projects where the research is embodied All editorial enquiries and subwithin the project-based design missions should be sent to: investigations and outcomes. AcBrent Allpress, Editor, ADR companying exegesis plays a role School of Architecture + Design, in situating, framing and clearly RMIT communicating the contribuGPO Box 2476v, tion that the project makes to Melbourne 3001 knowledge within the field of Victoria, Australia. architectural design. The exegesis Email: brent.allpress@rmit.edu.au may be text-based but it may also encompass other disciplinary modes of representation such as Editorial Policy: diagrams and drawings that also Architectural Design Research is play a framing exegetical role. an international refereed journal The editors welcome the submisthat publishes architectural sion of project-based research design research, focusing parundertaken through design inticularly on project-based design vestigation and speculation, and research and associated disscholarly reflection on research course on design. This journal is embodied within a contributor’s founded on the premise that the design practice and projects. activity of designing constitutes a crucial mode of research specific The journal also publishes to the architectural discipline. discourse on architectural It primarily aims to publish ardesign, to bring project-based chitectural research undertaken design research and discourse

Submission Guidelines Detailed submission information, including style guide, referencing and image file formatting instructions are available on the Architectural Design Research website: http://adr.tce.rmit.edu.au/

Design research project submissions should consist of: Documentation of project-based design research, incorporating appropriate drawings, photographs and other relevant modes of representation. Scholarly exegesis (1000-2000 words) A4 format.

Design research article submissions should consist of: Written article incorporating appropriate drawings, photographs and other relevant modes of representation (4000-6000 words)

into a productive and informed dialogue. The editors welcome the submission of scholarly design research articles addressing significant contemporary architectural design problematics, emerging design strategies and practices, scholarly critiques of contemporary design practice and projects, and extended articles by authors on their project-based design research. All submissions of design research projects and design research articles are double blind refereed by scholars actively engaged in project-based design research and in discourse on design research and practices. Architectural Design Research is published annually in full colour as an open submission issue, with occasional special issues.

words maximum), and a separate short biographical statement that includes the authors institutional and professional affiliations, and relevant recent projects and publications (50 words maximum). - individual high resolution image Contributors should submit and text files intended for final the following: publication of the project or ar- a manuscript of the contributicle. Refer to the ADR website tor’s project or article in doublefor file formatting instructions. spaced format, submitted in - individual high resolution image hard copy and on disk. Keep and text files intended for final settings and formatting as simpublication of the project or arple as possible so the text can ticle. Refer to the ADR website easily be reset to the style of the for file formatting instructions. journal’s templates. - a PDF file of the above with all If a submission is accepted for author’s names removed for publication, the Editors reserve blind refereeing purposes. the right to re-format all project - a separate text file containing and article layouts. the title of the research project or article submission, the authors name/s, and an abstract of the submitted work (150

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