Lunch 7 University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall PO Box 400122 Charlottesville VA 22904-4122 Find us on the web: www.uvalunch.com Copyright Š 2011 University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, VA All rights reserved Editors: Nate Burgess, Jack Cochran, Joey Hays, Nicole Keroack Cover image by Daphne Lasky Printed in the United States by Carter Printing, Richmond, VA For future volumes, Lunch is accepting submissions from alumni, students, and former and current faculty of the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The editors would like to thank the students, faculty, and alumni who submitted their work for publication, and the sixteen copy editors who helped construct the narrative and layout of the journal. We are grateful to Dean Kim Tanzer, Kimberly Wong, the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and the School of Architecture Foundation for their support and dedication that make Lunch possible each year. Lunch 7 was supported by the University of Virginia Council for the Arts. Special thanks also to Robin Dripps and Lucia Phinney for their contribution to this year’s journal.
lunch 7: CONVERSATIONS
CONVERSATIONS Lunch began as a student-initiated journal demonstrating the quality and range of work within the School of Architecture and beyond. The title of “lunch” refers to the notion of informal exchanges between students and faculty around a meal. In this seventh issue, we return to the original concept of conversation as a generative tool for creating the journal— encouraging debate and interaction among professionals, academics, and students. The word “conversation” once referred to a person’s manner of being in a place, a person’s method of interacting with persons and things. Only later did the word narrow to reflect, specifically, the exchange of words. We believe design is a continued conversation with the world in this broadest sense. Lunch 7 encompasses design projects, transcribed conversations, and essays from all disciplines within the School of Architecture. We curated unexpected juxtapositions and overlaps between selected pieces, finding they gain strength through comparison and interaction. We hope that Lunch supports the School of Architecture in its broad scope and diversity of approaches.
Nate Burgess, Jack Cochran, Joey Hays, Nicole Keroack April 29, 2012
Advising Editors: Beth Bailey, Charles Sparkman Faculty Advisors: Iñaki Alday, Phoebe Crisman, Robin Dripps, Elizabeth K. Meyer Lunch Team: Dani Alexander, Adede Amenyah, Michelle Benoit, Brian Davis, Brianne Doak, Alan Ford, Ting Ting Jin, Peter Kempson, Nick Knodt, Marie Miller, James Moore, Katie Orr, Katherine Treppendahl, Abigail Whalen, Clayton Williams, Weishun Xu
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GEoff Manaugh, sarah peck, Cassim shepard post press plOT: Digital and analog discourse DAPHNE LASKY PAINTING FOR INSECTS randall winston Platforming: Localized, Open Source Infrastructures as Frameworks for Public Space james moore diversifying the discourse Charles sparkman recombinant fabrication
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LEVI BRYANT with brian davis
On Landscape ontology: objects, networks, and assemblages Alexa bush and nicole keroack acqua venezia: prototypes for a sustainable water economy MICHAEL BEAMAN and zaneta hong MATERIOLOGY daniel mowery eight stairways of rome Brad schuck dwelling for a fiddler Sanda Iliescu looking at leonardo
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Camilo Restrepo
grassroots architecture in a global marketplace maurice cox and betsy roettger the roots of music Jonathan coble and kirsten sparenborg ecoremod2 and falmouth field school camille behnke City to suburb: two charlottesville schools chelsea dewitt and dasha lebedeva EDGE ADAPTATIONS amadeo benetta and daniel larossa burma reframed
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RAFAEL MONEO
time, materiality, and the individual Justin Hershberger on craft JULIA PRICE, KURT MARSH, and ERIN ROOT terra nuova: building a new venetian ground W.G. CLARK with allison murphy CLARK HOUSE: lOCAL AND REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE Kristina hill with kate hayes and dasha lebedeva sand engines
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teresa gali-izard and julian raxworthy on management Ashley allis asylum lauren hackney memory, material, morphology: regeneration at marmet Joey hays disturbing pleasures of maintenance sarah cancienne and jen lynch living fossil to landscape machine
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EDUARDO ARROYO
Uncertainty and bravery laura sasso climate change and city dynamics beth bailey et al. re-bound chair oscar obando impressions of le corbusier sarah cancienne and Katherine treppendahl Strategies for good clean fun
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iÑaki alday and robin dripps re-valuIng research
POST PRESS PLOT digital and analog discourse a conversation with Geoff Manaugh, BldgBlog Sarah Peck, Landscape Urbanism Cassim SheparD, Urban omnibus
WITH Nathan Burgess, Mla 2013; JACOB FOX, mla 2013; JAMES MOORE, MLA 2013; JULIAN RAXWORTHY, LECTURER IN LANSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
manaugh, peck, shepard POST press PLOT
Where does architectural discourse take place today? While not yet fully valued in academic and professional contexts, blogging and social media platforms have become a critical mechanism for exchanging ideas about buildings and landscapes. The Student Association of Landscape Architects (SALAD) organized a symposium in the University Rotunda in April 2012 to address the internet’s impact on publishing and theory. SALAD invited the editors of three blogs—Urban Omnibus, Landscape Urbanism, and BLDGBLOG—to discuss their work. The following conversation between bloggers, students, and faculty expanded on themes present in the bloggers’ individual presentations. James Moore: Your presentations about your blogs today seemed to relate directly to your own personality and your ideas about making cities. How do you toe the line between satisfying a broader audience and maintaining a certain criticality? Does this represent a conflict? Cassim Shepard: I don’t think it is a conflict. There is always an incentive or directive to grow one’s audience, but it is important to have a clear idea of the range of people you’d like to reach. In my case, I threw out a whole bunch of lists of identity tags that one might apply to the sorts of people that might be interested in the stuff that we put out there. It is about expanding the audience to a broader set of people than would normally come to, for example, Architectural League lectures to see a famous architect talk about his or her work. But it’s also important to remind ourselves that it is not for everyone. It’s for people who think the material is interesting. That is an important criteria to allow us enough space to do what we think is interesting, knowing that we want to have a wide ranging appeal, but one that is not the most populist idea of what might be relevant. I don’t know if that keeps us critical, so much as it keeps us at a certain level of rigor in selection of topic. It also helps us maintain a constant desire to make topics diverse, while having internal consistency or coherence. It’s about principles: does this thing represent a new way of thinking or a new way of acting that we think is a good idea? Even if the idea isn’t necessarily instrumental, it might be a fresh perspective. I would say it is an issue of coherence and principles vis-a-vis knowing who your audience is, rather than criticality and page views. Sarah Peck: I think you need to start with the why. I am referring to a TED talk by Simon Sinek called “Start With Why”? I think you need to look at what you want to achieve. It doesn’t need to be grand or complex. It could be that I want to document every underground space. I want to explore. I want to write once a week. The second thing to remember is the word “obvious.” What is obvious to you is not obvious to everyone else. Even the act of regurgitating ideas, link love, and sharing puts a spin on things that people might find interesting. Be brave, be bold, write down what you think.
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Julian Raxworthy: It was interesting to hear two of you mention writing and stories. When you do writing like that, you have an interesting fascination/jealousy relationship to what you are writing about. Is there a role for a rising practice evocative of Orson Welles, where we can create a creative hybrid space between the things we are discussing and a prose form of storytelling? Geoff Manaugh: The value of design writing isn’t in trying to leverage a connoisseurlike opinion of what is positive or negative and how it falls into some sort of design legacy. Instead, it is in referring to an object or story or proposal or built project in a way that opens up the context within which that project can be discussed. For me, this involves pushing the future applications that a thing might have. Someone comes up with a new 3D printer or a new model for a landscape architecture firm. Where might this be in 5 years? Maybe there is some weird new technology in the military. It might be incredible if Zaha Hadid could use it. Let’s think about that design possibility. These could be blog posts. They are instigations or proposals. Oil and a gas companies use methods that could be absorbed into landscape architecture. There are things happening at Field Operations that would be useful for Exxon Mobil. Why not trying to start that conversation with a provocative blog post or bootstrapping a blog post into existence? This is a better use of a writer’s time than saying that a project is good or bad. CS: Context is a powerful term and a powerful thing to provide. In my work at Urban Omnibus, very few of the contributors identify as writers. But we interview them or have them write content themselves. People involved in a design milieu may not be the most comfortable writing about themselves in the design literature. Part of my technical assistance is in helping them understand what they are doing. I want the person whose work is being discussed to explain why their work is important to them. Another important part is explaining to my readers, who may trust my voice, what the context for a project is and why they should care. Sometimes this might be how it might be applied and sometimes how it might fit into traditions from different fields. I talked about genre creation, but a more important role for blogs is context revision. What are the various scales of reference in which something can fit, and how can we insist on a broader context for a piece of work without destroying the integrity of it? What is this broader context? SP: You made me jump to something when you mentioned both writing and story. There is data, information, and context. Stories pull on our emotions; there is lyricism, breath, and cadence. Each element is so important because it’s about transference of culture. It’s about passing on who we are from generation to generation. We are undergoing a mass exodus of information from our brains right now and proliferation of data in an unprecedented way. We are tasked with a way of curating this data that makes sense. As designers we are engaged with the creative and the
GM: I don’t think printed matter is going to disappear, even if it literally only becomes the realm of a “do not disturb” sign printed somewhere. But I also think books have a utility and an enthusiastic tactility, and I don’t think they are going to go away because of something like an iPad. I like that I can go somewhere that doesn’t have access to an AT&T satellite and read something that isn’t shining a light in my face. Maybe I’m just an old fuddy-duddy or something.
manaugh, peck, shepard
Nate Burgess: I thought it was interesting that writing a book was mentioned. I wonder what opinions you have on physically printed material. Is print publishing going to go away? If not, do you find it useful? How can people that engage in this activity learn from what you do as bloggers?
POST press PLOT
imaginative and the explorative. We like letting our brain wander in these random and tertiary ways.
I did a thing called the BLDGBLOG Book, which was based on BLDGBLOG. I found something really interesting, and I think it has critical implications. If you take something off of a blog and paste into a Word document and print it, a lot of times it is terrible. You will go read this thing and think it is unbelievable that anyone could ever read the website and ever find the author literate, not to mention that anyone would return to the website over and over again. You have to find different ways to write that take advantage of the printed page. For example, you can’t take advantage of base linking strategies that link to the Wikipedia page for, say, the War of 1812. You have to actually say what it was. That is, there are rhetorical needs that come out of writing on a piece of paper. On the other hand, there are people that take a critical essay and load it on a blog, and it is unreadable. Blogs and books don’t translate one to the other in a clear or crisp way. Stupid things like the candy trail—having a picture at the bottom or top of the page—or finding interesting ways of using links that aren’t just the exact same New York Times story make people want to keep scrolling. That’s the challenge of blogging. The implication is that if you want to write print books or magazine articles, it is a distinct art or craft. You need to write in a different way or a different circumstance. Your readers might be hiking. They might be exhausted at the end of the day. They might be turning to your book for refuge instead of turning to the Internet in a very externally motivated way, wanting to find out what’s going on. One option is “I want to turn to the Internet and see what is happening in the world.” The other is “I want to get away.” These require very different styles of writing. CS: I don’t think books are going to be a thing of the past any time soon. Geoff invokes the “Do Not Disturb Sign.” I think another reason is that a lot of people would have no idea how to decorate without them. I know I wouldn’t. Since I have had the ability to operate in multiple media—making films, doing audio,
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writing—I’m a big believer in the idea that any creative project needs to be what it is supposed to be. Should this be a written piece, or is there a good reason for it to be a video? What would the particular advantage be to that particular medium? One thing I like about the online context is that everything we’ve ever done is always there. We can study things longitudinally. So much of traditional mainstream media prioritizes opening day. For a landscape, the opening day is probably the least interesting day. A building starts to deteriorate right away so it makes sense that the opening day is so important. There is a cyclicality to the way the news media talks about events that I don’t feel bound by. That being said, I think the reason why books are interesting things, and a reason why I would like to make a book, is to mark a particular moment in time, which is an ironic thing, since we think of books as timeless. If you are going to make something, the material should dictate the medium. I think an important aspect of this for books is that compendiums of online writing should mark a moment in time. There are aspects about the modes of how a book is experienced, like Geoff invoked, and there are aspects about the modes of how it exists in a variety of different time schemes. SP: I don’t think that printed book is going away. I do think, however, that publishing is changing very quickly, and that publishing doesn’t know what publishing is doing. We now have the ability for every single person to be a publisher. This is making it easier and harder for everyone. The onus of responsibility is now on the reader to figure out what is good and what is not, and I think what is becoming scarce are good editors and critics. On the Internet, you start to develop a trust wrelationship with someone who will deliver good content. You start to develop patterns and grooves in virtual and visible Internet space. This is why Facebook is important. You know what it looks like and what it is going to do, and how you are going to spend your time. Books are exponentially harder than blog posts: you have to work with and craft an idea, and put it somewhere so that someone else can interface with you. Online it is a conversation. We can react, come back later, change our minds. In a book, you can’t do that as easily. It takes a lot more time. The prize is going to go to editors and curators. Jacob Fox: Where do you find all this stuff for your blogs? You all cut really interesting transects through disciplines. You represent a lot of ideas. Where are these discussions happening? Do these happen in person or on the Internet? Is the Internet doing a good job, or does the Internet just represent work from symposiums like this one? GM: I’ve been noticing the rhythm of where these conversations take place. Twitter is a place where a lot of conversations happen. Twitter is a constant adrenaline rush, but you have very few sustained conversations with people. I find that one great thing about writing is that when you start writing it can lead to more of itself. If you
In terms of where I get material—it is everywhere. If you talk to a twelve-year-old about what kind of tree fort they want to live in, the next thing you get is a really interesting architectural answer. I mean, depending on the twelve-year-old you are talking to. This is why architecture is so exciting. I think the reason why books Sarah mentioned how people want to talk about landscape. I want to emphatically emphasize that. Architects love to beat themselves up and say nobody cares about architecture. What they mean is “nobody wants to talk to me about Le Corbusier.”
manaugh, peck, shepard
It is the same with blogging. I will link to something on Twitter, and I regret having done it. If I had opened up a new post on Blogger, it would have led to more of itself. If you just resort to quick and dirty Facebook and twitter stuff, it evaporates.
POST press PLOT
were to open up a comment on someone’s blog, it may only take five minutes or six minutes, but you can start a more substantial interaction with the author.
are interesting things, and a reason why I would like to make a book, is to mark a particular moment in time.
In reality, millions of people want to talk about architecture. If you can engage those people and find that audience, it is a great way to find people who say they have read your blog and discover material. SP: I think Geoff answered your question in his opening sentence: an obsessive curiosity. It is an overwhelming child-like curiosity. You ask questions, find and seek. In terms of the dialogue happening offline, I think it is at least 50% or more of the total conversation. People will contact me to allude to something buried deep in my blog at the end of a blog post that I have forgotten. This is an exciting thing. CS: With Urban Omnibus, so much is rooted in individuals that there is a very particular relationship between online and offline content. Everything we put up involves at least one face-to-face conversation with someone who exists in the real world. We are trying to create a conversation based on the fact that conversations weren’t bubbling up in a city-wide way between these different silos of professional experience or expertise. There were a lot of people who felt completely excluded from the way architects talk about their work, primarily people in city government. They are people who say, “I love this stuff, but I am mainly interested in how to get things get done.” I think where these conversations are—and where new ideas and strategies are actually happening—is at the bar, the coffee shop, and the water cooler. So it’s just a matter of trying to be a fly on the wall for all those conversations.
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lasky Painting for insects
Painting for insects daphne lasky, M.ARCH 2011 Thesis critic: Robin Dripps During my thesis year, I pursued a course of research that imagines painting as a launching point for parametric explorations. My primary interest was the investigation of the two-dimensional logics that underpin the description of three-dimensional space, and the identification and development of fields that bring this to light. This thesis built upon my parametric investigations to argue that the manipulation of material properties facilitates the experience and communication of complex fields. In order to do this, I examined the use of color in a painting by Paolo Uccello, from his 15th century Battle of San Romano cycle. As an architect, I am interested in this work because while I have the luxury of working in three-dimensional space, the painter is constrained to two dimensions. This constraint drives a different set of choices about space, namely, the intense prioritization of the information to be communicated. Study of these choices generates insights about spatial fields and materials which can perhaps be expanded to the world of architecture.
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This painting, the 15th century Battle of San Romano (top) can be studied traditionally for its iconographic content, for its compositional arrangements, and for the indications of movement and rhythm present in the image. However, in these paintings, it is not just line and form, particularly in the guise of linear perspective, that indicate depth, but also the properties of color that determine our understanding of space. Brush strokes and pigment simultaneously represent themselves as marks made by a human hand, and refer to an imagined space that the viewer must construct for herself. opposite: The image sampler function in Grasshopper gathers information about color, in both its synthetic and component parts. Hue, chroma, and value work together in shifting ways to create colors. Hue refers to a color’s property as specifically red, green, blue, or yellow, etc. Chroma describes the perceived intensity of a specific color in relation to white or black. Value describes the perceived brightness of a color. These three measures are relatively independent aspects of color, and can work together in an infinite number of ways. Using manipulations of any of these components, painters can create colors and color combinations that describe a wide range of spatial relationships.
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Painting for insects
lasky
lasky Painting for insects above, left: I was primarily interested in field-making through translation, field-making through the layering of data, and in finding ways of working through and across fields. following: The final series of drawings and paintings of fields is designed to slowly materialize each layer of information. Color plays a role not only in communicating linked systems of data, but in facilitating the communication of a complex space. Further manipulations of color reinforce the systems present, and serve as touchstones that facilitate continual reorientation within the field. The layered use of color and attention to the physical properties of paint give the painting a presence in a shallow space, while referring to a complex field the viewer can construct for herself.
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Painting for insects
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winston Platforming
Platforming Localized, Open Source Infrastructures as Frameworks for Public Space rAndall winston, M.Arch 2011 thesis critic: peter waldman The condition of Los Angeles is critical. A sense of urgency compelled by an impending water shortage and rising energy costs is compounded by a nearly bankrupt city government and a stagnating unemployment rate. The city’s infrastructures—fecund hybridizations of nature, culture and the built environment— offer opportunities for change as the networks that underlie these environmental and economic crises. Located in the Central Industrial area of downtown Los Angeles, designated a redevelopment project area by the city, Platforming serves as a model for community redevelopment by augmenting existing infrastructures to enable more resilient relationships between the natural and built environment, people and the resources we use. Localized harvesting and storing of water, energy, and biomass resources are envisioned within an open source network. Properties and their inhabitants become productive participants in a public utilities market where resources are bought, traded, and sold in distributed, peer-to-peer fashion. The city’s former role as builder, owner, and manager of large, one-way utilities evolves into market regulator and guarantor of a multiplicity of resources flowing bi-directionally and sourced from any building or landscape that produces energy, recycled water, or biomass. Within this network, a combination of loose and fixed design strategies embeds opportunities for job creation, social gathering, recreation, and civic empowerment.
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The city of Los Angeles envisions the Central Industrial area as the Clean Tech Corridor, a global hub for the research, commercialization and deployment of clean technologies. While agreeing with these economic development goals, Platforming reinterprets “clean technology� to correspond to the gritty urban environment that characterizes the area as well as the inherent dynamism of technological innovation. Opportunities for more vibrant exchanges and experiences are created through digitally networked environments that intersect public and private spaces, fostering a kind of urbanism that is not necessarily clean or neatly resolved. The project is underpinned by four principles: distributed production, visible flows, sharing feedback, and public space.
DISTRIBUTED PRODUCTION All new and adaptively re-used public and private properties are not only required to achieve net-zero water and energy use, but must also install rainwater collecting and graywater recycling systems, energy generation systems, and biomass collection units that produce and/or store resources in excess of the minimum needs of occupants. VISIBLE FLOWS The distributed production of water, energy, and biomass is made visible through required smart metering systems that measure and track resource use and production, and are linked to a digital public utilities market where resources can be bought, traded, and sold. SHARING FEEDBACK The city is responsible for ensuring the bi-directional flow of privately generated energy and recycled water, whereby resources flow into and out of buildings and landscapes, to and from the larger public market. People take on more responsibility for the resources they use, pay less for them in a more competitive market, and benefit from the open sharing of resource-related ideas. PUBLIC ACCESSIBILITY A network of public spaces and pathways is woven into new and existing developments, linked by a re-engineered Los Angeles River. The river as a conduit for the movement of water, power and freight is expanded to include pedestrians and habitable public space, creating additional real estate and a stronger link between residents and a major, constitutive part of their environment.
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Platforming
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Platforming
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Platforming
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DIVERSIFYING THE DISCOURSE A CALL FOR STUDENT VOICES OUTSIDE THE STUDIO James Moore, MLA 2013
After a long day of classroom discussion and downloads, model cut-andpasting, computer point-and-clicking, and collective brain-bashing we, the design students, are called to cram our bodies into flip-down seats and steel ourselves for a presentation whose contents are largely an unknown. Some gather up front with pens in hand and laptops set to record. Others jockey for position in the back so that they might slip out the door with a phone to their ear at the first sign of a cliché font or conflicting color scheme. At their best, lectures awaken the spirit. They present new ideas or reframe old ones in a different light. At their worst they can be dull as toast, overly esoteric, or self-glorifying. How can this format rise above mere transmission? Surely, the oneway monologue would benefit from additional options for dialogue. The question and answer, often the only chance one might have to elevate the event, is often treated as an afterthought, or leftover time. Many students duck and run at the end of a two hour lecture. The “So What Did You Think of the Lecture?” exchanged the following day between classmates is often the end of any reflection. Rarely does this conversation leave the building and enter the community. Rarer still does someone formally engage with what they have seen and heard, outline the argument, weigh it against their own ideas, and share their insights with others. If our school goes
diversifying the discourse
Writing is—like drawing, photography, and modeling—a design practice and it benefits from exposure to the public. When given a design problem, we are taught that sites are not empty, but full of previous conditions, histories, and phenomena. And so it is with writing. There is never truly a “blank page.” There exists a tremendous history of thoughts and ideas that undergird our words though often we feel dumbfounded when given a vague prompt. This is why a rigorous review of lectures can be such a useful place to begin to develop students’ writing. This is also an opportunity to learn how to write for a larger audience. Often student writing is only subjected to the criticism of professors and is left to molder in a drawer. Writing for a larger public is a critical skill. It demands that we write with a spark of elegance and simplicity. It demands that we think outside of our architectural “–isms” and address an audience who every day confront, question and experience the spatial consequences of design.
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through the trouble of scheduling, paying, and hosting speakers, then we should make every attempt to use those events to create a sustained dialogue within the institution and the world.
The Student Association of Landscape Architecture and Design (SALAD) in the fall of 2011 began a program that hopes to encourage thoughtful and passionate engagement with select lectures and then transmit them to the larger discipline. With the support of our department and faculty, we reached out to The Dirt, the professional blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects. The demand for constant content strains even with the best-staffed blog, and The Dirt is no exception. SALAD (thanks to the university’s support) was able to offer compensation, editorial assistance, and coordination to the student authors. The Dirt published four of our articles in the fall of 2011 and hopes to continue (if not increase) this pace. Each article received over 1,500 views and spurred comments from readers across the nation. Three students—Brian Davis, Dasha Lebedeva, and Peter Malandra—contributed four articles to The Dirt, covering a wide range of issues. The authors offer insights on the ideas of professionals, but also bring to the articles their own concerns and begin to grapple with the ground between the two. Here, we will provide a short introduction to each, but encourage you to go read them in full yourself, comment on them, and continue the conversation. In Dasha Lebedeva’s article on Camilo Restrepo, she demonstrates the power that language can have in describing the potential within a public space. Calling pure formalism a fossil, a fixed frozen object, unresponsive to the swiftly changing social conditions in Medellin, Colombia, Restrepo advocates for designers to “perform architecture as a thoughtful action for the management and administration of space.” With his combination of high-theory and fervent social activism—“For the poor, the best,” he says—Restrepo calls us all to examine the relationships between concept and material practice.
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Peter Malandra covers the highly conceptual Dutch designer Ronald Rietveld, who is similarly concerned with the complexities of intervening in public space, but who comes from a very different geographical background than Restrepo. He calls for designers to explicitly engage the strategic and catalytic in their writing, representation and design. Though we may have heard this again and again, Rietveld’s proposals show how this cliché might be invigorated with creativity and a somewhat perverse sense of humor. His projects cause us to ask how far into the future designers can maintain control, and what happens when they open up their project to uncertainty. Peter Malandra’s second article has Michael Vergason tracing his use of drawing throughout his personal and professional history—from his travels in Italy and beyond—to careful site reading and research. In lieu of the typical discussions on expanded digital techniques, Pete shows us how refreshing it is to be reminded how much one can glean from the simple discipline of observation and inquiry through drawing. Finally, Brian Davis investigates the ideas of restoration ecologist Steven Handel. Handel presented much of his work, including the Fresh Kills Landfill project, as a simple act of stewardship, but Davis pushes the conversation further by bringing in Handel’s own interests. Davis points out that as an ecologist, Handel is just as concerned with the orchestration of agents and actors as the medium of his work (humans, bees) as he is with the traditional subjects of restoration (flora and soil). Davis also questions whether “stewardship,” a term used by Handel, is the only way to consider our relationship to the landscape and looks to the term “kinship” as an alternative. Though this experiment has been in large part a success, there is room for improvement. In these matters, time and resources are always a concern. Students are taxed for free time as it is and have difficulty doing extensive research around the issues raised by a lecturer. The articles by themselves might not individually trigger a conversation; if we asked each student to look at previous articles and reference a connection to at least one of them, a chain of dialogue might be formed. Professors might also be brought in to peer-review, and the resulting discussion might yield interesting content. Also, there is the tricky editorial balance of how to retain a critical lens while respecting the professionals who go out of their way to share their ideas and work with us. We don’t want a surplus of snark, nor do we want to shill for our visitors. We hold our school work to a high standard; so should we our work with guests. Are lectures a critical component of our discourse? We think so, but only so far as they push our conversations further. Initiatives that empower students to respond thoughtfully and share their thoughts with their peers and the larger world might play a role in turning the lecture from a terminal point to the beginning of something much, much larger.
Courtesy Marcus Brooks
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diversifying the discourse
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RECOMBINANT FABRICATION AN AUTOMATED WORKFLOW OF DATA MANAGEMENT, RECURSIVE EVOLUTION, AND CNC FABRICATION Charles Sparkman, M.arch 2012 critic: ROBIN DRIPPs Winner of the 2012 robert j. huskey research exhibition
However, as emerging ways of making bridge the divide between design-thinking and making/fabrication, they radically alter the role of the designer. Instead of mastering a single skill or craft, designers are expected to navigate complex workflows across analog and digital media, thereby uniting design and making into an integrated action. Furthermore, the traditional hierarchy of skills taught in schools (where a student might learn drawing, drafting, and CAD in a linear sequence) is being replaced by nonlinear paths, which produce designers that are agile and conversant in moving rapidly between modes of representation and fabrication. It is no longer possible to work in a single media, which precludes iteration and translation of design ideas across systems and scales. Workflows, therefore, facilitate a larger conversation between designers and other disciplines, affording us the opportunity to insert foreign bodies of knowledge into complex design processes.
sparkman RECOMBINANT FABRICATION
THE WORKFLOW IS THE MESSAGE It starts out so simple. With pencil and paper, we begin design education, only to discover an ever-expanding world of digital modeling, scripting, and CNC fabrication. We weigh these emerging media against notions of analog craft and find great expression in synthetic (analog and digital) forms. Yet, as we navigate ways of making we precariously lean towards a single mode—or sometimes a single application—that accommodates a particular aesthetic, often relying upon a single media to manifest design intent into physical form.
The following project is not a demonstration of a single way of making, but an example of a workflow. Therefore, discrete ways of making are treated as components within a recursive sequence of steps. The workflow is portable and dynamic, open to accommodate additional components so that it becomes a robust conversation between multiple disciplines and ways of making.
RECOMBINANT BOOKSHELF This project synthesizes research in architecture, design, computer science, and fabrication into a recursive workflow. The workflow accesses data stored in a user’s Amazon account (dimensions of purchased and suggested books) to generate customized, CNC-fabricated bookshelves. With a click of a mouse-button, a user can order a unique, extensible bookshelf to fit their exact needs. The recursive workflow choreographs a latent dataset into a digital model, a sequence of CNC toolpaths, a series of CNC-routed plywood panels, and finally into a sanded and assembled shelf. The script mines the user’s Amazon account for the dimensions of their books, calculates their required shelf space, and generates individual shelf modules. Then, the script organizes shelf modules into a unique assembly and calculates the slotted joinery between each module. Next, the script generates and exports CNC toolpaths (for a computer-aided router) and exports a manual of assembly for the entire bookshelf. Finally, the script calculates the smallest possible volume of the assembly so that they can be flat-packed and shipped to the user.
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1 DATA INPUT FROM AMAZON
2 Shelf calculation
3 organization + Joinery
A Visual Basic script imports the heights, widths, and depths of the user’s Amazon books (purchased and suggested) as a data tree.
The script calculates the required shelf space and generates shelf sizes using the dimensions from Amazon.
A recursive script organizes shelves into a larger assembly and solves the slotted joinery between modules.
Title
The Republic; Plato Delirious New York; Koolhaas Ways of Seeing; Berger Mythologies; Barthes The Visual Culture Reader; Mirzoeff The Vision Machine; Virilio Camera Lucida; Barthes The Pillars of the Earth; Follett Thousand Plateaus; Deleuze The Poetics of Space Planet of Slums; Davis Society of the Spectacle; Debord The Production of Space; Lefebvre The Land I'm Bound to; Leigh A Mind of Its Own; Friedman Marcel Breuer, Architect; Hyman Eero Saarinen; Merkel The Fountainhead; Rand The Prince; Machiavelli The Art of War; Tzu Purgatory; Dante Inferno; Dante Design and Form; Itten The Art of Color; Itten The Bauhaus: 1919-1933; Droste Clark and Menefee; Jensen Emergence; Johnson Collage City; Rowe The Eyes of the Skin; Pallasmaa A Natural History of the Senses Build-on; Klanten Tom Kundig, Houses; Ngo Postmodernism; Jameson Metro Stop Paris; Dallas Invisible Cities; Calvino Cosmicomics; Calvino The Baron in the Trees; Calvino Numbers in the Dark; Calvino Difficult Loves; Calvino Mr. Palomar; Calvino Marcovaldo; Calvino The Plague; Camus The Metamorphosis; Kafka The Myth of Sisyphus; Camus The Fall; Camus The Stranger; Camus
Height Width Depth Owns 7.6 7.6 9.4 9.7 7.8 7.9 8 10.1 9.1 8.2 8.1 9.1 8.4 9.1 9.2 9 9 9.2 8 7.3 8.8 8.2 9 11.3 8.2 12.1 7.7 8.4 10.8 11.7 9.2 9 6.8 8 8 6.9 8 12.2 9.1 8.8 11 11.5 8.4 8.8 11.6 8
5.1 5 7.3 7.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.8 6.1 5.4 5.4 7.2 5.3 6 6.3 6 6.1 6.1 5.4 5.6 5.9 5.1 5.9 10 5.1 9.6 5.3 11 10.5 10.2 7.3 6.5 4.1 5.4 5.2 4.2 8 11.6 7.4 5.8 10.9 11.4 5.5 6 8.3 5.8
cnc router cutting toolpaths
1 0.9 1.3 0.6 0.6 0.7 0.9 2.5 0.3 0.5 0.3 0.6 0.3 0.9 2.2 0.7 1.4 0.7 0.8 0.7 0.7 0.4 1.1 1 0.9 1 0.3 0.4 1.4 1.3 0.8 1.8 0.3 0.5 1.1 1 0.5 1 0.3 0.8 1.1 1.4 0.7 0.8 0.6 0.4
1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
18 x 12 x 12 14 x 9 x 12
24 x 10 x 12
13 x 15 x 12
16 x 15 x 12
24 x 8 x 12
24 x 12 x 12
17 x 18 x 12
24 x 9 x 12
cnc routed sheets
layout of shelf assembly
4 Toolpath Optimization
5 Fabrication + Assembly
6 Extensive Shelves
The script generates toolpaths for CNC fabrication and compiles cutsheets that minimize material waste. Additionally, the script exports a unique manual of assembly so the end-user can construct the shelves.
See PHOTOGRAPHIC sequence Below
The assembly is left open-jointed so the user can insert additional shelves as they accumulate books off of their Amazon “suggested” list.
The shelves are fabricated by a CNC router and assembled manually by the user.
RECOMBINANT FABRICATION
sparkman
infinite iterations using the workflow
CUTSHEETS FOR CNC ROUTER
EXTENSIVE SHELVES SLOT INTO ASSEMBLY
INITIAL ASSEMBLY
EXTENSIVE SHELVES SLOT INTO ASSEMBLY
slotted shelf joinery
completed shelf joinery
assembly with books
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