MAS CAAD ETHZ 2010-2011 · ITA(Institute of Technology in Architecture), Faculty of Architecture ETH Zurich » M1: Living in a world of Abundant Potentials

M1: final presentations

mascaad2010 — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 11:28:44 +0000

image on the home page mixed by agata muszynska, based on images by Stanza

Agata Muszynska:Abstract Machine_pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hideaki Takenaga:Assemblage_pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jesper Thøger Christensen:Plane of Consistency_pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jorge Orozco: Stratification_pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

Magda Osinska: Deterritoialization_pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mihye An: Matrix

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nikola Marincic: The World of Rhizome

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mohammad Kadivar: Architectural Concept in Islamic Architecture(Mosque Architecture Past and Present)

Click here to view the embedded video.

M1: student works

mascaad2010 — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:28:27 +0000

Jesper Thøger Christensen: Plane of Consistency

What is Architecture?

I started trying to dissect the plane of consistency.

Trying to gain an understanding of the concept by describing itís parts.

Looking at the plane of consistency as the unformed, unorganized, destratified matter and all its flows and intensities.

Opposite to strata as the thickening, slowing down of the plane of consistency giving form to matter

I tried to image it as a non-geometric virtual plane

a self-organizing process which always differs from itself – as the differential.

An ever changing probabilistic structure, a pure field of potential of connectivity

However I reached the conclusion that it was not about trying to isolate the concept but instead try to make connections between the various concepts of Deleuze.

That be the plane of consistency, the abstract machine, stratification and destratification, re- and deterritorialization, etc.

Looking at the concepts as a way to relate strata of different kind not by comparison on one level but by a common third on another level.

So to reach the full potential we should navigate (with the help of the Abstract Machine) on the space of potentials (Plane of Consistency ñ a topological space with intensities, de- and reterritorialized flows)

Leaving the normal architectural tracing of human behaviour into a static design with the architect as author.

Instead architecture should form a map with the user creating behaviour

This map I see as an infinite nested probabilistic system (a rhizome), that will learn on the fly, and organise itself constantly, depending on the connections established, without an architect forcing a form upon matter – rather constructing the unconscious.

What is Architecture?I started trying to dissect the plane of consistency.Trying to gain an understanding of the concept by describing itís parts.
Looking at the plane of consistency as the unformed, unorganized, destratified matter and all its flows and intensities.Opposite to strata as the thickening, slowing down of the plane of consistency giving form to matter
I tried to image it as a non-geometric virtual planea self-organizing process which always differs from itself – as the differential.An ever changing probabilistic structure, a pure field of potential of connectivity
However I reached the conclusion that it was not about trying to isolate the concept but instead try to make connections between the various concepts of Deleuze.That be the plane of consistency, the abstract machine, stratification and destratification, re- and deterritorialization, etc.Looking at the concepts as a way to relate strata of different kind not by comparison on one level but by a common third on another level.
So to reach the full potential we should navigate (with the help of the Abstract Machine) on the space of potentials (Plane of Consistency ñ a topological space with intensities, de- and reterritorialized flows)
Leaving the normal architectural tracing of human behaviour into a static design with the architect as author.Instead architecture should form a map with the user creating behaviour
This map I see as an infinite nested probabilistic system (a rhizome), that will learn on the fly, and organise itself constantly, depending on the connections established, without an architect forcing a form upon matter – rather constructing the unconscious.

Magda Osinska: Deterritoialization

Magda Osinska: Deterritoialization_pdf part1

Magda Osinska: Deterritoialization_pdf part2

Deterritorialization:Desestabilizes spatial boundaries or increase internal heterogeneity.Concept of territorialization plays a synthetic role, through the permanent articulations produced by this process that the whole emerges from its parts and maintains its identity once has emerged.Territorialization:Process that define or sharpen spatial boundaries of actual territories.Non-spatial process which increase internal homogeneity of an assemblage.

Reterritorialization:Establish a new relationship, a new process, a new interaction, a new interlinking, provide a new concept, re-define, re-configure, re-combine, differentiation the role. One of the examples on which Deleuze explain the process Deterritorialization & Reterritorialization is the: Beautiful story… “Orchid and the Wasp”1.Where is the beginning of the process? 2.Beautiful story-What kind of process is happened between them? What is the potential of this process? 3.Why Orchid? Why Wasp? APARALLE EVOLUTION of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other?Nothing happened? Or something happened because of assemblages?5.What kind of order do they have? What kind of order do they need? (Abstract Machine? +Paine of Consistency?)4.What does it mean for architecture…?

Beautiful story…What kind of process is happened between them? “Orchid and the Wasp”What is the potential of this process? What is really happened? What is the process?NOT IMITATION NOR RESEMBLANCE but CAPTURE OF CODE,surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a VERITABLE BECOMINGBECOMING- wasp of the orchid and BECOMING-orchid of the waspAssemblage Theory.

APARALLE EVOLUTION of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other…?

APARALLE EVOLUTION =if the Pink Panter imitate the pink? or if she paints the world in pink on pink?

so, what to do?1.ALWAYS FOLLOW THE RHIZOM 2.CONJUGATE DETERRITORIALIZATION FLOWES3. WRITE4.FORM A RHIZOM6.INCREASE YOUR TERRITORY BY DETERRITORRIALIZATION7.EXTEND THE LINE OF LIGHTS TO THE POINT WHERE IT BECOMES AN ABSTRACT MACHINE COVERING THE ENTIRE PLANE OF CONSISTENCY

Agata Muszynska: Abstract Machine

Hideaki Takenaga:Assemblage

Jorge Orozco: Stratification

Mihye An: Matrix

Nikola Marincic: Rhizome

M1:18.10.2010/ Prof.Kate Marshall/Narrative Infrastructures: Architecture, Narrative, Fiction

mascaad2010 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 12:20:55 +0000

Narrative Infrastructures: Architecture, Media, Fiction

In this lecture I will show how infrastructure, or what the American novelist Henry Roth calls “the strange world behind the walls,” works not only as a highly visible and privileged topic of fiction, but also as an important way of thinking about narrative form. Reading infrastructures quite literally as narrative objects – and thinking about the narrative infrastructures that order and orient everyday experience – allows for a reconceptualization of the built world and its visibilities. It also makes room for reconsidering the structures of the persons that inhabit this world and its descriptions, for infrastructure has the uncanny tendency to provide in literary representations the precise locus of modern reflexivity. I will discuss how the idea of infrastructure develops in contemporary media theory, and how forms of blockage, noise, or excessive connectivity have been rendering infrastructures textually visible in works of narrative and visual art over the past century. The task, then, will be to discover in infrastructure not only a vast system of metaphoric resonance, but the structure of modern communication, and to therefore put pressure on theories of architectonics and construction otherwise unaccountable to this paradoxical situation.

slides:narrative infrastructures pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

M1: Sequences. Concepts and simple Methods/ lecture by Klaus Wassermann

mascaad2010 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:26:13 +0000

Listen to the lecture here:

MAS10_1M8_wassermann_sequences_01

MAS10_1M8_wassermann_sequences_02

MAS10_1M8_wassermann_sequences_03

Click here to view the embedded video.

M1:on coding/ lecture by Vera Bühlmann

mascaad2010 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:25:35 +0000

This lecture will start with the assumption that the mediation between narratives and numbers happens by coding. It will introduce a basic problem involved in any concrete, real-world application of a numerical model: namely the problem of how to turn a symbolical calculus into a significant one. I will suggest that historically, there had been two common stances in dealing with this extra-systemical reference involved in this problem, those of symbolization and construction.

Symbolization, so I would like to suggest, arranges an abstract setting that is arbitrary in its set-up, and that relies in order to function well (i.e. turn something on which we can count into something that is also significant to us) on the belief in it. Construction, on the other hand, arranges an abstract setting that is not arbitrary but necessary in its specific set-up, relying as it does on mechanical functioning.

The argument put forward in this lecture is that the construction approach is a way of dealing with extra-systemical reference only on the basis of naturalizing things that have been symbolized previously, by articulating them categorically, specifically. A special emphasis will be put on the relation between measurement and coding, and the space of medialization that opens up in-between. How can we think about construction that does not rely on naturalizing things but on medializing them? How can we think about construction within the symbolic?

Constructing within the symbolic: a thought experiment pdf

Listen to the lecture here:

MAS10_1M5_bühlmann_01

MAS10_1M5_bühlmann_02

Click here to view the embedded video.

M1:”about the point”/lecture by Ludger Hovestadt

mascaad2010 — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:25:12 +0000

The point is a geometrical abstraction, everyone would probably agree with that.

This lecture by Ludger Hovestadt explores how the abstract concept of a point releases different potentials to be realized in different technological paradigms. It gives an introduction to what it can allow for first in a pre-analytical, geometrical paradigm, then in an analytical, mechanical paradigm, and closes with an outlook and a first attempt to characterize the story of the point within the more recent paradigm of electronic technologies and its networks.

Listen to the lecture here:

MAS10_1M4_hovestadt_01 part1

MAS10_1M4_hovestadt_02 part2

MAS10_1M4_hovestadt_03part3

slides:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rhizome pdf

Deleuze and Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus pdf

M1:Evolution. About Owls flying from Athens to Manhattan/ lecture by Klaus Wassermann

mascaad2010 — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 11:24:43 +0000

slides:evolution pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

M1:01.10.2010/Dr.Edward Willat/Gilles Deleuzes Architectonics of Growth

mascaad2010 — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:20:14 +0000

Architectonics has a long history in philosophy. Successive philosophers sought to locate the beginning or foundation of all knowledge. This was used to organise all the disciplines of knowledge in a system. This lecture will explore the work of Aristotle and Kant where the foundational and organisational tasks of architectonics are articulated. We will then introduce the crisis of foundations that altered our understanding of knowledge in the twentieth century. This crisis undermines architectonic systems, revealing vulerabilities in these supposedly complete structures. By exploring Diane Morgan’s re-reading of Kant’s architectonic in the light of this crisis we will uncover a new version of architectonics that now emerges. Deleuze and Guattari also give us a new formulation of architectonics when they put forward the notion of the ‘rhizome’ as a model for all knowledge. What emerges is a practical, open and interdisciplinary version of architectonics. Instead of seeking a systematic overview of other disciplines philosophy now engages with the concrete work of different fields and seeks to articulate the principles behind a knowledge which lacks foundations.

Slides: A History of Architectonics pdf Architectonics Handout pdf

Click here to view the embedded video.

M1:mediality & architectonics/ lecture by Vera Bühlmann

mascaad2010 — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:18:28 +0000

Lecture by Vera Bühlmann, an an introduction to the background issues to Michel Serres’ Text “The Origins of Geometry”. Why is geometry so fundamental to our thinking? What does it mean to our CAAD problematics on finding solutions that cannot be drawn?

The origin of geometry itself, so Serres claims, was of a double nature: Using figures, schemas, and diagrams on the one hand, and using letters, words, and sentences of the system, organized by their own semantics and syntax on the other hand. Geometry is seen by Serres as a double system which represents itself and expresses itself, one by the other. Different schools of thought in different times have liked to privilege the narratives and legends over the proofs or figures, words and formulas – or the other way around. Thus our current problematics of how to deal with our possibility in CAAD to design by scripting first, and then render the design into geometrical concreteness second, is thus as ancient as the origin of geometry itself. The question for us to focus on can thus not be how to close this constitutive gap. Our focus needs to address how to refine, how to differentiate and cultivate the abundant potentials that spring form the “horn of plenty,” as which Serres characterizes geometry in its mediating role between narratives and numbers.

slides: architectonics& mediality& web pdf

Listen to the lecture here: part3

M1:REAL ABUNDANCE/lecture by Ludger Hovestadt and Vera Bühlmann

mascaad2010 — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 11:17:50 +0000

Energy in the metalithic Era: lecture by Ludger Hovestadt and Vera Bühlmann on the [power]book.

Do we have enough energy for everyone? Of course not: we have more than enough.

More than enough to cover all our current needs, more than enough to cater for expanding populations, growing economies and rising standards of living, across the globe. We have so much energy that, once weʼve sorted out the logistics of distributing it, we wonʼt know what to do with it all. And we wonʼt need to, either: it will just be there. As a matter of course.

We have, on planet earth, an abundance of energy. True, our resources here are finite and some of them are now getting scarce. And there is a limit, it seems, to what the planet and its atmosphere can take in terms of factors that alter their finely tuned balance. But in actual fact, resources are not the issue. And if it is the case that our carbon dioxide emissions, for example, are causing climate change, then an end to this is also on the cards. We can, with technology that is available today, solve all our energy problems for generations to come, and take care of the CO2 situation, quite in passing.

There is a world in which the power is always on. Where energy, instead of being owned and controlled by a few, is owned by nobody, harvested by many and controlled by everybody, because everybody has an active say in it. Energy that doesnʼt pollute the planet, that doesnʼt heat up the atmosphere and thatʼs not going to run out if we add a few billion of us people to the planet. And itʼs not a world that exists in our wildest dreams, itʼs a world we have right at our fingertips: there is room, there is water, there is food and there is power for everybody. We can now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, take a conceptual leap forward and put ourselves onto a different footing altogether: we can embrace abundance.

The Abundance Story pdf a radical new perspective on our energy ‘situation’

slides: M zero energy pdf

Listen to the lecture here:

part1

part2

MAS10_0M9_energy3_M8k16b part3

part4

MAS10_0M9_energy5_M8k16b part5