Author Archives: vague

On the 29th of January the remaining in Zurich, MAS students gave a presentation of their final theses projects for the researchers and the professor of the chair Ludger Hovestadt. Here a collection of images with a short descriptions from the students’ work that can give an overview of the range of topics that they chose to deal with computationally. Along with these images some snapshots from the  day of presentation.

We wish all the best to the MAS1112 in their future ventures

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It’s not easy, finding your own position as an architect. With our technologies, we accelerate everything: more people, more mobility, more television, more images, more phones, more networks, more research, more publications, more complexity, more statistics, more rubbish, more technology, more advertising, more consumerism… Google, Twitter, games, leisure, over-ageing, privacy, intellectual property, corporate communications, global village, mega-cities, economy drives, liberalism, marketing, entertainment, war architecture… It’s easy to think that all this could be halted, that it could all slow down, that it is possible to cast an anchor an arrest the movement. Sustainability, misery, crisis, scarce resources, nature, empathy, renunciation, limitation, insurance, reassurance, delegation, the original, the origin, territory, land, causes, simplicity, clarity, guilt, regeneration, recycling, recreation, creation, simplicity, materials-appropriate construction… but information technology is of a different ‘nature’. Which is why our old concepts are not sufficient to grasp it or its phenomena. Just as described in the fable of the Hare and the Tortoise: the hare kills himself running and the tortoise doesn’t even get out of breath. That’s exactly what we’re witnessing: we feel washed away every time we try to cast an anchor, within the sea of our old conceptions. And so, adrift, we keep looking for an equilibrium in arranging our belongings. But how about, instead of casting anchors, we learn to surf?

Phototrophic is an autonomous interactive installation, that is comprised of electroactive polymers (EAP), electolunminescence foils (EL), dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC)  and bioplastics. The focus of this project was to make a self sufficient architectural composition from the above materials, that we customly produced following a simple set of instructions.

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Material availability – the explosion of materials – the search for construction that is appropriate to materials – no longer boiled,
refined, concentrated, arduous, cleansed – materials are being thought up and made, drawn from the earth, in controlled processes. The most explicit manifestation of this is found in doping, the deliberate adding of impurities – materials achieve what we’ve never been able to achieve through continuities: they turn sunlight into electricity, they glow, shine, gleam, oscillate, move, see, smell, hear, sound, absorb, concentrate, switch, operate logically… simply because we’ve coded them, doped them.
This module conveys, by way of exercises, the methods of material doping. What we are looking for are material constructions which articulate these constructed material properties into new kinds of constructions. Processing, wiring, CNC production.

What could be more fantastical, of more consequence, than building a new city? Or a new house? Hunting a hog or ploughing a field is easy
enough, you can follow a natural order. But building a new city? That’s pure imagination, pure virtuality. On a small, carefully chosen and defined plot of land, a city can be anything we want it to be. There, in that particular abstraction of territory, there are no qualitative boundaries, except those set by our own imagination, which in turn has been shaped over time by the rhythms of the fields that lie under the sun.
Today, thus our contention, it is no longer the cultivation of fields that is being visualised and whose surpluses find articulation in the cities. Through information technology it is our cities themselves that are being cultivated. Today we look for virtualisations and architectural articulations on a new plateau. What, then, are the imaginings, the thought patterns that are being shown to us by Vitruvius, Palladio, Ledoux, Durand, Semper, Loos,
Wright, Corbusier, Sullivan, Rossi, Krier, Ungers, Alexander, Otto, Venturi, Eisenman, Libeskind, Hadid, Gehry, Lynn, Herzog & de Meuron, Zumthor, Koolhaas? What are the virtualities, what the urbanities described by deconstructivism, structuralism, post-structuralism, minimalism, functionalism, international style, modernity, postmodernism, existentialism, phenomenology, behaviourism, positivism, vitalism?
Let’s cultivate these ideas for our new architecture and our new cities.

Computers are general machines (Turing 1936). Not just all known, but also all future machines can be logically visualised through them. Computers are abstract from any physics (von Neumann, 1945). The networks of space and time (Baran, 1964, Licklider, 1960), reduced to minute, printed particles, connected with each other by electromagnetic modulations. Billions of them. Every computer, phone, machine. Design is no longer constructed from necessities, rather it condensates from the wealth of all possibilities. Rendered from virtual availability into concrete existence. And it’s so simple: mechanics from CNC production, electrical controls from do-it-yourself kits, general processors, accessible networks, a bit of software.
This module offers practical exercises in the established manifestations of virtual information technology order systems, and an introduction to corresponding thought patterns. Over the last few years, electronic prototyping has evolved to the extent where any interested lay person can very quickly develop electronic gadgets and connect them to the mediality of the internet. This module gives an overview over the technological concepts and delivers a guide to building your own gadgets in electronics, software and mechanics. The Internet of Things, distributed computing, remote procedure calls, TCP/IP, URL, Google Earth, sensors, actuators, Arduino, automation, interaction technologies: processing, wiring, CNC production.

Programming for architects has become a very popular topic in the last years. Tools have become simpler, computers faster, tutorials and are online available as video, there are huge amounts of examples ready to copy and play. In this
scenario we face one major problem: the programming languages and the tutorials suggest direct recipes for fast solutions, whatever the problem may be. They are pretty successful in the sense that with their help, everybody can produce very fast the very same results. This scenario is a symptom of the – we call it – aggressive cultural ignorance of cybernetics. In contrast to the major articulations in this field, we do not think, that there is any truth or meaning in what a program can produce. Even if our algorithms generate forms that look strangely familiar to us, because they resemble some biological or natural phenomena, they are not cracking some immediate code of nature. In what computers can produce, we find a mirroring of the categories of our thinking, knowledge, and our tools. If we take code for natural in any sense, we are heading towards a naked and most extreme reductionist functionalism.
To bypass such un-ingenuous schematism, his module sets out with cultural, mathematical, and technological implications contained within the different programming paradigms to develop a rich understanding of the power of coding. Coding means orchestrating cultural déjà vus. By coding we are sheaving rich symbolizations to work within a digital architectonics that is constituted by our assignations of value to the old and familiar, as articulations for attention within an open competition among our contemporaries.
CODING I is a 4 week course and will concentrate on the media of digital graphics and images. We will exercise different levels of abstraction towards images, to get an understanding of different ways of thinking that have evolved throughout the past centuries. This path will leas us from magnitude to what we call multitudes, and on to the contemporary indexes whose subsumption can be understood as potitudes. CODING II will follow the same didactical line, but concentrate on 3D objects and vectors. It will linke more directly to traditional CAAD and computer architecture. The emphasis on images as objects of our exercises in CODING is chosen because this is technically less challenging and therefore suitable for a first round of this challenging program. The exercises are in Processing and Java.