Spatial and Temporal Sequence

The Movie: Cinema Paradiso
Director: Giuseppe Tornatore







I decided to study 3 different aspects of the scene.
The first one is foregroung(red), middle ground(yellow) and background(blue), to be more specific the shift of elements between those 3.
The second one is the use of flat image and perspective.
The third one would be surface and volume.
The elements I am using are the old guy and the kid, the movie and the public and their shifts as they frame scenes, work as backgrounds, or shift from surface and plane to volume.



flat image,
the public acts as a plane


perspective
the kid and the proyector frame the "movie".


flat image
the movie acts as surface against the wall which is a plane.


perspective
the window frames the view.
change of scale from enclosed to open space


perspective
the public is acting as a volume this time and has shifted to the foreground.


perspective
the public shifted to middle ground .


flat image
the public and the movie act as planes and overlap and links the next scene where the movie and the public become a volume.


perspective

Versioning - Connubial Reciprocities of Surface and Space

“ … produce ambiguous readings, blurring the distinction between the real and constructed appearances of buildings; defamiliarising the purported properties of materials and expanding the experiential and semantic effects of architecture.”

I found quite interesting the part of Versioning that talks about surface and space and the attempt of dA to reconcile them. The article gives a good analysis of the 2 traditions in history, those being the rationalist and the empirical finding middle ground in the treatment of the surface.

The rationalist tradition is found in the Renaissance and the Baroque periods with an interest in the relationship between the parts and its whole. On the other hand the empirical tradition has an interest between problems of expression and structural mechanics.

To attempt the reconciliation of surface and space dA takes the qualities of the 2 different traditions and combines them using the “ formal and structural effects of the empirical through the precision associated with that of the rationalist.”

I found the same problem I find with most of this articles, everything sounds very nice in theory but are they really like that in reality? I feel like because of the complexity of their designs and the theory behind them the experiential factor has to happen for me to actually believe what I read. I other words I have to see it and experience it to believe it. But that happens with every single building we study.

In any case the article was inspiring even though I don’t exactly see the examples given as a reflection of their attempt to reconcile surface and space. I liked the examples but for other reasons than those.
The Witte Arts building shows and interesting alternative to the contemporary use of the brick curtain wall.



The Hookah Den is another interesting approach; they use this “plywood bricks” whose dimension is directly related to structure and interior. It’s folding gives it rigidity and it’s size is determined by the banquettes set against them in the interior. This is probably the only example where I do find the reconciliation of surface and space but at the same time I think that this was possible because of the scale of the project.

After attending dA’s lecture yesterday my doubts about the disconnection between theory and execution was even clearer. Did I miss anything? For me the lecture had a strong emphasis on skin or surface, and they were the main element that guided their designs.

As a whole the article and the lecture were another good precedent of the advantages of today’s technology as one of the main tools used in the process for developing this new ideas in architecture.

Review Afterthoughts

Being honest I had no clue how that review was going to be. I thought is was going to end up being a critique of how good your animation looks because it's really hard to get the idea behind them; but like everyone else I agree that as the critique went on the responses were much better. I am still struggling to understand where this is leading me, I love the experimentation! especially how it makes me think outside the box, I guess by the end of the semester I would have a much more clearer idea. So far the readings have been helping me, even though I was pretty confused at the begging of the semester as time goes by I get a better understanding of the concepts and ideas we talk in class.

Again, I agree with everyone else about the faculty reaction, or the lack of it! It would've been nice to see the response from an outsider to this kind of process and technology.

As far as my project goes I wouldn't say I am disappointed but I wish I was more clear with my ideas. I have to simplify everything next time and concebtrate on one thing instead of a bunch of them.
what's next? I love all the ideas behind this process and I'm anxious to start using them in my studio process, although I'm still hesitant on how. I guess it's a mtter of time ....

Project 1 - Virtual Projection

Contemporary Techniques in Architecture

Ali Rahim discusses about the potential of contemporary techniques as something that influences and transforms culture, society and politics. Technology plays an important role being in constant interaction with culture and transforming it by a process of feedback and evolution.

In architecture technology is the key in the contemporary processes because they allow for exploration of unlimited possibilities. Technology allows for new design techniques that influence “objects”. This objects have variations that are transmitted culturally modifying human behavior and technical performance by becoming memes.
The later is what Rahim calls “ actualization in architecture”.

I found the last page quite interesting when he starts applying everything that was mentioned above into a project, especially how the use of the computer software allowed for a more deep exploration of different forces that interact with the building and influence its final form.
Can it really work as nicely as it sounds? The interaction between landscape and building, open vs. enclosed space, materials and light. In my opinion it sounds too good to be true but nonetheless the article helped me get a better understanding of how this new technology and all the programs and concepts we are dealing with in the class can be applied in the design process.

Project 1c - Compositional displacements

Warped Space

To be honest I found the reading quite hard to understand, I had to read it very slow and take notes on everything. I’m not sure if I got the point, I hope I did, but from what I read I understood that Anthony Vidler talks about this new tendencies of form, and vocabulary, influenced by technology that are conceived and manipulated in a virtual space. Basically what we are experimenting with in the class right now… blobs, folds,nurbs, etc etc. He calls them warped spaces and categorizes them as psychological and artistic.
This new forms result from the contemporary experimentations that continue analyzing what has been a concern since the turn of the century, the intersection of spatial with psychoanalytical thought, while “distorting the traditional space of modernism and questioning the equally traditional fiction of the humanist subject”. The two categories of warped spaces find common ground in the space of the city, and as a result from the representation or effort to solve the problems of city life emerges the need to develop new forms of expression.
As far as this goes I don’t think this is new, every single movement (yes, I do consider this as an emerging new movement) starts as a result of what is going on around us, it's the way we react to things that are happening at the time, either bad or good, things that we want to change or improve. Anyway this is not the main point. Vidler goes more into detail about this in the essay Death Cube "K" where he talks about the "Neoformations of Morphosis" (for the ones like me that didn't know what a neformation was: new and abnormal growth of tissue ) and devides all this new forms in 6 categories:Scapelands
landscape like forms), Men in Black (bureaucratic aesthetic albies), Morphing the Type (return to typollogies), Ellipses, Tipping the wall (spatiallity that refuses gravity) and the Burrow (space made with the earth and in the earth). He mentions Kafka's spaces a lot because his architectural and spatial formulations of modern life are relevant to the interpretation of Morphosis's recent urban and institutional projects.The essay concludes saying that Morphosis's neoformations begin to open up the territory of deterritorialization fro an architectural practice of global aspirations.
It's hard for me to have a real opinion about this text, I am still absorbing it and I wish I could find relations with other texts but this terms and theories are new for me, I'm still getting used to them.