Interactive Architecture (video) is an illustration of the concept that digital projections can interact with the surfaces upon which they are projected.

salary vs performance by ben fry

Will your house become beachfront property by 2100? Find out with Flood Maps.

more at Times Online

Here’s a beautiful set of photographs exploring refractions through various glass and transparent objects by Alan Jaras. Spectacular Flickr sets : Bending Light, Twisting Light, MicroWorld

via BLDGBLOG

Writing software is at the core of Casey Reas’s artistic practice. The digital is his medium of choice rather than a means of manipulation. He reflects on the evolution of his work in software and why the history of using computers to produce visual images is largely an unrecorded one in the history of art, but why this might all be set to change as scripting takes on a new primacy in contemporary art.

I started playing with computers as a child. Our family’s Apple IIe machine was a toy for playing video games and writing simple programs in BASIC and Logo.1 I spent years exploring and testing it, but I preferred drawing and my interest in computers slowly dissipated. In 1997 I was introduced to John Maeda and the work of his students in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at MIT.

[pdf download]

With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, the great spectre that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but vanished, leaving in its wake an ideological vacuum that is now being filled by the tentacles of globalisation with its ecumenical ambition. As humanity has become mesmerised by the triumphant spell of capitalism, what remains less apparent in the aftermath of this dissolution is that the world is moving incipiently towards a threshold that is far more radical and fantastic than any utopic vision since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Once again, the world is witnessing the rumblings of a Promethean fire that is destined to irrupt into the universe of humanity, calling into question the nature and function of life–world relations as they so far have existed. These rumblings, stemming in large measure from the convergence of computation and biogenetics in the latter part of the 20th century, have already begun to invoke gravid visions of the unthinkable: the unmasking of the primordial veil of reality. [pdf download]

An old one, but a good one. Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno’s “Protrude, Flow”

Figure 1. San Jose State University Museum of Art, and Design Silicon Valley, California, Competition Entry, Worms-eye view, 2003.

5. Nothing Is Random: Automason Ver 2.0

“The ruin mentality appears frivolous, fixated on surface not substance. It is in fact deeply pessimistic, counting more ancestors than descendents, sure without thinking that it inhabits a decadent phase.�

Robert Harbison, “The Built, The Unbuilt and the Unbuildable�1

While computers have dramatically changed the way architects design, construction in the US and around the world is still dependent on a diverse mix of labor intensive processes employing both traditional and nontraditional materials. Instead of focusing exclusively on the digital fabrication of building components in the factory, this essay explores the creation of proprietary software designed to effect meaningful changes in the way work is produced in the field. Enhancing the efficiency and formal potential of conventional building techniques in the present requires an expanded definition of computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM). For this purpose Automason Ver 1.0 was developed around the analogous operation of cellular automaton programs and masonry construction.

A cellular automaton (CA) program consists of a field of discrete cells (on or off, transparent or opaque, white or black) divided into small groups, or neighborhoods. The configuration of each neighborhood is used to determine the future state of the next generation of cells. Both complex and uniform patterns emerge from the ground up in a network of parts generated by local interactions. The idea of using simple programs to drive the construction of bricks-and-mortar structures comes from the observation that masons work much like cellular automaton programs. By following procedures based on laws of adjacency and iteration, a mason builds by stacking one brick at a time. With a simple set of rules, complex brick patterns can be constructed without reference to an equally complicated index of parts: construction documents, shop drawings, and so on. In fact, cellular automata can facilitate the production of extremely difficult designs without forcing the mason to do more work i.e. “building without drawings.� An automasonry wall’s 2 expressive power is the direct result of its parts and the way they are assembled. This follows one of the guiding principles of Modernism, but with a difference: structures driven by simple programs need not be reduced to a limited inventory of pared-down, predetermined or ideal types. (A brick does not only want to be an arch.) The best way to know how a given rule will behave is to set it in motion.

Figure 2. Five Cellular automaton computations showing complex patters generated from simple rules, 2003.

With simple programs, building details obtain their complexity for free: no external agency or extraneous system is needed to design them. (This kind of complexity is not dependent on the incessant differentiation of parts, but on the application of fixed rules in a discrete system that requires only two components.) The overall form of a CA masonry structure must therefore be evaluated in terms of its relationship to specific building requirements interpreted and organized by the architect. Here, Darwin’s theory of evolution falls short as a practical model for design. Rather than linking environmental pressures with blind chance to produce morphogenic variation, in an automasonry structure, functional constraints are used to willfully select self-organizing patterns that are particular to the rigorous, computational properties of a specific material. (Architecture is the intersection of desire, computation, function and matter.)

A Museum For San Jose

“Q: Do you work mostly with your own programs?�

“A: I write software…this is the political aspect of my work…we need to take the computer back from the large developers that control the tools most artists use…�

Golan Levin in conversation with RES Magazine1

For the San Jose State University Museum of Art and Design competition (2003), a ‘class two’ CA code 4 was used to produce both complex and simple patterns from strait courses of stone and glass block. Rooms with windows and galleries requiring large, blank display walls were laid out in accordance with the competition brief. Once these parameters were set in place a search was made through multiple iterations in order to find the most appropriate patterns. For the museum’s exterior, internal subdivisions and fire stairs, a five-cell outer totalistic 3 cellular automaton was found which damped out the complexity of the lower floors to create a partly windowless volume with intricate openings at the base. (The top of the building is terminated by skylights that draw the sun into a narrow atrium facing east.)

Figure 3. Three diagrams showing structural framework variations in relationship to changing brick and glass block veneer patterns. Automason Ver 1.0 calculates beam depths between columns positioned according to the initial conditions of a given Cellular Automaton code. 2005.

From the complexity of the lower levels, the project culminates in a quiescent and illuminated void. Vertical supports for the building’s interior spaces were determine by the initial conditions of the CA code on the ground floor. A non-regular grid of columns produced different spans with beams of varying depths setting up an exchange between light, gravity and computation. Rather than being neutral infill, the project’s surfaces actively shape an internal concrete armature that rhythmically fluctuates as the CA patterns ascend into space. The parametric relationship between enclosing walls and structure constitutes both the organizational logic of Automason Ver 1.0 (written in C++) and the tectonic interconnections forged by the project during construction. Here in its making, architecture itself is computed. (The building’s surfaces are not a product of some external image concealing structure, nor are they shaped by a remote database or calculating machine.) In the San Jose State University Museum of Art and Design, the nature and position of each masonry unit affects its immediate neighbors and the order of the whole. Because the system is extremely sensitive to small changes, every brick counts in a truly organic architecture created by the rigorous application of simple programs.

Figure 4. View of atrium showing concrete frame and automasonry walls, San Jose State University Museum of Art and Design, San Jose, California, Competition Entry, 2003

The design and organization of the San Jose project also express its code’s ability to efficiently produce irregular patterns that are organically linked to blank, homogeneous space. These relationships are produced using local rules that are not based on the recursion of simple motifs, faithfully rendered at different scales (self-similarity). No image of the whole can be found in the details. Neither scale invariance nor the repetition of a standard module can be used to guide the mason’s work. While the code for a completed wall can be ascertained through direct observation, the rules on their own give little indication of the kinds of forms they can produce. Sameness and variation, periodicity and aperiodicity are therefore binaries that accentuate the morphological potential of simple programs.

These computational strategies open up architecture to new ways of thinking and are useful as an alternative to one of contemporary design’s most pervasive motifs. The ability to integrate different functions and internal space requirements without resorting to antagonistic compositional strategies has traditionally been the purpose of ‘folding’ in architecture. The work of Rene Thom is often used in this context to connect opposing forces on a single, deformed surface. While Thom’s catastrophe diagrams are used mostly as a device to exceed the operative limits of collage, an abrupt change in the condition of a system or the integration of contradictory space requirements does not necessarily mandate compositional strategies based on an infinitely divisible logic. Discrete operations can be equally effective in generating networked relationships between distinct elements. The fold as a leitmotif for contemporary practice (Eisenman, Gehry, et al) requires ‘a continuous variation of matter’. 4 The architectural effects of the fold can be matched by the iteration of programs like cellular automata where simple codes resolve the dynamic and often conflicting demands of function. The following categories, linked to their current formal expression, now give way to a new set of procedures:

Bifurcation————————-Folding/Deformation————————-Simple Programs
Affiliation—————————Smoothness/Continuity————————-Discrete Space
Differentiation———————Mass Customization———————Complexity for Free
Variation—————————-Self-Similarity —————————————A periodicity
Fabrication————————-Robotics(CAD/CAM)———————–Augmented Craft

Ornament, Entropy and the Picturesque

For the 19th-century architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, ornament was indispensable. As a medium it could exceed function and morphological necessity transforming utilitarian constructions into great works of art. Semper therefore insisted that a building’s structure and material weight should be concealed behind the ‘dissimulating fabric’ of decoration. This fabric was in turn used to signify the meaning and formal origins of architecture which he believed had evolved from more primitive techniques such as weaving, pottery and metalwork. (A woven pattern rendered in stone for example could actively link the genealogy of a simple wall to the rich history of textile design.) In many ways Semper’s idea of applied decoration presages Robert Venturi’s concept of the decorated shed, where signs and

Figure 5. The plan of San Jose is based on a five-cell grid. The building’s vertical circulation core is indicated by 3 consecutive black squares (far right). There are three looped walls in the project. The initial conditions for each CA loop also designates column locations for the building’s concrete frame.

symbols are simply attached to raw functional structures. In contrast to Semper and Venturi, Frank Lloyd Wright’s theory of ornament encouraged the development of integral patterns arising naturally from a building’s physical structure. For Louis Sullivan and John Root, Wright’s early mentors, decorative motifs were a special means of expression that reinforced the primary facts of function and assembly. All of theses ideas were, of course, negated by the European Modernists who pushed for the total elimination of ornament.

While the patterned surfaces of San Jose are not themselves a product of organizing principles governed by structural necessity, they are also not applied decoration. In the process of unbuilding complexity, class two cellular automata visibly drive the organization of structure and space. Far from a simplicity achieved through the removal of intricate details, blank homogeneous surfaces emerge spontaneously out of heterogeneous patterns that negate themselves. Literally, ornament self-organizes its own disappearance. This approach escapes the narrow dialectic that pits formal excess on the one hand against a strict return to minimal forms on the other. Two distinct systems, masonry veneer and reinforced concrete, are here clearly integrated without having to blur or confuse the boundaries between them.

While the results look as if architecture was being subject to decay, this is not a design signifying the uncontroled disruption of function and structural integrity: at San Jose form is the result of a code that actively unbuilds the complexity of the project’s lower floors to produce a series of closed spaces. The brick walls of SITE’s Best Department store in Houston, Texas (1974) form a mock ruin by copying an image or picture external to the materials and techniques that produced it. The brick walls of San Jose are self-organized into what looks like a ruin by following a generative process internal to the materials and techniques of building construction. The former is a film-still folly, an intentionally provocative simulation of entropy. Its strangeness is predicated on the contradictory tension between movement and stasis, consumerism and death, (shoppers menaced by a picturesque simulation of falling bricks) while the latter is a process moving incrementally towards increasing levels of ineffability and emptiness. (One critiques function through irony, the other produces an instrumental transition that is both organic and real.) Through long rectangular openings located above its blank surfaces the museum reaches into a vast and unfabricated silence. The vertical progression from intricate fenestration to solid walls is ultimately a move beyond glass and stone, complexity and minimalism, ornament and structure, usefulness and obsolescence, shadows and light, 0’s and 1’s. At the roof all dualities come to an end.

Conclusion:

Cellular automata facilitate the construction of complex details. Ornament is no longer a contrivance or afterthought. Rather it is integral to the making of architecture. The organic patterns in San Jose effortlessly disappear into an emptiness of their own creation-a ruin in reverse. Ornaments energy is aloud to effortlessly exhaust its own presence without privileging structural necessity as a dominant motivation for architecture. The duality of ornament vs. structure is exhausted.

Notes

1. Robert Habrison from “The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable�, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, p-105.
2. An ‘automasonry wall’ is a wall made with simple programs.
3 For a detailed description of the classification system for cellular automaton programs, see: Stephen Wolfram, ‘Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata’, Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers, Westview Press (Philadelphia), 1995, pp 140–57. A class two pattern starts out complex and ends up simple.
4 ‘Outer totalistic’ is a shorthand format for specifying cellular automaton rules.
1 Golan Levin, ‘High-Bandwidth Magic Show�, Interview RES Magazine, Vol. 9 No. 4, 2006.
5 Peter Eisenman, ‘Visions unfolding’, Zone: Incorporations v. 6, Sanford Kwinter and Jonathan Cary (ed), Zone Books, Brooklyn, New York, 1992, p 234.
6. Nonstandard, a-periodic automasonry patterns are more meaningful, architecturally, than ones that are fractal like or modular. This is true because a self-similar motif can be repeated over and over again. A more complex code that breaks this kind of modular repetition would require an external index of part-to-whole or part-to-part relationships (shop drawings) that would demand more effort on the part of the craftsman. If the mason has a series of fixed rules repeatedly applied locally, i.e. a cellular automaton program, then this index becomes unnecessary and the mason’s workload decreases. So there is a direct relationship between a-periodicity as a formal idea and the actual process of bodies staking bricks. This is both a question of expression and practicality. How do you maximize complexity in form while minimizing energy and effort? The automasonry program was applied to the San Jose Museum Competition as a way of demonstrating a simple idea: increased complexity with decreased effort means that nothing in the system is contrived or capricious.

by Michael Silver

One of the great lessons of the 20th Century that our particular generation of architects has inherited is our appreciation of the infra-thin scale: the primal math containing the profound secrets to all animate matter. Whether it is the splitting of the atom, or the isolation of the DNA strand in the first half of the century, or more recently discoveries surrounding the genome project, collectively they represent within their own respective disciplines the smallest increment of information necessary to recreate all possible expressions in the game of life. The significant value for architecture lies in our capacity to speculate upon biological mimesis as a new paradigm for both material and programmatic behavior. In other words, world history has entered into a radical phase where the very destiny of life as we know it can now be altered by reconfiguring the “computational logics” of natural selection. Beyond the profound ethical consequences of these considerations — which clearly need to be addressed — the significance of these advances for contemporary material practices resides in the infinite performative scenarios available in the creation of sentient matter.

Auto Braids / Auto Breeding

Today we confront an accelerated technological revolution unparalleled in modern times. The pursuit of electronic networks aimed at overcoming the inhibiting effects of distance has irreversibly altered the accepted protocols of vision and thereby its corresponding value. In this project of erasing distance, the loss of the real becomes synonymous with speed. Appearances are liquidated and swiftly reabsorbed into the endless disciplinary logic of commodified skins. The challenge for architecture is to develop a corresponding theory: one that mediates between aesthetics of the inert and energy to excess; between the limit and transgression. As Foucault wrote, “Its model is that of a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating transaction or the conquest of a territory. A power exercised rather than possessed: it is not the privilege acquired or preserved, but the overall effect of its strategic positions.”

Take today’s “travel gear” as an example: a heterogeneous collection of portable, exotic hardware, permitting the individual an extraordinary degree of personal autonomy, mobility, information and control. Alluringly soft and hard, crisp or curved, glossy or grained, slippery or matte, convex or concave, these streamlined, ergonomically precise vehicles represent the infinite range of topological blends that are available to us.
Now that membrane technology can effectively re-enact a broad range of sentient expressions (for example, elastic modification, climatic adjustment, and material responsiveness from memory retention), these “imitations” challenge the conventional precept that inorganic bodies are distinctly separate from their organic counterparts. Biologically mimetic and artificially intelligent, these life-like specimens represent an entirely new synthetic ecology. No longer simple inanimate objects, they are an indispensable extension of our desire to bring architecture to life.

In appreciation of this shift towards the “play of surface,” Auto Braids / Auto Breeding (a “display-scape” specifically fabricated for our exhibition of Jean Prouvé’s modular systems) set out to produce just such an instance of biological mimesis. Faithful to the proposition that all topological behavior is ultimately determined by its base mathematical logics, we began to look for an ideal computational unit capable of initiating infinite variation throughout the replicating process. Unlike the early modernist conception of the building block as a continuous reinstatement of sameness leading to generic patterns of pure unadulterated repetition, our “digital module” was conceived as an iterative seedling, part of a larger “field operation.” In other words, the discrete iconographic image of the repetitive unit made popular during the early years of mass production was purposefully suppressed here in favor of an “intelligent behavior” — the measure of our unit’s value was determined by its ability to initiate multiple affiliations within a changing aggregative context. As a singular isolated wave pattern, its deceptively simple collection of local topological characteristics functioned as the base material for the production of a larger, continuously changing “sea of surface intensities.”

Inspired by Jean Prouvé’s commitment to the most advanced technology of his time and the legendary contributions he made to the development of modular systems, the exhibition installation set out to reinterpret these conceptual directives from a new and contemporary perspective within the theoretical aims of Auto-Braids / Auto-Breeding. Celebrating the current opportunities afforded by high-end 3-D modeling software and five-axis rapid prototyping milling, a series of interlocking modular elements were produced for assembly as an exhibition “display-scape”. Offered as one continuous surface and capable of varying spatial configurations due to changing programmatic and contextual requirements, this new topological terrain represents a universal meta-stage for the entire collection of artifacts. Through the rigorous and changing assignment of destination, sequence, and proximity an endless scenerio of conceptual affiliations are achieved. Each offering a subtle or dramatic reinterpretation of their professed value in history. Intended to function as a curatorial game board, this new membrane and its matrix of landing sites serves to offer a range of recombinatory flexibility ideal for any collection continuously undergoing change.

The simultaneous pursuit of curatorial and topological “multiplicity” inherent in Auto-Braids / Auto-Breeding represents a much larger architectural aspiration beyond the limits of the gallery. It concerns the future development and application of ‘biological mimesis’ as a new paradigm for architectural production. As we enter through this new phase of morphogenetic and technological expansion we unleash a range of material and programmatic opportunity capable of altering the very destiny of architecture.

by Evan Douglis

Scary! The bump keying technique is a lock picking technique that will open practically any lock by anyone with a bump key in a matter of seconds without any skill.

via MAKE