The creators of this online journal and forum controversially argue that computation will engender the final stage of development in the relationship between architecture and computers by ...
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 ...
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 ...
While computers have dramatically changed the way architects design, construction in the US and around the world is still dependent on ...
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 ...
Contemporary telecommunication and computer technologies have fundamentally changed the relationship between sign and space, iconography and matter. While Venturi’s model for the decorated shed grew out ...
The current programming culture in architecture could all too easily be written off as a youthful, geeky obsession with the algorithmic and the parametric among nascent practitioners, who ...
After seeing Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion World Map, a map projected on a flattened isohedron, we began working on the idea of using computer ...
G. Holmes Perkins, 1904-2004 In September of 2004 I attended two events that reflect on each other. One was the Non-Standard Praxis conference held at MIT. The ...
With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, thegreat specter that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but ...
Contemporary architects are judged as much by their buildings as they are by the sophistication of the techniques used in design and construction. A certain fascination with technology is natural ...
Genomic architecture is based on the manipulation of the architectural genome. Like its biological counterpart, this genome is universal and encompasses all architecture — past, present and future. ...Transmitting Iconography
“We shall emphasize image-image over process or form-in asserting that architecture depends in its perception and creation on past experiences and emotional associations and that these symbolic and representational elements may often be contradictory to the form, structure and program with which they combine in the same building. We shall survey this contradiction in its two main manifestations: 1. Where architectural systems of space, structure and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form. This kind of building-become-sculpture we call the duck…2. Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them. This we call the decorated shed.”
Contemporary telecommunication and computer technologies have fundamentally changed the relationship between sign and space, iconography and matter. While Venturi’s model for the decorated shed grew out an analysis of postwar American culture (roadside architecture, urban sprawl and the Las Vegas strip), today’s virtual technologies have created a different world where cell phones, computers networks and the Internet have become ubiquitous.
It is my contention that the “decorated shed”, as Venturi defined it in opposition to the “duck”, is no longer relevant today as an dominant paradigm of architectural signification. Rather an impure fusion of the two is beginning to take hold as information and material processing technologies begin to converge through the shared language of binary digits. Here neither the scenographic nor the tectonic can be considered in isolation. While the “duck” is still relevant, as the self-referential expression of architecture’s internal protocols (see: “Automason Ver 1.0″), this essay is primarily concerned with the effects symbols and images have on architecture as they are transported into built space.
The ability to manipulate, distort and materialize information generated from precise 3D scans stored as coordinate maps in a computer’s memory has fundamentally changed the relationship between signification and space, matter and information. High on the list of tools used by architects today are new techniques of space mapping and robotic fabrication.
Because Venturi considers the symbolic accumulation of images on the surface of the decorated shed as “antispatial”, he privileges an architecture where symbols become more important than buildings. In this view, “The application of juxtaposed signs does not fundamentally change architectural form.”2 What’s more the decorated shed maintains an outmoded definition of information by separating space from symbolic language (maps, images, words), the very distinction that is blurred when the physical world is digitally recorded in three-dimensions. Venturi’s critique of the duck (modern architecture) also fails as matter becomes increasingly subject to manipulation by new data processing tools. No longer just a symbol of its own tectonics, a new kind of “duck” must acknowledge the fluid relationship between physical and digital processes. In fact, between the source material to be scanned and the computer with its numerous output devises, there stands a complex chain of protocols that mediate signs and matter. Central to these processes is the phenomenon of noise.
Noise is the signature of a communication device that imprints itself on a message traveling the relay from transmitter (scanner), to signal processor (computer), to receiver (fabrication robot) so that each step is a process of mediation where, along with the message we receive, there is always the potential for change. The transmission of the message as well as the production of noise is understood in this case as inseparable processes. While the ability to transmit error free data through a digital communication channel is an important part of modern communication technology, it is also one of the most powerful means yet devised for separating matter and information. In other words, if one can transmit signals through a communication channel without interference (without resistance), then the material properties of the system become transparent. The medium is no longer the message. The material facts of the system and the context of its operation are neutralized. This fact, this engineering achievement, has potentially devastating consequences for architectural practice because it defines the relationship between matter and information in ways that deny the inherently physical nature of building design. While communication engineers are primarily concerned with the clear transmission of messages, this essay considers the value of noise as an mediating agent critical to the production of built form and seeks out strategies of signal processing that are instrumental to the transmission of symbolic meaning in architecture.
Where the modernist duck exemplifies the direct expression of a building’s form, structure, and program interference implies the distortion of signs embedded in matter. (The medium determines the content of a message as much as the message shapes the medium.) A “Noisy Duck” would therefore be an impure mixture of information and matter where the limits of physical processing become as important as the distortions they produce. In other words a new model of architectural signification (not abstraction) combines Venturi’s communicative model of detached signs (now understood as digitized space) with the modernist penchant for structurally expressive form, i.e. matter produced robotically. The “Noisy Duck” is therefore a hybrid model that unites ephemeral messages and viscous matter though the flowing conduit of digital networks. Symbolic architecture cannot exist without noise because humans cannot live in signs. Again, the conversion of space into code is a process of mediation that interferes with the pure transmission of a message while the protocols of the receiver (fabrication robot) in turn; impose limits on the kind of meanings that can be expressed during construction. This seems to be the most appropriate model for a discipline that must constantly negotiate the differences between space, matter and language.
By seeing architecture as a medium for the contamination of messages (and vise versa), the traditional opposition between text and building, structure and ornament, symbol and space becomes untenable. When signs are no longer confined to the limiting horizon of a billboard-video screen, and when the “connotative” messages of the shed are translated into computer data, it becomes impossible to maintain the tropes of communication that have characterized postmodernism from Las Vegas to Time Square.3
Architects interested in Semiotics and Deconstruction during the 70s and 80s could not have predicted the rapid development of new mapping techniques, much less their facile addition to the contemporary architect’s repertoire of design tools. (This also holds true for computers in general).
While the use of digital scanning technologies by surveyors and construction engineers is quickly becoming wide spread, we have yet to see applications specific to the tranformative potential of art and design. Architects like Frank Gehry, who use digitizers in their practice to convert handcrafted models into computer data and eventually full-scale projects, merely employ the scanner as a pantographic devise. Manual labor assumes a special status in the design process, as buildings become facsimiles of auraic forms authored by a master builder. This faith in an economy of resemblance, in the logical correspondence between original and copy, overstates the value of individual expression, limits critical analysis to biographical anecdotes, and perpetuates the cult of personality. Branded by the fingerprints of a heroic avant-garde, this willful transmission of desire is preserved through duplication and enlargement. Of course significant changes are made in the process of translating models to buildings, but this fact is not made explicit in the design itself. The resulting architecture shows little evidence of the computer’s role in the creation of underlying formal principles, much less the reciprocating effects of interacting media. What’s more, this brand of architecture (abstract, curvilinear and complex) is not concerned explicitly with issues of representation and the signifying role played by communicating symbols i.e. computer codes representing space. The machines used to design, construct and manage these buildings are used mostly for production purposes.
Because the tools themselves generate few surprises, information in this process is defined as a disembodied code. For Gehry materials are the passive receptors of a ideas that reflect as closely as possible a sculptural idea given in advance: paper becomes sheet metal, clay becomes concrete. Following the model laid down by Claude Shannon in his “Mathematical Theory of Communication”, information arrives at its destination purged of noise through various techniques of statistical processing and error correction. Alternate theories of communication like the one formulated by the British information theorist, Donald MacKay, in the 50s, seeks a more complex definition of communication by explicitly counting the “conditional readiness of the receiver.” In other words, it is the way information is encountered in its context and medium that determines how a message will be interpreted. MacKay’s notion of “conditional readiness” is a promising alternative to paradigms of communication that discard mediation and noise in favor of the pure transmission of signs. From a post-critical perspective, where the architect is not so much concerned with showing how a system works as he or she is interested its creative potential, the imminent mutation of the sign becomes an important part of computation and design. MacKay’s notion of “conditional readiness” can therefore be used to accentuate the ways information changes as it absorbs noise and changes media.
by Mike Silver
related : [Cybertouching : Transmitting Tactility]
who cares? what total and pompous gibberish. if writing this silly nonsense makes you feel important then you must feel really really important. i repeat. who cares?
Although the language is convoluted I like where Mike is going with the “Noisy Duck” analogy.
And I wish he would elaborate on Mackay’s notion of the “conditional readiness of the receiver.â€?…an issue with so many implications that extend beyond Architecture and into the scientific process itself (see Merleau Ponty)