Sunday, October 19, 2008

Design methodology

No project is the same, in architecture in particular that means that my methodology tends to assume some kind of "dynamic existence".
Meaning that the relevance of the initial premises changes greatly, leading to quite different approaches and developments.

This "core premises" for me are:

Concept | idea, character, shape, poetics, etc., restless, dynamic and abstract nature.

Territory | morphology, views, patterns, materials, geography, memory, etc., less abstract, cognitive and emotional in nature.

Program | logic, function, safety, rules, etc, down to earth, rational, logic in nature.

This means that some projects have a strong conceptual drive. These kinds tend to be more autistic and self justified.

Others, the second kind, are sensible to the territory usually gaining an endemic nature, becoming themselves part of it.

Others yet, are program motivated by the program, build to perform.

To these extreme examples I often call characters.

Of course, few are “pure characters” from start to finish, in most of the cases all these aspects need to be weaved somehow. Still, I think there must be a predominant one, a ruler that sets the development dynamics. It will be the generative DNA of the project.

From here a storyboard can be produced, using key frames to mark essential parts of the project. All of them generated from the initial DNA and containing the very same character. In the end both diversity and oneness is attained.

I'm drifting a bit... So, the great thing about being an architect is the ability to dose these aspects with sensibility and art.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Fun with attractors





Chaos is fun! Far from the randomness disorder concept nature proves it's existence trough intelligent and complex mathematics. I used Chaoscope to experiment with attractors, and I ended up with this gorgeous looking images as a bonus.

Testing Organic forms









A small incursion into hypernurbs and matrix extrusion. No code.
My next step will be (probably) voronoy and L-systems, (Qhull and Rhino..)
Good tips are welcome.