ARCH 177 COMPUTER GRAPHICS, IMAGE PROCESSING AND VISION

Structure, Organization and Instability: Simulation Laboratory

Professor Pablo Lorenzo Eiroa

 Using the city as an architecture laboratory, we experimented with landscape-urban strategies for the artificial ground defined by Cooper Union buildings, including Cooper Square and other urban archipelagos, through analog and digital strategies of description. The various processes of instability that affect the structure of the city were used to inform space through mapping, testing and searching for latent opportunities to acquire specific material to work with. These issues were studied with physical on-field experiments (immediacy), precise hand sketches (materiality, intuition), Photoshop (manipulation), AutoCAD (vectorial), Rhino (section-precise, static construction: striated) and MAYA software (dynamic-anexact, time-based construction: smooth).

Many steps were studied: First, architecture latencies in the city were analyzed with precise hand line drawings: site mappings and descriptions of possible material effects of acting forces, were digitally manipulated to inform computer vectors (analog to digital). Second, projecting a territorialization of the site to reveal implicit structure relationships and then projecting diagrams by transferring information from one program to the other (digital-digital). Third, motivating the stability of this structure to inform difference using and manipulating previous information (digital as analog). Fourth, thinking of time strategies, studying techniques for the output of digital information (digital to physical): which in this case is an animation.

Contemporary domination of the digital medium does not rely solely on the expertise of the latest program, but implies a personalized analogical strategy to cut through standardization. The course did not focus only in resolving a problem, but in generating an interesting problem: Algorithms (if…then…loop: array of non-critical solutions; or the computer logos) were substituted by analog strategies that consist of layering information developing interfaces between architecture problems and computer software. In a structure, each component is related with the other, and with the totality. Surface writing, that is to index difference by accumulating transformations on a matrix, was studied as an iconographic medium to visually program a different kind of analogically produced, materially informed architecture based algorithm. Part / whole relationship is understood in terms of layering architecture codes. Perspective and representation are also resisted to encourage a more indexical, accumulative, construction of form (topology) to focus on its architecture performance.