Lighting Studies

Lighting study for a bridge railing using Vray for Rhino. Irradiance map renderer, point lights w/ 100 lumens, light yellow. Spotlights with very wide aperatures, zero hardness, lm/m/s/sm. Playing with angles and locations of spotlights in relation to nearby castings and a concrete deck surface. Playing with shadow radius. Small radius gives clean edges, versus a larger radius which feathers the edge.

Site Photos

Site photos and scale. How tall is that tree? Which tree is that? Where exactly am i standing? What is my focal length? Can I please get a body in there for scale?

Communication: Wall

Walls are not just boundaries. They are explanations, communications. They describe the fringe, the edge, where one thing meets another. They are the mediators. They mentor and foster ideas about US and THEM. Building one describes how one views the other. Walls are for friends just as much as enemies.

Walls reflect back to either side. They are not necessarily double-sided. They can influence view, change wind and air quality, privilege situation, establish heirarchies. They can generate electricity, kill butterflies, fence of nature preserves, delineate private from public, public from private.

Walls are layered, transitioning between solid and void, opacity and transparency, light and dark, soft and hard. Their construction is a description, a mediation, an expression, a transformation of a condition.

Idea: Component Cars

In CS250, we talked about the mass and the aerodynamic resistance of the vehicle being the two leading contributors to energy inefficiencies. What is the potential of a "modular" car, interchangable pods which can be swapped in and out as necessary? How do we build a "reducible" vehicle? Can we make a big/small car?

Engagemet between People and People Systems

Idea: Common culture is ever becoming less and less an engagement between people, but rather an interfacing of individuals with the abstraction of culture.

Implications: Value. Under the first condition, there is a value placed upon individuals: each individual is engaged with other individuals, and thus a rich and immediate connection between them. The second condition reduces individuals to the abstractions of the things they produce. Architects are reduced to the buildings they design. Contractors are nothing more than house-builders. There is so little enmeshing between people that they in a sense cease to mean anything to each other.

If people don't value each other, then why should they care whether the other survives or not?

The Economy and Empowerment
The Economy is the system which we interface with when we want to get things done. It's not access to people who have the ability to produce something, but rather the abstract and inaccessible system which, to most, magically produces capital for those that need it.

Loudness

Loudness: the volume at which the various elements of spatial experience communicate at. In a world driven by competition and the desire to differentiate oneself from the crowd (the image of desire) the amplitude one body exerts is paramount. Businesses make bigger, brighter signs, have wider doors, flashier products, project farther into the most public of spaces so that they may seduce possible patrons. A Genetic of Loud. If I can shout louder than my neighbor, the idea follows, people will hear me better than him.

This competition has contributed to the overwhelming shock value which contributes to the blase individual. The constant stimulation not only anesthetizes the nerves, but also conditions them to accept this stimulation as normal. Advertising becomes reality. Perpetual seduction is normal. Brought into our homes via the television, our computers, we are within ourselves as individuals, and yet at the complete mercy of an Orwellian system. The system is currently without much abuse, as far as we can tell. But the infrastructure for power is in place. The deafening loudness we experience at all times is translated to confusion in some, to fury in others, and complete comfort in more.

Planting Seeds

These two bodies begin as seeds, and within these seeds is contained genetic information which informs the growth of the bodies. Each body grows differently: The earthen body grows radially, like roots, in all directions, and slowly, methodically. The heavy masonry must be well planned, not reacting to the nuances of daily life, but rather reflecting upon trends and traditions, long-term trajectories, steady-state transformations.

The flying body grows more like an animal, fast and on the road to autonomy, constantly poking and provoking it's environment out of necessary curiosity. It darts about quickly, growing rapidly in some places, consuming what is no longer necessary and recombining it with immediate necessities. The flying body has the ability to change rapidly, based once again on an underlying genetic code. However, the speed at which these changes occur allows for a kind of instability, a temporality where nothing is reliable, nothing is for certain. Everything must be questioned, and it is the nature of this body that demands this kind of questioning.

But the way this body must grow is coded in an unfamiliar language. Here we jump to the construction techniques of this school. The formal conception uses extremely flexible material, lightweight, permeable and easily manipulable. The issue at hand is that the performance of this material does not maintain with scale. Actual construction materials are much stiffer, less flexible, heavier than those in the model. Thus, rather than being able to stretch where necessary, the full-scale material will have to be cut and stitched, much like that of a piece of clothing, in order to fulfill their formal requirements. These seams fall into three-dimensional space, and the performance of these materials at full scale are figurable in two ways: one, by experimentation, and the other (which fits wonderfully into our seeding concept) via the computer. The computer can calculate the patterns necessary to construct this flying school. Thus, the computer lab (at the center) is the seed which will allow the remainder of the school to grow out from. It is the RNA, the decoder for the genome.