NotesMarch+26

PRATT midreview Part 2

9.55 RYAN

Notes on current state of the project containers possible typology, site; tensegrity concepts, parasite or commensalism Networks and membranes, NanoTech Hydrophilic surfaces; etc. tech transfer mobile construction unit. What is function? decentralization and self organization Nanotech interesting as working with base elements

research chronology bubble diagram incl. disaster relief, etc. Mobile lab with operator local influences, climate, culture, material

material ideas: nanotech, thermoelectric, desalinization, biodegrade, PV self healing. Shipping container becomes the 'scaffold', also vernacular and infrastructure.

Individual units evolve Funding sources

Four existing networks plus the new network shipping environ geo research science tech research local authorities moblle lab net MACHINICPHYLUM quote from Manuel

Project now more an agent in the system _

GEORGE: immediate and necessary next step to test- diagram with components identified but not yet designed

RYAN: how to improve precedents, like tree house. Creating scaffold with intent to apply membranes ; using tensegrity

JEFF: you stopped with the mobile lab, which actually isn't the stopping point for you. There's an extension from the mobile lab. THe container idea has become vestigial. It has become about what the mobile labs do.

Want to think about the qualities you want the distribution system to have. Too many limits to existing shipping container system. What is more effective distribution system? Exciting is how much wider a net you have cast, to tap into the different things.

BRIAN: I have culled from the presentation some very strong ideas, but you need to present them with brutal clarity. There's a lot of information and it's still a research proposal. The one slide which digests it into a coherent proposition...

This proposal is different in that perhaps one is not shipping materials but skills/tools- and membranes. Membranes maximum surface for minimum mass- grafted onto local vernacular mass.

But then to what effect, will this become a kit you provide? Are you putting together tools- I am curious how many case studies you can do before you know this will work.

IGLOO Mods: I am skeptical because, unless it's a project only about disaster relief in Alaska...

GEORGE: You may end up somewhere slightly different. The goal isn't just a better bamboo stick house in the trees, you are defining where the third world meets the first world. But again, this isn't just redesign- it's redefining the way that people live.

Then, even a single case study might already uncover a lot of these issues- so it's not the better tree house, but what changes in the treehouse that redefines the 'primitive' to 'high tech' relationship.

BRIAN: There is a strange problem here- admirable agenda to deal vernacular and think global. I would say treat the vernacular ruthlessly- just as mass, a common set of systems that have to interact with the membrane. However, I 'm not sure that is your agenda.

RYAN: that is consistent with my goal tho

BRIAN: to truly address the vernacular, you can't conceive of a global system.

There is a dilemma between the desire to create a global system- exportable, flexible- not designed for specific conditions but benefiting from them. You rethink the idea of vernacular- like, I don't care what it looks like- but how many calories are in this stuff locally if we burn it- look at local very ruthlessly.

ADAM: Apple store presentation a few months ago. Universal Everything. For everyone everywhere.

The project is like that- not bad- but there should be a test case specificity Point: the shipping container is a point of departure and maybe mechanism for deploying the system- but how efficient is it for deployment? Is there another way of deployment? Perhaps the shipping container is not the only scaffold. Ambient shelter machine.

RYAN: if the scaffold for the majority is the vernacular, our vernacular is the shipping container.

ADAM: Ambience presupposes deployment. The logic of deployment- i recall reading that in various disaster zones- the problem with housing is not the lack of will, but that by the time the gov't has solved, people have already grass roots solved issues.

BRIAN: So much of shipping is going to the membrane... air filled packing, not peanuts... So much about deployment. Maybe you try to avoid inflatable projects, but the language of membrane seems more native than the shipping container.

JEFF: There are dichotomies here- global vs. local, various scales- maybe one way to move forward could be to vacate the territory at the architectural scale. Perhaps atomic/nanotech is a way to step out the dialectic of local/global.

More material intensive- admixture approach. Then work out the very large scale, abstract distributions.

using components not thought of as objects but as powders, or fluids... rather than worrying about something nominally measured like the TEU.

GEORGE: trouble with this as he's not a chemist or nanotech expert. but- finding moments where the super high tech meets the low tech- then making test statement about what it can be like.

Chemistry is the ultimate 'international style'. What is at stake is- can you find a way to use nanotech and find a way for link culture with nanotech.

Important to understand- the issue between the science and the human culture. How this is negotiated. What seems like an effort to help the 3rd world then becomes a key point of negotiation.

CHRIS: If the architecture is less present than in a typical proposal- your arch. is a network of networks- an architecture as it is used politically- like 'the architect of a war'. Coordination of members, entities, logistics, tech- As Jeff's suggestion, if it was going this way maybe could be interesting to push the thesis beyond problem solving- implications of disaster relief, etc- the perfect solution... in context of nanotech- the less earnest or utopian implications of the project mght be interesting.

First iteration as organization, then various scenarios playing out from that. And of course, given the time left, what is the architecture.

Shipping container. There's been a certain obsession with the TEU, now it is more convincing, the TEU has drifted to the background- the project now being an infrastructure of deployment.

Now moving away from the TEU heavy materials and toward the nanotech- it does become lighter. The idea that it might not rely on heavy slow industrial distribution.... implication within a network of networks- there is still when this is deployed it is a centralized system, stuffed into a container and deployed...

Well maybe could be more opensource, local.

GEORGE: architectural space could be a way to negotiate these issues.. and lab could be a site. Labs are meeting places, right now labs are so isolated from the worlds they are changing.

BRIAN: ultimately we're saying that the lab is a slow element, the membrane fast... so could this be seen as a thesis... nanomembranes can be reprogrammed? Wouldn't it be interesting- if it was about an element with the introduction of slow tech which gets there later, this gets acclimated by the introduction of other elements. Membrane is about surface- but also there is a tremendous amount of membrane used in agriculture. Possibilites for the membrane to act in different manners. How can it gain intelligence.

ADAM: not arguing against a material makeup, but it seems that- thinking as an arch. of networks and thinking about deployment of material- then the project could be network protocols for deciding where things come from to get to a place. COuld be very smart to think about flexible protocol.

10.35 LARRY

circulation systems in city flash points, overriding moments in system systems of control meant to channel flow street design: no street signs, curbs runway, Plaza decommissioned airport runways: ambient systems of control present in infrastructure

Deployable assembled communities Slab City

airport conversion/reclamation

GEORGE: to be very clear- where is the site

LARRY: Denver, 4500 acres

BRIAN: what is your proposal? I feel like you present compelling research, but what are you doing?

LARRY: form more of an application for deployable piece of architecture that can change with the times. Adaptive reuse project. Organic growth.

CHRIS: Programmatically?

LARRY: I didn't label the program but want it to be adaptive use, since the...

BRIAN: Adaptive use is not a program, it's a strategy.

LARRY: The site has been given program from the developers.

JEFF: is the proposal a counter proposal? If so then you should be careful which assumptions you take from the RFP. It is dicey to say that something is permanent if it is 5 feet thick. for example what are the strategic benefits from keeping something or getting rid of it.

Counterproposals challenge the assumptions laid out by a 'legitimate ' proposal. That's the crux of most historical preservation issues.

BRIAN: the big issue with this site- the first 8 feet is a brownfield site, jet fuel... the concept of what is permament, is at heart.

LARRY: extracting parcels.

ADAM: in beginning your analysis of mechanisms of flow control- and concept of proximity based response- this feeds into your analysis of speed, but I don't see the connection between that research and how it manifests in your proposal.

LARRY: infrastructure when designed for a certain purpose has certain properties.

ADAM: OK, but what are you proposing for?

LARRY: how it would adapt into something completely different.

BRIAN: We are waiting for the nature of your critique, otherwise we will speculate on this, and that is YOUR work in the project. Has to be more than looking at aerial photos... FLight paths over the city, the spatial envelope extending around the airport. This is such a loaded site but you aren't presenting us your opinion on it...

ADAM: brownfields remediation is a factor that modulates the speed of development. Also, landscape- reclaiming brownfield sites is not necessarily an eradication but the process of healing can be part of the site.... Bartons' work [sp?] You are coexisting on a site that has been contaminated,

CHRIS: you did look at field operations, and so forth, and I am surprised that there isn't more of this stuff in here. The proposal could respond to this development via a park remediation infrastructure.... Brian's point thinking about the loaded aspect of the existing subdivision housing development- informs how you position yourself. You need to define the program, charge of the project.

What about the static fixed nature of a subdivision, vs. somthing with an organization and program that is about diversity and mixture...

Already tarmacs are mixed- soft and hard- notations, lighting, hard, soft,

the tarmac and the airport works as a big filter distributing flow. Already an interesting precedent for a system promoting flexibility.

Could think about a more aggressive counterproposal. Something like: housing is problematic... you deal with the nature of remediation infrastructures..

GEORGE: you are like a blind curator funded well but unable to see what you are reorganizing. Also, you may need to use a logic like the near collision of a taxi on a NYC street- and apply that to a deployment of a housing project... Also, there simply isn't enough work. You need to produce!

BRIAN: if you are relying on the research image and haven't digested it, it should be the start of a range of your own work emerging from this, you have to own it, produce something in the way of an argument and a project.

11.05 EMMA

Parks, urban event. What is ambience. Introduce an opposition to this. Ambience is an equation. Opposition. How ambience can be create thru juxtaposition of rural and urban.

• Brooklyn Heights, promenade Public backyard

• BQE... was supposed to plow thru bklyn heights but prevented

• Central Park removing of social barriers, stratification. Challenging parks as lower class or upper class pedestrian and vehicular traffics.

• Rio Coastline, Copacabana promenade and beach Layering of urban and natural. Unlike Brooklyn this is layered horizontally

• Parc de la Villette layering of gridpoints, lines, landscaping emphasizing grid points vis. folies

• OMA Melun Senart Bands with controlled program residual spaces are spaces that are unplanned

• Field Ops Freshkills Land moving in time, time considered

CA work from fall semester clear rules yielding random result Analysis of Processing/CA- macro and micro analysis of morphology

basic behavior of the system.

gravity, appearance, collision, void, growth etc.

Looking for a certain typology applicable to any site. Equation. Project aiming for a circulatory gallery space, where the architect or material directs traffic and the park/urban---

GEORGE: to some degree ... to what degree a place like the brooklyn promenade already is a circ. gallery space? Can you start with one of your precedents and introduce moves aiming to manipulate the ambience? You've put your time into looking at physical sites so you need to engage such a site directly.

BRIAN: diagram that showed various precedent sites. Strategies of spatial layering... what I understood following as a more dynamic system that can't be broken down into a single image. I assumed that was the direction this was going- an urban circulation that can't be quantified in a single 2D image

you use a language of diagramming but with a much more complex vocabulary.

ADAM: I look at this process- you've used technology to write a poem. The list of threes is a kind of poem derived from your analysis of the system... and the CA also- and this is a series of alternative or related strategies emerging out of a unifying logic. You are being vague about what is going to be, but each of these groups of three could be a 'folie'... but I don't see a connection between this yet and your phase two.

JEFF: there is a deep issue: the research quest- as been largely in search of certainty. you aere looking for fundaments that you can be comfortable with... and I hate to say it, but it's not going to happen, you can't have certainty in what we do. Have to be experimentation.

S. D Beauvoir quote: "My project is never founded, it founds itself." Ethics of Ambiguity[?]

Now what is your argument for the next generation of urban rural land...

BRIAN made an interesting reading of your project.. The way you laid out your argument, it seems that new forms of layering have emerged over the past 100 years.

The research is interesting... some moments a bit too formal. There's a lot of intentionality behind, for example, LaVillette, that you missed out.

The folies are a way of dealing with scale, and the site, and indeterminacy too. You've shunned that because it is on vague ground.

One analog I came up with is this: you can't win a chess game on the first move. You have to look at how move is strategically valuable.

ADAM: interesting that you choose FreshKills as your last example of layering. It is a strategy for controlling temporal evolution. Long term strategy.

And in your three sets- your ability to derive these operations is your ability to watch a system evolve over time. How could this be generative for you?

ED: The comment on poetry is very important I believe. if you take the terms you have used in develping the three terms page, and treat it both as a linguistic poem system, but also a strong analysis that can be reapplied back to the precedent models you studied. Also remember that Poeisis is invention that emerges out of rulesets, usually. Most great poetry is permeated by a powerful ruleset that sets up the paradox- invention and unpreditablity emerge out of rules....

Also you need to claim a serious ambition in the project. THe project is very close to being strong, but the goals are not strongly stated enough.

GEORGE :

You can't justify the whole thing from beginning, and in thesis situation the thesis is supposed to be your personal statement. but You can't do that- design changes what you do, think, it changes YOU.

You can see thesis as radically ambitious, but it isn't necessarily the ultimate answer to architecture, but you do need to choose something that is clear and run it thru- it's one choice among 50 you may investigate in your career.

DOn't be afraid to choose just one path- and go with it.

_

11.45 NOZOMI

scripting research film editing layered film stills diagram of timeline as field conditions editing allows for shifting of material within

Mulholland Drive analysis developing understanding of timeline film requires us to recognize a trigger

3 larger segments of mul. drive dreams intertwined

Film Locations structural analysis Amplified emotions

EXAMPLE of primary program field - Trigger

Chinese restaurant. Take out typology adaptation

Distribution diagram

Dining / seating / setting arrangments

second site: Tower in Park corridor movie

Film as reverse condition of lip sync tower in park film, also analyzed

how to make more communicative

using daily life event, eating- public space or small gallery space in building

city grid cut in micro- dissect how trigger works technique of creating new proposal

ED: need to show the film stills in the 4 locations analysis more clearly, it is not possible to understand this map/diagram

CHRIS: the general premise as the idea of trigger, in the context of Mul Drive pulls out a series. In some cases event, others environ, object, program. Trigger sets up relationships. Can connect narratives across time. Almost like a 'port'. This is similar to the analysis of the chinese restaurant. Similiarly devices that can set up relations. There is correlation in terms of overlaps, ambiguity. Whether character/narrative in Mul. Drive, or in the housing study- two overlapping conditions. Visual, spatial condition- ordered hallway, but dense layered and mixed sonic texture. The program in the rooms. A system of separation and distinction, another of correlation and overlap.

Rather than designing a building/environ. it would be a suggestion to work at the scale of the triggers. Communication systems, pieces of equipment.

JEFF: Have to do something specific, understanding of ambience Glad that the Mul. Drive and tower analysis are tied together. The concept of trigger is too broad. Maybe not necessarily all that interesting. But you have discovered a specific type of trigger that thru temporal manipulation allows something to be realized.

The realization of the film within a film... you can get the same effect by inverting the sound/space matrix in the building. I was assuming you were going for - a radical thing, perhaps- a chinese takeawy. How can you make a radical takeaway?

I was expecting to see how to distribute this in the city in a filmic way. By experiencing the same thing over and over visually... the point off which one hears all the variation... but it has to come with a larger concept...

ADAM: purely in the presentation, you have to figure out what the story arc is. Chris resummarized and it became clearer. It was frustrating because you have some very nice drawings, but unless you lead us thru it is hard to follow. Esp. when you talk about the trigger, which is almost like a hypertext link. I was thinking of Bunuel. Or Existenz. A weird shifting, you think you are one place and then find yourself someplace very very different.

SO: clarify the story arc of the presentation, and- think what the concrete instantiation of what the triggers become.

GEORGE: Lip syncing. moment of clarity: the building can reverse that... In terms of cuts... triggers- lipsync as a cut to the past because you realize that it's already been planned out. Predetermined.

I wonder if you might think- thru the section cuts - not a literal one but a jump cut, an immediate connection between things.

I imagine there is a security camera setup in the building. Also, what about using microphones and projection....

and: what is your goal with the housing- trying to solve or improve?

NOZOMI: I would like - certainly that is our job to improve things, but in meantime conceptual ideas/triggers- start disappearing, so for today I was doing building configs. about spaces, hoping that these two things

GEORGE: I have no concern - it can hold together well- but right now you are not clear what your intent is. The challenge the project takes on- in a way the field you try to intervene in- is an ambient problem. Housing blocks- not a cut and dry situation. EG, room scale is not the problem, but might be part of the problem.

Sound fields that are distancing, dehumanizing... repetitions.

That can be the project statement. You identify an ambient condition that you want to adjust with certain techniques you have taken from the movie and analysis.

JEFF: Well, so the way you presented housing seemed more as pure research, you need to clarify when you present.

What you are trying to resolve is how you can use the ambient trigger to achieve a new level of realization.

ADAM: Strategy of how to implement an experiential jump cut. The thing that makes the jump cut interesting is that it is potentially surreal. There is a logic of dreams that embodies the jump cut. Bunuel, etc. you think you are in one place and you are actually somewhere else.

Specifically- not the fact that you are changing but the juxtaposition of what you are changing from.

GEORGE: important to have a site you know a lot about. Goals for new ambience in your site. So long as you don't claim to be solving THE PROBLEM OF HOUSING, but introduce moments that create effects...

Chinese Takeout is interesting too...

JEFF: Stronger to do as intervention in existing bldg, not new design.

CHRIS: Housing problem as site, then clearly by the other research it is not a new proposal but a series of insertions, working at smaller scale. Lip sync example: nice to look at in the context of a system with slippage between two forms of perception- visual, sonic. SOmetimes coordinated, then slip and they read as separate systems.

This in Mul Drive. That slippage and by extension the ambiguity- something not fixed is inherently flexible.

Jeunet's film Amelie: Doug Diaz has beautiful reading of the film. Triggers, pieces of equipment in the city that Amelie uses in great ways.

Such as phone booth, she flips this and uses it as a mechanism to generate awareness in people. Mechanism to capture attention. Trigger of memory structure. Degree of play, invention, imagination- the way that she sees opportunity in something mundane as a phone booth.

Interesting in how your project can work esp. in context of housing proposal. At all scales housing is about hyper controlled environ. People there are very much being determined by all the forces in the housing block- spatial, bureaucratic, economic...

So, if the phone booth example is a device for agency- generating new potential- then that idea of agency could drive how you work in the housing block.

Can be straighforward but configured loosely enough so that everyday objects and systems can be reinterpreted. Harness a territory like this.

The work is very thorough, thoughtful-- but the presentation is not helping you. You should write out the presentation, make it legible and clear so critics can participate in it. one page maybe, help to structure your ideas.

_

12.35 MARCUS

Flaneur adaptable membrane for subway car evolution of social archetype Baudelaire, flaneur boulevards, then Benjamin, the arcades, the fragment- impressions recorded in arcades, and film- splicing of events to montage SI, impressions of the city subjectively recorded thru fragments Constant; social archetype no longer passive but creates own environ

APPROPRIATED COACH subway car exterior, interior

subway user archetypes range of potential activities communal or individual compartmentalization and/or unification

Coach study will use structure of car, but adapt membrane FTA SOAC [state of art car] 1970s

membranes around structure, mechanically operated transparent, opaque, display system...

train- segments- information- ads in train engage lines they run on- not bringing flaneur into subway but that is a leaping point- the recording the flaneur makes is already fragmented subway potentially allows it to be less- hard to reconcile, makes sense logistically putting ads up ___

GEORGE: rather than talking about advertising- the place for a thesis that is relevant is the 'socially activated compart. ' page. This is what a subway does to us and filters our perception of the city. This is an incredible serious place to investigate. It is not just about advertising.

ADAM: One thing happening- I agree that the membrane is not interesting as only display system. What about thinking programmatically what happens in the cars. The much more speculative -

MARCUS: Surfaces are malleable, user can reconfigure and appropriate for activities.

GEORGE: you should design inside this and the next diagram- ['socially activated compart. ' ]

take a stand on this more directly. Propose something that does it differently. A car that is not possible to individually differentiate. Or a car that does it for you.

You are experienced in the city- the flaneur- the ability to float critically through the city. Reflect on the

FRANK: you have a network of tunnels running thru the city, perhaps not focus on only one car. Just the car design is not revolutionizing the way we occupy the car The examples shown don't feed back with the city yet, how to make the subject something entirely different.

Trains with movies, not to destination, change the way one commutes and even lives in the city.

ADAM: Cult novel in Russian, about guy riding subway getting drunk. At this point... there is an interesting notion of randomness- cars that have potential experiences you have programmed into them and then randomly assembled in strings in the staging yard, so you don't know what you are going to encounter when the car pulls in....

GEORGE: social impact, people who won't usually communicate put into contact by vagaries of subway

You could still- focusing on subway car- you can unfold- sampling of each persons' day- if you redesign the car you have to show what it is doing outside of itself.

CHRIS: utilitarian infrastructure with light accessory progams- street performers, advertising. The idea that you would pressure this a bit and build on Franks suggestion- pushing program and event not oriented to pure travel

infrastructure holds utilitarian capacity but takes on cultureal and programmatic

Example: L Train... tied beyond physicality to information networks... L Train flash mob, people put website up, informally declared last car of L Train at certain times of day as a singles car. Mixing device.... something like this- pushes in this case even, on the periphery of point a to point b, but pushing it also think about system in terms of its redundancy. You have peak zones, times when packed system has been designed to a certain tolerance in train lengths etc where max density can be achieved maybe at that time hard to argue for extra programs but there is all the time between peak hours.

Creative Time for example treats the entire city as a big piece of infrastructure.

institutions- sponsor- who would do this coop network between city and cultural institutions Coordinate different uses for this. Suggestion of not limiting to the car itself.

MARCUS: That was original intent.

CHRIS: treating the whole system, infrastructure as site.

GEORGE: since so much of the project is about perception, then media is a component of this. Why don't they put TVs in subway cars? Regardless of how you take advantage of holes in the system, much could be done with a reprogrammable media system in / attached to a car.

Otherwise it may be just a schedule.. tho the schedule could be the most elegant way to do it.....

CHRIS: There IS an obvious precedent for this kind of thing. Airport comps from the 90s. See Kansai Airport comp- Tschumi's scheme... airport as destination. a place not just to get on a plane but to work, shop, etc.

Infrastructure not just a distribution system. Similar suggestion at the scale of an urban subway system.

Conditioning subway platforms- lighting, temperature-

ED: you need to take a clearer position on the implications of the new flaneur, since the ambition of the project is tied to this.

Radical nature of train- songs with trains, train as line of flight into the city or out of the city.

Jimi Hendrix: "Hear my Train a'comin'" Tom Waits Adrian Belew Elvis Mystery Train etc etc

Thousands of songs about the train and what it can do.

and films... Dark City Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Kontrol

GEORGE: is it about a billion dollar remix or a subtle set of changes that influence the system...

Wouldn't want to see the subway systems melt away... it should be ... engaging the real systems that are there and still produce social connections

CHRIS: Harnessing it as a space for collective imagination. This is the great thing about graffitti- the infrastructure supports the generation of media, expression, communication.....

Reyner Banham, text vehicles of desire- car customization-