form·Z Joint Study report

Mar 10, 08:42 pm

form·Z Joint Study report

form·Z online 2004-2005 form·Z Joint Study Annual Report:
Some notes on the production of Digital Form / The Modeling Abstract Machine

Space is never universal, but subjective. Furthermore, computer aided design in architecture has manufactured a new digital uncanny. The medium of digital representation is also a medium of invention. New territories, unthinkable a decade ago, are fabricated and the boundaries of organic and inorganic are blurred. The emergence of digital forms requires a new grammar for reading and understanding. During this process the initial stage of play and proliferation has to be followed by the tenacious work of selection and interpretation. The addiction with the promise of the new has become the new reality. Technology is inextricably linked to our contemporary condition. According to Benjamin, the aesthetic experience, consisted of keeping defamiliarization alive, as contrasted to its opposite – familiarization and security. This “weakening” of architecture, has altered the relationship between structure / image and structure / skin. It is interesting to debate that which is always discussed in architectural circles, namely, structure versus ornament. Since the Renaissance, architectural theory has always distinguished between structure and ornament, and has set forth the hierarchy between them. In contemporary discourse, this dichotomy has been eliminated. One can unleash within a digital environment a population of virtual desires that varies from the beautiful to the grotesque. The new tools of topological procedures allow operations such as stretching without tearing, and folding without gluing, preserve only a set of very abstract properties invariant. At a larger scale this generates the development of an urban environment as a dynamic space of flows and ‘smart’ zones where continuous topological surfaces connect exterior and interior spaces, functional programs and infrastructures. The emphasis of the exploration is for morphological complexity whereby the construction and selection of rules that produce specific effects is motivated by aesthetic and plastic sensibilities. For the first time, architecture is genuinely searching for complexity of this formal type in order to keep in touch to that of the city of the networks and systems and the intricacy of culture and vagueness of globalization.

“Some Notes on the Production of Digital Form” Images and Project by GEORGE KATODRYTIS / STUDIONOVA: Full PDF files can be downladed from: www.formz.com