Reflections on Computational Design Through Interactions With Materiality and Physical Mock-Ups

Abstract

The “Medium is the Message” is an environmental art installation project intended to explore the interrelationship of art and democracy upon the platform of public space. The various attempts at instigating dialogue and public engagement have served to demonstrate Michael Sorkin's premise that “the accommodation of differences is the key project of contemporary democracy.” This active engagement in contemporary social issues provides a framework for deeper understanding of academic knowledge in the design professions and opens up potential for its future application, unveiling public space as the critical stage upon which positions of identity are established and negotiated.     

The Biography of Furniture

Abstract

The intimate relationship of the designer and the client has led me to a parallel practice of investigating the built form of biography. The notion of working with biography is a device for avoiding willful design. It provides a conceptual guidance to make decisions. The medium that has been used is “furniture,” which is a smaller and more direct vehicle for ideas than architectural space.     

Haptic Diagrams: From Cinematography to Architectural Performance

Abstract

Contemporary design practices use the diagram as an active agent in the development of form and matter into architectural space. Deleuze and Guattari, following Foucault,¹ defined the diagram as an “abstract machine,” which “does not function to represent even something real, but rather constructed a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”² This formulation emphasizes the diagram's configuration and its modes of operation through virtuality and potentiality. In this sense, the diagram is the architects' way of dreaming, the “no-place” encompassing the utopian act. Simultaneously being reality and process, the diagram delays the relation between sign and meaning and promotes a shift from architecture as form or sign to an architecture of forces, performance, and performativity.³     

Design in Movement: The Prospects of Interdisciplinary Design

Abstract

In what ways can architectural design define identity, or alternatively, challenge received identity? Based on a design pedagogy that experiments with both defamiliarization and dance, we distinguish two ways: (1) in the readymade space of the eye, as meanings other than the received ones can emerge, or (2) in the space-in-the-making of the body, as the reading of meaning in ready-made space alone is challenged, and meaning also emerges in the order of our mutual movement with one another.

Our pedagogy represents a collaboration between an architect and a philosopher, both actively engaged in interdisciplinary education within and between their respective schools as well as with the School of Engineering. From the outset, we saw “design in movement” as a potential framework to foster side-by-side collaboration between disciplines (interdisciplinarity) rather than merely among disciplines (multidisciplinarity).

Design in movement is a complement to traditional architectural design in space. Design in movement allows us to experience, through our bodies, in a way that challenges our deeply ingrained visual culture. If we design in this visual culture without being able to call the culture into question, we do not take advantage of the full range of design's liberative potential: it is one thing to design so as to refuse any single authoritative reading in space, but another to discover an alternative to reading itself. We are investigating how design in movement can motivate new ways of liberative building and inhabiting that challenge the hegemony of design in space.     

The Building Store: Direct Modelling as a Studio Process

This article describes a series of design studios which followed a practice familiar to the drawing class—to prescribe limited but facilitating means at the same time that topic and task are assigned. We were concerned, in a climate dominated by second-hand graphic and literary ideas, to simplify the conditions for making architecture, as in the drawing class one simplifies to address more directly representation and expression. The Building Store offered media with which to compose built form and space by directly modelling it, without the complexities of translation and transfer which tend to overwhelm our difficult and diffusive art.

Five successive studios are described, each of which explored various potentials of this procedure. The first states recurring principles; the second recognizes interplay with a “field”; the third introduces a more instrumental inventory; the fourth develops documentation practice; and the fifth raises questions of architectural detail.     

Interior Design Dilemmas in a Shared Room of Silence

Abstract

This text sheds light on the delicate practice of including different religious as well as nonreligious expressions in a shared room. The effects of design decisions in a “room of silence” at a Swedish hospital are studied over a transitional period of renovation of the space. We observe the impact of materiality in the room’s establishment, renovation, and usage, and show how the room’s interior design, its decor and objects, are conditioned by ritual acts as well by practical and spontaneous place-making processes. By following how the negotiations of the interior space relate to presupposed separations of aesthetic and religious ideals, we see how the design of a room of silence can allow several religious groups to comfortably use one common room; but also how design can cause clashes between different interests and how materiality is forced in the end to advice a clear spatial distinction between different types of usage in the room.     

Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey

Abstract

Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) is a controversial condition involving heightened sensitivities to chemicals and allergens. Retreating to “safe” environments is the best available therapy, making the dwellings of those with MCS compelling studies of healthful design.

Safe environments have been offered as exemplars of “green” architecture and have been parodied so as to ridicule environmental concern. In both cases, real lessons are obscured. Reflecting on a study of dwellings built by people with MCS, this essay seeks to clarify the relationship of these unique constructions to ecologically minded architecture as a whole. The dialogue between safe and green points towards their synthesis.     

Interstitial Space and Everyday Housing Practices

Abstract

This paper explores the role of interstitial space and everyday housing practices at the domestic scale. Interstitial space is often framed as “empty” or “in-between” space located in the shadows of conventional built form and everyday practices. In this paper, we focus on interstitial space as a site of often undervalued or taken-for-granted housing possibility. We begin the paper by outlining the contours of interstitial space as a theoretical concept before highlighting two cross-cultural examples of domestic housing storage practices within the Australian context: (1) “under the house” in the Queensland vernacular and (2) “close to the wind-break” in a remote Aboriginal community in the centre of Australia. We conclude by drawing attention to the importance of interstitial spatial practices for housing theory and practice and offer suggestions for further research.     

Energy costs and environmental impact joined to the substitution of CFCs in vapour compression plants

At present, the utilization of vapour compression plants in refrigeration and air conditioning fields may have a negative impact on the environment both in direct and indirect terms. In fact, polluting substances are released during the conversion processes which occur to make the necessary mechanical energy available; but it is also acknowledged that a great many of the usual working fluids take part in stratospherical ozone destruction and/or in the so-called “greenhouse effect”.

Therefore, such problems are the subject of many studies and meetings in which international research workers, manufacturers and designers are involved.

These studies especially aim at:

i. an appraisal of actual and potential damage

ii. the setting up of plants and/or alternative working fluids

iii. a comparative evaluation in terms of energy efficiency and environmental impact (see 2)

iv. localization of any potentially dangerous working practices.

In this paper, energy costs and environmental impacts associated with the utilization of compression plants running with both traditional and “alternative” fluids will be evaluated on a theoretical-numerical base.     

Experimental and theoretical investigation of effects of wall’s thermophysical properties on time lag and decrement factor

Energy saving policies are necessary to control energy consumption, use energy efficiently and effectively, and reassess available production and consumption systems. In this context, the objectives of this study are to investigate the thermal behaviours of opaque wall materials under solar energy change, and the interaction between thermophysical characteristics of opaque wall materials and solar energy falling onto exterior surface of the wall affects interior environment. Parameters of characteristics used in wall formation, their positions, wall thermal behaviours, and “time lag” and “decrement factor” having effect on the changes of conditions of interior space were investigated experimentally for different wall formations. The experimental findings were compared with the results of equations derived by using an analytic methodology.     

基于多元环境模式的空间涵构教学探索--以三年级建筑设计教学为例

在全球化时代背景下,如何从地域差异性和环境独特性出发进行建筑空间的深层建构,是建筑学教育的难点之一。本文以三年级建筑设计教学为例,首先建立了“由环境导向空间”的总体教学框架,然后提出了“以研究指导设计”的教学理念及其模式,并进一步从多个方面探讨了具体教学环节和方法。     

Pollution problems give the earth a chance

Electric narrow gauge railroads near highways are torn up to provide space for exhaust‐spewing buses. New apartments and hotels are added to seaside resorts to increase the amount of unfiltered sewage in the sea. Venice and Bruges discharge untreated human faeces into the canals sailed by oblivious tourists, while Europe heralds with joy the era of the plastic container but no new dumps.

Totally ignorant of the environmental disaster to which America just awoke, other countries seem to be determined to emulate the United States in a headlong rush to destruction.

“Give Earth a chance”, is the author's cry. The author does not wish to be a prophet of doom, but evidence produced by scientists of repute points to the urgent need to sacrifice some of the aspects of the “easy life”, to reduce industrial pollution, to restrict demands for energy, and to control the population explosion. The alternative is an unhabitable Earth or a substandard geoecosystem housing a debilitated humanity.     

商业中心区地下空间发展机制及城市设计方法

商业中心区功能高度复合、空间高度集聚,其发展要求建立舒适的全步行系统、空间垂直发展。地下空间的立体化发展机制是利用地下交通空间带动“地下商业、休闲、娱乐”功能发展,增强城市空间之间的联系使之达到功能混合、空间集聚、交通网络化的目的。商业中心区地下空间城市设计的关键在TOD模式导向下以轨道交通为“发展轴”,与其他区域或中心联系;以轨道站点为“发展源”、地下步行网络为“发展流”、地下车库为“发展块”,将机动车交通全部放入地下,构建片区化、网络化、立体化、简洁化的地下空间形态,建立轨道影响区内的全步行系统及立体步道网络串联公共空间、娱乐空间、商业空间,促进商业中心区的立体集约化发展。     

Mobile Design as Neighborhood Acupuncture: Activating the Storytelling Networks of South Los Angeles

Abstract

A delicate touch is required to empower neighborhoods using civic media. Funding is persistently scarce. Especially in marginalized neighborhoods, blunt designs can be counterproductive and even entrench complex problems. New metaphors may be needed to guide design and empower local neighborhoods. Urban acupuncture is used as the basis for this study, emphasizing a light-touch strategy that has shown success in Brazil with urban transit, and more recently in Europe with urban design. We specifically propose “neighborhood acupuncture” to address the local level, tapping the sociology of place-based communication. To investigate the implications for systematic design, a case study is probed in South Los Angeles using mobile media for community mapping. Using qualitative methods, three tactics were investigated for the potential to “poke” the network into action, including one to bridge diverse storytelling networks. Each tactic ultimately seeks to build the capacity for collective action around neighborhood issues. Acupuncture is broadly argued to sustain two design shifts: first to help approach neighborhoods as ecosystems, and second, to design for circulation rather than any single technology platform.     

Experimental Characterisation of the Fire Behaviour of Thermal Insulation Materials for a Performance-Based Design Methodology

A novel performance-based methodology for the quantitative fire safe design of building assemblies including insulation materials has recently been proposed. This approach is based on the definition of suitable thermal barriers in order to control the fire hazards imposed by the insulation. Under this framework, the concept of “critical temperature” has been used to define an initiating failure criterion for the insulation, so as to ensure there will be no significant contribution to the fire nor generation of hazardous gas effluents. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate this “critical temperature” using as examples some of the most common insulation materials used for buildings in the EU market, i.e. rigid polyisocyanurate foam, rigid phenolic foam, rigid expanded polystyrene foam and low density flexible stone wool. A characterisation of these materials, based on a series of ad-hoc Cone Calorimeter and thermo-gravimetric experiments, serves to establish the rationale behind the quantification of the critical temperature. The temperature of the main peak of pyrolysis, obtained from differential thermo-gravimetric analysis under a nitrogen atmosphere at low heating rates, is proposed as the “critical temperature” for materials that do not significantly shrink and melt, i.e. charring insulation materials. For materials with shrinking and melting behaviour it is suggested that the melting point could be used as “critical temperature”. Conservative values of “critical temperature” proposed are 300°C for polyisocyanurate, 425°C for phenolic foam and 240°C for expanded polystyrene. The concept of a “critical temperature” for the low density stone wool is examined in the same manner and found to be non-applicable due to the inability to promote a flammable mixture. Additionally, thermal inertia values required for the performance-based methodology are obtained for PIR and PF using a novel approach, providing thermal inertia values within the range 4.5 to 6.5 × 10³ W² s K^?2 m^?4.     

“They say this is a home”: the challenge of “home” in residential care settings for old and young

In this article, we want to bolster a critical discussion of how the “home” is used in research on residential care, and additionally make sense of young and old residents’ feelings of resistance, through the lens of a critical geography of home. We illustrate how the home ideal might be provocative and frustrating for the residents, although previous studies point out that the ideal is used by staff and in policy to reassure residents of a sense of belonging and mastery. Examples from interviews with young unaccompanied boys as well as older residents living in residential care have been used and the analysis resulted in two themes: “Residents’ conflicting experiences of space” (shared space, restricted space and regulated space, and “Residents’ feelings of homelessness” (transitional space and encroached space). How the residents themselves understand the space that is called their home and why their home can stir ambivalent or negative feelings of isolation, exclusion, and homelessness, is relevant in order to avoid romanticizing home. Residents’ understanding of home can be different from the staff, a reminder that home is a much more complex notion than the rosy ideal.

     

Seeing syncretism as visual blasphemy: critical eyes on caodai religious architecture

ABSTRACT

The exuberant, eclectic architecture of the Caodai Holy See in French Indochina was described as a “grotesque combination” of European and Asian elements by several famous writers and this sense of horror served to construct a notion of “visual blasphemy” which merged aesthetic and ethical elements. Architecture is always read and misread though a cultural lens. It has been argued that the colonial “world as staged” (Mitchell 1999) produced its own “reality-effects,” so I argue that an anti-colonial counter project of large public works tied to an innovative Asian synthesis of world religions served not only to bolster the morale of a once downtrodden people but also to convince them of the historical inevitability of their triumph. Caodaism was a new religious movement followed by 3 million people in French Indochina and its daring and “presumptuous” architecture was a visual act of insurrection, an iconographic revolution designed to precede and prepare the way for the political revolution to follow.