COOPER UNION -Organizational
Simulation of Fluid Territories -
Professor
Pablo Lorenzo Eiroa
Students groups:
Jeremie Waechter, Sylyng Yong and Katheleen Brumder
(selection of work)
Introduction:
"Progress and catastrophe are
the opposite faces of the same coin" Hanna
Arendt (1968)
“The
State subordinates the hydraulic force to canals, pipes, damns that do not allow
turbulence, which obligates movement to go from one point to another, for the
space to be striated and measured, for the fluid to depend on the solid, and the
flux to proceed passing by parallel laminar series. Instead, the hydraulic model
of the nomad science and the war machine consist of expanding by turbulence over
a smooth space, in producing a movement that occupies the space and that affects
simultaneously all the points, instead of being occupied by itself as a local
movement that goes from one point to another. ”
Gilles
Deleuze and Feliz Guattari “A Thousand Plateaus”
ORGANIZATION AND STRUCTURE
Space and Structure have
always been related to architecture’s subject matter. In order for an idea to be
of any relevance to deep structure, it has to be able to relate to the structure
of that space. Public space and infrastructure play a similar role in that
relationship. Architectural ideas concerning public space should relate to its
structure. In this sense, infrastructure remains an area untouched by our
profession, with few alternatives largely unexplored, where it is only developed
by state driven organizations like the Army Corps of Engineers. Since a large
amount of energy and economic resources are related to infrastructure renewal
and enlargement, the architect, in a side role, should engage a more active
participation in order to take these opportunities for large-scale interventions
to transform so that they can achieve a more sensible role to the urban space.
The problems of infrastructure excess and infrastructure redundancy are produced
as everyday common interventions and present continuous opportunities for
architecture interventions to affect the city at large.
There is a known
shift in worldwide port cities over the turn of the 20th
century that involves the recycling of the port’s infrastructure in
order to incorporate the ports into the fabric of the city.
The shift produced by maritime global exchange, presents a
background for a less developed problem. The shift in the
incorporation of these structures, which were originally designed
for different scales, purposes, and then domesticated by cities,
mark a special social shift in the perception of urban space
structures. On the other hand, those same cities are challenged by a
parallel problem, in relation to the same areas of exchange between
city and water. Today, water control systems are the focus of
attention of many states, since not only the rising levels of
underground water affect cities in floods with water coming from
underneath, but also from borders facing open waters or rivers, with
problems of containing the increasing pressure of water. As studied
at Princeton University, the effects produced by global warming
present the case that in 100 years, the tide will raise 2 feet
globally, an equivalent of .60m (for instance, the shore of New
Jersey and its beaches will be receding by 240 feet (80m).
INFRASTRUCTURE EXCESS AND
ARCHITECTURE AS EXCESS
Infrastructure today has no
time, it is always new and replaced for the new, instead of growing and adapting
organically with the city. A more open-ended comprehensive thinking of the
public space in relation to infrastructure is necessary. A strategy with these
bases could adapt to new uses proposing an alternative behavior. Public space
and its structure must incorporate accumulation of time, effects, functions, and
layering of problems, which continuously transform within time. Infrastructure
interventions progressively have become simple engineering, linear solutions,
while opportunities for integration in a more comprehensive urban design
panorama are being simplified by shallow economic thinking. Its excess, its
qualities, and side effects as well as its urban potential are eliminated as
non-critical interventions become aggressive, eliminating any possibility of
those landscapes to acquire identity or quality by simple substitution.
Homogenization, standardization, simplification and insensibility are the only
means to measure itself with anything else other than its immediate simplified
purpose of its construction. Many times we can notice that infrastructure is
replaced by building parallel infrastructures, with increasing simplification.
The excess and replacement become unproductive redundancy because of the new
rigid design, which derives only by multiplication of the same problems it tries
to solve. A demand for accumulation by time instead of replacement is necessary.
Integration rather than elimination and a comprehensive inclusion can only use
time as a tool to accumulate complexity rather than beginning new in each case.
Since Hurricane Katrina,
current solutions for controlling New Orleans’ possible future floods will
include the building of extra large infrastructure interventions with a degree
of structural excess. Architects in this context can use, boost, and redirect
this excess towards developing landscape architecture operations out of
infrastructure deviations, side effects or latent opportunities in resistance by
using infrastructure together with the existing environmental forces. A more
creative and dynamically efficient determination of the structure of public
space will allow for these large infrastructure interventions to operate at a
more adequate and sensible scale. In this way, allowing spatial architecture
strategies and public space to be conceived, which otherwise, without
compromising the structure (infrastructure) of that public space will tend to be
restricted to work as urban decoration.
SEMINAR LAYOUT
A specific response to the
area affected by the Hurricane Katrina, starts to inform problems which may end
up activating design strategies and specific speculations. Preliminary analog
research of specific conditions of interest within the site and then
specifically related to the events of Katrina are tested, resisted and recorded
digitally to understand them by filtering pieces of collected information.
Following those tests, classification in terms of qualification and
quantification allows for that material to be more determinate in a certain
artificial parameter, understood in terms of gradients of behavior and scales of
modalities, by this operative means start thinking how one might be able to
manipulate those analyzed problems. Creative observation determinates the scope
of the analysis and the generation of material to study and apply.
Experimentation and testing
included parallel physical bodies’ problems of weight, density, fluidity,
tectonics and resistances, against immaterial agents such as forces of gravity,
inertia, vectors, directions and turbulences. These forces were tested and
compared against real forces and then the computer worked as a tool to classify,
catalog, and measure specifically those interactions. As an architect may take
an architectural section to study a certain object, the model, in our case, was
filtered digitally to understand parts as a layered condition in which
visualizing and separating systems of information that then can be classified,
ordered and studied separated.
Time was understood in
three different modalities which would relate to organization time, phasing and
ultimate stability. Organizational time was worked so that the design and
development of the project is understood on a dynamic basis of interaction
between information that may change on a time basis, so then the project would
have to assume that the organization might evolve responding to the shift of the
different conditions. Phasing is understood in a conventional way with the
exception that is taken as an opportunity for consistent change or adaptability:
program may change, grow or transformed as well as the physical conditions of
the project informed by their construction phases. Ultimate Stability refers to
the progressive accumulative deceleration of instability or change in the
project. In reaching the ultimate span of its active organizational life, it
becomes more stable as things more fixed, and starting then a more productive
phase in its development.
MATERIAL EFFECTS
Working with concepts of
entropy, the course looked at environmental processes as material processes
which the students could relate physically to understand and manipulate in
scale. By developing a system of exchange of information, one may focus and
study a particular effect to understand a larger process. Those material
processes will then be dynamically studied and simulated again through
digital dynamic
interfaces. The research on New
Orleans’ Infrastructure and environmental processes, as well as latent
infrastructure side effects, were used to study how to propagate, accelerate or
decelerate certain selected processes to manipulate these anomalies to generate
landscape opportunities as feedback, as it happened before with the crop fields.
REPRESENTATION vs
SIMULATION:
“Today abstraction is no longer
that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer
that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation
by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no
longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that
precedes the territory – precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, …
It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the
deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real
itself”.Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
By
applying certain digital frames to animated sequences of the analog research, a
new digital material becomes visible and operative. Framing, layering and
filtering with digital tools becomes a mode to select information. Forced
distortion and manipulation should be discerned between excessive information. A
creative vision of “what to look for,” and “how to look,” became two faces of
the same problem related to interpretation and reading. In this sense, a more
active and important role to representation started activating the problem of
presentation as opposed to representation.
One of the ideas worked
through this specific medium was to present rather than represent actions,
problems, solutions and speculations. Animation was then understood not only as
a representation in time, but as a way to think and understand the constitution
and construction of form within time. A strategy, which uses time to build up
form, would be able to include more evidence or data as well as dynamic input
that would progressively become incorporated as new problems and shifts to
solve.
