this is the paper that i turned in to ali rahim. comments are welcome, but i have already turned it in so any revisions to the paper would only be for my own viewing...
Typological Elegance: The Performance of the Dynamic System
Erin Keith
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As architects and designers, typology has been a mainstay of our craft, the “what” of what we are designing. It is the format, organization, square footage, and purpose of the architecture that we create, and it has historically provided a dominant model for architectural working methods. It is the convention of what a building is used for. The difficulty with this understanding is the rigid nature of the typology, and our problems as designers arise as we attempt to break from this rigidity. William Braham in “After Typology: The Suffering of Diagrams” states that “Even though architects have rarely been able to maintain any kind of useful distinction between typologies of function[the museum, church, or house] and typologies of form[the pyramid, atrium, or basilica]. “Types are so evidently bound to particular conventions, cultures, and forms of practice that it is remarkable that the abstract concept retains any currency whatsoever.” The techniques derived from the dynamic system make these set typologies inconsequential.
As a theoretical ideology the modernists told us that form should follow the function, and their process of understanding context and typology grew from the formalization of the diagram as a literal representation of information that is then brought directly into the form and function of the building. Through this process, there are a finite number of design moves that can be made, limiting and again holding the building back from what it is truly used for, many things all at once. Ben Van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UN Studio write in their article “Diagrams – Interactive Instruments in Operation” that “a representational technique implies that we converge on reality from a conceptual position and in that way fix the relationship between idea and form, between content and structure. When form and content are super-imposed in this way, a type emerges,. This is the problem with an architecture that is based on a representational concept; it cannot escape existing typologies.” By this point in history, UN Studios is describing how we as designers have grown beyond the form and function to deal with the complex nature of present day human patterns and usage. Typology is now about how we live, and the influences that drive us to live the way that we do. The nature of our society is now one that requires the greatest amount of efficacy in every piece of our lives. Through advanced digital techniques we are now grafting these patterns and influences into our products, our designs creating buildings that truly perform.
At this point contemporary architectural techniques are now available to test these historical mainstays of typology and to break the rules and restrictions that they have given us. The form of the object is unimportant; instead it is the performance, the efficacy of the object/project--the unidentifiable makes the usage, the typology, the programmatic aspect and organization of the object transformative. As we are now a society of efficiency, where we multi-task even as we walk down the street, so too should our architecture. Even the traditional buildings that we currently inhabit are forced to bend to the owner and applied use, but as architects, we should be looking past these issues and into the future of design as buildings can no longer fit into labeled typologies.
Dynamic systems move beyond the alteration and deformation of the recognizable form, and instead alter the way that typology is viewed. The dynamic system makes the typology of culture and tradition obsolete as it takes the formalized ideas behind these and removes a set use, replacing it rather with a continuous conglomeration of uses of space and function. The elegance is one made up not of form but format. The resultant conditions of the dynamical system are the customization and yet complete loss of identity – a hybrid situation—the elegance of the new techniques are these very situations, and their gradient conditions beyond a singular reference. It is not about the program, it is about the usefulness. The typology is affected by elegance of technique.
Elegance is to be understood as a behavioral condition brought about by the techniques of the dynamic system—the process, rigor and intricacy of information of the dynamic system. Van Berkel state that “an instrumentailizing technique such as the diagram delays typological fixation. An experimental or instrumental technique does not proceed as literally from signs. If aspects such as routing, time, and organization are incorporated into the structure using an instrumentalizing technique, concepts external to architecture are introduced into it rather than superimposed. Instances of specific interpretation, utilization, perception, construction, and so on unfold and proliferate applications on various levels of abstraction, liberating the design from a tendency toward fixed typologies.”
Technologically based architectural practices such as Greg Lynn’s FORM, OCEAN NORTH, and NOX run by Lars Spuybroek, are examples that move away from the formalities of representational architecture and come to utilize the diagram as a potential to develop and create dynamic and emergent systems. This creates an environment where the technological advances have made generative potentials from new software and technological paradigms.
The diagram at this point is understood as Deleuze’s “abstract machine”, a generative biologically based machine that deals with complex systematic workings which are based in algorithms and can spontaneously emerge into something else; a system that must be set in motion for a transformative process to begin. The abstract machine through this understanding is made up of the affects and effects of design and architecture, where a complex system or set of complex systems create a situation where the clarity of usage becomes blurred through the scale of material, building, and even the city. Affects in this way are dual-directional as the abstract machine influences the original while simultaneously influencing the applied. These influences are worked into the digital techniques used to graph and follow the dynamic system, as there are variances in the rates of change within it. The scale of the dynamic system as followed by the techniques that monitor it, also challenge the set typologies, as the elegance of the design of anything ranging from the object to the instillation is only implied through its performance .
In Greg Lynn’s Teapot the form is unrelatable, an alien to the kitchen, let alone the museum, and yet it functions and is preformative in both locations. The elegant curves suggest its form in the hand, yet the respective top and bottom, handle and stem are ambiguous. The transformations that the object has undergone through Lynn’s rigorous design process allow for affordances in it’s use. These affordances activate the affects and affordances that change in use from teapot to coffee mug to sugar castor to milk jug to tray.
For OCEAN NORTH’s Extraterrain it is no longer the object that is in focus, but rather the context that is placed within, the spatial surroundings. It is an extension of a programmatically decoded urban surface into the scale of furniture. Yet within the museum it is an art piece, in a night club: a piece of furniture, in the back yard: a jungle gym. In this situation, only the context can dictate a use, program or typology. At any moment in time it is the totality of the configured space that engenders the status of the object. In this way the affects of any design connect the architect with the user, making the specifics of a usage, program or typology of the object or even building only worth the range of usage and level of effective affordance.
In Lars Spuybroek’s “wet grid” design for the “Vision Machine” exhibition in the Beaux-Arts Museum, the space is indefinable as form bleeds out from the main space of the atrium into the hallways. The instillation, though programmed for the specifics of this exhibition, was later utilized as a backdrop for various dance performances and fashion shows. Here also the context of the object/project comes into play, as the functionality of the scale allows for an ambiguity of usage and typology. Although the techniques used to develop the form are based initially in the dynamic system, the preformative nature of the instillation yielded many other programmatic uses after the fact. Its preformative elegance is inherent to the design, allowing for this to occur. The later utilization therefore gives credence to the complexity of processes that yielded the organization. Through this efficient use of built structure, the efficacy of the project is realized and the initial programmatic function is debunked. Typology is pushed aside once again.
Through these examinations of design at various scales, the initial clarity of a set typology is continually distorted and blurred as seen through the dynamic system and the techniques that bring these systems into the design at any scale. Through the diagrammatic understanding that Deleuze gives of the abstract machine, the initial form of the building becomes unimportant in comparison with the performance of the form and the spatial variations and flows within it. As we come to further master the techniques that bring about the better understanding of these complex concepts, the need to relinquish ourselves of typologies becomes apparent, and to instead test the abilities of our designs through the measurement of the elegance of the preformative nature of the project. The design’s efficiency, efficacy and affordances.
posted by ekeith @ 6:27 PM
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