London Stadium Density

Position: 1+3

Through a focus on developing design tools that directly translate index and feedback data into tectonic form, architecture becomes a medium for creating continuity between spectator and event.


The power of form-finding algorithms already employed to organize social networks, manage databases and model biologic conditions needs to activate new architectural techniques. Negotiating the boundaries of site, program, and physics inherent to a stadium in southwest London provides extensive and intensive sources that must be related and structured. A commitment to creating input –sensitive software and code ties the design of a stadium typology to local and transient information and self-stopping and optimizing methods.

Two Recent Stadiums

Here are two very recent compitetion winners for other stadiums around the world:

The 2014 Olympic Stadium in Sochi, Russia, by stadium design behemoth Populous.

UN Studio's Dalian Football Stadium in China:

Note the context of these facilities.

Exploded Axon 1.1

Pedestrian Flow 1.0

London Stadium Comparison

1 [and] 3 [and] 9

Expanding  the Cottage:  Processing a New Riverside Stand

  The power of form-finding algorithms already employed to organize social networks, manage databases and model biologic processes needs to activate new architectural techniques. Negotiating the boundaries of site, program, and physics inherent to a stadium in southwest London provides myriad input that must be related and structured. A simultaneous feeding-back of data across scales can produce a space more directly engaged with the experience of the spectator.
 
    Increasing the capacity of Craven Cottage presents an opportunity for the stadium to address site conditions, connect with the surrounding community, and provide additional facilities for the club. The funneling of pedestrians from transportation centers and pubs, through the adjacent neighborhood and park, and to the turnstiles can be re-organized by examining flow-paths and disruptions. Blurring the line between stadium and community allows for additional functions to activate the ground and connect to the river. Exploring the performance of seating configurations and enclosure creates new formal
potentials. While these issues may seem disparate, a process led by feedback and simultaneous calculation will expose hybrid solutions. In order to "repair the rift between the materiality of tectonic structure and the sensuousness of human experience"(1), the success of these solutions relies on the algorithm’s ability for self-similar and self-stopping transformations. Fractals, branching, and other self-similar forms allow for continuity and articulation across a variety of scales. Tying these systems to gravity, cohesion, or other self-stopping methods reintegrates abstract models into a real environment. The experience of an architecture emerging from the negotiation of external and internal forces establishes a continuum between place, spectator, and event.

(1) Spuybroek, Lars. The Architecture of Continuity. Rotterdam: V_2 Publishing. 2008

Reading #3: How to Define an Urban Site

I really appreciate the central point of this reading, "How to Define an Urban Site" by Andrea Kahn, that an urban site cannot be taken in isolation. Kahn states: "The point is not that drawing boundaries is impermissible...but that the permeability of those boundaries has to be constantly reasserted." Of course, as we have just read for Urban Theory, Christopher Alexander advocates a semi-lattice and not tree like view of the city, and it only makes sense that urban sites must be defined on a continuum with that around it in order to create a lattice.  This is not only true of an urban site, but true of all "objects". Manuel Delanda theorizes a history of meshworks working more emergently than hierarchies in his book: A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History.

In a more architectural context, Lars Spuybroek speaks of an architecture of continuity. Drawing his definition from Charles Sanders Pierce, he states that: "Continuity is part of real things, and therefore things are necessarily vague, since they are one and many at the same time". For Spuybroek, this has immediate architectural consequences: "There is a decisive difference between a fold and a corner. A fold in a piece of paper, for instance, doesn't interrupt the continuity of the surface, but with a corner, both surfaces just end there; at that point it becomes a nonelement, not even a part. Corners are where architecture is at its deadest." Instead of corners and discrete pre-defined elements, NOX's architecture is one of weaving, bundling, an interaction between line and surface. The relationship between architecture and "context" can work similarly, acknowledging an absence of edges, and embracing continuity.  

Site Analysis: Craven Cottage

Craven Cottage, SW6

Home of Fulham FC, Craven Cottage is the one of the oldest and smallest grounds in the English Premier League. While league average attendance is around 35,000, the pitch, in West London, has a capacity of under 26,000. In addition to the tight boundaries of the site, expansion plans have been hindered by the "Johnny Haynes end" status as a grade II listed building. The best opportunity may be to rebuild the riverside stand: Adding capacity, amenities, and a better connection to the Thames. More radical positions could also be explored.

A stadium is an ideal site/program to explore previously discussed issues of material processes and simultaneous feedback. Additional parameters of sight-lines, acoustics,  and egress can be explored in addition to initial investigations in lightweight "form-finding" structures.

http://www.fulhamfc.com/Club/CravenCottage.aspx

Reading #2: The Muses are not Amused

I was promised to be irratated reading "The Muses are not Amused" by Jorge Silvetti. However, with my mind pre-blown, I think it failed to fully live up to the hype. Though it is meant to be provocative and garner a sharp rebuttal, I actually agree with the central point which is, that recently, architects try to pass off the 'authorship' of form in the search of rigor. This search for the grounding of form-making into some deeper apparatus: data (or worse, the representation of data), software, history, or metaphor, is widely implemented, and Silvetti simply exposes it as a cold fish, a tangental path away from the real thing. While this may be a fair criticism, I think it is mostly a framing problem and not a process problem. While these architects focus on their project's connections to sci-fi movies or claim that they are more 'chemical engineer than designer', the implicit and more direct connections back to form-making are still there, just not articulated. The tendency to remove authorship is only dangerous when it is coupled with some claim to perfection. When Joshua Prince-Ramus claims that seattle public library (a supreme example of Programism) is a completely rational structure, that it only works in its final configuration, he takes it too far. Instead, this technique should be treated like a blindfold exercise, if the results are useful, go with it.

Willfullness or "intuition" will always be part of the architect's process, but sometimes it lies deeper than putting pencil to paper. In computer science, the programmer is constancely weighing algorithms against other algorithms that produce the same result: while one is faster, it is also more memory intensive, etc. Here, intuition lies in the negotiation of these factors. Architects encounter similar issues all the time: an optimal use of materials may not be cost effective, a structural system may conflict with spatial configuration. This is where the muse comes in, the metaphor or the computer program or history may help you answer seemingly arbitrary questions as well as intuitive conflicts.

Sketch #3: Making something

Verifying the script:

In order to trust Processing, the software, I needed to start trying to recreate the results through anolog methods. I took a self-stopping vault system I developed last year at the AA, and printed it out with the laser cutter 3 different ways: 1. a smashed version of the processing output. 2. the pre-scored flat pattern, with the hope of deforming it. 3. The flat pieces seperated and then stitched together during construction:

  

Here are the results:

Method #1:

Method #2:

Method #3:

1 + 3 + 9

Material Processing: Self-starting, Self-stopping Architecture

The potential of automated computing rests not in autopoiesis, or self-generation, but in the simultaneity, flexibility, and interconnectivity of the systems created. While form-finding algorithms can transform data sets into novel instances of structure, space, and experience, this process will never be free from an initial ‘willed’ construct. Instead, the goal remains to relate more closely to the human condition, now increasingly associated with theories of emergence, continuity and complexity.

Architecture must rely on simultaneous processes of generation in order to achieve continuity. Scripting techniques of recursion, feedback loops, and conditional statements allow for continuously calculated differentiation and interaction across a variety of scales. A self-starting method can begin by gathering and organizing relevant data from a number of sources both intensive and extensive: material properties, programmatic flows, environmental conditions, building codes, etc. When algorithms translate these relationships into form, in order for the output to be useful, it must be self-stopping. This allies with the principle of emergence: A set of relationships begins at equilibrium, gains new information, and then reorganizes itself to find a new equilibrium. Frei Otto’s ‘material computing’ experiments exhibit this phenomenon, but only explore one factor of the system: the structure. A simultaneous program will create feedback across organization systems both performative and experiential, finding-form through negotiation and translation.

This experiment can be tested through the design and exploration of an architectural project: A framework of electric refueling stations along the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Second Concept Sketch

Here is my second concept sketch, more of a montage/mind-plot this time around.

First Concept Sketch

Stemming from "How to Draw Up a Project", here is my initial concept sketch.

Response to "How to Draw Up a Project" by Jose Luis Mateo

In this essay, Jose Luis Mateo defines the architectural process as series of steps with a specific direction. He explains that a project will begin as a vague idea, gain a structure, and finally assume a skin and spatial condition. In his conception, buildings today are composed of skin and bones, separate entities combining to define space. While this may be a successful approach to framing a process, it leaves out possibilities of feedback between structure, space, and skin. Because these elements are hierarchically separated, the project loses its ability to form hybrid and novel architectural conditions.



In citing possible dangers to the process, Mateo argues that projects need ideas that do not restrict formal explorations. My professor last semester would reiterate a similar sentiment: Don't let the project become a building too soon. In Mateo's first two steps, a "phantom" pairs with structural logic. For me, the "phantom" is the set of potential relationships between users, environment, and context that the project must content with. The structure is not the physical members tasked with overcoming the force of gravity, but a framework of decisions that organize space. The interaction and feedback between data (the phantom) and decisions (the structure) produces the hierarchy, rules, and specific geometry necessary for defining space, skin and physical structure. The architectural process is then about gathering data of various types (environment, program, occupancy, codes, etc) and coupling them with analytical tools and form-finding algorithms that translate data into workable architectures.

Welcome

This is a weblog created to document thesis prep work for course 48-497. I am a 5th year architecture student at Carnegie Mellon. This blog will contain posts of assignments and other materials related to the thesis design process. Check back for periodic updates.