Move Foward to Final

It's a good result after 4 sleeples nights. Anyway I passed. But I need to work crasily till the end.

But, that will be after Sissi's visit.

In Between Structure

Long time no update. This is pretty old stuff. Now my thesis is under great changes. Maybe this is just a memory.

Provisional Pass

Well, at least it's not a fail. And I'm really glad Mark agreed with me. It's true I'm closer deep inside with a designer than a theorist. It's true I still need to do a lot more.

She's Standing There

Yes, but only if I can finish this shit and she would like to stand there. I mean, the situation is pretty dangerous now. The model is so hard to build, and I'm not that productive for all these months. Come on, got to finish it and let her stand there.

Big Form

Yesterday, the Science Fair went well for me, got lots of different suggestions from the teachers. At least I got these volumns to cover the site. However, the plan is really not working. And Sarah criticized my statement and logic again. I wasted today, and I need to get back to the busy working mode tomorrow.

Vector Render

No meaning, just for fun. I've got much lazier than before, for sure. Go, work harder...

Structure

Though still a little confused about the intermediate program suggested by mark, it's kind of helpful to think of structure and skin, especially when there is not much time left. I'm not sure wether this is really what I wanted to do at the very beginning, but probably it's the best choice for now.

Planar Program

Got to think about program. But I'm so slow, and I'm in anxiety recently. Probably I can't do it the way I wished originally. But I must try...

Galapagos Solver and Vectors

I tried to maximize the difference between the vectors of all the skewed objects. Just as a try for this plug-in. I guess the real solution is to learn the Genetic Algorithm, but not this plug-in. But apparently I don't have time for that. I wish I could learn more Maths and Computer before...

Thesis Logo

We need a image and some introduction for the Homecoming event. I'll just use this one, though this may not be related to my operation at all. Makr said this kind of volumns are bias in between objects and vectors. I agree, so still need to try more operations on other forms, and what is more, the volumn, or objects need to react or resist the vectors.

Basic Operation

Fold

It's so hard to figure out the process of Eisenman's rebostockpark master plan, especially for the "unfolding" technique.

I guess this sentence is useful and helpful: As with a puppet connected to strings, we assume the will of the hand to be privileged and to subordinate the expression of the puppet itself. However, as Deleuze explains, there is a continuum of activity within the string that transmits, allowing the trajectories of the puppet to inform the hand at the same time the hand "manipulate" it.

Within this context of event and fold, the complex volumetric folds can either be read as implicating the ground plane or as being informed by it.

Therefore, reading the typology as subordinate to the site suggests a hierarchical order contrary to the economy of the fold.

Gravity

Gravity, a very important vector field on such a hilly site.

Start of the Compound Field

Let me make it simple and specific, to analyze site vectors and program objects parallelly, and then abstract them and interact them to form the compound field.

Beginning of Thesis

Ok, I need to start.

Actually it's already the second week, but I'm still writing that paragraph of statement. But it's a good chance for me to organize my pictures.

Where should I go?

I don't want to always ask this kind of questions. But the fact is that there are always so many questions. Even I drove away alone for 9,000 miles, I still need to get back, and then...

OK, thesis, site, program, and process, I'll just highlight this several bullet points for this time.

Somewhere in Seattle downtown.

Another Poster

I think I start to like making posters. This is another one for intern's presentation, which was sent out the morning of this event. I took the picture in Pike Market.

Last thing important in NBBJ's summer intern, the intern's presentation.

A departing bird in Elliot Bay, Seattle.

Crossing the West

Well, I just forget about this. I don't know whether I'm going to keep this blog. It seems I'm mostly keep in touch with some of my friends through Xiaonei.com...

But any way, I'm in Seattle now, and I drove here from Houston 2 months ago. I will be back to Houston in August. Here are some pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/firewoodwolf/CrossingTheWestToSeattle#

Pilosophy of FOA

Some notes from the book Nexus, by FOA.

Gilles Deleuze's definition of life

The three requirements for a philosophy of life are the following:

1. Vital difference can only be lived and thought as internal difference; only in this sense, the 'tendency to change' is not accidental and the variations find in this tendency an interior cause.

2. These variations don't enter into relationships of association or addition, but on the contrary, of disassociation or division.

3. They therefore imply a virtuality that actualizes itself following lines of divergence, so that the evolution doesn't go from one actual term to another in a homogeneous unilinear series, but rather from virtual to the heterogeneous terms in which it is actualized along a ramified series.

FOA's determinism

It creates its own urgency and expands its duration in a way to assure an extremely determined behavior, a robust regime. Such an determinism doesn't try to create a figure to adore or an absolute to represent, simply because it doesn't need them to proceed' It is creative and not explicative.

It is vital.

It's constituted by several parts:

1. Function (information)

Function is inscribed in a function-matter vector, converting it into an immanent and non-rationalizeble state. It becomes memory, a history of diverse and coexistent times, information of conflicting behaviors, lines of virtual difference.

As in other evolving processes, within the project's internal evolution differentiated diagrammatic levels mutually interfere with transversal information. In this process of incrementing comlexity, change is produced accidentally by crossing information, as if things are the linear result of the information to which they submit themselves.

Information doesn't explain effect, and effect is not explicable according to its own final external common sense. In yokohama it becomes evident that changes like the fluctuation of the displacement of symmetry, the longitudical and proportional variations, the progressive accentuation of the grain of resolution, the passages between systems of material striation are involved in an overall becoming through successive local interferences that are neither accidental nor final.

This deviations different from a problem solving understood as an immediate consequence of an apparently preexisting problem, evident in itself. And it is different from an autonomous artifice, a construction that is only internally coherent, without superiority. It acts by producing and following opportunities; production rather than solution or immediate alienation

2. Material (Behavior)

3. Organization (Regime)

4/ Aura (Delay and Potentiallity)

5Consistency (Plan of conservation and divergence)

Habermas on Modern Architecture

The broadened architectural concept that had encouraged the Modern Movement to overcome a stylistic pluralism that stood out against everyday reality was a mixed blessing. Not only did it focus attention on the important relations between industrial design, interior design, and the architecture of housing and town planning, but it also acted as a sponsor when the theoreticians of the New Architecture (Neues Bauen) wanted to see total forms of life completely subjugated to the dictates of their design tasks. However such totalities extend beyond the powers of design. When Le Corbusier finally managed to realize his design for a "Unite Jardin Verticale", it was the communal facilities that remained unused or were eradicated.

The utopia of preconceived forms of life that had already inspired the designs of Owen and Fourier could not be filled with life, not only because of a hopeless underestimation of the diversity, complexity, and variability of modern aspects of life, but also because modernized societies with their functional interdependencies go beyond the dimensions of living conditions that could be gauged by the planner with his imagination.

The crisis that has become apparent today within modern architecture can be traced back not to a crisis in architecture itself, but to the fact that it had readily allowed itself to be overburdened.

The problem of town planning are not primarily problems of design, but problems of controlling and dealing with the anonymous system-imperatives that inluecnce the spheres of city life and threaten to devastate the urban fabric.

After a century's criticism of the large city, after innumerable, repeated, and disillusioned attempts to keep a balance in the cities, to save the inner cities, to divide urban space into residential areas and commercial quarters, industrial facilities and garden suburbs; private and public zones; to build habitable satellite towns; to rehabilitate slum areas; to regulate traffic most sensibly, ect. --the question that is brought to mind is whether the actual notion of the city has not itself been superseded.

However, by the 19th century at the latest, the city became the intersection point of a different kind of functional relationship. It was embedded in abstract systems, which could no longer be captured aesthetically in an intelligible presence.

Once cannot recognize the functional relations whose point of intersection they form. The graphics of company trademarks and of neon-light advertisements demonstrate that differentiation must take place by means other than that of the formal language of architecture.

Another indication that the urban habitat is increasingly being mediated by systemic relations, which cannot be given concrete form, is the faliure of perhaps the most ambitious project of the New Architecture. To this day, it has not been possible to integrate social housing and factories within the city. The urban agglomerations have outgrown the old concept of the city that people so cherish. However, that is neither the failure of modern architecture, nor of any other architecture.

The colonization of the human habitat by the imperatives of autonomized systems of economic and administrative processes. However, it will only be possible to learn something from all of these oppositions if we keep one thing in mind: At a certain foutunate moment in modern architecture, the aesthetic identity of constructivism met with the practical spirit of strict functionalism and cohered informally. Traditions can only livc through such historic moments.