Construction
Construct: Different Rule(r)s
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AimThere is great comfort in material objects – mainly because their rules and rulers are so well known. But what about the rules and rulers of the immaterial objects of architecture like the design process, its methods, dynamics, flows and spaces? If space indeed is more than a passive container, how can we as architects manipulate and construct such a space – we could ask; along which structures we can move without resorting to the familiarity of the material form? At first glance it seems quite impossible to construct something from nothing – to construct something in space and of space – to deal with the things which are left when the comfortable materials of architecture are gone; distribution of energies, dynamic movements, social codes, constant transformation, flows of information and all the events that just keep on happening.
This construction will argue that the structures of the space used in a design process may very well be different from the structures of the produced final space and that it is possible to construct a ‘design space’ as an investigative and constructive medium. One objective is to be able to control the structure of space without objects, but only with the distribution of mathematical ‘energy’ and ‘gravity’ as an immaterial design potential of applications like Maya from Alias/Wavefront.(1)
ConstructionThe construction of Different Rule(r)s is based on few but very advanced features. An emitter produced particles with a spread of 0.00, in other words the particles followed a the path of a straight line with the direction 1, 0.05, 0.05 (x,y,z) with no rotation or torsion. A series of gravity fields were distributed in space to determine the curvature and torsion of each particle as it moved through space. In this way the spatial structure of a kappa-tau curve was constructed for a great amount of particles at the same time. As the interactions between the gravity fields and the particles evolved. So in the words of Nio and Spuybroek as quoted above, the ‘flock’ of particles were not animated but breed.
The construction was made in the software MAYA from Alias/Wavefront. It used the functions of Gravitational Fields, Emitters, Flow Along Curve and Flow Along Surface. The final video was edited in Final Cut Express and QuickTime Pro.
DiscussionIt is important to distinguish this space of movements from the simulation of the movement of people as Greg Lynn did in the Port Authority Gateway. Lynn writes: “The site was modeled with forces of attraction based on the movement of pedestrians, automobiles and busses. The gradient of speed were visualized with the addition of a particle-emitting surface at the entry of the bus ramps into the façade of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.”(2) In this way Lynn’s project had its offset in a mapping in the forces of the real space which were made visible through the ‘stand-ins’ as particles from the emitter. Lynn is therefore not constructing an entirely new space, but rather articulating the existing real space in a very advanced way.
But what is then the difference between a space curve in the form of a kappa-tau curve and an ordinary Nurbs curve. The context of MAYA is no doubt governed by a Cartesian space grid which is almost impossible to get around. But the non-Cartesian space can exist as a displacement of the Cartesian space, as what moves beyond the ordinary grid. The crucial element here is the will of the architect what he will choose as his field of play.
In this respect the curves produced in DR were in between splines and kappa-tau curves since they were controlled by attractors as the control points of a spline but at the same time they were like a kappa-tau curve since the path became a dynamic accumulation of forces as time went by so the end of the curve did not follow the path of the beginning of the curve.(3) Compared to the spline curve the kappa-tau curve is even more dependant of the temporare dimension making it a curve of four dimensional space-time, challenging the formal predictability of an architecture.
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(1) In this way it is remarkably how much the gravitational controls in Maya resembles the description of the effect that acceleration/gravitation has on space in modern physics e.g. the rubber sheet of Einstein.
(2) Lynn, Greg (1999), Animate Form, , New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 104.
(3) This is quite notable in the animation ‘Different Rule(r)s 7’
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