Narrative

Meet in Rosenberg Library R304

Subject: Narrative and Symbolism, telling a story
Film: Akire Kurosawa's Dreams

Bring to class: Drawing Notebook, Pencil, Pen, Brush

Assignment: Interpret Kurosawa's symbolism and narrative. Describe using setting, facial expressions, music, clothing, atmosphere/nature, allegory.

Sketches of Frank Gehry

In-class film viewing of film: Sketches Of Frank Gehry

We will watch and discuss in class.

DO NOT GO TO THE ROSENBERG LIBRARY.

CONFLUENCES

Lecture on:
The Design and Realization of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall
The Process, The Surfaces, The Acoustics, The Building


Assignment: Answer the following,
How does Gehry reflect upon last weeks reading, "But Is It Art?", High Tech, and Fame
How does one develop a concept?
How many iterations are developed in a process?
How does one develop process?
How does one develop form?
How does technology evolve architecture?
How is high tech influencing the look of architecture and what does it represent to the current society?
What are the forms of Gehry's work represent? What is his belief in architecture?

READING - Looking Around

By Witold Rybczynski

"But Is It Art?"

High Tech

Fame

Basic Observations

Class reading and discussion:

• Experiencing Architecture by Rasmussen
• Handout: Chapter 1 "Basic Observation"

Assignment: In your sketchbook, draw the objects in your immediate surroundings that you encounter and interact with every day, i.e. bed sheets, toothbrush, walls, chair, etc. OBSERVE first. See what it means to have "hard" and "soft" surfaces, "light" and "heavy" objects. Draw shapes and textures according to these words. Also your line weights of your drawn objects MUST also reflect "hard, soft, light, and heavy." Each object should be drawn encompassing the an entire page. Drawing small is unnecessary and does not help you further your process in understanding an objects edge and line. Remember, "express" the line, not the object. Objects are lines and edges, so don't focus on drawing the object. i.e. don't draw a ball. Draw the shape.
Not only will you draw the object, your lineweights should also be expressive of these words. Note: Dull pencils are unacceptable drawings. Always have a sharpened tip and use a 3B or higher.

SITE

SITE

Man uses shapes to help understand our spatial relationship to things. We are tactile, have memories, are shaped in a way to allow different levels of contact with the landscape (i.e. we move, walk, stand, sit, see, feel, touch, smell, etc.)

The landscape itself contains shapes developed through the elements and the factor of time. Nature has such history and perfection. We try to solve these mysteries by our standards of solutions and knowledge, Numbers.

We are discovering the landscape and learning what it means and what it is trying to say. We don't know much about it still. Our curiosity and desire to discover help us to find a closer relationship to that of objects that exist.

We are intuitive creatures and our memories allow our intuition to thrive. We think, therefore we exist. Like nature, we evolve and change. As forms evolve and change, landscape is a constant. We look to the site as a way to understand what we build.


Process of Creating Method
1. Observation(to see, perceive, to feel(tactile)
Observe the landscape through its x,y cartesian coordinates.
2. Analysis(sketchbook document, collecting)
3. (Re)-present(words, still images, film, objects)

Observe
Landscape in its Natural State (untouched)

• The landscape exists with materials, color, texture, structure, shapes, a natural order and metaphor.

Analyze
Landscape in its Natural/Re-present State (un/touched)

• Document the shapes and find truth and simplicity to its forms. How do shapes relate to one another? What is its physical properties? How does it live, grow, and die, in nature.
  
• Where do their forms come from?
• What are simple shapes? What are evolved shapes?
• Analyze using numbers and equation
• What is the metaphors of objects.
  

Re-present
Landscape in its (Re)present State (touched)

• How do you interpret the world after observation and analysis using both words and form?
• How do you respect the true nature of the form while allowing the human intervention to affect its form?
• What is the poetic value or importance to your creation?
• How will your object change in the landscape using the Horizontal and Vertical Analysis?
• How do you re-present the presence of time?
• How does the human body and its perceptions relate to your form/object?
  

Horizontal and Vertical Analysis
There are characters that exist that transform and evolve the landscape; the Earth, Wind, Air, Water, Sun, and (Outer-Space).

VERTICAL ANALYSIS

SPACE
|
SUN
|
AIR
|
WATER (RAIN)
|
WATER (RIVERS,OCEANS)
|
EARTH (SOIL)



Elements of Change


OUTER-SPACE

• proof that there is more to be discovered
• Untouched Worlds, Curiosity, Dreamers, Fountain of Youth
• "We are not alone."
• provides a scale of existence (i.e. bright stars as planets)

SUN

• presents(see) the world in day and night using light and shadow
• gives life, growth(vertical), and death/deterioration/weathering to objects
• provides heat
• makes time exist (i.e. day, night)

AIR

• has no boundary
• is invisible
• holds life (oxygen)
• is vast
• allows for wind to travel through

WIND (action)

• travels
• exists in the air
• moves objects
• moves/transforms/deforms object
• horizontal element
  

WATER

• horizontal and vertical element
• liquid
• passive or rough
• gives life
• travels
• movement relates to the wind and gravity

EARTH

• soil that bears life, growth, and death
• acts as a foundation, a datum, "we are grounded."
• contains layers of physical history (build-up, verticality)
• objects root into it

Static Objects
Earth (clay, sand, dirt)
Moss
Stone
Twigs
Leaves
Trees
Ice


COMBINATION EQUATION

STATIC OBJECT + ELEMENTS OF CHANGE = TIME = EXISTENCE



ASSIGNMENT
Create an object in the landscape using Process of Creating Method, Horizontal and Vertical Analysis, and Combination Equation.

Draw a plan view, a section view, and all elevations(sides).
Each drawing must be as large as the page in your sketchbook.
One drawing per page.
Your lineweights must vary in density, lightness and darkness must be expressed, and shadows must be present.

Andy Goldsworthy

Meet in Rosenberg Library, R305
Watch Film: River and Tides

Objective: Artist as Space Maker, Landscape as Inspiration, Landscape as Resource, Landscape as Structural Source, Ordering the Landscape in Formal and Informal Shapes, Relationship to the Cartesian Coordinates

Project: Your client is Andy Goldsworthy. Design a Meditation Space for Andy Goldsworthy. The space must reveal an identity about Andy as an artist and as a person. Think about the shapes and materials Andy uses in his work. How will the form reflect your client. Think about poetry and then think about the meditation space. Think about what we have been discussing in class, and use the previous lectures to help you design this space.

You are also to define a landscape, a place where the meditation space will be.

Your drawings, to be done in your sketchbook, must have a site plan indicating the landscape and the relationship to the Cartesian coordinates/ the sun's path, a floor plan, and a 1-pint perspective that describes the space, i.e. a window overlooking a moving river, etc.

We will have a group pin-up and discussion next session.

FORM-MAKING

FORM-MAKING
Architects, artist, and designers are form-makers. We also desire a sense of order, an idea of arranging the space around us so that we can experience it. Early on in history, Math has been the ideal calculation to solve the order of the world, starting with the Greeks, as a way to make sense of the surroundings one lived in. The precise knowledge of mathematics to provide an identity to define the forms in the natural world, eventually led to these ideals being placed back on the structures we were to live in. Since we build alongside nature, a sense of harmony should exist. Architecture begun to see the order of buildings which in turn represented a harmony with the landscape.




COGITO ERGO SUM
As Reneé Descartes states, "Cogito ergo Sum,"
a french philosopher & mathematician / 1596-1650, coined the phrase that would be the trademark for many others to follow suit in its statement.

“I think, therefore I am.”

Thinking is used as a source to claim that we exist. If you can think it, it is believed to exist. If you are thinking, then you exist. There are thoughts, and thoughts cannot exist without the brain, we we must exist, therefore “we are.”
But since we don't habit our minds, form-making represents our thoughts into creation.

The human senses validate the experience of the object. To bring these two aspects, the mind-to think, and the body-to experience is what develops an a way of existing (in architecture.)


Descartes also goes to say the that visual simplification is a way for us to understand the world with clarity and distinction in our mind.
What is clear to that of a physical object should be as clear to that which is in the mind. If we see a square, we should also be able to see a square in our mind.

Descartes goes to also state that mathematics and geometrical ideas is clear and distinct knowledge (which can be transferred into ordering our surroundings.)

Once again, a square in your mind, if you are thinking it with with clarity and distinction, will be a square when you create its existence. But to know what a square is, you will need tools to help create this form.


TOOLS and TECHNOLOGY
allow for the expression of forms and space to be rendered onto paper or the computer. Notice, that the tools we use all lead back to the cartesian coordinates and the rendering of dynamic symmetry. The horizontal and vertical axes will become a constant in rendering design and the fundamental knowledge in form-making. Tools and technology are what shape architecture. As technology becomes sophisticated, so does its tools. But the cartesian coordinate grid remains.

Pure forms are created from a compass, T-square and 30-60 and 45 degree triangles. Non-traditional or complex forms that need major computation form the cartesian grid can be developed on the computer.





DYNAMIC SYMMETRY
Mathematics is a universal language. Greeks were the first to recognize its distinction. Enter Pythagoras (c.550-500BC), who states that the "visible world is merely an illusion that hides the real mathematical reality of things. Mathematics exist separately from human beings and is prior to the creation of the universe itself. This platonist view of mathematics "pre-existing" and is the real truth to the universe has been used rigorously in architecture as way of solving our visual perception of spaces, mathematical formulas in the form of lines and shapes, and its positioning in space.
The Golden Section or Golden Rectangle became an instrument in defining size and shape in both the floor plan, sections, and the elevations of a building.
After its disappearance in use, Dynamic Symmetry came later in 1920 by way of Jay Hambidge, an author and teacher, as a revival to the use of geometric harmony with nature, and emphasized the use of the diagonal as a way to develop the 'dynamic' process of form making. Dynamic Symmetry shows the description of a square.

Think it as I describe it.

“The square is a very simple shape. It is contained by four straight lines of equal length joined together by four right angles. It appears rigid, uncompromising and empty, but it is on the contrary, an expression of unity. When it is understood, the empty space and its shape becomes more than a graphic element, it will generate the basic elements of design.”

Once it is created, our experience allows us to define it in the world, and we can apply complexity through the use of our human experience with it. Take for example the true quantifiable properties of material things, i.e. length, width, height, size, shape, position, etc. but never of properties such as smell and or touch. We can only experience these senses and cannot be quantifiable.



It is a system that with the use of the technology, both hand drawn and digital means can allow us to look more in depth on the world we exist in.

As Descartes points out; because we have thought of it with our clear understanding and use of mathematics, then it begins to exist. From this, existence beckons experience. One can say that because we have caused it to exist in the world of perception, by way of formulating drawings or software to represent its form, we must now understand the experience. With experience, the use of the human senses, we are confronted with the use of complexity, our senses are not only visual. When we combined these two efforts together, simplicity and complexity, architecture becomes "real." Imagination allow for it to exist and we allow our senses to experience its existence.

CARTESIAN COORDINATES
Descartes also developed the convention of Cartesian Coordinates, representing unknowns in values of x, y, and z and knowns as a,b, and c. In its basic and simple point of view, we can reference the world with the horizontal and the vertical. We branch out from this position once we validate its relationship to this x, y axis. If we begin to look at a grid system, the world can now be seen through the horizontal and vertical, and location with the the 2-d and 3-d realms. We have the ability to record the idea in all points of view, the floor plan, the elevation, and the section. Spatial depth can be recorded in terms of perspective and axonometric views, and difference in scale. In this viewpoint we are able to position ourselves in space on any plane and relate ourselves to the ground.












"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Gestalt Principle



SIMPLICITY TO COMPLEXITY
Simplicity is not only in its form, but also in its expression. Simplicity is defined as the absence of luxury and ornament and clarity of expression. Complexity what is to follow.

Precedence in Architecture
Plan to Section Plan to Elevation
As a formative idea, the relationship of a plan to a section or an elevation entails design by using an identifiable correlation between the horizontal and vertical configurations of the building. Embodied in this is the linking of the two realms so that decisions in one arena determine or influence the form of the other.

Analysis -
Structure, Natural Light, Massing, Plan to Section, Unit to Whole, Circulation, Repetitive to Unique, Geometry, Symmetry and Balance, Additive & Subtractive, Hierarchy, Parti

Le Corbusier



Gunnar Asplund



Robert Venturi




Formative Ideas -
is a concept which can be used to influence or give form to design. The ideas offer ways to organize decisions, to provide order, and to consciously generate form. By engaging one formative idea instead of another, one begins to determine the formal result and the manner in which it will differ from other configurations. The use of different ordering ideas may generate different results.
We will look at the following: Geometry, Geometric Derivatives, Equal, Transition, Rotate, Shift, Overlap



IN SUMMARY
Mathematics is science. Science is Reliable. Mathematics is reliable knowledge.
It cannot be interpreted in any other way other that its self-evident axioms, i.e. parallel lines never meet, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. We obtain a great deal of reliable knowledge through the use of mathematics. These are rules that apply in the realm of architecture.

Experience is sensory. Our senses remember. Our memories develop experiential knowledge.

These two forms of knowledge define architecture to one that is both simplex and complex at the same time. We do not live in caverns of geometry alone. It is through our daily lives and personal interactions that define the spaces we live in. Geometry may gives us an initial spatial position to our place, but it is up to our experience, and our moving bodies to provide it with the experience that can reshape its geometry to accommodate our current viewpoints, our current lifestyles, and our current themes that we investigate and explore. As we begin to create a memory of ideas that shape our daily existence, we slowly develop the complexity forms will need in a changing society.


FORM MAKERS
Andy Goldsworthy - sculptor


Steven Holl - architect
Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 1992-1998












Chapel of St. Ignatius
Seattle, Washington, 1994-1997