Project Description:
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Disruptive Continuity – Solutions in(Form)ed via Iterative Digital Process
Installation
Focused on the design process, the installation uses recent work to reveal methodologies employed in practice and teaching. The Anthropocene is spatialized using 3d printed models, images, drawings, and abstractions - individual artifacts that collectively reveal influence and their transformations through translation.
“Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.” Lethem, Jonathan [1]
Contextualizing One's Context: Truths, Errors, and Omissions
Describing one's Anthropocene (lived experience) is challenging because it exists as past, present, and future, evolving continuously over the decades. It is a space of fluid unfolding that is influenced by family, culture, context, ambition, goals and unexpected opportunity. While retrospectively logical, it is difficult to isolate. Interrogating this produces more questions and few truths. If I am to give it structure, my Anthropocene is an open/flexible process of adaptation, a way of seeing and facilitating a holistic solution(s). It is not what I can predict; it is about that which arises unexpectedly, reframing prior thinking and opening new trajectories.
In contemporary architectural education, students use digital tools to produce superficial models or visual representations of a built work; however, in practice, the digital model produces the constructed reality. Academia and practice are both being revolutionized via parametric tools allowing increased speed and variation, but they are still tools with limitations regarding the complexity of the problems they can resolve. [2] This too could be said of architects, who without these tools, are limited by time and fee to explore solutions.
My design process evolves within this context, using digital tools, in digital space, with digital fabrication methods foregrounding the architect’s decision making to simultaneously evolve with the project and new technologies. An architect draws from years of experience, tapping into information that cannot be quantified nor computed. This entangled evolution allows for experiential and intuitive knowledge to direct decisions within the multitude of specific, regulated and changing project requirements. Working in this way opens the project to emergent potentials, adaptable to chance and discovery, imbuing the architecture with these sensibilities. Critical to this process is an understanding of form. Form is understood within a complex set of interactions where the shape of matter and the ability to control its construction, lead to new spatial possibilities and imbedded intelligence within the form and the digital model that drives it. The individual decisions within the whole are used to maximize the opportunities to solve problems through design while further increasing coherence. Problems are understood within a field of relative relationships where the architect controls specifics at both macro and micro-interactions, now primed to seek out new combinations where win-win solutions are manifested.
I explore this context in my work at PLUS-SUM Studio, teaching what I know at the University of Kentucky College of Design and expanding my student’s introspective knowledge. This process flows between academia and practice, each informing the other while allowing it to reflexively transform my thinking.
“My ‘Intimate landscape’ is my ‘knowledge base’ as an architect. (my ‘introverted compass’)” - Yael Reisner, Architecture and Beauty Symposium at SCI-Arc
[1] Lethem, Jonathan “The Ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism By Jonathan Letham” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007. Pg. 61.
[2] Davis, Daniel “Why Architects Can’t Be Automated” Architect Magazine, June 15, 2015. http://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/why-architects-cant-be-automated_o
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