Midterm Reflections

Overall, I found the midterm review to be a very successful one in that it was different from the monotonous critiques of our typical studio reviews. I was inspired by the broad scope of approaches employed by the various students in the class. In general, we all had the same departure point, but from there, it was readily apparent that we all experimented with vastly different analytical experimentation.

Although I find the concept of animation as process a very intriguing and avant-garde approach to design, I am still struggling with its practical application in static form. After reading my peers comments on their blogs, I have to agree with the general sentiment that it is difficult to regulate and justify the manipulation of modeled form. The fact that it is so easy to manipulate the original modeled form to get a better view or to create a sexy image is a difficult urge to subdue, despite the fact that it does not hold true to the spirit of the project.

Also, I have to agree with Dorit in that the faculty sitting in on our review from our own school were almost non-existent. I was hoping that they would at least raise some questions as to what we were trying to accomplish or what we had gained out of the assignment. All of the outside reviewers, including Ron and Mark were great, but it is a growing concern of mine that the faculty within the school are falling behind the technological curve of where the profession is heading. These are the people who should be teaching, critiquing and getting us excited about the possibilities of these new tools available to us.

Triple jump

Midterm Animation

Midterm Progress

Section Animation

Sectional Analysis

Skin and Bones

In Leibniz's writings on folds and how they differ from the concept of skin and external membrane, I found myself questioning the deconstructive rational of blobs, skins and stretched membranes. If these forms were to be true to the architecture they are trying to represent, it would seem to me that they would not just reflect their skeletal structure, but also begin to have their own skeletal structure. The "skin" or "wrapped membrane", if indeed an animate form, would also have to react to its internal forces as well as its external forces. Once a skin if pulled taught around its generating skeleton, there would be a new concentration of external forces on the areas between that which is held taught by frame. This membrane needs to react to these forces not in their physical application but in their conceptual existence. I was intrigued by this idea of the "fold" being the space between where these internal and external tensions exist. "The Libnizan fold is in continuous movement, enveloping former folds and creating new ones on the surface of the diaphragm. Secondly, the fold, as an interior mechanism which at once reflects the outside and represents the forces of the inside, is more of a mediating device, a spatial instrument, than an object acted upon from one side or the other" I started to make some sense out of this after reading Victor Hugo's description of the interior of a monumental element built of wood and plaster from the Napoleonic era. He describes the outside as a normal form of an elephant and the inside as a huge skeleton. It was his description of the space created within the elephant based on the interior forces of framing and the external forces of the plaster coating that got me really thinking about this concept of the animate fold. "A long beam overhead, to which massive side-members were attached at regular intervals, represented the back-bone and ribs, with plaster stalactites hanging from them like entrails; and everywhere there were great spiders' webs like dusty diaphragms. Here and there in the corners were patches of black that seemed to be alive and had changed their position with sudden, startled movements. The litter fallen from the back of the elephant on to its stomach had evened out the concavity of the latter, so that one could walk on it as though on a floor." BOO YAH KA SHA........ The space between that which is and that which is not.