i had to upload a jpg because the pdf wouldn't work.

program I

wow, didn't realize that was so big. not so abbreviated, i guess. oops.

updated problem / project statement

Hi Hi,

It's been awhile since a new post.  I have looked at the problem and project statements once more, and I'm posting an abbreviated version of them.  Some program stuff will be added after our presentations tomorrow.

Introduction / Problem Statement:  Modern man no longer probes his surroundings, and is no longer intrigued and perplexed by what transpires around him.  There is an overall lack of engagement with his environment.  This isolation has occurred simultaneously in both the mind and the body. 

Mental disassociations:

1.   Mentally, modern society is over stimulated, predominately through media and communications.  

Ex:  Television commercials, movie trailers and billboard ads have become increasingly loud and flashy to get our attention.  We adapt to these ploys, and become acclimated to the media-devised sensory explosions.  This creates a cycle of over stimulation, adaptation, and numbness.  In become adapted and eventually numb, we place filters on our senses.  This alters our perception and involvement with our context.

2.  We are also responsible for the disconnect between mind and surroundings through our professional and personal lives.   Both these areas of our life are filled with obligations:  working longer days, and commitments to family, friends and communities.  In focusing on these activities, are minds become distracted from the present, real condition.  Ex:  A person can be walking in the rain, while talking on their cell phone, step through a big puddle, and be almost hit by a bus while being totally oblivious.

Physical disassocations:

1.  Technologies have replaced what we do in both our professional and personal lives.  In doing so, a manual, physical component (our bodies) are no longer a viable way in which we interact with our environments.  Machines have replaced physical labor:  tractors sew fields instead of farmer's with bags of seeds, cars are assembled with pistons instead of hands.  Technologies have replaced traditional forms of physical recreation and entertainment:  we turn to the Internet and the television instead of going to community dances or evening walks.  There is no longer a physicality which tied us to our environments.  We are immobile.

The mind and body have consequently been separated from each other.  As each is connected (they operate in the same body, with shared connections etc.)  In being connected, if one is altered, filtered or distracted, so is the other.  

Project Statement:

Architecture should create engagements and interactions, and by doing so, negate any filters, distractions or immobility that handicap our minds' and bodies' perceptions of their surroundings.  To define and create these interactions one has to look at the problems which they will solve.  This filters are the filters, distractions and immobility that occur in our minds and bodies as a result of a modern lifestyle.

Each problem can be characterized by its lack of motion.

Filters:  Filters alter, edit or stop a flow of information.  In essence, by using filters on our senses, we have limited the amount of mental activity.  We crave a sort of stability in this chaotic place, and this stability is characterized by a lack of movement and exchange.

Distractions:  When distracted, our attention is pulled in every which way - we lack focus and direction.  Movement can be characterized by this focus and direction:  like  a bullet zooming at a target, or a racer sprinting towards the finish line.  Distraction can have movement, but it is haphazard, unfocused, and chaotic - an undesired movement.

Immobility:  Our bodies are motionless at work, and we are couch potatoes in our personal lives.  By replacing manual activities with automated ones, we have removed a physical movement.

If all of these problems can be defined by their lack of motion, then motion must be integral to their solution.  Motion must define the engagements and interactions through architecture in order to solve these dilemmas.  But how is motion defined?  What are the different types that can be manipulated with architecture? 

1.  Non Physical Movement:

a.  Illusion:  When someone or an object feels as if they are in physical motion when they are not.  For example, a person can be sitting in a parked, stationary car, and the car besides them begins to move.  For a moment, this person is 'tricked' into thinking they are in motion.  This can be unnerving, and lasts only for a moment.

b.  Implied:  This is more conscious than an illusion of movement.  This occurs when the person knows that an object (or place etc.) is not in motion, but it looks like it is in motion.  It is as if they creator of this object or form wanted them to understand the idea of movement, while not having any physical motion.  This can be seen in Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity of Space, or in many of Zaha Hadid's buildings, which seem to slither and crawl across the landscape.

2. Physical Movement:

a.  Passive:  Physical movement is the most obvious, literal type of movement.  In passive physical movement, something or someone is being moved by something or someone.  You are not actively doing the moving, but you are experiencing it.  When a person is standing on a moving sidewalk through an airport terminal, they are being moved passively.  

b.  Active:  Active movement is when someone or something moves someone or something.  One becomes the mover instead of the moved.  Frederick Kiesler's Art of This Century Gallery contains this type of movement.  Throughout the gallery, there are knobs, levers etc. waiting to be pulled or lifted by a visitor so that they can reveal or display art.  The visitor does the moving, and is responsible for the action.

3.  Narrative Movement:

Narrative movement is a combination of both physical and non-physical.  Movement that is used to articulate a narrative depends on the person moving physically, as well as the non-physical understanding of the allusions to movement.  With each physical step, a memory is made of this moving experience.  When a person recounts all of these physical moments and stitches them together to form one large, implied movement, they've experienced and created a narrative.  Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans' Memorial depicts this type of movement:  there is the physical, active motion of descent and then ascent, coupled with the pauses to view names and an overall procession.  The coupling of this procession with the physical actions forms a narrative.  

4.  Speed

While not specifically a type of movement, the speed at which a movement takes place helps to define the movement.  Any type of movement, non-physical and physical, can occur at any speed or rate.  Take physical, active motion for example:  a door can be pushed open slowly, or a knife can chop carrots quickly.

 Each type of motion, whether it is the non-physical, the physical or a combination of the two, implemented at any rate or speed, can be manipulated through architecture to create interactions.  By exploiting these motions through architecture, they will become designed, layered, interlinked, structured and orchestrated to change one’s perception of their surroundings.

Architectural Intentions & Methods:

Each method should exploit, highlight or emphasize the different types of movements and speeds.  These methods of exploitations create relationships between the different movements, speeds, and the contexts and people who are making or engaging in them.

1.  Nesting:  Nesting can act as an organizational method for movement.  By designating the 'placement' of certain motions within other motions, unique opportunties arise. Nesting can either highlight a more normal state, where certain movements happen and behave in an expected hiearchy, or they can emphasize some sort of abnormalty by acting against or interfering with this hierarchy. 

2.  Layering:  Investigations into the effects of manipulating movement by layering differeing types and speeds of specific motions.  Certain programs will call for a new type of layering that may be different from others, or not contain any layering at all.  This type of structure allows certain comparisons and relationships to be made between the various movements.

2.  Revealing:  As opposed to nesting or layering, the act of revealing is a negative process as opposed to a positive one.  Movements can be stripped away and simplified.  When a movement or speed is not in comparison or association to any other movement or speed, its definition changes.

This isn't the 'bloggy' version of assignment 2, (to come after i rework it) but I just tried this to clarify some things, as a kind of study. I'm putting it out here for public record:

Our architecture should be more responsive and engaging. This will change how environments are perceived.

Responsive architecture is interactive.

Interaction is obtained through the manipulation of motion.

Every building has motion, but not every building has motion that creates interaction between architecture and occupant.

Examples that move and cause interaction:

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial: She gets the visitor to engage through transcending a ramp into the earth, among other things, and them brings them back out of the earth again on another ramp. There is a literal engagement as your legs move you down and back up, and a mental engagement, as you grapple with the ideas of grief that she has imbedded in the project.

Frederick Kiesler’s Art of the Century gallery/museum: Kiesler involves the occupant by having the visitor physically work devices in order to view the art in the exhibit. If they are not being asked to do something physical to view art, they must move or approach the art in an unprecedented way (art hung on tethers, for example.) The new motions change how this space is understood.

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeannerets second Citrohan House: The way in which we move through a building can be engaging. This two story project has a very light, airy second floor, and a very dense first floor. In moving from the first to the second, the occupant undergoes a narrative or sequence. This is his ‘promenade architecturale.’ Mentally, they are interacting with their surroundings as they accumulate the short history of their travel up and into the house.

Ron Heron, Walking City: This city is meant to walk. In physically ‘walking’ over the earth, it can change the constituents of environments, and thus how people interact with these environments. It’s mobility forms new patterns of behavior, awareness and perceptions.

I thought of one more:

6. A New Bank
This would be the home for the new Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. With all the junk that is going on, new financial buildings could be built for 'new' financial institutions. An investment bank cannot, after these recent events carry on business in the same way, and neither can their architecture. new consciousness of present day existence.

Ideas

I decided to post some ideas I have on potential program. I thought it would help to put it out there and get some feedback, and also, to write in this informal bloggy way.

What Seth said of my potential program was helpful. It is true I am going for some kind of awakening - a bringing forth of consciousness. I am going to do this through movement / action / kinetics. Naturally, he recommended that I consider something perhaps spiritually based. I decided I want to do the opposite. To do something 'nonspiritually' based. I want to do this so the awakening through motion is not confused with some sort of spiritual emotion or feeling. Perhaps the feeling of being awakened will be rife with some similar emotions, and in a way, be spiritual. (i think this is what Seth meant anyway.) However, I don't want it to be SPIRITUAL (meaning... Episcopalian, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim etc. No religion. A non-religious project.)

To be more specific, I'm looking for a program that cannot be everyday and mundane - because then the building will lose that initial sake of awakening simply because one has exposure to it daily. One can't expect some one's apartment to wow them daily with a barage of things to make them awake and conscious. People would go crazy. So while not mundane, I don't want something so extra special. I do not want some bizarre hybrid architecture with two weird programs smashed together for the sake of it being interesting. Like a zoo in a grocery or something. (Of course, i am interested in this to a point. If it is for a purpose in relating to my thesis.)

So with all this in mind, I have a few considerations (in no order):
1. A Chocolate Factory
I like this because one story, like in the movie, takes place in one place, and movement is crucial to the understanding of this narrative. the people are changed by their movements and the movements of other things. I don't think it's too feasible or fitting for my project, however. I thought of it over the summer.
2. A large City Convenience thingy.
This would have a butcher, florist, laundromat, fishmonger, bakery, hardware store, cafe, bookshop in one entity. I like this because, while everyday places for everyday tasks, if combined, and Incorporated with this movement business, they might provide something new. I think of the North End in Boston, where people actually still use butchers and bakeries etc., not grocery stores, and are so much better for it. They know their neighborhood. Yet, these places are not everyday, nor are they extra unique. They are needed.
3. A Place for Atheism
This is decidedly nonspiritual and that's why I like it. Having a real focus on the present, the real, the now. Being conscious of how you are living your life now.
4. Library / Bathhouse.
I ripped this from Luis today. But I swear, I was already thinking about a library. It sounds mundane, but I like it. I made a list of 'still' and 'busy' activities. Reading and washing can be counted as both, depending on how you go about it. (still can mean conscious, and busy can mean unconscious.) I really like the duality they have. I also like the idea of the bathhouse - a very old program that doesn't exist. I think of Boston, just because I am familiar with it, and see there is nothing like it. A public pool, which is sparse, cannot compare. It has a strong community component. Washing / swimming can turn conscious again. Imagine business people, on their lunch break, going to the public bath for a little mini-rest in the middle of the day. I like the library component because it is modern (less social, but just as communal) kind of bathhouse. People gather in this public place for a specific purpose. They can see and meet and learn. Perhaps this library is more interactive and less solitary. I just like it.

I had this other list, but they are getting old:
4. Arboretum
5. Seed Bank

Ok, I wrote it down, or typed it up, rather, and I'm going to let it sit for a bit. If you read this, let me know what you think.