Matrix

Matrix for the gifting project, to the best of my understanding and "illustrator" ability

Completing the design

The exterior facade was completed, it was just modifying the interior left to do now. All the main ideas that I had been considering up to this point have directly influenced this end result. The several floors are connected by ramps and spaced apart to leave a hollow centre in middle of the building. I've also adjusted the diameter of the tubes differently to try and create smaller gaps on the side of the building where, for example, i'd want less light where the sun will hit, but larger gaps for the light to penetrate through in a different time of the day. This pattern is dispersed randomly, there isn't a specific reason as to why a specific space gets more light in the afternoon than the morning where instead a different space could have the same effect.

I don't imagine the varying quality of light to be dramatic, but me and my colleagues working routinely day by day will begin to notice the subtle differences, and I hope perhaps this may subconciously encourage the interaction between them during different parts of the day, where they want to stay away from the light and park on the sofa on the ground floor, or rejuvenate in the sunlight on a different floor.

Connecting

So now I've completed my original building, with slight renovations made to it. Me and Bennett agreed to connect our buildings together. His architecture firm would be a prime routine client for my virtual immersion pre-construction architecture business.

As for the modifications, I've looked back on my original focuses on the earth formations in antelope canyon and the investigation in my stop motion on the revolution of the sun in the daytime. This led to me think about how some spaces maybe well-lit in the morning, but as the sun moves towards midday and the afternoon the angle of the sunlight can cause these spaces to become much more dim lit, whereas spaces that may have been previously dark would receive maximum sunlight. With the interior spaces spread around the building both laterally and vertically, different colleagues can be 'gifted' the natural light at different times of the day.

An idea I very much like, although somewhat hard to experiment and prove on such a program as second life...

Developing Developing

This external structure is taking up most of my building time: getting the right position of each prim, locking them in place, changing the angle etc etc I've had no time to consider my interior work, besides playing with textures and colours

But if I am looking at the gift of light, something I consider while I build is whether to be presented with the gift of light first you must become aware of the amount of light in a space. Maybe I could control this by the size of the gaps made by the external facade, and where these gaps in relation to the interior space..

Starting on Second Life

It's been a whole semester since I've properly built on this programme again, but wasn't long before all the shortcuts flash backed to me. The idea was to renovate the building around the new idea of the gifting if light, but to renovate it I first had to construct the original building. Although the only space I found large enough for my building was on the kaiako-side of the tallest mountain... since I had to adjust the architecture to suit the new topography I had already started renovating.

It started with pancake-levelling of the base floors, just to set a general shape for the facade to follow and also to give me a visual guide later on. Ian suggested I play around with floor height and placement, not to make something generic. That's a thought I'm keeping in the back of my mind as I'll start to renovate.

The main holdback so far has been the amount of time it takes to position each prim in relation to another, getting it just right involves a lot of angle work as well as movement. But moreso has been the lack of available prims - the region has a set limit for how many prims there can be. Since all the projects from the last few groups as well as past projects from last semester and even last year are present, there's not a lot of space left.

Also noticed that Bennett (BigFudge) is building very close to mine, could be an opportunity to connect later on

From Annabel's earthform texture I was inspired to look at natural canyon formations that occur in America. I specifically researched the rock formations that create walkable shallow canyons within the crust. Because of the thick layers that stack and curve around the gaps, very little light shines through, and as the sun moves throughout the day the angle of approach continuosly changes which is interesting because certain areas that we're shadowed for the entire day are lit up, and areas that have been lit for the most of the day can become cold and sheathed in the afternoon.

Jump to 2:02 to see the amazing formations that I'm talking about


Here's another video, although not as good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJF-sEh7hjA&feature=related

Sculpted Prims and trading

Importing the sculpted prim into second life I still had several choices to make: what texture to apply onto it, and what motion script to apply to it to relate it to some aspect of my stop motion.

The texture i chose was a blank texture with very high shininess and a slight glow with a suction bumpiness, resulting in a material not unlike the facade tube-like structure in my motion design. I wanted it to relate somehow physically back to my building, because I realised that the object was more furniture and less architectural, and needed some relation to my personal building.

The Motion was a little trickier. The aspect of gifting i was looking at specifically was the gift of light. So it was appropriate to reflect on the motion directly at the end of my video, where I investigate the effect the sun has on my building throughout the day, in terms of shining through the gaps and creating different qualities of light (by varying the amount of light shing through the gaps depending on the angle of the sun to the facade). So I modelled that - replicating the sculpted prim and applying a slow rotation script. The one above rotates at half the rate to the one below, more interesting that having them rotate at the same rate. It also brought more attention the direct relation they have on each other, also as they rotate in opposite directions, outlining that inverse relation the sun + shadows have on each other (as the sun moves anti-clockwise, the shadows repliacte the movement but clockwise).

After displaying all our sculpted prims on the red carpet we had to trade our prims with each other. Several avatars requested permission to use the rotating piece, so I set it on so that anyone may be able to use it. I was most fascinated in Annabel's wall sample piece (second photograph, sculptie on the right), especially because of the texture, that I want to investigate into later

Sculpting an object for Second Life

The next task was to sculpt an object (section of a wall, floor, furniture etc) from our stop motion building in 3DS studio max. I sculpted a hypothetical coffee table for 4, and chose to capture the general motion of my video in the design of the table/chairs. To me the video was somewhat smooth flowing, a mixture of timelapse sections and stop motion animations.

This was my second time using 3Ds studio max. To get the program fully working i also had to download a plug-in for sculpting prims from this website: http://maniacsl.blogspot.com/2011/02/basic-installation-of-prim-composer.html, as it doesn't come with the program. After a few short youtube tutorials, i finally got a grip of how to use it. Reflecting back on the smooth, flowing motion of the video, i sculpted a prim where the chairs are flowing out through the bulk table centre

The end result was seemingly random, but you could still make out the chairs and the table. I then uploaded the element into second life by converting it into a red,blue and green png image

FLAXTIVE architecture

Flaxtive - that's the word I'd use to describe my building. The flax-like weave of the tubes that reflect light in different directions, disorientating both light and the viewer. The -tive is to create an adjective, but was originally from merging the two words - Flax and reflective - together.

Just experimenting with prim composer on Autodesk 3DS Studio Max, playing with sculpting and then exporting through an image. This image can be used to recreate a 3D object, by reading each different colour as well as each colours co-ordinates. Nifty

Gifting

The new topic for Project four is 'Gifting'. We discussed the idea of 'gifting', what is it? When and where more specifically, is it done? Gifting presents, to giving the gift of knowledge, or even life through birth, or saving another life. Even moreso, sacrificing your life for another.

But what was more important is to relate these ideas to architecture. What does a building gift to us? How does it provide us with the means to gift, to encourage the idea of gifting and sharing? Although of course in a more indirect and subtle manner, architecture can give us protection and security, freedom, or even the direct opposite (think prisons, courtrooms etc). This is all part of what we discussed today.

Architecture also provides the means for humans to give and gift. A meeting room, an exhibition space, a lecture hall, a classroom, all these different types of architecture and predetermined for their own specific purposes in function to be optimal for gifting of knowledge, creative skill etc. If we dive deeper we can analyze what about these rooms encourages that gifting: the arrangement of tables in a classroom, the form of the interior as the result of acoustics in a lecture hall, the subtle forceful direction and implication of the corridors and attention brought to a piece of art in an exhibition. One thing that largely fascinated me was light. The amount of light in a room can receive different reactions of mood from humans, just as the colour of the light can invoke various emotions. Dim, artifical lighting sets the mood for the exchange of romance and love; bright natural sunlight promotes gifting of knowledge.

Of course the gift of light, is like the gift of vision to a blind man.



The gift of light:

The small canadian town of Inuvik goes through several weeks a year without any sunlight. Children still attend school at night, people still shop for their groceries, and the routine of a normal sunny day is still imposed. The american juice company Tropicana gifted a large artifical helium sphere of light to the people of Inuvik, along with 1200 bottles of free juice. The sphere acted as a small sun to the town, and was created in time to celebrate the sunrise festival which celebrates the return of the sun after the short period of continuous night.

Finished A1 Paper Animation

Gathering Stop Motion Animation

This is the complete video of the stop motion animationg for the gathering topic. I Will post pictures of the finished copy soon, as well details of the project and its development

Developing the design

At this point I'm stuck on how to continue my development of the design. So I decided to revisit my previous projects again as well as my matrix project, the New England house by office dA. I drew up a series of patterns and wrote up relevant ideas portrayed by the house, in an effort to merge the ideas together.

I liked the idea of reflection in my sustenance project, especially because there isn't any still texture, such as the grains on a wooden table, or the rough grey on concrete. The texture instead comments on all the textures around it, both still and moving. Was wondering if my entire building's exterior was made of mirrors, it would be amazing. It would almost certainly blend in with the background sky, and that's when i thought of the incredible 'cloud gate' in chicago. The smooth curve and reflectiveness of the bean gives an image of an augmented reality. The edges blend with reality but then obscure the images in the centre, distorting the space behind as well as the space it consumes. This is a perfect idea for my project...

Elaborating the function

To elaborate and develop the idea of this 'virtual box' I started thinking about the practicality and design of it, because ultimately the function of the building and its purpose will almost certainly define its aesthetic, so it seems ideal to research this aspect. I figured being inside a virtual 'box' one would not be able to move around the virtual space, only have the space move using another feature such as vocal or hand gestures. But this would remove another element of reality - using your legs - and therefore again remind you that you are in fact in a virtual world and not one that's real. I want my clients to be fully immersed into their architecture, to have static images gives only a very tiny portion of it.

Another design idea I included was that of reaction space - whereby specifically pointing to or trying to touch a surface one could zoom into it and get a full 3-dimensional view of the texture, or stroke their hand against it to hear what it would sound like in real life. Generally something along those lines...

The final result was a large Sphere that I'd situate directly in the centre of the building, where one can walk and roll the sphere to walk around the virtual world, like a guinea pig exercise wheel.

Ideas I'm considering:
Having the sphere sitting on the bottom floor but protruding high to the second floor, and all other floors having circular openings directly above the sphere so that's its visible from above.

Like russian dolls creating a-sphere-within-a-sphere effect, a geometrically appealing effect, the bigger sphere being the exterior of the actual building.

Experimenting with Stop Motion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyrW5rUpL0c

I've done my share of video editing in the past, so that was another reason i was looking forward to this project - being able to use my experience.

So instead of adobe after effects for editing, I used adobe premiere pro cs5.5 which is much simpler to arrange and organise stills and music. You can still edit the video quality itself and add effects, but for more advanced video effects one would use after effects, which is what makes it temperamental to use for simple clipping and arranging.

I had already been taking photographs of my drawing, so I quickly made a stop motion film to experiment with the idea of speed drawing, as well as an actual stop motion animation towards the end, where Im looking through different possibilities of computer-related businesses.

The song is Vagabond by Wolfmother

New England House

There wasn't a lot I could find out about this house, in fact it was particularly hard to find, and only site seemed to have any information on it whatsoever. Still, it gave me some insight into the why/how of the project, where the matrix filled in the rest. Here's the article from the site http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/residential/archives/0604RHe-1.asp House in New England

New England Office dA, Inc. With the New England House, clad in black rubber and cedar, Office dA reinvents the cube By Fred Bernstein Monica Ponce de Leon & Nader Tehrani Twenty-five years have passed since the Rubik’s Cube was a marketing meteor, but as a metaphor, it still has force for Monica Ponce de Leon. Each year, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), she teaches a studio named for the maddening puzzle, which offers an important lesson: When a volume’s exterior is truly linked to its interior, getting the outside right may require tireless manipulation of the inside. Ponce de Leon and Nader Tehrani, her GSD colleague and partner in the Boston firm Office dA, have created a house that demonstrates that challenge. The typical American approach to home design, in which each new space adds a new volume, held no appeal for them. “This house,” says Ponce de Leon, “is the opposite of sprawl.” That, and the desire to get the two-bedroom, 2,600-square-foot interior up high enough to give the owners treetop views, resulted in a nearly cubic building. But there is nothing simple about this cube, which twists and turns in plan and section in an almost dizzying profusion of material and formal explorations. Tehrani and Ponce de Leon, who have been working together since they partnered on their GSD thesis in 1991, consider their projects built essays. In this case, the clients, a young couple, set the bar high: Collectors of contemporary art, they imagined their land as a place for site-specific artworks, of which the Office dA building, a weekend house, would be the first. On the site, extending over more than 30 acres in western New England, half a dozen old farm structures already stood around an oval “village green.” Tehrani and Ponce de Leon wanted the house to mine—as well as undermine—local building traditions. For the east elevation, which visitors see from the driveway, and the south facade, which they pass on their way to the front door, the architects chose shiplap and board-and-batten siding, materials that, Tehrani suggests, “emerge from the language of the farm.” The more private north and west facades, however, were free to speak languages of the architects’ own invention. Inside, too, Office dA avoided domestic clichés. Much of the ground floor is relegated to the garage, but the architects didn’t permit anything as simple as a door from there to, say, a mudroom. The entry is via an outdoor stairway, where the cedar south facade and rubber west one peel apart, creating a slit that suggests a journey to the center of the earth. The walls bracketing the stairs tilt in, “carving away headroom as you no longer need it,” says Ponce de Leon, explaining one of the moves that show the careful tailoring of plan and section. Making additional references to the facades, many of the interior elements (some created in collaboration with Boston designers Manuel de Santaren and Carolina Tress-Balsbaugh) seem to bring exterior components inside. A mahogany fireplace surround, for example, suggests, in its composition and overlap of vertical and horizontal patterns, a microcosm of the house’s southeast corner. Inflected by the exterior cladding, some of the windows look through horizontal wood slats, while others are pinched by bands of rubber.

Gathering Ideas

Reflecting on the idea of 'gathering,' we have to take ideas back from our previous two projects, as well as a building we are researching, and our 1:100 site model back at the start of the semester. Also have to define the building through our startup business idea and colleagues... which I think will mainly define the interior of my building.

I've started my bringing the main focus of my first two projects together - light weaving through, and freeform architecture, where my second project had no defined form, but an infinite number of potential forms. However this was applied to a temporary market stall, not sure how it would survive with heavy wind loads and permanent loads on various floors...

Startup Business

After intense brainstorming I found a new idea for a business that I'm very passionate about. I did have some subtle inspirations for this, so that I could believe that this idea would be possible and be brought to the world of architecture:

The idea arose from a business of software engineering and video game desiging: virtual reality.

In our technological age our experience of the world can be seen to rapidly accelerating to new artificial levels. The Internet has largely provided catalyst for this, in the form of avatars and online mmorpgs as well as social networking sites. But so has technology: the micro-chip and the processor is getting smaller and faster. We went from small round CRT's to Large Flat OLED's to 3DTV, the 3D still requires glasses and isn't exactly realistic but is definitely rapidly heading towards an end result that will be indisinguishable from real life.

Well what if one could, even today, immerse themselves in an artificial reality but trick the senses to feel, smell, see and believe what they're seeing is real. This is my essential idea, a business for a team that creates and operates a virtual reality 'box' that simulates an architect's design for a building and renders it in real life to a 3D simulation as well life-like sound replication (depending on materials). This is much like the virtual box seen in the film 'Sunshine' by Danny Boyle:

Except we're not yet up to the technology of advanced 3D projection, BUT, we have got to a point where we have invented glasses that 'augment reality.' Meaning the background and environment stays the same, but the glasses project an object or objects in 3D as you would see it in real life (http://www.vuzix.com/ar/products_wrap920ar.html#wrap920ar). Even the new nintendo 3DS has it. With the conjunction of these glasses and the virtual reality room with 3D sounds and touch capability, an architect can experience their unconstructed design as if it were real, and their clients can explore it and review the design before construction, avoiding added costs and changes during the construction phase of the project.