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Structure and Instability: Cartesian absolute structures and topological relative displacements
COOPER UNION - ARCH 177 COMPUTER GRAPHICS, IMAGE PROCESSING AND VISION - Structure and Instability - Professor Pablo Lorenzo-EiroaThis course revisits architecture autonomy within the history and theories of the Cooper Union through the nine square grid problem, to possibly provide a strategy to redefine post-structuralism as a continuity of structuralism. The temporal and institutional links between Wittkower’s Palladian villas diagram, Rowe’s Palladio-Le Corbusier diagram, Hejduk’s Texas Houses and Eisenman’s Houses series, may provide an axis of reference to review alternatives that engage architecture’s deep structure and suspend the problematic icon-(o)-graphic stylistic trend of deconstructivism.As a laboratory, we experimented with a vectorial cube and its “ground” through analog and digital assisted strategies. Alternative processes of instability were studied to affect the nine square grid structure by projecting discontinuous displacements, but also gradual time-based surface topological differentiation –searching for qualitative change. Wolfflin’s continuous state of revolution in art (Renaissance-Baroque) is forced into a synthetic formal solution: a simultaneously structured (striated) and continuous (smooth) space.Algorithms (if…then…loop: array of non-critical solutions; or the computer logos) are substituted by analog strategies that consist of layering information, developing interfaces between architecture problems through specific software. Surface writing, that is, to index difference by accumulating transformations over a matrix (plateau), are studied as a formal medium to work, to visually control, and program a different kind of analogically produced architecture based algorithm - which informs space and organization indirectly. The final cube was presented with an animated digital simulation that critically revised time-based sequential diagrams indexing and editing its constitutional process.This course is the third of a series that studied structure and instability as an autonomous problem of spatial organization in different scales: first, an artificial ecology structuring a shifting territory (New Orleans Delta, 2006); second, an urban structure as a landscape (Cooper Union Campus, 2007); and third, a virtual cube in computer’s ground-less space (Vectorial Nine Square Grid, 2008).
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