Intro
This 10-day workshop will focus on the speciation of form and geometry under a model of investigation characterized by extreme integration. These formal and geometrical species would then be studied through scalar and typological lenses, so that they grow and transform its character in order to produce a full building enclosure. During the first sessions of the workshop students will work on research and morphology while we look into a series of case studies and analyze them graphically and formally using the capabilities of 3D Modeling Software such as Maya and Rhino. The case studies will be drawn from Ernst Haeckel’s Arts Forms in Nature, composed of a wide range of microscopic sea species. What interests us from these species is their ability to produce an infinite variety of forms through a combination of “homogeneity of structure with heterogeneity of individuation”[1]. Along that line of thinking, The Mathematics of the pliant… refers to rigorous organizational patterns of species and its intrinsic geometric order that are capable of yielding yet plastic formations. From this research students will be asked to extract two types of formal principles:
1-Formal reintegration
This part of the research concentrates on the investigation of form-making, emphasizing on issues of organization and structure (understood in the broad sense of the word), but not so much in a strict Cartesian sense through reductive compartmentalization processes, but more as a dynamic additive process that grows from one formal condition to another one –so that mass becomes volumes, volumes become limbs or surfaces, surfaces become strands, etc. To this extent, we will understand the geometric principle underlying Haeckel’s species more as a kind of fundamental connectivity between different orders rather than a set of static rules. Along that line of thinking, you should pay attention to the following types of formal growth or transitions:
This part of the research concentrates on the investigation of form-making, emphasizing on issues of organization and structure (understood in the broad sense of the word), but not so much in a strict Cartesian sense through reductive compartmentalization processes, but more as a dynamic additive process that grows from one formal condition to another one –so that mass becomes volumes, volumes become limbs or surfaces, surfaces become strands, etc. To this extent, we will understand the geometric principle underlying Haeckel’s species more as a kind of fundamental connectivity between different orders rather than a set of static rules. Along that line of thinking, you should pay attention to the following types of formal growth or transitions:
From Mass to Volumes
From Volumes to Limbs
From Volume to Surface
From Surface to Strand
From Surface to Pleats
In this way, we will examine the articulation of these different forms on their potential to bridge between different typological orders as well as their ability to produce qualitative effects.
2-Relief Reintegration
This second part of the research will look at Haeckel’s species in search for a texture or a relief strategy. The goal is to investigate haptic moments through a hybrid morphology that synthesizes both creased and smoothed conditions while simultaneously allowing for absolute continuity in the outermost layer of the species. In doing so, we will look at those examples from Haeckel’s plates that achieve a sophisticated level of texture.
In the second part of the workshop, the structural, heuristic, and transformative logic present in the chosen species will be used to regenerate an ‘architectural host’, drawn from a series of case study Houses (Farnsworth House, Kaufmann House or Eames House). This approach should utterly lead to a specific kind of dynamic process: one in which the conditional operators of a given species, such as its self-replicating formative system as well as its mechanism for absorption and transformation of its immediate environment become symbiotic in nature. Thus, in this process it is expected that the metabolism of the ‘architectural host’ will be altered into a new material organization, with a different set of tissues, interstitial spaces and vestigial traces, which, in turn, should establish potential conditions for further transformation and differentiation into future organisms.
