December 1, 2007

'Clouds in the bottles'

Refernces:
- ‘Phenomenology of Perception’ Merleau Ponty
- ‘Being Digital’ Nicholas Negroponte
- ‘Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture’ Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto     Perez-Gomez
- ‘Anchoring’ Steven Holl
- ‘Quantum City’ Ayssar Arida
- ‘Interactive Architecture’ Kas Oosterhuis

Examples
-diller scofidio, the blur building

The Blur Building is a project for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel. The lightweight tensegrity structure measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 75 feet high. However the primary building material is indigenous to the site, water.
It is one of the first examples of architecture of atmosphere and looking for the nature of the space.
Diller Scofidio created the final form of the project by using water vapor. Thanks to it they achieve a building structure, which is visible, and have specific shape, but on the other hand you can go through it, it is man-made very dense fog.
When you enter the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are deleted, you only walk through an optical "white-out" and the "white-noise".

- research for invisible materials by Dr. Ulf Leonhardt at Scotland's St. Andrews University

Dr. Ulf Leonhardt at Scotland's St. Andrews University has recently published two papers concerning the potential realization of invisibility using modern MetaMaterials. He looks for a new class of ordered nanocomposites that exhibit exceptional properties not readily observed in nature. These properties arise from qualitatively new response functions that are: not observed in the constituent materials and result from the inclusion of artificially fabricated, extrinsic, low dimensional inhomogeneities.
According to Dr. Leonhardt, the key to achieving invisibility lies in creating transparent materials capable of bending light around objects hidden behind them. While seemingly far-fetched, light-bending phenomena such as hot road mirages or water refractions occur naturally.

- ‘Atomic: full of love, full of wonder’ by Nike Savvas

Nike Savvas made this sculpture/installation “Atomic: full of love, full of wonder”, which is a room filled with colored polystyrene balls, suspended with nylon wires. There’re some industrial fans too, which blow from time to time, and make the whole installation wobble.
That is an interesting example of an art installation which is focused on the micro elements of materials. Nike Savvas presents a zoom into structure of every physicall object and shows relationship between atoms.

-Printable solar cells
Ludger Hovestadt, a professor for architecture and CAAD at ETHZ, looking through the technological development of the "information society", described how the granularity of objects is becoming smaller and smaller, until today matter can be investigated and described at sub-atomic scale. "The Big Zoom" as he called it, gives us an understanding of the materials available to us which has led us to reconstructing objects from their most fundamental parts. We can build our environment from atomic scales upwards developing new smart, responsive and communicative material constructs. "No longer are objects or processes the constituting elements of a building. Now they are described as technical networks of communicating nodes, which balance themselves in contrived patterns."
An example of Nano materials providing base materials for new technologies, is ’spray on’ solar collection material that is capable of capturing energy in the infra red spectrum, developed by University of Toronto. "Printable" solar cells are coated with a common ingredient used in toothpaste and suntan lotion and are able to produce electricity from direct sunlight as well as low-light and indoor lighting. They are manufactured with a process similar to inject printing.
Considering current solar technology, perhaps one day we could print onto virtually any other material, mixing previously unlike material combinations, to generate sustainable power supplies in the most unlikely of scenarios.
With the ability to rapidly create our environment as and when we need it, Ludger suggests that "We are going towards the end of devices and instead the construction of devices by print processes."
Considering the near future of architectural practice and the freedom it will provide for artists, architects and designers will have possibility to generate their own technology and suprising applications from microscopic up to the architectural scales.
characterize it and describe it. In this kind of geometry it is very hard to define spaces for people without any decisive obstructions.
This is one of the most important roles for contemporary computation and digital tools…how to find that kind of spaces and make it somehow visible, how to define it. One of the possible ways would be to use new materials, that can offer illusion of immateriality- materials that on the one hand are still physical, but from a level of perception become immaterial; their physical structure is fine enough to make them be perceived as invisible.
That kind of architecture would have no physical barriers, but would be open by his physical no-existence, being a challenge for designers and receivers as well.
It has also another important aspect of designing process. The space created in this way is not strictly being related the people, but to the atmosphere of place. The creation process could involve climate or different temperatures, being independent from human activity.

-hypersolid
As Kas Oosterhuis mentioned in his book “ Interactive architecture", recently there has been discovered in laboratory conditions a material called hypersolid, which is invisible and has got the ability to penetrate one another. If it becomes possible to create hypersolid in normal conditions, that would open infinite possibilities for applying it into architectural scale.