TECH IS MORE?

TECH IS MORE?
Minimalism in the new age of Architecture and Digital Technologies


ABSTRACT:

If less is more… is tech more?
In the age of new technologies, new materials and media, a new architecture-digital architecture- emerges, redefining space, function and form. The use of new technologies such as CAD (Computer Aided Design) or CAM (Computer Aided Manufacture), make easier the process of producing an architectural project and set the foundations for new concepts, new forms and new architectural volumes.
If Mies van der Rohe used the phrase “less is more” to describe his aesthetic tactics of flattening and emphasizing a building's frame, eliminating interior walls and adopting an open plan, and reducing the structure to a strong, transparent, elegant skin, then could we say that tech (as in technologies) is more, in the sense that in the contemporary time digital architecture could actually produce the same aesthetics, using these new technologies, but reconciliated to its time? And can digital technologies contribute to the creation of a new more abstract and complex minimalism?



KEYWORDS:
minimalism; digital technologies; complexity; new architecture;

Contour Crafting

Description:
Contour Crafting (CC) is a computer-automated construction technology, invented and developed at USC by Behrokh Khoshnevis Professor, University of Southern California to deliver rapid production, ease of use, significant reduction of waste, and other substantial cost savings. Not only will CC have a significant impact on the point of delivery, but the whole support structure will be similarly affected by the technology. We anticipate substantial revenues for a wide variety of direct users of the technology and its suppliers. In addition to the enormous economic potential, CC has been designed to deliver improved quality of life, superior safety, and beneficial environmental impact. In this sense, CC will enable the construction of custom-designed, low-cost housing with a level of quality heretofore unobtainable. Further, safety elements inherent in the process will significantly reduce the rate of on-the-job injuries that are so prevalent in the construction industry today, thereby lowering the costs of litigation, insurance, and medical treatment, to say nothing of saving lives. The environmental impact will also be significant through energy savings for construction and the near-elimination of waste product. In the long run, CC will revolutionize the construction industry.

Technology:
The CC Technology: CC is a hybrid fabrication method that combines an extrusion process for forming object surfaces and a filling process to build the object core in layered fashion. The extrusion nozzle used to create structural elements has multiple outlets, one for each side, and others for the inner (core) of a wall structure. Each side orifice has an adjacent trowel. As the material is extruded, the traversal of the trowels creates smooth (2 micron has been achieved) outer and top surfaces on each layer. The nozzle can be deflected to create non-orthogonal surfaces such as domes and vaults. Co-extrusion of multiple materials is also possible. For example, plaster as the outer surface material and concrete as the core structural material may be co-extruded by the CC nozzle.

Conclusion:
Counter crafting is a mass customizinging technology that reduces the cost of construction and also production time. Interested part of this technology is it has a different goal of mass customizing in the sence of mass urban or rural housing sectors. On the other hand most of the available mass customization procedures are cost worthy and industrial production. This counter crafting is on site mass customization system that is really cheap in total. Counter crafting works on very simple logics of building construction where as the other mass customizers deals with complex computer generated design solutionns andmateriality.
Whereas in the use of counter crafting it has a limitation on materials and design complexsities although the goal is different from the traditionla mass customization system and CC has huge potentialities but this simple technology still not proved on the field of construction and architecture.

Media:new materiality?

Materiality in architecture is the concept of, or applied use of various materials or substances in the medium of building

In the age of interaction and media, new materials keep appearing in the field of architecture. But could we say that interaction or media themselves represent the new materiality of architecture?

Development in display technology and building materials are leading to new forms of hybrid architecture that breakaway from existing conceptions of surface, structure, lighting and moving imagery. Therefore media facades are starting to integrate in an architectural and urban context.
The first example of interactive architecture with media facades was the building of Galleria West Shopping Center in Seoul, Korea, designed in 2002 by UN Studio architects in assosiation with Arup Lighting. The building has become the latest, intriguing style icon in the city and a world first for electronic facade technology.



Together UN Studio and Arup Lighting, have created a new facade that projects a lively, ever changing surface, with a total of 4330 glass discs mounted on the existing concrete skin of the building, and transformed the Galleria into a continuously changing, light-reactive and computer-programmable radiant surface.
The chameleon-like facade reflects the details of natural light on opalescent, dichroic glass discs during the day. At night the discs are individually backlit and controlled by a computer program to create brilliant and unique color schemes all aver the building-each disc acting like a big pixel on a giant screen.
4330 discs, each 850mm in diameter, make up the entire facade of the mall. They can be programmed to show outstanding displays in every imaginable shade. At other times the building can even become a giant billboard, its pixels feeding text or images around the entire external structure.
Although the technology is not new, its application on such a big scale makes it exceptional. The fact that it can interface with video and film makes it a unique hybrid project.

Advertising billboards, interactive facades and new technologies create a new field in architectural design and materiality and in a way (re-)define architecture and urban space as we know it. The integration of media facades with architectural structures produces a new type of architecture-media architecture-which informs not only the building but also urban space.

Variable Dynamic Spaces

Project: E-Motive House (2002)
Office: ONL (Rotterdam)
Client: ONL Research Work





ONL is an architectural office, based in Rotterdam-Holland(1990), created by Kas Oosterhuis and Ilona Lenard. Kas Oosterhuis works as a professor for Architectural Design and Design Methods at the Delft University of Technology and he is the director of the Hyperbody Research Group. Ilona Lenard is a certified actress and sculptor.
The office combines visionary design strategies with super knowledge of innovative mass customs production methods, allowing the construction of geometrically complex architecture.
The E-Motive House is a research project, experimenting on interacting spaces. Its form is a long movable space with two solid blocks on both ends. The space in between, changes its shape and content, depending on the weather and the movement of its inhabitants, therefore changing the geometry and developing its own emotion.
Its structure is a weaving loom, between hard and soft structure, consisting of wooden beams on one hand and long shaped inflatable chambers on the other. The interaction of these two structures is based on the game development program Virtools, and the reaction of this space will always be different as a result of complex consideration between various factors.
At the end the E-Motive House experience, gives to the inhabitants a feeling of a real time interaction, like learning to live in an environment with an own mind.

Book Refernce: ONL Hyperbody Logic