when I’m bored I…

… play with Surface Evolver, TopMod + Rhinoscript…

I’ve been spending too much time teaching and working for other people.  Tonight I finally sat down and started to play with a few things that have been running in my head for the last few weeks, stuff that is related in parts to the work I’ve been doing both at the office and at uni.  These are a few tests (warm up stretches   using Surface Evolver, some remeshing in TopMod, then a touch of Rhinoscript.

Schoen's Manta Genus 19 on Schoen's Manta Genus 19

earlier script version, mistakes at edges

Close, still no cigar...

To be Continued...

The Living Tower – revisited

An upper-pool studio project I did about 6 months ago with my design partner Mike Sharp just got listed for the Colorbond Student Biennale prize.  whoohoo!  There was alot of unfinished business with this project, so Mike and I decided to rework it up for the second stage submission.  check it out:

Shameless self-promotion

…the first stage of my online folio is nearly done.  You can take a look at http://www.coroflot.com/jessicain.

folio featured in the architecture stream on Coroflot

Major Project comedown

I had my thesis comedown this week while doing some temp work at Minifie Nixon.  Not a great look, brain stalling in front your computer with a massive deadline looming.  Having said that I’m still having trouble not working.  Anyway, I realised I hadn’t posted up final images from the major project saga, so here they are:

Beyond the Dreams of Avarice seeks greater meaning in architecture as a reflection of current society, one that is, paradoxically, highly connected yet confused and troubled.  A proposal for a financial centre in Melbourne, the design process evolved through extensive reading and exploration of several key themes – the unstable, endogenous nature of the financial system; emergent processes; the tower typology in buildings of commerce; and the application of computational design processes to tease out highly abstract concepts into physical form and spatial experience.

The project considers the economic cycle as a reflection of people’s tendency to veer from euphoria to depression, and draws design ideas from notions of unease.  It rejects architectural symbols of power and top-down organizational structures.  Instead, the project considers the wisdom of crowds as an alternative model, using bottom-up emergent processes – driven by a combination of tangible architectural parameters as well as intangible qualities – to generate form and space.

view the project panels and reference folio on Issuu:

Presentation Panels: http://issuu.com/jessin/docs/mp_panels

Reference Folio: http://issuu.com/jessin/docs/majorproject_reference

stupid catalogue submission

Always good fun trying to name a project 10 min before you’re due to submit catalogue images.  Been throwing around different names, trying to come up with something that would nicely round up ‘instability’, ‘pandemonium’, ‘euphoric–depressive’, and ‘greed sucks’.  I gave up, and just stole a well known phrase, ‘Beyond the Dreams of Avarice’.

Here’s the crappy blurb that’s going into the catalogue.  Hopefully it’s vague enough to give me space to move:

Buildings designed to house and stand for institutions of finance have tended to portray notions of stability, order, growth and power.  the unstable and cyclic nature of economics is rarely acknowledged, even though these qualities are an inherent part of the financial system to which these buildings owe their existence.  Beyond the Dreams of Avarice is a proposal for a financial centre in the melbourne cbd that has come about from an exploration of several themes – the unstable, endogenous nature of the financial system; the psychology of debt and the wisdom of crowds; the tower typology in buildings of commerce; and the application of computational design processes to tease out highly abstract concepts into physical form and spatial experience.

10 Days, 9 Hours, 16 Min, 37 sec to go…

some test renders, and a half finished section…

MP update

Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:

re-working the two smaller buildings that sit between the 3 towers:

Trying to get the ground-scape plaza thing to come into the building – running through it’s main circulation, creating some steppy floorplates:

going mad-ugly-crazy-scripty…and emergent Snoopy…

my studio mate pointed out that the tower on the far right looks like Snoopy… I think that’s the only thing I like about this test…

this is where I’m at so far….

and I think this is where I’ll stop with scripting form…time to start the “proper” stuff…

MP rant

How you visualise, in form and space, the abstract, intangible and complicated stuff that drives economics?   I have no idea.  I’ve been stuffing my head with readings in economics, network theory, stuff about commercial building typologies and architecture theory, and then trying to condense these ideas into a thesis, and realise them into a  design for a building.  The above diagram is the first sketch from a notebook for a draft script to try and tie some of these ideas together. Currently re-writing the script, will post a draft soon…

stuff I’ve been reading recently

economics

• Maddison, A 2007, Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
• Maddison, A 2001, About the World Economy: Historical Statistics, OECD Development Centre.
• Ferguson, N 2008, The Ascent of Money – A Financial History of the World, Allen Lane, London.
• Hon, D 2007, Empire of Debt, Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters, accessed 26th September 2009, from https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/74/The_Empire_of_Debt.html
• Atwood, M 2008, Payback – Debt and the shadow side of Wealth, Bloomsbury, London
• Barry N, Burton J et al 1984, Hayek’s ‘Serfdom’ revisited, Institute of Economic Affairs, London

towers

• Willis, C 1995, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

melb archi history & theory

• Goad, P 2002, A Short history of Melbourne Architecture, Pesaro Publishing, Sydney.
• Goad, P 1999, Melbourne Architecture, The Watermark Press, Sydney.
• Lewis, M 1994, Melbourne – The City’s History and Development, City of Melbourne, Melbourne.
• Evans, D (ed) 1992, Aardvark II: the RMIT guide to contemporary Melbourne architecture, RMIT University Press, Melbourne.
• Evans, D (ed) 1997, Aardvark, accessed 24 August 2009, from http://aardvark.tce.rmit.edu.au

more theory

• Blazwick, I [ed] 2001, Century City – Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Gallery Publishing, London.
• In, J 2005, ‘Round and Around again : Demystifying Art and Architecture through the work of Walter Benjamin and Cedric Price‘, Undergraduate Research Essay, Faculty of Architecture Building + Planning, University of Melbourne

network theory

• Burke A & Tierney T [eds] 2007, Network Practices, Princeton Architectural Press, New York
• Connected – How Kevin Bacon cured Cancer 2008, video recording, Australian Broadcasting Corporation + British Broadcasting Corporation.
• Surowiecki J 2005, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday, London

archi theory

• Contemporary Techniques in Architecture (Architectural Design vol 72 no.1 2002)
• Koolhaas, R 1978, Delirious New York, The Monacelli Press, New York.
• Koolhaas, R 2006, El Croquis 131/132: OMA Rem Koolhaas 1996-2006: Delirious and More, El Croquis, Madrid.
• Hookway, B 1999, Pandemonium – The rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World, Princeton Architectural Press, New York

Demystifying Art and Architecture through the work of Walter Benjamin and Cedric Price

Round and around again – Demystifying Art and Architecture through the work of Walter Benjamin and Cedric Price.

Theories of Architecture – Semester 2, 2005, University of Melbourne Undergraduate Research Essay

Introduction
The writings of German literary theorist and critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) were essential to the development of cultural studies, in the same way that much of contemporary architecture would have been inconceivable without the work of British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003). Price & Benjamin both worked against their respective avant-garde establishments and instead attempted to engage with (and were unafraid to acknowledge that they did), everyday people and popular culture as creative inspiration for their work.

Download the full essay:  Round and Around again – demystifying Art and Architecture through the work of Walter Benjamin and Cedric Price.