Hyposurface: from Autoplastic to Alloplastic Space
Mark Goulthorpe
DECOI Architects, Paris
Introduction
By way of immediate qualification to an essay
which attempts to orient current technical developments in relation to a series
of dECOi projects, I would suggest that the greatest liberation offered by new
technology in architecture is not its formal potential as much as the patterns
of creativity and practice it engenders.
For increasingly in the projects presented here dECOi operates as an
extended network of technical expertise: Mark Burry and his research team at Deakin
University in Australia as architects and parametric/ programmatic
designers; Peter Wood in New Zealand as programmer; Alex Scott in London as
mathematician; Chris Glasow in London as systems engineer; and the engineers
(structural/services) of David Glover’s team at Ove Arup in London. This reflects how we’re working in a new
technical environment - a new form of practice, in a sense - a loose and light
network which deploys highly specialist technical skill to suit a particular
project.
By way of a second disclaimer, I would
suggest that the rapid technological development we're witnessing, which we
struggle to comprehend given the sheer pace of change that overwhelms us, is
somehow of a different order than previous technological revolutions. For the shift from an industrial society to
a society of mass communication, which is the essential transformation taking
place in the present, seems to be a subliminal and almost inexpressive
technological transition - is formless, in a sense - which begs the
question of how it may be expressed in form. If one holds that
architecture is somehow the crystallization of cultural change in concrete
form, one suspects that in the present there is no simple physical equivalent
for the burst of communication technologies that colour contemporary life. But I think that one might effectively raise
a series of questions apropos technology by briefly looking at 3 or 4 of
our current projects, and which suggest a range of possibilities fostered by
new technology.
By way of a third doubt, we might qualify in
advance the apparent optimism of architects for CAD technology by thinking back
to Thomas More and his island ‘Utopia’,
which marks in some way the advent of
Modern rationalism. This was, if
not quite a technological utopia, certainly a metaphysical one, More’s vision typically deductive,
prognostic, causal. But which by the time of Francis Bacon’s New
Atlantis is a technological
utopia availing itself of all the possibilities put at humanity’s disposal by
the known machines of the time. There’s
a sort of implicit sanction within these two accounts which lies in their
nature as reality optimized by rational DESIGN as if the very ethos of design were sponsored by Modern rationalist
thought and its utopian leanings. The
faintly euphoric ‘technological’ discourse of architecture at present - a sort
of Neue Bauhaus - then seems curiously misplaced historically given the
20th century’s general anti-, dis-, or counter-utopian discourse. But even this seems to have finally run its
course, dissolving into the electronic heterotopia of the present with
its diverse opportunities of irony and distortion (as it’s been said) as a
liberating potential.1 This would seem to mark the dissolution of design
ethos into non-causal process(ing), which begs the question of ‘design’ itself:
who 'designs' anymore? Or rather, has
'design' not become uncoupled from its rational, deterministic, tradition?
The utopianism that attatches to technological
discourse in the present seems blind to the counter-finality of technology's
own accomplishments - that transparency has, as it were, by its own more and
more perfect fulfillment, failed by its own success. For what we seem to have inherited is not the warped utopia
depicted in countless visions of a singular and tyrranical technology (such as
that in Orwell's 1984), but a rich and diverse heterotopia which
has opened the possibility of countless channels of local dialect competing
directly with the channels of power.
Undoubtedly such multiplicitous and global connectivity has sent
creative thought in multiple directions…
Foster/Design
Such issues of transparency and of
determinism - ‘design’ itself, in a
sense - surface in a formal study we were invited to do for Foster & Partners. This intrigued us initially simply in its
formal potential - its benign complex-curved form. But as we developed various design strategies it began to reveal
myriad other facets of a new creative territory. The project is a giant clam of sorts, an external carapace which
shrouds three internal theatres, the surface swelling differentially over
each. Foster’s had approached it
in classic fashion as an exercise in rational design methodology, but ran
aground in their attempt to generate such a sensual complex-curved form
‘deductively’ – and certainly to understand what they had produced in any
precise sense.
Our approach was not to design the
form - not to define it determinately with a gestural flourish - but to
set constraints by which the form could find itself. Initially we gave an imaginary force to the number of people
within the theatres as a series of diffuse force fields which lifted or
cushioned an elastic surface, and then we produced mathematical descriptions
which gave substance to such elasticity.
In effect we didn't define the
form as a figure in space, but left it as a movement hanging in space – a
reversal of gestural instinct: a sort of Asiatic sense. There’s an elegance to this besides the
flowing form, a curious new aesthetic act: not to design an object, but to
devise the possibility of
an object: it’s not an architecture so much as the possibility of an
architecture. For us it was like
watching determinacy evaporate. But
such model offers what we call a precise indeterminacy, which applies
formally as well as processurally: there’s a rigour and a relaxation - it’s
not an art of the accident!
Formally the object is intriguing - an
elemental fusion and opacity which seems to announce a new formal territory in
which there’s an implicit degradation of property: the roof curls down to become a wall, the structure fuses with the surface, the openings emerge and
merge into the background form by a material tessellation as a languid
intersection of fluid curves in space.
It’s as if all the delineations of Modernist rationality, which followed
on from the tenets of industrial production - the separation of structure,
wall, surface (even of architect, engineer, manufacturer) - dissolve in the
opacity of such formal register. It
cries out for a seamless and reciprocal processing
and for systems of non-standard
post-industrial manufacture
We felt the inexpressivity and occlusion of
this project and the articulate indeterminacy of such creative process
offered a quite compelling reorientation of technical discourse: there’s a
melt-down of technical expressivity, almost, a lowering of its profile to zero,
an almost inexpressive fluidity.
Bremner/Parametric
The Bremner House, at a different scale,
follows on from this where we’re renovating a townhouse in Kensington/Chelsea
in London. Here we're adding a
conservatory to provide a sun-terrace with views up the Thames and in order to
create a unified volume over the awkward corner we’ve simply wrapped it with a
single surface of glass which articulates into flat glass facets. Behind the skin is then a system of
motorized blinds which sheath the space and which will constantly adjust to
create a kind of shrouded cocoon. These
we’ve put on a bus system - a sort of virtual wiring - such that a simple
thermostat and a light-detector are sufficient to create subtle gradations of
movement control.
Strange as it may seem, we’d characterize
this, again, as inexpressive, or indeterminate - a hypo- rather
than hyper- surface, despite it’s distinctive form. The budget was extremely limited so from the
outset we realized that we would need to conform to the parameters dictated by
the contractor - size of glass, minimum angle of panes, etc. So we needed not only a hyper-accurate
description sufficient to allow numeric command machine manufacture but a
system of modelling that was elastic or adaptable such that any change could be
readily incorporated globally. We
therefore developed it as a parametric model, a model where all the
geometries are linked, constrained by various parameters given by the
contractor, engineer, etc. such that any change in those parameters will
globally deform the model. This has
resulted in an extremely competitive bid - of the same order as a rectangular
glasshouse,which we also bid, the contractor reassured that we can offer a
precise description that can readily assimilate his input.
There is certainly an interesting shift in
logic, here, not only in the continuity of creative process into manufacture -
they are seamless, in a sense - but that such elastic descriptive capacity
offers a precision without determinism or without auto-determinism:
the form infinitely more complex than we’d have designed.
It marks the shift, which I’ll qualify more in relation to another
project, from what I’d call autoplastic to alloplastic ‘space’,
both in the creative process and in the architectural itself. Autoplastic
being a determinate, fixed environment - one 'designs', auto-dictates - and alloplastic
an indeterminate, open description, a reciprocal relation between environment
and self.
In our creative process we're here in
a mode of plastic reciprocity: we’re setting parameters which release forms
which we then interrogate technically, aesthetically, etc. Such back and forth
process condenses a compelling final form as a sort of trapping of such
indeterminacy, and which itself, in a quite subtle way, becomes alloplastic
in its responsiveness, in its capacity to modify to environmental stimuli.
Pallas
House (in collaboration with Objectile)
The Pallas
House developed not so much out of a concern for elastic modes of
description, but looked to capture an energetics in material form as a sort of frozen
calculus. The house was for a developer fascinated by new technology
who asked that we try to attain the formal sophistication of product design,
which suggested an approach that utilized generative software linked directly
to automated manufacturing techniques.
The design then developed as an attempt to take to full architectural
scale the experimental generative and manufacturing potential of Objectile
software (Cache/Beauce), which permits surfaces and forms to be generated
mathematically in formats suitable for direct manufacture by CNC machine. But our fascination was much more in the
implied drift of design process into calculus-imagining, and the release of a
new genera(c)tive potential implicit in such working method.
The complex external skin was imagined as a
sort of arabesque screen as a filter to the harsh tropical climate, and it developed as a series of
formulaically-derived complex-curved shells, incised with numerically-generated
glyphs which capture the trace of a curve differentially mapped onto a rotating
solid. At first glance its subtle
morphing is perhaps unremarkable - virtually a standard cladding-surface,
albeit of synchopated rhythm. But at a
level of detail, where the surface captures a movement and develops as a fluid
trapping of thickness, there's a shiver of a new logic, the perforations
opening and closing according to orientation as a sort of frozen
responsiveness: an entirely non-standard surface. As variable electro-glyphs incised in a subtely curving plane,
the project hints at new possibilities of numeric craft and decora(c)tion and a
sort of melt-down of expressivity, a formal diffusion in the capture of
a latent possibility which we characterized as an active inert.
Here the implicit suggestion is that one
might translate the cathode-ray scanning of a screen to a numeric-command
machine (routing, milling, etc) to be able to apply complex calculus
derivatives directly to material surfaces.
The resulting data-derivative, of 'impossible' complexity, was to be
routed accurately in plywood and cast in aluminium or plastic. Here one might say (with Cache) that the image
becomes primary2,
begins to become the operative (pro-active) medium, our design function
displaced to that of fascinated sampler of endless computational
patterning. The skin in this sense
became elastic in that it was no longer conceived as a model or representation
of fixity, but became suspended as a norm-surface,
responsive to parametric input from client, engineer or architect, a flexible
matrix of possibility.
Aegis
The idea of trapping movement was carried
forward in another project, Aegis, which won an invited competition
earlier this year and has now been commissioned. It has developed as a speculation on
the alloplastic condition referred to above, and as a vehicle for
foregrounding current operative design strategies. It was devised in response to a competition for an art piece for
the Hippodrome theatre in Birmingham, specifically for the ‘prow’ which
emerges from the depth of the foyer to cantilever over the street. The brief simply asked for a piece which
would in some way portray on the exterior that which was happening on the
interior - that it be a dynamic and ‘interactive’ art work.
The resultant project is simple
in its conception: one might even say that it is nothing or that it highlights the
nothing – the everyday events which occur in the theatre around it. It is a simple surface - metallic and
facetted - an inert backdrop to events.
But it is a surface of potential which may suddenly be released -
and in response to stimuli captured from the theatre environment it can
dissolve into movement - supple fluidity or complex patterning. It
is therefore a translation surface, a sort of synaesthetic
transfer device, a surface-effect as cross-wiring of the senses. It plays the field of art as it alternates
between foreground and background states, an emergent decora(c)tion
which then vanishes-as-trace.
The surface will be capable of
registering any pattern or sequence which we can generate mathematically, and
launched by an embedded network of half a dozen Scenix microchips. It deforms physically according to stimuli
captured from the environment, which may be selectively deployed as active or
passive sensors. It will be linked to
the base electrical services of the
building which are to be operated using a coordinated bus system, such that all
electrical activity can feed into its operational matrix. But additional input from receptors of
noise, temperature and movement will be sampled by a program control monitor
which will select a number of base mathematical descriptions, each
parametrically variable in terms of speed, amplitude, direction, etc. The elastic surface will then be driven by a
bed of about 3,000 pneumatic pistons, which offer a displacement performance of
some 600mm 2-3 times per second!
As a device of translation
upon translation Aegis highlights the extent of writing systems (mathematical,
programmatic, machine code, etc) in their utter saturation of the cultural
field, writing now become primary.
But the project seeks to emphasize the irreducibly human aspects of such
iterative processes, playing on the slippages between domains and the pleasures
of forms of notation (the ‘elegance’ of programmatic description, for instance,
or the 'humour' of the mathematics).
Certainly we foreground the extent to which mathematics underpins almost
all CAD operating systems, making explicit that which is implicit in
simulations of time and force, revealing their generative precepts. Working with a high-level mathematician has
been liberating (maths is his language
of mischief!), opening rather than delimiting the range of generative
possibility.
Alloplastic
In a sense Aegis explores
potential shifts in cultural as much as technical pattern, looking for new
potentials offered by an electronic creative environment, and for me it begins
to venture into psychological territory – into the ‘psychologies of
(electronic) perception’. The
characteristic cultural strategy of the twentieth century has widely been
characterized as that of shock - a dis/re-orienting wrench of cultural
expectation. Walter Benjamin,in his
essay ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, for instance, characterizes
the effective art-work as a shock, which assaults the viewer, similar to
Heidegger’s term, ‘Stoss’, literally a blow. It was Nietzche who suggested that modern man
“is a reactive, no longer active
creature”, and it is perhaps such cultural reactivity which now begins
to dissipate as we enter a profligate and spontaneous space of digital creativity.
Stoss –
shock – is a reactive strategy, still reliant on a legitimizing cultural
origin and the very structures of representation that it calls into question:
it is a reactivity-against. My sense is of a dissipation of the
shock-effect and the development of irreferent creative processes - metonymic
and freely associative rather than metaphoric and representative. Not so much a dis/re-orientation as an
endless suspension of the possibility of orientation. This has been characterized, quite legitimately,
I think, as no longer a cultural mode of shock but a mode of trauma,
trauma occuring almost as a suspension of shock, a stimulated absence…
Classically trauma occurs as the
struggle of the mind to capture an event which has escaped registration, occurs
on the site of a conceptual gap, the
mind searching restlessly for a missing referent. This motivated suspension, or precise indeterminacy - no
longer reactive but interactive - seems to mark an emergent form of cultural capacity markedly at
odds with accounts of extant cultural patterns. If one looks to Gombrich, for instance, in his ‘Sense of Order’ (circa
1960? and subtitled, interestingly enough, ‘the psychologies of
perception’), he continually asserts that the mind cannot tolerate sustained
dis-orientation and will quickly ground it in reference. But with computational power, as here, to
calculate real-time 10,000 points physically moving in space, where transformation
replaces the notion of origin as operative principle, dis-orientation
and trauma emerge into a fully interactive
cultural milieu. And trauma, as shock, is not simply
debilitating - it stimulates wildly, often triggering neglected modes of
cognition as a highly activated ‘sampling’ of experience, seemingly calling the
bodily senses into play cognitively and creating a highly charged proprioreceptive
state.
The terms autoplastic and alloplastic
to which I referred are psychological
terms, introduced by Ferenczi in his studies of trauma, in which (effectively)
he extended Freud’s notion of trauma as
resulting from dramatic situations of stress, to a much more generalized
social theory. In Ferenczi’s terms an autoplastic environment is one where the
subject is challenged by a highly determining context and is forced to
auto-adapt in the face of such resistance which can lead to neuroses of
trauma. He contrasts this with an alloplastic
environment in which there is the possibility of a reciprocal transformation
in which both subject and environment negotiate interactively.
The terms I implicate here to
make the suggestion that as we seemingly pass to a cultural mode of trauma, we might think this transition in
terms of a shift from autoplastic to alloplastic mode. Both in terms of cultural production
- the fluid processural negotiations with a software environment - and cultural
reception - the transformative effects of an electronic environment becoming
actual.
Paramorph
(Gateway)
A final project, which has just
been shortlisted to the final four in a quite large open competition is a
Gateway to the South Bank in London - simply negotiating between the new Eurostar
terminal at Waterloo and the Royal Festival Hall, National Film
theatre, etc - actually the pedestrian passage under a railway
viaduct. We took a cue from Paul Virilio
in his suggestion that the last vestige of the gateway to the city is the
ephemeral scanning-device at airports, but which for us already extends in
depth throughout the city as a vast network of monitoring and surveillance
devices which regulate, implicitly or explicitly, patterns of behaviour. The gateway, it might fairly be said is
around us and within us, exists everywhere in an electronic urban environment
as an endless sytem of subliminal regulatory thresholds.
The usual refrain is that this
represents the tyrrany of technology, manipulating behaviour
oppressively. But my sense is that
there are many other possibilities as this technological network becomes
multiplicitous - the sort of Jacques Tati vision of technology - where the
endless proliferation ends up in a sort of liberal chaos! Such vision is shared by Gianni Vattimo in
his effective update of McLuhan's technical treatises of the 1960s:
“Contrary to what critical sociology has long
believed, standardization, uniformity, the manipulation of concensus and the errors of totalitarianism are not
the only possible outcome of the advent of generalized communication, the mass
media and reproduction. Alongside these
possibilities – which are objects of political choice – there opens an alternative
possible outcome. The advent of the
media enhances the inconstancy and superficiality of experience… The society of the spectacle spoken of by
the situationists is not simply a society of appearance manipulated by power:
it is also the society in which reality presents itself as softer and more
fluid, and in which experience can again acquire the characteristics of
oscillation, disorientation and play.”
So we imagined the Gateway as Playtime(!)
- a trapping device of the patterns and rhythms of movement of which the
site is a point of confluence - a sort of urban theatre, but a virtual mirror
not of pattern, but of discrepancy: how the site diverges from itself.
‘Trapping’ I use in the double sense of decoration and capture, and as a
means of emphasizing the ornamentality of such technologies in offering
a mapping of patterns of cultural behaviour now no longer as a threshold
condition but dispersed throughout the city, in transit… The site will play
itself back to itself, but geared to its difference from itself, highlighting
the moments at which regular pattern degenerates. It will operate as a play-back device which actually begins to
encourage interraction - a 'ministry of silly walks'!
Again, we’ve worked from nothing,
from the base void presented to us, which we’ve then looked to distort not just
parametrically but paramorphically. A 'paramorph' being a body with the same
constituent elements, but which takes on different forms. Following on from his work mapping Gaudi's Sagrada
Familia church in Barcelona, Mark
Burry developed a paramorphic principle beginning with a constrained cube, but
which warps off plane by plane as a sequential transformation of the same.
The initial form was derived from the idea of trapping noise - that the
noise of the overlapping transport systems will cause the paramorphe to distort
radically, here into convoluted loops.
But the apparently non-standard and serial deformation of the resultant
series of shells belies a common principle or property, which in this case
is that they are describeable with ruled surfaces, lend themselves to ready
description and hence construction…
We are still thinking through the
consequences of this latest technological strategy, but undoubtedly we’re beginning to explore a quite new creative
possibility: that of a constrained yet radically open environment...
Conclusion
In these projects we
continually find ourselves asking 'what ‘is’ technology?' We take it in a broad cultural sense, as
have many of the thinkers of technology this century: for Heidegger, technology
as Ge-Stell, enframing, man continually setting up frames by which to
comprehend and modify being. Even McLuhan, who was quite specific about various
technologies, defines technology quite vaguely and non-technically as the
‘extensions of man’ - not simply a mechanical
prosthesis but any
sense in which man ‘outers’ his internal capacity. For him, too, technology is not merely an external device, but
one that actively infiltrates back within the organism, changing patterns of
thought and cultural desire: “man creates a tool, the tool changes man” -
changes his imagination, crucially.
So we might think of technology as the base
cultural textile,as the pattern of thought itself, almost. But this would be to take, certainly
Heidegger, to a quite radical conclusion - that technology is not just the sum
total of the machines at man’s disposal, but encompases the shifts in the
patterns of thought they engender. But
in light of the current technological shift, which is not so much informatic
machines and their calculating power, but more crucially a global society
coming to terms with electronics (with greatly expanded possibilities of mass
communication) it seems justified to stretch Heidegger a little. In fact that’s the question, I think: to ask
to what extent current shifts in the very nature of technology demand an
interrogation of accounts such as Heidegger’s or Benjamin’s.
Such questions might preface how we, as
architects, capture the liberties and pleasures offered by such transition -
the shifts in cultural and not merely technical possibility. And
if one doubts the possibility of cultural liberation engendered by technology
one only has to think of Benjamin’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
which announces the loss of ‘aura’ of the art-work without pessimism (with
enthusiasm, actually), the cult value of the art-work and its basis in ritual
giving way to its exhibition value, to art’s being able to participate
much more closely in quotidian life…
In looking for the potential of a new
technology, for new patterns of cultural production and reception, I think that
there is a new environment of reciprocity opening which one can begin to
identify and act upon, which perhaps begins to ‘make legible’ the full range of
parameters that impinge on the act of architecture. Suddenly the entire process can
factor in the design methodology: we’re able to ‘relax’ a form of Foster’s to
reflect fluctuations in budget, able to capture the patterns of habitation
real-time in form, able to map patterns of discrepancy.
This, then, is simply an attempt to
understand how we’re working - not conjecturing too much about how we will
work, but simply qualifying the experience of practice that’s happening to us
in the present. Our response to the
question of rapid technological change is positive, but reflective, as we seek
to recognize the current technological shift underway and to interrogate it not
just in its evident formal capacity but in its quite subliminal affect on
cultural manner. Heidegger and Benjamin take on crucial
significance in this, and their evident inheritors - McLuhan, Derrida, Vattimo
- and I find my desire to disturb or stretch their formulations (as, I admit, a
still-reactive cultural practitioner) qualified by an appreciation for
their insight. Most particularly for
Benjamin’s optimism which I think has been born out in the liberalism of
the present.
In talking of technology Heidegger suggests
that the setting up of Ge-Stell, of
frameworks, enables man to separate a World from the Earth.
That he says ‘a’ world and not ‘the’ world I think is poignant,
suggesting that there are myriad possibilities available in what has evidently
become a technological heterotopia. It’s the differences and dialects of that
new environment that seem to me compelling, and which we as a team variously
pursue, looking to explore the range of cultural possibility offered by a new
technology - its liberating pleasures - in multiple ways…
CREDITS
FOSTER/FORM - formal Studies for Foster & Partners
Design Team: Mark Goulthorpe, Gaspard Giroud, Arnaud Descombes
Technical Design: Prof Mark Burry at the University of Deakin, Australia
Mathematical Studies: Alex Scott, UCL
LUSCHWITZ/BREMNER HOUSE
Kensington, London, 1999
Design Team: Mark Goulthorpe, Gabrielle Evangelisti
Technical Design: Prof Mark Burry of the University of Deakin, with Greg More
Engineers: Tom Grey of RFR, Paris
PALLAS HOUSE
Bukit Tunku, Malaysia, 1997
Design Team: Mark Goulthorpe,
Matthieu le Savre, Karine Chartier, Nadir Tazdait, Arnaud Descombes, with Objectile
(Bernard Cache, Patrick Beaucé)
Engineers: Ove Arup – David Glover, Sean Billings, Andy Sedgewick
HYSTERA PROTERA
Studies in the decora(c)ting of structure, 1996
Design Team: Mark Goulthorpe, Arnaud Descombes
AEGIS
Design Team: Mark Goulthorpe, Mark Burry, Oliver Dering, Arnaud Descombes
Technical Support: The University of Deakin, Australia: Prof Mark Burry, Grant Dunlop
Programming: Peter Wood, University of Wellington, NZ
System Engineering/Design: Chris Glasow of Andromeda Telematics, London
Mathematics: Dr Alex Scott, UCL
Engineering: David Glover and Sean Billings of Ove Arup & Partners, London
PARAMORPH
Competition for a Gateway to the South Bank, London, 1999
Design Team: Mark Goulthorpe, Gaspard Giroud, Gabrielle Evangelisti, Felix Robbins
Design/Technical support: Prof Mark Burry, the University of Deakin, Australia, with Grant Dunlop, Greg More
Electronics/Audio: Chris Glasow, Louis Dandrel
Engineers: David Glover, Sean Billings, Ove Arup & Partners, London