Week 5 - Intro to 4-Dimensional Diagramming

Tutor: Florian Heise

Design Aims.


"A place where people learn and experience bodily sensations"


The aims set by Florian leaves the students open to experiment with a large range of concepts. By doing this, the student can concentrate on the architectural experimentation of form and fully engage in the learning experience of 4D Diagramming.


Class Description.


Examine, emulate, and interrogate various approaches to the application of animation software to architectural design. This will develop a series of concept designs for our project. 


Tutorial.


The tutorial set the scene for the rest of the semester. Florian showed us his work regarding the use of animations to influence the building fabric. One of the experiments was quite interesting; through the use of particle tracing he was able to create a building form. This type of experiment visually seems to lends itself towards a design which expresses structure for aesthetic purposes.  This is shown below.

This sort of experiment has been done on a site with a very small footprint. This means Florian's variables would have to have been very tightly controlled to keep the particles within the boundaries. If we bring a similar technique to the howard smith wharves site, there is a far greater opportunity to create a much more expressive form that could react to the river along with other elements and disperse along the site.


Due to the complexity of the systems being used, it was hard to get a grasp of what Florian was actually doing. But after completing the readings, it became clear what systems Florian was using and what other possibilities we have at hand.


Readings.

The readings discussed the use of computer simulation to aid the design process, rather than using them just to extrude a form from a plan. The Architecture in the Digital Age reading comments “The plan no longer ‘generates’ the design; sections attain a purely analytical role”. By this, Kolarevic refers to the power of designing through digital mediums to create architectural that doesn’t conform to a plan but has an infinite number of possible outcomes. After using the computer to create from, the plan and section is used to analyse and understand the form.

The various ways to generate form through polysurfaces, morphing, keyframing, inverse kinematics, particle systems, space warps and so on, brings a whole new dimension to design. The way you can create objects that respond and relate to each other has a very large integration into architecture.

Before architects used to design a building to respond to a site or nearby elements, by assuming some sort of relationship. Now an architect can actually set up the strengths of relationships in space and get a visual representation of the pure responses of elements next to each other. This medium of design is very abstract and peels the context back to its most basic level. 

Experimentation.