Gilles Retsin: Bits & pieces: discrete architecture (December 5, 2018)

good evening welcome to CyArk I am David rhew I'm chair of postgraduate studies here and it's my pleasure to introduce you to gio retsyn gio retsyn has us practice in london he is program director of be pro architectural design at the Bartlett he is a practicing architect as well that's the official part Geel is part of a I guess the Star Trek next generation so people like me and her nan and I'm whisking someone other people here were kind of Spock and Captain Kirk etc you're you're Picard and so on right so I think a number of things have changed since the initial adoption of computation and the digital as a discourse of architecture I think back when I was trying to establish myself I think there was a lot of hope for the future how machines and technologies and new ways of thinking could somehow liberate the formal ambitions we had I think and maybe now we're living through a time when we're maybe a little bit more sober about this and it's not entirely utopian or a happy story so I I just wanted to start with this picture because you know architecture for since inception has struggled with the problem of putting together discrete elements to produce an illusion of continuity and it spans millennia to our most recent century and and I think we we deal with this kind of problem all the time as architects we have to lay the bricks and these generic elements and ultimately produce some illusion perhaps of the continuous but this dichotomy of what's continuous and what's discrete I think continues to trouble us and I think this is one of the two things said maybe I just want to put on the table here as a way of introduction to zeal I think there are two issues here looking at yields work that I find relevant for us to pay attention to one is then with the current generation of architects that are taking a hardcore stab at the problem of computation itself the recognition that computation is a discreet method and maybe we should abandon this illusion of continuity so I just pulled this from your website shield and it's if anything a kind of a strong image of and maybe in aesthetics of the discreet and I think one thing that I consider when I look at your work shield is what might be lost in the abandonment of the aesthetics of the continuous and one might be gained and are we seeing a new new static category or an old one I wonder so that's one the question of the discrete the second I think maybe is the question of automation I think in our embrace of machines I could liberate the our formal desires within the discipline I think machines and technologies have been - as the engine of that and what's not to like about technological progress I guess but here's maybe just a counterpoint that I just want to also put on this table about with regards to automation earlier this year I've struck by this op-ed by Thomas Edsel who's writing some incredible op-ed for the New York Times with this amazing title robots can't vote but they helped elect Trump so later in their article he cites this map that was produced by some research at MIT that basically just did a kind of head count of where the robots are and makes the observation that there's something that this tells us about why some of the red states flipped or the blue states flip to red and a lot of people essentially got put out of work so automation is something that I never anticipated in the 90s would have a kind of unanticipated economic effect of substituting labor and I think maybe in this kind of second wave of consideration of our digital technologies and what it means for design we can't really ignore some of these consequences so with that light light note I'd like to welcome Jill great thank you David for the introduction thanks to the Shire community for getting me over here um I think actually was a really good introduction because it actually covers a lot of the topics that are in my talk which ranges really from kind of historical concerns with part-to-whole relationships to automation to questions of politics so it's it's actually that kind of dark and note I think is quite important so um as a kind of disclaimer so my talk is as usual pretty MP part I always try to do another talk which is a really bad idea but I have brought kind of three objects with me or three devices with me from London to kind of help me do the talk so I brought a box I brought Greg Lin's curve I brought this one Domino as well and so with this kind of three devices I kind of tried to to to talk about that notion of of the discrete oh and I also brought malevich's black square as well so let's start with box so I'm the box and I think it's kind of perhaps that it's most kind of radical in this image this is an image by Andreas Gursky and that's an image that really for me kind of defines what the digital is today so the digital is not about kind of funky glossy kind of you know Star Trek forums that I removed from this world but it's completely embedded in the world it's made of cardboard in a way it's made of banal objects that we order on Amazon and the interesting thing of this in this image which is basically full of kind of cardboard boxes is the logic with which these boxes are organized so these boxes are organized within human logic they're basically organized with very precise algorithmic concerns of which shampoo we order most or which book is most likely to be ordered etc so none of these elements which apparently look on first view would look very banal and very normal very everyday they actually have a kind of an algorithmic logic behind them and it's interesting to kind of look at images like this like this on warehouses and really proposed that these images are actually digital production so digital production is even aesthetically I think far removed from what architects traditionally have thought that it was like this kind of almost modernist clean white space is actually a space of digital production so when you when we involve a great limbs curve in that story of course Greg Lynn scarf was trying to read architecture of its parts it was actually a proposal of an architecture that is only whole that is always whole that it starts out as a whole and just kind of changes and morphs into another whole and it was a rejection of the modernist notion of basically discrete parts of our elements that are assembled and then create an illusion of of continuity as was mentioned before like this is was meant to not be an illusion he was meant to basically be an architecture without parts but of course and I will actually steal that word illusion I think that's that's quite interesting that what David suggested of course like the moment that you then want to create continuous work following Greg Linds curve you inevitably end up with with a surface and you end up kind of with the notion that digital fabrication robots automation that they are there to kind of help you establish that overall form so while there are no parts involved in the design process at the very last minute before it comes into the world you basically make use of robots to derive all the part so all of these parts have no role in the design process they're not on the same kind of level of of importance they they're merely there as a kind of a domestication of the whole and that that paradigm went under the kind of denominator of mass customization so the idea in the 90s was essentially that with digital technologies you would be able to customize everything in reality that has been kind of mainly and for a very weird reason only been reduced to shoes like actually the only kind of product that really follows the kind of digital IDs of the 90s including like biological references our shoes right so parametric system has it's kind of like future in English use so if you google digital architecture today or like digital plus architectural not digital architecture but this kind of to words you really get kind of a broad to that you know what I would say can attack a paradigm of the night shoe right so you see this kind of objects which have very kind of references to to nature to biological systems etc and they're all kind of based on that notion of of mass customization and that notion of basically you know form that that can be created by domesticating its parts so when I started my practice and after graduating I really wanted to take a kind of a big distance from from this world although I do have to say like I always show these images to debate you know to kind of provoke but then I recently discovered two of those images I need to I need to recycle those so essentially like if you if you if you look today at that concern of of mass customization the image on the left has been used a lot by by architects in the past to basically describe the relationship between production and an architectural language so that's the fourth Factory where you see serialized production and then the architecture kind of responds to that as well the kind of universal serialized production but while this image was used to really dismiss in a way a kind of that paradigm of of see reality of discreteness and mass production in a way the what we see today that actually the paradigm of mass customization actually looks like this space and the very least that you can say is that the contemporary spaces of spaces of digital production and the old image of cereal production that they at least have a kind of an ambiguous relationship they're not this kind of hyperbolic future as an IQ tries to tell us that it is but it's actually much more much closer related to that old system of production and the thing that is that is different in that image is not actually the form but it's actually the system of organization between power that is different and that's also something like this is just as a kind of a provocation but it's also something that you really see in the in digital objects so digital objects today the most prolific ones are not masks customized I think probably 60% of the audience has the same black eye phone in their pocket you can choose any color you want as long as it's black so what kind of yes so if you kind of look at those spaces you could suggest and that's something that the discreet proposes that actually the digital is hasn't it's not primarily something that has a kind of a formal repercussion but it's actually a system that has deep political and social repercussions to it one of which was mentioned in the introduction the kind of the kind of political consequences basically of automating labor so I edited a volume of architectural design called the discrete which will come out in April next year that brings together basically a generation a new generation of people that tries to understand the digital not from this kind of paradigm of continuity and mass customization and not as something that is primarily about form but basically looking at the digital as a system that has political and social consequences and I kind of starts from the notion that by reintroducing the parts that we could actually start to capitalize on certain political possibilities of the digital and I I think anyway I'm just kind of very briefly going over these images from the introduction which kind of show a certain kind of you know a certain everyday norm hyperbolic but very committed project of the digital and did this talk I mean I won't actually talk too much about the the kind of the overall paradigm of the discrete in this talk I will mainly talk about my own work as a as an architect I will probably do another lecture at some point about you know the discrete as a kind of project kind of a shared approach so in a way so you get this kind of between the modernist notion of assembly the discrete is kind of a weird kind of parallel in a very kind of a symmetry to that notion where parts where basically you get universal generic parts back in the game so the the other device so this was kind of roughly basically talking a bit about discrete is talking a bit about Greg Linds curve as a device so the next two devices that will briefly use are the box and the Domino so the the box is a kind of it's a theoretical device that I developed which is basically inspired by some of Slavoj Zizek statements that sometimes you need to oversimplify things to find the kind of the core like he's saying we think too much in shades of gray and we should be kind of more black and white so this box basically helps as a device to oversimplify architectural history and I'm sorry for the people who teach architects on history here in CyArk like the next slides I really blunt and very untrue but but I think but also very productive so the metal box basically consists of points math lines and surfaces and what it allows you to do is kind of oversimplify architectural history so in this little diagram you see kind of what yeah like a textual history like what we have done until now so it could roughly argue that everything was based on mass until until basically early modernism where instead of operating on the level of the metal box itself on the level of the mass you basically start to operate on the level of planes and aligns and essentially then the kind of the parametric project is a liquid is a liquid version of that surface project which we just discussed so then if you're a young architect and if you graduate and you want to do something new the only kind of parts that are left in the box to play with in the metal box are essentially the points right so we can kind of do a project based on the the most on the most discrete parts of those box whereas the other parts in the box have kind of been used this is the tacky version of the same diagram so you can kind of see like you know the project of basically Porsche a mass etc the project of of lines and then the liquid if ocation of that project and then the kind of the project in way of points or data the project off of discreteness and we can do the same kind of a really blunt kind of architectural history course with a with a domino so this is also like architectural history until modernism right so so everything is essentially based on their own mass right on the compression walls and then you have this kind of really interesting moment where essentially architecture flips inside out like that's the kind of the most radical moment that ever happened to architecture when the Domino enters the field so it when the Domino comes architecture completely changes like it literally flips inside out it's all of a sudden no more notion of a facade there's no more notion of walls essentially and it completely changes right and so the Domino is a kind of it's a very persistent model like it's it's really difficult to get rid of it Philippe Morel calls it the universal Turing machine of architecture everything you try to do kind of comes back to this model and you know hits you back in the face and you're kind of still struggling a lot with trying to deal with that extremely successful model and I think it's also really interesting as an architectural model because it kind of it's really on the line between being genius and stupid which is I think something that architecture you know always situates itself at like like this model is so in one way so stupid that the curve is e even when he developed it didn't actually recognize that this was a genius model it took him roughly 20 years to understand that this was actually the most radical thing that he had done right and it's also kind of you know it's it's important to recognize it did this kind of persistence of that model and I'll just skip this so basically like that model in the next version of like in the next decade of blunt architectural history diagrams that model persisting it keeps kind of being in the background of of architectural moves rights like it's a in terms of part-to-whole relationships it's it's always kind of operating behind how things look like and even today like today this basically comes back button colored versions like this is so did this was basically you know post-modernism deconstructivism the parametric project kind of object project and then today like you get these rehashes with with a kind of a color scheme of those projects right but essentially like under the skin of all of those things you still have this kind of universal Turing machine of architecture that kind of metal Domino that supports all of those all of those moves right and if you then look at architects you kind of realize that in a way the Domino is there and then it's essentially kind of fitted out with a certain meaning like in the parametric computational project is fitted out with a kind of a computational meaning like it's actually kind of communicating to you that you know that they're digital that the computer has been used in the design process of fitting out his Domino in a kind of object project it communicates that it's an object and you know so when when when I graduated from DAA and started my practice this was one of the first projects I did together with with is a block and it was a kind of a project where we decided to do everything that was not allowed to do at AAA that we were not supposed to do which was you know doing an object making something that has a material quality etc and what I realized when doing this project is that actually the thing that interested me most was not the you know was not actually the object itself but what interested me most was kind of the the wild organization of parts that that yeah like this kind of zooming in almost on the objects like it was I it was actually the organization of parts rather than the kind of the overall form or the figure that was of interest to me and this and kind of continued in a in a series of projects which were always still defined by an object or by a kind of you know overall figure but always a kind of the moment that for me is interesting is the organization of this part so I started kind of kind of questioning really true through those projects if actually if actually the you know the overall figure or the form for me was most relevant at all right if actually my project should be concerned to that so um yeah so I started to work kind of with more and more generic containers in a way to allow to allow this organization of parts to to take place and in many ways I would like to kind of also argue that that effort of kind of reading itself of the kind of the figure or the form it's also in a very kind of a mode of resistance to to kind of an extremely image driven culture that happens after after the end of modernism which in this book by rené de Graaff is described and it's really a project that kind of wants to resist basically the reduction of architecture to surface I think that's almost like a political project so you could argue that architecture today happens kind of in this like one centimeter space between you know the suspended ceiling and the next suspended ceiling below it's red so basically this entire world is kind of extra architectural and we we are kind of reduce basically to that kind of just merely that the kind of surface that then communicates whether you're interested in computation or in or in history or in other notions right so the entire kind of interest of architecture is actually situated today outside of architecture we are just reduced to this mere line so my kind of project was really interested in in a way kind of rebelling or revolting against that kind of reduction to the surface and kind of trying to see if we could again colonizer occupy basically the volume where difficult extant architecture again to this kind of space and why is that important like you could say that's I mean for me it's important as a designer but it also has big consequences for our profession for a kind of potential political impact and this is like pretty dry but like these are just some diagrams from the economists which basically shows the productivity of construction versus other industries and a large part of the reason why our cadets are you know why the profession of architecture is kind of in in some way in crisis with being very low paid being reduced to that surface is partially because we're not able to to to kind of get this productivity up right and that like that's not a funny diagram this basically shows the digitisation like the level of digitization in the construction industry so we are right here just to both hunting so hunting is actually the least digitized profession because it's not fun to hunt with drones and you know like it's an artisanal sport right agriculture is actually globally below construction that actually if you look at the Western world it's actually right here on top right so it's actually just between kind of construction and hunting like who's more primitive and that of course results that has major complications like the fact that we are not dealing with automation and digitization as major consequences for things like housing crisis accessibility to housing etc and it's important like my kind of statement is basically that part of the reason like we cannot really automate or digitize architecture if we are reduced to this surface like we actually need to kind of in a way colonize back that volume in order to access those questions and it's it's it's also important to realize like until now kind of the the only thing architects have kind of come up with in terms of digitization and automation is what I would say kind of really restricted to hipster ideas like the Fab Lab like you can see the hipster here with beard and the glasses and it's kind of the idea that you know purely true things like a Fab Lab that you could actually increase access to to housing which is I think a very kind of naive idea right so so this is really like where this notion of of automation comes in like the question I could we actually start to shift thinking from mere like digital design actually starting to think about automation and I actually also think that's a kind of both notion of being digital and a notion of being post digital like the realization that if automation is all around us and if part of the everyday that actually we could just take that onward and try to think about it and I actually think that automation is really a design project so it's not a it's not a project of robots it's actually a project of architects trying to figure out how how we could automate so in a way like this part of the lecture is kind of a long-winded kind of disclaimer a little bit about kind of a you know a kind of foundation that I operate on as a designer right and it comes also a little bit from my kind of schizophrenic background between coming from having worked in Switzerland before I went to the two David's with Christian carats essentially we were operating on the kind of the fundamental aspects of this Domino rather than on the surface right so anyway my my architecture kind of comes from this kind of background of both being interested in computation but then also being interested in this kind of disciplinary kind of hardcore of architecture so the problem is if you if you want to actually design an architecture without Hall right so an architecture without a figure in architecture that only consists of parts how can we actually keep authorship in that like how can we prevent a kind of World of Warcraft architecture but I would actually kind of author and did like develop design methodologies in this kind of in in this kind of ultra discreet world like how can you design without drawing right and previously in the in the kind of digital design world that question has been answered with what I call the kind of shopping mall of algorithms like these are all kind of cliche algorithms that have been used by architects to organize basically lots of discrete parts into into buildings right so that is kind of projected onto onto architecture rather than those rules kind of coming really from architects so we have like Voronoi diagrams swarms cellular automata etc but the question for me is really like could we actually develop those kind of rules of how we organize parts without that kind of indexical relationship to a natural algorithm and initially this is my graduation project from from daa initially that kind of you know really works still in that kind of natural algorithm world right and I think also like if you actually although there are lots of interesting aspects of this basically that it also operates as a volume but essentially you could also still read the kind of a figure in there like you can on one that you you need an algorithm to organize all of those materials but in the end you can still look at it and kind of look at it as a kind of a figural figure of project so the same at this work which is the Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki like that project is kind of working towards essentially looking at an increased notion of parts but at the same time it's still easy to kind of draw or sketch that project like you still Rita project basically as as kind of volume and a big horizontal slab but it's still the parts I still kind of domesticated to to construct that Hall and looking back at the project actually the part that I think that was actually most successful for me was the least figure part is actually this floor slab here so when I finished that project this the floors left rotted and the kind of the extravagant roof structure became a kind of a driver for the for the next work and on the one hand like when you're inside of this building like that this is the big exhibition hall you kind of there's kind of a moment that the figure of the hole disappears and you're purely in a kind of world that is defined by an organization of parts which is you know you kind of get rid more of the figure when when you're in the interior of that building which brings us to the next object that I took from London which is the black square from Olivet and this is really kind of for me very interesting to talk about you know the question of figure whole and parts and it may also access the notion of abstraction so when you look at this painting the questions like how did Mali which actually draw this paint this painting like did he you know he established him onto the black square but did he actually start to you know to paint to follow the brush strokes kind of along the edges to to construct his abstraction or did he did he actually go diagonally through this painting which then gives you a really big problem when you hit the corner point or did he paint it kind of in a random motion right or did he first draw a duck and then went over it again as a kind of you know as a kind of joke you know so so it's a it's really intriguing to kind of a thing basically how how you can make a painting that is that abstract right or did he first use masking tape and then kind of paint the whole thing but then isn't like the masking tape then the you know the black square rather than the actual black square so you could essentially do like almost an entire exhibition of it with black squares right which could all have an entirely different ontology behind him like some of them could be done you know you know with all the different paradigms and funny enough the black square today looks like this in a in Tate Modern so it actually kind of cracked into a into a Voronoi diagram today so so so this is really interesting in terms of basically problems of you know kind of matter parts versus the construction of this abstraction right and today it's actually very easy to do proper black squares you know that can actually deal with the abstraction like you could easily compute basically every pixel and not have to deal with is kind of you know these kind of questions and in many ways you could have I'm kind of interested in the question then like if that's the you know you have those problems in the black square but actually if you make the black cube you kind of confronted in a way with with similar problems and if you look at the people who before we had the computer kind of could any way deal with that level of abstraction I like it my appeal Abstract Expressionists like Clifford still or Mark Rothko who basically managed to kind of acknowledge in a way that they were painting and didn't need they were kind of dealing with the brushstroke immediately in in the painting so my record of enters a little bit like after doing the Guggenheim entered in that domain where basically I decided that the figure is not important for me but basically purely that organization of the parts so you could actually this is a competition for the Liggett Museum in Budapest which I just decided to not be bothered about a figure at all about the outline of that building but essentially just kind of resolved this lapse into series a series of parts where the entire quality of the building and the entire interest is on that level of how you basically construct that abstraction rather than figure yeah and that's also something that kind of resonates in a way in a lot of the work we do today also has research like this is a research into robotic 3d printing which I do together with my colleague Manuel humanists where essentially we're not really bothered by the overall figure but merely develop algorithms that are able to kind of organize massive amount of parts into in respect to each other so the question is then like if you do that on a like textual scale this is the trunk of the Budapest Museum where basically that kind of gets resolved really in thousands of small linear elements that I a grenade together and then in the practice I started questioning more and more how how radical you could actually push that form of discreteness so it started to develop building elements like like this ones which are basically it's kind of hexagonal piles or chunks that that are aggregated which then resulted in projects like this which is sketch for a museum in Vienna at the Cairo spots and it's it's interesting like if you compare this project to to the Guggenheim project it's it actually doesn't really require the kind of to precisely define tall anymore like there's more and more agencies science to really the aggregation of the of the parts and this started to become really important in the in the block hearth project so the brachot project is a project by a friend of mine from Belgium that I studied together with he became a climate engineer which means that instead of an architect which means which meant that he had a lot of money and needed an architects and as he's you know as he was someone who was good with money the idea was to basically convince him he went to instead like Jill I know he will do something really crazy but tried to keep it kind of simple so the idea was basically to go to him and say like look the whole building is just based on this on this part and we'll just basically assemble all of those parts together into your house like your house is actually completely based on a kind of a rational civilization and the only thing you really have to pay extra for it is red zones which are the zones where those parts are customized and intersect so these red zones although they they do have a kind of a repeating pattern through them so that's a kind of the model for that building which is in a very kind of strange moment because it's it's really kind of working I think an interesting line between being organic and assembled and between familiar and weirds so to convince him that is that it was possible to build his we made this a big architectural model made of lots of plaster pieces that are assembled and essentially the model is kind of you know it's essentially a very stupid model if you try to do something like this as an architect because essentially you're building a horizontal brick wall right so the the only way how this could work was actually by adding a layer in tension on top of it which is this glass fiber layer here that keeps the the horizontal brick wall into place but anyway like we managed to kind of construct that model and compare it basically to the rendering and then kind of show him that that it's possible to to do this that's the kind of the fight the final image in the forest and yeah so and essentially like this building kind of really started to introduce that idea of driving that discreteness to to more and more radical moment where you really just have like one part that starts to the size to construct the size to construct a whole that project obviously didn't didn't happen like all of these nice arguments he didn't buy the project so then I recycled the exactly the same building system for another version of this museum again in Vienna to carve spots and it's interesting them to like look at this this building and basically the argument here that although it consists of things that look like slaps that essentially this building has actually no slapped like there and it also has no column it essentially just exists of an agglomeration or an assembly of parts yeah that also didn't happen of course so in the end that just takes kind of a piece of furniture so if we bring back Greg Linds curve and kind of try to understand basically what this kind of you know how far you could actually push a system that consists just off of one element the interesting thing is that those parts are always kind of immediately also organized in a in a volumetric way so for the next project is essentially zooming in almost on one of the competition projects in Vienna and kind of scaling up those parts and really understanding how they would be constructed so they essentially made of timber sheets that are assembled into this elf l-shaped building blocks so this is a multi-family home which means like there's basically three families living there and again the kind of argument is that this is a building that is to a certain degree as a kind of an excessive language but essentially consists of always the same parts that are assembled together so we have this kind of really large parts this hierarchy then you have smaller plants etc that are assembled together and well what is interesting for me here is that on that it's really kind of establishing an architecture that that has that is radical in terms of its qualities so you cannot look at this building and say that this again that this is a column this is actually I would argue ontologically two or three parts that together perform the function of a column so function is not embedded anymore in an architectural element but function becomes an emergent property of of the assembly itself and the the other strange thing is that essentially in this kind of spaces you get a kind of an an experience almost of phenomenologically of total continuity so although this is made out of discrete elements you're almost in a kind of a cave like organic environment where there is one material that constructs everything that surrounds while at the same time you can always at every point distinguish the building block and the part itself and like also when looking at this kind of architecture the idea is basically that this is a building that resists a super home or a super form there is no kind of predefined overarching form but there is essentially a form that is continuously unfinished aware the parts are on the same ontological level of importance as their kind of overall final state so you cannot kind of describe this building through a diagram or a super form you can also not understand it through an assembly of of slabs or columns you can really just kind of understand this as a series of of parts that continuously remain a part and that never at any points are kind of domesticated to be to be to be a whole right and so that's also kind of a Belgian move the Belgians are good at surrealism to say like that basically that this is not a column and this is this is not a slab but these are basically always kind of ontologically speaking remain kind of Assemblies of parts and of course that's that's a very difficult debate to have I always get attacked on the on making that statement like a lots of people saying like come on this is just like three slaps and this is a column right but and that's and that's also funny that this was actually in the introduction by David that of course this is a kind of a problem that architecture has struggled with for a long time and in many ways of course these Greek columns are also made of of discrete you know elements of stone that have been assembled but it's important that I think kind of ontologically speaking that on that level the stone itself has no importance is actually just merely there to kind of establish this column while in this case of these columns were resisting every part remains actually a part and and remains also kind of a readable part which is expressed by over exaggerating the joints and the the shadow gaps between the elements and again also important to kind of point out in terms of functionality that this part and this part is exactly the same there is no there is no more material in this building elements that there is in this building element so some of the parts perform a kind of a heroic function like here they're actually carrying a lot of loads and some of the other parts perform a kind of a silly function by just being merely you know decorative or kind of forming a seating surface yeah and it's in its it's interesting to kind of question at what moment basically a part gains ontologically that kind of Independence of the hall for example here in the the Baalbek megaliths that's a human here this is a building block so at this moment purely through kind of the scale of things you could argue that the power back megaliths in a way is a building where maybe the parts ontologically are on the same level of importance as the hall just merely because of the after incredible incredible dimensions and that's also kind of word maybe noting to kind of pitch in some of discussions that are also going on in the school here like that's really kind of this notion that Levi Bryant called a strange Mary ology right it's a moment that basically objects are ontologically on the same level of importance this famous flat ontology and I would kind of argue that to a certain extent this this body of work is kind of influenced by that idea of of creating a strange mary ology a moment where none of the parts are dependent on the whole but they kind of operate on the on the same level of importance it's also interesting in terms of domesticity like in many ways I would argue this is a kind of a very maybe millennial building so what you see like the like this floor plan is not accidentally kind of drawn like this you see it's a floor plan with a kind of a loser reigns or lose arrangements of of furniture and it's really kind of meant that in this building that you basically the the kind of the discrete parts operate to a certain extent they create this kind of almost cave-like structure but then everything else that basically caters for human needs is not part of the system this is something else that I get criticized for a lot but essentially the facade I'm completely uninterested in facades so the facade is absolutely not a part of the system there's no attempt to do that I think kind of the you know the kind of the the facade anyway is a kind of a completely separate project and the only thing it's trying to do is to basically not exist right to just kind of offer transparency but disappear as something that is a big architectural concern so all of the kind of the human domestic activities are taking place outside of the system which is this kind of also referenced in a way to another project by by super studio as a kind of a precedent so also things like the lighting for example there is actually no lighting embedded in and in the in the building itself it's all kind of just added and I deliberately just show the wire like it's really the idea that you almost go to a cave and kind of try to make it inhabitable the same either the speaker's here just kind of almost temporarily kind of positioned in that building also the stairs and doors in this case the stair is even not located in the building but is located outside of the perimeter wall and then they have a kind of a little bridge into the building so and that's actually something that carries through all the projects so everything that you know caters to the human is separate like also in this case the staircases are not part of the system all right in this case as well and that's something that also I think architectural II there's a lineage of doing this it's not for example here this building by a belgian architect julian Lampoon's we also see that essentially the architectural part is just the concern with these big concrete walls and then to make it inhabited and the inhabitable that's basically a series of objects added to it so then the kind of statement is then innovate and that's you know the term smooth he refers to to Deleuze and Guattari when they use when they talk about the smoothness try it which continues which continuously operate together and the same in architecture essentially the discrete and continuous are always in a dialogue together so and in many ways like that like that's kind of a an interesting comparison to say that in the end kind of what is discrete pieces established is a kind of an ultimate continuity so in many ways you there is a kind of a very interesting edge basically testing what you can consider continues on what you can consider this creat so I would argue that all of this Domino diagrams that I'm drawing here establish an architecture that is actually fin phenomenologically but also ontologically speaking continuous in the end we will with which is which is an interesting debate now that there are also some concerns that basically come from some basically benefits that that happened from this move did this radical reduction from architecture this kind of complicated assembly to a kind of an assembly that is oversimplified and almost almost stupid right like that's probably I think the most interesting move of the discrete is the consequences of reducing Architecture from on average an assembly of 7,000 parts and processes to essentially just a few parts and that's a very important notion for automation like that's actually why I'm saying also that automation is a is a design project because essentially if we want to automate this kind of syntax that is based on the 7,000 different parts we have a little bit of trouble if you want to automate that with a robots and this is essentially what architects have been trying to do for the past 20 years so the vision of thinking about robots has essentially been not to change the architecture but essentially you know have an orange robotic arm attack one of those 7,000 parts and that's of course it's a weird kind of effort these are five Korean page d students who have been automating robots to put floor tiles for five years so if you make the calculation how long it would take to automate architecture at large so that takes five Korean PhD students times five years times 7,000 parts right so of course it's it's a kind of a futile exercise to try to automate a system that is completely based on manual labor so it's actually a design project to try to rethink not the robot itself but essentially try to rethink the syntax of architecture and essentially all when I got hired at the Bartlett the question was they had bought a few of those orange robotic arms and the question was basically like you are young you need to do something with these robots we don't really know what to do with it and our kind of an initial idea was really to no two person basically the use of those robots and all of the robots kind of worldwide all of this orange machines essentially operates on a kind of a paradigm of you know craft or mass customization so they never thought of as means to really automate something but amaura meant as a kind of a kind of aesthetic exercise of of craft right so in a way what kind of the that the discrete body of work is trying to suggest this instead of looking at you know robots as this kind of world of you know digital design and doing cute and beautiful things essentially kind of look at it like how it operates in in in in the world of automation this is the Okada warehouse which is a fully automated warehouse in the UK where you basically all the vegetables tomatoes shampoo everything you want and this kind of little robots pick it up in this massive super studio like grits and then deliver it at it gets delivered at your doorstep and the light is only switched on here to make the picture in fact you don't even need their there there are no humans in this Factory and that's essentially a little bit the idea of like instead of looking at mass production as this kind of beautiful world could we actually also look at it at this kind of inhuman world of automation as something that could give think back to architecture and become a creative project which is you know what this kind of weird explorations by my students at the Bartlett are by trying to do yeah I'll just maybe quickly show I'm running a bit of a lot of time so just skip this yep so do the question and also my practice is essentially also question of scale which is the question like how large candice parts actually gets right like before it becomes another project so this project for Museum in Korea is essentially exploring parts that are extremely extremely large that's a that's a human here human scale figures so these are kind of 15 to 20 meters long CLT lumber elements that are assembled and then you you get something strange that basically ontological II speaking again this kind of the they're almost like on a megalithic else care it is kind of huge parts which are incredibly present in the building and also sorry to balance a kind of a weird read relation between what is figural and what is what is not figure because they are so large they're actually kind of almost micro figures that are assembled together so this whole museum consists of 273 parts they're actually exactly dis parts so if you take those parts you assemble them into this series of exhibition pavilions and it's also interesting here that you essentially get a language that is not so dependent anymore on the number it's much more realistic in terms of building technology while maintaining the kind of the core idea of of that discrete project and here we also integrates all the technical devices into this into the elements and from some perspectives you get another kind of almost you know highly reduced kind of visual language while conceptually speaking and still same project this is a German architect who has theorized that work and he has kind of advanced a notion that that you know that that architecture is actually that it is a complete distraction to basically think about part to whole relationships in this way and that it would make much more that architecture is essentially kind of a phenomenological project where you should always think about it as a kind of a layering of surfaces that is meant to communicate something right which was I was I get most on top of basically this project that if if you would actually construct this you know the the the the the effort of making this out of discrete pieces was was a a futile effort anyway so and I would actually argue exactly the opposite right I would actually argue that like if you look at villa savoir before before it was restored i found it deeply shocking that this was not made of concrete was actually made of a cement block right like like this image is basically right like by my kind of arguments different to Colleen Rose argument my you know the modernists were never modern would be more on kind of the level of these images than or the kind of the level of of composition so if you look at the section of this museum in Korea you kind of see the you know insane in a way kind of stupidity or simplicity of of those parts coming together which is which is it is massive joints and again it's also kind of important to point out in these drawings that of course is this weird snake line here which completely escapes the logic of of the building the only reason why that snake line is there is really just because I like it's like there's no where there is you know there is no kind of deep political argument behind this thing but it's really in a very kind of something that you know felt good for the design and contrast to to that no to this kind of organization of parts right okay so I got a chance to to test out this these IDs in this project for the talent for the talent Biennale where I won the competition and I won the competition so the competition actually asked to do a parametric pavilion so they wanted this kind of material optimization game with timber and I actually reversed a brief and actually asked to do to do I actually proposed to do a high-rise block like to be interesting kind of mass housing and essentially started out designing a mass housing block and then just isolated to just took one part of this mass housing book and use that as the pavilion so the the pavilion is completely based on the sheets of plywood that's just one sheet of plywood which you cut with the CNC machine into a kit of parts and then this kit of parts establishes this this building block these building blocks are then stitched together under tension and produce something that acts as a continuous beam structurally speaking and the in terms of like detailing and that's actually very important for this project in terms of detailing the idea was to deal with these blocks as an absolute abstraction so none of the kind of CNC cut details the DIY details should be visible so all of the kind of the mechanics and the kind of engineering of constructing these monolithic all blocks are essentially hidden and are not visible in the final product the only thing we spend a lot of time on is actually again creating this really big shadow gap so that you would understand that this so that you would always be able to kind of read and see these pieces as as independent entities and fearing that shadow gap was actually like a big problem in terms of in terms of also like if you cut apply what there's a lot of noise that goes through those shadow gaps and it's kind of difficult for the plywood the idea was that we could also automate the assembly of those books itself so that you use a robot to kind of just automate those blocks when you assemble it these are the blocks waiting for assembly which is kind of like I mean they're not huge but it kind of they do have a scale that you kind of rarely encounter in architecture so they're 2 meters 30 that kind of mini megaliths in one way this is a when we're shipping it to the site and then you see this kind of a I think quite beautiful moments of assembly that that's a Oscar one of the people that helped to the assembly and you kind of see this this incredible you know the kind of the the size of that building block versus the the human body and here you can see the before we finished off the detailing I can see here the metal rods that basically stitched those blocks together before they're covered and I mean this is Kevin one of the other people that worked for me which was able to kind of just grab one of those blocks and and built right with these elements and it kind of very primitive and simply I I couldn't do that I'm not strong enough to do that and as you can see also the the building is it basically has these parts that are covered in black tar where there is more moisture which is kind of black straight and then bottom and again important to point out kind of the game of the shadow gaps between those parts also the fact that it's raised off the ground it's kind of firm and it was quite interesting like for me this pavilion was a kind of a playground really like this is kind of the crazy corner where the building is kind of in a really this kind of perpetual state of being unfinished and absolutely kind of non figural then our other parts that are really rectilinear like this is kind of anyway an experiment to see if this kind of work would actually be able to sustain itself without you know any kind of purely perpendicular orthogonal way we then again a kind of the crazy corner from from the back and the kind of what was also interesting is that the realization for me when the pavilion was when this installation was finished is that actually that actually the is that actually the parts could have been bigger so there was actually one of the they're already big but essentially when you're when you're there they the same structure would actually also sustain itself if if the parts would be would be double or triple the size so this pavilion is still it's still up for the moment in the snow and it's also important to mention so now I'm curating the next iteration of this of this pavilion which will see a lot of people that also maybe you are familiar with competing with each other like a kind of the competition of the generation so will be interesting to follow and it's interesting I mean for like for me I always say like I have this kind of Freudian slip to call it a pavilion but for me was not a pavilion it was really in a way a piece to speculate about mass housing it's it's kind of for me a kind to I mean it's a little bit pretentious to say but it wanted to kind of be a kind of a fragment or kind of doorman or kind of a prototype for a larger system of housing it rather than rather than a pavilion that is merely concerned with itself and housing is something that I have been kind of secretly working on for the last two three years which has kind of translated for example in this project which is a 200 meter long housing block that consists all of this kind of black l-shaped parts and the idea is basically that by positioning those building blocks you get you have you have the possibility to differentiate living spaces in the core and not at not at the surface so the this kind of large project of the of different kind of concern with basically the mess spaces that I'm running in the background so to wrap it up really the question then is like how low can you go with his resolution like at what moment is this kind of Reglan curved story running out of running out of steam and it's of course interesting that actually like um you know you don't actually change the the argument you don't actually change the algorithm but I get this kind of the zero point where Greg Linds curve is completely reduced right and yeah so the the kind of the the last body of work that I'm doing is very interested in this kind of exploring basically this this dis you know this kind of zero degree of architecture right like the like the moment that we're really close to basically operate with barely anything and I think it's actually interesting that I I think there is again a kind of a moment in time that that level of abstraction is is interesting like I think some of some of this kind of abstract art moves are becoming really popular like for example it of white or with projects like cows or the XX so essentially there's a kind of a body of work boiling up for the past year which is based on its ultra low resolution extremely large parts and got a chance to test one of those on a concert hall in Germany where we basically this is an existing concert hall in the it's in Nuremberg and that's a project together with Stephan Albert German architects and essentially they were asking for an extension of the building so essentially just proposed as a way to trick the jury we just proposed a big box it's in Germany so that that works because like with these competitions you need to qualify so or like our idea was we will just send him a box and then when you get into the second round he will discover that this box is not actually a box right so that works so we got into the second round of a competition for a concert hall against a few big big offices and then we started to basically define that you know to scare the jury that the box that they had chosen was was much more scary than that they had thought so these are desired the building blocks of that box so they all factory cut CLT elements and this is these are all the elements you need to make a functional concert hall so we don't have any more elements than than this ones those elements are set into a really large voxel space these are people that's a voxel so this is like massive boxes and essentially on a computational level every one of those boxes has a little v-shaped element and then these v-shaped elements are assembled into into basically you know things that move between being a column and a floor and I then translated into into sheets and I stole this diagram for my students this is not a diagram for the project but it illustrates the point quite well so you have this kind of voxel space where you have all these building elements which I then basically rotating and flipping and kind of assembling together into a into a series of of columns and beams so that's the entire concert hall laid out and in the sheets after the voxels have been assembled again the kind of a massive scale that's the the kind of the procedure where you have all of the the computationally discrete parts then turned into discrete sheets that can be all prefabricated and cut in a factory this is kind of the sequence of assembling so essentially everything in this building is is is based on on the same material and the kind of the same part route so it's really kind of a completely monolithic structure it's also interesting to point out again about a question of like detailing that this is really like detailing for children like this is kind of a kindergarten detailing that you need to construct this building like it's literally just as massive sheets of timber which you can throw together and assemble and then kind of you just need to kind of you know quickly kind of close it off at at the edge but there is almost no detailing in this building and it's it's it was interesting for me to kind of really explore with this building how much we were willing to reduce the kind of the level of excitement in the project as well there's this really nice statement by REM koolhaas races that he has a high tolerance for repetition and excitement so I would say like in this building kind of developed a similar tolerance for for that and of course like what is actually interesting in this building is that it's a box right but again like ontologically speaking it's not a box so it's it's a complete kind of it's just an aggregation of this similar voxel-based l-shaped building parts that construct this entire building and although this building may look like a series of slaps and columns it's actually a building that has no columns and that has those slabs actually even structurally speaking it's just basically these elements that continuously maintain that kind of their level of being mere elements and again this is expressed also through this kind of extravagant joints that you see kind of reappearing on the in the edges of that building again the staircase or anything that makes a human inhabitation possible is excluded from the system so you have this kind of continuous staircase cutting through the ceiling there and it's also important to notice like this kind of the fact that the timber texture is absolutely fake this was actually a mistake from the render people like we tried to convince them to do a good timber texture but I didn't really manage so but it's a it's it's it's actually also interesting because in a way the the the these elements are artificial anyway so you could actually kind of design the texture to be to be over scaled when the concert hall sits in the middle and it's just kind of a subdivision of of this of this larger system yeah so we'll keep it there thank you

Channel: SCI-Arc Media Archive

Views: 5,848

Rating: 4.961165 out of 5

Keywords: Discontinuity, Part-to-whole, Concert halls, Pavilions, Multi-unit housing, Art museums, Construction, Assembly, Dom-ino house, Greg Lynn, Continuous surfaces, Houses, Kazimir Malevich, Guggenheim museums, Architectural competitions, Cultural centers, Digital construction, Digital fabrication

Id: cfWrPd2Klv8

Length: 69min 7sec (4147 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2018