Growing Tray
Ecology-
Contemporary vernacular thought regarding the relationship between ecology and ‘man made’ built space is still plagued by two interrelated misconceptions. The first is that the artificial and the natural are somehow differentiated. Environmental ecology is applied as a gloss over autonomous construction as an aesthetic or ‘green-washing’ manuver. This project approaches this relationship from the opposite angle, which is to say that ecological phenomena and man-made artifacts are codependent on social, economic and political levels.
The second fallacy is the distance between ecology {read: resource extraction and waste dispersal] and most people’s sphere of consciousness. Production, distribution and waste dispersal practices are all but invisible to most everyone in society, the only point of interaction, and consequently influence, is the point of consumption. By placing ecological process in close knit juxtaposition with inhabitation, it fosters consumer awareness and so yields more control over choices.
Here we see the growing trays which allow seedlings to be grown on an artifi cial surface. The trays are optimized for different spatial requirements at different stages in the growth cycle. They are pre-fabricated and standardized to fit within the armature, allowing more or less of a particular type as needs require.
Layers
Rather than one over-arching logic, applied in a totalizing manner, the tectonics must be designed around many interrelated, mutually dependent organizations. This allows them to perform their unique functions while sharing a deep reciprocity with each other and the site conditions. This is material tectonics as spatial analogy for networked yet determined fl ows, as opposed to aesthetic
metaphor.
Program
Inhabitation, Culture, Research, Production, Distribution, Consumption
In order to access and occupy the remote and harsh zone of an interchange multiple programs are necessary. No single program arranged
in a monoculture could possibly survive on its own. Each program and use therefore has a reciprocal and integral relationship with each other. They rely on each other in a symbiosis that allows them to perform to their potential. Housing provides more permanent dwellings for the researchers and farmers and transient accommodation for agro-tourists, which increases awareness on a visceral and experiential level. The tree farm and its infrastructure protects the housing with sound attenuation and carbon sequestration. Research areas develop strands of tree that grow straighter, are less prone to disease and sequest carbon at faster rates. Commercial space interfaces with the public, creating a sense of place while providing education thereby improving awareness, and contributing economic resources. Distribution facilitates growth of the system by
providing a collection point from which to transplant trees that are ready to be planted, whether along the highway or to points beyond.
Cross programming, not only makes sense on economic and ecological levels, but is vital to the project’s existence. The separation and
division of program is primarily what creates liminal space; it is fi tting that programmatic weaving offers the alternative.
Autonomous Tectonics
Autonomous tectonics are intentionally designed in a vacuum. They are often conceived and created for a singular purpose, to be applied simply in various contexts and scales. In this model, pure engineering and fi xed assembly line repetitive construction practices dictate forms and geometry regardless of place and time. In a Fordist ‘one size fi ts all’ mantra, the designed object in inherently placeless, as it ‘fi ts’ equally well or poorly with its context. Highway infrastructure, with the primary goal of facilitating an automobile’s direction at a certain rate of speed, is placeless. Autonomous tectonics are imperialistic: they require that the site respond to them. As the model for infrastructure, and some urban planning, for the past 100 years, the coming challenge will be how to fi t into and mediate timeless and placeless
fi xed geometries.
Co-adaptive Tectonics
Co-adaptive tectonics are defined by a shared reciprocity with their given context. They are intimately site specific. Also, termed ‘mass-customization,’ these Post-Fordist assembly methodologies enable a class or range of objects that fi t together to respond to sites specifi cally. They are determinately non-linear, and intelligent and self refl exive enough to respond to local conditions, geometries, and mandates. Toshio Shibata’s photography illustrates a fl exible, adaptive organization that responds to specific needs. The conditions of the site, whether economic, ecologic, social, cultural or political inform the tectonics and then the tectonics enable strategic operation on the site.
Organizational Logics
Any architectural or urban planning project is an exercise in organization. However, and particularly in architecture, there is often one or a few set of primary ideas that facilitate the project. T wo or three logics often determine the over-arching organization of the building. This is typically quite conducive for the process and is a mechanism to identify and solve problems. However, when jumping up in scale to the issue of wasted land, there are often many pre-existing organizing logics already at play in the site. The challenge then becomes: how to dovetail with existing logics, whilst augmenting them in a beneficial manner. Some potential logics are not spatial [viz, some are better accessed through lists of data, than by geometry], however our purposes at the moment are only concerned with spatial logics, some of which are detailed above.
Site
Interchange 68 is the name of the confluence of interstate transport that is the transition between I-95 and I-80. As the junction for two of the longest and highest volume highways on the eastern seaboard [I-95 runs from Boston to Atlanta, and I-80 heads out from New York to Pittsburgh and eventually Chicago and points west.], it’s proximity of 6 miles from Manhattan, and comprising an area roughly the size of Central Park, interchange 68 provides fertile testing ground for provoking liminal space.
Dividing Teaneck New Jersey to the north and Ridgefield Park to the south, the interchange, a threshold and connector by automobile, poses a huge physical barrier to any other form of terrestrial transport. To access and occupy the site, a new level of connective tissue is required at a finer scale. An artificial topography, any new graft of armature must be reflexive and adaptive in time and space. It must intelligently respond to changes in elevation and proximity to the highway and neighbourhood fabric. The challenge becomes scalar. Is it possible to intelligently and productively mediate the local neighbourhood space [designed for a sense of place] with interstate infrastructure [designed for velocity]?
“New Jersey State Highway Dept.
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past – just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River Drive) does a good business in STONE, BITUMINOUS, SAND, and CEMENT. Passaic seems full of “holes” compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory traces of an abandoned set of futures.”
-Robert Smithson, Monuments of Passaic
The urban periphery is defined more by what it is not than by what it is.
The horizontal stratification of urban space into zones of singular purposes has forged pervasive intermediary tracts. Dubbed the ‘holey plane’[1], these zones facilitate control, separation and flexibility. Without inherent moral value, they are one outcome of processes whose effects also include a breakdown of public space, ecological destruction, banality, economic unfeasibility, and architectural homogeneity. Their role is to contain waste, hold matter, move through, and separate uses. Bodily inhabitation is often impossible, displeasurable, and sometimes dangerous.
Liminality is ripe for rethinking. What would it mean to revise ‘drosscape,’ not as “waste”, but as opportunity for dense inhabitation?[2] Can we envision a re-grafting of domestic, infrastructural and productive spaces into a symbiosis rather than a contravention? Rather than expanding outwards, can we expand inwards?
This pamphlet addresses these concerns by synthesizing competing organizational logics. It envisions altering the architectural design process, contractual apparatuses, tectonics, and urban planning. As a break from static contemporary construction contracts, the design schedule is re-thought to conceptualize the architecture project not as a product, but as a series of interrelated interventions that both operate on, and are informed by, the site and use. Novel tectonics are employed as the physical armature that engenders cynosural change.
The frontier is literally in our cities.
Ideas for paper works of architecture:
4x8 House - Prefabricated dwelling based on a grid of a standard sheet of plywood, cnc milled members also from plywood with no loss of material and minimal hardware.
Subdivided Pavilion - An exercise investigating geometric potentials and limitations of paneling systems.
Retaining Block - A synthesis of architecture and infrstructure, a combination of a Narkomfin, or Unite style housing block with a retaining wall where each is mututally co-dependent. Inhabited infrastructure.
Growing Partition - A freestanding green wall for exterior application involving photo-voltaics and luminescence.
Dord Space - Investigation into regrafting liminal space on the urban periphery.
Co-Adaptive Tectonics - A dynamic shading infrastructure.
I am attempting to create custom trusses from a group of curves that all have unique rails and orientations. I want to sweep or extrude or revolve a custom profile along these, using them as rails. However, there are over 40+ 'flange' curves and hundreds+ 'web' curves. Essentially, I want to be able to feed all of these curves within a Grasshopper definition and skin them. The pipe tool can do this very well, but I do not want a circular profile, one has to look like a wide flange [which means it needs directional or orientation information in 3 axis], and the other is simply rectangular [which means it only requires 2].
Any ideas?
1 an example of the base geometry and definition
2 what I want to achieve [the final profile geom isnt set yet.]
