the space between

Just for fun, a shot of me and the final presentation boards and models.

So, I had something else going on this month, so I am late in posting the updates of the final model and presentation. The model is of a portion of the entire potential construction. It is the entire section, and just a third or so of the plan. It is aluminum, laser cut and hand-brushed, bent in the shop, and attached with .080 threaded rod and teeny teeny nuts, all threaded by hand. It took awhile to put together, and cost a small fortune, but it will get me out of school and is quite beautiful.

I’m almost finished with the first portion of the thesis. I’m going to take next semester to write the book, document the work, change my abstract and title, and I’ll walk in June.

I’m trying to build a final model out of parts I don’t have yet. The presentation is Saturday at noon, and if all goes well, I can assemble this model in the next two days and put the rest of my graphical presentation together.

The guest critics are John Zissovici of Cornell, and Wolfgang Tschapeller of Vienna. My committee will of course be there, along with Jean LaMarche, a member of the faculty here, as a critic. Between all five of these luminaries, I should either get some really helpful criticism or get completely smashed.

I’ll update with final model photos next week, probably. And shots of my presentation boards.

Until then.

This is the most recent model, and the second-to-last model of this thesis (due to the 17 days remaining before my presentation). It was made by connecting the nodes of the by-now-familiar crossed-line planes created from the original diagrams of The Desert Music. The last entry had a pink plan and elevation showing a solid-void relationship created by connecting these nodes. The frame for the model was built by using those pink drawings to locate the nodes on the plywood backing, drilling holes, and projecting steel wire out from the holes. This is the wireframe of a couple entries ago. Copper wire was then used to connect the nodes with solder.

Plan and elevation views of the model. In these two perpendicular views, the extruded nature of both plan and section are seen—the break with rectangularity occurs in the third dimension, and a shift in point of view prevents the consistent plan and elevation from being seen:

Finally, a gratuitous close-up shot of the model:

This model does not show any cladding; as such, there is quite a bit of ambiguity as to what would be filled in or not. My final model will be a surface model, which will be the cladding of this wireframe. I am trying to figure out a scale and a material for it, and I will need to crash-course myself on NURBS modeling so that I can get the shapes and sizes of the various (close to 500) parts that will be necessary for construction of the model.

This final model will be large enough that the interior condition will be visible, and the spaces created by all these manipulations will be able to be comprehended. Unlike music, which is comprehended linearly from beginning to end, my construction will be able to be seen externally, from beginning to end, or internally, with each individual space being a cut through one moment of the piece (albeit simplified and diagrammed). A section cut through the piece of music will be equivalent to a line of sight at one point in the construction, rather than a section cut through the construction.

OK. Time to eat turkey. Then, on to the final model. My committee thinks I can just barely get it done if I have help and if I don’t do anything else for the next two weeks.

These are the working drawings from which I made my most recent, soldered model. Pictures of that model will be coming; I just took them a few minutes ago.

These drawings are the plan and section of the wireframe model (last entry), connecting the nodes of the five diagram planes with an arbitrary amount of space between them. In these drawings, I’ve shaded in the places where the acrylic model (two entries ago) was solid.

The sectional/elevation drawing. The solidity at each end is deceptive—you can see by looking at the plan below that the solidity on one end is only present on the two narrow bands, while it occurs on most of the plan’s width on the other end.

The plan drawing. Really, an aerial view of the wireframe with points connected. Put these two drawings together, and you have spatial conditions created. You’ll have to imagine the two drawings coming together, and space existing at the intersection of the two. Again, using the previous example, on the left of the drawing the elevation drawing is solid at the end. You can see in the plan, however, that the two narrow bars are the only place that solidity is present sectionally.

You’ll be able to see better where these drawings come from when you see the photos of the copper wire model; the process was simply to connect each point on each of the vertical planes to the nearest point on the adjacent vertical plane. This involved a change in both x and y coordinates, often, and sometimes just a change in x or y. The z change was always consistent; the distance between each of the vertical planes.

The spaces created are mostly non-orthoganal, which is refreshing after my previous rectangular models. Rather than being the space itself, the diagrams are now being used as a framework between which spaces are created by connecting the dots, so to speak.

The result of these drawings, the copper wire model, will be posted soon. Comments? Is my process somewhat clear? What parts are confusing? I have to present this in a few weeks, and if there are parts of my process which are really unclear, I’d love to be able to clear them up before the 11th of December.

After the acrylic model, and a fairly productive review, and a lot of frustration about how to proceed, I went back and started trying to make a building out of the model. As you can tell by the couple email exchanges I mentioned in earlier posts, I was having physical and philosophical difficulties with this idea. I needed a fresh way to look at the model.

First I built it again in cardboard. I stopped that fairly quickly, because I didn’t like it and I didn’t think it was heading in the right direction. I was extruding the voids in the acrylic model in chipboard. I’ll take a photo of it sometime; I did two layers, and there are some spatial possibilities, but I was not excited about it at all.

Then I built it with wires. Not an extrusion of the two-dimensional diagram, but a set of five wireframes that are two-dimensional, spaced apart (an arbitrary distance). The photos didn’t turn out so well, but here are a few shots of this model:

I was very excited about this model. The wireframing of the diagram creates spatial possibilities. On the acrylic model, I had solid and void areas. If I wanted to make space, I could either make the void the space and the solid completely solid material, but that’s a lot of concrete, or any other material, in places, for no particular reason other than it being the diagram. Or, I could make the voids nothing (outside spaces), and the solid areas hollow. This has its own problems. [The diagrams, and music, have binary conditions - you either have material or no material. Architecture has a ternary condition - you have space which is formed by a material enclosure, that material enclosure itself, and non-material].

The wireframe opens possibilities, and I decided to connect the nodes of the wireframe together as the next model. The the space is created between the wireframe planes, rather than by extruding them. As soon as I take some photos, I will post them.

This wireframe model was very well received by my committee. They were happy with the progress, are satisfied with the process I have followed throughout the semester, and are confident that if I keep producing work, I will be fine, finish on time, and graduate.

This update should have happened before the last couple posts. The acrylic model I’m showing here was done in the end of October, but I didn’t get photos taken till late last week.

First, I laser cut acrylic to create the extruded block that I posted 3d images of earlier. I wanted to see it in three dimensions. No design changes happened between the images a few posts ago and the building of the acrylic model.

However, after seeing it and starting to think about it as a building, I turned it up on its end:

I had an (excellent) professor for a couple studios who always would take students models and turn them upside down or sideways, often with more interesting results. I think this model works better as a tall volume; it allows for better comprehension of the layers with light able to pass through the entire volume.

The extruded dimension is arbitrary. As is obvious by the construction method (layers of acrylic), l’m still taking my diagrams and forcing them into three dimensions through extrusion.

I’m not totally satisfied with this model for this reason. The space is still being created through extruding two-dimensional pieces, and were the solid portions of the acrylic hollow, the spaces created could be interesting, but would be convoluted. Like my previous email exchanges about this model, I feel like I’m forcing a building into something that doesn’t want to be a building. The light-well potential I thought existed really doesn’t exist, and I decided to look for a different way to use this model to create space. More on that in the next post.

I spent this week productively. I had an excellent meeting with my comittee last Friday; they were happy with my process and the direction I am heading. I still must post images of my process as it has developed over the last week or two. I will do that after getting some sleep, though.

I just finished a wireframe model with steel and copper wires and solder. Lots and lots of solder. Solder doesn’t bond well to steel. There are a total of 492 wires and 984 solder joints.

My head hurts from the solder/flux fumes. I had to take breaks every 45 minutes or so to keep from passing out.

I’m signing off and going to bed.

So, this “+c” idea is really what the essence of the thesis is becoming - I’m proposing a mode of translation that uses a reduction of the original artifact to create a reduction of a new artifact, and then builds the new artifact out of that reduction. This contrasts with the typical mode of translation, which is to imitate the perceived process of the original author/composer in the creation of a new artifact. That is, if a composer took a cellular unit and performed a series of manipulations on it, the architect engaged in translation would take a cellular architectural unit or drawing and imitate those manipulations.

The problem with that is that the orignal author’s process was divorced from an attempt to imitate another process. The architect, in trying to recreate the process, has the additional baggage of trying to recreate the process, and the process is by default a very different one than the original author’s.

There is a short story by Borges, called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In it, Borges tells the story of his fictional author Menard, who strives to write Don Quixote several hundred years after it was written, without using the original text. Menard considers several possibilities, including fighting the Turks, to recreate in his life the things which Cervantes experienced in his life that caused him to write the Quixote. In the end, however, there is the realization that even if he could be succesful, and rewrite literally every word of Cervantes without referring to the text, the piece he wrote, even if every word were identical, would be a completely different work.

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrius memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.

Initially, Menard’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight agains the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918—be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard weighed that course (I know he pretty thoroughly mastered seventeeth-century Castilian) but he discard it as too easy…Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.

He goes on to perform a sort of literary analysis on Menard’s Quixote vis-a-vis Cervantes’ (keeping in mind that the texts are identical!) After two identical quotes, Borges has this to say:

History, the mother of truth!—the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality itself…The contrast is styles is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard—who is, in a addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes—is somewhat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who emplyes the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness.

Why do I extensively quote Borges? Because it’s a great story, and you should all read it. But more, to illustrate that recreating a process is not as interesting to me as my current chosen working method. First, it is impossible to recreate a process. Second, it is too easy.

Instead, my process looks like this:

This is yielding some interesting spatial possibilities, which I will post shortly. This post was just to explain the translation process further and provide some background rationale for it.

There are two varieties of calculus - derivative and integral. In derivative calculus, an expression is brought down a level of magnitude, from, for example, 2x² + 10 to 4x. The + 10, when brought down an order of exponential magnitude, disappears (it goes from being 10 * x⁰ to 0.

The derivative is the equation for the slope of the parent expression. Ignore this if you don’t know calculus; I am not going to explain it here.

Anyway, integral calculus moves back up the exponent food chain, with 4x becoming 2x² + c. C stands for the possibility of another number in the parent equation that would have been lost in translation while deriving and re-integrating the expression. 2x2 + 5, or 2x² + 235 would both derive to 4x. This number, which is a known quantity in the first half of the translation, is not known when going back up. It has been lost. It must be represented with a variable, because it could be there, and it could be anything.

I’m looking for the +c. I have an expression (The Desert Music), and I have derived it, to arrive at the diagrams of many weeks ago. I’ve translated those diagrams to three dimensions, but I DON’T HAVE ARCHITECTURE YET. I have a diagram of architecture, and I need to take that diagram and perform a sort of integral calculus on it, to make the architecture that would produce the three-dimensional diagram.

What this looks like, I have no more idea than I did weeks ago. Argh.