When modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornament.  In promoting Space and Articulation over symbolism and ornament, they distorted the whole building into a duck. They substituted for the innocent and inexpensive practice of applied decoration on a conventional shed the rather cynical and expensive distortion of program and structure to promote a duck… It is now time to reevaluate the once-horrifying statement of John Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.

-Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas

I’ve never been able to come to terms with Venturi – he simultaneously challenges and disgusts me.  It makes me feel a little like a heathen that neither wants to be baptized nor go to hell.

A few examples of the exciting new architecture coming out of Japan recently,

giving some early samples of possible new directions after the current Japanese masters

including Ito, Ando, Sejima…etc.

Junya Ishigami, Kanagawa Institute of Technology.

Sou Fujimoto, House N

Kumiko Inui.

Akihisa Hirata.

Hiroshi Sambuichi, Base Valley House.

Or, as he’s known to his friends, the anticube

I was pondering how one might go about elevating a building (think tree-house) and it occurred to me that there might be some interesting starting points in the platonic solids.  Wikipedia led me to this guy, who interests me for a couple reasons.  First, it uses a square base and cap, allowing it to be used to construct spaces which don’t have odd angles on top of it.  Second, it stacks both horizontally and vertically – this basic geometry can be repeated outward to make a square grid and upward to make multiple stories.  Finally, I suspect this is the optimal structural way to support a square in space using only tensile/compressive members (ie, no shear walls).

It looks like there was an interesting late submission to the Re:Vision Dallas competition by Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, which seems to address a lot of the ideas we were hoping to integrate into our own proposal; there’s extensive green space, an attempt to create a diversity of experience and address the issue of verticality, and a decent amount of systems thinking.  They seem to be using fairly well-understood systems (greywater treatment, PV panels, green roofs etc), but it’s at least nice to see more people presenting these elements as a central aspect of a design proposal.

More eye candy after the break

This just turned up in a post about the gas crisis of ’73.  It’s described as “the outcome of the architect asking himself the question “How to make a house that resembles a park?”, and has an interesting resemblance to our approach to the Red Bluff residence.

I couldn’t find any good images of the interior, but the basic design seems interesting.  It’s a shame that integrated systems thinking seems to have died out in the 80′s after the energy crisis abated.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Riversimple’s Opensource car, here’s a story on an emerging business model in the world of video games; community funded games.

One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community. So right now, what typically happens is you have this budget – it needs to be huge, it has to be $10m – $30m, and it has to be all available at the beginning of the project. There’s a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative.

What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, ‘Hey, I really like this idea you have. I’ll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I’ll also get a copy of that game.’

So move financing from something that occurs between a publisher and a developer… Instead have it be something where funding is coming out of community for games and game concepts they really like.

This is an interesting idea, it’s like micro-credit patronage.  Sort of reminds me of Radiohead releasing their most recent album online and asking people to pay whatever they felt the album was worth.  I’ve been thinking about ways in which something similar to this could be used to build architecture, but it doesn’t seem like the ‘installed user base’ would be high enough…

Riversimple has just announced they will be releasing the plans for their new fuel-cell car under a creative-commons license.  They’ve also set up a collaborative wiki so people who are interested in participating in the design process can download the CAD files, make improvements and submit them to the community for review.

The opensource design approach has had great success in the domain of software design, due mostly to the low cost of implementing software designs and transferring the code base.  There’s been discussion about applying the basic system of production to other fields, but this seems to be the first viable example.  The most interesting aspect of Riversimple’s announcement is that the design was released in a fully-formed state; the collaborative process is starting after a commercial company spent the time engineering the design and making the difficult decisions about what the goals and tactics of the project (this is most often where ‘open-source’ projects break down when the cost of implementing a design is substantial).

This speaks to an argument I’ve made a couple times; designers are paid for their ability to solve problems, not for the end-result of the design process.  Aside from legal issues, there doesn’t seem to be a strong argument against releasing designs after they’ve been completed.  This also ties into my argument earlier that building a system for exchanging architectural details could vastly accelerate the evolutionary process of architectural details.

One of the biggest shocks I had after graduating from architecture school and working in an office was that architects don’t generally work at the same scale as we’re trained to in school.  My design eduction emphasized creatively approaching a site and considering what mix of uses would be appropriate, investigating demographic trends, exploring how architecture can influence cultural development, and proposing new types of build environments.  It quickly became clear that most architectural firms do little or none of that; they are hired essentially to provide window-dressing for a project which is dictated primarily by either a developer’s market analysis or an institution’s project brief.  While there are plenty of counter-examples, the majority of buildings seem to be built in a system in which the architect is not the primary decision-maker as to what should be built.

The development ecosystem has become defined by a couple primary actors; clients, developers, investors, institutions, builders and regulatory agencies.  Decisions as to what should be built is made by these actors, then architects and engineers are commissioned to implement these decisions.  I see a lot of benefits to this ecosystem, it is good at responding to market forces, partitions risk to appropriate parties, and works well in the free-market economy.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a great job of addressing objectives which are not easily monetized; coherent communities, sustainable building practices, innovation and others.  My feeling is that to change the outcomes of development, we must first change the ecosystem in which development occurs.

Tom, Agustina and I had an interesting conversation over beers the other night about the emerging role of computers in the design and construction process.  To my mind two main questions emerged: what is a useful role for computation in the design process and how does architecture respond to the impact of CNC manufacturing processes on the constraints imposed on the builder.  These are both very expansive topics, so I’ll stick to the first.

After reading and discussing Tom’s post, I thought I’d throw out some more ideas.  I think the biggest challenge to start with is developing a coherent message about how we think the country should go about addressing the ‘green revolution’

Charles Perrow published an interesting book called ‘Normal Accidents‘, which is an anthropological study of catastrophe.  He argues that all systems fail given enough time and that to reduce the frequency and severity of catasrophes we must address the systems which fail (rather than blaming actors in such systems, ie blame the people).  His basic argument is that there are two fundamental factors which influence the probability of a system failure: the complexity of the system and the interconnectedness of the system. Complexity here refers to non-linear causation chains; a complex system is one in which a cause cannot be clearly determined by observing an effect.  Interconnectedness refers to the degree of coordination required between components of a system.  He argues that as complexity and interconnectedness increase, the probability of failure must also increase.