templating bubbles

sci-arc/ fall 2006/ collaboration w/ [e]Guys www.bv001.com

Sun, May 13, 2007  Permanent link

Hylomorphic Architecture

Hylomorphic Architecture
[Seoul, Korea]
scenario: self-organization, uncertainty, porous boundaries


Hylomorphic Architecture was a winning entry for SPACE international student competition held in Seoul in 2006. The topic of the competition was “faster and bigger,” and the requirement was to master-plan 1000 housing units in a faster and bigger growing dynamic Seoul environment.

My initial provocation was of “no master-plan”. There is no master-plan when it comes to complex adaptive systems. Complex systems call for no master-plan but rather an introduction of self-organization. This non-panoptical system refuses a position of central control, but instead welcomes a drifting and localized negotiation of boundaries. It this reactionary and incremental growth process, all actions are temporal, non-static, and arrhythmic. The site in Seoul is located in the midst of the edge of city-sprawl. City-sprawl is a result of flawed capitalistc endeveours. The site is symbolically nested in-between high-speed auto-ways (representing technology as speed), set across from a wall of high-rise buildings (representing technology as size). Hylomorphic architecture liberates the site from these symbolic neighboring conditions: as an initiation of new process of city growth. It does not become a monumentalization of the “complex” but realizes itself in (real-time) action and process. “Uncertainty” is its main operative protocol, and its random prediction directs its “becoming”.

Jean Oury: “Hesitation is a logical crossroads. If you don’t get past the hesitation barrier, you regress toward dogmatism, a kind of rigidity... But if you get over this hump, you find yourself at an anthropological junction, faced with two paths - one, belief, the other, desire - that allow you to gain access to a sort of mutation in existence.”



the organism that is a city
that is an extension of myself


ANIMATION: FOAM BODIES

Sat, May 12, 2007  Permanent link

The Third Level

The Third Level
[Los Angeles, 2006]
scenario: deterritorialization, slippage/liberation, schizophrenia


Borrowing from Jack Finney’s short story “The Third Level,” I imagined an entry-port that takes you to another world of another time and space. When you enter this rabbit hole, it spits you back out into the streets, but into different streets of another dimension. The hole spits you back like in “Being John Malkovich” which takes you through unstabilization and deterritorialization (hypnosis), where rhizomes are a lifestyle (of endlessness). All boundaries are porous, so you may always enter and escape any state (of mind). The real and the virtual co-exist and are superposed, You are able to be here and there, now and then, existing in- and infecting the quantum realm (schizo).

Francois Roche: “I’ve heard about something that builds up only through multiple, heterogeneous and contradictory scenarios, something that rejects even the idea of a possible prediction about its form of growth of future typology... something shapeless grafted onto existing tissue, something that needs no vanishing point to justify itself but instead welcomes a quivering existence immersed in a real-time vibratory state, here and now.”

Francois Roustang: “You are one of the nerve endings of this body that is a city, you are at the center where it all interconnects, of a multitude of pulses, and you feel the growth of this body that is a city like an extension of your own corporality. No one can make you accept a form that didn’t feel right to you first, an no authority can take it from you. No morality can be dictated from on high... You are this body that is a city and you feel it growing.”



infiltration into the third level




view through the portal







ANIMATION: LOS ANGELES MEMORIES 2006-2056

Sat, May 12, 2007  Permanent link

Permanent Scaffolding

U.N. Headquarters
[New York City, 2005]
scenario: permanent scaffolding, becoming


The U.N. project was about attaching a soft intervention in order to infiltrate the static system of the United Nations, which was a reaction based on the notion that the organization is founded on now-obsolete models of world council. In order to address this problem I proposed a new architectural concept that would facilitate the necessary revamping of the U.N. and help handle its issues of inefficiency and inevitable existential crisis relevant to today’s mode of world operation. It dealt with the possibilities of building the idea of “growth” and “design” convergingly to work together towards an emergent construct. Against traditional notions of architecture with a set finished product, I proposed an open-ended, never-ending construction process (both material/immaterial) that can adapt to ever constant changes brought by the site and the natural development world climate. (as permanent-scaffolding).

Sanford Kwinter: “Architecture would ... be seen in its full proximity and intimacy with the system of forces that gives shape and rhythm to the everyday life of the body. Thus the object - be it a building, a compound site or an entrie urban matrix, insofar as such unities continue to exist at all as functional terms - would be defined not by how it appears, but rather by practices: those it partakes of and those that take place within it.”

Neil Leach: It “registers the impulses of human habitation and adapts to those impulses,” allowing new spaces to emerge, those that were not preprogrammed but were born of need.



open-ended growing model

Sat, May 12, 2007  Permanent link