wsoa-arch120-l-samson-blog

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Week 12

This week we went on a field trip to the LA Cleantech incubator in Downtown Los Angeles. We started our tour outside waiting for everyone to arrive, while outside I immediately noticed the difference in the parking lot to any other in the Los Angeles area. This parking lot is covered in solar panels and about 50% of the parking spaces are for electric vehicle charging. We went inside and were given a talk by Hadley and Peter Arnold from the Arid Lands Institute. They told us about their work in the past and what they are currently working on as well as giving us a tour of the incubator. They said that they started with looking at precedent and looking at the way that water has been managed in the past. They looked at how infrastructure was made and how it impacts the surrounding area. They said that the first part of their research was based on getting behind the camera and documenting and getting students behind the camera and getting out of the classroom and getting out into the environment. The now part of their research can be classified by their project Hazel. Which is a program run through in app on a mobile device that puts new perspective on the location bringing water into the equation when determining where or how to build. After that they gave us a quick tour of the facility showing us how it is the most water recycling building in Los Angeles.

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Week 11

This week’s reading was Croner’s Taking Measure which gets into the subject of material practice verses dematerialized practice. Which is the contrast between people who build buildings verses building objects. Such as grandiose projects, at large scales, infrastructural scales, things like freeways, and the great wall of china. Mathematics was made because the Egyptians need a way of resetting property line along Nile because of yearly flooding. Geometry came around in roman times of construction but has resurgence in the renaissance when it was applied to paintings to create perspective. “Geometry united humanity and nature” (Croner 5). Geometry is an astronomical measurement; time is out of joint. He says geometric measuring isn’t just about gridding it out it was about of space was about fixing location from the skies are place in the cosmic. Jefferson thought mathematical measure was the tool which the new molars and social could be achieved in his view of America. He thought division was created to create a new perfect society with property division made for equally sized parcel. Saying that rectangular grid privileges no one point above the other. A Finally thought from Croner is that railroad and electric telegraph responsible for the destruction of space and time.

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Week 10

This week’s lecture was on infrastructure first the speakers spoke about infrastructure failures such as the Oroville Dam, the I-35 Mississippi River Bridge, and the lack of infrastructure for the flooding caused by hurricane Katrina and hurricane Harvey. Next they spoke about the infrastructural successes such as the high line in New York which was the repurposing of an old freight line to be used as public space to be used. The topic of how it was cheaper to repurpose the demolish preexisting infrastructure was a common thread across the lecture. Aleksandra spoke about a couple different form of infrastructure, in particular to light rail systems and how they can link and or divide neighborhoods. She spoke about the project she has done relating to the London underground and how the stations are a system of nodes the people collect in. She also talked about how it’s a network that isn’t visible but is pure connectivity. In her dressing the station she came up with a series of towers that would do more than be a train station. Each tower would have different things include that would respond to the individual needs of the area it was being placed in. She then compared to it to projects she has done with Woodbury students with the LA Metro saying that it is an above ground and visible infrastructure that connects and divides neighborhoods. Lastly she spoke about the infrastructure in relation to watershed. First she spoke about the LA river and how LA gets all of its water from other places since we can’t produce our own natural water. Lastly she spoke about her distributed hotel project which was an eco-hotel because of the way it reuses and treats it water through reeds. The hotel also made artificial valleys in which this water accumulates and is treated.

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Week 9

This week we went on a field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We were told to write about a specific piece of art in the museum. The piece I choose to write about is “Smoke” by Tony Smith. I choose to use this piece after walking through the whole Ahmanson building and not really being able to connect with any of the other pieces in the building. It is a overwhelming piece and it takes you quite by surprise when considering it is completely different than most of other pieces housed under the same roof. After looking it up and learning that it is made of painted aluminum and weighs in at seven tons seven hundred pounds which just even more speaks to its overwhelming nature in size and form. The piece is a large scale version of a cardboard model Tony Smith had made. The first iteration of smoke was made in 1967 of painted plywood in Washington D.C. This sculpture was made posthumously in 2005. It is the first of three made in this edition. The 2/3 made at in the same series is held in a private collection.

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The lecture by Joshua G Stein was very interesting and the way that his lecture linked to the reading of the week was flawless. I found it intriguing how he described his version of High Tech and Lo-fi and how it applied to his work. I found it especially interesting how he applied it to his slip casting and milling. He focused in on the areas that need perfect precision and then let the other areas take on the form of the material and the process. That makes the objects take on different form because of this. I also found it interesting of what he had to say about the Pye reading and how he answered a few of the questions asked in class. The one that stood out to me is what he said about which process he prefers using had or using digital fabrication tools to produce model. He said that to him it doesn’t really matter which realm he starts in but that it is crucial in his process to always move back and forth between the two. For myself I found it encouraging that you don’t need to always start in one realm but that people who do it professional start at different places but all have a similar end goal in mind.

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"Harbin Opera House, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China, 2015 : MAD Architects." A & U: Architecture & Urbanism, no. 3, Mar. 2016, pp. 56-63. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.woodbury.edu:880/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=749847&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 "MAD Architects: Harbin Opera House, Harbin, China, Design 2010, Construction 2011-15." GA Document, no. 134, Nov. 2015, pp. 72-99. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.woodbury.edu:880/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=746030&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 Seno, Alexandra A. "Dangerous Curves: The Sensual Lines of a Performing-Arts Complex Express a City's Bold Bid for Attention." Architectural Record, vol. 203, no. 12, Dec. 2015, p. 81. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.woodbury.edu:880/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=743498&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 Mollard, Manon. "Mad Scene." Architectural Review, vol. 238, no. 1425, Nov. 2015, pp. 66-77. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.woodbury.edu:880/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=743962&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 den Hartog, Harry and Yan-song Ma. "'The City of the Future Should Concern People and Nature' : Ma Yansong on Mad's New Design Philosophy." Mark: Another Architecture, no. 59, Dec. 2015, pp. 92-111. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.woodbury.edu:880/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=744174&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 Bernstein, Fred A. "Breaking the Mold: China's Most Avant-Garde Architect, Ma Yansong, Has His Sights Set on the U.S. Is America Ready?." Architectural Digest, vol. 73, no. 10, Oct. 2016, pp. 158-161. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.woodbury.edu:880/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=756665&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 Cochran, Sam. "On the Edge: Defined by Technological Innovation, Fearless Formmaking, and Novel Engagement with Setting, Today's Most Compelling Architecture Dazzles the Eye and Delights the Imagination. Meet Seven New Structures - from Museums to Music Halls, a Soaring Skyscraper to a Clever Community Center - That Are Rewriting the Rules." Architectural Digest, vol. 73, no. 2, Feb. 2016, pp. 98-103. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.woodbury.edu:880/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=746700&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

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Lynn says that animation is not just movement its growth. He says that architects are stuck is stasis and in the inherit but that he wants architects to embrace animation in architecture. He continues to argue that buildings just project stasis and that they need to make their buildings more dynamic. Another key point of his is that animation isn’t just about movement but more so about evolution. He did not want to make a building that was moving but more so a building that implied movement throughout. He wanted to achieve this through key frame animation and the way these forms could be molded. This isn’t a new idea the Madan people used reeds of the qasab plant to construct a spine system to hold up their roofs. These curves are shared in splines and in the hulls of boats. Changing the parameters and edges of a system throughout a set of iterations the object would embody the movement of the moves of the iterations, he used this to create his embryological house series. I also found really interesting what he had to say about Sir D’Arcy Thompson biomorphology and how it maps out the parametrics. I find this extremely similar to that of the work the Le Corbusier did with the proportion system of the human body.

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After having gone to the Broad museum the week before to hear Yasushi Ishida speak about the museum and the way that it was designed was extremely interesting. I found it very interesting that the project had a different design for the veil originally but that it was outside of the cost budget to construct it in that original way. To the subject of computation which was the graphics used to demonstrate the building in an earthquake were fascinating and to hear the amount of give the building was allowed. As well as in the diagram I found it interesting that you could immediately see the areas of issue and fix them on the fly rather than turning into a situation of the likes of “Galloping Gertie”. Lastly to Yasushi Ishida’s diagram the one that shows the museum in an exploded view with veil taken of exposing the vault and the offices bellow. In Heather Floods lecture the I caught on to what she said about color in her piece “Punk’d” and that all she was trying to accomplish was creating another color using two colors just through combining material in a certain mater.

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This week we didn’t have any readings or lecture but we did go to the broad museum and walk around downtown Los Angeles from the Broad to Grand Park to visits and talk about Citadel LA. On this walk we stopped in the center of grand park and Professor McLemore pointed out the different buildings that make up the citadel. The buildings that make up this heterotopia are the criminal justice center, department of regional planning, hall of records, hall of administrations, courthouse, law library, and finally city hall. This area holding all of the executive and judicial branch buildings for the Los Angeles area effectively making it the local governmental heterotopia. Onward back to the Broad museum we go briefly stopping at the Disney concert hall which is another example of heterotopia the outside of building speaks to a different story than the internal use of the building. This is the same story told by the building of the broad the juxtaposition of the veil versus the vault as Professor McLemore pointed out when we were in the museum. I find the collection very interesting and a few of the pieces of the collection to really stand out, but to me what really stands out about it all is the vault and the way the that it interconnects everything together.

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I found the Edward Soja piece on heterotopias very interesting how he had a few different views of how a heterotopia could take on form. He quotes Bachelard “the space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions’”. Then going on to say this was not the space Foucault had in mind. But that heterotopias are other spaces and places that people don’t really see for what they are. Breaking down these places into two separate categories the first being a more protected and private place “reserved for individuals who are in some way in a state of stressful personal transition (crisis heterotopias such as the nineteenth-century boarding school, military service facilities, the honeymoon hotel)”. The second being “more modern heterotopias of deviation such as rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons”. To me this means that these places are of such that are taking shape and evolving with the times of society. Soja later says that these heterotopias change with time as well and gives the example of the heterotopia of a cemetery and the importance of heritage and respect for elders that has come from the past. Whereas nowadays people have made a change away from this for the most part where the same importance is not held for the dead in most cultures.

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I found it interesting how in the Zumthor piece how he made connections to his past and said how they played into his design process he uses today. At the beginning of the piece he refers to a door knob and the memories it brings up. How those memories influence curves and such in his creations currently. I also really appreciate the connection he makes between architecture and music and how components of a building must all work in harmony with each other much like players of a symphony must work in harmony of each other to play a well composed selection of music. I personally like these two parts or the piece the most because I make a connection with them. I have not lived as much of a life but I draw much inspiration in my creations from the house I grew up in and how I create space. Secondly I have a love for music and creating it just as much as I do for architecture and creating it. The connection between architecture and music isn’t one that I have thought about but it really spoke to me since they are both things in where ever part needs to work together to work perfectly or the project won’t work.

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I thought that the Michael Young piece, Mark Ericson work shown in his lecture, and Marcel Duchamp’s stoppages all bared a lot of similarities. Hey were all produced in different ways but achieve a similar result. The term spline discussed in Young’s piece I found particularly interesting in relation to the boats. I also loved the projections of the boat shown in the piece. Overall what I took away from the readings and lecture was the underlying theme of created tools used to aide in the production of different works. I like how the readings connected the computer programs we use today back to the origins of orthographic drawing. Each one of these individuals use different tools that they themselves have created or adopted from the tools of other before them to accomplish their own goals. I had a hard time following the pamphlet.

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Week 1 Reading Summary

Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles Four Ecologies is an interesting take on Los Angeles putting into four categories that all the areas fall into one way or another. The beaches and cities surrounding it were categorized as Surfturbia. The famous houses on the hills locked away behind their guarded gates and the other expensive homes around were aptly named The Foothills. The other areas described to be less interesting and thought to not match the previous areas in great were named the Plains of Id. The only thing left is the mess of large roads linking these areas to each other which we refer to as the freeways Banham choose to call it Autopia. Other things that Banham says is part of Los Angeles classifications is enormous space, electronic device (which he refers to as the gizmo), synthetic chemicals, and TVs. Banham sought out to document the city in its entirety and view everything the city had to offer, to see everything for the beauty that is within it. This was written in a different time as was the research from a different time but the main ideas, points, and ecological areas still hold true to this day.