10.23.01

• Wisdom

Lies in the ability to subordinate greatness in anything to goodness in everything

• The motivation: creating spaces and objects that can physically re-configure themselves to meet changing needs with an emphasis on the dynamics of architectural space.

• Designing intelligent kinetic systems is not inventing, but appreciating and marshalling technology that exists and extrapolating it to suit an architectural vision.

• What we are describing with advanced kinetic systems in architecture is a structure as a mechanistic machine that is controlled by a separate non-mechanistic machine: the computer

• Extreme mechanical contraptions today are reminiscent of the last gasps of the Victorian era – pushing to the extremes of the possible within a closed system - what will evolve is an evolution from the strictly mechanical to that of intelligent responsive synthetic biomechanics.

• Future human interaction with the built environment is extremely difficult to predict even as science-fact extrapolations because it is ensnared with contradictions. In the example set forth by Arthur Clarke: “A really perfect system of communication would have an extremely inhibiting effect on transportation. Less obvious is the fact that if travel became nearly instantaneous, would anyone bother to communicate?” Our cities are the result of our mastery over neither.

• In order to design, one needs to make a conscious effort to unlearn everything we have learned about design and seen of design while simultaneously we need to absorb all of the available physical potentials affecting design, be it materials, computation, structure,
  
  
• Adaptable space: that can at any instant meet the desires of the inhabitants – the changing needs of the users - the changing environmental context: that can satisfy all of ones senses while simultaneously satisfying functional needs.

· In order to design, one needs to make a conscious effort to unlearn everything we have learned about design and seen of design while simultaneously we need to absorb all of the available physical potentials affecting design, be it materials, computation, structure, human nature and on and on …only then can we design with the freshness of a child and the tools to tackle the complexities.

· If a detail has no function – it has no purpose – if it has no purpose – omit it. To “please the eye” is not a function; it can be a result but not a derivative.

· Idiosyncratic Libraries

Trouble is, all we have to work with is our past. We put everything in our heads and its like a tool chest; an idiosyncratic resource library, the source at any given moment is finite but our ways of reassembling the pieces or the past is by any practical means infinite. I can make the most beautiful curve you’ve ever seen and I can make a curve slightly unbalanced that will irk you every time you glance at it on the wall.

Good designers get to know these shared libraries that we all use to decide one curve is right or wrong.

Those that are “correct” seem to capture significant aspects of our shared experiences, perceptions, attitudes and intuitions.

Those who are good come to know their own libraries in their heads and foster them.

bad designers own a lot of design books.

Forms are more a lot more trouble than ideas because they’re easier to identify

and unless incredibly candid; devoid of context.

Context liberates imaginative thinking, liberates meaning.

Unfortunately we can make architecture with form and no meaning

but vice versa cant very well keep you dry and warm.

· I’ve never learned anything in school and I have never found another person to be a significant influence on how I have thought about design - schools are important for the resources they provide including people. Addendum: our perception of ourselves is defined by the perception of others.

· Any precedent study is the absolute worst thing to do.  I never understood why design studios began with them.

· If you love the design

or hate the design

is irrelevant

If you feel nothing

then the design has failed

· Indirect Altruism

Altruism is fine as long as you are first and foremost giving to yourself. It is a good thing that there are those for whom giving to oneself is a direct result of giving to others. The artist or architect or musician is a more selfish, yet the end result is still an indirect altruism. If one cares passionately about what they do in the arts, they will eventually do it well enough to affect others. If you don’t give importance to what you re doing, no one else will care, and thus, no effect. Addendum: No person can succeed in this world if there is no one who cares about what they do.

· Design is a verb – never a noun.

• If it needs to be explained, I have no interest in it

• If a building could mediate our needs and the environment outside: Its demand on physical resources could be slashed. If it could transform to facilitate multi-uses: Its function would be optimized. If a building could adapt to our desires: It would shape our experience.

• Adaptive response to change must intelligently moderate human activity and the environment and build upon the task of enhancing everyday activities by creating architecture that extends our capabilities.

• The result of creating intelligent and responsively adaptable spaces will be architecture of unique and wholly unexplored applications that address the dynamic, flexible and constantly changing activities of today and tomorrow.

• If we were to a show a great scientist of the past the most sophisticated mechanical device made today it would surely amaze, but the principals would have been straightforward enough. If we were to show the same scientist a television or a computer or radar, it would have appeared magical to them. The difficulty for them would not have been one of complexity; but rather they would have been lacking in the mental framework required to conceptualize such non-mechanistic devices. Today it does not take much effort to extrapolate existing computation as a means for kinetic actuation. We are rapidly approaching a time where the integration of embedded computation and kinetic function becomes a practical and feasible reality. Material development in architecture id becoming magical. Soon the need for computation will be delegated to regulation and actuation will be carried out by the materials themselves.

• While there may be many reasons for employing kinetic solutions in architecture we can always rest assured that they are a means to facilitate adaptability.

• Interests lie in defining how responsive transformable kinetic objects occupy predefined physical space as well as how moving physical objects can share a common physical space to create adaptable spatial configurations.

• Our capabilities of utilizing kinetics in architecture today can be extended far beyond what has previously been possible. Advancement however, will only be accomplished when kinetic structures are addressed not primarily or singularly, but as an integral component of a larger system

• If climate control were localized by architectural means at an urban scale would there be any desire to investigate planetary engineering given the potentially adverse effects on terrestrial equilibrium?

· A metaphor...

atop my phonograph there sits

a magnet

suspended from a piece of string

attached to the ceiling

is another magnet

the opposite

resting one inch above

the first magnet

when I turn the phonograph on

the slowest speed

the first magnet revolves

round and round

the second magnet

suspended from the string

begins to swing

but is always thrashed about

in a chaotic matter

by the field of the first magnet

as it attempts it's great fluid swings

back into the circumference

of the phonograph

when the phonograph revolves

at the fastest speed

the field of the first magnet

catapults the second, suspended

magnet into a great, fluid swing

again and again

round and round

somehow smooth and peaceful