Lecture Week 10

WHAT IS ARCHITECTURE?

Yasu's Story

Confucious

"tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand"

AA Workshop

Yasu explained of his experience as a student utilising the workshop to build models and furniture encouraging us to utilise our own workshop facilities as it is through this construction process that you will learn how things are put together, and enable you to design more effectively.

He also spent much time submitting to international competitions.

Junction Space

He became interested in internet & progamming however still missed the tactile nature of physical forms and being able to touch what was made.

Triggering Events (2001)

Found that he didn't learn very well from textbooks. Instead offered to do an installation at a museum in Hong Kong. Made from toughened glass sources the piece measured people moving through space, which then sent a message back to the computer.

Later the discovery of an electronic circuit prototype was made which enabled the ability to experiment straight away without studying electronic engineering - world of controlling electronic devices. Prototype called - Parallax BasicStamp Development Board.

Kinetic Pond (2002)

Hypothetical idea for a bridge/pond, created as a 1st year student exercise. This was a relatively short project to figure out a very simple idea of how it could be done. Models were built with lego pieces.

This idea then led to Kinetic Cube 2002, which was a continuation from the first idea. The interest was in it being an interface the people play with.

ACTIVE BUILDINGS

What can we do about buildings that simply stand still?

- Take a huge amount of resources to build a building
- Huge waste of resources when demolished
- Need to provide a more creative solution
- Next 21, Osaka Japan  - Components are modular, panels can be recycled or reused.

Nakagin Capsule Tower

- Movement called Metabolism
- People don't utilise modular buildings
- Take away the capsules to refubish and rearrange
- None of the capules have utilised this capapbility to date
- Was built to be very sustainable  as it can renew itself
- Major design flaw - have to take away all capsules above before you can remove ones below

Next 21

- A huge research project run by a gas company
- Sent researchers to the building to explain how the building works and what it can do.
- At the moment this is successful while the researchers are there to explain the functionality of the building however once this is stopped it may not be quite so successful
- The user therefore needs to be provided with an interface

Office Space in Margaret St

- This building is quite limiting in terms of what could be done with the environment for individual users
- The idea was to create an interface so that people could control their own environment.
- Achieved through the controlling of blinds. An electronic device was attached to the manual window control which allowed the blinds to be controlled remotely.

This was done through Pachube, a server available to the general public for repository of data. Allows access of data anywhere in the world.

Cedric Price described architecture as  "a kit of parts, not a building".

In essence this encourages designers to think about creating something else and to really think about different aspects of what architecture really could be.