Sunday, September 19, 2010

Weather Precast: Demo Set



House as thesis


The contemporary notion of travelling is inseparable from transportation vehicles and digital recorders like cameras. The panoramic and all-encompassing are mandatory selling points. Vehicles speed through aerials, moving frames and single-point perspectives, while cameras instantly flash on nearest surfaces in accordance. The act of occupancy necessarily mean passive capturing in replacement of active engagement.

Yet, such "realistic" measurements render only a highly biased selection of existence. These technological extensions of our body prove only limited and retreat back to brain activities to complete the reconstruction. Surfing on the surface of a city, the recorder picks up sufficient cues to convince himself of a civilization in real existence beyond his visions. To the viewer, a photograph presents not a captured moment, but an atmosphere opened up for an imagined generalization. Not only the selection images, but the order of presentation may also greatly affect the impression of a space, such as people, density, weather conditions. The city is a result of collective hallucination of mistaken spaces.

The ambivalence in our engagement within the urban condition is analogous to our ambivalence towards the environment, reluctance in full utilization or total surrender. But extreme weather conditions propel a decision and intensify urbanization. In occurrence of extreme weathers, like typhoon in Hong Kong, activity pattern is removed from the surface and urban conditions are exaggerated and pushed to the extremes. The population retract from open air and open water, condense into points and form edge conditions.

Movement in response to extreme weathers is not simply a distinction between outdoor and indoor, but refuge in the underground system and confrontation with the storm at the waterfront. The interest therefore lies in the possibility of investigating storm-sensitive spaces and housing storm activities.

[ presuppose ] [ turbulence ]

PRESUPPOSE

- take for granted or as a given; suppose beforehand
- require as a necessary antecedent or precondition

+ "'airing' instead of the 'clearing' As she puts it: 'It is not light that creates the clearing, but light comes about only in virtue of the transparent levity of air. Light presupposes air.'" (p93)


TURBULENCE

- unstable flow of a liquid or gas
- instability in the atmosphere
- a state of violent disturbance and disorder (as in politics or social conditions generally)

+ "What is turbulence then? It is a mess of disorder at all scales, small eddies within large ones. It is unstable. It is highly dissipative, meaning that turbulence drains energy and creates drag. it is motion turned random. But how does flow change from smooth to turbulent?" (S, M, L, XL, O.M.A., Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau, p1268)

reading: Air/Condition, Peter Sloterdijk (2009)

[ allegorical ] [ confounded ]

ALLEGORY

- a short moral story (often with animal characters)
- a visible symbol representing an abstract idea
- an expressive style that uses fictional characters and events to describe some subject by suggestive resemblances; an extended metaphor .

+ "Allegories are not what we need now." (Manuel Gausa, the metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture)

+ "The allegory seeks...to recover that which tends to die out. And the allegory acquires greater presence when a culture feels threatened, when a civilization is transformed and when certain historical forms fade. The allegory expresses the lament - the nostalgia - for this loss and has come to produce a whole series of aesthetic strategies which slow that loss or which, at the very least, maintain alive and present in another form that which, or the image of that which, is being lost." (DELCAN, Juan, "Arquitectura en la era de la electronica, "BAU016, 1997.)

CONFOUNDED

- bewildered; confused; perplexed.

reading: Robert Smithson: The collected Writings