charles wu / www.charleswu.co.uk
sustainable positive reduction/ urban phenomenon/ cinematic architecture
METAMORPHOSIS
Metamorphosis is the act and process from an intuition, to plasticity, and to theory - to make, to process making, to organise the process of making.
‘To make’ tends to come first, like a hunch, an intuition, a desire to come into being. Making is the fundamental act of existence, it is the need to create and respond. To make is plastic, and is a continuous process of self- reflection and criticism. It works with the fundamentality of material, whether they are words, paper, light, water, ink, and frequency in air. It’s the most irrational but conscious act, an act that creates most excitement. It’s also the act that requires most determination, stamina, patience, perseverance, passion and hard work.
Then comes the work of critics, including the maker himself, of re-tracing the process of making (in order to make again, or make better), and to theorise the process of making (to bring the act to a universal level). This, unfortunately, is what’s most accessible to others who receive the work. While the act of making is intimate and introverted, and that the actual process very personal, the re-tracing and theorising of the process is didactic and at some point, almost lacks suspense. We all know the masterpiece reflects extensive knowledge and countless sleepless nights, but what we see is what really matters.
We could simply dismiss, then, the power of making, and the actual progress from the impulsive act of make to metamorphosis. This material consciousness is only for the brave ones, and hides in the dark, where it always wanted to be.
Quote a short episode from one of my favourite book, THE CRAFTSMAN, ‘The painter Edgar Degas is once supposed to have remarked to Stephane Mallarme, ‘I have a wonderful idea for a poen but I can’t seen to work it out,’ whereupon Mallarme replied, ‘My dear Edgar, poems are not made with ideas, they are made with words.’’
CRAFT
This is the time to rethink our relationship with product. A time to dig out the dirt and witness how this rhizome of roots has spread around the plateau like wild fire, an esoteric network deep into the core of soil, seemingly impossible to root out.
Capitalism. TINA (There Is No Alternative)
We are built into the environment that produces to replace. Alice Rawsthorn in ‘Objectified’ mentioned that the first mass production was probably the first emperor of China producing bows and arrows for war. What he would like to achieve is that all bows are the same shape and weight so that if a soldier dies, others could pick it up and use them. Mass production has become linked to functionality, design for the ‘average’. However, it is not until Ford Motor Company’s Model T revolutionized automobile mass production did we realise our place in the complex socio-economic chain clearer than ever before.
Fordism has changed every relationship: cost/ designer/ manufacturer/ material/ product/ consumer. It provides the thrust the rides up to today, where technological advancement has brought mass production into the age of ‘brainlessness’. Our over reliance, and pride, in the mechanical procedures of production has led design into a disposable alternative, and then a branding tool. In order to keep up with the productivity that allows governments to print bigger greens, design is used against the human psychology, triggering the eager to possess. In order to achieve that, designers task is to develop a product that cost nothing to produce as carries a ‘designed’ guise. Architects, those bunch who’re always slow to act and afraid to be left behind, jumps on the wagon by screaming slogans of ‘modular systems’ and ‘beauty of the repetition’. They claim that mass production in building modular system has resulted in a ‘mechanical beauty never seen in the history of mankind’ which is ‘so close to the perfection of a machine’.
We have to agree mega corporations hire designers to achieve a task of actualising an aim: to make a profit. The bigger the profit, however it seems today, the larger the sacrifice. We are constantly going to the pharmacy, and if the medicine we buy can make us well, how could the pharmaceutical companies become one of the biggest corporations in the world?
The Indian NHS runs in a different way. Citizens are asked to pay monthly to the NHS while they’re healthy, and once they got ill, they could receive NHS service and from then on, pay nothing. This provides an incentive for the government to ensure that it’s the wellbeing of the citizens which is the first priority. Design and product has to take on the same route before our modes of manufacturing spins out of control.
What if we look at the other end of capitalism, where all products are own by an agent (X). X goes between the corporations and the consumers. Corporations sells a product to X, and consumers come to rent the product from X. X’s role is to ensure, if a product is broken, X would send it back to the corporations, or lower the rent of the product, indirectly punishing the corporations for a bad product. So instead of having corporations throwing products out of their factory regardless of the market need and quality control, it’s a self-regulating cycle that has sustainable, people-oriented and very healthy.
(beauty rocking chair from Gary Weeks, it could last a century I reckon)
Slightly utilitarian, but it has a beautiful aim. Designers are now given a ‘new’ task, the noble task to design a product that lasts, a product the requires little to no repair and maintenance, a product that acquires timeless beauty. Designers now have to pick up their craft, really driving technical prowess to produce an object that is sustainable, responsive and humane. It is not about plastic moulded chairs anymore, it’s about a wooden chair that response to ergonomics, catering all extremes of body dimensions, a chair that is new after generations.
From now on we produce to sustain. It’s more economical then windfarm, more efficient then hybrids, and more human than William Morris. I embrace the new design revolution.
extended reading: OBJECTIFIED and the beautiful The Language of Things.
SIZA
Álvaro Siza has been announced as the RIBA’s 2009 Royal Gold Medallist.
The official citation reads:
“Álvaro Siza is simply a profoundly complete architect who defies categorisation. The forging of a masterful and seemingly inevitable architecture out of the possibilities of a site is one of the supreme characteristics of Álvaro Siza’s architecture. He manipulates his readings of place into sculptural forms that are never predictable or ordinary, yet are never allowed to dominate over use or typological intelligibility.
In Siza’s buildings, perhaps like no others, it is the relationships between the elements of the architecture that is given primacy rather than the shape or texture of the elements themselves. This is an architecture in which an economy of expressive means is combined with an abundance of spatial revelation.
Álvaro Siza is, and always has been, a committed teacher and educator. He has enabled many younger architects to gain commissions through the work he was initially offered and this selflessness is one of many examples of his commitment to the greater architectural project, rather than to personal success. Unusually for an architect of such international standing, Siza has deliberately kept his studio small to ensure his attention to every project. He is generous with his appreciation of other architects.
For the inspiring and instructive body of work he has produced over 40 years, and for his immense contribution to architecture through dialogue and teaching, the RIBA, on behalf of H. M. the Queen, is honoured to present the 2009 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to Álvaro Joaquim Melo Siza Vieira. We wish him many more years of fulfilment of his unique vision of the possibilities of building.”
How beautiful. A man whose works embeds so much thoughts and self reflections, quietness, demand no gimmicks or screams. I look up to Alvaro Siza.
CERAMICS
digital ceramics never feels right. But it’s true it’s such a beautiful material you can always find someone, somehow, managed to update it.
The Wedgwoodn’t Tureen by Michael Eden, research graduate from RCA. interesting interpretation of the traditional form with a typical material, but contemporary form making techniques. However the exquisite poroxity and clean surface suggest just a little too much computer working. The beauty of ceramics is the interaction between the makers hands and the users’. It’s a tactile experience, very intimate and subtle. Alright, everything’s manufactured in China today anyway.
TORUS
more on Michael Eden’s webpage
EMBLEMATIC QUALITY
OMA has a very good practice in keeping things simple, monolithic. Or at least things that seems simple. Pure Geometry, a perfect square for a new eco-city, a circle for a tower, a gem for a concert hall. That’s where the beauty comes from, simple and pure geometry is difficult to find in nature, and they’re so artificial the eyes cannot resist them. That is it, the statement. Something to leave you gapsing for breath, ‘if it’s ever built, wow…’
Floating airport for Amsterdam, as a substitude for Schiphol on land (but under water) which could in turn be used as multi-purpose new urban development.
MORE?
International Airport for Jeddah, OMA
WTF?
MVRDV has joint forces with DELFT University to create a studio unit t?f, the Why factor, focusing on urban issues around the world. One of the finished project is the Green Dream.
I know very little about it, but from what i see, an array of Hanging Gardens hovering above the checkered city. How innovative these array are the size of an exact grid of Barcelona, where the triangular bits of the city, where the grid is cut of by diagonally running roads, the modelmakers have decided not put anything on it because they do not fit the array, or they put some glowing translucent sphere.
Where do we go from here, homestly?
VARIATIONS
TOP TOWERS by Brazilian architects Konigsberger and Vanucchi in São Paulo, Brazil has brought in a reverie of infinite possibilities.
The building is like a canvas, and broad strokes and dotted lines of white. That could be 1 way of perceiving it.
It could also be seen as variations of a single and simple idea of a terrace set on one side of a unit, and through shifting side and linking the terraces, a very intricate and elegant result emerges. A bit of ornamentation, but nothing too vulgar.
images taken from the Deezen page.
PERFORMANCE II
What eco-morphology would like to mimick is the performative function of a simple geometric form. Geometric form that has certain repucurssions in itself. A honeycomb extrudes in 1 direction, but holding compressive forces from 6. Through parametric manipulations, one could understand, sometimes even exhaust the limitations and variation of this geometric form. Though such procedure, the integrated functionaity of the form is explored, it’s structural, compositional, environmental repucurssions would be noticible. That’s the morphological part of thing.
Architecture mimicking nature also comes in it’s ability to utilise a simple geometric form like a cell. Proliferation of such a cell into a array that transforms and differentiates itself through the manipulative parameters. Therefore some of these ‘cells’ become thicker and longer to hold load, some become thinner but extruding in a different orientation to differentiate lighting and directing views. And they are all honeycomb, the geometric form easily recognisable by the eyes.
I really enjoy this honeycomb morphology, visit the site by material system.
PERFORMANCE
Nature is the well-deserved specialist for integrated systems. Roots as anchors by grabbing hold of soil, finding the right sources of water and nutrients, preventing insect from invading the inside of the tree, preventing lost of water vapour through its surface, but allowing maximum surface area for absorption,as well as balancing the cantilever of the tree branches.
They come from the same cell of the xylem and pholeum. But older. The tree work as one, through capilliary effect and osmosis through the air pores of the leaves, pulling water up from the soil. It is incredible architecture.
OMA NORTH SEA GNEREATOR
MASTERPLAN ZEEKRACHT (sea power) for the North Sea has the main feathre being a ring of cables that connects windmill farms of the seven adjacent countries. An international institute in the centre of the ring unites the knowledge on wind energy. The Netherlands takes a central position in the plan, not only geographically but also as a source of experience and information.
With shared infrastructure and shared knowledge the North Sea countries can make the step from carbon based energy towards sustainable energy. Aniticipated that in 2050 Europe should be able to be independent of the oil state and Russia using a combination of wind and solar energy. THE WIND ENERGY GENERATED AT THE NORTH SEA EQUALS THE AMOUNT OF ENERGY NOW PRODUCED IN THE PERSIAN GOLF.
I cannot help but marvelling at the way OMA disseminates their works. What an image of this gigantic ring producing and flowing electricity. What string statement of energy producing and ambitious forecasts.
Buckminster Fuller once said that only those who are comprehensive and not specific would survive. There was the Great Prirates then who now dominate the world economic landscape. It’s time for us to venture out at sea again.
