garethace

I linked it on the other thread a while ago; I wrote a couple of words and posted up some images here:

BTW, you may need quite a fast connection to see all the photos, and a big display would be handy, or else just wait a long while on a slower connection, as I often have to do. 🙁

My ideas about Thom Mayne’s work

It is quite simple actually, that architects should play war strategy games like Shogun Total War, in order to become more versatile with the way that they use computer interfaces.

I have been pretty busy of late writing a Photoshop benchmark, to go into a suite of major benchmarks soon. See how it develops, but I wanted to make sure that how Architects might use a Photoshop system in future should be part of ‘a benchmark result’.

I.e. quite heavy image working.

Some interesting thoughts about Toronto in that article, had a good read of it this morning. What did you people think at all?

btw guys, I said I would link this just for the glass and steel, CG visualisation fans here. Enjoy!

CG Architect

Page 2.

Page 3.

Just make sure you are on a fast connection! 🙂

I am not too familiar with developers myself, but I did stumble across an article about a Toronto developer, which might prove interesting to thread readers on this topic.

Toronto developer

null

I don’t really want to go to deeply into this thread quite yet, but I divide this issue into two parts:

1) The involvement of the government in having conference centres.

2) Conference centres themselves.

Any thread like this, is going to get all muddled up very quickly in confusing those two issues, so one should only start a thread about conference centres by qualifying which area, the thread is meant to be about – then posts tend to stick more to a common line of argument.

Perhaps start dual threads and just cross reference them.

Anyhow, the point 1) above is part of a larger debate about moral in relationship to the planning process in general. And because of this, I think it is just too over-simplified to start all shouting, “I hate SDCC or every CC” without first at least trying to present how these government organisations fuction. I mean, they deal with many, many, many, many different issues and as such never seem to have nearly as much of a clue as architects have in relation to specific buildings.

What that linked article does do, is present to all readers to this thread, at least some idea of how the administration, that is a Planning department actually is. I.e. We have to put ourselves temporarily in the shoes of a planning executive, responsible with the organisation of his/her department. Until you actually do that, all off-loading of criticism and opinions here on this board does become a bit of a farse.

On the subject of point 2) above, I am currently working on a specific post, about conference centres. Why? Because, besides all the Planning department stuff, that has become embedded into the discussion topic of Ireland/conference centres – there is quite an interesting architectural discussion buried in there someplace about a conference centre as a building type, which fills a certain need by a modern western society in 2004 – which I am very interested in debating about, on-its-own, and distinctly separate from the whole Irish Government/Planning department/Conference centre talk.

It would be a shame, if this recent government intervention mess, would cloud too much over the debate about the Architecture of conference centres as a building type. In fact, I would go so far as to say, noone has ever gone into a study of conference centres around the world, the places where they occur, what events are held in them – at least, I don’t have any links to discussions/articles/reviews of this at my finger tips. Do you?

Even Magazine article issue dates/vols/no.s would be much appreciated thanks.

Typically, the problems associated with any government department or structure are very similar to the ones decribed on the links here.

I think the comment made by what? about the 32-storey thread, and the debating style used here at Archiseek was all too true.

im continually amazed at the opinions on this website about highrise buildings. there seems to be a strong vein of height lust fuelled by (in my opinion) some sort of insecurity amongst the architectural community here that we dont have any tall buildings in dublin. the reason we dont have tall building is not solely down to overbearing planners. it is because we have never had the economical needs that create high rise buildings.
if you want to solve urban sprawl a much more purtinant issue is the density of suburbia rather than the city centre. the attitude of “lets build a 60 storey skyscraper because we can” in the middle on 2storiesville is a futile self-indulgent excercise

I mean, it is all a bit too ‘Frank McDonald’ in its format – sure Frank can include the whole wider political argument in most of his articles about Irish architecture, because for the simple reason, it draws in a much larger target readership/audience for his articles in his newspaper, but does it make the debate about the architecture any bit better?

I think Architects are good at realising what buildings function or are used for, or might be one day used for – that is their unique facility – just sticking to the basics sometimes, is a better format for architectural debate on-line, than trying to piggy-back, a political scandal newsbreak ontop of an interesting debate about a building type.

The Russians did actually learn one thing from their space travel though, which I don’t think the Americans might have grasped quite yet – a la world space station etc, etc.

That people who are left up there in orbit, go absolutely bats mentally.

No getting around that fact – one American tried to spend some time up with the Russians and came down a very broken man indeed.

The right stuff, may not be the right stuff after all.

Aside from the whole physcho thing, the body just disintegrates without the use of muscles and the presence of gravity – you could not have what is depicted in Star Trek period. Even with the exercise and all of that, the Russians still found that muscle mass was just depleting away to nothing!

The muscles on one’s face didn’t know how to respond to the absence of gravity and that caused all kinds of physical problems.

I would think exploring the sea, might be one positive development to come from all of this space age investment and time though, and that extra knowledge gained about the sea, climatic factors and analysis, might eventually lead to better and more economic use of tidal power in the long run.

So one cannot dismiss the benefits of space travel for solar/wind/wave either. Many of the vessels exploring the underwater currents in the seas now, are space age technology, materials and workmanship – alot of them russian too.

Originally posted by FIN
yes. i agree. where the machines will have to be programed to adapt to it’s environs and then so given the scope to “grow”.

Naw, you have it on backways! 🙂 It works the other way around – the environment always chooses some poor unsuspectiing smuck, at some particular time and place to become the dominant race – how do you think, such arse holes like humans ever managed to get where they are – on their own merit! Huh!

read on, and see what I mean exactly,

>Computers are glorified calculators

What a quote! I will have to remember it.

>I agree that the human has shown a unique ability to progress.

Not necessarily true, they stayed using basic stone tools and without the gift of fire for millions of years. Then for some reason, something just happened suddenly and from no development whatsoever over a very extended period, you abruptly had huge leaps and bounds in their development compressed into quiet a short period of time. My own guess, is that since Dinosaurs were on the way out, nature just picked something else to be the successor – hence human beings stepped into the breach.

It is like re-introducing the wolf back into Yellow Stone National Park – every system needs that vital component in order to function correctly – that component will always be filled by some species. In the case of the wolfs at Yellowstone, they are finding after ten years, they no longer have the same trouble with other species breeding out of control – everything else has stabilised. Of course, farmers are worried about the wolf attacking the cattle etc still, but largely the move has worked out well.

Upright walking and increasing of brain mass all happened in the human species, subsequent to this dramatic beginning in the acceleration of human development. If you like, the environment just happened to choose human beings – the same way as it will someday more than likely just ‘choose’ machines to be our successors. I love the part in the movie by Spielberg, called AI, where a last of the batch, human constructed robot named David I think, remains the only lasting legacy of the human species to the newer and more sophisticated machine species. I think we know very little about Dinosaurs, but they were the dominant species for millions of years of the earth’s history.

> the operating system of ur pc is not quite what we are talking about and neither are we
>saying ur pc will sprout legs and begin to walk.

Actually, the only thing that robotics has hightlighted is how complex the actual act of upright walking is. It is something which all human beings instinctively take for granted and learn naturally. It is something our built environments are constructed around. You start hitting all kinds of complexity brick walls and the project to make machines walk around an environment designed for humans ultimately fails. The same as the environment in which Dinosaurs thrived was unsuitable for human habitation and development. However, robots are great for crawling down sewer pipes and places where humans cannot – sending AI bots into our own veins, is another example, going to Mars etc, etc, etc.

Our dependency on robots will grow as time goes on, our privacy will be non-existent. See the movie AI by Spielberg when you get around to it.

>It all works from the same principle the only difference is that the computers you are
>talking about have much more capacity, more complex programmes containing much
>higher numbers of viarables in their decision making process.

Simply not true, everything in a computer/machinery is inherent quite simple – it depends just on modulations of voltage in electricity to make 1 and 0s. Everything has to fit through that same small window – that is why you need a computer chip to work faster and faster – hence the hipe about MHZ. Mind you, as computer chips become smaller and smaller, and you can fit more onto the same piece of cheap, bulk, Si wafer – then sort of AI networks can be simulated very easily. It becomes less and less about speed and MHZ and more to do with AI networking.

SGI and NASA are always combining together thousands, literally thousands of chips to work as a single image of an operating system – then you can really begin to plug in the big questions and get your answers. To reference the article about WiFi – I want to be able to stick my own PDA out of the window of my Taxi, in a downtown traffic jamb and instantly, without being plugged in, it communicates with all the other machines in the vicinity – it draws its power from the Radio waves etc, etc. See how machines could be more adaptable than humans? Unless we can develop mind reading capabilities that is.

I mean, this cross-communication could be really cool on Mars, where whole armies of the buggers would work like in the Star Wars movies – you could use the planet Mars, to have like of Paint Ball gaming on drugs, using cheap useless robots. Of course the robots would eventually just get tired of that an rebel on us! 🙂

Do a goggle for things like ‘Red Storm’. The next Playstation 3, will be designed a bit like this – a load of little computers stuffed into one chip. As chips become cheaper and cheaper this becomes possible. The trouble with MicroSoft products, is they never seem to be able to ‘move’ off of the simple PC – even though they were extremely sucessful on that one platform. OSes like Linux have been extremely sucessful on larger clusters of hundreds and thousands of computers though. Strange.

Unlike our own human biological networks, which manage to construct complex arrangements and patterns. When machines begin to intelligently recognise patterns, as in art with humans, maybe then. . . that is mostly what architects are trained to do isn’t it? I mean, you know automatically when a young architectural student has suddenly ‘transitioned’ when the patterns of line weights and patterns they make on a drawing presentation actually begins to communicate a message above the addition of its components and becomes the multiple of its components.

I must be stupid as an Architect, as I failed to ‘transition’. I feel at home with computers in this respect. 🙂 What is crucial to understand from the ‘Chip Foundry’ article is that each chip ‘bakes’ itself differently. No two are exactly alike, and machinery does go out of sync by accident, so the odds are, that eventually something strange and errie is going to just happen.

>It all comes back to risk and reward there has been nothing found in space that merits colonisation.
>Resources should be directed at two aspects of space, the sun and the harnessing of
>solor energy and the moon the harnessing of tidal energy. Other expenditure is simply
>indulging the whims of a particular scientific elite

But don’t you just love all the pomp and cerimony of it all? I mean imagine trying to make a good Bruce Willis – type action flic about tidal energy! By the way, good post there What?

Building Aesthetics, is one thing I do not try to verbalise and it doesn’t always translate in drawings or renderings either.

I gets back to that project for Beirut doesn’t it? I mean, the fact that most buildings there were made of soft limestone, plastered over to stop it crumbling, but now they are expressing the limestone to make it look neat and clean looking.

Competitions are a bit like ‘Radio Friendly’ songs though – I really don’t know if they achieve very much at the end of the day. What have you thought about big competitions like Bibliotheque de Paris etc?

How French were those entries, I quite liked the one by Meier myself, and also the one by Stirling. I saw a recent monograph on Botta and he seems to have built a lot of works, that were ‘sort of designs on paper’ for a long, long, long time.

Does a Botta design on paper translate very well into reality – his buildings try to evoke a sense of place, materiality etc I think – whether you can do that in modern construction or not. . . . I guess one really has to go and look at some newly completed Botta works to find that one out.

I am going to post something about Thom Mayne aswell shortly – a nice post, with a lot of images – possibly put it at cyburbia or CG Architect or someplace and link it here. It sort of will deal with how Mayne deals with ‘place’ and the earth in areas like Los Angeles with little to go on.

Do you think his few realised works live up? Diamond Ranch high school for instance, theory, reality, experience. . . .