Yale Spring 2015 Hernan Diaz Alonso Studio: Thomas Friddle

Description

Instructor : Hernan Diaz-Alonso

TA : Austin Samson

Consultant : Ivan Bernal

The design ethos brought about by the digital turn triggered some key shifts in architecture over the past twenty years. The far-reaching effects and consequences of this phenomenon are hard to spell out - and perhaps still too recent to be fully theorized (despite many attempts to do so). However, I think that some of the main shifts that occurred in our field can be summarized as follows:

Representation to Simulation
Composition to Systems
Collage to Pixelation
Geometry to Image
Close Reading to Virtuosity
Details to Close Ups
New Coherencies

There has been an ongoing interest in all of these themes in architecture, but for the purpose of this studio I want to explore the last four a bit more carefully. This is mainly because I see them as framing, and in a sense implying, the other four themes on the list.

Frame

This studio proposes a new self-camouflaging malware propagation system, to explore the nature of flesh, reflections and glossiness, an architecture that overcomes shortcomings in the current generation of metamorphic formalism and specially to produce non-phenomenological ethereal masses architecture. Specifically, although mutants produced by current state-of-the art metamorphic engines are diverse; they still contain many characteristic binary features that reliably distinguish them from benign architecture.

The anti-mass or blurred mass as a formal code forgoes the concept of a Metamorphic body and instead creates mutants by stitching together parts from opaque effects that have been classified as benign by local conditions. The studio is interesting in exploring potential architectural expressions of a contemporary neo formal mass butchery. The symptoms are many are don't point to any single condition or cause, and we're working with just a few that interest us in particular.

What is the formal project today in relation to the tissue of the city and what could it be? The conflicts of Modernity, from laboratory-assisted reproduction to European monotony, revolve to a significant degree around the transformation or conservation of particular bio sociological arrangements, of obsolete architecture types. The globalization of Western design forms has also meant a globalization of glass formal infrastructure originated for a historically contingent of type accumulation. We argue that the mismatches between architectural conventions for the space and the multiplicity of biosociologial realities are severe. This studio will explore other possibilities by attempting to accommodate one particular, highly idiosyncratic formal tissue condition that would be entirely unsuited to a conventional exhibition space. The studio will explore, thought very precise digital techniques, multiple ontologies thought stitching of architecture pieces.

Distorted reflection, animations, rendering, biosynthetic replacements, will serve an Aesthetic technique catalogue for the production of architecture design. We will absorb both the optimistic and progressive as well as the menacing and dystopian, and for this studio, will liberally apply precedents from all of these.

The aspiration of the work is proposing to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity trough the understanding of Rituals of butchery, carving, re assembling following the notion of the forms. Most butchery techniques had the capacity to combine the power of raw mutilations with highly sophisticated formal understanding of organization, as well a saturated and excessive ornament in the instruments of rituals. There is another history and evolution of rituals in relation to the bodies and their mutilations, human and animals alike. These MISFITS produced some of the most contradictory conditions of beauty and horror.

Thomas Friddle_02/10