Fall 2016
Drawing and representation has always taken on a multitude of roles within architecture, from technical description and representation to radical proposals and flights of the imagination. In recent decades, the role of architectural drawing has been further confounded by the appearance of new digital tools, which have downplayed the utility of two dimensional drawing in favor of three dimensional and time-based representations. While these tools have allowed radical new possibilities for representation, they have also effectively divorced our bodies and sense of touch from the process of design, making it a wholly visual process. The goal of the project is to critically investigate the continuing role of representation within architecture, exploring both its traditional uses in light of new tools, and how these tools can lead to radically new methods of design and exploration.
This project, an animation, uses time, the fourth dimension, as an opportunity to study architecture as an animate entity. The program and systems of a building often have a complex relationship to their context, these relationships are often impossible to fully understand or identify in a single instance. Concepts such as these are documented through an aggregation of imagery in order to analyze the environmental changes at play.
Within the study of an architectural detail is found the genetic make-up of a structure’s larger context. Isolation and abstraction of the minute allows one to re-evaluate the larger whole and understand it in a new way. The architecture depicted in the project, OMA’s Taipei Performing Art’s Center, is analyzed and represented under the constraints of the Paranoiac-Critical method. The building is interpreted as a glitch due to its programmatic qualities and its structural effects; this quality guiding the construction of the final animation.
