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| Kas Oosterhuis. Il lato selvaggio dell'architettura Marco Brizzi |
| [in italiano] | MARCO
BRIZZI: Kas, your work has a considerable relationship with information
technologies, which seems to assume a fundamental part in the development
of contemporary architecture. How are information technologies in general
changing the architectural practice, and what is your design ethics
in this change? KAS OOSTERHUIS: IT is changing the practice in many ways: 1. The design process. IT invades the design process, liquidizes and animates the geometries and its functionalities. 2. The site, IT links the local site to the global site. The building is no longer a stand-alone interface. The traditional urban context is now extended with the global context through wires and through connections to the Internet and other networks. 3. Materialization. We establish a hot line between the 3D model and the realization of the cutting and deformations of the building material. We are working on a machine to machine communication. 4. IT unleashes the wildness / intuition. We must learn to train our intuition in order to be able to master the logic. We must learn to go with the flow and at the same time develop resistance to the mainstream. Our new working space is a complex field of tension upon which many vectors and forces are executing their influence. 5. Real time behavior. Buildings, which display real time behavior, are essentially out of control. They start to behave unexpectedly, like the weather. 6. IT sets the basis for active data-driven structures. The data-driven constructs feed on data in real time. The building constantly feels internal and external environmental shifts, it measures its position in space and time, it reconfigures itself as a living integrity. 7. Consciousness of the building. The building starts to know its users and their preferences. The interaction between users and building will be smooth, without touching buttons and knobs. They will become aware of each other and develop a personal relationship. 8. Digital life-forms. In the end the digital life-forms will surpass the carbon-based life-forms. Digital life-forms travel with the speed of light, and this gives them a vast advantage over carbon-based life-forms which can only travel with a limited ground speed. One of your latest projects, the Trans_Ports 2001 that will be realized in Rotterdam is widely devoted to new technologies and it seems to resume all the principal topics of IT in architecture. Could you describe the design process and anticipate how the final architecture itself will reconfigure its relationships with the people and the environment? |
[11nov1999] | ||
 Trans_Ports 2001: play mode.  Trans_Ports 2001: work mode. |
The
design started really with a conversation I had with my structural engineer.
He told me that they proposed once computer driven pneumatic cylinders
to anticipate dynamic windloads. This means that the building is somehow
relaxing when there is no wind, and that it strengthens itself when
the wind comes up. It acts like a muscle that produces power when it
has to lift something. The building reacts in real time to exterior
forces. But structural engineers use this technique to withstand deformation.
They calculate with deformations, but the hidden (or not hidden) agenda
is always to withstand the forces, to minimize deformations. So I instantly
thought of using this technique to actively create forces from within.
The building no longer reacts to exterior forces, but acts in real time
to generate interior fields of tension. I was very excited about this
concept, which was fully sustained by my structural engineer. This real
time calculus technique was at the basis of the design concept. If buildings
can act actively and if their actions are connected to a database, buildings
start to develop a reason to move of their own. They no longer resist
deformation, they deform in real time to create specific configurations,
related to specific sorts of use. When the active structure, conceived as a spaceframe consisting of many data-driven pneumatic cylinders, changes shape, the exterior skin and the interior skin will move along with the skeleton. We have to develop a flexible continuous sort of 3D rubber skin to suit these deformations. Also the interior skin, where the information is immersed through thousands of programmable LED's, must be flexible and be able to follow the movements of the structure. What we do as architects is to determine the bandwith of the deformations. We cannot predict any specific configuration, neither in its physical, nor in its information content. But we know the maximum deformation, we know the working space of the building. Here the building for the first time will be an ongoing process, the building reconfigures in real time, the exact appearance is basically unpredictable, the movement never stops. The configurations will never repeat. When the buildings rest, the movements are unnoticealdy slow, but still moving. Movement is the standard mode, the still is the movement stretched in time as to appear in peace. The real time reaction and reconfiguration produces new behaviors in architecture. The interaction between users and building is going to be realized in dynamic experience trough transparent interfaces… Let's face the relation between users and the self-conscious machine. There always was a very complex relationship between user and instrument. Machines are the extensions of the human body. But on the other hand the machines have their own agenda. They evolve and the people are certainly not their masters. They are their players, their users; the machines have an evolutionary will of their own. The standard computer of today (Pentium 500) can be regarded as an external brain that is activated through the human brain>arm>hand>finger trajectory. Now our brains operate, in this very beginning of the digital era, as a programmatic part of the global network of Internet. We are becoming part of a global game. Now our computers are still patiently waiting for commands. But in the near future the many functions of the computer will be miniaturized and immersed in numerous devices, in operating systems of complex environments, and finally into our own bodies. The bioports from the movie eXistenZ (David Cronenberg 1999, www.existenz.com) induce a new entrance to our nervous system, a new sense-organ that enables us to enter parallel worlds through touching the fetal gamepod. But in eXistenZ the bodies of the players become inert, they are plugged in letting in a pseudo-medical infuse. The fact that David Cronenberg introduces this paralyzing situation means that he can not yet completely accept that we can experience real and virtual worlds at the same time. A convincing example of this simultaneity is the electronic glasses that the surgeon wears when operating a patient. He wears the dataglasses that gives him real time information on the condition of the patient (heartbeat, blood pressure etc) together with experiencing the real view on the opened body. The experience of virtual worlds will become very natural and will go naturally along with so-called real experiences. The interaction between user and machine becomes by virtue of the miniaturization of the technological extensions rather a mental fusion than a physical one. The early images of cyborgs bearing a heavy burden of technological equipment are hopelessly obsolete by now. It is the machines which evolve in high speed and we people can only try to lead this evolution into a certain direction. This process of digital product-evolution is happening right before our eyes now. We can only try to feed the machines, to raise them properly, and to let them go when they are grown up. As you said, that work of the architect is also to establish a connection between the 3D model and the production of the cutting and deformations of the building material. What technologies are actually capable to realize this requirement, and what machines do you work with? |
 Trans_Ports 2001. |
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  Trans_Ports 2001: external views. |
The
key to the connection of 3D model and production is that we must establish
machine to machine communication. There are fully operational CNC machines
which can cut glass, wood or steel plates. Other machines, which we
are already connected to, are the milling robots for milling medium-sized
foam-models, and stereolithography for even smaller models, but for
the real building we connect to the robust machines for bending steel
profiles (used in the Saltwaterpavilion, the Music Sculpture and the
Garbagetransferstation). These machines eat data directly from our PCs.
That means that the traditional drawing has become obsolete. And in
addition to this there are now important new developments in the making:
the invention of the flexible molds. If the molds, which are defining
the shape of, for example concrete elements, are flexible and data-driven,
than we can establish the machine to machine communications also here,
and then industrial production has fully catght up with the new possibilities
for producing a series of tailor-made, unique elements instead of a
series of the same, then repetition is no longer an economic force.
In our practice we prepare the 3D models for the milling machines and
the data-bases for the CNC machines. Industry, production and commerce are the engines of change. The reconfiguration of industrial processes that IT introduces in the practice can develop new architectures and new behaviors. In this way, from your point of view, does the matter of architecture change too? Yes, the matter of architecture will become invaded by these new microtechniques. Once technology invades the body, the body will never be the same again. Technology evolves at a fast rate and uses our bodies as software for the technological bodies, just as the car uses its driver as software to travel along its route. In the meantime it has become clear that human development is not the final goal of evolution, but that technology is gradually taking over our prominent position in evolution and is evolving at a much faster rate than biological life has ever been able to develop. What were initially technological extensions of the human body to increase the power of humans are now moving step by step towards complex emotional instruments whose behavior is unpredictable. Technology is turning wild. Architectural bodies too are now the target of technological invasion. These bodies are a part of global networks, they are (linked by cables) wired. Bodies are connected to databases and their behavior and (form) shape can be programmed. The body-specific scripts feed on data from databases that are upgrading themselves in real time. Architectural bodies can now be literally animated. Architecture no longer has a static final image, its visible form is becoming as unpredictable as the weather. Architecture is turning wild. |
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