Waterworlds Studio X

Forms of simultaneous unity and disunity:

As the second year studio at DIA expands into a full year, Studio X takes the opportunity to explore deeper and formally more abstract topics, within the Algorithmic Design agenda.

This year's agenda is to examine unified and continuous compositions as a starting point, establish rules and geometrical controls, while later concentrating more diversified system compositions that propose radical shifts, breaks and discontinuities within the established framework. we are looking to discover a world perfection, beyond the suffocation of prediction and patterned growth, we seek the suprising, we seek moments of "free-ness"; those instances where unity becomes discontinuous and separated-ness becomes a continuous to unify.

The students are asked to select a site in the sea or the ocean and define a brief for a floating city or habitation or facility that allows them a range of options in establishing a meaningful organization for their architectural experimentations;

The studio is complemented by workshops and seminars on Cybernetics, scripting and rendering techniques.

On the unfinished...

In examining the architectural endeavours of Antonio Gaudi I soon came to realize that the intent is never to offer a complete building (or project) but to actually put in motion a process of constructing, a process of making that never comes to its end- because it cannot come to its end.
Gaudi’s work is fundamentally –for lack of a better word fractal- like an organism in the process of constant regeneration, of constant folding and unfolding the pleats of space and imagination in ways that are at the same time provocative, creative, esoteric, mystical.

Gaudi doesn’t need to justify himself or his obsession to his contemporaries. As a matter of fact his contemporaries often ridiculed his designs (?) – if one can actually use this term to describe this particular process of engaging the material. He feels or actually he knows-albeit instinctively- that in the long term -the view of things- the cosmos functions in a different way.

At a time when his superstar contemporaries, like Le Corbusier, A. Loos, Wagner, W. Gropius, Mies V.d.Rohe and other Architectural Immortal Giants- were actively promoting the modern as the stance against the traditional, the cliché, as the ever new beginning, he sought to explode both contemporary and traditional ideas together by sabotaging them from the inside. The Sagrada Familia- a project that lays the diagram of the Spanish catholic church in to full view- to the content of the Client, but also in a clearly sarcastic way to the eyes of the future reader, he postponed the problem of recognition and gains ultimate justification, because his recognition comes almost a century later than his death. Seeking to be the “one unknown”, the one who seeks not to see himself raised on the altar of fame. He becomes quietly present.
It would be both appropriate and inappropriate in my view to finish such a project. Appropriate because future generations would have the chance to continue and evolve the work. (in that sense the project should not be finished as originally intended. It should rather take on the ideas of the following generations and fuse them in to an eternally evolving project: similar to the act of procreation and death. He is in my view the “architect par excellence” exactly because of this reason. In not seeking to promote one but by allowing others to complete what he has started he becomes the architect or the initiator or the father of the idea of a project in constant evolution.

It would also be inappropriate on the other hand –that is for the future generations- to complete the Sagrada familia, exactly because there would be the danger of never achieving the mastery of the master thus running the risk of having a completed but contrived project.

The question then becomes, is a project to be finished? In the Epicurean sense, nothing is ever finished or complete. That certainly holds true for the institutions that buildings come to provide shelter and symbolism for. Whether that may be a single family house, a government institution, a religious building or even an event space, a space of public assembly or a civic project, the object can never be complete. That is not only the essence of the project, it is the project.

I have just discovered this...

discoverd this blog by chance, its excellent XTOS , very unique...

XTOS INTRO MSG

Hello world!
this is my first ever Blog!
i have been meaning to make this happen for a Long time nOw and now it is reality...so,
my friends, please leave your views and comments on to this space and let's make this the paGe of the millenium!
this space is open to all points of view and all subjects, but remember, respect to your fellOw human being is a minimum obligation here, so rock on but Never forget...

enjoy!

Xtos
8-9-07