Dutch Abstraction Through Digitalism

Dutch abstraction through digitalism

nels long

About this Work

At the time of this writing Nels Long is a fourth year architecture student on exchange at Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey from his home institution of Mississippi State University. This work is the result of a three week research course taught by Prof. Gregory Watson of Mississippi State University hosted by the Rijksakademie of Fine Arts, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The purpose of this course was to introduce students from all design fields to the concept of theory research, writing and graphical organization within the context of contemporary Dutch art and architecture.

“ ‘Architecture is the masterly correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’ as Le Corubusier put it in his manifesto Towards A New Architecture. Everything has changed since then, and we are ready for the new paradigm: ‘Architecture is the programmable hyper-body played skillfully by its masters at the speed of light.’ Le Corbusier gave shape and meaning to architecture in the era of the Industrial Revolution. Let’s now programme hyper-reality in our era of the Digital Revolution. Let’s Face it: virtual reality is tin all respects more real than what we take to be natural reality. Virtual reality including any software ever written for any plat form is hyper real. Simply because we know the stuff it is made of. We know every bit and byte. In the Digital Revolution reality is being rewritten from ground zero. Architecture becomes a game being played by its users. And not only architecture will be subject to the forces of real time calculation. Planning, construction, interior design and landscape design are also ready to be developed as real time games. During the design process the game is designed by the architect and played by all parties involved. During the life cycle of the building and the built environment the game is played by their users, by the visitors and by the built environment itself. Visitors become participants in the experience economy. By playing the game the participants set the parameters. Each actor triggers an array of sensors writing the new data into a database from where the building picks up the new data and starts reconfiguring itself in shape, in content, or both in shape and content. Then the new configuration is matched to the desired conditions. It is far to say that the building will find itself in a state of continuous operation. The building, consisting of numerous cooperating programmable elements will behave like a swarm. The building elements will show flocking behavior always keeping an eye on the neighboring actor, always ready to act and react.

Hence we propose a new motto for the discipline of architecture: ‘ Game, set and match.’ To be played over and over again.

Architecture is turning wild.”

Kas Oosterhuis

Proposal for Study The components of modernism were materials, space, light, systems, etc. All of these things very available to detection by the human senses. Modernization came about because of the invention of new products generated by new systems during the Industrial Revolution. Each one of these new products generated a new way of looking at the built world, and in turn created an entire movement and series of built work in its wake.

The days of the Industrial Revolution are now passed, and while new products and systems still continue to be developed the fundamental building blocks of our postmodern world have been developed. We must therefore look for authenticity in a new set of parameters, based on the Digital Revolution.

Early modernists looked to paintings and sculptures, hand made objects as a source for the abstraction that generated movements such as De Stijl.

Today abstraction can be found in many more varieties and genres, such as contemporary mathematics, software design, algorithmic composition as well as others. These templates provide for a level of abstraction that breaches the level of visual aesthetic and begins to address the very base of siting, planning, and systems generation that could in turn provoke a new visual aesthetic.

Various Dutch architects and designers have begun to look at the application of these new methods at varying levels of intensity. OMA, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is among the leaders of this movement as it can be applied to the sensitivity of the urban fabric, while MVRDV is more concerned with the built world and an object within a greater context and applies these digital technologies as such.

Therefore, my proposal for study during the Maymester Study in Holland, is to address the connection between the importance of abstraction in early modernist and De Stijl movements and how it has been continued in current design projects in the area, but also how this abstraction has left the world of visual aesthetic and has begun to take on a more comprehensive nature in the design process using the new tools that the Digital Revolution has to offer. I plan to do this by analyizing one piece of work by a De Stijl artist and comparing it to a specific building which represents the current digitized dutch aesthetic.

Piet Mondrian, Victory Boogie Woogie, 1942-1944.

Oil paint, pieces of paper and plastic, and black chalk on canvas, 127 x 127 cm, vertical axis 179 cm. On loan from the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, Amsterdam. Gemeentemusem, Den Haag.

The Building

SiloDam Architect: MVRDV Site area: Amsterdam, 2,600 square meters on IJ river.

Building area: 26,000 square meters, 20m x 112m x 30 m.

142 owner occupied units, 15 rented units, 600 square meters of retail.

Completed: 2002 Client: Rabo Vastgoed, De Principaal B.V. Construction: Bouwcombinatie Graansilo’s V.O.F. (Bouwbedrijf M.J. de Nijs en Zonen B.V. en Kondor Wessels Noord)

SiloDam. MVRDV. 17 November 2010 <http://www.arcspace.com/architects/ mvrdv/silodam_article.html>.

The original intention of this was written as a hypothesis while still in the United States and before any research had been done. Because of this there were several factors that were unexpected and therefore changed the overall outcome of the study. The most significant of these was in the building selection itself. Judging from the aesthetic and organization of MVRDV projects it was believed that such computational techniques were used in their design process. After SiloDam. MVRDV. 17 November 2010 visiting their office and recieving a talk on their process it was <http://www.arcspace.com/architects/ discovered that they rely on the coputer very little for genera- mvrdv/silodam_article.html>. tive purposes, which was in complete contradiction to the hypothesis and selection for the building. In meeting with the architects however, something else was discovered which validated SiloDam as the target for this study. While computational software was not being used as heavily as had been anticipated, computation was still in effect. The way that MVRDV talks about their projects is a digital language composed of various scaling packets of program very similar to what would be written should it be put into an alogorithmic script. When designing a building they first look at the form as a whole, then through a series of subdivisions based on an unspoken algorithm that is inherent to the design but not expressed or used computationally but rather logically.

This raised interesting questions about the nature of computational design and the importance of the publicity of the algorithm itself. This prompted a slight change in the original hypothesis in an attempt to answer these unexpected questions. Therefore, this study will now take the aesthetic presented in SiloDam and attempt to create the algorithm behind the implied logic based on the process used by Georges Vantongerloo in his â&#x20AC;&#x153;Groupâ&#x20AC;? series, in which the logic and the algorithm was very clear and indeed the focus of the painting itself.

The Paintings Artist: Georges Vantongerloo School: Concrete Art, De Stijl Group: Y= Oil on Canvas, Watercolor on Paper, India Ink on Paper Dates: 1930-1934

Vantongerloo, Georges. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Composition Red Yellow Greenâ&#x20AC;?. Digital Representation. Original Oil on Canvas. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain. 1930.

Vantongerloo, Georges. “Composition y=-x^2+ 3x +10.” Gauche, Watercolor and Ink on Paper. 1934. Nov. 18th. < http:// www.mutualart.com/Artwork/COMPOSITION-y--x2-3x-10/E6B5E0AF9CEC08F8>.

Vantongerloo, Georges. “Composition y = ax^2 + bx +c.” Oil and Ink on Canvas. 1933. Nov. 18th. < http://www.mondriaanhuis.nl/ collection/all/?collection=ICN>.

George Vantongerloo was a Belgian arist and architect who was a founding member of De Stijl and Concrete Abstraction. His work during the Concrete Abstraction period is the focus of this study. The movement took the ideals of the De Stijl movement but pushed it further claiming that complete alienation from everything regarding form and a complete basis in mathematics allowed for true abstraction. Following this methodology his paintings and sculptures were based on mathematical formulas or algorithms for the basis of this study. There is very little to be found about this period in his work so the majority of the analysis here is based on personal interpretation of the compositions in relation to their titles and how the mathematics could have influenced their design.

Each of his works is a derivation on the typical form of the quadtractic formula, 0 = -ax^2 +bx + c, the term quad relating to the square. The main uses of the quadratic formula are relating to the need reduce multiple variables down to one within the calculation. The fact that the premier variable is typically of a power of two however implies that the resulting curve, R, be of parabolic nature. Since there is no available source for the thoughts of Vantongerloo regarding this series, and each piece is a composition of squares, the logical conclusion is that rather acting as a graph of the associated function, it is rather a representation of the combination of the included components rather than a graph of the function itself. For example if R exists within cartesian space on the x, y scale than the area of R, or the space below the curve when abtracted would result in a series of rectangles of varying scale and proportion.

A parabola has three factors which define its shape, width, heighth and the fuction defining the curve. Vantongerloo’s paintings are typically limited to three colors, which originally appeared to be a return to his De Stijl past, but under closer study may in fact relate to their placement and orientation under the defining constructs of the equation they are named for. If one were to look at the piece ‘y= -ax^2 + bx +c” (previous page) the formula for a typical quadratic equation resulting in a parabola within positive space, the red square represents the height while the combination of off-white and blue rectangles creates a triangulation that represents the width, with a move relating to the subdivision of the area into rectangles.

Vantongerloo, Georges. “XVII Composition Dans le Carre”. Photo. Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. 11/17/2010. < http://www. kunstmuseumsg.ch/pressebilder/index. php?anlass=elfsammlungen>

This concept of “pixelation”, or a self simlar scaling subdivision of a region into smaller regions that is seen in the work of Vantongerloo, is very close to the way that MVRDV spoke of their work, thus drawing the connection for this study. Returning to the process of inherent computational algorithms within the work of MVRDV, how would a series of self simlar scaling subdivison work in three dimensional space as a method for allocating program spaces for architecture. This diagram (opposite) begins to show this process beginning at the form as a whole it is then split in half, then into the four blocks which give the building its unique pattern.

Subdivided further each block is split lengthwise into groupings of apartments, then types of apartments, then down into the apartments themselves before finally being shown as rooms within the apartments. This diagram extends past what is here visable beyond the extents of the form and into the city itself drawing its inspiration from the organization of the contextual area itself. One such study that has been previously conducted is the mapping of residential spaces in the surrounding area by volumn and then “folding” the map to create the SiloDam which contained the same amount of inhabitable space as the studied context (Farkas, 2007).

This contextual study begins to address the computational level that was expected in SiloDam but was not mentioned by the architects in their presentation or found anywhere in the offical documentation of the project. Had this study been done during the conceptualization of SiloDam the result could have been a very different buliding which may or may not have been more in tune to the surrounding context .

In the spirit of the Concrete Abstractionists, the conclusion of this work is an attempt to synthesize the paintings and the building diagrammatically in a way the the algorithm of pixelation as previously discussed becomes a primary focus of the building itself. The diagram (opposite) attempts to work backwards from an already existing building to guess at the logic developed in the design phase but presenting it according to a digital logic by means of a network of relationships. Expressed two dimensionally in order to be easily compared to the paintings whose logic is behind this look into the buildings composition.

As previously stated the break down of the spaces is self similar scaling, basically meaning that one of the smallest when multiplied by some number has the ability to fill the volume, or in this case the area of the largest unit. This diagram is the graphical representation of the algorithm behind SiloDam which was expected to instated at the front but rather as a result of the studies done during this project is only here presented.

The concept of pixelation, as seen here, and also of the mathematically derrived rule behind a city bring up interesting possibilities for future design. Pixelation as used here or cellular automata which is the mathematically correct term for this process, works in both directions. If something with the scale of a building can be broken down in to something with the scale of a room whle still maintaining self similarity, then it can also be broken down into something with the scale of a floor tile, or the molecule of the wood of which the tile is made. This molecule would of course not have the same structure to be called self similar, but working backwards from the molecule could not a building be a self similar scaling fractal of a wood molecule.

Working from the other direction, a building is simply one component within the urban fabric of a city much the same way that a room is a comonent of a building. Therefore, if a room can have a mathematical relationship with a building then is it not true that a building can have a mathematical scaling relationship with the city in which it is built, or the country in which it is built. This way mathematics allows designers to create works that the context mathematically as well as aesthetically in an attempt to create more urban friendly designs.

Bibliography Farkas, Chen and Gaash, Netta. “Silo Dam - MVRDV”. Nov 16, 2007. Nov 18, 2010. < http://silodammvrdv.blogspot. com/>.

ArcSpace. “SiloDam, MVRDV.” Feb 5, 2005. Nov 16, 2010. < http://www.arcspace.com/architects/mvrdv/silodam_article. html> All other sources are cited within the text.