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PROTOMORPHS: EMERGENT ONTOLOGICAL FORMATIONS Danielle Willems Co-Founder of Mæta Design (2008). Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute. M.Arch from Columbia University, GSAPP (2007)
Foundation 501 [M.ARCH]
Protomorphs’ perceives the architectural production as part of a larger, self-organizing, material process. While engaging in the production of protomorphic-architectural environments through the generative capacities of algorithmic /diagrammatic logics, our primary focus will be the relationship between city and architecture. Finding the constitutive difference between the two in time, more so than in form. Protomorph is an investigation into the processes of becoming, and as such, it fuses the two modes of thought into a unified phase space. One of the challenges in the studio will be the re-invention of the means of assessment, the development of notations, and techniques that will document the forces and the production of “difference” in the spatial manifestations of the generative systems. With the introduction of a secondary scale of time in the design process, borrowing a concept from biology, symbiogenesis will be the primary force in the evolution of the projects. The studio methodology consists of three feedback layers: generative diagram, prototyping model, and video. The generative diagram is the assembly machine to forms. The physical model should be a method of rapid prototyping the limits of the generative diagram in order to make specific spaces/scapes and formal behaviors in relationship to the projects spatial/temporal thesis. The video component will be used as a different method of exploring, experimenting, generating spatial sequences, creating immersive environments, and building a narrative inside or through the architectural forms.