Frack It

FRACK IT

Graduate Thesis 2022

John Chan

Graduate Thesis 2022 Provocations Positions Project

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Thesis Statement This thesis is a digital discourse on the psychogeography of the walk, building on the work of Constant, and the Situationist and superimposing traffic data, to better situate the walk in contemporary urban space. Here, the Derive is manifested as a data set which covers much more than the immediate city area and spreads across trans-city traffic. The data sets also draw on Citizen Science to better democratize data and respond to that data simultaneously in the form of architecture. Here big data meets Architecture Without Architects, in a concurrent battle for an architecture of the current.

Citizen science describes approaches in which laypeople engage in, and contribute to, science; it encapsulates all the various levels of engagement and the ways in which that data is gathered and

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evaluated, however in this thesis, the results are applied architecturally instead of scientifically, perhaps a scientific approach into architecture in terms of city planning and design.

The objective is to utilize a procedural generation with the data or data visualization procured during the process to design a computational city, where the result is the people’s collective intelligence, in contrast of the traditional means of city planning and design.

The workflow is itself is aimed to be a challenge to the current need of menial labor in term of design process.

It is speculated that much of the current design process can be automated instead of a manual workflow.

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Illustration by: K.Perelli, S.Morrell, Leganerd.

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Provocations

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Week 01 The city’s many tall, narrow tower blocks were packed tight against each other—so tight as to make the whole place seem like one massive structure: part architecture, part organism. There was little uniformity of shape, height, or building material.

Cast-iron balconies lurched against brick annexes and concrete walls. Wiring and cables covered every surface: running vertically from ground level up to forests of rooftop television aerials, or stretching horizontally like innumerable rolls of dark twine that seemed almost to bind the buildings together. Entering the city meant leaving daylight behind. There were hundreds of alleyways, most just a few feet wide. Some routes cut below buildings, while other tunnels were formed by the accumulation of refuse tossed out of windows and onto wire netting strung between tower blocks. Thousands of metal and plastic water pipes ran along walls and ceilings, most of them leaking and corroded. As protection against the relentless drips that fell in the alleyways, a hat was standard issue for the city’s postman.

Many residents chose to use umbrellas.

There were only two elevators in the entire city. At the foot of some of the high-rises, communal and individual mailboxes were nailed to the walls. But often the only option for the postman was to climb. Even several stories up, the maze of pathways continued: knotted arteries that burrowed into the heart of the city along interconnecting bridges and stairwells.

Moving deeper, long corridors offered glimpses into smoke-filled rooms. The incessant click of mahjong tiles echoed along the walls. Gambling parlors lined up alongside strip clubs and pornographic cinemas. Prostitutes—including children—solicited in the darkness, leading clients away to backroom brothels. And everywhere there were bodies lying in the gloom. At Kwong Ming Street—known as “Electric Station”—wooden stalls sold cheap drugs. Addicts crouched down to inhale heroin smoke through tubes held over heated tinfoil. Bare rooms, enticingly referred to as “divans” were filled with prone men and women, all sunk in opium stupors. Many of the city’s rats were addicts too, and could be seen writhing in torment in dark corners, desperate for a hit.

There was no law to speak of. This was an anarchist society, self-regulating and self-determining. It was a colony within a colony, a city within a city, a tiny block of territory at once contested and neglected. It was known as Kowloon Walled City.

But locals called it something else. Hak Nam—the City of Darkness.

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1.Kowloon Wall City Aerial View

2.Kowloon Wall City Aerial View

3.Kowloon Wall City Perspective

1. A huge cluster of buildings that makes up Kowloon Wall City 2. Units looks similar yet stangely not.

3. Stack of units that belongs to different individual buildings.

10 1. Section showing the dense but organized spatial arrangement 2. Image showing experience as a person inside

1.Section Drawing of Kowloon Walled City

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Week 02 Alberti defined the city as a large house and the house as a small city and also each room in the house should be seen as a miniature building so the whole house can be seen as an aggregation of various parts. As a result of this definition it can be said that he interpreted that the city is actually a single object. He defined four kinds of city-objects: the city as a circle, the city as a grid, the city as archipelago, and the city as a solid.

According to philosopher Graham Harman by undermining, we assume a city “is built of some basic physical or historical element whose permutations give rise to these objects as a sort of derivative product.”

The first variation of an undermining toward the city can be seen in the Modern Movement. The functionalist city is described as analogous to the organs of a body, in which the circulation system supports the bodily functions through a network. For instance, Le Corbusier reduced the city to its basic element by representing the space of habitation as a biological cell. The second undermining on the city can be seen in the modernist housing projects in Frankfurt. . In this period, architecture has attempted to understand the city through the fluxes, flows, and energies that go in, out, or circulate within it. The city is understood as a dynamic environment; its form is understood as a crystallization of matter and its structure

defined as a rhizomatic network.

In contrast to undermining, Harman defines overmining as as looking at objects from above. “Objects are important only insofar as they are manifested to the mind, or are part of some concrete event that affects other objects as well.” An overmining position can be seen in the phenomenological approach to the city. Also, another overmining position of the city as an object can be seen in Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City. Rossi defines the city as a man-made object, goes beyond the individual’s experience of a building, street, or district.

For Harman, an object can be defined as an autonomous unit. From this point, the form of the city is expressed as a figure-ground problem. But also if there isn’t a thing as a figure and every ground can be understood as the relationship between the parts, the city can be understood as an aggregated object.

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THE VILLAGE AS A HOTEL BY PTER TRUMMER WITH CYNTHYA

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1.

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1. From the city as a field to the city as an object 2. ARCHITECTURE AS PILED GROUNDS

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Week 03 The tensor field in this case is essentially two vector fields which are perpendicular at any given point.

The tensor field used here associates a tensor with every point in 2D space. A tensor gives us two bidirectional, perpendicular vectors called the ‘major’ and ‘minor’ eigenvectors. Given a tensor (src/ts/impl/ tensor.ts), we extract the two perpendicular vectors using the getMajor and getMinor methods.

A tensor field for the road network is created by smoothly combining grid and radial fields. See src/ts/impl/basis_field.ts for the representation of each basis field. src/ts/impl/tensor_field.ts is responsible for handling basis fields. It has a function samplePoint, which returns the tensor at that point in the field.

To create roads from the field, we integrate it, which is similar to tracing lines along the major and minor vector fields. Integrated lines are called streamlines, and the logic for handling streamlines is found in src/ts/impl/streamlines.ts. Integrators are found in src/ts/impl/integrator.ts, and RK4 is the integrator currently used. Given a starting point, we step in the direction of the major/minor vector by a distance dstep (configurable, found in the road/ params folders in the GUI) using the integrate function in the integrator class.

This process is repeated from the new point until a stopping condition is met

e.g. reach the edge of the screen, hit an iteration limit, go around in a circle.

We make sure that streamlines are separated from each other by a configurable distance dsep (configurable in the GUI). dsep controls how dense the resultant road network is. src/ts/impl/grid_storage is responsible for enforcing this by making sure that any new point to be added to a streamline is dsep away from other streamlines.

Parks are generated the same was as building blocks are found - finding polygons in the graph. Large parks are created by finding polygons in the major road graph, before minor roads are generated.

Rotational noise is added to the parks to make minor road paths through them more curvy. The user has an ‘addParks’ button in the UI that regenerates parks in the current road geometry. Big parks will be generated if minor roads are not there, otherwise, small parks are made.

To add buildings we need to know the location and shape of building lots. We have a list of streamlines, where each streamline is a list of vectors. This is fine for drawing but challenging for logic - we don’t know where the intersections are.

To generate lots, we first need to build a logical graph of the road network consisting of nodes and edges.

Graduate Thesis 2022

PROCEDURAL CITY GENERATOR @[RPNANLETRAIN

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1. Infinite Procedurally Generated City In Unity

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2.From algorithm to city generations

1. City generated in Unity 2. Algorithm used to provide basic parameters

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Image generated by GPT-2 from Jan Gehl's quote

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Week 04 This week was provocation workshop with Casey Rhem. We had to use the GPT-2 , an AI to translate text and images.

I used Jan Gehl's quote :" Culture and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They will gather in public if you give them a good place to do it.", for the AI to generate.

For the text part, it gave me a short story.

And you can set up an encampment of tents, a big field, and then you can have them come together. And just like today, they will build something and they will start out with the simplest thing. Like building a wall and putting up a fence, just something to separate them from one another."

"Can you put me in touch with the White House?" he says.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below "That will be the first step, yes," Hahn replies. "Once you can get in touch with anyone who knows about the people who work at the White House, then they will send me the information. If you come to the White House during the first few months of your transition, you'll get some initial support. If not, then we're really behind, because you have to figure out all of the things to do. There's no way you can put a bunch of newbies in a room for four

hours and give them instructions. So you know, you have to make it look easy and easy to do, but you're going to have to work hard and do the hard work."

Dillon asks if this means the transition has been "a failure," but Hahn says: "Not yet.

You know, for us, this is an extraordinary moment that we've been involved with.

And we're very proud of what we accomplished here, but we will always come back to that, not just in terms of success but also with a real sense of pride that, well, that the American people and the world saw what we could do."

I ask Dillon what he thinks the administration is going to do now and he replies: "Well, when the government closes tomorrow--and, yes, this will happen, because Congress will be out of session for the inauguration--the next day we're going to hold a rally at the White House, along with the families of the people shot. And we'll talk through what we want our government to do and what we've always supported: getting guns off the street, getting guns into the hands of the law-abiding citizens, giving them access to the best-quality training, providing for law enforcement officials to be able to protect their communities."

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1.Image generated by GPT-2 from Jan Gehl's quote

2. Image generated by GPT-2 from Jan Gehl's quote

1. Interestingly the image strongly suggest the field that Peter Trummer talked about.

2. The suggestion of water-body which were not even in the text prompt.

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1.mage generated by GPT-2

2.Image generated by GPT-2

3. Image generated by GPT-2

4. Image generated by GPT-2

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The building aperture implies a grid.

Excessive amount of light from the building.

Panelization on the sky.

People socializing.

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Cae Lique Dolest Abo

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Week 05 In all the readings I did this week, the readings all explore about city's planning, exclusively horizontally. Derive suggested

by Situationist suggested a horizontal movement between different part or cluster of city blocks for its inhabitants. The technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances is possible to be applied both vertically and horizontally within the field.

The psychogeography would be greatly varied by the directional capabilities of the city itself. The dimension of such psychogeography , it is already suggested a degree of directional capability. The interaction between clusters, in three dimensions would also be diversified.

Now that third dimension is established, Anthropology of building type is being challenged. When a type of building starts to transform, for example, an addiction t o the existing structure, its own function and form would morph accordingly, thus a new type is born. When such type begin a cluster with another types of building.

A cluster is formed, then from cluster to field, from a field to a city.

Disjunction, between each building, cluster, field, would still provide homogeneity between them through psychogeography, in fact, the more disjointed they are, the more homogeneous they would become.

The confrontation between human activities and the city itself would happen

between the disjunction/circulation. The activities would happen between clusters, along the psychogeography along with the directional capabilities.

It seems that all of the elements can be found in the procedural city generation through with the different application of the axis for the tensor field. For now, it remains interesting for me to explore if the dynamic or property of Kowloon Walled City can be replicated through programming and achieve a legible city planning through programming and scripting, since the Kowloon Walled City was an organic outcome of the collective input of its residents.

Through that, maybe the process of city planning can be automated, the growth of such city may result an infinitely vertical / horizontal / diagonal growth.

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1. Drifting' through a city as a means of identifying oneself

2. Transformative Anthropology

3. Homogeneity in being disjointed.

1. Situationists's drift being horizontal 2. Manifesto: For an Accelerationist Politics's transformation can be manifested in architecture.

3. Disjoined homogeneity can be found in kowloon walled city.

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1. Situationist representations of 'drift'

2. Psychogeography of Paris

3. Bernard Tschumi's 'The Block"

1. This diagram can be read vertically.

2. The movement between streets and field, similar to KWC. 3. Derive/Disjoined between architecture element to create a field.

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1. Kowloon Walled City Plan

2.Kowloon Walled City Aerial View

1. Psychogeography within KWC 2. KWC itself being derived and disjoined from the rest of the city.

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Week 06 This week. I started looking deeper into the psychogeography and the representation of it. I found that human traffic largely do not follow designed city grid. This phenomenon is called desired path. In simple terms, this is the path that people take that is not a designated path ie, a path through Astroturf. It would be extremely interesting to mix the element of desired 1.Eric Fischer's Taipei "Geotaggers World

path into the psychogeography in terms of city design.

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2.Map box movement data of Seattle

3. Eric Fischer's London "Local and Tourists"

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Not necessarily following a grid Human activities clusters.

Human path does not follow grid.

Human traffic mimiking blood vessel,

4. Eric Fischer's New York "Path through cities"

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Graduate Thesis 2022

Intuitive Wayfinding + Accurate Design

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Illustration by

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Positions

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Week 07 This week the objective is simple. It is to retrieve foot traffic data from data analytics.

After researching about the sources and the cost of varies sources. Since, I do not have the means to carry out my own data collection in a city scale. I have to rely on third party analytics.

So I found the provider who provide such data, interestingly, they offer not only foot traffic data but also shop visit data. In fact, there are many brands which uses such data to design their business strategy.

Graduate Thesis 2022

1. Foot traffic data set and its variable for DTLA

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Week 08 A Visual presentation of such data through point cloud. This is a test toward using data collected however the result is not satisfactory.

Graduate Thesis 2022

1. A not so successful application of data.

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Week 09 Data visualization through Kepler.GL. The Data used are point of interests, mainly shops and commercial establishment.

Buildings are extruded in the map for better representation. Dots represent the frequency of visit of the point of interests in the dataset.

This data set used in this visualization does not provide data of foot traffic, rather the intensity of how much a point of interests were visited in the data collecting period.

Still, it is already displaying the cluster of visit in a city and this indicate how the people are visiting different point of interest in Los Angeles This data is valuable in relation of psychogeography as it is already showing how the clusters of people are formed and the distance between each cluster.

Next to do is to refine the data and actually show foot traffic on street level to get closer to psychogeography.

Graduate Thesis 2022

1. Foot traffic data set and its visualization for DTLA

2. Foot traffic data set and its visualization for DTLA

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Week 10 This week the data set is of UK and Wales, .The graphic are depicting people that travels from home to workplace, from point residence to point workplace.

This illustrated the traffic pattern and the clustering of both homes and workplaces on the map of UK. From reading of the visualization, this show that the central London being the major cluster of density of both residents and workplace when there are smaller cluster around the island.

The distance that people travel however are longer and cover a larger area in the major cluster than those are in the small cluster. It is safe to assume that traffic takes longer and cover more ground within London than other small clusters.

Graduate Thesis 2022

1. Traffic data visualization between home and workplace around London.

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Project

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Week 11 This week was a graphical application of digital imaging of the map data. The map data visualized in the previous weeks were imported into a placement map generator to provide further randomization of the said data.

The program then generate a displacement map by replacing the graphics used in the first step. in my application, the box was originated from the foot traffic data from the downtown area in Los Angeles, then the background was generated by the area in downtown Los Angeles that had less foot traffic.

Graduate Thesis 2022

1. Application of the data visualization as displacement.

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Week 12 This week is to test the procedural generation on blender. I managed to have basic blocks of building to populated on a specified plane and the nodes give the freedom to manipulated the density, scale and on various formation.

Next is to figure out how to manipulate the generate according to the data input.

1. Demonstration of procedural workflow.

Graduate Thesis 2022

2. Demonstration of procedural workflow on a different plane.

3. Demonstration of procedural workflow of different density.

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Week 13 This week. I have managed to manipulate the procedural generation to act according to the data visualization in the earlier weeks. I have, again used the traffic data between home and workplace in London and its surrounding area since the data set was the most structure and comprehensive.

After the data was processed, I put the visualization of the generation and the existing google earth image together to draw an comparison.

It is interesting to note that, what is driven

1. Google Earth image of area around London.

by the data looks largely different from the physical world and I find that it is a really interesting observation in contrast of the density of physical space and digital representation of the same area.

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2. Traffic between home and workplace around London.

2. Procedural generation with the application of the traffic data visualization.

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1. Demonstration of the same work flow in greater detail.

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Graduate Thesis 2022

Credits Thesis Advisor: William Virgil HT Advisor: Marcelyn Gow Partner in Crime: Charlie Allen Personal Advisor: Daniel Lau

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