http://patternredux.wordpress.com/

Background

Pattern is back in architecture.
Decorative patterning of surfaces such as geometric tiled floors, screen walls or carved reliefs had flourished through ancient, medieval, renaissance, and neoclassical periods such that by the ascendance of modernism they were wholly taken for granted.   Much of modernism,
and in particular the International Style, opted for the clean planes of color, monolithic material, and white walls that eventually caused the sophistication and ubiquitous presence of patterning to disappear.
However, over the last couple decades, through the ambitious attempts by Postmodernism, Deconstructivism and now Parametrics to develop a new vocabulary for architecture, the call for the pattern has emerged again. This emergence is almost single-handedly coupled with the integration of advanced design and production technology in architecture.   Patterning is once again a fundamental creative act in architecture and through the use of digital technology the pattern has entirely shifted from its previous role as secondary or tertiary ornament to the primary creative gesture of building.
This class will expose students to this new paradigm of the pattern through a Pattern Redux.

Approach and Goals

Individual students will develop their own projects through the session beginning with precedent pattern studies, followed by pattern evolutions and concluding with pattern creations.   They begin by choosing a historical or existing project to study and present as a basis for their logical investigation.  Students will translate information from their studies into digital material and specify, discover, add and articulate new digital patterns based on the extracted logics of their precedents. Digital pattern translation will be taught using Rhino Grasshopper, Generative Components or 3D Studio Max and tutorials will be specifically crafted to engaging pattern discourse. The projects students will study and
ultimately create can have any size and function from a small art piece to a building or a map.  The projects will be approached and evaluated within the conceptual context described above, looking at how students can articulate a redux of pattern through intense analysis, digital translation, and intuitive transformation through the spectrums outlined.  Fundamentally, pattern will be adopted by students to denote a new interpretation of architecture.  The goal of the class is to give students the technical skills and knowledge to engage the contemporary discourse of patterns in architecture by seeking new interpretations of existing work and by evolving them towards a hybridized conceptual state that traverses historical institutions and contemporary digital design methodologies.

Instructor : Yong Ju Lee, MSU

Firefly test

lastest animation

prototype

Construction document for The Dynamic Performance of Nature

Planning to be realized at The Leonardo, Utah’s science-tech-art center in June, 2011.

Connections are interfaces between discretized materials, assemblies, spaces, and structures.  They are performative in as much as they actively facilitate transference of information, activity, and most often, energy amongst localities of a system.  Despite such virtuosity, they are often conceived as static problem-solving tools derived blindly from an architectonic problem with which they have no inherent relation; or they are considered the site of a sort of poetic first principle out of which structure, form, material, and space, all unfold in a supposed harmonious resolution.
 The fundamental problem with such conceptions is that they place the connection within a hierarchy; the connection is always subject of or subject to some other element or system of elements, be it formal, structural, or even logical.  Contemporary architecture requires a consideration of the connection that’s independent of such an impositional hierarchy.  
 Local Manifold considers the connection in terms of its identity as a self-referential system, a hive of localities which neither serve nor are served by another entity.  As an architectural project, it manifests connectivity as a condition that permeates a spatial field and is irreducible to formal heuristics or tectonic poetics.  In this way the role of the connection is to metastasize a plurality of field-defining elements into an architecture of utter autonomic poesy.

updated rendering

construction document

contruction site

Interview with Vevant.

http://vevant.com/2010/08/09/phytobench-comfortably-green/

Campaign for funding PhytoBench

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/softrigid/phytobench-plant-growing-furniture-for-environment

The Dynamic Performance of Nature is a solar-powered installation designed to sense the animate natural environment of the world and interactively communicate it to the visitors of the Leonardo through an intelligent, dynamic wall.  It’s inspired by the concept that sustainability for the 21st century should be crafted to evolve beyond conventional application of green techniques into something alive and integrated with the environment, conditioning the most sophisticated forms of creativity for the preservation of life.  This dynamic and interactive installation will invite curious inquisition as well as detached contemplation of the synthesis between light, material, space, and global environmental information.

Installation diagram

Plan

Section detail

Perspective

Assembly Diagram

Elevations

Processing animation samples for LED matrix (Thanks for Hayes Shair for his assistance.)

View from left

View from right

Winner of a commission for a permanent installation at The Leonardo, an art, science, and technology museum in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Yong Ju Lee + Brian Brush

Surface manipulation..