TPE 2.0.2: Platform

TPE 2.0.2: Computation and the Urban Generic

My thesis project was selected for the GSD's platform exhibit and publication (it has since also been chosen for exhibition in Histories of the Present). With the benefit of last year's example and a little more lead time for the editorial team, I felt this volume was conceptually much stronger than the first, and managed to clean up a number of the graphical problems as well.

p240-241 (from Actar's promotional material)

Within the book we were only give forty words to describe our project and its relation to the chapter theme - in my case Authorship. I find it difficult to say much of anything in forty words, and my copy speaks more to the general basis of the project hinting a bit at the representational issues I dealt with.
Authorship,though, I think is one of the best themes the project could have ended up in, especially given the company (Marrikka Trotter and Quilian Riano being two of the people I discussed my project with at great length).

Certainly the idea of producing these buildings and projections in a black-box way, letting the programs innards make unmediated decisions, is about questioning the need for "the human hand" in design and definitely challenges the practice's current model of authorship. As is the genericity of the production; my goal was never a sort of stylistic "parametricism" that was obviously computer-generated, but stealthily embedded, an auto-generated design that might pass the turing test, something which could potentially be passed off as typical generic tower/cluster development designs. This is one of the reasons I spent so much effort ensuring that the design engine resolved any intersections or inconsistencies. Every design was fully-formed from the moment the code updated.

On the other hand the intense specificity of the internal mechanisms is an argument for reclaiming more operative authorship from powercopy-ish software (generic authorship as Mario Carpo calls it). Because I was dealing much more intimately with the code I was able to embed a number of idiosyncratic moments and interfaces within the genetics of the design and find ways for them to implement differently within different configurations.

Authorship text by Platform editor Felipe Correa (photo by Quilian Riano)

One aspect I wish I had been able to express better, however, was the extent that misrepresentation (of data, of the parametric process, of its own image) played in so many of the design decisions. After a certain number of iterations, the code makes a claim to authority simply through expert design generation, however after very many tests, the impossibility of reading the logic through the artifacts begins to undermine the claim. Rather than smooth variation, very similar inputs typically produce vastly different outputs. This play with resolution, information sampling, and data forgetting I coded into the process were all responses to issues of self-similarity or the literal translations of "data-scapes" into boring indexical maps. The result, a possible cause for doubting the "objectivity" of the software, of course also draws attention to the location of my own "subjectivity" in the process. Yes, it is an authorial composition: not "signature" architecture, but not automatic architecture, either. It is authorial, but in a new kind of way.

I'd also like to thank publicly at this moment: Scott Cohen, my thesis advisor; my final jury, especially Wes Jones and Robert Levit for their animated discussion; Michael Meredith for his critiques; my thesis production team; and everyone on the 5th tray who was willing to have a discussion with me about the project.