fun factory | recombinant architecture

05/24/10 | postmortem

Tony — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:50:42 +0000

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As Dandy Don Meredith used to say, “Turn out the lights, the party’s over…” The project has been printed and presented, the critiques received, celebratory drinks drank.

It has been an exhilarating, enlightening, and rewarding experience working on this project. My brain literally felt as if it was working better towards the end – the mental equivalent of looking at yourself in the mirror and noticing improvement. It felt wonderful. Although the project has been finished now for going on two weeks, my brain is still swimming with these ideas.

The compelling ideas of the project, and all of the different directions it could go, are the strength of the project – perhaps its greatest strength. But it is also the project’s greatest flaw. This project tried to deliver ideas at many scales – a historical scale, a building scale, a detail scale, and time at the site scale and time at the urban scale. There was also a larger idea of architecture operating at an economic scale, in response to the forces of supply and demand. I think it smacks of self-aggrandizement to say that this project fought battles on many different fronts. It did; however, the result was a project that some of the critics thought unfocused and underdeveloped.

Looking back I don’t know or don’t feel as if I negotiated the relationship between the Fun Factory at the detail scale and at the urban scale. Perhaps there is no good way to negotiate it: at the second cross check review I was told the urban scale issues were more compelling – at the final review I was told that the detail scale was the more compelling aspect of the project and that I ignored it. They may both be right. I was also told at the second cross-check review by my advisor Ozayr that it would be better to focus on one aspect of the project and develop it to 90 instead of developing two foci to 60. And I think the latter happened to the project’s detriment.

But – again – the ideas have merit. Of course they do. What I mean to say is that I find the ideas charming. So I’m going to continue this project with a three-year arc in mind. The first year will be to shore up the ideas of the Fun Factory – to get both ideas developed to 100, to their logical conclusion. In the first six months, I’ll be retrenching into a research phase, looking at one of the glaring historical omissions from the project – Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace. I’ll also be researching ways to re-present the work of this project through 3D modeling and animation and drawing and collage, looking for more non-traditional ways of presenting architectural thought. Parallel to that I’ll be working on truly developing the details of the Fun Factory and become much more explicit about the disassemblable and recombinant nature of the project. In the second six months I’ll re-engage with the field of industrial ecology and the urban scale of the project. So a year from now the goal will be to have a Fun Factory project that tells a more complete story of a building that acts on a site, disassembles and reassembles on another site, and what the larger implications for architecture can and/or should be.

The second half of this two year arc will be to look at the products of the Fun Factory; that is, the Fun House. And then perhaps the Fun School, or the Fun Penitentiary, or the Fun Hospital to Fun ad Infinitum. Because the larger point of the project is to develop architecture that is not permanent or immortal but durable and resilient – with components that make the best use of the limited material resources that we have available, saving them from the landfill. Finally the the third year of this arc of work will be to take on the chief argument against it; that is, build an immortal building. A building that will last for hundreds of years. We as architects and designers will always want our buildings to last forever. Ultimately design for disassembly demands that we look at the totality of the project – program, site, circumstance, assembly – and make the wisest use of material possible. We have to carefully evaluate the needs of the client, of the user, and of the site and the larger urban fabric so that we do not design buildings that fail to live up to its grand ambitions and lie empty and wasted twenty years hence.

Finally, then, as we strike the sets and turn down the lights on this project, so too does this blog end. But as I continue the research and continue to engage with these ideas I’ll do so on a new blog that both tracks my work and also posts links and news to ideas that I’m actively engaging in – a blog with a bit of a broader scope (read: more pop culture references).

See you around.

4/27/10

Tony — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 04:21:36 +0000

Harrington_unusedPresentation

I said two weeks ago that the idea of the factory was dependent upon “an intellectual construct” – a corporate structure that foresees its own departure from a place, and makes it explicit in their arrival to a place. well, I’ve designed a logo for it. I may take another spin at it; that logo just might be crazy enough to work.

The second link is to a PDF of a presentation that I was supposed to give in my materials class this afternoon; unfortunately, the guest speaker used the second half of class (she didn’t run long, class just ran out of time for me to make my presentation). It was a good exercise, though, to try and condense and pull out the broad strokes and the most salient points. It helped to focus the thinking (I certainly hope). I’ve also been hunting around for the larger point, or the answer to Ozayr’s question about how this site work has affected my understanding of design for disassembly and/or recombinant architecture (if that can/should be described as distinct from one another). From my sketchpad, which is down to its second-to-last page, with some additional thoughts from the last few minutes (in italics):

Both of these site, besides sharing similar contextual features are both, essentially, left over and abandoned, yet they exist at urban confluences (if that doesn’t sound too florid or reek of douchebaggery). The Brooklyn Center site exists at the threshold of Brooklyn Center and Minneapolis at a particular threshold of a residential area and a lite industrial area. Similarly, the Minneapolis site is a place of greater confluence, with access to amenities cultural and educational, and natural. If there is a spirit of design for disassembly and recombinant architecture it is this: that site is the medium, the petri dish that guides the recombination. The same program and the same parts come together and crystallize in one configuration on one manner on one site, and a different medium – a different site -yields a different configuration (that is, if we’re doing our job right).

There is a point here that I’ve been fumbling for words for – an economic issue.

“Material culture provides in sum a picture of what human beings are capable of making… Nature might be a better guide, if we understand our own labors as part of its being.” Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

Cedric Price – Fun Palace, Interaction Centre, Potteries Thinkbelt – Industry – But there was an attitude about providing education to the working class, combating a post-WWII “brain drain” and challenging a nation’s education system. Rooted in the belief that men are ennobled by learning and working.

And “Intellectual Construct” echoes a notion put forth by Stewart Brand – in a TED talk given in June 2009 – 2050 80% urban

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/stewart_brand_proclaims_4_environmental_heresies.html

- “placing supply right next to demand”

-”How cities create value” – placing different contexts next to each other. (?) Is then, the Fun Palace a city in microcosm? That is, one could very easily argue that the Fun Palace was meant to not only facilitate a myriad of different programmatic contexts, but to juxtapose those contexts?

04/14/10 | 2

Tony — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:09:13 +0000

All I can think about at this point – the big takeaway from the crosscheck – is that it’s the little things that make all the difference. I’m referring to the two drawings above. Honestly, I had thought that they would just be background information, information that would help ground the project and reinforce the story of the Fun Factory (that’s how the project shall be referred to from now on) and ultimately reinforce the technical aspects of the project. But no, all of the reviewers keyed on those drawings -both for their virtues and their flaws. And now the project stands at a crossroads, the project’s proverbial Rubicon, with two choices for the direction of the project.

Or to toss in another strained metaphor: this is a war that is fought on two fronts, and each front offers its own unique set of challenges. There is the front of fully exploring the implications of the detail and the technical aspects of the project. The benefit of the choice of that front is, at the end of the project, I will have a greater technical understanding of how this project is put together on the Lake Breeze Avenue site. I will – presumably – know how all of the nuts and bolts of the project fit together. That will be successful, and that will be interesting.

But will it be as successful, will it be as interesting, as the dimension of the project that explores the temporal and site issues, as well as making the arguments for recombination? Clearly, the timeline and site sequence diagrams had an impact; again, for good and ill. Good in that they clearly had power and had impact on the reviewers; ill in their incompleteness. The diagrams had holes and needed more explanation. The diagrams failed to elucidate the site criteria; that is, what made that site important.

The diagrams need to be expand upon, and that’s what I want to expand on. I want to make the argument that this architecture is recombinant. I want to make the argument for disassembly. I don’t know if that argument is made on the technical front. The detail would show that, yes, the structure is disassemblable, but it would not tell the larger story of the Fun Factory. It would not elucidate in any way that these structures – the products of this intellectual construct of a benevolent, progressive corporation (a construct which, in and of itself, wants and needs to be expanded upon) – seed themselves on a site, situate themselves on the site, grow and evolve and remediate the site, and departs. But leaves the site in a better condition than when it was found.

That said, the detail cannot and will not go away, if only for my personal satisfaction. The technical aspect needs to remain in whatever capacity it can. There is also a diagram, similar to the diagram in the Cedric Price precedent, that wants to appear in the final presentation. The biggest and most clear needs of the project require new modes of representation, i.e. models and perspectives and renderings. The consistent rap on the project was that it did not adequately represent – even in terms of diagrams – the life of the site and how it’s impacted by the Fun Factory and what the life of the site and its future denizens is and what it will become.

04/14/10 | 1 notes from the cross-check review

Tony — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:08:17 +0000

ANDREW BLAISDELL’S NOTES:

End date – Saturation – assumes zero business adaptation over 30 years “most common mortgage”

“Community decides what it is” gift?

What is the “radius of influence?”

How does/can it recombine in a different configuration

Infrastructure as catalyst/crutch

List of criteria to make ideal site (100 mi)

(What led you to this site?)

Scenario Planning

C. Price – structure changes w/ use on experiential level

-immediacy of change via activities

Flows of vehicles – relating to layout

Base module – “graphically”

Clear premise

Talk more about your strategy; local specificity vs. larger scenario (processes)

Reinvent this wheel

Just use the “structure” wheel

Landscape over thirty years, water flows, trees, topography

Red bars – architectural buffers

Because modular remnant can be modulated, i.e. singular, specific to site

-permeable, elevated, sunken, vertical

Time-lapse

“How Buildings Learn,” by Stewart Brand

Where are you going with this?

Jeff: “What if you made the architecture?”

Pullman, Chicago

-beautiful objects, remnant

Filling in gaps of communication

-diagrams about vehicle access “nuanced”

Storyboard of life cycle (must have)

Crane incorporated like that skyscraper in…

Zones of space – overlapping, system that make them up.

Why do you need a buffer?

How does this thing get recombined?

-Where do you inject a lack of control (30 years)

Massing models

Much potential in diagrams

Build site could be most “troublesome” area of neighborhood

-crime, pollution, noise, etc

-building site is then catered to being archi-remediation site.
What’s achievable?

What if you just borrowed the building system from the past, and you are therefore a contribution to the conversation?

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Finally – haven’t updated these in awhile – may be the last updates to these:

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04/08/10 | mojo

Tony — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 05:01:58 +0000

Mojo, momentum, da rock, da roll, and/or da muse -whatever you, dear reader, care to call it – has come. The week’s work thus far has looked at the project at the site and/or temporal scale.

First the issue of time. I’ve been using the intellectual construct of a factory that would disassemble itself within a given timespan and move on down the road, as it were. The factory, then, is a sort of architectural “seed,” that would place itself within its site and its given context, build itself up and then proceed to provide prefabricated homes to its market and to a given radius of influence. And as soon as its saturated that radius, it would begin drawing down its operation, diassembling itself and preparing for its inevitable migration to a new site on down the road. That in and of itself is an intellectual construct to flesh out. The template I used – the span of time that it is keyed to – is the thirty year mortgage, the most common mortgage in both residential and commercial real estate. It seems that if its operational radius was completely saturated well within the thirty year mortgage or if the facility lasted on the site well beyond the thirty year mortgage that either way the factory would, through the sale of its products, have enough money to pay the mortgage. The other reason for the selection of this timeframe is the story of GM’s and Toyota’s joint venture NUMMI plant. Toyota’s first American factory – and the first factory Toyota has had to close – lasted from 1984 to 2010. Despite NUMMI’s innovative and efficient production techniques, those techniques were not effectively implemented across GM as a whole, and it became a casualty of GM’s management practices. The factory lasted 26 years; so again 30 years seemed a reasonable estimate of the lifetime of the factory. I plotted out that after the factory was constructed, within a year and a half the factory would be producing product at 75% effectiveness. This assumes that modifications and upgrades to the factory at approximately five year increments would raise the productive power of the factory to its ultimate threshold. This construct also assumes that shortly after that ultimate threshold of productivity is reached that then the market – its effective radius of influence – would soon be saturated, and then it would begin to disassemble and draw down its operation.

Which leads to the second diagram, which shows how the factory evolves on its site. The first image represents the site ostensibly as it is now: largely a ruin in need of remediation and/or cleanup – hence the brown color. The subsequent diagrams show the site with a green hue – implying that that remediation and cleanup has taken place, or it is assumed that it will happen. The first gesture is the construction of the production/manufacturing program followed by the construction of the office/design programs and followed by the construction of the first major street and parking avenues for the employees. The fourth step in the sequence is the construction of three architectural buffers (Ozayr’s term) – essentially showpieces of the factory – i.e. the wall of the 2010 model of somesuch prefabricated house that is currently under production. And so begins a sequence of adding streets and avenues that allows for a small residential grid to emerge that divides up into 12 lots approximately 50′ x 150′. Then the factory could feed these lots with their product and create a prefabricated company village. Or subdivision. Hamlet? Shire? Enclave? Whatever the case, the final three steps concern the disassembly of the manufacturing facility and parts of the design/office space. With a program of 45000 square feet, that’s approximately 15,000 square feet lost at each stage of disassembly. At the first step of deconstruction, half of the manufacturing building is disassembled and the rest in the second. After the second step of deconstruction the remaining manufacturing facility moves into the design building. Finally, the factory’s production stops and moves on to renew the cycle at a new site, its programs are drawn down and the building is given over to the community. Offices are repurposed; the employee cafeteria becomes a community center (or what have you) and design facilities and office programs become repurposed also. And in the wake of diassembly is left ample green space and the concrete pads become community patios for, again, whatever activity they wish. A band shell? A garden pavillion? A farmer’s market?

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03/31/10

Tony — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:51:21 +0000

And now, as they used to say on Python, for something completely different… at least to start…

I found Andrea Ponsi’s lecture this evening uttlery, well, charming. Enchanting. Certainly one of the better lectures I have seen in my time here as a student. One one hand, now I don’t feel so bad about taking so many notes and writing so much in what I viewed as essentially a repository for visual thoughts; on the other hand, I felt as if I would like to have a non-drawing limb cut off in exchange for that level of precision and control. The movies that showcased his drawings were beautiful in and off themselves. It’s just that, the control and the precision and clarity of vision apparent in all the drawings – even those he believed allegorical and/or abstract – was striking. The writing was equal beautiful and equally concise – like his drawing, not a line seemed extraneous or out of place. I may, in the future, attempt some different writing approaches on the blog going forward, and especially in the home stretch of this project.

Speaking as to this project – Ryan Diedrich said it best: it’s time to design. The progress of the last two days was to begin pushing ideas on how the factory relates to infrastructure; that is, just how large is the factory’s radius of influence beyond it’s immediate site? More sitework – more touring the neighborhood and up to date GIS information is paramount to produce the details and site model that I’ll need by this time next week. Further, today I began making explicit what the program actually is. Obviously what is need now will be square footages and real numbers and to begin testing that against site conditions to see if the “U” configuration can/will work.

Rough drafts, the last two days of work:

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03/29/10… back after a rather long hiatus…

Tony — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 04:51:33 +0000

Back after spring break; back after pushing through the doldrums. This week we get back on the blogging horse in a big (read: consistent) way. As to the aforementioned doldrums: trying to get into the nature of the factory, of how the process would actually work came little progress. Trying to understand how the bay of a factory would disassemble, one at a time, leading to changes in program. A brief foray into It was suggested that, in order to get a better handle on it I needed something to react against. I was as close I’ll ever come to being a rebel without a clause. So over spring break I looked for – and found – a site with which to begin, and to react against. And, in a sense, that move itself has changed the project in a fairly profound way. The conceptual idea behind the factory is that it will act as an incubator in whatever neighborhood it is placed in. It will ingratiate itself into the community, while outputting houses into its surrounding context. As the neighborhood begins to saturate, or hits a saturation point, that is the point when the factory begins to disassemble. The work this week then, will be to explore the site (read: produce a site model) and to explore – in a very real sense – the program of the factory and to begin to explore not only physical diassembly but programmatic disassembly.

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3/9/10

Tony — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:09:42 +0000

Today’s work mainly explored the factory floor – approximately 20000 s.f. of space in the proposed factory. More specifically, I began exploring scripted solutions to the problem. to see if anything would result. The factory floor will be an open floor, with random punctuations to either create apertures for light or to insert open spaces within the factory floor – outdoor testing facilities, informal gathering spaces, etc. It’s also an outgrowth of considering just what is/ what will be the component in the factory, which led to thoughts about the skin of the building. That is, on an open factory floor there will be little in the way of interior partitions. There will be a great deal of opportunity for reusing components in the skin of the building. So today’s work was re-familiarizing myself somewhat with the MEL scripting process and the Maya interface. Then I followed a familiar strategy – stacking and packing pipes and cutting out spaces and shaping volumes. Not sure if that will/would be a fruitful strategy; it may be moreso to consider stochastically stacking and packing rectangular prisms based upon a predetermined size, i.e. 4′ x 8′ or 5′ x 10′. Tomorrow’s strategy will be to explore considering each bay as a polypipe shape, and manipulating the faces of that pipe to create spaces and volumes.

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3/8/10

Tony — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:29:40 +0000

Today’s work was, still, looking at the scale of one bay. “Bay” could be added to the continuum of “detail-component – framework.” That is, “bay” would be the union of two programmatic components. One “bay” in this case is 2500 square feet. Each component then can be divided into two sub-components of 625 square feet each, which can further divide up into sub-components of 312.5 square feet each. These subdivisions allow for discrete pieces to be removed in strategic locations for outdoor gathering and/or testing facilities, and, conceptually, interesting solid/void relationships. It would also give a logic to pierce the volume and create apertures. I’m thinking back to old projects about stacking and packing algorithms and boolean operations – wondering if they’ll be useful or a needless layer of complexity – it will be worth exploring in the next couple of weeks.

An idea also kicking around in the back of my mind is – and this is the best phrase I can come up with – is “anticipating exigency” or “creating exigency.” Which really means – using components that have unique properties either in shape or material or structure such that in the next use it can really create interest when re-combined. Such as when Single Speed Design used curved pieces of the Leverett Circle Bridge in their designs for the Big Dig Building. Because, conceptually, if regular modular construction fosters easier disassembly we come back to the problem of just building big warehouses that last forever. If modular, prefabricated logics are the easiest to disassemble, then boxes make the simplest strategy. So even though at this stage it may be prototypical or siteless, it may serve to create constraints, i.e. a hypothetical bend in the site to bend the plan. And that will most effectively combat what I’ve felt for the past few days – what I’ve been fighting against for lack of a better term – “designer’s block.” It began with the laying out of the factory’s bays. But the ideas of anticipating exigency and looking at asymmetry – creating some specific moves to react against – are the best ways to combat that. Seems elementary almost to think that. But it may be a lesson for the future – on this project on others – to take a look at projects at certain points and ask, “Now what assumptions am I making here? Is that necessarily a correct premise?”

03/04/10

Tony — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:45:31 +0000

Today’s work was to build the component, literally, from the bottom up – to begin exploring the factory at the scale of one bay and develop a repeatable component. Looking at the rough estimates of program that I developed earlier in the week, the basic unit of space is some multiple of 2500. That is, space for design is 2500 s.f. (2500 x 1), or prototyping is 7500 s.f. (2500 x 3), etc. So 2500 s.f. would be the basic unit of space. I want to bisect the factory floor with a spine for moving material – an open space for a crane to run longitudinally through the factory floor, so I split that number in half – 1250 square feet. On each side of the material spine is 1250 s.f. of space. Halving that number in half again creates a 25′ x 25′ square – which seems a reasonable-sized chunk of space. Further, placing structural supports at 25′-0″ o.c. seems a reasonable division of space. So each bay would be 25′-0″ wide, and 140′-0″ feet long – 3400 square feet, which is composed of 3-5 reusable components in the floors.

There is the problem of foundations – what to do? There are two intriguing ideas worth exploring in both physical and virtual models in terms of foundation. One is Jacob’s suggestion of box culverts – precast concrete structures that have a multitude of uses. They could be custom designed such that they could both support the floor and walls and serve as space through which to run mechanical and/or electrical systems. Their modular nature would also allow for relatively easy disassembly. There are other options as well: the grade beam which would tie in to spread footings. The grade beam and the wall sub-assembly would have to be designed such that they could easily key into each other. The least attractive option seems to be slab on grade. I don’t like that solution simply because it may be too easy, and a slab on grade may be easily removable but not easily reusable. The box culvert component seems like it could be added to a wall and floor component assembly and, should that bay be removed, those pieces could easily be removed and reused. It’s clear that I need to get some advice on this; at this point I’m kind of flailing with regards to a solution for the foundation.