CCA Architecture

What do we mean these days when we say interdisciplinary? Interdisciplinary practice takes – by definition – nearly limitless forms. Some feel that this word – provocative once – is now a bit wishy-washy, ill-defined. Yet it remains in our skin today to keep inventing beyond old boundaries of practice, to create new kinds of work and learn what results they can tell us about our world.

Rather than amounting to a formless, undisciplined hybridization of media, our work in this studio is to select and profit from the particulars of different working methods. Visual critic Barbara Stafford has called for what she calls a “disciplined interdisciplinarity.” In so doing, we can analyze and learn from each medium and method, and create new areas for learning as they are brought into a dialogue with one another.

I personally prefer to call this Transmedia Practice. This is to emphasize work across media, studying their selection and uses, towards the invention and emergence of new methods of work.

Temporary constructions are particularly well suited to such a studio, since they intrinsically ask you to rethink some fundamentals of (architectural) practice: design process, fabrication and inhabitation. For our studio, these are affected, respectively, by collaboration, electronic patternmaking, and programs of viewing.

As the quotes above remind us, both of our central architectural media and technologies this semester destabilize design and building as we know it. Thus we find new ways to structure space and social relations.

Part of the semester will be an exploration of materials, methods and Maya in making airpods (revisiting architectural precedents along the way, from Archigram to Ant Farm as well as examples from art and cinema).

The second part of the semester will ask you to edit computer model animations, process video and other content into short video and then upload them to iTunes as video podcasts.

So if we have 10 students, then by the end of the semester we can have a season of episodes of CCATV: On the Air available for download and viewing from the internet. In so doing, you will learn a number of new skills and new media of representation, but have meaningfully reflected on how these media of viewing affect our conception of – and use of – space today.

On the Air is a play on words. It regards two types of technologies that involve air in architecture: pneumatics (construction) and broadcast (representation). Each of these – and some potential relationships between them – are the subjects of this studio.
Both inflatable structures and internet broadcast have potential to abruptly alter and occupy space, structure social relations and enable new programmatic conditions.

Inflatable structures can dramatically expand from a two-dimensional surface, defining spatial and programmatic relations within a period of time exponentially smaller than afforded by most other forms of construction. It also has limits not associated with other types of building. For these reasons they carry a sense of the event with them, and can be found most commonly today – even rented – for programs of entertainment: a bounce house, a float, and so on. But their spatial and tectonic lives have gone largely unexplored, a problem that current modeling software and materials could help us examine and rectify.

Over eleven years now since the introduction of the internet to common use, it is ubiquitous within the industrialized world, and ever-changing in its modes of access and use.  Since its advent, Apple’s iTunes has been recognized for having hemmed file sharing of music and rewritten the rules of music sale, distribution and consumption. This has in large part been thanks to the company’s marriage of hardware and software. The last year or so has seen the blossoming of satellite radio and of podcasts, each challenging legal and economic norms of radio broadcast. Similarly, they each rely on new technologies that challenge old delineations between private and public space as they had previously been locatable on radio. For this studio, we will work with and around the spatial implications of the video podcast.

Methods of digital fabrication in architecture frequently result in fragmentary or modular constructions, pieces of which are a function of machinery’s scale and standard material dimensions (a 4x8 sheet of plywood in the United States, for example). Can we rescale this conception towards an immediate corporal relation within our current output capacities?

How do we use the podcast to access content? How can the video podcast serve as a medium of architectural representation? How can it serve to catalyze and disseminate architectural ideas? How does the pod create privacy within public places, while viewing? What are potential relationships that can be invented between the space of viewing and the space onscreen? These are some of the questions we will explore through our exercises.