sha_hybrid

[a little rambly]

Reading Lynn's Animate Form was actually truly exciting -- the example of the boat hull as not being dynamic but still responding to a variety of situations that occur over time was to me one of the best explanations of how to achieve or study dynamic architecture. It reminds me of the evolution of video and computer games. Before, movements were discrete -- walk forward, stop, then turn, then walk forward again. In the past few years, though, technology has come forward to view movement as a series of intensities in a continuum (ie walking is not a separate state but an increase in movement in the legs, etc..) so that hybrid movement can be achieved through blending. If characters walk and turn at the same time, pulling out weapons or things, the result is that each action affects the other. The final, visual effect, is of fluid movement, where turning affects the walk but then reduces intensity as the turn is finished. The upcoming game, Spore, is actually then an exercise in the procedural blending of monsters the user creates to interpret how it will walk and move.

In a field like gaming, though, animation and motion can still have literal expressions. Is what Lynn argues for a still frame of the blended movement of a character that is walking, jumping, and calling out to someone at the same time? If it is as simple as that -- that architecture is a moment captured from a series of flows and forces that change and grow over time, that would be fantastic.

Hybrid as brought up with the Manimal, too, generates some interesting thoughts, especially on blending of disciplines. I'm excited by the idea of hybrid practice, something that has been happening in other scales of design but seems to be a quieter subject in the world of architecture. This has been a continued source of confusion for me -- though there are a few firms like TODA and maybe AMO that seem to be intent on exploring the gap between architecture and design, within the design fields there is already a sense of a larger community. One DesignObserver article argues that graphic design does not deal with history, while architects remain embedded in it, but I don't think that's the answer. The discussion consistently returns to the idea of graphic design as an ephemeral product vs. architecture as a static, permanent being. That, then, makes me interested in graphic design that starts to cope with its own 'mortality' -- did the Cranbrook kids of the 90s come the closest to existential graphic design? When does architecture experience a similar crisis of self?

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/020666.html