Wayne SchaapNovember 23, 2010

Technique Diagrams: The Appliance House

For the diagramming techniques of The Appliance House, the case study diagrams will explore the abstract relationships that can evolve and develop out of diagramming. By specifically exploring the ideas of, flow, flexibility, and adaptability from the "Body" and "Form" diagrams. This set of diagrams will begin to unfold the hidden potential within the idea of abstraction. By exploring the, "process of emergence, the made as being part of the making,"(Spuybroek, p 359), these diagrams attempt to explore the idea of information potential. What information can be gained though the process of diagramming? How can the process be abstracted, allowing an adaption to be applied to different architectural ideas? Will the abstraction allow for the development of new architectural ideas as an adaption of diagramming techniques?

The diagram below is a process diagram relating to the "Plastic Mould-Ability" diagram from the "Form" diagrams. This diagram explores the idea of push/pull points that are the starting point of the diagram exploring plastic mould-ability. The relationship between major control points and an edge condition produces a diagram with flowing elastic shapes that have the potential to create space. The major control points become hubs of information that inform the creation of lines and the connection between hubs.

Expanding on this diagram further, the context of production is explored in the next set of diagrams, exploring the ideas that Lars Spuybroek mentions in his Nox essay, "The Structure of Vagueness," about the information that can be extracted from a series of repetitions. This is where the idea of flexibility within the system emerges through a process of repetition, the rigid lines from the previous diagram, are repeated five times, and result in a the creation of numerous flexible space volumes. Relative to the initial diagrams in the "Form" exercise, this diagram illustrates how space can be created through diagramming before The Appliance House was created. The information flows created between nodes when repeated, begin to develop inhabitable space within the boundaries of the system. Which raises the question of how this information can be manipulated further, providing further information within the system?

The above process of repetition led to further diagrams exploring the idea of solidification. How can the diagrammatic information processes begin to solidify, creating a further distillation of information? The next diagram explores the idea of solidification through repetition, which begins to create density by layering lines of information. By extracting one volume of space from the previous diagram, an exploration of Vertical amplitude and Diagonal amplitude is explored. The resulting diagrams can relate directly to the "Relative Height and Space Confinement" diagrams from the "Body" exercise. The convergence of lines creates a vertical density that can begin to inform the Appliance House in section and elevation, not just in plan. These diagrammatic processes can be applied to different sets of information criteria, information that is not specific to The Appliance House, which allows the diagrams to begin to inform other design processes.

During the diagramming "Form" exercise, the diagram of "Structural Form" in The Appliance House was directly related to the physical structure observed while researching The Appliance House; for the purposes of exploration, the next set of diagrams explores the idea of structure from the opposite observation point. Where the initial "Form" diagrams explored the resultant structure, these diagrams attempt to explore the idea of structural form as a continuation of the first diagram in this

paper. How can the idea of flexibility, flow, and adaptability evolve from the initial control points defined in the Plastic Mould-Ability Diagram? By extracting the spaces created from the flexibility of the plastic mould-ability diagram, an abstraction of the resultant space can be extracted; from the abstraction, a process of diagramming can begin to inform structure within the context of the "Body" diagrams. The golden triangle relationship observed in The Appliance House can be applied to the diagrams below, and be used to extract another layer of information and inform another set of diagrams.

Read in plan, from a spatial standpoint, the diagrams below begin to inform major structural elements, similar to the structural observations seen in the" Form" diagrams. They also begin to inform the "Body" diagrams by implying a sense of size relative to the human body. Read as elevations, the below diagrams can begin to inform the design of horizontal and vertical spatial relationships. Unexpectedly, Lars Spuybroek's claim that, "we should opt for a method where elevation and plan are intertwined and co-evolve into structure,"(Spuybroek, p. 358) starts to emerge from a set of diagrams that initially started as a diagram in plan.

My initial expectations from this diagramming exercise were the creation of three separate and

individual diagram sets, evolving from three different starting points. Interestingly, as the diagrams

evolved it became apparent that the desired information could be extracted from a manipulation of the initial diagram in the set. By exploring the initial diagram at a deeper level and manipulating the data extracted from consecutive diagrams, multiple layers of information are exposed. As Lars Spuybroek observed in his essay, The Structure of Vagueness, "effects that co-exist in the final result, all the curves, mergings[sic] and holes are interrelated, nothing can be changed without affecting the arrangement of the whole," these diagrams begin to refer to the idea of the interconnected information loops. My initial expectations were influenced by the individual creation of my "Form" and "Body" diagrams and are useful for understanding The Appliance House, although the relationship between the diagrams is disconnected. Through the above process of diagramming, an interconnected relationship between my initial diagrams emerges, and further connections could be observed through a deeper process of diagramming evolving from the initial data set.

The major observation resulting from diagramming my diagrams is an interconnectedness between my initial "Form" and "Body" diagrams that is not obvious because of diagramming The Appliance House after it was created. I have to conclude that if this interconnectedness can be recognized after the fact, then the interconnectedness can be created from an initial starting point; evolving from an interconnected repetition of diagrammatic processes, with the potential for the information extracted to evolve into structuralized and solidified form.

Bibliography

Spuybroek, Lars. Nox. Machining Architecture, (Spuybroek, 2004)