A 4001 Core Studio Fall 1997 Instructors: Jos Bosman, Evan Douglis (Coordinator - fall), Paola Iaccuci, William Mac Donald (Acting Core Director - Fall), Reinhold Martin, Philip Parker Teaching Assistant: David Erdman CHANNEL SURFING: URBAN NETWORKS Introduction Using New York City as a design laboratory, the three projects of Core Studio 1 are intended to initiate a process of 'design research' with an emphasis on conceptualization and abstraction as a means of generating architectural strategies. The studio will be framed around the proposition that architecture be understood as a set of 'relationships,' rather than as an autonomous object. To that end, the studio will explore ways of producing architectural interventions based on an understanding of the city as a field of dynamic, cross-referenced organizational networks. Increasingly, fixed boundaries of all kinds, from self-contained economies to stable identities, are being challenged by the need to dissolve their limits and connect themselves to larger assemblages. Often unexpectedly, the flows of information, people, and goods traveling across such channels have been shown to exhibit properties, such as unpredictable adjustments, disturbances, and reorganizations, unavailable to autonomous entities. Architecture and urbanism are active participants in the dynamic, their own assumptions regarding containment and closure challenged by these ever-multiplying networks of exchange, communication, and action, thus opening up a wide range of new architectural and urbanistic potentials. What is a network? How does it function? What are its effects? These and related questions will form the basis of the inquiry into the 'network' a possible architectural and urban strategy. Opportunities to experiment with particular ways of understanding and manipulating network-based models of architecture and urbanism will be provide by: 1. Identifying latent conditions in which coexisting architectural and infrastructure systems influence one another, often in nonhierarchical and nonlinear ways. 2. Developing techniques for transforming these conditions into a productive mechanism capable of organizing both spatial and temporal relationships. 3. Testing this knowledge in a concrete urban situation in which nonlinear, non hierarchical, networked relations are engendered simultaneously at a variety of scales and under a multiplicity of program requirements. The studio will consist of three projects. In the first project, emphasis will be placed on translation from abstract idea to drawing, and in the second, form two dimensions to three dimensions using models. The third project will synthesize the issues explored in the first two with a site in New York and a specified program. The three projects should be considered as a series in which each is capable of modifying - and not merely extending - the results of the previous work. For example, work done in Project 1 could influence assumptions made in Project 2, and so on. This type of approach, in which hypotheses and assumptions are continuously tested and reworked, emphasizes the importance of process and transformation in the development of architectural ideas. Project 1 CROSSED SIGNALS This project will concentrate on the analysis and generation of networked, feedback-driven phenomena. Information concerning urban traffic patterns, filtered through the news media, will be used as an index of the dynamism of the city itself. Students sill be asked both to analyze the presentation and organization of the information, and to use it as a basis for extrapolating further organizational schemes. The fundamental indeterminacy and incompleteness of any given database will be converted into an opportunity to speculate on possible, alternative configurations. 1. Sample several different New York City traffic reports (i.e., WNCY, 1010 WINS, WOR, etc.). What are the internal dynamics of each report? How do they organize the information? how does this organization change over the 24 hours, as the traffic patterns change? And vice versa? What relationships (i.e. repetition, cross referencing, feedback) become evident between reports on any given station or between reports on different stations over the 24 hours? 2. Using the fundamental incompleteness and indeterminacy of the reports (i.e. their inability to describe all traffic at all times, or to predict future conditions precisely) as an opportunity to speculate, generate three different organizational diagrams which build on - or supplement - their logics. Each diagram should be drawn in ink on 11" x 17" mylar. 3. With these diagrams as a guide, use a camera to produce three further speculations on possible visual manifestations of such systems, again considering th e indeterminacy of the diagrams and the further need for invention. Each study should be made up of (9) 5 x 7 photographs arranged in relations to each other and should attempt to present a spatial analog (and not a "picture") of the phenomena encoded in the initial diagrams. 4. Referring back to the diagrams or simple proceeding forward, derive a set of procedures through which each photographic studies a translated into a notational drawings (again, not "pictures", but abstract systems). Each of the three drawings should be executed in ink on 17" x 22" mylar. Particular attention should be paid to the further identification of degrees of differentiation, gaps, connections, and movements.