Skin as a hat and yoga mat

Ok, so that took a little longer than I expected. I got a little caught up in v-ray options that are far, far beyond my capabilities. Nevertheless, below is what I was blathering about before.

oh, and yes. The bump map on those skins?

that's elmo.

that's right. I went there.



Skin as facade/mask, right?



So the logical jump to skin as hat makes sense, yeah? Now, the relationship changes from what happens above to below...



conditions that may happen above say, a river... precious ores... hot freaking magma. What are the implications for those skins then? and when it's one of those bubbly homogenous skins, where is the bottom/top and sides? Does it become something akin to the mobius strip...? oh... the possibilities...

...the complete lack of time

Iterations of skin

Looking at Piel.Skin made me think, there's obviously more than one axis of skin. Skin that surrounds a building/place as a mask/facade has been my dominant thought.

of course skin could also be the metaphorical hat of the building.

or the yoga mat.

yeah, yeah... sounds crazy.... I'll just knock up a quick idea of what I'm talking about.

Internet freebies on skin architecture

Anybody else exploring skin? mmMmmmmmmm..... skiiiiiiin.....

creepy.

well, found a really good resource:

Skin Architecture

seems to be an online version of a book by Ethel Baraona Pohl called Piel.Skin. Buy it!! Buy it!! I get commissions!!! naww.. I don't. I get nothing. Good book nonetheless. Oh and the website is flash driven... so it actually looks like you're turning the pages. Made me giggle with glee.

it covers a broad range of architectural examples and includes our very own (he says, lodged very firmly in Perth) Federation Square, and Carter Tucker House by Sean Godsell.

starts with an interesting quote by Mr. Manuel Gausa:

"Contemporary architecture replaces the idea of facade with that of skin: an exterior layer mediating between the building and its environment"

brother speaks truth.

check it, da screenshots (what are the copyright rules with the PrtScn button, I wonder?):

Skin, because you're worth it

A little more prying and I stumbled onto a pretty cool site:

GeneratorX

Has some absolutely kickin' examples of digital code (well, it's visual manifestation anyway...) being made tangible. One that stuck out for me was the corian skin created by Studio Commonwealth:




What I can make of it, Commonwealth have developed the skin as a single plane and created the protrusions by pushing out points of the skin. This makes those particular points thinner and therefore allows more light to pass through those points. Imagine flattening a piece of bubblegum and stretching out specific points of that plane.

They achieved this using corian (as stated); a form of resin. Resintastic.

Generator X is an exhibition/conference involved with software/digital generation in art and design. It seems like it's based in Norway and started in 2005 with a few iterations occurring afterwards, the latest in 2008.

Architectural Skins + Big Words

Have you ever noticed that in a profession primarily devoted to drawing and building stuff, we use an unnecessarily large amount of big words? I blame our references to dead french philosophers... there was always going to be something lost (or gained, as it were) in translation.

I digress a little.

After being suitably overawed by the Martha und Daneil Gantenbein (see previous posts) and in consultation with Daniel, I've decided to focus my research on architectural skin + theory. The leap in logic is pretty obvious, right? Well, in hindsight it is, so damn you.

My initial research has lead me, unsurprisingly, to the masters of skin; Herzog & De Meuron. I'm sure you've seen the Allianz Arena:

Glows a different colour at night depending on the football (soccer) team that plays there. Red for Bayern Munich, blue for 1860 Munich, white for the German national team. (picture and info courtesy of Wikipedia. Ah... why does everybody hate you Wikipedia?)

purrrty. I've also stumbled onto what is known as the computational sublime (bweh?!), which is essentially exploration using computers with references to theoretical philosophies. I will be directing a majority of my research towards this area with the intention of trying out different skins in different contexts/scales. Should be interesting.

wtf! wtf! wtf! blinking car!

BLINKING CAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (?)

youtube version

the project in video form.... groovy:

more robotic madness

some pictures of the brick + polycarbonate panel production:

which was formed by the idea of encasing bubbles, possibly an abstraction of the notion of bubbly champagne and its storage? (maybe the architects just liked bubbles?)

and then... its placement as a formal wall using concrete columns as a grid set-out



complete with manly bricklayer :D

Robots and bricks

make an amazingly good coupling. The following was taken from archidose (and yes, scanning architecture blogs is only something I've picked up in the last three weeks).

Anyhoo... it's a project by Bearth & Deplazes Architeckten, completed in 2008, behold the Martha und Daniel Gantenbein:








"Ah! but it's just a barn!!" you cry. Fools! check that brick facade detail:















Yeah... yeah...!! bubbles! how on earth did they do that? Well... liasoning with people who know all sorts of crazy technology.In this instance, Gramazio & Kohler. They used a robotic production method developed at the ETH (Zurich) and it's something that I will be looking into for a possible research topic.

But for now, more of the crazy double brick facade with the polycarbonate panel interior: