Convoluted Flesh
A synthetic approach to analogue and digital architecture
The convoluted (i.e. overlapped, intertwined and blurred) nature of contemporary architectural design, as we understand it, goes beyond the functions of opulence and intricacy, of technique and simulation, of module and optimisation. It invokes something ranking above notions of beauty, style, and elegance - it evokes the sublime, the blissful and the mysterious even within the digital domain. The concept of Convoluted Flesh, which is central to our design investigations in the practice of marcosandmarjan and our diploma units at the Bartlett UCL (Unit 20) and Westminster University (DS10), entails an organic spatial and strategic vision that includes the significance of atmospherics and bodily experience, in conjunction with the designer’s technological and poetic awareness.
Simultaneously, our understanding of Flesh in architectural terms stands in opposition to the common, yet reductive metaphor of skin as a flat and thin membrane that denies the virtue of inhabitable thick walls. In a time when a lot of the mainstream digital discourse is essentially surface-bound - risking flattening and disembodying the architectural ‘skin’ ever more, at the same time, depriving it from its human and material content, the aim of Convoluted Flesh, on the contrary, is to stress the urgency of a Thick Embodied Flesh that encompasses new ornamental, sensual and corporeal qualities in architecture.
Our endeavour is then to establish a debate in which experimentation, technology and progress does neither exclude the intuitive and poetic freedom of designers as truly creative thinkers, nor the inherent relationship between the user and the depth of the architectural flesh. Hence, we consider a poetic, as well as ‘corpological’ approach that complement a typological and topological understanding of architecture. A lot of leading discussions in the digital realm are still very much the result of an initial period of discovery of disembodied virtual realities, data-scapes and cyber-realities that culminated in an almost quasi-religious myth of total liberation from physical limitations. Such processes, it seems, have focused more on generating architecture from outside via formulated methodologies towards structural, engineered tectonics. The notion of Convoluted Flesh, on the other hand, implies an approach that develops from inside out, involving experiential qualities, inhabitation and use. Rather than following the structural ‘truthful’ efficiency of the Gothic and its parametric revival, phenomena of Convoluted Flesh are intrinsically associated with a sense of formal, structural and spatial complexity, borrowing from a plethora of Baroque binary conditions, such as the dichotomy of rational and empirical thinking, along with the morphing of classical architectural semantics into playful theatrical tectonics and typologies. It involves the body in a variety of arguments that aim for the synthesis of techniques, technics and technologies, and the performance (understood both as task and as staging) of the architectural flesh.
Our previous professional and academic design research spirals away from the apparently unquestioned and rather predictable version of what we consider as the contemporary emergence of a new ‘digital modernism’: the unspecified whitewash (or often just ‘greywash’) of 3D surfaces, the universal Sachlichkeit [objectiveness] of parametric design techniques, and the mechanistic concept of the computer as a purely generative utensil. In turn, in this workshop we want to explore different notions of Convoluted Flesh as a way to challenge such approaches, envisioning experimental, and thus unpredictable conditions in design that are the result of the individual’s eccentric, yet informed understanding of architecture. By looking into advances within a wide range of manufacturing technologies and working methodologies, we aim for an open-minded and creative interpretation of such processes, simultaneously pursuing a synthetic model of design that convolutes the technological with the poetic, the visionary with the historic, as well as the ornamental and tectonic within the architectural flesh.
An example of this is our NURBSTER series, which combines models and 1:1 prototypes conceived as exhibition installations, and their implications on larger-scale constructs. They create an analogue/digital repertoire by utilising 2D/3D modelling software, in addition to CNC, CAD/CAM and RP technologies that allow the easy assemblage of a large amount of components. The size and scale of the majority of NURBSTERs locates them into the domain of interior and urban furniture design, which considers modularity and mass-production, structural stability and tectonic presence. The results are assemblages featuring a high level of formal complexity that nonetheless fit programmatic and ergonomic requisites. Different NURBSTERs have been exhibited in a variety of places, including the Bartlett in London and Fragner Gallery in Prague; Venice Biennale; Feng Chia University, Taiwan, TU Braunschweig and iCP Hamburg; ExperimentaDesign in Lisbon and MEIAC in Badajoz, Spain.
In the end, the concept of Convoluted Flesh will be used to re-addresses the relationships of façade (expression, reception, materiality) and interior (effect, action, space), of fixedness (stasis, corporeality of matter) and festiveness (movement, celebration of space), of below (matter, function) and above (manner, vision), of being (manifestation) and bogus (magic), of body and architecture. It sees a great potential in sublime, blissful and mysterious conditions as potentially opening up new aesthetic, spatial or material possibilities that are less limited than its technologically-driven and form-generating counterparts. Above all, it allows creating visions in which the depth of the architectural flesh is, more than anything, convoluted, poetic and synthetic.
related website:
http://home.so-net.net.tw/baroque2004/
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