Week 8

The Surface As Architecture. As the title suggest, this text from Antoine Picon explores the treatment of surface in architecture such the importance of a surface's complexity, instability and required flexibility of its implementation. One key point is the introduction of “hyper surfaces”, coined by Stephen Perrella  he describes it as “convergence between cyberspace, envisaged as hypermedia and architecture conceived primarily as a surface of projection or a terminal”. This of course sets itself apart from what would be just a regular surface of a building i.e. a brick wall. How  i understand the Difference between them is that hyper surface’s rely heavily on digital technology to apply a 3D built surface to a 2D plane. What helped me to visualise this was the Hyper surface installation project by the Architectural Computing faculty outside of Customs house.

Looking at the picture above of the installation you can see how the computer aided in bringing out the ornamental characteristics of this project. The text then goes on further to point out two main arguments for this obsession with surface. One being surface bear more immediately the mark of formation processes than volumes which makes sense since when you first look at a building you are being subjected to the surface of it which follows the form. Second argument being surface challenge the traditional mode of presence in architecture which elaborated can mean If we view architecture as taking up space the presence the structure has can come down to its outward aesthetic. Lastly the second reading i looked into was “Self-Organised Bodies” by roland snook they define self-organised bodies as an “exploration of volatile, topological, and organisation order from non linear interactions to components at a local level”. The concept of swarm intelligence helps to clear this theory up which is “is the collective behaviour of decentralised, self-organized systems, natural or artificial”. Basically what this self organised bodies can be understood as a system of points in a structure the react of each other to generate interesting shapes, for example when a flock of birds fly in a group the individual birds more but the “swarm shape” change. Now this can easily be related back to surfaces since the whole idea of self- organised bodies is the creation of interesting forms therefore surfaces.