It took me forever to finish reading the article. I'm stunned by how much information there are in a downland gridshell to learn before you can "accurately" make one. It seems to me that maybe just because of a small mistake, you can go home one day celebrating how a successful construction day you've had and come back to the site the next day with your jaw falling on the ground looking at your brilliant work turning into a broken basket. Maybe I'm exaggerating it too much. But I did enjoy feeling my guts dancing salsa to the sound of cracking wood today during the group project ^.^
I wonder, that nothing in the nature is perfectly rectilinear, yet when we try to build some organic shapes, it seems so difficult. When things are in straight lines, it's easy to mass-produce, to transport and to put together. However, structures like gridshell requires that each element is unique in shape. The "unlikely-ness" of the elements makes the process of design and construction very complex. Even though each shell starts with a flat mat, when it's start to be raised and shaped, each node on the shell must fall into its exact place. In our discussion on Friday, we mentioned that each gridshell project is different. It's not about we learned our experience this time and we'll make it better next time. We'll move on to a new stage of discovering the technology. When I write to here, I also start to wonder, when gridshell structure become a possibility of a new direction of architecture, are we stepping forward in terms of advancing the technology or looking backward towards how our ancestors started to learn the nature. Like Frei Otto said, he was just letting nature to take place and make the materials to do their own job, are we "relearning" the nature using the new materials that we created? Are we, as human beings, giving up the big ambition of "concurring the nature" and start to realize that nature itself is actually a extremely complex puzzle that we still can't really solve?
After industrial revolution, production processes are broken into pieces in order to achieve mass production and speed. In a large office building, people call different sections of the cubicals "district" and some information are confidential even between departments within one company. The beauty of gridshell construction is during the process, it brings everyone to work together. In many projects nowadays, there's lack of good communication between the architects, the engineers and the builder (crafter). For gridshell, just like each timber component is touching each other and work as a whole, everyone working in the project needs to know what others are doing and how they do it. Again, because of the nature of the working process of downland gridshell, are we stepping back to the traditional way of collaboration? I'd say it's not going backward, but it's like a cycle of revolution. Maybe many years later, a gridshell structure can be easily constructed by one or few people like a camping tent...
That's enough for now... 晚安～
2 comments:
What a delightful post. You raise an issue that you we will discuss on the appearance of nature's complexity. Food for future thought: what's the difference between complexity and complicated?
"are we stepping forward in terms of advancing the technology or looking backward towards how our ancestors started to learn the nature." A great dichotomy here - but perhaps no dichotomory required. Why the "or": wouldn't we have really advanced with technology if we could simultaneously create / innovate while also mainting our ties to nature?
Note on Matthew's post this week about how technology obscures old skills - such as handwriting. Does technology obscure our link to nature? Is this cultural, an aspect of use, and/or an aspect of the technology "itself"?
"Complex" is more formal and technical, such as a problem in mathematics, while something like personal life can be "complicated". That is, something complex may be well-organized and logically constructed as well as subtle and intricate, while a thing that is complicated will have something irregular or asymmetrical in addition to fundamental intricacy.
On looking backwards while moving forward, this is analogous to the method of devloping environmental technologies. Advancing technology before examining either ahead of its time or without comprehensive understanding of its effect on nature is the cause of the industrial pollution we are faced with today. The two notions of looking backward while moving forward are not dichotomous but rather mutually conclusive. In other words, we must understand where we've been to know where we are going; or, more pointedly, where we ought to go.
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