Fractals video by xlace. Thanks to @generatorx and @subblue for sharing this on twitter.

Tomas Saraceno

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As we have often highlighted on this blog, flickr is one of the most important social networking tools for our office, as it allows us to keep in contact with many people and to share our work. One of the most successful operations we have carried out on flickr is the Passerella 2006 Flickr Group where we collect photos of our footbridge in Turin taken by people.
With this post we would like to share a small selection of pictures coming from our Flickr network. This is a good example of how networking is about learning and discovering things, rather than just advertising your own work.
While looking through our flickr contacts I noticed that most of them share their photos with an “all rights reserved” copyright. With the exception of those who are doing this for professional reasons, I think many people are simply not aware that they can choose their license. As a result Flickr chooses this copyright as the default license. I would invite people to check this and, if they can,  to use a creative commons license (for example this one that Tomas Saraceno is using) in order to make it easier for their pictures to circulate on the web. There are lots of amazing photos in our contacts gallery which we cannot publish here because they are covered by a copyright.

Kp6 and IMG_6424, Tomas Saraceno | we have already posted the artist’s work at Biennale of Venice here (in italian)

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Pratt CES HL-1, Pratt CES HL-5 and Prass CES HL-7, core.formula

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“No title”, “Mi sono rotto…. il gomito” and “microbios12-3565″, nachetz

‘The Alphabet’ is the name of the first joint project between ewo, the manufacturer of superior-quality lighting systems, and the inter-disciplinary team at JDS ARCHITECTS. The project in the ewoLAB series will be revealed to the public for the first time at Frankfurt’s Light+Building from 11.04.2010 to 16.04.2010.
The idea here was to develop a lighting system, which in terms of both form and technical specifications, meets project requirements.

Different places and spaces should be lit differently. How to adapt lighting to places without always changing design?
This lamppost family functions as an alphabet of light, where each configuration is a new letter to light up a specific context. The design is almost invisible, just a simple round steel profile perforated randomly to let let some light come out. The addition of elements composes the shape of the lamppost in an infinite range of combination to adapt to the light’s surrounding requirements.

Julien De Smedt, JDS ARCHITECTS:

On peut le comprendre dans un sens très strict, comme le font les algoristes, en exigeant qu’il n’y ait rien d’autre que le calcul, ou tolérer que le calcul brut soit suivi de retouches diverses dans des logiciels graphiques, voire intégré à des photo-montages. Il est évident qu’aucune école artistique ne peut conserver bien longtemps de frontière bien rigoureuse et qu’il y aura toujours quelqu’un pour mélanger les genres.

Mais au debut Les Algoristes ont commencé à se regrouper suite à une conférence “Art et Algorithmes” au SIGGRAPH en 1995. Le terme a été inventé et définit par Jean-Pierre Hébert, suivant l’algorithme en pseudo-code suivant :

if (creation && object of art && algorithm && one's own algorithm) {
     include * an algorist *
} elseif (!creation || !object of art || !algorithm || !one's own algorithm) {
     exclude * not an algorist *
}

On ne trouvera pas que des images fractales. Les techniques fractales sont souvent utilisées en arrière plan pour donner de la complexité aux images, mais il y a d’autres façons de façons de donner de la complexité (cf les images faites au traceur de courbes par Roman Verostko ou les pavages plans de Escher), et puis il y a des images algorithmiques qui recherchent plutôt une simplicité “zen” (cf: Jean Pierre Hébert je vous conseille d’aller voir son site c’est une mine )

Les algoristes ne représentent pas une technique numérique particulière, mais plutôt une attitude philosophique, celle d’arriver à un résultat artistique par une pure démarche algorithmique. Le résultat peut être une image aussi bien que de la sculpture. Les algorithmes ne sont pas forcément numériques, mais doivent faire partie de l’origine de l’oeuvre.

Algoristes au sens large:

Fondateurs: Al-Khawarizmi ( “Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah” La science de la restauration et la réduction, Khiva c.778-C.850), Nicolas Chuquet ( “Tripartie en la science des Nombres ” Triparty Nombre des sciences. Paris, 1445-1488),

Dans les arts, il a toujours existés des algoristes très nombreux, notamment dans les arts premiers, populaires et traditionnels.  En architecture, calligraphie, les tapis,les textiles, les pavages, la musique et la poésie, les algoristes ont été à jamais présent.

Les algoristes des temps modernes inclurait certainement Josef Albers, Max Bill, Wassily Kandinsly, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Piet Mondrian, François Morellet, Kenneth Nolland, Seurat dans la peinture, Le Corbusier entre autres en architecture; Bella Bartok, Arnold Schönberg et Edgar Varèse longtemps après que Johan Sebastian Bach et Antonio Vivaldi dans la musique, Georges Perrec, Oulipo & Alamo dans la littérature, etc …

Les algorithmes peuvent définir une forme, une pièce, un style, une période ou un corps entier de metier. Ce qui s’est passé depuis l’aube de la civilisation, au Bauhaus et du constructivisme, vers l’abstraction géométrique en Peinture, à ce jour. Et maintenant, de nombreux algoristes, mais de loin pas tous, utilisent des ordinateurs comme l’un de leurs outils de travail. Les ordinateurs aident les définir, mettre en œuvre ou d’utiliser les algorithmes qui façonnent leur travail.

Il en est de Yoshiyuki Abe, Peter Beyls, Larry Cuba, Jean-Francois Colonna, Andrew Crompton, Hans Dehlinger, Brian Evans, Chaim Goodman-Strauss, George W. Hart, Atelier Ho!, L’AAI (artificielle), Xah Lee, Vera Molnar, Gerhard Rohringer, Bruce Shapiro, Karl Sims, Simon Thomas, et bien d’autres, chaque algoriste developpe ces propres outils.

Pour la génération contemporaine de algoristes, les algorithmes doivent être précisément définies, au point de devenir naturellement des programmes d’ordinateur. Au-delà des concepts intuitifs, vaguement défini par le schéma de composition, chaque étape doit être planifiée dès la vision de l’œuvre, définie analytiquement, calculé. Les contraintes techniques abondent et doivent être maîtrisés. Évidemment, cette discipline qui requiere rigueur, ne peut s’appliquer partout, mais pour certains, il est en train de devenir une importante source d’inspiration.

POUR GRATTER UN PEU PLUS:
http://www.gratin.org/
www.multimedialab.be
soft:
http://processing.org/
http://www.grasshopper3d.com/
et beaucoup d’autres……

D’une longueur de 67 mètres, la passerelle pèse environ 160 tonnes, dont 130 tonnes d’acier. La charpente du tube est une résille complexe de géométrie variable retranscrivant l’intensité des efforts dans l’ouvrage.

Le communiqué de presse réalisé conjointement entre BTuA (Bernard Tschumi urbanistes Architectes) et HDA | Hugh Dutton Associés est téléchargeable ici. Toutes les photos de la passerelle, depuis la fabrication en usine jusqu’à la réception de l’ouvrage, sont également disponibles sur flickr.

Complexitys blog was conceived amid much brainstorming and deliberation, and with much enthusiasm, but with little idea of exactly which direction it would proceed in. Little more than two months after its birth and we’ve been surprised and encouraged to see the first important result of our devotion to, and investment in, an open online communication of architecture.
As Domenico Di Siena from Ecosistema Urbano Office explained in our “web for architects” training in Paris, “an architecture office’s blog is not a portfolio or a place to talk about themselves, but rather an incredibly powerful tool to create a community around the office’s activities and interests”.
Two months into the project and several blogs worldwide have begun talking about complexitys, so these words are now becoming reality.

We would like to thank these blogs personally, as they encourage us to keep working on ours:

DIGITAG& – Italian-based blog with an international reach, which aims to tag contents about digital architecture.

RHINO OFFICIAL BLOGS (French, English and other languages available) – a special thankyou to McNeel’s staff for their constant support for complex geometry and modeling issues, such as the Unrolling Double Curved Surfaces (and by the way, thanks too to Lowell Walmsley for his DevSrf Rhino Tool support).

RHINO CON Ñ – a Chilian blog which describes us as practicing an #openculture (thanks for that).

ArchDaily – a very important architecture blog talks about our last footbridge in La Roche sur Yon in France.

Furthermore, this blog and our twitter (mainly thanks to #gh3D and #rhinoscript ashtags) have enabled us to come into contact with many people who share our interests, such as Pier Paolo Presta and his blog, Rodrigo and his DesignPlayGrounds and the blog UN DIDI, with the wonderful Massive Unroll tool (which we used to produce the image shown above, available in a free wallpaper format here).

So many thanks to all of those who follow us. We would gladly welcome comments and/or suggestions on how to further develop our blog, and we will continue to give regular updates and continue to evolve.
We will soon be introducing an Engineering category, run mainly by HDA’s engineers, for those interested in more technical and scientific content relating to architecture and complex geometry.

Di solito per viaggiare e andare a visitare una città ho sempre bisogno di una scusa.
Ad esempio Venezia. E’ da qualche anno che la Biennale d’arte e d’architettura sono diventate la scusa per visitare questa bellissima città invasa dai turisti. Un poste posto bellissimo e, come direbbe questo professore, forse altrettanto inutile…?
La foto qui sopra l’ho scattata nella sala centrale del Padiglione Italia ed e’ forse una delle poche opere che ricordero’ di questa mostra MAKING WORLDS. L’artista è Tomas Saraceno (che vi invito a conoscere con questo nuovo strumento: spezify) e la sua installazione si presenta a molteplici interpretazioni. In particolare mi è sembrato, situato nel centro nevralgico della mostra, un riuscitissimo ritratto della complessità della contemporaneità e allo stesso tempo una speculazione costruttiva sui cambiamenti culturali che la stanno caratterizzando.

Ragnatela intricata, rappresentazione della complessità della rete delle informazioni, necessità di una visione olistica dei problemi ecologico, economico e morale della nostra epoca…c’e’ poi anche chi ne ha fatto una rappresentazione della crisi dell’arte contemporanea. Se volete sentire che cosa ne pensa l’artista, qua sotto trovate il video. Lui parla di “spider web” e di una “web on the web”, che fin troppo facilmente fa pensare a una rappresentazione di Internet – il 2.0 e la collaborazione e l’ “autocostruzione” non sarebbero altro che modificazioni effettuate su servizi proposti da altri utilizzatori, “una rete sulla rete”.

Infine, ecco delle foto di altri lavori dell’artista Tomas Saraceno.