Form

13. Urban, desert

2009-10-12T04:30:00.002-04:00

Urban desert. Urban, desert. A large, empty desert lot at the edge of the city of Ajman. Every urban empty lot in Ajman has desert sand because the city is the desert, the city is overtaking the desert. Even the sidewalks in the fringe areas are sand sidewalks, and the curbs in the streets accumulate the sand blown around by urban desert storms, mini-storms, micro-storms, neighborhood storms that reallocate the urban sand and accumulate it in every crevice to remind us that, after all, the city is still usurping the desert. Ajman, like many other smaller cities in the UAE, is under steady transformation from a desert city to a city built where there was a desert, a peculiar form of artificial urbanity made possible by the abundance of targeted investments, the abundance of manual labor and the abundance of empty desert space. Larger metropolises like Dubai or Abu Dhabi have managed to eliminate (hide) the desert as an urban presence. But in Ajman, the desert is still visible in the amalgam of scattered built episodes (buildings, districts, infrastructure) that so artificially conform the urban landscape in this part of the world. None of the intrinsic qualities of the desert –silence, absence, homogeneity, persistence- is present, in any way, in the city. Only the sand that accumulates everywhere remind us of what this once was.

12. Pockmarks

2009-09-24T14:44:00.003-04:00

The first image is an apartment building in the center of Berlin; the second is the Natural History Museum in London. The small round holes on the surface of the Berlin building could be from bullet marks from the Battle of Berlin. The larger, shallower pockmarks on the Natural History Museum are likely from shrapnel, from bombs dropped by German planes. These acts of violence were not planned as form-giving, aside from the perversion of leaving ruins in one’s wake as a sign of victory. They are physical signs of the war, of the irruption of something irrational and destructive. The pockmarks, now, make that original irruption present again and again, not necessarily as reminders (these marks are invisible or meaningless to most people), much less as metaphors, but as indexes. What is the point of asking about the meaning of a scar beyond the feeling of loss and pain, or the memory of pain, or phantom pains? We surely could read meanings into these forms, trying to imagine what it felt like to be in a bomb raid or live in a war-torn city; we could imbue them with logic and rationality by reading their historical origins, forensically as it were. Along these lines, we could be wary of aestheticizing violence by looking at the marks as visually arresting. Yet, for me, what is most poignant about these marks is neither scientific nor symbolic, but sensorial: being struck by their visual and tactile presence. The marks cannot be fully understood, and still embody some of that irrational violence that produced them.

Post by Daniela Sandler

11. But...why?

2009-09-07T05:48:00.001-04:00

A relatively new building in Ajman, UAE, that I see every day when I return to my hotel. It resembles Graves’s Portland building and the rest of the post-modern grotesque architectural nonsense. I wonder who decided to paint the plane that way and, if it was about getting the most of a boring façade by means of cheap paint, why not go crazy about it? Why not a super-billboard, or a ten-story high mosaic with the portrait of the Sharjah Sheikh Al Quissimi? Buildings in Sharjah have acceptable prismatic proportions and perforation rhythms, they are usually anonymous except they tend to have a statement of sorts, formal, ornamental or painted like in this case.

As long as it does not come with anything even remotely close to the postmodernist rhetoric…

10. Tombsign

2009-09-01T10:01:00.001-04:00

In Costa Rica, the place where a fatal traffic accident has taken place is marked with what we could call a tombsign: a square that frames a heart and a halo. Painted in the same color that the rest of road signs, the first time I saw it I could not decipher its meaning. When I learned what it was, I could not make up my mind to whether the factual anonymity of its presence –at least in terms of color and medium- was deliberate to soften its tragic meaning or just the result of bad design.

Are signs supposed to target emotions?

9. Random walk of pi

2009-08-26T01:38:00.002-04:00

The constant number pi has an infinite number of decimal places with no recognizable system within the sequence. However, the distribution of the 10 possible digits is quite uniformly balanced, at least within the displayed range from 1 to 1,000,000 positions after the comma. Each digit is represented by a direction from 0° to 360°. For example, each time the 0 arises, a line with a certain fixed length is displayed with the value of 0°. The end of each line is at the same time the start of the line for the following digit; the length of each line remaining constant. The result of the lines is a path; the so-called random walk.

The colored areas represent the distribution of the decimal of pi. These always start with 0, but with each succeeding step the values are increased by 10,000. These areas are laid around the most extreme points of the random walk. It can be observe that the lager the displayed range becomes the more round the areas are.

From Daniel A Becker’s web site

8. Sputnik, moon, test pattern

2009-08-12T07:59:00.000-04:00

Television test cards, or test patterns as they are commonly called, existed only as a cultural memory by the time I was born. The card was a calibration device; its layout engineered by engineers. If the image on my screen showed a squashed ellipse, you’d call a technician, who would track mud into your living room to adjust the TV’s screen ratio until it was rightly a circle. “While you’re here, I don’t suppose you could add some counter-weight to that wobbly ceiling fan?” you might ask him, not wanting to clean the mud up twice.

The ceiling fan is Sputnik, whose orbit is a balancing act between two constituent forces. Perfect, spherical, and gleaming, the artificial Soviet moon passed over our heads, its forward velocity balanced against the gravitational pull of the earth. After the TV station signs off with the “Star-Spangled Banner” and broadcasts the test card, you go outside, hoping to see the new satellite streak overhead. Like the circle on the TV, an orbit is a détente between the x- and y- axis results in an endless circle. For Sputnik, x- is velocity, y- is gravity. Y- is constant, atmospheric drag decreases x- and the circle slowly crushes into an ellipse. The shiny little moon’s constant “beep beep beep” is silenced by a fiery return to Earth.

The ceiling fan spins silently now. Our affinity for the perfection of this shape is aboriginal. The sun and the moon are our oldest companions, and on their habits we learned to hang our most important activities: planting and harvest, feast and famine, war and peace. Man’s accomplishments can be traced as our mastery and appropriation of the circle and sphere, forms made by the universe with hardly a thought.

Post by Andrew Liebchen

7. Yuanlou homes in Fujian

2009-08-10T08:49:00.000-04:00

“The tulous are found in the southern and western part of the Fujian Province as well as in the neighboring province of Guangdong. They vary in size, and can be circular or rectangular. The round form seems to be the most recent form, having diameters ranging from 17 to 91 meters. It is believed that they originated in the 13th or 14th century. There are a few thousand tulou in existence today, with as many as 600 inhabitants spanning three or four generations. Of these, perhaps a thousand are round, yuanlou (round building). Five standing yuanlou exceed 70 meters in diameter. Perhaps the largest is Zaitianlou in Zhaoan, with 2,4 m thick walls and a diameter of 91 meters (Knapp, 2000, p. 264).”

“On the outside, the village's bare pathways and buildings are of the same material, clay. One meets very few people and the tulou shows little interest in the world outside. It is dense and compact, with up to 250 small uniform rooms, constructed in two or three-story wooden structures. These are placed around the building’s periphery and ordered symmetrically around its central axis.”

“The courtyard is used for drying clothes and rice, for communal activities, and for children's play. It may be empty or filled with one or two-story buildings: stables, guest rooms, toilets or an outdoor kitchen for use in the summer. It is also in the courtyard that the ancestral altar is situated.”

From Jens Aaberg-Jørgensen’s web page http://www.chinadwelling.dk/

6. Homes of harmony

2009-08-02T22:44:00.000-04:00

“The past has been the age of struggle. Contest between man and man, nation and nation, has everywhere been exhibited. And it can hardly be said, even yet, that humanity has an abiding place, or a continual city. But a new order of society is now being ushered into existence. New forms of life and action will appear. There will be less of isolation—of mere individualism; there will be more of association, of co-operation—exhibiting the harmonious GROUP-LIFE. And finer offspring, also, manifesting the finer aspirations, will be produced through the aid of these finer conditions.
The new order of society will call for NEW ARCHITECTURE, corresponding to its wants, its aspirations. Now, nature exhibits variety. It also manifests unity. In a very prominent way, and as one of her main features, nature presents CIRCULARITY OF FORM. Wherever the human eye beholds nature, it marks that interesting phenomenon. The forests, the earth, the planets, and, in short, all the heavenly bodies exhibit circularity of form.

These diagrams may be intended to turn the attention of the public mind to new forms, not only of structure for the individual or isolated family, but for unitary edifices; also for the organisation of CIRCULAR CITIES.”

From Simon Crosby Hewitt, 22 Tremont Street, Boston, May 1st, 1856

To Robert Owen and others, members of the Congress to be assembled in London, England, 14th May, 1856, to discuss principles and measures for the Reformation of the World.

5. T=O map

2009-07-21T16:56:00.000-04:00

Even if T=O maps can be found as early as the 7th century in Isidore of Seville’s Encyclopedia, Medieval Europe has many examples of maps that appropriated the circular form both as a representational resource and as a vehicle to express symbolism. In the case of the T=O map, the truncated cross within the disc, the world was depicted as a circle with a T within, the upper half representing Asia, the lower left Europe, and the lower right Africa. Jerusalem defines the center (in the time of the crusaders, Jerusalem often appeared as a complete circle divided into quadrants). The T=O map in the image was printed in Augsburg in 1472. The vertical segment of the T is the Mediterranean sea (Mediterraneum), separating Europe from Africa. Asia is separated from Europe and Africa by an unknown Maremagnum Fine, and circling all three continents, the outer ring of the circle is the Mare Oceanum, the outer limit of the Earth as it was understood then. The circle as a cartographic instrument was never as powerful as it is in this map, which possesses an extraordinary symbolism that could only be embodied in the circle, the most symbolic of all geometric forms since the beginning of times.

4. Viral spin

2009-07-12T14:09:00.001-04:00

3. Web trend map

2009-07-03T23:09:00.000-04:00

The web trend map version 4, by Information Architects. It plots the leading names and domains of the Internet onto the Tokyo Metro map, providing a visual understanding of the virtual reality that defines Internet as the space of networks. The Tokyo Metro map (top image) is a visual representation of a very concrete thing: trains and tracks and platforms and millions of people next to each other, sweating, laughing or trying to read their newspaper. The web trend map puts lines and nodes to the test of showing how the virtual works, how it is linked and how it is navigated. Mapping is a form of survival, an attempt to make concrete what was unknown and threatening. Mapping is a process of domestication, and the formal quality of maps has to do with the complexity and the completeness of their messages to the user. This does not mean maps need to have too much information; on the contrary, like in most processes of form making, true sophistication comes with the processes of editing and simplification.

2. Night, urban

2009-06-28T11:55:00.000-04:00

Satellite night images of Athens, Buenos Aires and London (not to the same scale). From a distance, millions of single light-emitting elements (lamp-posts, car lights, building lights, etc.) add up to define the form of the full city. The tiny size of those light-emitting elements, when seen from space, diffuses the form of the city into a nebulous massing, where only a few elements such as thoroughfares and roads, neighborhoods, or the higher-density areas, are distinguishable. In these images, form is the result of the addition of a large number of minuscule units, in the same way that a large number of pixels define the image in a computer screen. This definition of form rejects the idea of contour, even geometry. It proposes a way of understanding complex formal relationships by means of very simple parameters such as concentration -in this case of light; adjacency -lit versus dark areas; or relative position -centralized versus radial arrangement.

1. Viral loop maps

2009-06-24T15:27:00.000-04:00

What is the form of social networks? In the May issue of Fast Company there is an interesting diagram that explains the growth model of a social network. The model is based on the number of network users and how it multiplies exponentially over short periods of time, sometimes as much as 4% per day. That is why they call it viral. Each one of the circular units in the image represents a series of connections that originated from a single user (center of the sphere). No two circular units are formally alike since the way connections develop is user-specific: the same system generates an infinite number of different diagrams. This representation of the concept of the double viral loop, based on the premise that each new user begets more users, is inevitably centralized, since it originates in one person (user). The way the starbursts –white points- and the connections –green lines- metamorphose into a whole generates a specific type of porosity, evident as one zooms in. At small scale, when it is hard to separate both components, porosity becomes translucency and the circular units become complex, multi-layered entities.

In-form this blog! Form requesting your submissions

2009-06-18T21:32:00.000-04:00

Form is now accepting submissions. This blog wants to be a participatory forum about the topic of form in art, architecture, design and everyday life and I look forward to including in it your images and thoughts.

Interested? Send me just one image (jpeg, 1MB max.) and a small text (250 words max.) of anything human-made that you consider formally extraordinary, explaining your reasons or making a statement about it. It could be your work or the work of others; contemporary, futuristic or part of the past; high or low, simple or complex; buildings, spaces, objects, experiments, everyday things, artworks, designs...just one image and a small text, so that we keep it brief for many people to participate.

Send your material to form@muchieast.com with your name, contact information and a few words about who you are, what you do and why are you interested in form.

An open discussion about form

2009-06-18T18:18:00.000-04:00

How do we arrive at certain formal results versus others? How is form a matter of choice versus the result of a personal reading of a specific socio-cutural moment? How are formal results creative versus automatic? This blog is an open forum for the discussion of form as the result of creative processes in architecture, design or art. It is not a discourse about natural form and its perfection, but about human-made form and its imperfection, its inevitable arbitrariness.