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Two Love Letters to Eisenman
The translation of cultural production into digital code, the proliferation of databases, and the loss of medium specificity through the interface have conspired to create a culture of rapid, nearly frictionless exchange. This is an admittedly exhausted cliché, but nonetheless relevant to our situation.
In this studio, my goal was to find out what new methodologies for working with existing cultural productions are suggested by a digital culture of constant translation, variation, and reformatting. Also, how should I deploy the tactics of destabilization, re-mixing, misuse, and misreading in order to build a workflow for generating unlimited new forms based on precedents?
The series of diagrams of Peter Eisenman’s House VI was my starting point.
Letter 1: Plan
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A transformation of a diagram of Eisenman’s House VI
The transformation aided by MATLAB Image Processing Toolbox provides capability to change the structure of any given image in various ways. The great number of transformative operations carried out before moving on to the interpretation phase was more of a recursive post-rational process; I transformed an image, and then reflected on what new architectural qualities and opportunities had been brought to the new image. To make sure the outcomes of the transformations were productive, every iteration of the transformation was based on the knowledge accumulated in the previous ones.
In Letter 1, among all the transformation outcome derived from the diagrams of Eisenman’s House VI, I chose to use the delaminated one as the starting point of the interpretation phase; the image was treated as the plan of the house to be generated.
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Interpretation outcome
Physical model
The interlaced interior walls are made of lattices with various levels of densities, which regulate the visual and spatial relationships between adjacent or overlapping rooms in a dynamic way. Apart from this, the densities are also able to imply the openness of each space, hinting which rooms are more public and which are more private.
Axon cutaway and elevations
Letter 2: Elevation
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A transformation of a diagram of Eisenman’s House VI
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Interpretation outcome
Physical model
