Cartographing the wind

Abstract

At the beginning of the design process the architect possesses only a random collection of information, requirements, intentions, and assumptions, and then suddenly on the drawing board appears a proposal for an architectural form. How is th is idea generated, what influences its shape, from what is it derived from? Faced with the daunting task of conceiving a building form, should one first study the functional requirements, or manipulate geometrical systems, or give expression to inner intuitions? During this critical stage of creating something out of nothing, architects desire a set of normative principles that could guide their activities. Many theories about the source of form were developed to help govern architectural practice, and much practice derived from these theories. This question about the source of form is equally central to theories in other fields from art and architectural history to anthropology. However these other fields are not concerned with creating architectu ral forms, but are attempts to explain the social, cultural, and historical phenomena which are manifested in the built environment. Today we must acknowledge that any new form of architecture not only has to rethink the specific forms it produces, but, as a condition for doing so, has to rethink the form, shape, and articulation of its practice of architecture. Henri FociII on suggests that all of life, has a certain shape, a certain form that is the result of its affiliations and intermingling with other forms. It is in the shaping of the form of practices including techniques, investigations, operations, perceptions, and logics, that the new architectural form prevail. Cartographing the wind is a research into an invention of new architectural practice. By experimenting and developing the analysis\ design of an enveloping architecture capable of reconfiguring and mapping aerodynamic spectrum around the object. Sophisticated configuration of programs emerge to respond with complex order to determine and redefine the new limits of our condition of architectural experience. Like a net, a map does not simply describe what is. A map does not only set up a grid which determines what can be found by selection or omission. Nor is it merely a series of lines inscribed on a blank surface. There is an alterity which provokes the desire to map, to contain and to represent which is to say, to embody or to embrace the unknown. Cartographing the Wind focuses on the shift from the fixed static notions of architecture to dynamiC formations. The mapping of the nonlinear dynamics in wind forces transforms and destabilizes classical perceptions of space, geometry, program, and universality.