Water on the Moon

NASA scientists announced on Friday that they had found water on the Moon. Spacecraft LCROSS struck twice (7:31am/7:36am EDT, October 9) into the Cabeus crater, a permanently shadowed region near the Moon's south pole. After a month's analysis, NASA concluded that the impact kicked up 26 gallons of water, in the forms of ice and vapor. This is exciting news, even though the invisible plume on October 9 turned out to be a huge disappointment. (Yes, I did wake up and watch it live on NASA's webcast, partly due to jet lag...)

This discovery opens a new page for lunar research. The moon is no longer seen as a dead place, but rather an attractive destination. A base camp for astronauts becomes possible. And in the future, water on the Moon could even influence our own lives...

Bottled water shipped from the Moon - no pollution whatsoever!

Fancy resort on the Moon? Bucky Fuller dome over a crater!

How about a fish farm? Seafood will soon have a variety called "moonfood."

The future of megaprojects

The megaprojects symposium at the Cooper Union last Saturday was a weird event. It was organized by the Institute for Urban Design but there weren't many designers there. I always think it's helpful to hear opinions from politicians, lawyers, and businessmen. But if the most mentioned terms were "incremental", "human scale", "suburban town center", it would be just a waste of time.

Fortunately my tolerance was high enough to stay until eventually Thom Mayne, our newly named representative in Obama's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, showed up and injected some interesting energy into the event. I was also glad that I could actually extract some interesting points from the limited number of interesting speakers, and at the same time quietly built up my own arguments against the majority of unbearable conservatives.

What's qualified as a megaproject?
Tony Vidler opened the symposium by mentioning the 1960s and 70s. But to my surprise, none of the rest seemed to think Archigram or Superstudio were relevant. With the help of my iPhone and Wikipedia, I found out the definition of megaproject has in fact more to do with investment than form. It's more an infrastructure-related concept. OK, I admit my assumption was wrong.

Some design-based speakers did talk about form. They presented their "nice" redevelopment projects for some suburban town centers. The proposals were to subdivide the site with the most boring "human scale" streets you can ever imagine, criticizing the massive form of the original shopping mall. I think the problems of malls were not about the size but the ignorance of the opportunities bigness could provide. Bigness creates intense activities. Megastructures such as the New Babylon and the Continuous Monument contain the entire city and its diverse urban life. There is freedom of navigation, open possibilities of impromptu interactions and misuse. What's in a mall? One thing - commerce. Look at the huge parking lot around it! And look at all those little houses beyond it! These segmented large pieces convey nothing mega to me, although I am sure they were truly mega-investments.

Villa Italia. Lakewood, CO. 1966

Mega = sprawl?
The problem of American suburbs, as Robert Fishman of UMich pointed out, is the paradox that they are megaprojects that were not meant to be big. There was tremendous ambition and courage involved in Levittown, but the image is just massive smallness. The whole "New Town" movement was an escape from density. But is density something we should be afraid of? Escape is always simple. But what about the complexity and richness of life in a dense community? It could be difficult sometimes, but it's always full of energy and excitement. Vishaan Chakrabarti of Columbia University used sustainability as an argument against sprawl: "What's the point of driving three hours to your super-green home?"

How much do we rely on our cars?

The "new towns" in Asia present a totally different image from the American ones. They are not satellite towns far from the city core, nor picturesque "paradise" in the woods. They are actually an extension of a dense metropolis urban form. Behind these images are visions to think big. Robert Fishman called them "grand manners." To answer the question of what we are seeking when we build big, Vishaan Chakrabarti compared how stimulus money were spent in different countries. In the US, the majority went to offsetting governmental deficits, while the Chinese package lays out an extensive list of large infrastructure projects. If we think big and see the opportunities for new infrastructure around high density, we will understand how megaprojects can bring along other megaprojects. We call this progress.

Is bold vision what we need?
After a boring description of large projects in Europe and the US, Susan Fainstein raised this question: "Is bold vision what we need?" Thom Mayne jumped. Of course we need boldness to rethink the issues we have!" The problem right now is precisely a lack of broad visionary thinking." Projects without visions are just soulless. I don't even think they can be called design. There's no content, no contribution to anything whatsoever.

This reminds me of the fight between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, although Fainstein is nothing compared to Jacobs. I do admire Robert Moses' contribution to the modern New York. You need boldness to get things done. What do you think is behind the efficient German railroad system, Copenhagen's finger plan, and the light rail system in Portland?

New Urbanism or Neo-suburbanism?
When someone from the audience asked about solutions to our current urban and suburban problems (what a lameo), Fainstein answered, "I think New Urbanism is a good antidote." Thom Mayne jumped again. "New Urbanism is the most irrelevant to urban sense. It's totally a nostalgic suburban idea. No complex issues involved. Nothing close to the metropolis we are talking about." Unfortunately, there were still quite some incrementalists in the room. Emily Talen of Arizona State University, supporter of New Urbanism as she herself claimed, condemned megaprojects as one person's visions, top down, controlled, incomplete and fake. I was amused. She actually thinks New Urbanist towns are not fake!

Exchange

"If you have an apple and I have an apple, and we exchange apples, we each have one apple.
If you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, we each have two ideas."

- George Bernard Shaw

Systematic heterogeneity

I went to the Mass Studies lecture at Columbia on Wednesday. I was surprised by Mark Wigley's introduction when he said, "If there are five, six, or seven, no more than eight emerging architects in the current world who you should keep an eye on, this is one of them. What we see here tonight are not just some random projects, but a redesign of architects as a species." I feel this may be a little bit of an overstatement, but the lecture turned out to be a pretty brilliant one.

One of the most valuable things I saw in Minsuk Cho, founder of Mass Studies, is that he's very conscious and rigorous about his practice. This is not common nowadays, especially among young architects. They do 12 projects a year in average. Instead of throwing out impulsive schemes that come from random "inspirations," they structure the projects within a systematic framework. The result, as Mark commented, is not a loose collection of shocking forms, but a deliberate repertoire of heterogeneous solutions in response to an insightful speculation of the over-populated urban conditions and other contemporary cultural and social phenomena.

"Systematic heterogeneity" is a goal that Mass Studies wants to achieve. It's something between a rigid corporate and a chaotic atelier. It has the rationality of the Hong Kong high-rise housing and also the vitality of the old streets and markets in that same city.
"Systematic heterogeneity" is also a framework that Mass Studies' practice is based upon. Cho divides that into two categories:
- BIGGER: Mass Matrix Studies / Vertical / Spatial / Hilberseimer's Dream
- FASTER: Mass Movement Studies / Horizontal / Temporal / Digital Age Flaneur
Except for the vertical/horizontal part, i think this list makes a lot of sense.

Mass matrix studies lead to "spatial decompression." Projects in this category are various manipulations of a basic spatial structure: the matrix. They are systematically named as "Skipped Matrix", "Missing Matrix", "Eroded Matrix", "Cracked Matrix", "Wave Matrix", "Bundle Matrix", etc. These different actions are not merely variations of a formal exploration. Rather, they are reactions to problems specific in each project.
"Missing Matrix" is a residential tower with sky gardens as the "missing" voids. The structure transfers at the communal clubhouse levels through trusses and sits on pilotis that create a more open ground floor.

Mass movement studies lead to "temporal decompression." When architecture is trying to map out the intimate experience of urban life, the interaction between user and space becomes analogous to a Korean meal (I guess also Chinese meal). Throughout the entire process, you would be able to choose and navigate between all the different dishes as you wish. This experience is very different from the linearity of a western multi-course meal.
The spatial relationships in the Xi Gallery encourage diverse movements. Private and public spheres start to merge and invade each other. Purposefully disorienting...

Mass Studies' agenda is clear and consistent. But when it comes to formal expression, there seems to be some inconsistency. Sometimes I feel they still can't resist the flamboyant extravagance of our time. Some projects are just too much (like the 2010 Expo Korean Pavilion)... and some are even gross. (I have to use this word to describe the Seoul 2026 project...) But I believe they can improve over time. As Mark said, they are definitely worth "keeping an eye on."

Design and construction

In the Machine Age, architectural revolution started with new materials and new construction technologies. The Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower showed the world new possibilities of glass and metal. And then came the reinvention of ferroconcrete. Architects of the time - Corb, Mies, Groupius, to name a few - reacted to these new ways of construction and redefined the types and aesthetics of architecture, moving away from the heaviness and rigidity of stone construction and adopting a system of lightness and freedom. In this case, design innovations were originated from reality.

The integrated circuit has led us into the Computer Age. The change, if you refuse to use the term revolution, in architecture in the last decade had its origins from technology as well. But this time, it's not new construction methods but new mediums of design and representation. With the help of digital design tools, architects can explore whatever weird forms they want and create dazzling realistic images to show them. Unlike the situations in the early 20th century, construction techniques of our time struggle to catch up. What dominates the scene now becomes a wild collection of images of hollow funny shapes, and their clumsy realizations.

This is sort of a continued thought from the previous post. I am not sure where this comparison leads. I just feel it's something worth writing down...

R-O-B builds

A Swiss robot (named R-O-B) has finished building a brick wall on Pike Street, New York. According to Storefront, this is the first ever architecture project digitally fabricated on site. The design was developed through Gramazio & Kohler's research on architecture and digital fabrication (DFab), which was initially established at ETH Zurich, Faculty of Architecture in 2005.

Watching R-O-B in action is exciting -

The robot is mounted on a lowbed trailer. It slides along the construction site through the process.
It picks up a brick from the belt and puts on some glue...
then moves out...
and gently lays down the brick in the precise position.
The result is a 22m-long structure built from more than 7,000 bricks. The weaving form loops in and out in changing rhythms, lifting off the ground sometimes and intersecting with itself.

I don't want to sound dismissive of new technology, which is in fact fascinating. But at the same time, I also have some doubts:
- Integration of design and fabrication: We all more or less design digitally now. But the highly acclaimed digital designs often ended up as clumsy plaster works. (Need an example?) The marriage of design and construction is a big challenge. R-O-B certainly opens up a whole new array of possibilities. At least it's way cooler than the current BIM hype that made the ugly Yankee Stadium "Best Project of the Year in New York."
- Accuracy: If you want a complex geometry (yeah, if you really need it), it would be hard to make it manually. CNC processes can make sure the outcome is precisely what you want. But with this brick wall, is on-site digital fabrication really "the only way" it can be achieved? OK, perhaps I should accept the fact that patience and craftsmanship are long lost legends...
- Strength: The industrial robot unit is powerful. Lifting bricks? Why use an ox cleaver to kill a chicken?
- Speed: The whole process took 4 weeks. I am not sure how that compares to conventional brick wall builders.
- Labor: And we do need labor after all. Controlling the machine, feeding the belt with bricks, and taking care of the built part, at least three people were working on site. I am not talking about how many people were behind the scene programming and writing scripts. After the robot was done, they still need to remove some bricks at the bottom since the design asks for some suspended sections. I guess you just can't ignore the law of gravity when you lay brick walls.

When talking with Michael the project leader and Cesar the producer, I learned some making-of stories. DFab is actually quite done with brick now. They have built several brick walls since 2006 and have already moved on to many other materials and techniques such as structural wood, drilling holes in concrete, and spraying foam. However, for this project, the mobile robot unit was borrowed from one of the sponsors Keller AG Ziegeleien. It is a brick company so the material would be free too. Suddenly the answer to my doubts became clear. It's not that DFab hasn't fully recognized the great potential of R-O-B, but just everything comes down to power and money. It's the reality of getting things done. Most architects choose not to talk about it, and schools never taught that either. Students just sit in front of the computer and play with Grasshopper. Parametric design has neglected one very important parameter - money. Maybe we need a software that allows you to slide a "budget bar" and your model will automatically change form and material...

Think positively

There's a big difference between seeing problems and being negative. It depends on your reactions to the problems. When some people see problems, they start to get frustrated. They sigh; they yell; and they think they are doomed. Another kind of reaction, which I would include in the category of positive thinking, is to actively seek solutions and take actions that will make things better.

Being able to identify problems is a skill. The positive attitude behind it is the audacity of hope. The Chinese phrase "crisis" comprises two characters: danger and opportunity. Seeing danger, and more importantly seeing opportunities in danger, gives people the courage to face reality and survive the crises. In the field of design, there are numerous examples where constraints are turned into the source of innovation. If you have a hopeful and constructive mind, challenge can always have positive influence and sparkle a new kind of creativity. "What's against it works for it."

In my opinion, the truly negative people are those who fear to face, or even don't care to understand reality. They live in their own world, like ostriches burying their heads in sand, pretending there's no problem and the world is all beautiful. This sounds nothing optimistic to me. It is just naivety. It is full of self-indulgence and lacks care. Of course, it's important to always look on the bright side, but it doesn't mean we should ignore the existence of the dark side. When small problems are neglected, they could accumulate and become big ones. Then it may be too late for any solution. In fact, ostriches are better than that. They actually do not bury their heads in sand. When threatened, they run away. I guess it's at least an acknowledgment of reality and probably the only one effective and constructive solution. If you know you can't win, RUN!

41 Cooper Square

I have to say I respect Thom Mayne because he was able to pull this off in a city like New York. I am not a big fan of Morphosis, but I think I like this building...

From the outside, it looks kind of bulky. But the metal skin gives it a nice texture. I am still not sure if the ground floor provides a good urban interface but the split of the screen is certainly successful in implying special (communal) happenings inside.


Entering the lobby... a grand stair leads the way directly up to the fourth floor, where a double height student lounge is located. I stared at the mesh/lattice in the atrium for quite a while and still couldn't figure out what it's there for. Certainly not structural. Maybe it's just there to hold the figure of the void together, and imply a dynamic gesture. Or maybe, it's just LA...

The stairs are my favorite part. The spiraling, overlapping geometry; the glowing guardrail; the offset handrail...

The stairs connect informal gathering spaces on different levels. At the top, the lattice seems to contract with a centripetal force and terminates at a skylight. This skylight is disappointingly small... After all the journey up the stairs, I expected a more interesting ending.

The perforated metal skin is another element I like in the building. The patches of "non-perforated" areas give subtle variations to an otherwise monotonous sun screen.

The sensibility of materiality is also exemplified in the auditorium, where the wrinkled metal mesh acts as acoustic panels.

Objectified

I missed the documentary "Objectified" when it was in theaters, so I ended up getting it from Netflix. It's actually better because I can watch it over and over again and write down the quotes I like. (Spoilers Alert!)

On form and function

Alice Rawsthorn, design editor of International Herald Tribune, comments on the new generation of products where "the form bears absolutely no relation to the function." "Look at something like an iPhone and think of all the things it does. In 'ye olden days' of what are called analog products, ... something like a chair or a spoon, 'form follows function' tended to work." Imagine some Martians land on Planet Earth, they could get a rough sense what they were supposed to do with them, by the shape of the object, by the way it looks. "Now all that has been annihilated by the microchip. So design is moving from this culture of the tangible and the material to an increasingly intangible and immaterial culture."

Karim Rashid talks about the camera. Before the digital age, the silver film defines the format and proportion of cameras. "All of a sudden our cameras have no film, why on earth do we have the same shape we had before?"

On design thinking

Design is not about the average person. Dan Formosa from Smart Design New York says, "What we really need to do to design, is to look at the extremes, the weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, the strongest or the fastest person. Because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself." If people with arthritis can hold on to a handle comfortably, it will work for everybody.

David Kelley recalls when he started the design consulting firm IDEO, industrial design was "primarily about aesthetics, or the cleverness around function." Designers were like "hired guns to complete some aspect." As they grew they became more and more involved in the design of the overall product. When they take a more user-centered consideration of "what do people value, what are their needs?" it results in different products, or sometimes it's not necessarily a product, not an object per se. The real question becomes not "What's a new toothbrush?" but "What's the future of oral care?" Design thinking is a way to systematically be innovative, to design creative scenarios that are based on objects.

On bad and good design

David Kelley: "People need to demand that design performs for them and is special in their lives. If you can't make your GPS thing work in your car, there should be like a riot because they are so poorly designed. Instead the person sits there and thinks, 'Oh I am not very smart, I can't make this GPS thing work.'"

Karim Rashid: You feel it when you sit in chairs that are very uncomfortable. Imagine how many chairs have been done to date in the world, "why on earth should we have an uncomfortable chair? There's no excuse whatsoever."

What's good design? Dieter Rams, German designer and former design director at Braun, gives the following ten principles:
"Good design should be innovative.
Good design should make a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic design.
Good design will make a product understandable.
Good design is honest.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is long-lived.
Good design is consistent in every detail.
Good design is environmental friendly.
Last but not least, good design is as little design as possible."

It's interesting to see how many designers featured in the film agree that good design objects are straight-forward. Henry Ford once said, "every object tells a story, if you know how to read it." Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa describes it as "design dissolving in behavior." This reminds me of the Daoist concept of "Wu Wei," which literally means "not doing anything" but implies letting it act naturally.

Jonathan Ive, Senior VP Indutrial Design of Apple, explains the design of the MacBook Air. "A lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they're not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable, it feels almost un-designed. It feels almost like, well of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" They tried to remove the things that are "all vying for you attention." It should "speak about how you are gonna use it, not the terrible struggles."

Alice Rawsthorn says, "Many of the best examples of industrial design are things that people don't think were designed at all." People just use them so comfortably that they just take it for granted. Yes, people tend to only notice and yell when things break or get stuck...

I am saving my favorite for the last. Dieter Rams again: "What particularly bothers me today is the arbitrariness and thoughtlessness, with which many things are produced and brought to market. Not only in the sector of consumer goods, but also in architecture, in advertising. We have too many unnecessary things everywhere." Nicely put! I am going to shave.

The pursuit of happiness

Blaise Pascal once said, "All men seek happiness. This is without exception." Happiness is one of the inalienable rights, but designers/architects don't seem to consider it necessary. They rarely smile in their portraits. Instead, they try to act serious to appear "cool." At a Columbia lecture last night, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister laughed at this and said, "Cool is just a stupid way of being."

In order to remain refreshed and happy, Sagmeister takes one-year sabbaticals every 7 years. (He just recently came back from one in Bali.) He did a little math: average Americans learn in the first 25 years of their life, then work for 40 years and retire at the age of 65. Why don't we use five of the retirement years and disperse them as intervals into those working years? For him, it's a good way to avoid repeating old ideas. And economically it's actually beneficial since you can raise the fees if you have good and fresh ideas all the time.

There are at least two ways of finding happiness in design. One can be happy experiencing design. For design objects, he talked about the moment of happiness in the 1980s when he rode a Yamaha motorcycle and listened to The Police's Synchronicity on a new Sony Walkman. As art works, James Turrell's room at PS1 in New York, Ji Lee's speech bubbles project, and Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago were used as examples that had made him happy.

You can also be happy designing. In the pursuit of happiness in design, he suggests to "think what you really like to do before doing it." Here's a list of things that he likes about his job:
1. Thinking about ideas and content freely - with the deadline far away.
(No pressure is always better.)
2. Working without interruption on a single project.
(Concentrate without being frazzled. Immerse yourself.)
3. Using a wide variety of tools and techniques.
(Try not to get stuck or repeat yourself.)
4. Traveling to new places.
(Just go out and see new things, even if it's just a few blocks away.)
5. Working on projects that matter to me.
(Care more if it's important for you.)
6. Having things come back from the printer done well.
(Enjoy the end results.)

To describe the right to happiness as "I just want to do what I like" sounds like an excuse to be egoistic and stubborn. But happiness is your own pleasure and satisfaction, and is ultimately about fulfillment of the self. Right, maybe I should consider my own feelings more and treat myself better...

For the record, here are my favorite things from the lecture:
Favorite design: trophies for the Vilcek Awards.


Favorite story: When designing the logo for Casa da Musica, Sagmeister failed to avoid using the shape of the building. It was mostly because after Rem's presentation he realized architectural design is actually logo making. But he did avoid sameness by adapting the color palette with a computer program.


Favorite claim: "If a building can stand there for hundreds of years, it's a pretty damn sustainable building!"

Favorite of all favorites: laughing yoga.