Maquettes and sketches towards the realization of final development:
The final construction will be a harmonograph that will feature 2 pendulums that will move in a perpendicular motion. The maquette I constructed could not handle the weight of a pen; therefore, could not be used to to see if the mechanism worked. However, the basic structure will be similar to the maquette. Specific materials and mechanism are do be discussed and established.
In late 1927 and early 1928,
Sheeler spent six weeks documenting the Ford Motor Company's automobile plant
in River Rouge, Michigan, as part of the promotional campaign for the release
of the Model A Ford. Sheeler's thirty-two photographs of the Ford plant depict
its acres of gleaming, massive machinery,
rather than the human process of labor. They celebrate the company's—and, by
association, America's—ideals of power and productivity, although there is also
a strangely forbidding atmosphere to the unpopulated scenes. Some of the
photographs would serve as sources for later works in other media, he wrote,
"I had come to feel that a picture could have incorporated in it the
structural design implied in abstraction and be presented in a wholly realistic
manner."
-Murphy, Jessica.
"Charles Sheeler (1883–1965)". In Heilbrunn
Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/shee/hd_shee.htm (November 2009)
"At the dawn of the
twentieth century Henry Adams proclaimed that the machine was as central to our
modern American culture as the Virgin was to medieval culture. Charles Sheeler
(1886-1965) was one of the most noted American artists to embrace the
iconography of the machine. But was he high priest or heretic in the religion
of mass production and technology that dominated his era? In paintings,
drawings, and photographs depicting New York skyscapers, Henry Ford's automobile
factories, and machine-dominated interiors, Sheeler produced images of
extraordinary aesthetic power that confirmed America's technological and
industrial prestige in vivid detail."
The Architecture Machine Toward a More Human
Environment Nicholas
Negroponte
The use of computers to aid the architectural designer and
urban planner is already beyond the experimental stage and part of the workaday
routine of many professionals. There are, for example, machines that transform
two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional perspective displays and others
that check myriad aspects of a design against specifications and tolerance
requirements. The Architecture Machine
looks several machine generations ahead of these to a future in which genuine
man-machine dialogue is achieved, when man and machine will act together on
something closer to equal terms toward a common goal, each contributing his-its
own characteristic faculty.
The ideal result would be a final design so seamless and
well integrated that it is not possible to tell which partner contributed what,
and so creative and innovative, yet contingency-proof, that neither an unaided
designer nor the most elaborate computer system could have produced it without
the help of the other. Negroponte looks forward to man-machine relationships so
personal that each can (politely) interrupt the routine work of the other with
a fresh inspiration or a nudging reminder of higher priorities; so personal
indeed that the response pattern of a machine to one designer would be
significantly different from its dealings with a designer of another
temperament or of another culture.
Some of the proposals put forth here have already been
realized in a system called URBAN5, developed at M.I.T. and IBM by the author
and his colleagues. A full account of this system is given. Beyond this, the
more radical and adventuresome of the man-machine interactive attributes
envisioned by Negroponte are now being created with the coming of more
designers (men) trained in the newer technologies and more sophisticated
configurations (machines)—and the exploratory interaction of the two.
The author has consulted the full literature on systems
theory philosophy and has probed deeply into the underlying issues of
man-machine relationships and artificial intelligence. It is perhaps not so
surprising that an architect rather than a computationist should have provided
us with one of the most provocative proposals for humanizing this
relationship—architects have always been charged with infusing cold and neutral
material with true human dimension and meaning. And although the author's
illustrative examples are taken from architecture and planning, the book is
equally pertinent to those in other areas in which computer-aided design
processes are being pressed into active service. The fact that no specialized
knowledge of computers is required will also facilitate the spread of the
book's message: "The concern is to avoid dehumanizing a process whose aim
is definitely humanization."
The installation, called "Flight Assembled Architecture", was conceived
and built by teams led by my colleagues Fabio Gramazio & Matthias
Kohler as well as Raffaello D'Andrea at the ETH Zurich. It illustrates a
radically new way of thinking about materializing architecture: Use a
multitude of mobile flying agents working in parallel and acting
together as a scalable production means. As you can see in the video,
the quadrocopters are programmed to interact, lift, transport and
assemble small modules in order to erect a building.
Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions, there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated." — Paul Rand
