HT2012 12 CYBERGOTHIC

welcome everybody to ht 2012 intro to a history of architecture and urbanism histories of the future it's good to see you i hope that you're all well and welcome to today's lecture which is on cyber gothic we're going to be starting uh by looking at this drawing here and to focus our minds on what is happening in this instance of architectural vision and you see that it's representing what is called an exploded drawing that is a 3d element which has been opened up by some kind of a force it's like a system of parts that has been exploded each of those parts has been separated from the other parts but there's a clear sense that there's a line of force which connects them the drawing is you could say a deconstruction or a taking a part of something which exists to understand it more fully in a tectonic sense but also in a conceptual sense we get a sense of this curve that runs through all of the parts uniting them in a conceptual and archetectonic system so it's an exploded drawing it takes an architectural element in this case it's part of an arch as we'll see and it explodes it it separates it in order to reveal something about the nature of this element and it's this act of exploding which interests us today to understand architecture as an act of arresting forces of negotiating or managing the forces that are in play in an architectural system and dynamically achieving a state of equilibrium by balancing the antagonistic forces that exist within a building and by antagonistic forces we mean forces which are opposed to one another or in a at play with one another in a system and so this extremely careful delineation of separate parts which are exploded and tilted in relation to one another with very careful linear tracing that indicates exactly where these elements fit together it shows us and reveals to us something about the architectural forces that are holding this system in place and although this drawing was made in the 1860s this as it were animation of architectural form is extremely contemporary and it may be already a technique of representation that you've used in your architectural work i'm sure you will have seen it at psych and you'll probably go on to use it so the animation the explosion of architectural form in order to bring together different elements within a system this is the fundamental architectural concept which is going to guide our thinking today and you can see that it's a concept which exists more broadly within culture this is the work of a french anatomical or anatomist a scientist who was studying the human anatomy who was working at roughly the same time as uh violet leduc the architect and restorer who drew this exploded architectural drawing this is by jean-marc bujeri and you see that it's a representation of part of the human cranium or the whole of the human cranium but you see that ah press the wrong button hold on we're back you see that the cranium is cut and split with these lines to enable the artists the anatomist to explode the cranium to disunite the various parts out of which this skull is made to separate them and explode them to make it possible to see in more detail the individual pieces and their relationship to one another so what is happening at an anatomical scale within scientific representation in the early to mid 19th century is also happening in architecture as a way of understanding the building something like a body so here we're also talking about a relationship between bodies and buildings buildings and bodies as systems of dynamic forces which are held together as anatomy and of course the study of anatomy produces extraordinary acts of anatomical vision x-ray vision which um we can understand as a counterpoint or counter story or a parallel story within history running alongside the story of architecture and architectural representations and clearly there are some cases say in the anatomical drawing of spines when the breaking down of an anatomical element into vertebrae a very careful labeling and individuation of parts and then the exploding of those different parts and their separation in order to render each one of them describable and visualizable in all of its individuality that's a procedure which is also an architectural procedure as a method of analysis now what's also interesting about this comparison is that whereas the anatomist is taking apart a dead body of a human individual this architect the villain leduc is as it were also taking apart a deceased body or a body from another time in the sense that they're performing an analysis on a piece of gothic architecture that is architecture in this case from france from the uh 11th 12th or 13th century so from roughly 1100 to 1300 and something the uh the boundaries of this period or style known as the gothic is extremely flexible and we're going to talk more about that but the point is this form of representation emerges to try to resuscitate or give a kind of life to something which is historical something whose existence is in the past and ville leduc the same architect who made that drawing was drawing and exploding and dissecting all different kinds of 3d structure um in another one of his works he looked at medieval armor made of metal plates and used this x-ray vision to see inside the plates of metallic armor that were constituting the complicated 3d system of an articulated elbow joint and articulated means something that has a joint so the the armor is articulated around the elbow and he made extremely close anatomical representations from the front from the back of different parts of these armored systems to understand how they how they fit together and when it came to speculative architectural projects this same kind of representation uh was brought into play here you see one of villele leduc's quite radical speculative proposals for a work of architecture that was part made out of stone and part made out of iron and it's a proposal for an assembly hall and the idea is clearly to produce a large open enclosure a very large void that could house a large number of people an assembly a crowd to participate in public communal events it was a one-room space but of course the great problem the great architectural problem with being able to produce an enclosure for a large void in which people can meet is you have to have a complicated structural system to sustain the loads the gravitational loads of suspending all of this matter in the air and so what vla leduc produces is a drawing in which the weight of the matter of the ceiling finds this path running down each of these ribs into these iron elements that channel the weight of the ceiling above in very strict vector lines that is lines of force that have a very specific direction that are channeling the gravity challenging the forces and represent what we can call a load path that is the path through which the weight of the structure runs and finds its way ultimately down into the foundations and into the ground now in order to figure out how this ironwork held together as as a system vla leduc had to explode it he had to separate the individual parts of the system in order to understand how they would come together and so he explodes them these are all parts that would fit into one another and look how how anatomical some of these relationships are this is just like a ball and socket joint in their hips and at the same time vla leduc is working on these metal armor systems there's a whole number of these different projects that vla leduc worked on but the essential principle you can maybe see in these two quite simple drawings and the focus here is uh is in this area and you could say here vla leduc is representing a standard architectural system which is uh corbling you remember that cobling is this way of stacking stone elements usually in order to bear the load so the load is kind of channeled down here through this solid stone what viola logic proposes instead is to cut away all of that void and have the forces run in this strict line this vector line through this piece of iron which is now operating something like a crutch or a tie rod that is using its compressive strength to channel all of the forces through its body which opens up this void and uses much less material so although quite simple and light these two drawings represent two different destinies for architecture one is the solution of structure through mass and heaviness and having lots of material here is an alternative solution that introduces complexity instead of mass and you can see that all of these projects are in are in fact studies and how you can support large amounts of mass or weight through complex systems of assembled tie rods and columns um and uh prosthetics crutches that are holding the building up and this leads to some crazy combinations here we have a very large heavy gothic style assembly building which has this huge void that's been cut out of it and then it's held together on these crutches on these prosthetic elements made of iron that are situated in there and sustain the load by virtue of their compressive strength and the specific geometry which is used to situate them now vla leduc was most interested in combining stonework and ironwork but of course it was the time when other architects were finding ways to make architecture almost completely out of metal villa leduc he made many studies of the kinds of fixtures and architectural details that are necessary to join together metal plates to form the structural connections other architects in england such as woodward and dean in the oxford museum of natural history were making these highly anatomical skeletal kinds of buildings and you see again the arched pointed shapes here pointed arch shapes are being used with a lattice work like a skeleton a very little material comparatively huge void and very slender elements and instead of thick solid mass very light groups of thin columns and you see this is a museum of natural history you know a kind of science museum that has anatomical specimens you know of skeletal specimens like dinosaurs and it's interesting this connection between the anatomical structure of the dinosaur skeleton and the skeleton-like use of metal and you know metal in these works was performing not only um a load-bearing function but also a decorative function the thing about metal is that it's metamorphic iron can be cast and molded in and sculpted in many different kinds of shapes so the metal was both a structural and a decorative system you can see here um leaves and foliage being wrought in the iron contributing to this sense that iron is a material which is somehow alive its act of bearing forces is almost like an organic system that is living and each of its parts is moving and shaping itself according to the metamorphosis of forces so it's like a vital architecture an architecture which is alive which is pliable which is made of pliable materials that can shape themselves most efficiently just like nature does to sustain the loads that it has to support so this is the idea of architecture which uh we're gonna try to explore more today um the idea of an architecture of antagonistic forces that's held together and um resolves these different forces in an overall system vla leduc was looking backwards into the past to try and understand these moments in the present so we're gonna also um follow this um trajectory by looking back um into uh the history of gothic architecture as a way of understanding um this um uh uh this system of uh forces hence our title today uh cyber gothic so let's look now into um into an example and we're we're situating ourselves uh today to begin with um in the locality of paris in uh france and in particular to a cathedral building just north of uh paris in the area of sandini i can find it there we are and this will help situate us um in this uh in this world in this architectural world and this is one of the buildings which is generally thought to be one of the first complete gothic buildings begun in the you know nearly a thousand years ago now so we're looking back kind of into the midpoint of the ground that we've covered over this electric course and you see immediately that it picks up on some of these ideas of an anatomical or exploded set of antagonistic forces it's an extremely complicated three-dimensional object and so our task right now is to try and get inside some of this architectural complexity to understand how it's working and what kind of architectural effects does it produce so part of this work is going to involve as usual um uh architectural vision trying to find ways to use different forms of representation to analyze and understand and you can see this is just a quick mock-up to try and make a relationship between this 3d object and its 2d representations to see how that structure fits down and touches on the ground the plan is a very complicated plan and let's see if we can uh read it now what seems to be the case is what we have here is a very complicated but yet singular space it's you might say this is a one-room building because although it has a lot of interior complexity there are no walls inside of it there are no compartments which are shut off or closed from any of the others so if one were to walk around the building you can see as extremely free circulation there are no barriers of entry and that allows very complicated parts of circulation to um to wind themselves around through the cathedral and to some extent that represents the um complexity of the program so it being a a cathedral a church a religious space in which many different kinds of action happen so we have a single but differentiated room one a huge room in which many different kinds of behavior can happen now you may notice that hang on there is a wall in here which is this shape what we're seeing in this plan is something quite interesting in terms of architectural representation which is we're seeing an archaeological plan that is a plan of a site which has multiple buildings having been built on that site and so uh what we just outlined there was an early building that was quite that was produced with that uh kind of relatively simple wall and then a certain point in the building's um history that wall was or the building was kind of rebuilt on the same site in a completely different way it was it was transformed and it's the nature of that transformation which we're interested in uh today it's a huge building and we're we'll be able to talk about a few elements of it but you know it's important to think about how we can use different forms of representation to start understanding structurally and spatially the qualities of this architectural uh project and this you know in our work as researchers into kind of doing field work is to gather together different forms of representation so that we can take an elevation photograph and combine it with architectural plans to see how that plan fits and what it's representing to take different kinds of photography and bring them into the mix in a collage style to correlate and map and identify where different elements of the building are we can take sectional drawings and just bring them over and superimpose them to try to get extra levels of detail and in fact even bring in uh you know coloring and rendering to help us read what a sectional representation of the building looks like how it maps onto the facade and build up these sort of frankensteins of architectural representation that give us different forms of information so if we look inside the cathedral of santoni you see i think quite clearly now a sense of this vast unified um yet highly differentiated interior space one room architecture a massive single space which is produced with extraordinary height considerable width and allows in a lot of light and this is you might say um a key facet of what constitutes gothic architecture of the type that we're looking at today what results from this play of forces and architectural elements is that it's all geared around producing a space of collective assembly a huge space and a space which is defined by particular kinds of quality and in this case um particularly defined by light and you see that in these spaces part of what is achieved by this organic system of forces is a an astounding display of illumination so this anatomical skeleton of stonework and tracery allows voids to be produced to perforate the solid surface so that it becomes dematerialized and there is opportunity for these extraordinary displays of stained glass work which colors light which controls and and aestheticizes the space the entire atmosphere um of the of that vast one room and also allows a kind of representation um if you look very carefully and you have the right map and literature to help you out um good guidebooks it will be able to explain uh the sort of stories and um data and information which is embedded within these decorative systems known here as uh rose windows um i guess because they flower like a a rose um which i held together with quatrefoil shapes and that relates to these uh kind of decorative features decorative but also um structural and this particular part of the building happens to be called a transept because this large you know this very large space it needs kind of subdivision you need to be able to give names to the various parts of it um and so uh what we're seeing here in this part can be mapped on here the uh transept and likewise what we're looking at in um whoops what we're looking at here is the um nave and that the nave is that largest um kind of uniform part there in in the middle now we've talked about this architecture as a complicated set of parts which is holding in an equilibrium a balance or resolution of different forces um like an organic living form and that system of complicated parts can also be named um uh with uh uh with a specific and expert vocabulary we've already spoken about the stained glass you can refer to these lancet windows these are windows that have this very thin vertical member that comes down the middle that's called a lancet window we've seen that the structurally the uh the load path of the building again it follows uh the stonework all the way down from that vast roof through these supporting piers down into the ground equally every one of these ribs is channeling the forces of the building down and this is an important uh way to be able to read a building is to look at the load paths and that's a very wobbly load path and be able to map them and see i must have a bump in my mouth i'm going to leave that off now the um we can you know put labels on these rather than columns these are known as color nets because they're bunches bundles bundled together collections of miniature columns like tree trunks or stalks bundled together are known as colonettes other parts have other names the springer is where the vault springs from and this is maybe one of the most important ideas in this kind of architecture that we're looking at the gothic architecture today is the vault which is this system this 3d system for sustaining uh the ceiling and let's look at that in fact in a bit more uh detail down here here we're looking up from the ground towards the ceiling of a part of the sandini cathedral perhaps most spectacularly seen here and the vaults which are ripped the ribs are you know literally these raised pathways here they're ribbed and in between is the web so you can see these are very anatomical um phrases no rib like the rib um which is in in the body the web like the webbed foot um of a duck or something and these uh volts cross one another and it's this um crossing an intersection of volts which produces complexity in the structure it differentiates the structure and that's what gives it strength and there are different kinds of these vaulting systems the ones that we're looking at um right here um are groin volts and they have the pointed arch as opposed to a domical vault which is semicircular which is round now uh this is you know you will you will study these kind of load-bearing systems in detail in your structural analysis classes for sure so i'm not going to go into too much uh details here but of course it's essential to know that these are all systems for dealing with gravitational loads and the dead weight of the material and that's always represented as these vertical downward arrows in force diagrams and of course the point of the arch and the volt is to channel that vertical force down through these arches and into the ground and some of that force is sort of channeled outwards and that has to be supported um or it's channeled right down into the foundations with more or less efficiency and the different geometry of the arch arches and its efficiency is a whole subject of structural engineering which you will no doubt encounter but the point is that what we're looking at here are these groin vaults which are made with pointed arches and you see the pointedness of these architectural shapes and it's that pointedness as opposed to the semi-circularity the pointedness which displays a structural principle um which was first theorized in the 17th century even though it was used hundreds of years earlier by robert hook who came up with this sort of statement about how um hanging chains offered a ideal system of structural support and he said came up with this formulation that as hangs the flexible cable so inverted stands an arch and this idea you see here this is a drawing of a chain just hanging at a natural angle his idea was that if you flipped the chain you would get a perfect arch that is an arch which exists in compression so that all of the downward forces are perfectly channeled following the geometry of that archway and that would be structurally efficient well that system had already been figured out to some extent in islamic architecture which was defined by these pointed arches that were very efficient in um channeling these vertical loads um away and downwards into um uh into the ground and um you know here we're looking at a slightly later version from the 17th century in ishvahan but this had been figured out really early in islamic architecture you know just a few decades really after islam had begun had become established as as a religion as a social system and as an architectural system as well and so this indicates that the pointed arch system the gothic system of construction it was part of a trans-cultural network of exchange and this idea of the trans-cultural is one that we've come up um against uh before or worked with in this instance the kind of connective tissue of that transculturation was the historical phenomenon known as the crusades um a a violent and um kind of episode of history in which the christian church based in europe would make these military pilgrimages to jerusalem and fight with the islamic forces that held those territories in order to try and uh regain control gain control over these religious sites of religious importance obviously a series of cultural and religious social conflicts which continues unfortunately today but remember that throughout a large part of the historical period we've been um thinking about in our class um a lot of europe um southern spain in particular had really close contact with the islamic caliphate which of course began in mecca and medina and then spread throughout north africa and um and the levant and the east and so it's through these networks of military networks political networks social networks that it's possible that um these shapes and architectural systems could have traveled and this is something by the way that vla leduc the architect that we were looking at before was super aware of and among the many other things that he drew he also made a number of drawings of islamic architecture showing that this structural system the pointed arch had this ability to move through time to move through different geographies and um and find its way to europe where masons and stone cutters used it uh in in gothic architecture and you know again this is work by vla leduc and i show it we won't speak about it in detail but i show it as a demonstration of the kind of complexity and heterogeneity of architectural representations to really study and understand structure and material systems and how forces can be balanced with material um it meant performing these anatomical dissections and investigations on these ancient architectures to try to figure out how they um how they stood up to be able to draw them investigate them and then redeploy them within modern architecture nevertheless it's also um very interesting to point out that it's around this time that the gothic cathedrals were being built in the 12th 13th century that very early forms of architectural drawing start to emerge and the album or portfolio of villard encore is one of these early documents and i just put it here out of interest there are pdfs of it um online that you can investigate to see very early styles in europe of um of architectural drawing here in a kind of elevation style outline drawing but it shows you the emerging practice of drawing as a part of the architectural profession now what villard encore is drawing here is something um pretty interesting because this is a new kind of architectural element which has submerged in gothic architecture again in response to um sustaining these vast interior spaces of collective assembly which is the flying buttress and the flying buttress are these external ribbed structures which are again channeling this vertical load off the roof and supporting it by enabling a load path to take the weight and channel it outside the building and prop it up like prosthetic crotches to support and sustain and protect that interior space so here what we see is this void this emptiness that's full of light that's made out of spider webs or something on the outside that requires a prosthetic structure a prosthesis you know is like a crutch it means something that is added onto something to make it complete so in order to sustain this sense of lightness and air and um glory i suppose in stained glass light it requires an external prosthetic apparatus to help hold everything together and this is another component of the force system which you can see is surrounding the body of the cathedral like an exoskeleton to hold it all in place and it's part it's partly this these flying buttresses which account for the complexity of the plan because it's all of these individual pieces which you see here in the plan cut which are part of the scaffolding really the permanent scaffolding which which sustains these vast vast spaces not far away in the center of paris is the cathedral of notre dame um a building that emerged slightly after uh santoni and again this is a quick attempt to correlate the uh what the building looks like in elevation from the side with its plan and the plan shows you again that what we're dealing here with here is a highly complicated but single space again it's a space in which you could freely navigate through the nave through all of the various side chapels and around about in different directions visiting various parts of the church for whatever reason now this interestingly gives rise to the name the ambulatory um so this is the uh ion this kind of uh semi-circular area at the end of the cathedral here that is what we're looking at down here and it's called the ambulatory because it's for walking around in and you see that the path um you can follow leads around through this very dramatic play of light and structure and these turning corners that invite you to continue your walk and your movement uh through the space again you can see shared characteristics um an amazingly complicated rose window it's like a water lily pad or something on the outside looks like that on the inside radiating light and stained glass these are the transepts you can see this is the space which is behind this facade totally colored and rendered and you might think of stained glass as a medieval form of rendering it's the uh the photoshop filter that's filtering light in order to produce a specific kind of chromatic effect so stained glass as a filtration as a medieval system of filters that are geared just like the filters that we use right now to intensify the experience of space or um imagination this is the nave you see again how um all of this architectural complexity and organic exoskeleton uh systems are really there to support and produce this huge space for collective assembly for people being together in the same space to produce community and identity uh among uh people and uh by the way uh you notice if you compare these two elevations that um this one has something that this doesn't because in fact um uh like san denis the cathedral of not too damn these you can you imagine obviously these huge buildings took decades and decades to produce and the history of labor and materials is another one which we won't get into today but um fyi vla leduc crops up again as someone who worked on the restoration of this building so thinking of the building as a very ancient uh structure which is also still alive means that it needs continual care and attention to keep it alive and so this is where you can compare the work again of the architect to the anatomist as people who are trying to understand how these living architectures can be sustained over time vla leduc by building and restoring these spine-like turrets and producing kinds of cutaway acts on an axonometric drawing um as we understood right from the beginning of the course deploying these forms of architectural vision to get inside and under the skin of these buildings and to see in notre dame in particular it's quite amazing uh use of the flying buttress here you see it looking at the back of the church just how complicated this um outgrowth of thin stonework very precise precisely cut stonework that's necessary to sustain the loads and again what you really are looking at is um the pure vectors that transfer the load of the building outwards and providing it pathways to channel itself down into the uh down into the foundations of course um very tragically um in 2019 notre dame in paris uh caught fire and uh was very heavily damaged and partially um destroyed so this work of um the continual rebuilding and even resuscitation of uh of a structure is a constant project with a building on that kind of scale and given what happens in time and history uh you may have seen that that destruction gave rise to a series of more or less fantastical speculations on the future of the cathedral and the kind of roof systems that might replace the one being the one that was destroyed um this one of a swimming pool i think um certainly being the most fire resistant that was put on the table now we'll move um uh here towards our final uh episode in this um in this story which is to continue to think about um architecture as a living system of forces as antagonistic forces forces that have to be held together in tension that have to be arrested dynamically and channeled in order to produce stability robert mark who is a contemporary structural engineer performed these amazing analyses on flying buttresses to try to see inside them how the play of forces navigates through the material and this was using the photoelastic effect and again in your structural classes you may come across the photoelastic effect it's a way of imaging structure in this case actually transparent plexiglas laser cuts of flying buttresses subjecting them to load putting them under pressure and then as the plastic deforms it distorts um beams of light which are shown on it and the pattern of that distortion reveals which parts of the flying buttress are under most stress where the stress is concentrated um where it's distributed and the path that it takes through the structure and i think the shift we need to make in our thinking about the cyber gothic is that it's always alive it's always vivified by these um forces that are running through it whether we see it with our naked eye or not this is part of the work of architectural vision is to be able to look at the flying buttress and see these colors see these forces see the kind of antagonism the drama that is happening all the time now one architect who moves this story forward and for whom these kinds of observations was definitely true is the catalan architect antonio gaudi catalonia the an area in southern spain and you know what are we looking at here um it's a quite incredible architectural model which in fact is um quite a difficult thing to read and understand but let's look at it closely and see what we see you might be able to make out that there are a whole series of cables which are hanging down a forest of cables and then at the end of cables are these little bags they happen to be little bags which are filled with um something like lead shots like something weighing them down and so the little bags are hanging from these cables and as they hang they deform the cables in specific ways according to their weights as we've already seen when a chain hangs it makes a particular shape a catenary shape and catenary meaning the shape of a cable when it falls and that shape perfectly describes a force it's like it's a minimal um ideally minimal distortion of the cable in order to accommodate that load and so what we see assembled here is a highly complicated series of cables and weights which are all hanging upside down but if we just invert this structure because remember that hook's law was that a hanging chain if inverted became a perfect arch if we therefore rotate that then what we get is in fact the model of a building and that building is the cathedral of sagrada familia which is in the catalan city of barcelona and you may just be able to make out i hope that this building has resulted from this hanging model technique in which all of the shapes of this extremely complicated building have been calculated upside down through the use of a hanging model operating you might say as a kind of analog computer it's a computer which uses um the inherent properties of chains and um and hanging mechanisms to calculate the ideal structure that is the structure that holds up the right amount of weight with the minimum amount of material and by the way we mentioned islamic arches before the pointed arch and of course southern spain barcelona is here spain had been part of the islamic caliphate um all the way until in fact 1492 and so though gowdy would have been able to see you still able to see um the architectural history of that of the caliphates and here for example the alambra palace in granada not so far from barcelona in which these beautiful um and structurally efficient systems of ornamentation and pointed arches and collar nets were available and so gaudi's architecture is certainly a part of this trans-cultural history of the gothic or the cyber gothic elevation drawings reveal um the amazing complexity of this uh building and um we'll only be able to look at a portion of it but bearing in mind where we came from is looking at this as a system of antagonistic forces notice that in sagrada familia um here in fact let's just look at it uh in barcelona if we can find it here in northeast spain i've lost it where are you oh yeah over here that's better um here we are sagrada familia and notice the scaffolding because this is a gothic building which is still under construction um aimed for completion in 2026 so it's a building which is very much of histories of the future it's a historical building which is yet to be finished so it stretches into the future now um notice that in all of this um structural complexity the one element we don't see which we've been looking at previously is a flying buttress no flying buttresses so how is it that um this complicated and vast unified single one room uh interior building how is it that it's able to stay up without flying buttresses well gowdy considered that the flying buttress was like a crutch a prosthesis as we've said a support for a building that wasn't able to stand up itself and gowdy through this system of hanging weights was able to calculate systems of arches and columns that were structurally so ideal that you didn't need any supporting buttresses so he found a way to resolve the natural forces in the most ideal way possible and we'll look at those in just a second i just want to note here the documentation of the history of this building as it has grown over the last 150 years almost is in itself um a really interesting story about um about this like these this body which has slowly emerged and been river revivified resuscitated um again picking up on these anatomical ideas um of a skeleton of a set of um bones this is gradually coming to life and this is what it looks like inside amazingly uh like dramatic this similar sense of light a perforated surface but really muscular strong tendon like tree branch like columns and these columns have been uh calculated um to bear the load in um in the most efficient ways possible and a lot of what this has meant is returning to something that we saw in violet leduc which was this use of the iron element placed at an angle like a vector because it was that angle which enabled it to channel the force in the most uh dynamic and efficient line and so you'll notice that in gaudi's architecture the columns are not always vertical and they instead come down at these oblique angles spreading and opening out because that's the way that the catenary curves um make their shapes when they are calculated uh according to this uh model so even if you look um in through a section you can see really clearly that here we have some vertical elements but they're supporting uh columns which are placed at an oblique angle effectively uh turning out into that triangular shape now if you look at early 20th century structural engineering you see geometries like this emerging this in fact by a russian structural engineer for a hyperboloid structure and this is where it starts to get into a super complex structural engineering but gowdy um was working with the kind of um structural technologies that were being developed at the time with hyperboloid and briefly put hyperbolic structures hyper hyperboloid as a hyperbolic structure they have this quality of double curvature that means they curve in two directions across and this way too and it's this double curvature which makes them so strong and you see in the vaults of gowdy's architecture that again that surface is curving in two directions simultaneously and that's what gives it rigidity and strength and you can see not only are these vaults thin but they even have these voids punctuated in them it can remove that much material compare that to the earlier voids that the earlier volts that we were looking at um even though these are kind of efficient these have even more um void in them even more space even more apertures to allow light to come in and that really is the great um achievement here is a system that looks as if it has grown that looks as if it has grown um through natural forces that has um turned the building into a semi-alive resuscitated um uh kind of prosthetic monster something which is semi um alive something that becomes highly fantastical which is using organic complexity using differentiated geometry many different kinds of parts to distribute the huge load of a massive one-room space um through an entire system to dissipate it into the ground and at the same time produce um aesthetic aesthetic effects which produce atmosphere and feeling and energy in the space so that is um uh that is really what connects us back again to this original drawing uh the the idea of an explosive architecture or an exploded architecture whose structure and forces are revealed by means of this act of opening up conceptually taking apart deconstructing anatomizing the building to reveal its interior and then being able to put it back together and resolve those forces in a space which can enable collective life uh to take place so um thanks for listening and uh staying staying with this discussion of the cyber gothic and look forward to seeing you in class and be well in the meantime bye

2021-04-05 03:41

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