11.13.2017
- Sterling / Shaping Things – (pg86) Sterling spends a large part of the reading talking about bar codes through time and their place in our continually more quantified world. He gives the example about dogs in Belgrade being injected with RFID’s and how it would create a hierarchy of dogs, either elite with the code, or considered undesirable or illegal. This example cant help but be projected onto humans, where the government or health insurances administer human RFIDs. At some point does our desire (and with new technology, ability) to label and quantify all things become a societal problem? When human data is completely quantified and bar coded, we are reduced to products and numbers. Is there a point when these technologies, which are framed around making life easier for humans, ends up decreasing quality of life? These technologies are trying to turn life digital, which is cold and calculated, but humans are not built this way.
- Sterling / Shaping Things – (pg95) In the section “the model is the message” Sterling talks about creating a 3d model without “the burden of weighty physicality”, where the digital realm is advantageous due to lack of gravity, friction, and material. There are writers who i think would disagree with this statement, such as Josef and Anni Albers who talk about the truth in material, and the craftsmen relationship to working with and understanding that material. Have the times changed with new technologies that we no longer hold the physical and real at the highest level? Is a digital model just as valuable as a physical model? Certainly for making iterations, the digital model is choice and fast, but eventually ideas need to enter the physical realm, as stated before – we are humans of the physical realm, not computers.
- Burry & Fauli / Sagrada Familia – This reading covers the fabrication and process of designing the Rose window of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona in the context of “just-in-time” and parametric deign. They go into detail about how various parts of the 30 meter tall window was being designed and coordinated all over the world including Spain, Galicia and Australia. Is this a new way of considering globalization? When that term is described by Kenneth Frampton, he speaks negatively on the subject, as he felt it will lead to international styles which have no cultural richness, among other things. But here is an example of architects and data from around the world coming together to make a very site specific and culturally saturated building. Does “just-in-time” design overlap with globalization?
