boldtoad blog

I saw this simple display of building information on a ‘zero-energy’ building in Oberwinterthur, visited this week as part of a weeklong charrette I helped organize as part of ‘semaine enac‘ here at EPFL. The display indicates the current energy production by the building’s photovoltaics.

One of the architects of this project told us that the ‘green-ness’ of the building was not a major selling-point in renting the units, and in fact that most of the residents weren’t aware that this is a building that produces as much energy as it consumes. This display and the plaque to the right are a small gesture toward communicating this idea.

How does a green building communicate its green-ness - or is this kind of communication important?

There are often dramatic skies during my run home from work along Lake Leman - like this picture from last summer - but on this day last week the sky was mostly clear, there were was a light breeze and the air was warm - a beautiful early spring evening.

I’ve been trying to run back from work a few days each week, as a way of spending some time outside, and also to prepare for some mountain running races that I hope to do this summer. There are a lot of running races in the Swiss and French Alps and Pre-Alps which are mysteriously appealing - something about the allure of running on trails through mountain meadows and forests, the fascination of high places … I did my first running race since high school last week (Traines Savates) with Markus Hudert, with whom I’ve been training for another local race, the 20km de Lausanne which takes place this Saturday on the hilly streets leading up to Lausanne’s cathedral. The first, gentle mountain race is the following weekend - the Montee du Nozon in the Jura near Lac de Joux. My goal for the summer is to finish the Montreux-Rochers de Naye race in July, a challenging climb from the Lac Leman to a beautiful high point above Montreux (some photos here), and if that goes ok to finish Sierre - Zinal, which looks to be a bit harder. There’s also Neirivue-Moleson in early July. Should be a great summer!

I find it’s useful to have inspiring goals, even if the goal itself is not so intrinsically meaningful.

For the past couple of weekends it’s been beautifully warm and sunny, and it feels like spring is already here in Lausanne. This coincides nicely with our son Noah’s rapidly increasing mobility, and we’ve taken advantage by getting out on some lovely walks.

It’s a delight to see Noah grow up, and also bewildering to see how quickly everything changes for him. Having a toddler introduces a new sense of time. I feel like in middle age one becomes used to gradual change - the kind that’s recognizable over months or years - the kind of change that happens as you learn a new language, or master a new field of study, or try to get back in shape for running in the mountains. For me, anything worth doing takes a lot of time. For Noah, every discovery is a big important discovery, and every day brings something new!

My wife Kamni and I are trying to keep track of Noah’s daily discoveries, keeping daily notes on the words he learns and the things that interest him most. I hope we’ll have time some day to look back on those notes and relive some moments of this incredible time!

Last week I saw an exhibit of timber fabric structures, organized at ECAL by IBOIS, an EPFL lab that does research on wood technology. I had just attended a talk on timber fabric structures by Markus Hudert, a PhD candidate at IBOIS who’s writing his thesis on this topic, and wanted to see the work of the studio he helped organize.

The scale of the projects, the range of materials, and the potential architectural applications were all impressive and exciting. The one thing I missed was more documentation of the stages the students went through to reach their final projects - there were some study models, which were great, but I didn’t have a clear sense from the exhibit of the techniques students had used to develop their ideas.

My favorite project was the one shown above and below - a screen that is opaque from one direction and partially transparent through the other - a simple concept, and very nice in the final fullscale model.

As I wait for my New Yorker subscription to kick in (why must it take months for this to happen? Is it so hard to send magazines to Europe?) I’ve spent a few idle minutes reading online to find out what I’m missing. The web site has an amazing wealth of content, and is frustratingly overloaded with floating advertisements and animated gif’s

I’ve missed Hendrik Hertzberg’s analysis of current events since our subscription lapsed, and was very happy to find that he has a blog. Here is his reflection on Super Tuesday:

This week I’m attending LIFT in Geneva.The first LIFT in 2006 happened just a few weeks after I arrived in Switzerland to start a new job at EPFL. The conference was a great introduction to a mostly local community of entrepreneurs, web 2.0 enthusiasts, HCI researchers, and geeks. Since then the event has become much more international, both in the topics and the people it attracts. I’ll be interested to see how the event changes and matures over time, and whether it’s possible to maintain the friendly informality of the first year as LIFT grows. There are already many photos from this year’s event on flickr.

This Wednesday I joined a workshop organized by Nicolas Nova, Julian Bleeker and Fabien Girardin. The topic of the workshop was ‘Failures of Ubiquitous Computing’. The goal as I understood it was to look at the guiding visions of ubicomp (calm computing, the disappearing computer), to reflect on how far we’ve come, and to discuss whether these were the right goals in the first place.

I joined a small group (Frederic Kaplan of CRAFT, my EPFL neighbor Nicolas Jones, Jean-Baptiste Labrune and others whose names I didn’t catch) to discuss the vision of the disappearing computer (and its disappearing interface). First, we asked whether Mark Weiser’s vision for the disappearing computer implies the literal disappearance of the computer and its interface, or whether it’s more meaningful to talk about the perceived disappearance of tools whose use becomes unconscious through familiarity. Frederic made the interesting observation that the tools which become most indispensable generally require a lot of effort to master, and that this effort of learning is part of what makes the tool important to us. Examples of tools like this are language; musical instruments; and sports equipment, like the bicycle. I think Frederic’s comment is right on: it makes sense that the more effort you invest in learning to use a particular tool or interface, the more likely it is that this interface will become an essential part of your life and remain so.

We also discussed whether there are some types of technology that can (and should) disappear completely, without any adverse affects in terms of usability. I proposed that the network is a technology that doesn’t require a human interface - when wifi is completely ubiquitous, no one will miss plugging in ethernet cables. So, there are some interactions that are best handled by a machine-to-machine interface, which can and should become as invisible as possible, while other interactions enrich our lives and should always retain their human-to-human or human-to-computer interfaces.

The main take-away for me was this idea: that ubicomp can be successful both as a form of invisible computer-to-computer interaction; and as a tangible, designed interface for human-computer interaction. Problems arise when the human-computer interface disappears (in the literal sense). And, we shouldn’t assume that human-computer interfaces should be easy to use - there’s also a benefit to interfaces that reward the effort of a steep learning curve.

Over the Christmas holiday I was staying with my family on a farm not too far from Ronchamp, and visited Corbusier’s pilgrimage chapel there one foggy afternoon …

Even after being inundated with images of this place during my architectural education, I still found the building surprising. Overall, the building was more extraordinary than I’d expected, especially the interior, which conveyed the sense of a place of prayer even though it was quite unlike any chapel that I’ve been to before.

The primary surprise of the interior was the sloping floor - I was not expecting this, and yet it was such a powerful expression of the focus of the liturgy on the altar that I wondered why there aren’t more chapels with sloping floors. The floor slopes 2-3 feet over the length of the nave, not a great amount but enough to make you very conscious of the slope. This brought to mind the main entrance hall of the Tate Modern, which also uses a sloped floor (in that case more ground surface than floor) to fantastic effect.

Another surprise was the site. I had somehow expected the chapel to be in the midst of a vast field on a sloping hill with curves of the same gentleness and amplitude as the building. Instead I found a sharply pointed hill (or so it felt on the drive up), and a site that was much more tightly constrained than I’d expected, with encroaching trees and slopes close on all sides.

Since I’m reading Charles Jencks these days on iconography and semantics in architecture, here is are some interesting comments from his book ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’:

Put another way, Ronchamp has all the fascination of the discovery of a new archiac language; we stumble upon this Rosetta Stone, this fragment of a lost civilization, and every attempt to decode its surface yields another coherent meaning which we know does not refer to any precise social practice, as it appears to. Le Corbusier has so overcoded this building with metaphor, and so precisely related part to part, that the meanings seem as if they had been fixed by countless generations engaged in ritual: something as rich as the delicate patterns of Islam, the exact iconography of Shinto, is suggested. How frustrating, how enjoyable it is to experience this game of signification, which we know rests mostly on imaginative brilliance.

This conveys well some of the curious freshness of the building. I think Jencks overstates the lack of connection between the building and Catholic ritual. He expresses very well the super-saturation of metaphor in this, as in many other of Corbusier’s buildings. He’s completely unconcerned with site, materiality, and tectonics.

It’s reassuring to see how some buildings continue to surprise and delight through many changes in architectural fashion.

This past semester I’ve been working with two EPFL computer science students, Christian Abegg and David van der Maas, on projects closely related to my thesis work in architectural display. The projects ended last week; both were very successful in generating prototypes that explore the materiality and behavior of particular display materials (LEDs and thermochromic ink).

Both projects had the same brief: to build an ambient display for communicating information related to air quality in buildings. The information (temperature, humidity, CO2, VOC, dust) would need to be glanceable from a distance, and more detailed on close inspection.

I posted recently on David’s thermochromic project, so I’ll say a few words now about Christian’s project on LED display.

Christian started with a simple and elegant concept for the display. The information about air quality would be presented in a series of 8 LED rows (3 green, 3 yellow, 2 red), each row consisting of three LEDs of the same color - the outer two would be recessed as shown in the top photo in order to give a more diffuse light. The whole display would be placed behind a sheet of 3mm translucent plexi. The central LED’s were sanded flat, so that they would appear as dots, surrounded by a black ring. The most recent value would be shown as the brightest row, with recent values shown as rows that fade with time.

In this way, it’s possible to see whether air quality (measured by a particular variable) is increasing or decreasing. In the above example the quality is decreasing, in the example below it’s increasing.

The display is controlled by an AVR ethernet board, with separate boards for each group of LEDs and for the air quality sensors. This board acts as a web server, producing an XML feed the contains the sensor values, as well as controlling the LED display. Currently, the 64 LEDs are controlled (without multiplexing) by 4 PCA9635 chips:

And, the sensors have their own tiny boards: this one is for the light and temperature sensors (one on each side):

The light sensor is used to control the luminosity of the display based on ambient lighting conditions. We wanted the display to always use the lowest luminosity possible. The luminosity will definitely have to be fine-tuned once we’ve installed the display in our lab space.

The next step will be to create boards for the other sensors (humidity, VOCs, CO2, dust), to build the full LED display (with 5 columns of LEDs), and to figure out the details of the translation between sensor values and LED levels; there’s also much to be done in terms of refining the behavior of the display in software. It’s also unresolved how this display will be integrated in the context of a room.

Christian’s project report is here.

Over the past 18 months or so, the Interactive Wall project has been a very fun collaborative effort between the Media and Design Lab (Jeffrey Huang and myself) and David Gerber of Sci-Arc. The goal of the project has been to envision an interactive architecture that uses the dimensions, materiality, ranges, and other properties and constraints of the embedded technology (sensors, actuators) as parameters for design. The proposed function of the wall is shelving and display, and the proposed interactivity involved sensing the presence of people in proximity to the wall and the use of objects stored in the wall, information that would then be displayed on the wall’s surface.

The project originally took the form of a studio, followed by a second studio and two semester projects (all at Sci-Arc); and an internship at the Media and Design Lab. The work below was all produced by the most recent semester project at Sci-Arc. The people directly involved were David Gerber, Peter Dang, and Dean Demko.

The diagram above was intended to show the relation between several of the main design parameters: the location and dimension of sensors, the desired transparency of the wall, and the functionality of the wall as shelving. Although I think the diagram looks really cool, the concepts still need some work.

These images were part of the ppt presentation that David Gerber put together, and that I presented at Tectonics Making Meaning last month.

Here’s the model …

and a rendering of the model in situ …

and a CNC-milled version of the model …

I’ve been thinking lately about speed in interactive architecture, or more precisely rate of change, thanks to some experiments with thermochromic ink, work I’ve been doing with David van der Maas as part of my thesis on information display in buildings. One characteristic of color-changing inks is that they have a slow ‘refresh rate’, at least in comparison with commonly-used technologies like LED and LCD displays.

The color of the painted surface changes when the thermochromic ink reaches a threshold temperature, becoming transparent and revealing the color of the underlying surface. The ink we’re working with changes from blue to colorless at 40 degrees C. David has designed several circuit boards that generate heat through the resistance of printed copper wires that are 5 microns thick and about 100 microns wide.

The circuit boards densely cluster the wires into ‘pixels’ of ~1cm2. Depending on the current sent through the wires, these pixels take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to heat up, and 10-20 seconds to cool down again. In other words, the timeframe is very slow by the standards of current LED and LCD displays, but still fast compared to many processes acting on the building (which may be for example be diurnal or seasonal). Perhaps most importantly, the change in the thermochromic ink appears slow, perhaps because its rate of change does not call attention to itself.

It’s been interesting to explore the types of information that could benefit from this rate of change; and to imagine materials that would change yet more slowly, and types of information that would be ‘too slow’ for the thermochromic refresh rate.

I was excited to see that ’speed’ in architecture came up a few times, in interesting ways, at ‘Tectonics Making Meaning‘, a conference I attended in December at TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Because I’m slow to digest information (and suffer from a strange compulsion to edit my blog posts), I’m just now getting around to thinking and writing about the papers presented there.

One presentation that addressed the speed of architecture in passing was Karl Wallick’s very thought-provoking paper, ‘Finishing’. The paper extends some of the arguments from Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow’s book ‘On Weathering‘, discussing the tectonics of weathering as a design strategy:

Our faith in technology propels us forward. Technology will provide a path, an instrument to solve difficulties. Perhaps if we move as fast as cars and airplanes, we may evade the decay of weathering. One could interpret architecture’s continual fascination with machines as a frustration with our projects’ lack of mobility. We continually hold ourselves in comparison to cars and airplanes. Even the current attention lavished on prefabricated construction hints at our lack of confidence in addressing movement at an architecturally appropriate scale. If we shift our attention to the scale of time, we can enjoy the development of tectonic instruments which can channel dirt, stains, and shade.

This shift in time scale is interesting: the implication that architecture is ’slow’ by nature, and operates at a time scale distinct from that of the automobile or aircraft. I don’t fully agree with this assertion: interactive architecture has continued with some justification the Modernist fascination with speed and industrial products that allow rapid change, fluidity and mobility. I do find fascinating though Karl’s cautionary note, that something inherent to architecture may be lost when the building is seen in the time-frame appropriate to objects that are both rapidly fabricated and themselves capable of rapid adaptation. In any case, I agree that even a ‘fast’, or an interactive architecture needs to maintain some elements of slowness - in fact, needs a whole range of materials and processes whose rates of response to the building’s environment and inhabitants range from very slow to instantaneous …

A paper by Tomasz Jaskiewicz, ‘Open-Ended Digital Designing Towards Interactive Architecture’, also presented at Tectonics Making Meaning, talks about speed as a characteristic of all architectural environments:

Fundamentally, every single architectural space that we may typically encounter is already being interactive. Regardless of its scale; be this architectural object a whole city, a building or just a park bench, every one of them in countless ways maintains very explicit, bidirectional relations with its environment. From the point of view of theory of communication, existence of such relations implies interactivity. Architecture is constantly being informed and in return, it always acts as a source of information itself, mutually relating to many levels of previously received information. However, this interaction normally happens very slowly. Often it’s only apparent if we look at architectural spaces in “fast-forward motion”, over a span of years or decades, not seconds to which we, as people, are used to when “interacting” among each other. Therefore architecture has to do no more than simply increase its speed of performance to become noticeably interactive. Architectural processes of reading, transforming and communicating information, which in the old days used to take years, should now happen instantly.

I’m not sure what he means by looking at architectural spaces in ‘fast-forward motion’, or what exactly are the architectural processes described - I will have to get some clarification on this.

I found the quote from Valéry that I was looking for in yesterday’s post; it’s from the essay ‘Poésie et pensée abstraite’, translated as ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ by Denise Folliot. Here’s the last paragraph of the essay:

Think, too, that of all the arts, ours is perhaps that which co-ordinates the greatest number of independent parts or factors: sound, sense, the real and the imaginary, logic, syntax, and the double invention of content and form … and all this by means of a medium essentially practical, perpetually changing, soiled, a maid of all work, everyday language, from which we must draw a pure, ideal Voice, capable of communicating without weakness, without apparent effort, without offense to the ear, and without breaking the ephemeral sphere of the poetic universe, an idea of some self miraculously superior to Myself.

I’m now convinced that there’s no connection at all between this essay and blogging - what was I thinking?!? [Note attempt at finding an unedited, direct, spontaneous, raw voice].

Now back to work.