Flux - Asymptote

Entering the world of FLUX with Joey Chong

Hani Rashid + Lise Anne Couture

Introduction

Asymptote expands the boundaries of traditional architectural practice with work that ranges from buildings and urban design to gallery installations and computer generated environments. the firm, founded in New York in 1989 by Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, draws inspiration form a wide range of sources not traditionally associated with architecture, among them the phenomena of information space, the dynamics and tectonics of sports and sports equipment and organic systems of transformation. Their projects are equally concerned with change and fluctuating conditions - motion, light, speed and traversing virtual boundaries - as with new forms and generative processes and new types of building systems.

Lise Anne Couture

Lise Anne Couture reveived a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University. She has held appointments at several academic institutions, including the University if Michigan in Ann Arbor; the University of Montreal, the Stadelschule in Frankfurt, Columbia University, Parsons School of Design and Princeton University. She is currently the William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor of Architecture at Yale University.

Hani Rashid

Hani Rashid was born in Cario, Egypt in 1958 to a British mother and Egyptian father. He was raised in England and Canada. By the way - Hani Rashid is the brother of Karim Rashid.

Hani Rashid received his Master of Architecture degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. He has taught at numerous universities, including the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, the Technical University in Vienna, Lund University in Sweden and Harvard University. He is currently a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Columbia Univerisyt. Hani Rashid represented the United States at the 2000 Venice Biennale.

Redefining Architecture: How Virtual Spaces change to Real Places

Asymptote

The word Asymptote, defined as two parallel lines that meet at the vanishing point, conveys for them the philosophical underpinnings of their practice. The two lines of the asymptote that constantly approach each other but never touch capture the spirit of an open-ended practice, one that sees each project as part of a much larger body of work, a perpetual work in progress. Asymptote understands the object of architecture as being as much about irreconcilability and difference as it is about alignment and convergence. Architecture is a complex field of relationships that results in a dynamic and fluctuating entity. It is significant that the lines of the asymptote, like many simultaneous pursuits in their architectural practice, do not merge entirely but are rather like trajectories that create an increasingly dense territory between them.

Experimental and speculative works continue to be an important aspect of their practice. These provide opportunities to conduct research for our various building and digital projects, from the use of new technologies and “intelligent” materials, to issue of contemporary inhabitation and cultural significance. All of these concurrent pursuits typify their drive to tread unknown territories and explore new possibilities for architecture with the aim of creating meaningful and inpired spatial experiences.

2000

FLUXSPACE 2.0 PAVILION

Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

Asymptote’s involvement at the 2000 Venice Biennale was twofold, comprising Hani Rashid’s participation in the United States Pavilion and Asymptote’s largescale, freestanding installation in the gardens. Both efforts were meant to contribute to and enlarge the modes of exhibiting and experiencing architecture. The projects in the United States Pavilion were works in progress, experiments that for the first time tranformed the pavilion into a laboratory. With these projects there was no need to mark territory because the gardens and pavilions of the Biennale already provide a well-established cultural venue.

The installation in the gardens sought to engage an audience including but not limited to visitors to the Beinnale by providing a simultaneous spatial experience for a virtual audience.

Fluxspace 2.0 Pavilion’s Materials and Details

This outdoor pavilion measured 30 meters in length and rose 2 stories in height so it was visible throughout the historic grounds of the Biennale. The form and structure, a combination of steel frame and pneumatic envelope, created a tangible oscillation between the physical exterior and the fluid, continuously reconfigured state of its interior.

Panel Detail 1

Panel Detail 2

Panel Detail 3

The work housed two 180 degree Web cameras set within circular rotating mirrors in the Fluxspace interior. As a visitor approashed the structure and entered it beneath an air-filled shell, he or she experienced an interior world under perpentual transformation. Through the quasi-transparency of the rotating one-way mirrors one could see the interior space in a constant state of change and reassembly. The visitor was forced into an ambiguous relationship with the architecture, somewhere between its real condition and its imaginative state. The experience of the interior flux was enhanced by Internet images broadcast at 30 second intervals throughout the five-month duration of the exhibition.

The camera captured and catalogued some 1.6 million variations on the space’s interior. Both Biennale contributions sought to bring technology into the fold, not only as a tool of production and representation but as a means of engagement via interactivity and connections to global networks.

2004

METAMORPH

The program for 2004’s Venice architecture biennale, curated by Jurt W. Forster will be articulated, as usual, in two distinct environements - the Giardini and the Arsenale. Asymptote has complete engagrment in the exhibition. From installation and exhibition design to the graphic identities and catalogue design. Altogether, this provided a seamless experience and a spatially cohensive backdrop to the curator’s theme METAMORPH.

The Concept of METAMORPH

Study of Arsenale

Asymptote has completely transformed the longitudinal spaces in the Arsenale into a modulating terrain on which over 220 projects are exhibited with models, drawings and video installations. the computer generated morphing animation sequence used to conceive the stage in the Arsenale was dervied from combining perspectival geomaetry with the actions of torquing and stringing.

Hani Rashid’s sharp and energetic answers to Luca Molinari’s interview further explain the design concept.

Installing Space

During the Italian Renassance, Bramante’s perspectival experiment in Santa Maria delle Grazie, a small church in the center of Milan was not only an elegant architectural solution for a confined space but was a test environment for the future Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. This intervention created the new found geometric principles around perspective projection and produced a drorama of great cathedrals’ “potential” interior.

The evolution of these fluid architectures will be interesting to follow as architects become less concerned with differentiating between physicality and the virtual, increasingly becoming preoccupied with redefining what actually constitutes the spatial and how we in fact more within this new spaces. and ultimately, it is within the space of the installation where these sorts of assumptions can be tested. For Asymptote, the space of exhibition reinterpreted as a place for experimentation is crucial for research and envisioning architectural futures and possibilities.

Studies of the platform in the Arsenale

Metamorph Installation

The designs for all the exhibition areas by Asymptote are inspired by historic and contemporary influences and readings of these historically loaded enviornments. The Arsenale in particular has a colourful history as a place onve used for navel ship building and the manufacture and preparation of kilometers of rope for the sails of the Venetian ships of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

Asymptote’s transformation of the Cordiere in particular was predicted on a modulating spacial sequence developed by producing a morphing animation involving the actions of torquing and “stringing” the entire space. By utilizing the resulting “key-frames”, a sequence of elements with the potential to be used as walls surfaces and platforms evolved. These resulting forms and surfaces were further designed to accommodate models, drawings and video for the Metamorph exhibition. The displayed works that move along these “trajectories” forming a terrain of tendencies and formations as opposed to being simply displays. The experience of the exhibition is therefore spatial and acts itself as an architectural entity celebrating ideas, scale, form and meaning.

Conclusion for FLUX

By using two distintive projects done by Asymptote, namely Fluxspace 2.0 Pavilion and Metamorph, I have understand the process of how non-standard designs are being produced. I have used Fluxspace 2.0 Pavilion to demonstrate my understandings on the materials and consrtuction details of a temporary exhibition space and the technologies used to enhance the spatial experience. And through Asymptote’s “Metamorph”, I am able to understand how their concept develop into a piece of interior installation by the process called torquing and “stringing” done digitally.

It is a new way looking at spatial design through technology. Asymptotes’ seamless integration of architecture, installation, multimedia, graphic design and exhibition design form a spatially integrated back-drop to the Metamorph theme, making explicit a condition of variance, affinities and flux.