CULTura Atelier School of Art, Technology, and Design : Marfa, Texas

Date

2004

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Abstract

THESIS STATEMENT. Architecture is a complex system where space and form can be generated and articulated through the use of shape grammars. SCOPE. CULTura Atelier School of Art, Technology, and Design will house the work of cultural production, constantly framing, filtering, and curating emerging art forms. The project incorporates a fusion of design education, art production, research, and museum facilities for 150 students, 50 instructors/artists-in-residence/ curators, and 20 permanent staff members in a two year post professional education/research/ art production program as a part of a non-profit organization sponsoring emerging arts and media technologies. THEORETICAL FOCUS. The theoretical agenda of this project has two main implications: 1) architecture as a complex system - the study of complex systems when determining the abstract relationships and connections within the architectural problem and 2) shape grammars - the use of spatial algorithms (shape grammars) towards a better understanding of the architectural problem. The conceptualization of these conditions aims at a better understanding of the complexity of architecture through the use of shape grammars. CONTEXT. The project site is located in Marfa, Texas - a small ranching community of about 2300 residents, sitting on a high desert plateau, surrounded by mountains, about 150 miles east of El Paso, southwest Texas, The subject of context is highly important to this study for two main reasons: 1) to demonstrate that the use of computational design techniques draws on context as one of the main constructive forces in the generation of designs and 2) to investigate the explicit definition of reality vectors in a complex system of relationships of both tangible and intangible elements. FACILITY. The design of the CULTura Atelier is based on a dynamic complex system of both traditional and high tech art/media workshops that blur the boundary between production and exhibition, visitor and visited, observer and observed. The emerging interaction of art and science into the design field renders the notion of a facility as an impermanent assembly of parts. The building becomes an interface between the viewer/society and the artist/architect, a spacio-technological journey with a collective consciousness. Thus, the third implication of this project explores the use of shape grammars as generators of languages of designs that articulate the architectural problem.

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Keywords

Art schools -- Design and construction, Algorithms, Marfa (Tex.) -- Buildings, structures, etc

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