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PhD Defense by James Park

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Ph.D. Dissertation Topic Defense – James Park – College of Design, School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Date: Wednesday, April 28th, 2021

Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM EST

Link: https://bit.ly/3ginIX8

 

Advising Committee

Athanassios Economou, Ph.D., Advisor

Professor, School of Architecture

Adjunct Professor, School of Interactive Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology

 

Dennis Shelden, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, School of Architecture

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

 

Ji-Hyun Lee, Ph.D.

Professor, Graduate School of Culture Technology

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

 

Robert Woodbury, Ph.D.

Director, Smart Geometry Group

Professor Emeritus, School of Interactive Arts and Technology

Simon Fraser University

 

Title

Sketches Count: The Mies van der Rohe’s Dirksen Courthouse Archival Redrawn

 

Abstract

Mies van der Rohe’s Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in Chicago built in 1964 is arguably one of the most significant buildings in the history of judicial architecture in the U.S. and abroad because of its transformative role in the formulation of the conventions underlying contemporary courthouse design. Archived at the Museum of Modern Art New York (MoMA), a significant resource associated with the design of the courthouse is the extensive documentation of the design process at the office of Mies. This body of work consists of 135 sketches, diagrams and drawings, features alternative solutions, variational schemes, and sectional innovations, and provides an untapped resource to allow a closer look in the expressive range of the architectural language and the technical innovations proposed by one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century.

 

The work here takes on the Mies Archive and presents a formal reconstruction and automated completion of the preliminary representations materializing the unrealized possibilities embodied in the works. More specifically, a generative description of Mies’ courthouse design language is presented in the form of a shape grammar implemented in the Shape Machine, a pioneering recursive shape-rewrite technology developed at the Shape Computation Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The grammar is proposed as an open-ended set of shape rules that is readily expanded to complete the sets of design variations documented in the archive, along with several possible ones that can be in principle generated by the evolving grammar. Significantly, all new shape rules are introduced seamlessly, as an intrinsic part of the design process of the evolving grammar, without requiring reformatting of existing rules or advocating the design of a singular Miesian grammar.

 

The work aims to provide (a) a generative model of Mies’ courthouse design language; (b) an automated completion of some of the rudimentary sketches, diagrams and drawings in the Mies Archive at MoMA; (c) a prototype of an interactive design system for courthouse design that architects, designers and stakeholders of courthouse architecture can evaluate for practical use; and (d) some speculations on the transformative role of the proposed computational method in bridging the gap between sketching and drafting in the digital workflows of architects and designers.

 

 

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Created:04/21/2021
  • Modified By:Tatianna Richardson
  • Modified:04/21/2021

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