Jeffrey Sipprell

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February 27, 2006

Deltacon - the object v the network

Here is the long overdue post on the studio project for this quarter - which has manifested itself in the form of a housing project for the Sacramento River Delta area. This area is a highly politicized area of California that lies just south of Sacramento and east of San Francisco. It is the home of many of California's lushest farming grounds - mostly pears, grapes, and asparugus, but it is also where southern California (including myself) gets its drinking water. Throw in a dash of fishermen, hunters, recreational boaters and a pinch of conservationalists and you can imagine the types of clashes this area fosters.

The underlying issue to all of these groups is the levees - a word that is in our contemporary vocabularly after the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. The truth is, the levees in this area are in worse shape than they were in New Orleans, prompting Conan the Barbarian (yes, our governor) to include levee reconstruction in his new billions of dollars infrastructure proposal - now he's Arnold the Empire Builder (and he's up for re-election in November).

Roger Sherman has constructed the studio to examine five core interest groups - developers (which are basically our fictional clients), recreationalists, conservationalists, farmers and water interests (this last one being the people who seek to make money off of selling the abundant water to Los Angeles, San Diego, etc. - in a nutshell many islands are individually owned and if that person is able to flood their island they would create their own reservoir and be able to use their water rights as they see fit (think of the way air rights are traded and sold in New York City)). The success of the project hinges on your ability to adapt to these interest groups as possible market forces will play out over time.

My own personal inclination was to engage the water - the feature within the delta that all of the interest groups have a strong vested interest in. Prelminary research indicated that the water could be broken up into 4 core categories that all had varying degrees of engagement by these parties:

Cleanliness
Flow Rate
Depth
Salinity (or the resistance to the infiltration of salt water from the Pacific which would ruin the natural ecology and farmlands - it has been steadily creeping in through the last 25-30 years).
This chart shows the relative engagement of each interest group with those 4 core properties as well as a grouping of the 3 most important (turned out Depth wasn't such a big deal) into top level generic solutions of flow control and remediation. Archetypes of those solutions are illustrated in the next procedure setting up a library whereby similar forms can be composited to form an adaptive widget - a piece that can either control flows or remediate the water.

The concept here is that a mobile flow control system - here realized in mobile floating housing - could be deployed in such a way that the water network can be dynamically implemented. That is if southern California suffers a drought, more water can be diverted there or if the salinity is creeping in, more water can be pushed towards San Francisco Bay. A myriad of combinations could exist that could allow Calfed to actively engage the water system without relying on new permanent infrastructure - gates, canals, bypasses, etc. Such a project would be subsidized by housing developers who could create the sprawl they so desperately seek is this area of prized real estate - but here it would not be on land, but on water. Homeowners could move around freely or chain themselves together to form streets, communities or other networks that would also server as areas of water treatment. The sprawl therefore is beneficial as the more units that exist, the cleaner the water will become - leading to increased recreational use and money for the area.

The design right now is focused on developing the cell in a much less directional gridded way and to further develop the architecture to allow for a system of difference and public space to emerge within these larger aggregations. This approach was a shift from an earlier design where the project was thought of as more of an object - the first deltacon which was a mobile dam/hovercraft hybrid that would be recreational housing or a construction operations center - depending on how it was deployed by Calfed (the governing body of the delta).
It is so called deltacon since it kind of reminded me of a transformer.

You can see both approaches here:

Deltacon Prototype 1 - Object

Deltacon Prototype 2 - Network

Posted by jsipprell at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2006

Synesthesia - Playing with Felt

Synesthesia: Sound and Vision is a unique course that is being taught by Jason Payne and Heather Roberge of GNUForm (who incidentally are an entrant in this year's PS 1 Competition) as a design build project involving the school's, currently derelict, auditorium in which we are to create a visually and auditory pleasing solution. The space is a completely stripped concrete box that is approximately 40' X 65', which gives us a reverberation time of approximately 3 seconds. As you can imagine, lectures in the space are at times unbearable - particulary ones that are less attended (the chairs are cheap hard plastic so they so little acoustically).

Our goal is to get the reverberation time down to one second within a budget of $20,000. Now you can probably imagine why the school is offering this as a design build course - the only thing we can hope to do is pour all of our money into materials and do the labor ourselves. So we've got to design a solution that's cheap and can be installed with not too much professional expertise. Now for the final wrinkle - the fire marshal has demanded that we only use Class A fire rated materials. So anything that's even slightly synthetic is out the window. And we're also limited to what has been tested already by the state of California since the process by which to submit a new material for review would take ages.

So, where does that leave us? Natural Wool Felt. There were two other schemes that also tested a burlap curtain and a perforated hard surface scheme, but ultimately the combination of cost, installation, and natural fiber only left us with one alternative. Now, you've probably got a few pictures in your mind of what this felt looks like - let me stop you right there. We're limited to two colors - slightly off white and medium gray. Not exactly stirring the visual senses here. And we've got no money to do anything electrically, so we can only play with form, scale, and variation.

GNUForm was already working with felt through the summer (it was originally their project) in the form of laser cut squares that were hung to form sunspended flowers. These flowers were then arrayed across the room to form an undulating ceiling, while the walls were treated entirely with homasote.

Unfortunately the scheme didn't work within the budget and the application of hard surfaces to all walls didn't do anything acoustically. So beginning in January, myself and nine other students, began to looks at other ways to use the felt in a more comprehensive scheme that would cover both ceiling and wall. Some of my group's initial studies into the way the material could be manipulated can be seen below:

Study A
Study B
Study C
Study D
Study E
Study F
Study G

This ultimately led to a wall elevation of:

Elevation 1
Elevation 2

Unfortunately other studies into pinching strips of felt were chosen over the slitting and pinching that our group was interested in. Here's a couple pics of the ceiling system:

Ceiling 1
Ceiling 2

And a few pics of the other wall study (the second one is the one we are going with):

Alt Study 1
Alt Study 2

This weekend we're trying to meld the schemes together a little bit better in a way that is less homogenous. I'll post some pics of how that goes.

Posted by jsipprell at 3:29 PM | Comments (0)

February 5, 2006

The Irregularly Shaped Pearl

We have finally completed our research from the Fall Quarter for Greg Lynn's research studio titled The Irregularly Shaped Pearl. Our focus was to experimentally search for the contemporary equivalent of the baroque today within the following characteristics:

Albedo and Shadow
Continuous Curvature and Undulation
Drapery and Lightened Mass
Illusory Depth
Opalescence
Rustication

Posted by jsipprell at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

February 3, 2006

Dark Places Pictures

A couple photos from the Dark Places exhibit by SERVO. Installation is up until mid-April, I highly recommend making the trip to theSanta Monica Museum of Art to see it. (Photos courtesy of SERVO and the Santa Monica Museum of Art).

Posted by jsipprell at 7:40 PM | Comments (0)

February 2, 2006

Manifold Destiny - Exhibition

The Manifold Destiny show opened last Friday to a very good reviews and a healthy turnout. Here are some images and drawings presented in the show that represent a compendium of the best work done in the two years the course has been given. If you're in the Los Angeles area, it is open until the end of February.(Photos courtesy of Paul Locke)

Overall Show Pictures

Image 01
Image 02
Image 03
Image 04
Image 05
Image 06
Image 07
Image 08
Image 09
Image 10
Image 11