Mark Goulthorpe of dECOi Architects presented a lecture at Columbia last night called Lecture: The Possibility of (an) Architecture that was really interesting. one quote stood out ( and i’m probably not dead on with the wording, but i was still mulling it over too long before i decided i should write it down ) he said:

the rising tide of the parametric will swamp the lower end of our profession - thankfully, because all they do is collage readymades anyway.

the “collaging of readymades” idea is something i have been thinking about off and on for some time now. it’s something that, to some extent you have to do in the course of making architecture. it’s practically impossible to design everything. it’s usually not part of the scope of the project and when it is, it’s almost always cost prohibitive and makes maintenance a pain in the ass. i’m going to have to give some more thought to the counterpoints of standardization and mass customization, but he made some good points about the expeditious nature of assembling pieces that are not all the same. he said that Norman Foster told him once that you could never beat the efficiency of pressing out large quantities of the same piece; that that was the end of the discussion… however, if you can be more efficient in the assemblage, in the construction… perhaps you can beat out standardization. this was Mark’s point last night. of course, it doesn’t seem to be there yet considering the lengthy process of the project he was referencing and ultimately, the fact that it has not been realized. a couple other interesting things that came up that i’ve only done the most cursory of investigations into… * hyposurface and some videos he showed of it in action from a biolab symposium i think * springy thingy processing application straight to 3D print… how? research. * maison de verre * borromean knot or rings ( references to Lacan discussing Joyce and the sinthome or 4th ring ) * voronoi diagrams and tools to create them