SUMMARY - WIT Press · 2014. 5. 14. · Peter Eisenman's radical design for the Guardiola House in the Bay of Cadiz, Spain, whose intricate geometry was intended to critically deconstruct

Early attempts to combine the use of video

and computer in architectural education

M. Linzey, A. Soutar

Department of Architecture, University of

Auckland, New Zealand

SUMMARY

Computer and video belong to different codes of reference: while computer understanding

derives from a mathematical, and in architectural education a CAD base, the time-based

images collected on video belong to a filmic, literary foundation. Not only are their deriva-

tions very different, the people who choose to make special studies within each typically

come from different educational routes.

The undergraduate course in architecture at Auckland University actively promotes use of

both computer and video by students. However, student work which derives from both

media together is more rare. The paper, supported by video clips, reports on undergraduate

work performed between 1988 and 1992, illustrating early efforts to integrate computer and

video, and comments on their relevance in an architectural education.

INTRODUCTION

The principal challenge to interactive multimedia, according to Kristina Hooper-*-, is one of

pedagogy and design. Pedagogy is a challenge because traditional teaching is already seg-

regated into either computer or film, so multimedia tends to cut across traditional bounda-

ries. And design because it is now up to designers themselves, and in particular students

of design, to show the way to some extent, to use multimedia technology intelligently and

demonstrate by its use just how to make the technology effectively contribute to creative

work. Designers themselves have yet to demonstrate conclusively whether multimedia tech-

nology can generate a 'compelling experience' within the terms of reference and specific

Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 5, © 1993 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517

524 Visualization and Intelligent Design

criteria of architectural design. Is interactive multimedia technology running the risk of

developing in a user vacuum?

Knowing that interactive multimedia is on the horizon for educational institutions, the Auck-

land School has been at pains to encourage students to explore the interconnection between

video and computers in a number of different ways. So far the response from students has

been relatively slight. Three projects initiated and developed by students in the furtherance

of specific architectural design projects are reported here in the form of short video clips.

The videos were made without sophisticated post-production technology. The first tells a

simple 'story' of a young woman imprisoned, her escape coming when she turns into a

butterfly and flies through the cell bars—this metamorphosis was drawn in computer ani-

mation and simply edited into video. The second is an exploration of urban design at the

level of street scape, with computer wireframes and negative video images playing over the

geometry of architectural forms. Both these studies reveal something of the search for ex-

pression of an artist/architect no matter what the medium. The last item is a HyperCard™

stack prepared for a video archive. Groups of students have been involved for four years

on a community design project in the Cook Islands where successive cyclones had de-

stroyed a formal palace of a ruling family. Each year a student team has flown to Rarotonga

to work on rebuilding the palace. Some sixty hours of excellent video tapes have been

accumulated, showing the re-building, also local customs, life on the island, talks by elders,

etc. The Hypercard^M medium is used to pull it all together, with a second-by-second shot

list, and a cross reference to important key terms. It is a record in its own right of the historic

project in words, animation and sound. Multimedia serves to provide continuity for student

groups returning to the project from year to year.

CREATIVE PLURALISM IN THE EDUCATION OF ARCHITECTS

The Bachelor of Architecture degree course at Auckland University is one of only two

courses in architecture presently available in New Zealand. For this reason the course has

had to support a plurality of approaches and educational methods such as may be found

only in the collective programmes of more than one school of architecture abroad. Students

are encouraged to explore and to integrate a wide range of techniques for design and

communication rather than to develop only one method of achieving design. We are also

very aware that changing vocational perceptions and opportunities in practice call for a

wide range of choices and freedom to shape individual directions for study in the whole

education of an architect.


Visualization and Intelligent Design 525

A full range of graphical techniques from freehand drawing to computer draughting and

video are taught in support of architectural design. It is recognised that different students

have different natural aptitudes for techniques. It is also the case that different kinds of

project are more or less suitable than others for different media. For example, when urban

designers proposed a number of years ago to construct a monorail transportation system

through the inner city area of Sydney in connection with the Darling Harbour redevelop-

ment project, the medium of video was found to be a most appropriate vehicle to commu-

nicate to a wide audience a feeling for the anticipated impact of the scheme on the city

environment. Many urban design projects of students in the School are presented to advan-

tage using the broadcast qualities of video. Elsewhere in the architectural spectrum we have

Peter Eisenman's radical design for the Guardiola House in the Bay of Cadiz, Spain, whose

intricate geometry was intended to critically deconstruct the conventions of figure/ground,

object/space through a controlled sequence of translations and rotations in three dimen-

sions of a pure Platonic cube . Students find the exploration of hidden relationships in this

house is most edifying when it is explored in three dimensions with precision computer

draughting techniques such as Microstation™.

The two technologies derive from different pedigrees — one from a mathematical and

engineering world, the other from a filmic tradition. Video deals with a literal reality which

is then interpreted by the medium. Computer is a contrived reality from beginning to end,

the message is created entirely by the medium. In terms of the technology itself it is readily

acknowledged that the two techniques are following convergent paths—towards interactive

hypermedia and virtual reality—yet there may be deeper-seated psychological, educational

or perhaps cultural reasons why this technical convergence may or may not be 'taken up'

by designers. It may be the simple truth that one individual is better suited to expression

in video than on a computer. Early indications of resistance may emerge in the relatively

free choice yet critical design environment that the Auckland school offers in its design-

based undergraduate course of study. Here the design studio may be imagined as a sort of

'free market' for creative visualisation and graphical communication techniques where the

effectiveness of multimedia may be tested against a plurality of modes of presentation of

graphical thought.

Video and computer classes in the Bachelor of Architecture course of study are limited by

the commercial availability of affordable hardware and software. Computer work is sup-

ported on a network of mainly Apple Macintosh computers connected with a colour scan-

ner, plotter, laser printers, and a colour printer. Classes offer training in the following



computer graphics software products:

Claris CAD™MacPerspective™

Microstation™

Photoshop™

Upfront™

Stratavision™

Other software products, including Autocad™, HyperCard™, Macromind Director™,

are used for autonomous individual and group projects and for elective studies. All the

available software is regularly and avidly explored by keener students. Practically all stu-

dents in the Bachelor of Architecture course opt to study at least two semesters of computer

classes in the first and second years of professional education. A fewer number of more

senior students actively experiment with photorealistic techniques, walk-throughs, and so

on in elective studies under the tutorship of post-graduate students and technical support

staff.

Formal teaching in video technology is more severely limited by available resources. At

present our workspace includes an S-VHS recording and editing suite, a simple sound

mixer, and a Macintosh Ilsi computer connected to the School network. A single semester

course, Audiovisual Techniques, is offered in the third professional examination, but there is

a class size limitation of 24 students on this class. As well as video, this course introduces

skills and techniques in architectural photography, audio recording, and the critical analysis

of these media. The examination is project based. As is the case with computer work,

personal elective studies and additional projects are regularly undertaken by some students

preparing and editing videos for and in conjunction with design studio presentations.

COMBINED USES OF VIDEO AND COMPUTER

Both computer and video techniques regularly find their way into presentations by students

in the critical forum of the design studio, the heart of the architectural course of study. But

there are fewer situations in which the combination of video and computer work has been

successfully achieved in undergraduate design programmes.

The first example is a short video which was produced in 1990 by a team of three third year

students, Belinda Clapperton, Anna Marie Chin, and Stuart Whitfield, for the Audiovisual

Techniques course. It tells a simple 'story' of a prisoner whose 'escape' is achieved by turning



into a butterfly and flying away. A young

woman languishes in a cell. The angle of

her body expresses depression and de-

spondency. Her hand idly draws a figure

in the dirt. Then the scene is suddenly

transformed: an animated figure dances on

a blank background. Slowly the figure co-

coons itself in a black web (of depression?)

from which, after a time a butterfly emerges

and flies into the air. The butterfly departs

through the prison bars. In a final shot we

V

A

Fig. 1 A computer generated figure .

see the girl's clothes abandoned on the floor of the empty cell. This metamorphosis was

drawn in Photoshop^M and simply edited into the film video. Its justification in terms of

visual design, beyond the mere technical exercise, is that the film-to-computer transforma-

tion is a metaphor for imaginative transformation in general. The video represents a vision

of humanity trapped by architecture—a trauma with which many will readily identify—

then finding release through the imagination. The project should be appraised in design

terms—not in terms of glossy production values. As an adjunct to an architectural design,

the design of an imprisoning place, it represents a thoughtful and creative use of available

materials and technology. The switch from film to computer and back to film is of a part

with the switch from monochrome to colour—a device to enliven the imaginative faculty of

the viewer. These students explored the unique characteristics of the computer and video

media and found ways within both to best express the simple idea of architectural confine-

ment and release with an economy of means.

The second example of mixed video and

computer was produced by a third year stu-

dent, Simon Fernyhough, to represent an

aspect of his own design for an urban infill

redevelopment. A number of simple wire-

frame and solid objects were manipulated

on a scanned background image of an ex-

isting street scape. The dynamic sequence

of computer images was captured on video

output. The student used his own Omega Fig. 2 ... metamorphoses into a butterfly.



home computer, on which he also composed

his own soundtrack for the video clip. The

dynamic and transformational possibilities

of video were used in this case to comment

metaphorically upon similar qualities (dy-

namism and transformation from old to

new) in the architecture of the proposed

facade. At the same time the lifting and

transposition of pediment elements from the

old street frontage, and the metamorphosisFig. 3 The parapet above the old

from elsewhere in the Pacific rim of a Japa- shops is transposed into the air.

nese gate motif into the modernist grid of uptown Auckland were intended to communicate

the dynamic merging of old and new, tra-

dition and change—a tentative but

thoughtful response to post-modern de-

sires.

Fig. 4. A Japanese motif isintroduced into the design.

Again the fact that the technology coin-

cided with the task seems to be more im-

portant in this case in terms of successful

architectural design than merely to dem-

onstrate the student's versatility with

technology for its own sake. It may be

argued that these early assays into com-

bined video and computer are irrelevant because their means of production is already out-

of-date and superceded. But it is not the

mode of production nor even the rapid

strides that multimedia manufacturers

have made in recent years that is signifi-

cant here. When we- are studying the |

learning process and the educational path f

of designers, sometimes the cruder and

simpler technology, by placing a greater

demand for problem solving on students,"»"«"" mi" "

makes the problem solving that is going Fig. 5. A computer rendered design issuperimposed on the existing city scape.



on appear more transparent. Educators are more concerned with the means, and less with

the ends of commercial design.

The third example of multimedia work to be discussed here is a Hypercard^^ stack record-

ing a longer term project undertaken by students to restore a ruined nineteenth century

palace, Te Para-o-Tane, which stands on the main island, Rarotonga, of the Cook Islands

group. This community based construction project has been an invaluable experience for

students, providing not only practical construction and renovation experience with an an-

tique method of coral-lime wall construction but contact with another Pacific culture closely

related to New Zealand Maori, and insight into the values placed on architecture by another

culture. Each year the participating students recorded their experiences in Rarotonga on

video and with drawings, sketches and photographs. So far sixty five hours of video mate-

rial has been recorded, much of which is excellent in technical quality and content. Although

many students recorded the video material, measured the drawings, provided still photo-

graphs and sound tapes, in fact it was one of the authors [Anna Soutar] who is compiling

and designing the multimedia stack as part of project work for her Master of Philosophy

degree.

When authoring in multimedia one is struck at first by its non-linear, unstructured, appar-

ently non-narrative quality. How does one design a resource not knowing how it will be

used, in what sequence a user will skip from place to place within the web of information?

What will be the 'learning experience' or the 'entertainment value' of the work, leaving

aside its contribution to 'art'? But of course there is never any such thing as 'no narrative

Fig. 6. Te Para-o-Tane, an old palace at Rarotonga, is undergoing aprogramme of restoration.



trail.' We are indoctrinated by certain habits of discourse—by the linked flow and hidden

hierarchical structuring of written text, or by the staged flow of film from one carefully

framed shot to the next, the viewer carried along on a bed of music. All discourse, verbal

and graphical, is a series of depictions and a sub-text of interconnections which subvert or

reinforce the text with their own assertions, innuendo, collage. Integrated multimedia is no

different in this regard except that the user retains control over the timing and ordering of

the connections through the medium of the personal computer.

In designing the layout and transitions for the Rarotonga archive we also wanted to capture

something of the soft yet complex tropical rhythms, the warm, unaffected grace of the

island, the passionate intensity of wooden drums, the grace of the dance, and the symbolism

of the hibiscus flower. And at the same time we had cause to wonder at the appropriateness

of this novel electronic medium of infinite variety and interconnection to represent an an-

cient culture whose most respected attribute has been its ability to navigate by a traditional

form of integrated multimedia—reading distance and direction in the rising and setting of

the stars, the shapes of the waves, the seasons of the winds, in ocean currents, and by certain

other strange appearances which will ever remain beyond the sensible comprehension of the

West.

References:

1 Krishna Hooper, 'Interactive multimedia design 1988,' The multimedia Laboratory, AppleComputer, Inc., Technical Report #13, November 1988.

2 Anon., B. Arch 1993 Handbook, Department of Architecture, University of Auckland, 1993.3 P. Eisenman. Guardiola House, Santa Maria del Mar. in A. Papadakis, C. Cooke and A.Benjamin, eds., Deconstruction Omnibus, London, Academy Editions, 1989. p. 163.


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SUMMARY - WIT Press · 2014. 5. 14. · Peter Eisenman's radical design for the Guardiola House in the Bay of Cadiz, Spain, whose intricate geometry was intended to critically deconstruct