Jordi Vivaldi-Piera
Supervisor
Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Peter Trummer
CONTINUOUS WHILE DISCRETE:
Resonant piling as an architectural method applied to the problem of the floor in search for a new urban architectonical typology
Resonant piling as an architectural method applied to the problem of the floor in search for a new urban architectonical typology
The formal recourse to continuity, generalized in architecture with the computational revolution of the 1990s has shown symptoms of exhaustion. Together with a cross-disciplinary cultural movement, various architectural currents have reintroduced a form of discretism whose disciplinary impact has been, for the most part, largely cosmetic. This research is framed by that debate, and capitalyses on a formal study of the floor: it contains an analysis of the discrete floor characteristic of skyscrapers and the continuous floor characteristic of parametricism, proposing a third disposition which is not “continuous”, “discrete” or “continuous and discrete”, but rather “continuous while discrete”.This research demonstrates that the disciplinary contribution of this third floor is not based on a constructive or aesthetic order, but on a formal and performative one. In this process, we use two methodological tools. First, we develop a comparative table relating each floor type to the subject-object relationship that characterizes its particular zeitgeist, while describing 12 formal and performative attributes of each floor. Second, we present the results of a computational simulation based on a resonant piling process, which, as a design method, leaves behind emergentist teleological holism in order to embrace Levy Bryant’s regimes of attraction. This results in a catalog of 68 computational models that are analyzed based on six spatial categories. The floor disposition that emerges in various of these models is described as a continuous while discrete floor, and its analysis, based on 36 comparative axonometric drawings, outlines its formal and performative contributions in relation to the discrete floor and the continuous floor.