3b: ACTIVE FORM

“The designer of active form is designing the delta.  The means by which the form changes, not the field in its entirety, but the way the field is inflected.  The way the alteration multiplies across the field or reconditions a population or generates a network.  So while intensely involved with material and geometry, active forms are inclusive to but not limited to enclosure and may move beyond the conventional architectural site…….So here is a common art for shaping the object as well as how the object plays - the shape of the end piece as well as its repertoire.”   

-Keller Easterling, Disposition 

In architecture the line always represents something – material form, cuts, hidden elements, etc.  You have now constructed a diagram that should contain a field of lines, aggregated at various intensities.  Stage B of this project is to construct this diagram and to translate these fields into materiality.  We will be exploring the ideas of Active or Animate Form presented by Greg Lynn’s 1999 seminal book Animate Form, which acknowledges form as a resultant of inflicted forces and material responses. 

To begin, construct the diagram as a flexible two-dimensional material network.  Then, apply forces to this network that prompt it to bend, roll, split, fold, wrap into a three-dimensional form.  Therefore, Form is a resultant of material densities and intensities and external stimuli.   


PROJECT 3b: ACTIVE FORM