Aviary Student Project WIP

[woodface]

Dear cgarchitects,

 

I started a thread in General Discussion about two months ago asking for advice on technology I could use in a student project I am doing.

 

Here is my update on my work in progress. I am currently an intern, so I can only work on this project in the evenings and on the weekends - hence the slow progress.

 

I have three-four weeks before this has to be all wrapped up and handed in, and I would appreciate your thoughts and comments on my work so far.

 

I started by looking at birds I would focus my attention on, and settled on a set that encompassed weed, relic and ghost species. I found the birds by looking at the London Biodiversity Action Plans, which helpfully show which species are rare, in decline etc. in the different London Boroughs. Having selected the birds, I sketched them from photographs, and compiled the information into a double page spread that should be a model for future pages in the project (in layout, graphics, font, colours etc.)

 

I looked at the existing and traditional (which is more important to me than natural) habitats for these bird species, and found that there were four broad categories - Hedgerow, Tall Tree, Cliff, and Wetland/Reedbed. I tried to find out what made a good [hedgerow/cliff etc.] from a bird's point of view.

 

In my reading around these subjects, I came to a more concrete idea of the aviary and its purpose (which is supposed to be a response to the 'Environmental Zoo' competition brief). This aviary will be about illuminating the current relationship of the human world and the natural world. It's mission is one of education and conservation, but it does not seek to re-create wilderness or to create an experience of 'landscape immersion'. It will explain the categorisation of species into weeds, relics and ghosts, and it will highlight the forgotten cracks in the urban fabric where non-human life finds a toehold, and seek to subvert those cracks so that it is not only the weedy species that can exploit them.

 

The existing infrastructure of the human world has a lot of what Gilles Clément called the "third landscape" - that is, land that is neither wild nor cultivated/developed for human use. The third landscape is ignored and neglected. You can see it at the edge of the canal towpath (or these days, in the under-used canals themselves), on the railway margins, and at the base of electricity pylons. These human infrastructures could also be biodiversity infrastructures (in a way, they perform this function at the moment simply by virtue of being ignored). This 'fallow' land could be nurtured with the specific goal of habitat creation, to allow animals their own 'highways' to move from place to place. A more particular goal is to take structures that are currently used by weed species (like pylons that are used by starlings and crows) and alter them so that they can be used by relics and the ghosts - to create a kit/strategy that can be applied to a pylon to enhance its role as a part of the biodiversity infrastructure.

[woodface]

My kit would consist of something 'bolted' on to a pylon that transformed it into a more suitable artificial tree, as well as planting hedge species around the base (guided and kept in place by an artificial hedge structure) to create a sheltered interior zone. Here is where I turned to xfrog, as suggested by you guys. My experiments have been somewhat limited, and this is an area I really need to develop quickly in the next week.

 

I also created some morphs and collages to help illustrate the concept, even if they may not be aesthetically representative.

 

The xfrog experiments were about taking a simple piece of technology (like L section steels, or wooden dowels), and repeating/arranging them in tree-like forms. As you can see in the sketches, I am thinking of constraining these structures in a topiary kind of way (which I appreciate aesthetically for that crossing that natural/artificial border).

 

I would greatly appreciate your feedback in this area xfrog users!

[woodface]

I looked at why a pylon looks the way it does, after all they are entirely functional pieces of design, but are still to me quite striking and beautiful structures.

[woodface]

I examined my area (industrial East London - Hackney Wick, Lea Valley) for potential sites, which would show a confluence of the infrastructures I was looking at (canal, rail, electricity), and came up with several candidates. My total proposal would be for a network of third-landscape reserves, with the larger and more accessible ones forming the public-access 'zoos'. The site I chose is a disused rail yard on an island formed within the canal network around Hackney Wick/Stratford, where two sets of transmission lines converge and then move apart again.

 

There is a school of avant-garde contemporary architecture (Resier+Umemoto, Zaha Hadid, FOA, Neil Denari etc) that tries to say something about the modern world, the constant motion and metamorphosis of it, by using fluid lines and small deformations of standard units. “Architectural form no longer appears as a totally stable entity obtained through a series of steps comparable to a process of saturation. It is more akin to a snapshot taken in the middle of a continuous action, or better, a compromise between the fundamental instability of the physical world and the human quest for durability and recognisable patterns.” - Antoine Picon, Toward a Well-Tempered Digital Design.

 

This site already embodies those qualities – it is profoundly contemporary, even more so because of its state of decay. My approach to the site will be to retain evidence of all that exists at the site currently, including the railway track and power supply frames, the warehouses , and to overlaying extra layers on top. Someone visiting the site would be aware of its previous use and recolonisation. Some of the new layers would be in sympathy with the existing ones and someone would disregard them.

 

I looked at different forms that a hide (the enclosure that bird watchers use) could take, and arranged them on the site to work with the weed/relic/ghost zoning, and a journey from one end of the island to another.

 

In between the outer pylons are structures which hold up the enclosure for the cranes (the only species to be enclosed), and the enclosure itself is completely suspended above the ground for large portions of its area. Different grains would be planted and grown in fields laid out across the island, interrupted and surrounded by hedges. The public walkways that cross the site dissolve at its centre, to create that feeling of re-wilderness, and to encourage exploration. The walkways would rise to span over the (in-use) railway that bisects the site, and duck under the bridges to create vantage points suspended over water, but hidden in darkness.

[woodface]

I decided to use sketch and toon so that I could get a slightly more unified look across the whole project, from hand drawings to renders. This should hopefully allow me to create some good hand/render collages for the final images.

 

So far my renders seem to be taking an absolute age – maybe an hour or so for each one when done sketch and toon style, compared to a couple of minutes if done with the bog standard renderer. What is making my render times so high?

 

I am also not quite getting the effect I want with lineweights and distance. Ideally, outlines would be thick and edge/crease lines thin, but both would decrease in thickness the further away from the camera they were. The ratio between outline and non-outline would stay the same, while the absolute thickness would decline across the whole scene.

 

At the moment, line weights seem to be reducing, but within each object, so that each object in the scene shows the full transition from thick to thin.

 

The attached drawing shows the effect I want.

[edub]

Wow, haven't read all your posts yet, but I saw that photoshop images, and it really caught my interest.

 

I'm on a deadline, but when I have a spare minute, I'll read through your posts to figure out what this is all about.

[woodface]

Today's attempt to model the pylon topiary idea using xfrog. It was much more difficult than I thought. Despite the seemingly maths/rational way that xfrog behaves, I still find it hard to predict how the plant will look when I alter settings, and also find it difficult to think of the right settings to get the plant that is in my head.

 

I know that my problem here is the approach: basically filling up the 'topiary' volume (which I used as the prune object) with as much branch as possible. In a real world topiary/hedge situation, the growth is stimulated by the cutting, and so there is a much larger number of small branches at the edges. I'm not sure what settings I should use to achieve that.

 

My first attempt looked terribly spare – the primary branches 'collided' with the prune object quite close to the trunk, so no branches grew that reached the farthest extents of the prune object.

[woodface]

My second attempt was more rational, and I used a 45 degree screw, so that the direction of the 'pyramids' of the prune object and the direction of the branches would line up, allowing more of the volume to be filled.

 

Perhaps I should try posting at the yahoo xfrog user group for suggestions?