I’m trying to figure out how to generate a combination of simulated and real reflections and at the same time produce surface depth. This image shows the interior skin of my project as it stands now. These channels (based on my fat studies) will be chromed and sit behind a curved glass skin, hopefully creating a double mirror effect.
Fat House
I had no idea that this is where I was going with my studio project, but at the moment I’m exploring the concept of fat within architecture. I’m trying to figure out how to produce a kind of cherub eroticism as opposed to something streamlined. Clearly the eroticism part is not there yet.
Perforated Surfaces
This is basic, but useful. While messing around in Maya, I kind of reverse engineered the manner that subdivisions can be attached to one another to create larger more complex topologies. By using the principles for aggregation in reverse, this technique allows you to create geometrically resolved perforated surfaces. The above image shows a simple case: Create a polygon surface, extrude all the faces in plane but with an offset, delete the new faces, and convert to a subdivision surface. This can be done selectively or in more complex scenarios to produce topologically singular perforated surfaces.
Nesting Forms and Fishnet Structure
Nested Forms
Fishnet Structure
I'm working on two complimentary strategies at the moment, nesting forms and fishnet structural systems. The idea is to produce more of a sensual relationship between the forms and then to wrap them with a revealing exoskeleton.
Form Study Refined
Sparkles, Unitards, Make-up, Hair
This is a world I stumbled into Friday night after a few drinks on the town with my friend Peter Zuspan (glad I had my camera). Looks a bit like my studio project.
Orchid
More work for my Greg Lynn + Jeff Kipnis Studio...
Forms and Bodies and Colors
I’m trying to figure out some formal strategies for the house I am designing for the Greg Lynn + Jeff Kipnis studio I'm taking. At the moment I’m still fishing but there’s something about these that is working for me.
Arrests at GOP Convention Are Criticized
Via The Washington Post, written by By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
NEW YORK -- One late August evening, Alexander Pincus pedaled his bicycle to the Second Avenue Deli to buy matzo ball soup, a pastrami-on-rye and potato latkes for his sweetheart, who was sick with a cold.
He would not return for 28 hours. As Pincus and a friend left the deli, they inadvertently walked into a police blockade and sweep of bicycle-riding protesters two days before the Republican National Convention began. "I asked an officer how I could get home," Pincus recalled. "He said, 'Follow me,' and we went a few feet and cops grabbed us. They handcuffed us and made us kneel for an hour."
Police carted Pincus to a holding cell topped with razor wire and held him for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. The floor was a soup of oil and soot, he said, and the cell had so few portable toilets that some people relieved themselves in the corner. Pincus said a shoulder was dislocated as police pulled back his arms to handcuff him. "Cops kept saying to us, 'This is what you get for protesting,' " said Pincus, whose account of his arrest is supported in part by deli workers and a time-stamped food receipt.
Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York's was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.
In the days after the convention, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly stated that "every NYPD officer did a great job." But interviews with state court officials, City Council representatives, prosecutors, protesters and civil libertarians -- and a review of videos of demonstrations -- point to many problems with the police performance. Officers often sealed off streets with orange netting and used motor scooters and horses to sweep up hundreds of protesters at a time, including many who appear to have broken no laws. In two cases, police commanders appeared to allow marches to proceed, only to order many arrests minutes later.
Most of those arrested were held for more than two days without being arraigned, which a state Supreme Court judge ruled was a violation of legal guidelines. Defense attorneys predict a flood of civil lawsuits once protesters have settled the misdemeanor charges lodged against them.
"The overriding problem during the convention was the indiscriminate arrests . . . of people who did nothing wrong," Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said at a City Council hearing last week. "They were arrested because they were . . . participating in a lawful demonstration."
Police officials declined to talk about these problems last week, citing a pending court case. But the city's criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt, said in an interview that city lawyers tried to weed out the unjustly arrested and that the volume of arrests -- more than 1,100 on one day -- overwhelmed the police department. More broadly, Bloomberg and Kelly defended the vast majority of the arrests as justified and described holding cells as clean and humane.
Bloomberg, in interviews during convention week, said that protesters expected prisons to look like "Club Med." Kelly said police encountered other delays as they tried to find separate cells for a large number of female detainees.
The first mass arrests came three days before the Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 convention, when police swooped down on Critical Mass, a loosely knit collective of bicyclists who periodically flood city streets and slow traffic. Police usually tolerate the disruption, but that night officers arrested more than 200. Kelly told New York magazine that he wanted to send protesters a message.
The next few days were quiet, and a quarter-million-strong march went forward Aug. 29 without incident.
But the mood changed Aug. 31, when police made 1,128 arrests. Anarchists had pledged a day of resistance, blocking traffic. Police arrested hundreds, and civil liberties lawyers on the scene described most arrests as lawful.
But farther downtown on the same day, the War Resisters League, a decades-old pacifist group, was readying a peaceful march from Ground Zero to Madison Square Garden, where it intended to conduct a civil disobedience "die in."
A video provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows police commanders laying out the ground rules: As long as protesters did not block traffic, they would not get arrested during the walk north. (No permit is required for a march on a sidewalk as long as protesters leave space for other pedestrians to pass.) Within a block or two, however, the video shows marchers lined up on the sidewalk, far from an intersection, as a police officer announces on a bullhorn: "You're under arrest."
"They came with batons, bicycles, they came with netting," said the Rev. G. Simon Harak, a Jesuit priest. "The kind of forces you expect to be turned on terrorists was unleashed on us."
Police arrested 200 people, saying they had blocked the sidewalk.
About the same time Tuesday, several other groups of protesters started walking two abreast from Union Square, the city's historic protest soapbox, to Madison Square Garden. However, several demonstrators say -- and photographs show -- that police soon stopped them, asked them to raise their hands and arrested them.
Throughout the week, police also picked up dozens of people who appeared to have nothing to do with demonstrations, the New York Civil Liberties Union said. Among those swept up by police were several newspaper reporters, two women shopping at the Gap, a feeder company executive out for dinner with a friend, and Wendy Stefanelli, a costume designer with the TV show "Sex and the City," who was walking to get a drink with a friend.
She saw a police officer pushing a demonstrator against a wall and asked him to lay off. Police flooded the street, and she was arrested. "I don't know how this could happen," Stefanelli, 35, told the City Council last week. "I was coming from work."
Bloomberg has acknowledged that police may have arrested some innocent bystanders, but he suggested that it was partly their fault.
"If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest, you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll get tied up with it," he said on a weekly radio show on WABC.
Police hauled those arrested to newly built holding cells in a former bus depot on the Hudson River. In interviews, two dozen protesters from six states described floors covered in oil and officers who denied access to family and lawyers.
During this time, Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne twice stated to The Washington Post that most protesters had been released after six or seven hours. Only on Thursday, the last day of the convention, did he acknowledge the much longer delays.
Last Friday, Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, attributed the problems to a glut of arrests. Other city officials have spoken of state delays in processing fingerprints.
But senior police officials had said for months that they anticipated 1,000 arrests a day during the convention. Citing such warnings, state court officials, prosecutors and Legal Aid lawyers doubled staffing and opened extra courtrooms during convention week.
"What happened for several days is that we had resources available and we simply were not getting the bodies produced, the defendants in the courtroom," said David Bookstaver, spokesman for the state office of court administration.
State officials also released figures showing that they had processed 94 percent of all fingerprints within one hour.
The backlog created a legal crisis for the city. State Supreme Court Judge John Cataldo held officials in contempt of court. "These people," Cataldo said of those arrested, "have already been victims of the process."
His order resulted in the release of almost 500 people. Tricia Schriefer of Milwaukee had spent two days trying to find her daughter, Claire, 19, a college student who had been arrested Aug. 31. Tricia Schriefer called the police and city offices, only to be told that her daughter was in a legal twilight.
Her daughter was finally released -- without charges -- after Cataldo issued his ruling. "To be held for 50 hours and not be charged . . . it's pretty outrageous," Schriefer said. "It's just counter to everything I had understood about our legal process."
Since the convention ended, protesters have flocked daily into Manhattan Criminal Court, where most of them are accepting misdemeanors and violations -- charges that would typically carry no jail term. The difference between them and someone caught double-parking is that the protesters already had spent two days in jail.
"Too many New Yorkers were willing to look away," said Norman Siegal, a civil liberties lawyer who is representing Pincus. "We don't lose our rights overnight with a big bang; we lose them incrementally over time."
479GW Animation for Venice Biennale
I’ve just finished an animated movie on Archi-Techtonics 497 GW building in New York, which will be shown in the 2004 Venice Biennale. The project uses a rule based system in Flash to generate the animation sequences, all of which are rendered in Maya and then compiled in After Effects.
Bloody Hearts
I'm in a design studio taught by Greg Lynn and Jeff Kipnis this semester and this is my first little bit of work. See the brief of the studio here. So far it's amazing.
Convention Detention
Via The Village Voice, written by Tom Robbins:
Among those Mayor Bloomberg would have "just plead guilty" to arrest charges stemming from the Republican National Convention is Alex Pincus, 28, who spent 27 hours in jail and suffered a dislocated shoulder—all while trying to get chicken soup for his ailing girlfriend.
A graduate student in architecture at Columbia University, Pincus and a friend rode their bikes over to the Second Avenue Deli at the corner of East 10th Street on Friday evening, August 27. In addition to the soup, they bought corned beef and pastrami sandwiches, latkes, and soda. As they were waiting, they saw that the block had filled with bicyclists. These, they later learned, were some of the 5,000 people who had taken part in the Critical Mass ride, pedaling through Manhattan streets shouting anti-Bush slogans. When Pincus and his pal, Isa Wipfli, 29, went to retrieve their own bikes, they found that police had cordoned off the block at both ends. Pincus approached a nearby officer. "I said, 'Hi. We're just here buying dinner. We're not involved. How do we get out of here?' " Pincus said the cop led them down the street and then called two other police officers over, and shouted, "These guys!"
Pincus and Wipfli were immediately seized. "We tried to show them the bags of food and the receipt. We said, 'Look, it's still warm.' They wouldn't listen." One officer took Wipfli's bag and looked inside. "He said, 'Mmm, sandwiches. Looks good,' " said Pincus. What Pincus was more worried about was his chronically ailing shoulder as cops pulled his arms back and placed him in plastic flex-cuffs. "I tried to tell them I can't put it in that position, that it will dislocate. Instead, they pulled my shoulder out of its socket. The pain was tremendous."
Taken to the improvised holding pens at Pier 57 on the West Side, Pincus pleaded with police to at least let him be cuffed in front to ease the pain. "I must've tried to explain to 10 different people until they finally took me to see a nurse. She didn't know what to do, so they took me to St. Vincent's Hospital." On the way there, an apologetic officer told him that under normal circumstances, Pincus would be out of jail already. "He said usually I'd be released within two, three hours. But they had decided to hold people overnight to keep them off the streets so that they'd get the message and not do it again."
On Sunday, Bloomberg insisted that there is not "one shred of evidence" that protesters were kept locked up longer than usual. But he has blocked all efforts to find out. Last week his administration boycotted a hearing of the Committee on Governmental Operations called by Deputy City Council Majority Leader Bill Perkins, who was trying to get some answers about city arrest and detention policies during the protests. Perkins has vowed to issue subpoenas to city officials to compel their appearance, but no subpoena has been issued yet. Perkins said Council Speaker Gifford Miller is personally trying to reach an agreement with the administration to have officials appear before another hearing to be held in early October.
Just how Michael Bloomberg has handled the civil-liberties issues stemming from the convention—his refusal to allow an anti-war rally in Central Park and the controversies surrounding police treatment of protesters—would seem to be a likely issue for those eager to seek his job next year. But the top contenders have been mostly silent on the issue.
Miller, who has raised $3.3 million for a potential citywide race next year, is pushing the mayor to send representatives to the next hearing, aides said. But the council speaker declined to be interviewed about his own views on the subject of how the city handled the convention arrests.
He wasn't the only one ducking the issue. Comptroller William Thompson, another would-be Democratic mayoral contender, also begged off, citing the (largely administrative) role his office plays in overseeing legal claims against the city that will arise from the arrests.
In response to Voice questions, Manhattan borough president C. Virginia Fields, another mayoral wannabe, said she was disappointed in the city's performance. "We all knew, almost a year in advance, that hundreds of thousands of protesters were coming to New York," she said. "We all made the assumption that this is what the police department and city were preparing to address—not violating civil liberties or keeping people locked up for more than 24 hours without being arraigned."
"Detaining people for over 24 hours for the equivalent of a parking ticket is way over the top," former Bronx borough president Freddy Ferrer, a likely candidate in 2005, told the Voice. "The council is appropriately holding hearings, and the administration should appropriately answer questions. [Police commissioner] Ray Kelly is a good guy, but that doesn't give him immunity from answering in public."
Actually, as Perkins and several witnesses at the hearing pointed out, it's not that the mayor and Kelly aren't talking about the convention arrests; they're just picking their spots.
The two men authored a joint New York Post op-ed piece on September 10 hailing their own performance as a success, and insisting that Pier 57—where protesters said they were forced to lie down on oil-coated, rash-producing floors—"was run in a humane fashion and was well-equipped." Delays in processing arrestees had occurred, they wrote, "but not before nearly 1,200 protesters decided to break the law" on August 31 during a day of multiple demonstrations. Because of that upswell, "it shouldn't come as a surprise that waiting time [for release] may exceed the norm."
At the hearing, however, lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union produced a videotape of one mass arrest indicating that many of those jailed that day had not actually participated in civil disobedience. The tape showed police officials arresting more than 100 people who were peacefully walking near ground zero, heeding police orders to not block the sidewalk.
Kelly also told New York magazine's Robert Kolker that the Friday night arrests at which Pincus and his friend were picked up were part of a purposeful get-tough strategy. "Kelly admits now that he was sending a message," Kolker wrote. " 'It was clear,' [Kelly] says, 'that if they succeeded on Friday night, you were going to see a lot more of this when the convention kicked in.' "
If that was the direction that top police commanders issued to their troops, then it's little wonder that soup-and-sandwich-buying bystanders like Pincus and Wipfli got swept up in the nets. Last Friday, Pincus, wearing a suit and tie, showed up in Manhattan criminal court, where he pled not guilty to two counts of disorderly conduct and one count of parading without a permit, all violations punishable by up to 15 days in jail.
"I think Bloomberg and Kelly thought there would be a lot of praise for keeping the city quiet," said civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel, who, along with Earl Ward, represented Pincus. "They'd floated the idea there was going to be all this violence, and they kept saying, 'We're prepared. Citizens can go about their business.' Well, what about this citizen?"
THE REPUBLICANS: THE CONVENTION IN NEW YORK -- THE POLICE; With Restraint and New Tactics, March Is Kept Orderly
Via The New York Times, written by Michael Slackman and Al Baker:
Plainclothes police officers on stylish Italian motorscooters herded bicycle-riding demonstrators into thick orange nets stretched across intersections. Airborne spy cameras on blimps and helicopters monitored the crowd. Digital video cameras were used to tape arrest scenes and collect evidence for later use in court. A military-inspired sound device was ready to disperse crowds with shouted orders or painful blasts of noise.
After more than a year of planning and training, the New York Police Department oversaw yesterday's giant protest march by combining traditional methods of crowd control -- from undercover officers who infiltrated the crowd to a huge show of force -- with a variety of new techniques that clearly took some of the protesters by surprise.
The combined methods appeared effective at keeping yesterday's marchers where the police wanted them to be, and even protest advocates praised the police for their overall restraint, noting in particular that individual officers did not allow themselves to be provoked by the very few attempts to incite them.
When one protester threw what looked like feces at a row of young police officers on Seventh Avenue outside Madison Square Garden, they stood frozen and did not flinch, even to wipe away what turned out to be pieces of cardboard. When a group of protesters climbed atop some construction scaffolding, officers coaxed them down, then let them leave without arrest.
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This was part of the strategy that is beginning to define one of the greatest tests the Police Department has seen in recent years, not only dealing with successive days of protests, but doing so as journalists from all over the world are watching. Officers were drilled on teamwork, trained to respond to a supervisor's orders and never to react to a simple taunt.
When officers were ordered to make arrests, they acted quickly with precision, taking more than 200 people into custody yesterday, though at times over the weekend they moved so quickly that, it appears, they also swept up innocent bystanders who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even some of the Police Department's most persistent critics reluctantly gave the police good marks, though several said most of the credit for good behavior belonged to the demonstrators.
''A quarter of a million people made a commitment to a peaceful legal march,'' said one of yesterday's marchers, Ronald Kuby, the civil rights lawyer from New York who gave his own unofficial estimate of the crowd size. ''They were the ones who kept the peace. They were the ones who were well behaved. So this notion that the police did a good job is true only to the extent that the demonstrators themselves had a powerful commitment to keep this demonstration peaceful and legal.''
The greatest show of force came at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 34th Street, where the march turned east after moving uptown. On one corner more than a dozen officers sat on horseback, while dozens of other uniformed officers lined the streets. Motorcycles, scooters and vans filled the pavement just beyond the border of the protest zone.
A few yards away, at around 3 p.m., a fire broke out when a papier-mâché float made to look like a dragon was set ablaze. The police quickly blocked off the route at 34th Street and Avenue of the Americas and put the flames out with fire extinguishers. Several people were arrested, one of whom was charged with arson.
For all the preparations to deal with the crowd, it appeared that the police forgot at least one essential detail -- water for the officers who were weighed down with body armor and riot helmets. Officers had to rely on their supervisors to run into local convenience stores to buy water.
Still, over and over, as hundreds of thousands of people marched yesterday, up Seventh Avenue, across 34th Street and down Fifth Avenue, the police showed restraint, turning away, for example, when they were mocked for failing to secure a desired raise from the city. At one point, a large group of demonstrators surrounded a patrol car, waving anarchist flags and taunting the two officers inside. The police officers hit their siren, backed up and drove off. A few uniformed officers arrived and ordered the protesters onto the sidewalks, and the group just melted away.
There were red lines, however, and anyone on a bicycle seemed to be on the wrong side of that line. At a large bike protest on Friday, the police showed they were resolved to keep the bikes from blocking traffic, and they did that again yesterday. Bicycle-riding protesters said that the people in civilian clothing (who they assumed to be police) would ride into the pack of cyclists to slow them down. Protesters said the police strategy seemed to be contain, surge and arrest.
One incident involved a group of cyclists a few blocks away from the parade route. Chris Habib, 29, said police scooters sought to move the cyclists off the street by nudging their tires. He said that as the cyclists reached Seventh Avenue traveling west on 37th Street, they slowed, facing a dilemma. Police blocked any turn south and, the bikers believed that turning north on the southbound avenue would result in instant arrest.
Several bystanders said the police arrested people who were not protesting but happened to be in the area when the police swooped down.
At the Second Avenue Deli, Alexander Pincus, 28, and Isa Wipfli, 29, had just picked up a dinner of matzo ball soup, pirogi, pastrami and corned beef for Mr. Pincus's girlfriend when they stepped outside and saw swarms of police officers and bicyclists. Mr. Pincus said he and Mr. Wipfli approached a police officer looking for a way out.
''They took our bikes and handcuffed us,'' Mr. Wipfli said. ''We were like, 'Look at the food. It's still warm.' They wouldn't listen to anything we said.''
Art Space
I'm working at Archi-Tectonics this summer – so far so good. On my first day, Winka asked me to design a facade treatment for a two day competition.
Recon X in Space
David Boira helped me put together this short animation that re-imagines our Recon X furniture piece in outer space. There really isn’t much of a point to it other than the fact that I wanted to learn After Effects.
Kinematic Surface + CNC Milled Foam
I designed these display pieces with David Boira using a kinematic machinery that I built in Maya. They are going to be used for the GSAPP final show as display surfaces for the work built in our studio this semester. They were CNC milled out of high density foam at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles by our new friend Bryan Flaig.
Recon X Space Tracers
David Boira and I are using After Effects and Illustrator to make graphic tracers in this animation for Jose Sanchez's Advanced Digital Design seminar .
The Terminal
This is the final image of my presentation in Hernan Diaz Alonso's final review.
Between Form and Ornament
The goal of my research this semester has been to produce an architectural system that situates itself somewhere in the blurry space between structure, surface, form and ornament — hopefully that is beginning to come across in the work.
