Nous Gallery and algoritmic systems in architecture
I have only recently heard about the new Nous Gallery, curated by Paul Coates and Melissa Woolford, in Kings Cross. I have not had a chance to visit yet, but it looks like it is going to be a valuable new addition to the London Architecture scene. The gallery is focusing upon “projects that have been generated by the process of scripting or by another means of computational processing”.
image from http://www.nousgallery.net
There is currently an interesting looking exhibition of the work of CECA (a research group based at UEL and run by Paul Coates, Christian Derix Pablo Miranda Carranza and Robert Thum), and of ecoLogicStudio (Marco Poletto and Claudia Pasquero). The work on show looks like it shares a lot of common interests with some of the work our students produced a few years ago for the various Cybernetic Ecologies briefs, for the Polytechnic diploma studio at the University of Westminster (run with Karin Jaschke, Will McLean and Pete Silver). The Nous Gallery are looking for new work for the gallery, for a new archive, and also for their journal (to be edited by Lourdes Sanchez Espinell), and hopefully I will get some stuff together from teaching, WAG and my PhD for them.
Paul Coates (together with John Bell and Steve Rich) tutored both my Post Grad Diploma in Architecture, and MSc Computing and Design at the University of East London. I explored developing algorithmic processes that translated othographic digital CAD space into a 3D spatial coordinate system that was distorted by the singularities of view points and vanishing points into fields of perspective - dymanic topological manifolds that embodied fileds of perspectival influence. I developed as a case study the space between Schinkel’s Altes Museum and the old East German people’s palace in Berlin (Der Palast der Republik), which I argued was a space contested by two scopic regimes: a perspectival view drawn by Schinkel from the Altes Museum (which is now used as a planning tool by todays Berlin planners!) and the ‘axonometric’ space of the Palast. OM Ungers had just proposed a very orthogonal pavillion to sit in the middle of this space, and amongst other things I took Ungers’ proposal and ‘re-grew’, or projected it, into the topological manifold/coordinate space that registed these competing points of view.
