Architecture and Animation (Architectural Design) - Softcover

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In recent years, architectural animation has offered up a whole new field of conceptual and technical possibilities to architects. Whereas some designers are intent on exploring the creative potential that high-end computer software offers, others are experimenting with its production and technical possibilities. Architecture and Animation features the most innovative proponents of the media, while bringing animatory techniques' place in architectural practice under a new level of scrutiny.

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Editorial by Helen Castle

The relationship between architecture and animation is ripe for scrutiny. Over the last decade, animation has emerged in architectural practice as a sophisticated design toy. Initially, at least, animatory techniques were able to impress almost on the strength of their novelty alone. This is true of their use in filmic walkthroughs, as popular presentational gimmicks, and in the adoption in the creative process where they have been responsible for alluring, futuristic images, gyrating through space. In this issue of Architectural Design, animation s place in architecture comes of age. The blind infatuation of the early years is at a close. We are entering a challenging new era, as the relationship is being stretched and tested in every way. Mark Burry in his Our World project at RMIT, in Melbourne, and Tim Durfee and Terry Surjan teaching at SCI-Arc, in Los Angeles, for instance, are using animatory techniques in their studios as a means to question architectural and spatial p! erceptions. A by-product of the introduction of animation has been the folding of time into the creative process. Two contributors, Gregory More and Ali Rahim, tackle this new preoccupation from very different angles. More traces the introduction of time into the medium through the work of early 20th-century animators, while Rahim explores how the use of animation techniques in the creative process might optimise on unpredictable, irreversible and qualitative manner time, as formulated by Henri Bergson. Architects experimentation with animation and other digital techniques has helped to erode the boundaries between different media, if not separate disciplines: Bernard Tschumi uses animation to communicate, virtually, the experiential qualities of one of his own completed buildings, Lerner Hall; Chris Romero constructs hybrid constructions, which integrate computational and physical environments with a range of media components, in order to create installations for public part! icipation; and Tim Durfee employs his architectural knowledge and spatial skills to create an informational infrastructure for a CD-ROM magazine. Far beyond the surface excitement of the last ten years, architects are also realising the more profound potential of animated architecture. For Nicholson, it is life itself the essence, the smile and the flicker across the face. Kas Oosterhuis turns the tables and as technology runs wild, he foresees a time in which digital technology invades the building and becomes the moving object, rendering humans no more than software. Mark Goulthorpe of dECOI and Pia Ednie-Brown, in very different ways, acknowledge animation s emergence as a cultural phenomenon. For Neil Spiller, the evangelist of cyberspace and proselytiser of new technologies, the honeymoon period is over. As a testament to the absorption of animation into architecture, he calls for its more discerning and questioning use.