Final Reading and Assignment

Read Swarm Tectonics by Neil Leach

f ’’’’(4x4) An Intensive Architectural Intervention

“If we divide to volumes in half we end up with two equal volumes, each half the extent of the original one. Intensive properties on the other hand are properties such as temperature and pressure, which cannot be so divided”.

-Manuel Delanda

“Extensive systems obey an internal order that expands without changing its nature. Intensive systems follow a provisional internal order that adapts to, while influencing it’s surrounding. Architecture has configured itself as an extensive system from exigencies and contingencies. An intensive model of the body is defined through the internalization of external, differential, disparate forces such that stability emerges that is greater than the constituent elements”
- Greg Lynn


With the introduction of digital technique, our understating of architectural concepts shift away from the composition of the volume, void, and plane into the formation of the organ, cavity and skin. The vocabulary of tectonics has morphed from the pragmatic to the speculative. The digital culture of building is virtual in nature, the aesthetic is avant-garde, and our conceptual vocabulary reflects these intentions: taxonomy, ingestion, circulation, digestion, morphology, reproduction, prolapse, affinity, armature, orifice, membrane, interface, proformance, and biomimicry.

Intensive intervention

For your final project you will design an intensive system that will be used to produce an architectural intervention with Tadao Ando’s 4x4 house.
Throughout this course we have used various digital techniques to explore the virtual production of Affordence and Affect. Using these techniques you will design a system based on emergent behaviors. Conceptually this system is an intensive formation, and through an aggregate process it will grow and expand itself into an architectural intervention- an intensive architectural Intervention.

Right now you should have the Tadao Ando 4x4 house and the site modeled.

Render the model in perspective and section and upload it to the blog by 3/25.

In your first set of drawings you will design an intensive system. This system’s geometry should be defined by its emergent behaviors. Your systems should be derived from diagramming types of material organizations- using four inspirational images to produce the diagrams.

After establishing the basic geometric behaviors. You will explore 4 systematic interactions with various site elements and forces such as: internal conditions of the house, external conditions of the house, conditions of the ground, water, sun, and wind.

Upload these images to the blog by 4/13.


The second set of drawings will explore how each of these behavioral conditions create an aggregate formation, and how this aggregate formation leads to membrane(s), aperture(s), structure(s) and circulation(s).

Upload these images to the blog by 4/27.


Final Deliverables

A CD that contains at least

-2 perspective renderings of the 4x4 house before the intervention
-A page of diagrams that explains the intensive system, how and why it performs, how the geometry works and text.
-5 rendered perspectives (1400x1000) at 200 dpi. (3 external 2 internal)
-1 rendered exploded component perspective
-2 perspective sections, vector rendered, illustrator -line drawings
-1 Roof plan- line drawings - illustrator photoshop
-2 plans- line drawings - illustrator photoshop
-2 elevations line drawings - illustrator photoshop
- 400 word text explaining your design intentions. This text should use the concepts and language from the class readings.
-All Maya files


Formatted on 17x11 paper 200 dpi, 2 renderings per page, text should be graphically imbedded

All in a 10 to 12 page pdf.