Los Angeles, California, USA
Installation as part of the Gen(h)ome Project
Curated by Open Source Architecture, Kimberli Meyer, and Peter Noever; The MAK Center of Art and Architecture
Design Team:
Principal: Sean Lally
(Andrew Corrigan, Maria Gabriela Flores)
Vegetation and the accompanying qualities associated with it (micro-climates of temperature, light, scent and color) are often an immediate response when looking beyond architectural form as a means for heightening qualities within existing domestic spaces. The installation ‘Amplification’ looks to these qualities as design materials that can be quantified and acted upon during the design processes for the exploration of spatial constructs and territories beyond that of tectonic geometries. The project is an intervention that works to heighten and manipulate materials and energies often dismissed as qualitative and unquantifiable for visualizing during design innovation. Looking to the courtyard and garden of the Schindler House, the intention is to refrain from constructing or introducing a new system within the space but instead ‘amplify’ and operate upon the materials and energies that characterize and define an existing locale.
Working within existing vegetative and associated climatic and ecologic systems serves as a way to manipulate and operate on a set of existing information that lacks only a means for visualizing and operating upon it as design innovation. The domestic garden provides a range of opportunities in its abilities to introduce and provide spatial qualities, such as variability in bloom, growth size, color, scent, and filtration of light, as well as the micro-climates that are required for varied plant types. The ‘Amplification’ installation highlights an avenue of approach in which the designer today has much a wider and more diverse range of tools and techniques, providing an opportunity to engage and operate upon a broader bandwidth of information during the design process.
Each of the six vitrines located in the garden is identical in its geometric shape, but unique in its interior environment. Each contains a water basin with fluorescent tracer dye, heating systems within the water basin, lighting to detect the fluorescent dyes, fans to direct air currents, and vegetation.
Simulations in COSMOS (a computational fluid dynamic modeling software) permit a visualization of material energies, including thermal transfers and changes in air velocity.
Variables generally associated with a garden, including light, temperature, scent, and air velocity, are uniquely controlled in each of the six units in an attempt to produce distinct micro-climates in and around those shapes.
The inside surfaces of the acrylic vitrines are etched so as to trap condensation, allowing the water to pool in specified areas.
