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Voxel Space, Material Distributions

Stylianos Dritsas, Alexandros Tsamis, Lydia Kallipoliti

Abstract:

The valued contribution of the digital in architectural design can be traced on the accessibility routes it offered; the conduits established between other domains of knowledge and the ability for interdisciplinary research and experimentation. In parallel to the digital medium’s primary results of an elusive architectural form, computation has opened up channels that allowed for a cultural exchange of a distinctive kind, through the flux of paradigms and their breeding. We identify our activity engrafted in this context of crossbreeding. Inspired or just fascinated by the processes of spatial representation in medical digital imaging, we revisit our assumptions of architectural space and experiment.

Reconstruction, in medical imaging, refers to a process of recording a body’s substance, defying the qualitative presence of function, consistency and form. Minimal spatial entities or basic point atoms become registration devices of variant data properties, which are used, for recovering a volumetric representation of the body. The analogy of a digital image composed of pixels, picture elements with actual dimensions, serves as an example of the nature of this representation of a voxel constituent space. In this sense, reconstruction becomes a process of collecting ‘raw information’ from an environment -a target context- aiming to recompose a collective object of diaspora; this implies that reconstruction as an alternate mode of mapping withstands given abstractions, such as geometry, and focuses rather on an ambient distribution of properties. Reconstruction has no hope or ultimate goal for a global understanding and/or of an abstraction of its target context into principal elements and processes; it is familiar with its partiality and exploits the perceptual bottlenecks.

This particularly bizarre mode of registering information is an emergent and intrinsic condition of the digital. The medium is not employed in order to represent a simulated environment, but rather it has produced its own meta-product/paradigm; a voxel-based space. Reconstruction exudes potential in challenging given assumptions deeply instilled in architecture, such as the perception of space, crudely via geometric configurations. It becomes a vehicle for design, which defers immediate formal expression. Space therefore can be thought of as a scaffold of distributed properties and behaviors. Objects temporarily crystallize around information that becomes for some reason prominent. For instance, material properties, conditions of light, functional aspects and form are treated simultaneously through principles of proximity/coincidence/relevance. Design then becomes a procedural expression of mediated perception and injection of desire. By assigning material attributes to voxel constituent space, one can imagine the emergence of a material archipelagos, exceeding the limitations of intricate plastic wraps and prodding into a reality where distribution of material in space becomes part of the digital equation.