NEIL M.
DENARI
He received his Bachelor of Architecture
from the University of Houston in 1980 and
a Master of Architecture from Harvard
University in 1982.
His academic research focuses on urban
morphology, utopias, and vivid tectonics.
Neil Denari is principal of Neil M. Denari
Architects and a Professor in the
Department of Architecture and Urban
Design at UCLA.
IDEOLOGY :
Neil Denari became principally concerned
with issues of the dynamic relationship
between architecture and technology,
which has been made manifest in a
variety of ways as technology is
constantly and rapidly changing.
These changes are all part of the larger phenomena - globalization. The relationship
naturally brings up the discourse of representation in architecture and how it is affected by
the development of technology.
He says that digital tools have “fundamentally altered the way in which we conceptualize,
design, and fabricate architecture.”
His drawings were the two dimensional representations of his fully real and three
dimensional designs. The drawings were in no way meant to be a piece of art or beauty;
rather, they only served the purpose to convey the precision and detail necessary to
speak to an architectural - that is three dimensional - conception of space.
His initial works doesnot have any formal models of biological systems hence he lacked
the concepts and abstract terminology evloved by them. After a decade architecture,
concepts and fields such as entropy, cybernetics, self-organizing systems, neural
networks, and complexity have helped construct new formations of meaning, geometry,
and space.
Architects like Neil denari, Eisenmen and Lynn have discarded the eye mind connection
in favor of the transformative power of electronic media and openness towards the
system of metaphor that enable such media.
On the one hand, one perceives a renewed sense of craftsmanship in which computation
and robot-assisted fabrication can “extend the potential of what the hand can do,” in the
words. On the other hand, ever-increasing computational and 3D-modeling power have
nourished a whole field of virtual “screen architecture” that follows in the tradition of
conceptual and utopian proposals.
VERTICAL SMOOTH HOUSE
Neil Denari also employs techniques of folding to produce what he calls a “localized
worldsheet,” consisting of “a single curving sheet that bends into itself, creating invelopes
or internal surfaces that merge seamlessly with the exterior.
In projects such as his Vertical Smoothouse of 1997, Denari used his localized worldsheets
to transgress traditional binarisms of architecture such as inner/outer.
The final architectural form was produced by the interaction of outside forces with more
traditional forms of modernism in the affective space of the site, thereby displacing the
architect subject as the anthropomorphic interpreter of form.
“When the environment is inscribed or folded in such a way, the individual no longer
remains the discursive function; the individual is no longer required to understand or
interpret space.”
One should note that the architectures developed within such affective spaces are not
only products of affect but are also integrated within the affective space itself as yet
another external force.
In other words, affectively produced architectures are affective spaces themselves that
displace their spectators subjectivity.
Since the smooth surfaces of folded architecture are not reducible to generalized concepts
or idealized forms, they resist their viewers interpretation: they are forms in and of
themselves rather than microcosms of a grander vision.
In this way, affective architecture resists subjugation by the optical – that is, the mind-eye
reading of the observer.
Once the environment becomes affective, inscribed within another logic or an ur-logic, one
which is no longer translatable into the vision of the mind, then reason becomes detached
from vision…This begins to produce an environment that “looks back” – that is, the
environment seems to have an order than we can perceive, even though it does not seem
to mean anything
Such an ability to “look back, endows architecture with a new power to deteritorialize the
viewer – a haptic rather than optic ability to induce an affective change rather than effect
an interpretation for rapid visual consumption.
The fold is therefore one strategy for moving beyond the mechanics of vision in favor of a
new relationship to built space: a performative encounter with the other, the outside.
Taken as a larger field of movement, the fold represents a dramatic turn away from
traditional forms and theories of architecture toward a Deleuzean ontology as a positive
building program.
Longitudinal sectional perspective of Neil Denari’s 1998
Multisection Office Block project. The “laminar structure” of
Denari’s localized worldsheets serves as a single continuously
folded structure that mediates between previous binaries such
as “inside/outside” and “vertical/horizontal.” Source: Neil
Denari, Gyroscopic Horizons .
Floor plan and local site plan for Neil Denari’s 1993 Details Design
Studio project, in which Denari mapped the local flows of
information. The project was designed to act as a functional “wall”
that would divide act as an architectural interface between the
clerical and design spaces of the Details company.
Final design for the Details Design Studio project. The
undulating sheet of Denari’s design is a physical model of
information and personnel flows around and through the office
space. “The project creates an information cipher that passes
through the space, becoming in form within the room
itself.”Source: Neil Denari, Gyroscopic Horizons .
Neil Denari designs spherical complex for adidas and Dezeen's
P.O.D.System Architecture project
Neil Denari reveals the spherical building concept he developed for P.O.D.System
Architecture, our new collaboration with adidas Originals.
For the P.O.D.System Architecture project, Dezeen and adidas commissioned five Los
Angeles-based architecture firms to create a series of conceptual structures drawing from
the sports brand's recently launched P.O.D.System sneakers.
The spherical structure is fifteen storeys tall, and incorporates 80 pods that function as
spaces for both living and working.
Interwoven amongst the pods are running ramps and paths for pedestrians, as well as
silos for vertical farming.
The building features 80 live-work pods, linked by pedestrian walkways and elevated
running tracks Denari claims that the project incorporates "a whole world of sustainable
ideas that represent the collective nature of living in cities".
The architect says that his studio drew from a range of different technologies used in the
P.O.D.System sneakers to design the building, such as adidas' trademark Boost shock-
absorbing foam, which is used in the heel of the shoe.
The spherical shape of Denari's proposal draws on an image he found of a ball of adidas
signature Boost material.
The building's spherical shape was influenced by an image Denari's team discovered of a
ball of Boost material, which is made by fusing small, elliptical, thermoplastic pellets
together.
Denari imagines that the residential pods would be constructed from a lightweight mesh
material, referencing the upper of the P.O.D.System shoe.
In addition, Denari says that the pods – which form the building's residential units –
would be made from a lightweight mesh-like material, drawing from the breathable
uppers of the P.O.D.System shoe.
Denari claims that the project incorporates "a whole world of sustainable ideas that
represent the collective nature of living in cities“.
"This project is really thinking about the future of lightweight materials and how they
might be applied to architecture."
Denari’s Virtual Smoothouse –index a similar move away from previous practices of
building, they all nonetheless retain connections to modernism in their use of modernist
forms as initial objects of inflection and in their relatively static methods of determining
local forces.
Denari’s image demonstrates the generation of form from the integration of external
traffic flows. “What I am really trying to create is an architecture that generates
difference out of the repetitive conditions that surround us in the everyday zones that
occur from place to place
