FLUID STRUCTURES v.1.2

STRUCTURES 

In architecture, structures are the building’s weapons against gravity but also its programmatic strategies.

In a more general way, structures are creating complex organizations in a mass of abstract elements, defining relations of dependency among them: the rules.

Systems are applying and duplicating structures to install stability and durability, where they don’t exist and even in fields where those terms can’t or shouldn’t survive.

Structures are essential to assure harmony, which doesn’t mean: stability, in a group of elements.

In nature neither in contemporary world, elements aren’t living in a closed territory, recycling their self perpetually. Structures are confronted to each others, at the speed of electrons and communication paths, transforming themselves.

Mankind always had the will to observe and classify natural structures, including them in a stable system: eco-system. Nature is not a system; it’s a mass of structures adapting themselves, very fast, to each others in a state of endless emergency: life.

Systems are the abstract inventions of the humans to perpetuate structures, through space and time, to install the rules of a group on another.

Structures are real and are creating formal concepts. Systems are abstract and are serving personal interests.

FLUIDS

Fluids are usually used to transport thermal or hygienic comfort into buildings. Fluidity, as a sensation and as a concept, can also appear in architecture, by the use of ‘’structural tricks’’ during the design process.

Fluids belong to the largest state of matter in the universe. They don’t have any precise form and are adapting themselves to the surrounding information, faster than solids.

By their dynamic abilities, fluids always find the shortest path between two points, they dance with topography on a music played by gravity; they don’t create systems because of their eternal movement and transformations.

Different fluids can be mixed together to get new properties, being more efficient.

Where structures are creating differences and categories: limits; fluids are following the path of continuity between elements, carrying information and linking structures together, to provide them the possibility of change.

Structures are building space while fluids are transforming our perception of time.

FLUID STRUCTURES

Architecture has a difficult position in our contemporary world; it has to establish structures stable enough to support the emergency of immediate use, and fluid enough to follow future, fast, mutations in behaviors and environment. This is not a challenge reserved for architecture, but also for the other structure-creating fields.

To create fluid structures is to deal with the conception of spaces, generous enough to feel comfortable, not only by their quantity but by the feeling that they offer. It focuses on sub-spaces, creating links and information paths through a building, giving a sensation of fluidity by the change of our perceptions at each displacement.

Going through a fluid structure is like preparing ourselves to perpetual change, to instability.

Fluid structures can’t become a system, because they contain in their origins the germs of their future transformations, they can’t be duplicated without a mutation of themselves.

Fluid structures give to each unit of a group a potential power to modify the structure itself, in a will of never ending transformation process, respecting other elements: Expression of freedom of the individual in a collectivity…….expression of democracy.

Sinan Logie         December 2000