ENANTIOMORPH[AO]

a|Um STUDIO:
Ed Keller & Carla Leitao

PROJECT TEAM:
NEW YORK
_ Roland Snooks [Design Lead]
_ Ezio Blasetti
_ Dave Pigram

LOS ANGELES
_ Daniel Vasini
_ Emiliano Espasandin

LISBON
_ Claudia Sisti, EXTERNA Lda. [Landscape Consultant]
_ Valdemar Leitao, Umasideia Lda. [Structural Consultant]

Chirality (Greek handedness, derived from the word stem χειρ, ch[e]ir - hand) is an asymmetry property important in several branches of science. An object or a system is called chiral if it differs from its mirror image. Such objects then come in two forms, which are mirror images of each other, and these pairs of mirror image objects are called enantiomorphs (Greek opposite forms) or, when referring to molecules, enantiomers. A non-chiral object is called achiral (sometimes also amphichiral).

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The system was seeded with different dreamers searching for paths inflected by light.

The movements they made entwined as they grew slowly.
Dense and rare, they held themselves and split free. Moist and dry, they broke the spell of being. Orders of daylight fill the structure and reflect through seasons; orders of season hack the structure and burst with light.
The system is a medium that measures impulses and holds dual growth in a kind way, an intelligence made of fragility, elasticity and interdependence. It offers movement and distance, through scale and growth, between the rumors of the city and the sighs of living.

(The species talk through creation, projection, reflection of the interior where all met, and the external where they now always dwell.)

The species of the garden belong to new ecologies of chlorophyll and illusion:
   * those who grow slowly towards the light, in the dark, medium and bright light
   * those who project light and sound
   * those who hold all the others through days and nights and carry
     the smiles of the house, like mirrors of might.

The garden hacks itself and turns into a star.

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ENANTIOMORPHAO: PROJECT CONCEPT

Tiling patterns were studied for their density. The site was mapped as a set of fields. This map then delineated lines of sight, light intensity, areas of shadow, points of dry or moist growth, and was used to develop scripts that deployed tiling geometry across the site within an envelope of iteration. These scripts in Maya and GC morphed between triangular, pentagonal and hexagonal geometry, and iterated the panels in varying density according to our mapping studies. 

The tiled panel geometries function as overlapping screens for video projection and art installations at the Schindler house; as well they function to direct light and views on the site, and to mediate between the Schindler site and its neighbor sites. 

The tiles are the organizing system and generative edges for a minimal surface that, in thin shell concrete, connects all the tiles, functions as structure, and is a substrate for a complex vertical garden. Surface Evolver was used to develop this continuous minimal surface, and the topology of this surface was adjusted according to proximity to the new building to the south, as well as the plant types and light conditions the project creates on the Schindler site.

We understood the plants as a neural network in the site- a fragile/elastic/flexible intelligence around the mass of the wall. To deploy the garden across the minimal surface, a Rhino script was used to analyze the geometry of the minimal surface structure; working with our landscape consultant, this script determined the plant species that would best adhere to the different angles and light conditions. 

Every plant generates its own spatiotemporal field. Some believe that these can be seen with kirlian photography- the aura of the plant, which includes [in the Deleuzean sense] its literal temporal thresholds of engagement with the living landscape. In the Enantiomorphao, the plants merge with the ontological becoming other of the wall itself, which will metamorphose not only the husk of the Schindler house, but will reach out into Los Angeles as well. Los Angeles' time plane will become non-relative, as this autonomous, trans-temporal act of architecture meets the organic life and media systems thru the crucible we are deploying on the site.

In the Enantiomorphao, DNA-like components of living tissue, geometry, program and culture mix in world lines that connect to other bodies in the space of the city's game board. The project as a polemic in the city demands a powerful strategy that can colonize this site. An arts program curating video and audio installations, which use the wall system as a set of quasi-public projection screens, activates one element in the neighborhood which can function as a stealth social condenser. With occult scale shifts, site super-scaling, dimensional alteration, and pattern iterations the project addresses the molecular as well as the macroscale in the city to reinvent the fabric and landscape of imagination. 

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'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law-
love is the law, love under will.'

Enantiomorph
the monster dragon
devours wandering philosophers
spits out something new
and computationally irreducible

'Howway tha hyem, tha muggish enantiomorph.'

'Vai para trás a seu próprio universo
você enantiomorph selvagem.'