caustics
Caustic (optics)
Caustics made by the surface of water.
In optics, a caustic is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. The caustic is a curve or surface to which each of the light rays is tangent, defining a boundary of an envelope of rays as a curve of concentrated light.
Hiding Images in Plain Sight
An Article by Matt FerraroI recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It's a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent. A tiny window.
But it has the magic property that if you shine a flashlight on it, it forms an image.
Caustic Engineering
An Article by Geoff ManaughA piece of milled plexiglass acting as a projecting lens; via the Computer Graphics and Geometry Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
New milling techniques applied to glass and plexiglass panels could be used to “create windows that are also cryptic projectors, summoning ghostly images from sunlight.”
[Pauly and Bompas] hope that the technique will be used in architectural design, to create windows that mould sunlight and throw images or patterns onto walls or floors,” which, if timed, milled, and manipulated just right, could produce a slowly animated sequence of images being projected by an otherwise empty window during different times of day.
Architectural Caustics
A Research PaperTo control the shape of a caustic pattern generated by a specular or refractive surface, we need to solve the inverse problem: how can we change the surface geometry, such that incident light is redirected to produce a desired caustic image?
Einmal Ist Keinmal
Jacked in
In digital design, products and services are frequently imagined and implemented placelessly: as if the consumer were jacked into The Matrix, and considering this product or that product from among an infinite set of choices at an infinitely-provisioned mercantile. The things we make are good, by this way of reasoning, if they fit the market’s demand.
Immer wieder
My attitude toward Alexander’s teachings prior to experiencing the places and spaces realized in his practice was akin to what Alan Watts said about certain teachings in The Bible:
Sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, commandments are not given in the expectation that they will be obeyed, but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them.
Today, my answer is unequivocal. My interpretive lens: literal. Time and again, across cultures and continents and islands and oceans, in five different places now I’ve examined the evidence, and am persuaded.
Nicht nur einmal: immer wieder.
But what if it is?
Occasionally, one or two students out of sixty would take this task [of timeless thinking] up with some seriousness, and before too long would visit me in office hours to see if I could relieve them of their distress. They needed me to assure them that what Alexander says in his books isn’t…you know…real. For a number of reasons, not the least of which being the seeming incompatibility between how they’d been taught to think about design and what these teachings insist one must do in order to be, as they might say, “doing it right.”
And having never been to any of Alexander’s buildings, I’d simply turn the question around and ask “but what if it is real?”