A A _ D R L P H A S E _ I I _ F I N A L _ P U B L I C _ J U R Y 1 7 / 1 8 _ J A N U A R Y _ 2 0 1 3
Architec t ural As s o ciatio n S ch o ol o f Arch ite c tu re ProtoDes ig n v.3.0 MArch (Archi tec tu re a n d U rb a n ism ) A A Lec ture Hall 3 6 B edford S quare, Lo n d on WC 1 B 3 E S http:// w w w.aas cho o l.a c.u k/ a a d rl /
Presentation Schedule 00 AA DRL Programme Staff 01 Design Research Laboratory 02 Proto-Design 3.0 03 Behavioural Machines 04 Semiological Crowds 05 Reconsidering Elementarism 06 Behavioural Matter 3.0 Invited Critics Student Projects
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Cover Image: Valerie Bennett
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THURSDAY
17 JANUARY 2013
SESSION 1 10:00 Introduction 10:30 Spoon Benders 10 11:30 I Arch 11 12:30 Spores 12 13:30
Lunch Break
SESSION 2 14:30 Syntax Error 13 15:30 Linear Complex 14 16:30 thinkTANK 15 17:30 End
FRIDAY
18 JANUARY 2013
SESSION 2 10:00 Introduction 10:30 Balls 2 The Wall 17 11:30 Collapse–Collide 18 12.30 Dynamic Linearity 19 13:30
Lunch Break
SESSION 2 14:30 RES 20 15:30 Minus 1 21 16:30 26˙ 22 17.30 30 minute concluding comments 19.00 Keynote Lecture: Tom Wiscombe, 'Composite Thinking'
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Director
Theodore Spyropoulos
Minimaforms, London, Director
Founder
Course Masters
Patrik Schumacher
Shajay Bhoosan Robert Stuart-Smith Philippe Morel
Course Tutors
Pierandrea Angius Mollie Claypool Ryan Dillon Manuel JimĂŠnez GarcĂa Jose Sanchez Mostafa El-Sayed
Technical Tutor
Programme Coordinator
Albert Taylor
Ryan Dillon
Zaha Hadid Architects, London, Partner
Zaha Hadid Architects, London, Lead Researcher Kokkugia, Partner; Balmond Studio, London, Design Consultant, ECZT Architecture, Paris, Co-founder
Zaha Hadid Architects, London AA History and Theory Studies, Lecturer; UCL MArch Unit 19, London AA History and Theory Studies, Lecturer; EGG Office, Designer Minimaforms, London; madmdesign, Director, London Plethora Project, London, Director Zaha Hadid Architects, London, Designer
AKT II Consulting Structural and Civil Engineers, London
AA History and Theory Studies, Lecturer; EGG Office, Designer, London
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AA DRL
Design Research Laboratory Architecture and Urbanism
The DRL is a 16-month post-professional design programme, leading to an MArch (Architecture & Urbanism) degree. For over a decade, the DRL has been organised as an open-source design studio dedicated to a systematic exploration of new design tools, systems and discourses, targeting design innovations in architecture and urbanism. The DRL actively investigates and develops design skills with which to capture, control and shape a continuous flow of information across the distributed electronic networks of today’s rapidly-evolving digital design disciplines. Learning in the studio is project-based and includes the development of comprehensive, year-long design projects, supported by design workshops and seminars, applying new forms of associative logic towards the conception and materialisation of comprehensive design proposals. Design work is pursued by collective self-organised design teams within four parallel design studios, addressing an overall design research agenda through shared informationbased diagrams, data, models and scripts. The collaborative structure of the DRL design studio enables design teams to address the programme’s design research agenda through a sustained body of design work, which is regularly evaluated by student design teams, tutors and invited critics, and is channelled towards the development of recursive, research-based design methodologies and comprehensive design outcomes. DRL studio projects begin in January each year with the formation of design teams that carry forward discoveries made in Phase I workshops and seminars in Term 1. The design research work presented by twelve design teams in this two-day public jury in the AA Lecture Hall concludes Phase II of the Design Research Lab MArch programme’s two phases.
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PROTO-DESIGN 3.0
The invited jury will review the final phase of the third full year design research agenda called Proto-Design. Proto-Design investigates digital and analogue forms of computation in the pursuit of systemic design applications that are scenario and time based. Considering controls systems as open acts of design experimentation, the DRL examines production processes as active agents in the development of architecture. Behavioural, parametric and generative methodologies of computational design are coupled with physical computing and analogue experiments to create dynamic and reflexive feedback processes. New forms of spatial organisation are explored that are not type or site dependant but examine scenarios that evolve as ecologies and environments that seek adaptive and hyper-specific features. This performance-driven approach seeks to develop novel design proposals concerned with the everyday. The iterative methodologies of the design studio focuses on the investigations of spatial, structural and material organisation, engaging in contemporary discourses on computation and materialisation in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. Four parallel research studios, run by Theodore Spyropoulos, Patrik Schumacher, Robert Stuart-Smith and Philippe Morel, explore the possibilities of the Proto-Design studio. Theodore Spyropoulos’ studio, Behavioural Machines, investigates behaviour as the means to explore self-regulating and deployable soft systems within the field of scientific enquiry. Semiological Crowds, led by Patrik Schumacher focuses on the design of parametric prototypes that intelligently vary general topological schemata across a wide range of parametrically specifiable site conditions as a campus. Robert Stuart-Smith’s studio, Behavioural Materialism, explores how non-linear design processes may be instrumentalised to generate a temporal architecture with a designed life-cycle. Philippe Morel’s studio, Reconsidering Elementarism, challenges the contemporary relevance of high-technologies through shelter related architectures that make use of cheap and deployable elemental geometric components.
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Behavioural Machines Theodore Spyropoulos_Tutor | Shajay Bhooshan, Mostafa El-Sayed, Manuel Jiménez García_Assistants
‘Technology Is the Answer, But What Was the Question?’ – Cedric Price ‘There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.’ – R. Buckminster Fuller The studio will continue to explore Proto-Design as a behaviour-based agenda that engages experimental forms of material and computational practice. Examining cybernetic and systemic thinking through responsive forms of prototyping and experimentation the studio will develop synthetic design systems that actively seek to engage and participate in their environment. Projects will explore life-like tendencies that emerge as a product of these interactions. Material and computational synthesis will be sought continuing the studio’s interest in forms of digital materialism. Environmental parameters will stimulate and construct symbiotic partnerships between our synthetic systems and the playpen environments that they will engage an enable. Scenario: Issues of context, site and infrastructure will be challenged, as our systems will be exploring ideas of latency, adaptation and evolution. The aim is to design systems that have the capacity to evolve contextual parameters through direct engagement and feedback. This open systemic approach will seek to test its viability in multiple site interventions evolving solutions and hyper-specificity through this interaction with environmental and social conditioning. Systemic Ecologies for Living: The studio will explore the generative potential of self-regulating phenomena through the development of proto-architectural systems. As Gygory Kepes once said, ‘The dynamic unity of constancy and change has a fundamental role in our intellectual growth. Our clearest understanding of the nature of these complementary opposites has been reached through grasp of the principle of self-regulating systems.’ Our systemic approach will seek to evolve research that examines new forms of living and structuring of human environments. Experimenting through explicit models of interactions, observable patterns and proto-animalistic agency, the studio will explore the capacity for design systems to evolve architectural elements with the capacity to self-structure, respond and evolve. Structural morphologies as genotype/phenotype explorations will construct serial structural prototypes. The aim is to generate systemic relations that are adaptive- and time-based. Beyond deterministic methods of structuring space, issues of duration and populations will evolve a new language of assemblies as collective structures. Models will address implementation scenarios that engage singular/collective orders. Time will serve as a critical agent in the outlining of these systems and their ability to be implemented and organised. The studio will look towards an architecture that can be constructed as an adaptive network of stimulusresponse environments. These synthetic ecologies will seek to redefine how we live in our urban environments.
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Semiological Crowds Patrik Schumacher_Tutor | Pierandrea Angius_Assistant
All social life is communicative interaction, taking place in designed spaces among designed artefacts. These spaces and artefacts help to set up and define the communicative situations unfolding within and around them. All design is communication design. The societal function of urban and architectural design is the innovative ordering and framing of communicative interaction. The designed settings/spaces are themselves communications that define, premise and prime the communicative interactions that are expected to take place within that frame. Each frame is embedded within a system of frames that can be understood as a system of signification. Architecture’s task has three dimensions: organisation, articulation and signification. The three criteria of a successful design are thus its physical spacing/accessibility, its perceptual palpability, and its cognitive intelligibility. Every designer adapts to and intervenes intuitively within the spontaneous and historically evolving semiological system of the built environment. The aim of the project brief is to move from an intuitive participation within an evolving semiosis to an explicit design agenda that understands the design of an architectural complex as an opportunity to design a new, coherent system of signification without relying on the familiar codes found in the existing built environments. A new, purpose built environment for a sufficiently complex social institution so as to warrant and enable the design of an artificial architectural language or system of signification. The designed habitat or work environment would be an information rich, dense built environment that orders and codes/reveals the manifold social interactions to be expected within its spaces. Relevant distinctions in the programme domain are to be correlated with distinctions in the spatial/formal domain. The types of information that are to be encoded are the function type, the social type, and the location type. On the side of the signifier we can distinguish the following dimensions/registers of encoding: the positional dimension the spatial shape dimension. These three dimensions are functionally equivalent and can substitute each other. The designed semiological system should be conceived as a parametric system, i.e. the various distinctions and their correlations are subject to parametric variation. The programme domain, the domain of the signified, is best understood in terms of interaction patterns or communicative activities. These patterns of communicative interaction can be modelled via programmed agents that respond to the coded environmental clues. These agents aggregate and self-organise into crowds. The behaviour of the crowds are specific with respect to their environment and its functional designation. They are semiological, functional crowds. Here crowd modelling goes far beyond the mere simulation of circulatory flows. All intended life processes might be simulated. This implies that – for the first time in the history of architecture – the meaning of the system of signification can enter the digital model (design medium) and thus becomes the object of cumulative design elaboration.
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29:06:2009 ::: 10:00-10:45
Reconsidering Elementarism Philippe Morel_Tutor | Jose Sanchez_Assistant
The studio addresses the relationships between technology, architecture and mathematics by revisiting research of Elementarism in the 1920s and its cybernetic reinterpretations of the 1960s. Architecture, always more intimately connected to computation and the evolution of its related methods and procedures, is now confronted with a blatant paradox. On one hand it attempts to integrate diverse technologies in various ways causing architecture to solely be a vector of transmission for its related economy (for example, cognitive capitalism for which, to use Jeremy Rifkin’s terms, all materiality is just a ‘support for knowledge-value’). On the other hand it attempts to merge completely with technology denying architecture its fundamental qualities and thereby causing it to cease to appear like architecture at all, including in the eyes of the architects themselves – which partly explains the coldness that still accompanies the work of the Russian Productivists or Buckminster Fuller. In both cases, whether architecture transmits technology or becomes one with technology, it seems impossible for it to escape the construction of a technological civilisation and results in a sandcastle which, beyond its fantastic or even sublime character, still threatens to collapse at any moment. Faced with this situation (contrary to our society that is supposed to suffer from a lack of intelligent architectural responses despite the increasingly smart and efficient means at our disposal) viewing technology as a single knowledge – devoid of a purpose that justifies the means – is the only desirable response. Within this framework, architecture would not play any other role than that of an instrument of knowledge, which is content with being formally and materially ‘elementary’ whilst at the same time being theoretically ‘complex’. As a physical construction it would first aim for ensuring the conditions of an Existenzminimum at a time when this is increasingly threatened by fake ‘augmented’ realities. Architecture would not aim for any idealistic or liberal-pragmatic participation in the promotion of material technologies but attempt to make use of innovative concepts from one of the most challenging sector of sciences – the computer sciences – in order to reconsider the full specu- lative potential of Elementarism. Therefore, we can consider models for this architecture within the geometric Elementarism of the early twentieth-century in which a common scientific knowledge materialised, in certain vernacular architectures, which combine constructive simplicity and ornamental wealth as an expression of a shared culture. And going one step further we can look at the example of Islamic sacred architecture that combines the extreme sophistication and spirituality of a small number of its constituent elements with a minimal spatial model – an open but oriented space. By paying new attention to these elementarist variants – geometric, technicist, constructive, structural (thus those of Mies van der Rohe or Peter Eisenman) – the studio aims to define an architecture in tune with ‘the material and spiritual conditions of an era’ (that of computationalism).
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Behavioural Matter 3.0 Robert Stuart-Smith _Tutor | Tyson Hosmer_Assistant
Qualitative Aspects of Building Life Cycle: Our lives endure for twice the amount of time that most of the buildings that we live, work or play within, while other buildings exist for much briefer time frames. We essentially consume buildings, yet unlike other products, the life cycle of a building and its constituent parts is rarely considered important in design – as a responsibility or as an opportunity. Behavioural Matter explores how non-linear design processes may be instrumentalised to generate a temporal architecture with a designed life cycle. Whilst considering environmental principles such as PLM1, DFD2 or Cradle-to-Cradle3, we will seek out the design of more qualitative aspects of a building’s life cycle, that may produce architectonic affects. We will investigate an architecture that is capable of organising and reconstituting material flows – qualitatively. How small should architects think? At what scales is architectural design intent most affectively realised within building? Non-linear processes of formation and micro-material placement fabrication technologies offer a departure from Alberti’s concern with proportions, or Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino canonical architectural system, emphasising a focus on emergent wholes that do not concern themselves with the assembly, expression or proportion of parts but rather with new opportunities in qualitative and temporal aspects of architectural design. Operating at numerous scales within an integrated tectonic, polyvalence may be achieved within the material product. Polyvalence implies that numerous designed affects with multiple desirable attributes may co-exist intrinsically within the design. In designing a polyvalent organisation of matter as architecture, the domain of design is extended beyond current modes of conception and production in order to incorporate more negotiated matter relations that operate within a designed life cycle. Designing Architectural Microclimates: In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond provides arguments for a geographical history of humanity where social, technological and economic change is heavily influenced by geography. Understanding architecture as a smaller type of geography suggests architects may design ‘architectural micro-climates’. In biology, a unique microclimate frequently results in the adaptation and evolution of distinct plants and animals. We will be designing architectural microclimates that aim to facilitate creative spatial appropriation. High Density, Medium to Low Rise Co-Operative Housing: Co-operative housing will be investigated for its socially interactive and negotiated common spaces and its interface with its urban environs. Explored as a high-density medium to low-rise building typology, co-operative housing (such as the German Baugruppe) generates economic and political alternatives for housing within already established urban scenarios. With increasing levels of security infrastructure proliferating in today’s cities, versions of the co-operative housing concept allow varying degrees of controlled semi-public space to exist within the domestic domain.
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INVITED CRITICS
Critics for this two-day Phase 2 Public Jury include: Helen Castle is Editor of Architectural Design (AD) and Executive Commissioning Editor on the UK Architecture list at John Wiley. She has over 20 years of publishing experience on architecture publications. She had her first job as a graduate on AD in the early 90s before working for other publishers and coming back to AD in 1999 to work for Wiley. She has a BA in History of Art and Architecture from the University of East Anglia and a Masters in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. David Jason Gerber has worked for the Steinberg Group, Moshe Safdie, Gehry Technologies and as a project architect for Zaha Hadid. He has held appointments at MIT's Media Lab as a research fellow, as well as numerous teaching and research fellowships at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and currently teaches at SCIARC. He has taught at the AADRL, Innsbruck University, the EPFL Switzerland and has been a guest speaker and critic at Harvard and MIT. Gerber holds a BA in Architecture from the UC Berkeley, an MArch from the AA, MDes and DDes from Harvard University GSD. Adrian Lahoud is an architect, urban designer and researcher. In 2010 he co-edited a special issue of AD titled Post-Traumatic Urbanism featuring Slavoj Zizek. Forthcoming in 2012 are two books, Project for the Mediterranean and Spatial Organisation in Architecture and the City. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial in 2011 and in Korea at the Design Biennale Gwanju in 2011. Currently he is Director of The Bartlett Prospective MArch in Urban Design at UCL. He is also the Coordinator of the MA and a PhD supervisor at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University. Marta MalĂŠ-Alemany is a registered architect from Barcelona and the acting director of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona since July 2011, after co-directing its Master Program for several years. She has taught at MIT, UPENN, UCLA, SCI-ARC and the AADRL. She also directs her own professional studio in Barcelona and has curated several exhibitions on digital fabrication subjects. She graduated from ETSAV-UPC, holds a Masters in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University and is currently a PhD candidate at the ETSAB-UPC.
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Brett Steele is the Director of the AA and AA Publications. He is the founder and former Director of the AADRL Design Research Lab, the innovative team- and network-based MArch programme at the Architectural Association. He is also a Partner of DAL, desArchLab, an architectural office in London, and has taught and lectured at schools throughout the world. Albert Taylor founded Adams Kara Taylor with Hanif Kara in 1995, combines the practice-wide role of overseeing design and technical matters with leading a design group, allowing him to infuse the many projects with which he is involved with cutting edge technology. He has been especially active in building relationships with architects and clients, a role he shares with Hanif. Albert relishes working closely with firms like Foster and Partners, Eric Parry Architects, KPF Architects, Hamilton Associates, Zaha Hadid, Rafael Vinoly Architects and a number of young architectural practices. Peter Testa is Principal-in-Charge of Design at TESTA/WEISER and founding director of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). Testa has taught at MIT, Columbia University GSAPP and Harvard University GSD. He is Esherick Professor of Architecture at the University of California. Since 2004 he has been on the SCI-ARC Faculty where he initiated and designed the SCI-Arc Robotics & Simulation Lab. Testa holds an SMArchS from MIT and is a registered architect in California. He is the recipient of the MIT Innovation Award, three Graham Foundation Awards and the Design Arts Award of the National Endowment for the Arts. Tom Wiscombe is founder and principal of Tom Wiscombe Design, which has developed an international reputation through winning competition entries, exhibitions at major cultural institutions and publications worldwide. His work is part of the permanent collection of the FRAC Centre Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA (San Fransisco and New York). Wiscombe is a senior faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Wiscombe also holds the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship at Yale University. Previously, Wiscombe worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he was Chief Designer for the UFA Cinema Centre, Dresden and BMW Welt, Munich.
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ARACHN[OL]OIDS SPOON BENDERS 17.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Thursday 10:30 Philippe Morel Jose Sanchez Margarita De Bruijn (Netherlands/Mexico), Melika Aljukic (Croatic/Australia), Sreerag Palagnat Veetil (India), Carles Sala Roig (Spain)
The relationship between man and machine have become far more intertwined with the advances in neuroscience and communication, allowing faster and direct symbiotic coexistence. In this scenario, we aim to integrate positive aspects of technology within architectural design processes to create a prototypical system which could be seen as a prosthetic extension of the humane body. Our interest is in a system which utilises the users for the purpose of the creation of shelters. Rapid fabrication the shelters is attained by means of the intelligence embedded in a particular kinematic geometry, called Kaleidocycle. The elemental properties of spatial linkages with simple revolute joints is analysed to develop a machinery to weave and create inhabitable architectural skins. This modular robotic assembly sweeps three dimensional spaces with ruled surfaces of third order during its inversion, which in turn is investigated to be woven by a multiphase weaving mechanism implanted within the machine. Neural interface enables control of the spatial movement of the modular robotic assembly to be able to customise the individual shelters produced in real time. The project inherits the control over the conception, materiality, manufacturing, construction and consumption of inhabitable spaces. It retorts to the socio-political and economic pressures in the global capitalist society today, experimenting with lightweight intelligent materials, affordable and rapid prototyping technologies.
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DESIGN ME I ARCH 17.01 Thursday 11.30 Studio: Patrik Schumacher Assistant: Pierandrea Angius Team: Xuexin Duan (China), Vahid Eshraghi (Iran), Jie Shen (China), Wei You (China) In an opportunity to design a new, coherent system of signification that adapts to, and intervenes within the semiological systems of the built environment, a new artificial architectural language is needed that does not rely on the familiar codes found in the existing built environments. Such a system demands an architectural language grounded on the fundamentals of semiology. This project's proto-system simulates the existing social behaviours of the site. This results in a pattern of occupied territories within the site, demonstrating path networks and the density of occupation. The obtained data is later used for the placement and orientation of buildings. On the global scale, architectural forms are generated to maintain multiple readings by temporarily being clustered. Such possibilities maintain flexibility in the interior organisation and size of space. In the interior scale, the organisation is semiologically encoded through gestalt grouping principles and furniture configurations. Gestalt principles perceptually decompose the space to define the interior organisation while the furniture configuration amplifies this perception while characterising the spaces as events, which become possible through ‘gestalt switches’ made by different light condition and furniture movement and transformation.
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HYPERCELLS SPORES 17.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Thursday 12.30 Robert Stuart-Smith Tyson Hosmer Preety Anand (Germany), Grace Chung (Australia), Letian Li (China), Ecehan Esra Top (Turkey)
Hypercells is a chemical machine; a cybernetic ecology capable of regulating the micro and macro environment by chemically led communication between parts. It is based on separately fabricated multiple component systems, with each component having different lifecycles leading to premature systemic failures in the case of one component failing. The project utilises the physarum polycephalum (slime mould) to process information and self-regulate, relying on intercellular chemical signaling, within an architectural context. The proposed chemical machine is capable of sensing environmental conditions by chemically led communication between components and is capable of self-regulation these environmental conditions. For demonstrating the mode of operation, the chemical machine is situated on the extreme, yet generative environment of Mars. In this context, the chemical machine fulfils a technological need for offering a non-human centric mode of inhabitation, which is given by mode of operation. The function of the chemical machine is not only that of generic architecture, but also a life support for both humans and biology it harbors and also is an active contributor to the greater Mars environment. The technicalities of this thesis have been developed by interscientific collaboration with computer scientists, material scientists and chemical engineers.
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AEROS SYNTAXERROR 17.01 Thursday 14:30 Studio: Theodore Spyropoulos Assistants: Shajay Bhooshan, Mostafa El-Sayed, Manuel Jiménez García Team: Cemil Ceyhan Gonen (Turkey), Konstantinos Psomas (Cyprus), Sara Gemma Sabate Gomez (Spain), Vishu Bhooshan (India) “… the future of control: partnership, co-control, cyborgian control. What it all means is that the creator must share control and his destiny, with his creations.” -Kevin Kelly Aeros, like the name suggests, relates to air, more specifically in the domain of flight. Our research explores the aspect of robotics to generate flight choreographed structures using quad-copters as a fabrication as well as a design tool. The thesis proposes a development of a prototypical system-based on tensioning and dynamic relaxation. The system is realised through a time-based deployment of robotic agents. The research also explores the realm of material behavior by testing deposition strategies and phase changing materials like resin and foam. The emphasis is to question the existing notion of element – node space frame structures by generating an in-situ agent-based system for creating a shelter. A single fabrication process can adapt to generate transitivity from the vertical to horizontal. The system could lead to space creation and deployment strategies in places difficult for present construction systems to reach. We believe autonomous, self-organised fabrication could be a possibility in the near future.
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REFORMATION LINEAR COMPLEX 17.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Thursday 15:30 Patrik Schumacher Pierandrea Angius Yitzhak B. Samun (Israel), Sobitha Ravichandran (India), Anusha Tippa (India), Di Ding (China)
We have developed an interactive and digital design system that challenges the conventional methods of architectural design. It provides a simultaneous feedback between a suggested design and the predicted behaviour from those who are expected to occupy the space. The spatial layout of the project is be generated from behavioural tendencies and communicative patterns placed in a given context that would be observed and analysed, adapted and amended by the designer until reached an optimised outcome. This has also been processed to define the structural composition of the building. The building develops from the human interaction and the communication and the relationships of the people, instead of the visual composition of the geometrical shapes of the building. The beauty of a plan (as in Modernism) is irrelevant. The project is in fact an architectural machine, which takes the hands of the Architect directly out of the design process. It integrates human behavior in an unprecedented way and allows its collective behavior to define key aspects of the building design process. The role of the designer turns merely into an agent for a process that partially defines itself.
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LIFE AQUATECH THINKTANK 17.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Thursday 16:30 Robert Stuart-Smith Tyson Hosmer Armando Bussey (Mexico), Edward Roger Douglas Lückmann (Curaçao/Netherlands), Vichayuth Meenaphant (Thailand), Ana Margarita Wang-Zunig (Costa Rica)
The Life Aquatech investigates relationship between the building systems that mediate between interior and exterior and architectural design by shifting from air-based systems to water-based system. Human comfort is one of the main drivers of the investigation, seeking an ideal relationship between the user’s comfort in relation to temperature and how the building can self-regulate in order to provide it. By focusing on the behaviour of fluid as part of both generative design methodologies and evaluation tools for functional criteria, the Life Aquatech proposes the deployment of a building system where water plays an integral role in the building tectonic. Through the collection, storage and distribution of water, the building prototype aims to create a cohesive architectural environment through the interaction of different water-based building systems resulting in a fusion of design aesthetic and building performance. The proposed water management system is conceived as operating in relation to seasonal and daily cyclical needs in relation to water, where the behaviour of the building expresses how it engages with these criteria both in real-time performance and in the design process through the use of lightweight rigid material and soft expandable material.
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MORPHOLOGIC BALLS 2 THE WALL 18.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Friday 10.30 Philippe Morel Jose Sanchez Kele Zhu (China), Alberto Herrera Sales (Colombia), Nishanth Peethala (India), Chien-Shuo Pai (Taiwan)
The studio refers to the embedding of certain information that may be needed in a future stage of architectural design, as well as the connection between theory and design practice. By associating Elementarism with current computational processes that are available, it requires a reviewing of the processes within existing fabrication and construction systems. Considering these issues, an abstract geometric model that displayed properties of reconfiguration was selected and studied in order to arrive at components bearing lightness and curvature as characteristics. The research involved rationalising these concept and producing an architectural design that had issues of prefabrication and industrialised production within the deployment scenario. The result is a scalable system of standardised components with embedded soft joints that allow aggregations to be flexible and attain a designated global curvature. This system also negotiates the changing requirements of the user. Finally, the project becomes an exercise in trying to think in geometrical terms to produce to an architecture that takes into consideration change both in space and time.
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SWEATWORKS COLLAPSE-COLLIDE 18.01 Friday 11:30 Studio: Theodore Spyropoulos Assistants: Shajay Bhooshan, Mostafa El-Sayed, Manuel JimĂŠnez GarcĂa Team: Saman Dadgostar (Iran), Sofia Miranta Papageorgiou (Greece), Akber A. Khan (Pakistan), Felipe Sepulveda Rojas (Chile) The project is an proto-typical autonomous system employing the use of swarm robotics, which forms the crux of our proposal as it is tested in loose fill environments as an agent of structure and space. Conceived as social insects based upon the rules of stigmergic social hierarchies, our robots organise themselves as an artificial social ecosystem that can be likened most to that of termite ecologies. The deployment of the system begins with an assessment of environmental conditions and parameters, which are then are uploaded into the memory banks of the robots, which are then deployed as clustered packs in target zones via air drop. Final structural and spatial formations are emergent results of stigmergic behaviour resulting from the interaction robots within the environment. Deformations occur as a result of robotic negotiations with the environment's material and specific clustering logics utilised in order to best achieve their organisational and tectonic objectives. Aggregation and excavation logics that begin to facilitate the optimised manipulation of loose fill material have been studied through digital simulations and material tests. The prototypical aspect of the project is embodied by the system's ability to be deployed in a variety of loose-fill environments and land topologies, this is justified by the versatility of the stigmergic system developed to organise behavioural outputs of the robot swarm.
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DYNAMIC LINEARITY DIALOGUE 18.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Friday 12:30 Patrik Schumacher Pierandrea Angius Vibha Kukreja (India), Junshen Pan (China), Camille Sherrod (USA), Liyuan Zhang (China)
Our research focuses on social dynamics as a generative design tool in the studio titled Parametric Semiology with the aim of designing an architectural setting as a platform for a social scenario. We begin with the belief that human behaviour in an architectural setting is a ‘dialogue’ between innovative ordering and the framing of communicative spaces. By exploring a new method of social organisation, we deploy a semiological parametric system where social dynamics of spaces can be programmable within a set of architectural proto-scenarios. Parametric differentiation is extended in spaces that are capable of hosting different social events based on the ability of spatial elements to offer different readings. The flexibility of these readings is offered by a parametric system where each transformed frame signifies intended actions. The programme of the design is a villa within which to host a social event; where every ritual in the event determines the requirements of transformation and the social organisation of agent rituals. This event allows a spatial organisation that recognises that social communication depends on the physical arrangement of physical bodies in space.
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SINGULAR BRANCHING RES 18.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Friday 14:30 Robert Stuart-Smith Tyson Hosmer Felipe Escudero (Ecuador), Giovanni Parodi (Italy), Dimitrije Miletic (Serbia), Dimitar Pouchnikov (Bulgaria/USA)
RES approaches the proto-design agenda as a problem of how to conceive and manufacture bespoke architectural parts that come together to provide differentiated spaces through continuous material organisation on multiple scales. Our understanding of building-cycle is situated within the design of a process that is generative at the conception level as well as at the manufacturing level. This process consists of conceiving a building that responds to complex site conditions and simulating its manufacturing and assembly with the intention that although the intricacies of production are messy and not linear, the final architectural product is delivered as one entity. We use fibre-reinforced composite as a material that can be manufactured in a way so that the fibre patterning is intrinsically related to the building form. We propose that structural analysis of the building as a whole determines vectorial flows, fibres are then placed on parts by machines following agent-based drawings of strand organisation, finally parts are cast in suspension and assembled on site. While automating parts of this process and avoiding moulds traditionally used with Fibre Reinforced Composites minimise labour and construction tools, our interest resides in the discovery of interesting tectonic moments borne out of this processes.
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HEXAPODS MINUS 1 18.01 Studio: Assistant: Team:
Friday 15:30 Philippe Morel Jose Sanchez Sofia Amodio Bernal (Mexico), Maricruz Miranda L贸pez (Costa Rica), Bridget Munro (USA/UK)
Hexapods is a prototypical construction system, erected using torsion and held in place with tensioned membranes and magnetic joints. It provides a transitional architectural solution for displaced people; it is tested in peri-urban Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which is affected by population displacement and growth, and concomitant housing shortages. The conceptual research stems from nomadic African vernacular architecture; its use of knots allows rapid construction and deconstruction of dwellings. These knots were conceptualised into vectors and nodes, and kinetic research led to the torsion system. Hexapods frame is assembled flat, then twisted upright and locked with electro-permanent magnetic joints; collapse is prevented by a minimal surface membrane. Hexapods can be interconnected, allowing growth and expansion. This system also enables community participation and an expression of cultural identity through the potential application of local materials where the minimal surface is not structurally necessary. Technology such as sensors, smart meters and water and solar energy collection is embedded into Hexapods, facilitating activities like agriculture. A script based on cellular automata studies urban growth patterns for hexapod agglomerations, and shared agricultural and community spaces. Hexapods addresses social problems created by an expanding population.
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RHEO 26 ˚ 18.01 Friday 16:30 Studio: Theodore Spyropoulos Assistants: Shajay Bhooshan, Mostafa El-Sayed, Manuel Jiménez García Team: Liqun Zhao (China), Foteini Kontoleon (Greece), Christian Erl (Germany), Vineet J. Vora (India) Rheo is aimed at creating a dynamic prototypical space-framing system. It challenges the notions of plastic fabrication in architecture through exploiting their phase changing capabilities as an intrinsic part of the fabrication process itself. This architectural system questions the very nature of conventional space-frames and the organisation of line networks embedded within. In this regard, Rheo forms an essential next step in the lineage of structures such as the dynamic space frames by Konrad Waschsmann and the Yokohoma Port Terminal by Reiser and Umemoto. Furthermore, fabrication through extrusion in plastics allows for the creation of a truly continuous and homogenous structure. The process of research initially began with a study of the organisational logic of lines that follow optimisation criteria in latticed natural systems such as the glass sponge and radiolaria. This initial conceptual beginning allowed for a broader framework of research to be carried out in three constituent parts.
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DRL Phase I Studio Trip Hooke Park Students wearing a project tutor: Theodore Spyropoulos made in Workshop 1 Tutor: Alisa Andrasek
Student models Workshop 1 in Hooke Park Tutor: Theodore Spyropoulos
Introduction Week picnic in Bedford Square
Post-review celebration after Phase 1 presentations 24 Morwell Street Studio
(Both) Minus 1 Prototype Build Hooke Park Tutor: Philippe Morel 25
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Phase 1 Presentations Morwell Street Studios
A A _ D R L P H A S E _ I I _ F I N A L _ P U B L I C _ J U R Y 1 7 / 1 8 _ J A N U A R Y _ 2 0 1 3
17.01 T H U R S D AY
18.01 F R I D A Y
10:30 11:30 12:30 14:30 15:30 16:30
10:30 11:30 12.30 14:30 15:30 16:30
Spoon Benders I Arch Spores Syntax Error Linear Complex thinkTANK
Balls 2 The Wall Collapse–Collide Dynamic Linearity RES Minus 1 26˙